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Title: After Bern Author: Anonymous Date: June 8, 2016 Language: en Topics: anarchist movement, USA, critique, It's Going Down Source: https://itsgoingdown.org/bern-open-letter-newly-disheartened/
Several years ago, I worked as an after school program teacher. In the
3-4 hours I spent with kids before their parents arrived, instead of
playing outside or relaxing after a long day at school, I helped
administer tests, monitored performance, oversaw homework, and handed
out worksheets. The school I worked at didnât have much money; neither
did the kids or the people who worked there, and due to low test scores
we were threatened with being taken over by the state. Administrators
wanted to get these scores up and looked to the after school program to
raise performance. The kids of course, had other ideas.
The kids wanted to do anything but be in another 3-4 hours of school.
Once, we did an activity where they made posters about how they would
change the school for the better if they had the power to do so. Almost
every kid in the classroom of about 20 drew the school on fire. The
natives, as they say, were restless.
When I did attempt to implement instruction the kids would goof off,
talk back, or sometimes exploded by flipping over their desks or walking
out of the room. The stress of almost 10 hours of schooling was too much
for many of them, who also had to go home to blue-collar families that
were often struggling.
In order to better manage this chaotic and stressful situation, bosses
and specialists gave us a set of tools which by all accounts were
completely, âdemocratic.â We would start by âmaking agreementsâ with the
kids and creating âbuy inâ for activities and completed work. In order
to further create an environment of law and order, I often would appoint
student helpers from the class that worked as an auxiliary police force
in exchange for special privileges or candy.
In many ways, this classroom environment mirrored the creation of the
United States. A powerful elite helped to manage and shape a unruly
population of indentured servants, slaves, and indigenous people. But to
do so, it needed a police force. In order to get there, it gave
privileges to some (what became white people) while curtailing them for
others (everyone else).
The colonial powers used anti-Blackness and white supremacy, I used
Skittles and extra hall passes.
But government is much more than carrots and sticks, politics involves
overall the spectacle and myth of democracy. For instance, in our
training sessions we were told, âGet them to create a set of agreements
around rules and behavior in the classroom, but make sure you shape and
guide these rules. Obviously, donât let them get out of hand.â Meaning,
we were to help give the appearance of the students shaping the
guidelines for their behavior, however at all times we (who were ruled
over by the administration and themselves by the US government) in
actuality were there to create the physical framework. But moreover, we
existed to guard against school and thus government authority being
attacked by the unwashed young masses hell bent on doing zero work and
collectively singing J-Lo songs.
Lastly, in the eyes of the school powers that be, the ultimate goal of
such a project was that the kids would essentially grow to govern
themselves, but always how we wanted them to be governed. To keep them
from agreeing to actually set the school on fire, we had to make them
think that they were the ones organizing their day to day activities
which they hated so bitterly. In short, we had to make them appear as
the chief architects in their own immiseration.
But what about those that resisted? It wasnât long before acts of revolt
broke out. A tag on the board here, a mean drawing of myself there. Even
a cough could spread like wildfire into a chorus of rebellion. Before my
eyes, a hoard of Sponge Bob backpacks became a sea of little Nat
Turners. âStop it, stop it! Quiet!,â I cried out. âWhat are you, the old
white guy from the Hunger Games?,â they would ask. Disgraced, I knew the
answer. Yes.
Everything in the classroom that I helped create exists in the wider
American political landscape. From the growing policing of everyday
life, to the widening pool of those within a given population that are
âput in time out.â But just as in my class, in the grown up world
technology and statecraft have evolved to make politics appear as this
participatory activity that is alive in the hands of the population.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It was in helping kids create and shape their own governance that I came
to understand the real nature of how democracy works. When I would need
kids to do an activity, I would start out by âmaking agreements.â These
rules if broken, this would then mean that the students were breaking
agreements they had made âwith themselves.â âOh youâre not doing your
work Timmy? But you agreed to it! Go sit in time out!â
There is an immense system of violence and domination in place over us
that keeps the wheels of this system running. While it appears we have a
hand in shaping our lives, in reality there are clear systems of control
and management in place to make sure that the overall structure of this
society is not threatened. No matter who is elected, no matter what
political party you join, the appearance of popular control, of
democracy, is a total illusion. No where has this illusion been greater
in recent memory than in the campaign of Bernie Sanders.
Years later, many things in my life have changed but much remains the
same. I no longer have a part time job that pays me enough to live in a
poverty stricken county. I took a different unionized position in a
major industry where wages, working standards, and benefits have fallen
while the rate of work has increased. The amount of money that I pay for
rent has gone up over the last four years. I currently work up to 60
hours a week while my partner makes minimum wage in a nearby wealthy
downtown area in the service industry. I live in a rapidly gentrifying
working-class town outside of a major metropolitan area. Every year
things become more expensive, hotter, more polluted, and resources more
scarce. Food stamps are cut, more people are made homeless, and
everything from rent control to library hours are attacked.
