Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:32 on 15 October 2011

I got down to Westlake Park last evening to see what was going on at Occupy Seattle. Not terribly much, initially (there were several dozens of people around, many with signs, but not much was happening), so I went to find something for dinner.

When I got back from my meal, the evening “General Assembly” was in full swing. In general, it was pretty impressive. From what I could tell, anyone was free to join in and participate in its decisions, and there seemed to be a pretty strong effort to prevent a leadership and power hierarchy from arising. A fair amount of the meeting seemed to be focused on dealing with the problem of people autonomously going off and trying to speak for the Occupy Seattle movement in general, even though no Assembly had ever agreed to give them such power.

Some of the discussion related to the thing the Establishment media keeps talking about, the demands of occupiers. It’s clear from visiting the Occupy Seattle web site (link: http://occupyseattle.org/demands) that no such firm list of demands has yet been decided and agreed upon.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. The most powerful thing that is happening right now is that a bunch of people, many of whom don’t really have any background in activism, are acquiring one. And they’re using techniques which are decidedly non-authoritarian to organize themselves.

Those techniques are somewhat different from what many of the current crop of self-identified anarchists use. This has caused a measure of dismissiveness amongst some of my comrades about it. Which is not to say they never have a point — there is a measure of bourgeois naïveté to be found, as well as (particularly amongst some older folk there) plain old pro-Establishment bias.

However, that’s no reason to write the whole movement off. Expecting people to become committed anarchists within moments of their first exposure to anarchist propaganda is itself a naïve attitude, as well as an authoritarian one that devalues the other’s own judgement and experiences. It typically takes time to make a significant shift in one’s weltanschauung; wanting people to quickly agree with you is tantamount to a desire for them to outwardly cave to your reasoning (probably because you have brow-beaten them) while still doubting it inside. I’m optimistic that the Occupy movement is going to end up being a enlightening (and therefore, radicalizing) process for many if not most of its participants.

For one, whether its participants realize it or not, it is already a fundamentally radical movement, since it is denying the Establishment’s legitimacy to pronounce rules about camping and traffic. In the eyes of the law, the cops are actually in the right when they have used force against Occupy movements, since such events at the least are camping in parks the law says are for day use only, and often embark on unpermitted marches in the streets in violation of the traffic code.

(Digression: Yes, that means the Egyptian government was in fact legally entitled to try and forcibly break up the occupation of Tarhir Square. The landscaped area around the Square was a park, not a campground, so erecting tents and staying there overnight was in fact illegal, as was blocking traffic in what is a major Cairo intersection. That latter act was making Cairo’s already legendarily bad traffic even worse. Which in turn shows how much the domestic right-wing “law and order” crowd shares with unsavory thugs like Mubarak.)

In that, it’s rather a brilliant strategy, since it is leading the Establishment to act like jack-booted thugs when faced with a bunch of nonviolent people assembling and trying to hash out what to do as a result of the growing economic and social inequality in society. If they don’t do that, then the Establishment ends up caving to those who are directly challenging its authority, and Establishments absolutely hate to do that.

And when the Establishment acts like jack-booted thugs when faced with a nonviolent group of concerned young people, many of those concerned young people will end up being lessoned by the School of Hard Knocks that the stuff us radicals keep saying about the Establishment actually has validity.

Published at 12:59 on 14 October 2011

You don’t have to be a conspiracy kook to think so; there are plenty of good reasons to suspect it.

And in regard to it possibly being the work of an extremist cell within the Quds force, I must observe that it is equally likely to be a false flag operation from an extremist cell within the US intelligence community.

Published at 09:30 on 6 October 2011

Not always. If they see something they believe suspicious while zapping you with X-rays, the TSA will grope you anyhow. It happened to my sister a few days ago.

I opted for the groping on my recent trip, because I don’t believe them when they say the waves emitted from the machines are harmless. Powerful organizations like governments and corporations have persistently claimed such about various kinds of radiation, only to be definitively proven wrong later.

It happened to those downwind of the Nevada Test Site, and it’s starting to happen with cell phones.

Published at 09:48 on 5 October 2011

Apropos this entry, there is a reason that the ruling elite has lost the ideological flexibility needed to prevent their rule from being jeopardized by a crisis of their own creating: it’s all a matter of timing.

Those old enough to remember the Great Depression are now also old enough and few enough to be mostly irrelevant in the halls of power. Contrarily, those old enough to remember the fall of the USSR and its satellites (which the elite spun as a vindication of capitalist orthodoxy and a repudiation of anything critical of it) are numerous and at about their apex of power in those same halls.

So it’s a tremendous opportunity for those of us who are opposed to the current order. The only question is: can and will we take advantage of it?

Published at 11:29 on 27 September 2011

Basically, unlike in Venezuela, the revolution in Bolivia is a bottom-up affair, backed by a diversity of groups, as opposed to being something orchestrated from above by a single charismatic figure. That becomes clear when you read stories like this one about a highway project being opposed by the indigenous people whose land it would compromise.

