Wages of Rebellion (15 page)

Poor people of color are subject to daily abuse by omnipotent police forces. Police are permitted to strip them of their most basic rights and are either authorized to use deadly force or protected by their departments and the legal system in most cases when they do, even against unarmed suspects. The law professor Michelle Alexander, author of
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
, argues that we have created a criminal “caste system.” This caste system controls the lives of not only the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated but the 4.8 million people on probation or parole.
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Millions more people are forced into “permanent second-class citizenship” by their criminal records, which make employment, higher education, and public assistance difficult or impossible.
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A Department of Defense program known as “1033,” begun in the 1990s and authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act, and federal homeland security grants to the states have provided a total of $4.3 billion in military equipment to local police forces, either for free or on permanent loan, the magazine
Mother Jones
reported. The militarization of the police, which includes outfitting police departments with heavy machine guns, magazines, night vision equipment, aircraft, and armored vehicles, has effectively turned urban police, and increasingly rural police as well, into quasi-military forces of occupation. “Police
conduct up to 80,000 SWAT raids a year in the US, up from 3,000 a year in the early ’80s,” writes Hanqing Chen, the magazine’s reporter. The American Civil Liberties Union, cited in the article, found that “almost 80 percent of SWAT team raids are linked to search warrants to investigate potential criminal suspects, not for high-stakes ‘hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.’ The ACLU also noted that SWAT tactics are used disproportionately against people of color.”
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The urban poor are already in chains. These chains are being readied for the rest of us.

Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth examine 100 years of violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their 2008 article “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.” They conclude that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as violent uprisings. Nonviolent movements appeal to those employed within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are willing to abandon them. And, the authors point out, with as little as 3.5 percent of the population who are organized and disciplined, it is possible to bring down even the most ruthless totalitarian structures.

While governments “easily justify violent counterattacks against armed insurgents, regime violence against nonviolent movements is more likely to backfire against the regime,” Stephan and Chenoweth write. “Potentially sympathetic publics perceive violent militants as having maximalist or extremist goals beyond accommodation, but they perceive nonviolent resistance groups as less extreme, thereby enhancing their appeal and facilitating the extraction of concessions through bargaining.”
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The ability to draw those within the systems of power into the movement creates paralysis and crippling divisions within the ruling elite. And this is fundamental to all successful revolts. “Internally, members of a regime—including civil servants, security forces, and members of the judiciary—are more likely to shift loyalty toward nonviolent opposition groups than toward violent opposition groups,” they write.

Although it appears, as I write this book, that political ferment is dormant in the United States, this is incorrect. Revolutions, when they erupt, are to the wider public sudden and unexpected, because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is, as Berkman observed, invisible. Revolutions expose their face only after revolutionary ferment has largely been completed.

Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to begin by discrediting the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and constructing alternative ideas and language. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, once the old vocabulary no longer holds currency, the power elite is finished, although outwardly it may appear that nothing has changed. But this process is difficult to see and often takes years. Those in power are completely unaware that the shift is taking place. They will speak, like all dying elites, in the old language until they finally become figures of ridicule.

In the United States today, no person or movement can program the ignition of this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, its abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment and the massive debt peonage
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that is crippling millions of Americans, and the widespread despair and loss of hope, along with the collapse of institutions meant to carry piecemeal and incremental reforms, including the courts, make blowback inevitable.

“Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot ‘make’ a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,” Berkman wrote. “It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.”
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If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants, and police—to get them, in essence, to defect—nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, then state violence can spawn reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls “terrorism.” Violent uprisings are always tragic, and violent revolutions always empower revolutionaries, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who are as ruthless as their adversaries. Violence inevitably becomes the principal form of coercion on both sides of the divide. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, swiftly descends into nihilism, terrorism, and chaos. It consumes itself. This is the minefield we will have to cross.

“[The] tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions,” wrote Thomas Schelling.

