An Unofficial Manifesto of the September 17 Movement

The struggles of our brothers and sisters in the Middle East, in Spain, Ireland and Iceland and in Greece and Chile have shown what we are all capable of.  They've shown solidarity, courage, thirst for justice and a willingness to stand as brothers against the guns of tyrants. As civilizations erupt in righteous fury, as near light-speed access to information has opened up across borders, cultures and languages, it becomes more and more evident that the world is changing; the people are demanding change, and we will get it.

There are those, many in fact, who claim that these uprisings are third world occurrences. The Global uprising has no bearing on the world’s beacon of democracy except in that we are their role models. What arrogance! These reactionary talking heads are the same who believed the peoples of the Middle East to be happy with their kings and despots, or viewed them simply as economic pawns and their dead bodies as “collateral damage.” If it is a beacon of anything, the United States of America is a beacon of economic imperialism, efficient manufacture of consent, and plutocratic subversion of government. Global corporations control governments more efficiently than ever, profiting from war, imprisonment, bailouts, debt and massive tax loopholes. Unemployment is as bad as it has ever been while Wall Street sees record profits and pays lobbyists and fake “grass roots” organizations to campaign to reduce social mobility for the lower classes, and make ordinary people pay for crises we did not cause. We are living in an age of efficient tyranny by an increasingly elusive and deceitful oligarchy. This is an age of plutocracy. The US is ripe for revolution.

Participation vs. Spectator Democracy

A common misconception is that democracy simply comes from voting, that the act of ratifying decisions by electing the representatives who make them ultimately gives the final say to the people. This is simply inconsistent with reality; any American who pays attention can recall an instance of the contrary. True democracy - it literally meaning “government by the people” - requires active participation by the people. If legitimate power derives from a mandate from the masses, it is not unreasonable to deduct that decisions made without the consent of the governed are not acts of legitimate power. Without constant ratification by the populace, the assurance of consent with every action, a political structure becomes an entity separate from the people, working “for the people” in name only. 

Our current political body is such an entity, making decisions as a group separate from the people, justifying itself with the occasional election in which we are allowed to decide who among a wider group of oligarchs may make our decisions for us. Our participation in this “government by the people” is limited to control over minute details within a limited scope of ideas, instead of being the basis for all its workings. What have resulted are plutocracy, corruption, and the limiting of civic participation to something as cumbersome, pointless and apathy breeding as voting.

The separate entity, democratic only in name, works for its own benefit, and for the benefit of the upper class its members come from. In the summer of 2011, American Republicans and Democrats deliberated endlessly over what should be done about the country’s debt. The Republicans, so concerned with gaining control during the 2012 election, almost made it their strategy to let the economy crumble so it would be blamed on the democrats; this at the detriment of hundreds of thousands of citizens. While millions of Americans were without health care, Democrats caved to pressure from lobbyists and Republicans and allowed what could have been exceptional reform to become a Frankenstein’s monster designed by lobbyists. Joe Lieberman, the Democrat (now independent) who filibustered the only progressive measure in the bill happened to be the biggest recipient of PAC money from Insurance companies in all of congress; this, all while the majority of Americans wanted, or needed, something done about health costs.

Plutocratic Sabotage

The greatest saboteur of democratic fairness is the influence of money. Concentrated wealth is power without accountability. Nobody votes for who holds the most money, and yet the influence of their power writes legislation and decides what we may or may not see in the news. It also gives strong advantages in the ability to further their power through profits – profits often gained through gambling with people’s livelihoods, mass layoffs and exploitation of impoverished people. The goal of business is profit; and, as it turns out, doing what is best for the public is not profitable. Getting the most labor for the smallest wages, not having to bow to safety standards made to protect the public, and making the public pay for crises they didn’t cause are profitable. Ultimately, having no accountability to the people whose lives are impacted by the relentless pursuit of profits is just good business.

Good business is influencing political systems to act on your behalf, whether or not it is to the detriment of those whose best interest that political system is supposed to represent. There is no conscience, or rationality; only the blind pursuit of financial gain at whatever cost. Currently mobs of “Tea Partiers” funded by Koch Industries and the ghosts of the John Birch Society are relentlessly campaigning for the benefit of massive corporations under the guise of a populist grassroots movement. They have a great deal of money supporting their cause, and are willing to eradicate the entire middle class (through ending of collective bargaining, de-funding of education, extermination of social safety nets and programs people rely on, etc.) for the benefit of the economic elite. They, and thousands of lobbyists, work endlessly so that the very financial industry that caused our current economic crisis does not have to pay a penny to save it, despite having paid their Executives’ bonuses with out tax money. Instead, we pay for their crisis through our Pell grants, social security, retirement funds, Medicare, Medicaid and our right to collectively bargain.