Ironically, I represent the target audience of both the Sanders and the
Trump campaign. Both as a worker that is attacked by Wall-Street and
corporate capitalism and as a white male which has historically been
pandered to along the lines of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and
xenophobia. Funny thing is, Iâm not buying any of it.
In the last year, I watched the Sanders campaign grow in size but still,
I knew this day of disappointment was coming. On Monday, it arrived as
before voters had even taken to the polls or the ballots had been mailed
in and counted, Hillary Clinton, the much hated multi-millionaire,
proponent of neo-liberalism and US imperial intervention, attacker of
the poor and working-class, proponent of âSuper Predatorâ
anti-Blackness, and much hated Democratic Party front runner declared
victory. While Hillary would go on to receive more votes that Bernie
Sanders, Clinton declared victory based on the amounts of âSuper
Delegatesâ that were pledged to her from DNC Party insiders and
faithful. Thus, even if Sanders would have won by a landslide, he would
have lost due to mechanics of the political apparatus. But the
authoritarian inner workings of American democracy go much deeper than
simply the electoral college.
America is a settler nation created out of colonies managed by imperial
powers. Originally, only wealthy white men were allowed to vote. As one
of our founding fathers, John Jay put it, âThe people who own the
country ought to govern it.â Since the founding of the US, it took
bitter struggle to extend the vote to non-whites, to women, to the poor,
and even to people under 21. Since the civil rights movement, voting
rights in many states have been attacked and those in both major
corporate parties have passed a variety of laws (such as voter ID
checking) to ensure that namely African-American voters are kept away
from polling stations. Further, many former and current prisoners, the
majority of them poor and of color, are barred from voting. For a
country that describes itself first and foremost as a democracy, it has
a horrible track record of defending universal suffrage and openly works
to block it for some and celebrate it for others.
But even if everyone in the US could simply walk into a polling station
and cast a ballot without hassle, would it still make a difference? No,
it wouldnât. The candidates are decided by the electoral college and the
political parties themselves, not the voters. This current election
shows this to be true more than ever. The election, just like the
debates and all the TV interviews and shared internet articles, is part
of a show; a pageant of democracy.
But the electoral college is just one part of an over all picture.
Thereâs also the Supreme Court which is appointed by the President and
the ability by the President and Congress to override the decisions of
voters. But these are just the things that people recognize and admit to
themselves as out of our control regularly. We donât get to vote on wars
or if we fight and die in them. We donât get to decide if âourâ
government is allowed to conduct surveillance and attack social
movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter. We donât have control of if
it destroys the environment. There is no vote that can stop the police
from killing thousands of people per year or incarcerating millions
more. In all of these situations and in a millions more, our government
is a instrument of both class rule and racial apartheid that exists for
the benefit of the rich and powerful at the expense of the rest of us.
But even if we could vote on all of these things, to create a totally
directly democratic society or perhaps even vote for a politician that
says that they would either not do these things or do away with them, we
still are left with the rest of the world that government exists to
manage in the first place: capitalism.
Even if Bernie got elected, even if we had the ability to vote on
everything that our government does, that still wouldnât change the fact
that we live in a capitalist society; and itâs that fact that impacts
everything around us.
Almost everyone reading this doesnât own the place where they work; we
donât control the our means of survival. Instead we are forced to sell
our labor for a wage. Some of us might try and go to school to get a
better job where we can do this for more money, but often that just
leaves us in even more debt. Debt: for our cars, for our homes, for our
educations, for our credit cards which keep the heat on or provide day
care for our children. More and more, we are in debt, or indentured to
someone else. For food, for shelter, even for a job itself.
But someone is getting rich, it just sure isnât us. Since the economic
crisis of 2008, the richest 1% has gotten richer while the rest of us
have gotten poorer. In the meantime, most of us are working more than
even, with every second at work making someone else more wealthy.
Neo-liberalism, outsourcing, and attacks on labor unions have led to a
decimation of jobs in rural areas while in metropolitan ones, work and
capital is re-organized, as cities become gentrified, workers are pushed
out, and rent and home prices explode. Whole generations of working
people are now growing up with a grim future ahead of them. Their lives
look bleaker than their parents did as economic, ecological, and social
crisis lie around every corner and world war lies on the horizon.
Despite the claims of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party
to address these problems, they have only helped facilitate the
fattening of the 1%. The wealth gap between black, brown, and white
families has only gotten larger in the last 8 years as black net worth
has shrunk more than at any time in history since the great depression.
While fascists like Trump contend that this is due to free trade deals
like NAFTA and the FTAA, which is true in part, at the same time they
promote an economic nationalism that simply seeks to further drive down
wages by attacking unions, the environment, social programs, and
immigrant workers. None of these things will actually help American
workers, only further concentrate wealth in the hands of the few just as
they have done in the last several decades. One of the things it will do
is divide the working class; keeping it looking at those around and
below it, instead of those running the show and directing their misery,
above.