By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas—in our case, neoclassical economics and globalization—that sustain their structures of power. The process of understanding this can take years, but once people do understand it, “the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent,” as Berkman explained. “Evolution becomes revolution.”
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I prefer the gradual reforms of a functioning, liberal democracy. I fear the process of massive social engineering. I detest the poison of violence. I would rather live in a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority and promote the common good, a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. We live in a system that is incapable of reforming itself. The first step to dismantling that system is to dismantle the ideas that give it legitimacy. Once that is done, though the system may be able to cling to power through coercion and fear for years, it will have been given a mortal blow.

“Many ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil,” Berkman wrote.

R
onnie Kasrils, white, middle-class, and Jewish, was working as a twenty-two-year-old scriptwriter for a South African film company called Alpha Film Studios in March 1960 when the Sharpeville Massacre took place. Sixty-nine unarmed blacks who had been protesting the apartheid regime’s restrictive pass laws were gunned down by white South African police, with 180 seriously wounded.
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Many were shot in the back as they fled.
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He approached some black workers at the studio to commiserate. They told him: “This is South Africa.
Amapoyisa yi’zinja
. [The police are dogs].” Groups of white English and Afrikaans were also gathering in separate groups. The massacre, everyone knew, signaled the start of a new phase in blacks’ battle for liberation in apartheid South Africa. One of the white men told Kasrils: “
Moe’nie
[Don’t] worry, mate, you’ll be in the trenches with the rest of us.
Ons wit ous
[us white guys] have to sink or swim together.”
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But his white coworkers were wrong. Something snapped in Kasrils. He underwent a conversion—the rite of passage of all revolutionaries. During the next few days, he argued passionately with family and friends about the gross injustice that had taken place, but found that “outside my immediate circle, few whites showed any sensitivity—the general view being: ‘we should machinegun the lot of them.’ ”
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He watched enraged blacks burn their passbooks in defiance and get arrested. The apartheid government declared a state of emergency. It outlawed the African National Congress (ANC) and its rival, the Pan African Congress (PAC). British-made Saracen armored cars, with their mounted .30 caliber machine guns, rumbled down the streets of the Alexandra Township, where most of the black workers at the film studio lived. Kasrils was no longer able to be a passive accomplice in a system of such gross injustice. He took time off from his job and went to Durban, where he met Rowley Arenstein, a radical lawyer who was being hunted by the police. Arenstein urged Kasrils to join what he called “the movement,” predicting that the ruling National Party government would not last six more months in power—a prediction that was off by three decades. Kasrils became Arenstein’s driver. He chauffeured the lawyer to various safe houses around Durban. He met others also being hunted by the police.

Kasrils returned to his job, but at night he drafted and printed leaflets for the underground movement calling for the release of all detainees, the lifting of the state of emergency, and a democratic government for blacks and whites. He painted anti-apartheid slogans on walls at night. He eventually committed himself totally to the struggle. Turning his back on his job, his class, his government, and his race, Kasrils joined the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. He became a founding member, along with Nelson Mandela, of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), or Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the ANC. Kasrils became a rebel.

Such a decision to engage in open defiance, abandoning all that is safe, familiar, and secure for a precarious life of resistance, is often triggered by a singular traumatic experience. Lenin was radicalized when his older brother, Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, was executed after being involved in a plot to assassinate the Czar and he began to read his dead brother’s radical books.
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The trip taken by the twenty-two-year-old medical student Ernesto “Che” Guevara—like Kasrils and Lenin, a member of the middle class—into the poor backwaters of South America allowed him to place himself in the shoes of the oppressed. Such conversions have more to do with the heart than the head. Empathy is
the most important asset. Guevara, like Kasrils and Lenin, would use his empathy to justify violence—a dangerous transformation when all action, even murder, becomes acceptable in the name of the coming utopia. But the sentiments engendered at the moment of conversion are real. Albert Camus said that no rebellion can take place without this “strange form of love.”
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