More than just shirking responsibility to maximize profits, economic power influences government in other ways detrimental to the public. Private prisons, for instance, make a profit from every human being thrown into jail. They lobby to perpetuate harmful drug laws that put non-violent offenders in prison, and even help write racist anti-immigration laws that would arbitrarily put foreign workers into prisons. Private contractors, building war machines or sending mercenaries to fight, profit exorbitantly from frivolous war mongering and wasteful defense spending, as does a plethora of energy conglomerates that profit from newly formed puppet nations and the seizing of foreign resources. These actions and decisions are rarely questioned, yet they harm always.

Currently less than half a dozen corporations own all of the mainstream media outlets available to us. While some claim to be “fair and balanced” compared to the rest of the “liberal media,” rest assured that there is no liberal media. More importantly than omitting inconvenient stories and facts, corporate controlled media limits the scope of acceptable thought; the “liberal” news stations are only as liberal as is acceptable to corporate interests, and what fits snugly within the status quo. Opinions that are too challenging are never spoken; facts and stories that contradict what our understanding of the world is supposed to be are never aired. It’s called the “manufacture of consent;” it makes it safe to give us freedom of thought, because any thought which challenges the status quo beyond safe parameters is taboo and “crazy” if its existence is acknowledged at all. All the while, the narrative that other media outlets have “liberal bias” gives stations that very obviously advocate for plutocratic control and religious dominance a strong viewership.

Economic Power and Democracy

Economic power is not democratic power; it dominates our lives whether we like it or not.  Wealth is accumulated through owning some resource or productive property with the potential to provide things people need, and the selling of those things at the highest price people would be willing to pay for it before they would rather starve. If we want to live in a house, have a car or retire, we must go through a bank. If we want to get an education we must take out a student loan and spend most of our working lives paying it off. If we wish to eat to survive, we must work for a wage and purchase things that literally grow on trees from those who own the trees. Even sources of energy or sources of water are the property of someone who we must buy from if we would like to be warm in the winter or would like to hydrate ourselves.  In a purely socio-anthropological sense, wealth comes from depriving people of the things they need.

Of course, in most cases, a bit of work is required to turn property with productive potential into something usable by the average person – like growing seeds onto crops, putting crops into cans, turning wood into a home or turning steel into a car. Suffice to say, without labor the original resource is worthless; and yet, the owners of these resources accumulate many times the wealth that the workers do. If workers accumulated wealth proportionate to their contribution to the creaton of a product, the owner could not make a profit, he would break even. In fact, if each owner got back the same percentage of what they put in as each worker receives for what work they put in, the owners would lose money.

In special cases, one’s capital invested in creation of a product is the result of saving up wages or the accumulation of wealth created from one’s own work. Usually these are our small business owners, however, and very rarely do these individuals amass enough economic power to exploit entire populations or sabotage political systems. In fact, those who amass large, influential amounts of economic power most often do so much more easily than others due to pre-existing economic privileges. Even in cases of “self-made men,” there are always unfair advantages over others less physically, economically, mentally or socially able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” that come into play.

Economic power is power derived from coercive forces rather than through consent and participation. Even when voting occurs within a corporation, it excludes the workers and consumers most affected by the actions of the corporation, includes only those who stand to profit at the detriment of the rest, and the weight of each person’s vote is determined by how much economic power that individual has. Wealth always wins; economic power functions by the prehistoric notion that “might is right.” We must conclude that economic power and democracy are incompatible. Tyranny through property is not somehow freer than tyranny through government power.  To economic power, freedom is just another commodity to be bought and sold. The profit motive unchecked by the public interest is tyranny. There is no conscience, there is no justice.

Fairness and Freedom

It has been long debated whether or not Democracy is not in itself a form of tyranny. It is, they say, akin to two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner. It is important that the rights of minorities are always recognized and protected, of course, but it is also important to note how reactionary this analogy is meant to be. It would be worth making a bet that whoever originated that saying, or at least those who most often use it, were less referring to the rights of People of Color, Transgender and queer folk, Gays, Lesbians or the disabled, and more referring to the so called rights of business men to act without accountability to the “tyranny of the majority.”

