Wages of Rebellion (4 page)

By the time they were done, America’s progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century.

The great wave of revolution that took place in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union was the last revolutionary wave before the Arab uprisings in 2010. Fourteen Soviet republics in 1989 broke away to form independent states. Albania, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Congo-Brazzaville, Angola, Mozambique, Benin, Mongolia, and South Yemen all replaced their Communist governments. As a foreign correspondent, I witnessed the swift disintegration of the Communist regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

In all of these countries, a significant portion of the population had abandoned their faith in the ideological constructs of power, just as previous generations had abandoned the belief in the divine right of kings. These populations turned against a corrupt ruling elite. They lost hope for a better future unless those in power were replaced. And they seized in a revolutionary moment upon an ideal—one that was often more emotional than intellectual—that allowed them to defy established power. This revolutionary sentiment, as much a mood as an idea, is again on the march.

I
n a 2011
New York Times
article titled “As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around the Globe,” Nicholas Kulish made this point:

Whether an uprising will come in time to save us from the effects of climate change—which some experts say has already passed a point of no return—or whether it will be crushed by internal systems of security is unknown. It is worth remembering Blanqui’s warnings that human history can be a march to totalitarianism as well as to liberty. Since the uprisings in Tahrir Square in 2011, the Egyptian military has instituted a brutal counterrevolution. The Occupy encampments in the United States were cleared by force in cities across the country. The pervasive security and surveillance state, which makes us the most watched, spied and eavesdropped upon, monitored, photographed, and controlled population in human history, is being employed against all who rebel.

In three previous books,
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Death of the Liberal Class
, and
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
, I examined a cultural, political, and economic system in terminal decline. I chronicled the rise of totalitarian corporate power, or what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in
Democracy Incorporated
calls “inverted totalitarianism.” Inverted totalitarianism, which does not find its expression through a demagogue or charismatic leader, represents “the
political
coming of age of corporate power and the
political
demobilization of the citizenry,” he writes.
³⁹
It is a dispersed, faceless power—“the rule of Nobody,” as Hannah Arendt wrote—that is expressed in the blank, terrifying anonymity of the corporate state.
⁴⁰

Unlike classical totalitarian movements, the corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power internally that democracy is extinguished. The Constitution remains in place but has been so radically reinterpreted by the courts and by the executive and legislative branches of government, all serving corporate power, as to be essentially nullified. Inverted totalitarianism, Wolin writes, is not “expressly conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. Typically it is furthered by power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions.”
⁴¹
But inverted totalitarianism is as dangerous as classical forms
of totalitarianism. Corporate totalitarianism, for me, is interchangeable with inverted totalitarianism, as Wolin uses that term throughout his book.

I argued in my previous three books that change will only come from mass movements and large-scale acts of civil disobedience.
Wages of Rebellion
examines another aspect of revolt. Exploring the forces and personalities that foster rebellion, it looks at the personal cost of rebellion—what it takes emotionally, psychologically, and physically to defy absolute power.

Rebels share much in common with religious mystics. They hold fast to a vision that often they alone can see. They view rebellion as a moral imperative, even as they concede that the hope of success is slim and at times impossible. Rebels, a number of whom I interviewed for this book, are men and women endowed with a peculiar obstinacy. Willing to accept deprivation and self-sacrifice, they are not overly concerned with defeat. They endure through a fierce independence and courage. Many, maybe most, have difficult and eccentric personalities. The best of them are driven by a profound empathy, even love, for the vulnerable, the persecuted, and the weak.

Revolutions take time. They are often begun by one generation and completed by the next. “Those who give the first check to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin,” Michel de Montaigne wrote in 1580. “The fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another’s net.”
⁴²
Revolutions can be crushed by force—as amply demonstrated by history—or hijacked by individuals, such as Lenin, Trotsky, and later Joseph Stalin, or movements that betray the populace.