Of course Morales has become a new oppressor. How could he not, given the nature of the job he sought? By becoming the chief executive of a hierarchical system of authority, he chose to participate in a rotten system.

That’s not to say its a useless achievement and that Morales administration is no better than those it replaced, only that it’s a very limited achievement. Past administrations would not have stepped back, embarrassed, and called a moratorium. However, unless the pressure from below continues and intensifies, the outcome will be the typical “compromise” of industrial civilization: less wild nature and more development.

True change must always come from below.

Published at 09:51 on 25 September 2011

It’s hardly a new thing for them to do, but an item on the NPR news this morning shows them doing so yet again. To paraphrase what they said, they reported the following:

President Obama will be speaking at two engagements in Seattle. One is a $35,000 per head fund raiser, the other is larger and cheaper.

Cheaper? Than $35K/head? That’s meaningless. Virtually every event is cheaper than that. $1,000/head is a full 35 times cheaper and it’s still unaffordable to Americans of normal means. $100/head is 350 times cheaper (enough to qualify as “much cheaper” by most definitions), yet is still out of reach to most.

It’s quite transparent what NPR is trying to do: spin the story to make the Democrats seem as something other than a bourgeois party. And sure enough, a little research on Google comes up with this story, which reveals that neither event is geared towards the sort of average Americans that liberals profess to be so concerned about:

Then Obama will head to a larger fundraiser at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle, with tickets starting at $100 for balcony seats and up to $7,500 for VIP seating and a receiving-line photo with the president, according to event invitations. Up to 400 people are expected at that event, which will include a lunch catered by chef Tom Douglas and a performance by the Robert Cray Band. [emphasis added]

And really, how could it be otherwise? It’s a bourgeois society; if you participate in its formal means of exercising power, you will be compelled to act according to bourgeois values. You can’t fundamentally change rottenness simply by participating in it.

Published at 13:07 on 24 September 2011

One of the books I read while traveling on my recent trip south was Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. It sort of happened by chance: I was browsing the shelves at Left Bank Books, looking for a couple of good, inexpensive used books to read on my upcoming trip, and a copy of that title which satisfied those criteria caught my mind. Having never read it, and it being something of a highly-regarded science fiction classic, I naturally purchased it.

What makes it not merely futurist but a completely unrealistic fairy tale is the plot element of the robots being manufactured by an ethical corporation that insists all its products obey the Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. It is of course highly unlikely that any capitalist corporation would so voluntarily adhere to such a set of safeguards, particularly any corporation that made robots for the military. (And remember, the military has been the funding vehicle behind much of the research into high technology.)

Moreover, even in Asimov’s story, things eventually take sinister turns, as the main manufacturer of robots eventually does bow to pressure to weaken the laws of robotics which some of its models are programmed to obey. Eventually, things reach the point of the robots deciding to manipulate and rule humanity because they believe it is for our own good for them to do so.

So far from being an endorsement of futurism, I, Robot looks to me to be a vindication of my basically Luddite views of advanced technology.

Published at 09:16 on 19 September 2011

There’s been an awful lot of security stupidity since 9/11: measures instituted ostensibly to improve security, but which upon further thought (sometimes not much further thought at all) reveal themselves to be nothing but mindless exercises in petty fascism.

And when going through airport security yesterday, it struck me how the whole business of forcing airline passengers to remove their shoes so they can be X-rayed is probably one of these exercises. Consider that what shows up on an X-ray are metal objects, and that most high explosives are nonmetallic.

What tends to have metal is blasting caps; electric ones have wires, and the increasingly rare non-electric ones have brass or copper jackets. However, it is not all that hard to make your own homemade plastic-jacketed non-electric blasting caps. Once you’ve done that, all you need is some fuse (also conveniently non-metallic), and there you have it: your very own shoe bomb that will sail through the X-ray machine with nary a suspicion.

So unless I’m seriously missing something with the above analysis, the whole “take off your shoes” drill is merely a feel-good propaganda measure designed to reassure passengers that something has been done to screen out future shoe bombers. At least it has the side-benefit of enabling me to “forget” to put my shoes back on and enjoy a little barefoot time on my walk to the gate.

Published at 15:16 on 17 September 2011

And one could just as accurately substitute Sarkozy or Cameron for Obama in that picture.

Published at 14:09 on 17 September 2011

That’s what comes to mind when I read this story. Fresh from a conflict within his own government over how to manage the US budget, Geithner goes to Europe and tut-tuts at the Europeans for failing to act promptly and decisively about their economic problems.

Really, it looks like the post-WWII incarnation of modern capitalism is mostly done with. Those who oversee such societies are no longer willing or able to make the sort of departures from ideological orthodoxy necessary to sustain such a self-contradictory system.

The only question is whether the sort of class consciousness needed to seriously threaten (or, better yet, replace) the capitalist system exists as that system heads further into its worst crisis since the Great Depression. Particularly here in the USA (amongst the most clueless of all countries when it comes to class issues) that is, alas, highly dubious.