 Obviously precedent should be put into place to protect those marginalized by the majority. It still stands to reason, however, that while people are organized or governed, the freest and fairest way for them to be so is democratically. If people are to live in societies and communities, and not isolated from one another entirely, it is democratic organization that that prevents the corruption and tyranny of concentrated power.

Even in stateless societies, as we are long past the isolated pioneer days, it is rudimentary de-facto democratic organization that would prevent communities from being usurped by demagogues who would exploit the power vacuum and rule with their economic power. Freedom is most often taken away by concentrated wealth and concentrated political power; the horizontal orientation of proper democracy, then, best protects it, as it allows the people to protect it themselves, collectively.

In a sense, freedom is free, and democracy is the tool we use to keep it that way.

Democracy is not only the freest structure we’ve ever conceived, but the most just. To the dismay of some who look only at a country’s GDP and the profits of the rich, the quality of a society is best judged by how well-off the worst-off of that society are. Indeed, putting power into as many hands as possible ensures as many people as possible are satisfied. Society, after all, is a means of collective survival; it comes from recognizing the benefits that come from cooperation and mutual aid. Human beings are a social species akin to ants or bees, but with the gift and beauty of consciousness and personal individuality. It has been our consciousness and ingenuity, along with our natural capacity to organize that has allowed us to survive as a species. In fact, studies have shownthat acts of mutual aid and altruism trigger reward responses in the brain, even in cases when one acts against one’s self interest. Not only is cooperation moral, it is natural, and so the society which fosters it is the most moral, and most just.

The Case for Dissent

The idea that civilization is a biologically determined means of collective survival explains and is proven by our species’ rich history of dissent. Since the days when agriculture created productive property and division of labor, and gave way to the hierarchies, economic power and eventually lordship, “divine right” and government, structures that have put the self actualization needs of the power hungry ahead of the physiological needs of the rest have been met with the dissent of the masses. The outcomes of their actions have been limited only by their imaginations, and the extent of sabotage by demagogues. Indeed, if civilization is meant to benefit the whole of society, and justice and freedom are both natural and moral, then dissent is the noblest sentiment our species can comprehend – and we can comprehend quite a lot.

It was historian and civil rights advocate Howard Zinn who said that “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy, it is absolutely essential to it.” The men who founded this country shared his sentiment, believing that a people had the right to take and re-structure or replace their government as it would be necessary to maintain democratic principles and liberty. Thinkers like Thoreau knew it was necessary to revoke consent from a government if it was unjust. The suffragettes who won the right to vote, the civil rights champions who ended segregation, the industrial workers responsible for lessening the exploitation of the lower classes and the countless other people whose struggles failed and whom history has ignored, all knew that to further justice and liberty, action was required – action in defiance of the establishment whose power stood in the way of their liberation because it benefitted from their oppression.

If legitimate power is built on a mandate from the people, the truest and purest expression of democracy is to protest when that power betrays the people, to revoke consent when that power carries out injustices in their name, and to dismantle that power when it acts toward it’s own ends or to those of a ruling elite at the detriment of the people.

The Mission

Now is a crucial time. Global corporations dominate our lives and hold silver-spoon-fed politicians on puppet strings. The unions who brought us our weekends, pensions, overtime pay and rights in the workplace are being demonized and broken. Armies, mercenaries and jackals maintain global occupation – empowering despots and killing civilians - to line the pockets of oil companies and weapons contractors while telling us they are spreading democracy. Taxes are cut or nonexistent for banks and companies, but a grim reality for working people. They say “no taxes” but raise them for workers. They say “corporations are people too” but call unions corrupt. They crash markets, foreclose on homes, lay off workers and make record profits while they tell us lies about “shared sacrifice” when bringing our safety nets, wages, rights and education to the guillotine.

No more. The goals of the youth are simple – they’ve been cried out endlessly but muffled by background noises and ignored by those who find them inconvenient. We want democracy, not plutocracy; people before profits. We want:

1.     To eliminate the stranglehold of corporate power over our political system, and minimize as the role of money in political deliberation.

2.     To maximize participation and control by the people, and put all power – economic and political – in a position of direct accountability to the public interest.

