Of course one response is simply to say: Things are too hard, we can't organize, we can't change things, unless we change things in accordance with our masters. Because this is so perhaps we should accomodate ourselves to our masters as much as possible.
You say, "I think that today, thanks to their command of organization and technology, elites can pretty much get what they want without support or consent of the people." Where is there evidence of this? When El Salvadoran peasants go on strike the rulers are so upset they threatened to kill them. When the TWU goes on strike, "we" have to break them, fine their leaders and put them in jail. The U.S. rulers and business organizations, which has low union organization, spends a huge amount of money to maintain the disorganization of their workers. When nurses or newspapers boys organize they spend millions of dollars in Lawyers fees to get the NLRB to say that they have no right to organize. This goes on and on, in the U.S. and across the world. I think that at minimum I only have to point to Argentina, France, and Brazil in recent times, as a counter matter.
The real point here is that the rulers of every society have a large headstart on class solidarity and organization. The rest of us have to work everyday to reach a good level to counter such rulers. This has always been so. Technology makes no exceptions. People can be organized, and if they are organized they can have effect. I see no evidence that the world is different today in this respect than it was fifty years agon.
The military is a good example. In the pas,t elites depended on conscript
> armies which ultimately depended on people's consent to serve. Therefore,
> the elites had to give something back to the people in exchange for
> cannon
> fodder. But that is no loger true. Today, the elites rely exclusively on
> a
> mercenary army, which they hire and control without asking for popular
> consent.
I think we have to disagree here. Our rulers in the U.S. have to rely on a "volunteer" and mercenary army because the population force them to do so. There is plenty of class bias in this but the essetial point is that the middle class and a substantial portion of the working class refuses to act as cannon fodder.
The modern citizen conscript army dates from the time of the French Revolution. There are other ancient examples but basically citizenship in ancient times was more exclusive so I would like to exclude the ancient examples for now. The conscript army of the United States became a peace time army only after World War II. It was because of the mass uprest during the Vietnam War era that the draft was finally abolished. If our rulers could reintroduce the draft I think the evidence show that they would quite quickly. But when ever the balloon has been floated the reaction has been immediate and negative. The fact that we don't have a draft and the Army has been having a hard time finding decent new recruits is a limit that the U.S. population has placed upon military adventures. We know this because defense analysts say this is so.
The same holds for economic policy - elites can use taxes to
> subsidize any business or practice they want and how they want it without
> popular consent or even against it - e.g. when people boycott a firm.
I don't quite understand your point here. I think you are arguing my point that we must organize in order to counteract such policies. That is the sollution
> We live in a new brave world in which popular consent no longer matters -
> at
> least not as much as it used to. The elites, the Bushes, the Berlusconis
> and Co., can get what they want without popular consent, or manufacture
> such
> consent virtually at will if needed. This is not defeatism but the
> acknowledgement of facts.
What makes you think that things are any harder for us than it was for the anti-slavery advocates, who were often lynched for speaking out? Or for that matter why is it any harder than it was for union organizers in 1890? Things are different but not more difficult. Popular consent is itself a matter of organization and mobilization. It is possible that consent is manufactured as you say, but that is our failure, not the success of the Axis of B (Bush, Blair, Berlusconi.) Trotsky once said of the way Hitler came to power that Hitler played chess and the SPD and the Communist played losers-win. It didn't matter how well Hitler played the game because he was the only one playing to win. Poll after poll shows that most of the policies of the Axis of B, domestic are international are not supported by the population. In fact the population often thinks that the policy it supports and the B's oppose, are in fact supported by the B's. (I can provide many examples from both U.S. and Italy.) This is can be considered evidence for either your argument or my argument. The problem I see is that the people who are not organizing simply believe that nothing can be done.
I am not suggesting that people should resign to
> their fate, but that the old methods of "speaking truth to the power" do
> not
> work anymore because the power can get by without having to listen to the
> people.
You are correct here, speaking truth to power, never worked as far as I can see. We shouldn't be speaking truth to the powerful. They know the truth and they don't care and never cared.
Those of us who do care need to speak truth to those who are not powerful... but more we need to listen and hear what they have to say with us.
My solution.... organize, organize, organize, mobilize, mobilize, at work and in our neighborhoods... and do it as democratically as possible. There may come a time when we will have to do more but that is where we must begin.
-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060414/b25e7941/attachment.htm>