But while Trump uses racism to gain votes, much as George Wallace or
Barry Goldwater did before him, this electoral strategy is based on a
very real foundation of anti-Blackness and white supremacy that is key
building block of the American system. Racism is the glue that binds
this society together and keeps poor and working people from linking up
against it. This is why the police kill so many people every year and
millions are locked away in jail. Despite all the voting and reforms
since 1776, not much as changed about this aspect of the country, if
anything, there is simply now more than ever a myth that democracy can
overcome this oppression.
But capitalism is more than a constant cycle of boom and bust that
always affects the poor and working class negatively, and is based upon
white supremacy and anti-Blackness to ensure social control. It is also
a system of resource extraction and industrial production that always
needs to grow and expand. But it is this growth and expansion that is
hurdling all of humanity closer and closer to the brink of climate
chaos, a new world war, endemic drought and food shortages, and the
creation of millions of refugees. Trump represents the fascist strong
man that denies all of this, but the alternative of Sanders is no more
idiotic: the belief that capitalism can be reformed and that government
can do it.
But in thinking about the need to abolish capitalism, both as a means of
industrial production and as a way of life based around selling our
lives for wages and endless consumption, we come up against a very clear
reality: we canât do this through voting., through the State, or through
a politician.
Just as the students in my classroom werenât allowed to burn down the
school, so too are we not allowed to burn down capitalism through a
system designed to protect it. This isnât allowed by those in power no
matter how much we want it and it certainly isnât on the ballot. And, if
you even start to think about it, there are plenty of armies, police,
and government agencies in place to make sure you donât even get close.
This is why most people just sit at home, âThey game is rigged. What can
we do?â We then return to the same sense of powerlessness, isolation,
and despair that exist across all areas of daily life.
The world canât be changed through politics in a meaningful way because
government is a system of management that ensures that the power,
wealth, and privilege of a few is protected against the rest of us. That
hierarchies and systems of oppression and domination based upon racism,
sexism, and economic exploitation are kept in place, not done away with.
But moreover, democracy acts as a smokescreen for this dictatorship. It
is the system of âagreementsâ and âbuy insâ that keep us thinking that
we can have a say in an apparatus that dominates us.
It canât. It never has. And it never will.
For many Americans this is the hardest thing to understand and to come
to grasps with. That in order to actually create anything resembling a
âdemocratic societyâ we would have to employ largely undemocratic means.
If we donât want to be poor, we must take over the means of existence
from the rich. If we donât want the environment to be destroyed, we must
destroy the capitalist economy. If we donât want a police state, we must
confront and abolish the courts, police, and prisons in every aspect of
our lives. None of this can be done through the vote or through sitting
down at the table of politics with the rich and powerful.
We have to build something much different than just support for a
candidate. We have to build something that can make a real revolution.
That can create a different way of life. We have to breathe into
existence a movement that exists outside of the framework of politics as
we know it.
Across the United States, the Sanders campaign has raised over $207
million dollars. People knocked on doors, they put up stickers, they
organized rallies, and they made phone calls. Many people felt that a
change was coming. But moreover, they felt that things were different
this time and that finally the system would work the way it was supposed
to. After all, isnât participating in the democratic process one of the
most American things one can do? Werenât all those people doing exactly
what we were told since we were little kids we should have been doing to
make this country better all along?
But as Clinton announced her victory, or more realistically, the loyalty
of the Democratic Party faithful âSuper Delegates,â for many, memories
came back. Nader in 99, Kerry in 04, Obama in 08âŠ
What if we had put all of that time, energy, and organization in
building something that wasnât based around electing a politician? What
if we put that time, energy, organization, and hundreds of millions of
dollars into building organizations that can fight, win, and seize land?
For all the rhetoric of the Sanders campaign, his use of language of
Occupy and Black Lives Matter, both movements that the Democrats helped
to crush under their own heels, there was not a âpolitical revolution.â
Nothing was taken over. No buildings were occupied. No armies or police
forces confronted. The prisoners were left squarely in their cells. The
streets werenât ripped up for gardens and the oil pumps turned off.
Politics worked just as it always did. The powerful stayed in power and
the rich will only get richer. The millions of people pulled into the
Sanders campaign will now go home and go to bed. In another four years,
a new generation will be called upon to elect someone just like him and
again be let down. But moreover, those energized by Sanders are now free
to be led directly into the Democratic Party machineâŠ
If we are to move into the future, we have to come to first understand
what we are up against. We are up against a system of government that is
based around violent force and we are fighting to destroy a way of life
that is organized around industrial capitalism. For humanity to survive,
not just survive in the sense of less people in prison, a higher minimum
wage, and no student debt, but survive in the sense of continued life on
this planet, a revolution must be carried out that sweeps away
industrial capitalism and the governments that manage it â into the dust
bin of history.
The sooner we get to building such a movement, the sooner we can gets
towards making this reality. For everyone recovering from their 3rd
degree berns, we ask plainly: what side are you on? The game is rigged.
Your candidate lost. Itâs not that the system is broken, itâs that it is
working just the way it was always supposed to.
Isnât it time we had a real revolution? Or will we continue to buy into
our own destruction?