3.     To prioritize the well being of the country as a whole over the profits of plutocrats, and maximize the rights of ordinary people.

We cannot wait for these things. We cannot put them aside in the hopes that our children will see them come to fruition. We need them now. We will get them, and the longer we have to wait for them, the more our ends will justify our means. The start of the path toward greater democracy, liberty and equality will start with a few basic objectives to be determined in the course of our actions.

Our Call to Action

Our demands alone are not enough to silence us. Nothing will silence us. Our demands are far less important than our vision. They are far less potent than our love for justice and liberty and they are far less potentially dangerous than our anger.

The youth of the world have risen. Tyrants are falling, old systems of oppression are being challenged, people are beginning to finally question their governments, they are finally beginning to question global economic domination and they are finally seeing that their interests lie in true democracy, and are at odds with the interests of bankers, stockholders and CEOs. The oligarchs know this, and they are clinging desperately to the old myths that justified their power, and screaming them to whomever remain among those blind enough to believe them. Their panic is betrayed by their increasingly obvious contempt for democracy, and the popular revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Chile and Iceland are what make their hands tremble. The millions unemployed and under-employed, the millions without health care, the millions on Social Security and the millions who are beginning to question the system that betrayed them, are the single most dangerous force in this planet.

Now is the time to mobilize. Now is the time for all who value liberty, equality and justice stand with our brothers across the world. Today is the day we stop asking for change and start taking it.

Some Thoughts on Democratic Revolution

(This blog post is a pre-write for/forerunner to something else I've been working on) 

I recently read an article on Infoshop called "Do 'Leaderless Revolts' Contain the Seeds of Our Own Failure?." The article cites Anti-Austerity protests in Greece, as well as the revolutionary movements of Egypt and Spain. The strengths and weaknesses of these revolutions, which are addressed by the article, have mostly to do with the unique, technological nature of today's revolutions, but are also indicative of problems revolutionists have pondered for centuries.

In any revolution, dozens of fundamental questions need to be asked: What is the structure of the new society? Is this structure stable, and how do we maintain stability while maintaining the most possible liberty and equality for citizens? How do we deal with reactionary counter revolution? How do we prevent power hungry demagogues from taking advantage of the power vacuum? We can narrow all of these questions down to "how do we make sure a democratic revolution stays democratic?" 

There are countless ways a revolution can go wrong and ultimately put power into the hands of someone just as bad as, if not worse than, the previous ruler. A group might use coercion claiming to be acting in the name of the people, as with the Jacobins. A group might promise to ensure a smooth transition by fighting off counter-revolution, as with the Bolsheviks; or a group might simply have some other form of power with which to fill the power vacuum, as it is looking like it might be in Egypt.

Any sociology textbook will tell you that dissent is maximized and more likely to lead to action when people are able to communicate their grievances to one another, and when some kind of leader can articulate those grievances into some kind of plan. Social media, in these revolutions, has allowed for communication of grievances between individuals the likes of which have not been seen since the advent of the printing press (which is extremely important, though the media has played up social media's role in order to downplay the revolutionary fervor that had to have existed to begin with).  The result has been exacerbated dissent and efficient organization on a massive level that is mostly leaderless.

When any power structure is being removed, it is done so through at least one of two kinds of power: Counter-Power, the belief in specific goals or a specific structure as a replacement for the old, and Anti-Power, the basic desire and capacity to remove the current structure (I did not come up with counter/anti power, however the blogs I read about it on didn't cite anyone).  Organization through social media makes it possible to amass a great deal of anti-power; however, being leaderless the exacerbated dissent is without a sense of direction and without long term goals. After the removal of the old structure, confusion and lack of structure are left. This power vacuum can then be easily exploited by the private power of corporations or the violent power of a military. 

Clearly, of course, both anti-power and counter-power are necessary. A revolution by counter-power alone will never take off the ground except through military coup (which ultimately leads to more tyranny), and a revolution by anti-power leaves behind confusion to be exploited by demagogues (which ultimately leads to more tyranny). 

The anti-power we see in the Middle East and other countries in the 21st century, however, is very unique and may very well hold a solution to its own problem. We saw in these revolutions (particularly in Egypt) an enormous capacity for organization: means of passing information, committees and councils all came into fruition almost organically. Driven by simple common goals, people were capable of creating temporary structures through which to organize the revolt. Is it at all unreasonable, then to hope that counter-power and anti-power do not have to be separate? If these organizational structures can emerge organically among dissenters in the streets, they can be an example, or the beginnings, of a post-revolutionary structure.