Revolutions can even be
faux
revolutions when, through the careful manipulation of counterrevolutionary forces, they demand not reform but the restoration of retrograde power elites. The Central Intelligence Agency has long been a master of this technique. It organized street demonstrations and protests in Iran in 1953 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and his cabinet. It funded and stoked protests again in 1973 in Chile to prompt the Chilean military to overthrow President Salvador Allende. Seumas Milne raises this point in an article
about the 2014 protests in Venezuela featuring the subhead: “Street action is now regularly used with western backing to target elected governments in the interests of elites.” Milne writes: “The upsurge in global protest in the past couple of years has driven home the lesson that mass demonstrations can have entirely different social and political meanings. Just because they wear bandannas and build barricades—and have genuine grievances—doesn’t automatically mean protestors are fighting for democracy or social justice.”
⁴³

The closer one gets to the street during a revolution the messier it becomes. Movements within the revolutionary body frequently compete for power, fight over arcane bits of doctrine, dispute tactics, form counterproductive schisms, misread power, and engage in self-defeating power struggles. The state uses its resources to infiltrate, monitor, vilify, and arrest or assassinate the movement leaders—and all uprisings, even supposedly leaderless ones, have leaders.

When they are authentic, these movements express a fundamental truth about societies in decay that even those who cannot articulate it are often able to feel. This is the secret of their power. They offer new possibilities, a new language and vocabulary, to those who are being abused by failed systems of governance. Once this truth is unleashed, once it can be expressed, it is very hard to silence.

The Zapatista leader Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, in an interview with Gabriel García Márquez in
The Nation
magazine, made this point. He pointed out that revolutions entail a new way of communicating. “In my family, words had a very special value,” Marcos told the Colombian novelist.

There is nothing rational about rebellion. To rebel against insurmountable odds is an act of faith, without which the rebel is doomed. This faith is intrinsic to the rebel the way caution and prudence are intrinsic to those who seek to fit into existing power structures. The rebel, possessed by inner demons and angels, is driven by a vision. I do not know if the new revolutionary wave and the rebels produced by it will succeed. But I do know that without these rebels, we are doomed.

S
eventy-six-year-old Avgi Tzenis stood in the hall of her small brick row house on Bragg Street in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. Gray-haired and stocky, she was dressed in a bathrobe and open-toed sandals. The hall was dark and cold. It had been dark and cold since Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast a month earlier. Three feet of water and raw sewage had flooded and wrecked her home.

“We never had this problem before,” she said. “We never had water from the sea come down like this.”

For the poor of the Eastern Seaboard, Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 was the Katrina of the North. It once again exposed the nation’s fragile, dilapidated, and shoddy infrastructure, one that crumbles under minimal stress. The storm highlighted the inability of utility companies as well as state and federal agencies to cope with the looming environmental disasters that the climate crisis will cause to grow in
intensity and frequency. But most important, Sandy illustrated the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services, and abandons the wider population.

Sheepshead Bay, along with Coney Island, the Rockaways, parts of Staten Island, and long stretches of the New Jersey coast, were obliterated by the 2012 hurricane. In the aftermath, stores a block away, their merchandise destroyed by the water, sat boarded up and closed. Rows of derelict cars, with the tires and license plates removed and the windows smashed, hugged the sidewalks, looking like the skeletal remains of large metal fish. Food distribution centers, most of them set up by volunteers from Occupy Sandy Relief, hastily closed before dark because of looters and thieves. And storm victims who remained in their damaged homes, often without heat, electricity, or running water, told me they clutched knives at night to protect themselves from the gangs that prowled through the wreckage.

Increasingly freakish weather patterns ensure that storms like Sandy—which resulted in some $42 billion in property and infrastructure damage, as well as 147 direct deaths—will become routine.
²
Sandy was the second-costliest hurricane to hit the United States since 1900.
³
Only Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which resulted in $108 billion in damage, was more severe.
⁴
Many of the 305,000 houses in New York destroyed by Sandy have never been rebuilt.
⁵
New York City estimated that it would have to spend $800 million just to repair its roads.
⁶
And that is only the start. Hurricanes will descend on the Eastern Seaboard and other coastal areas with even greater destructive fury. A couple of more disasters like this one and sections of the Eastern Seaboard will become uninhabitable.