Counter-power can grow organically from anti-power, creating goals and structures custom made for, and by, the people. It would be purely democratic.

On Leftist Unity

One of the most important concepts in leftist ideology is that which emphasizes the importance of supporting all workers' struggles against the ruling classes. Considering the variety of thought and the infighting that occurs between various facets, being able to unify under a few basic and fundamental commonalities is extremely important.


Common Goals:
The Spanish Civil War of the mid to late 1930s gives us one of the best examples of a successful, decentralized socialist society, but it also gives us the best example of how having a lack of a unified platform can really blow up in your face. Portrayed by Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a great deal of infighting amongst the anti-fascist forces. The Anarchists, the bourgeious-democratic republicans and the various Marxist facets of the POUM all had different plans for post-war Spain. This infighting and failure to determine a common coalition platform hurt morale, and the overall "revolutionary spirit" of the Republican Left diminished as the war went on.

This is why it is extremely important to emphasize the common goals between differing leftist tendencies. Anarchists and Marxist Leninists do not have to necessarily be enemies, for instance. What we need is not to recruit as many people as possible to one group, but to create a coalition built on the common goals of those groups.

The difficulty in finding those commonalities rests on the fact that these different groups and ideologies have differing strategies for attaining the same goal. Both Marxist-Leninists and Anarchists, for example, hope for a stateless and classless society. The difference is that Marxist-Leninists would utilize a transitional socialist government, where anarchists would do away with the state immediately. Solving this problem rests on compromise and collaboration. An immediate goal needs to be established. The nature of the immediate goals depend on the nature of the coalition, and once those goals are reached, the hammering out of various other details may begin.

When it can be harmful
Supporting any opposition to the ruling elite is important to the health and efficiency of the movement, but there are many who seem to misunderstand. There are many who seem to believe that supporting any struggle against the ruling elite also means never questioning it; they refuse to criticize any regime that opposes "western" imperialism, no matter how worthy of criticism those regimes are. Supporting that opposition does not mean ignoring, accepting, or apologizing for the failures of those involved. Qaddafi's Libya, for instance, is defended by far too many people because it, especially in light of recent NATO agression, is an enemy of American and European economic willpower. Libyan opposition forces are called "counter-revolutionary," and "reactionary" despite the fact that Libya's government and its plethora of human rights violations are far from "revolutionary."

The Libyan "Opposition," on the other hand, is by no means immune to criticism simply because it opposes a tyrannical government. These groups are very thoroughly infiltrated by CIA influence and would likely only establish a bourgeois-democratic puppet government completely subservient to Western economic interests.

The opposition to the elite should be supported, but should never be beyond criticism.

Defeating the Moderate Advantage
Another obstacle faced by the Republican Left of the Spanish Civil War is one that the Left in the United States, as well as numerous other countries, still face. In any coalition of people and ideologies advocating reform, it is usually the least radical group whose demands are met (this is leaving out hostile coups and the like). Their platform is the least challenging, their transition is the least difficult and their ideology is the least at-odds with the status quo. In the Spanish Civil War, that group was the Republicans. In the United States, that group is the Democratic party, which many would-be socialists, anarchists or reformers side with. Because of its very moderately left leanings, it is perceived as more likely to gain ground in our political climate. The goals it seeks are small and still fit into the current socio-political structure while slightly acknowledging left wing sentiments. The result is, at best, minimal change.

This is a daunting conundrum, and one faced by both the left and the right, but its solution is simple.

Class Consciousness
The single most important part of any opposition to exploitation and tyranny is class consciousness. This should be the immediate goal for every leftist. Educate and agitate. Help people understand the nature of the current power structure and the nature of their place in it. Even those who simply understand those fundamental truths we know so well and don't necessarily act are still a part of the public's opinion. If the exploitative nature of capitalism (hell, even the simple fact that the rich are not looking out for you) becomes commonly understood, the entire society shifts.

This is why it is important for the left to be unified. We all have different ideas about stragegy and about post-revolutionary organization, but all of our ideals are built on the same truths. All of our ideals are built on class consciousness. Instead of telling everyone we can why Anarchism is the best ideology, or why the Soviet Model is the best system, we should all focus, as our immediate goal, on making those truths we have in common as understood as possible.