Protest (II)

Unicorn Riot has obtained a federal training manual, Field Force Operations, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Center for Domestic Preparedness (CDP). The federal government uses this document to train local law enforcement in techniques for quelling protests. It was acquired during our reporting on direct actions against the Dakota Access Pipeline when we filed a records request to the North Dakota Department of Corrections.

(From here)

This is a great find, and I encourage anyone planning protests in the U.S. to read it. If I have the energy I may do a series on it here. A few initial things to note:

* Why FEMA? You think of FEMA and you think of planning responses for natural disasters, mostly. But FEMA is part of Homeland Security now, and this training manual segues easily from methods for handling riots (arguably a kind of disaster) to methods for getting rid of nonviolent protestors who are blocking something. Essentially, riots and nonviolent planned protest are treated as two points along a kind of continuum of similar types of events, which allows for justification of a continuum of the same techniques used to suppress both.

* The three types of protestors. The Unicorn Riot article mentions this, but I'll repeat it: the document models all protestors as belonging to one of three basic types: everyday citizens, professional protestors, and anarchists. That says a whole lot about both the police and the left in the U.S. First, there may be "professional protestors" -- it's a big country -- but I've never met one. I've met a lot of committed activists, but "professional" implies protest for pay, and more than that, hiring yourself out for any kind of protest whose organizers will pay you. I think that this is projection on the part of the security services, who imagine that people have to be paid to do something they believe in just as they are. Second, given the numerically low number of anarchists, it's revealing that the police encounter them as a distinct category and don't have one for any other part of the left.

* The war-propaganda element. There are items scattered throughout the document that attempt to immunize the trainee against natural human feeling in favor of "professionalism" or "controlling the situation". According to the document, people screaming in pain may not really be hurt, they may just be trying to fool you into letting them go. If they say something like "We're peaceful protestors, why are you doing this?" they're just trying to make you feel bad. If protestor medics come in and try to gain access to protestors who they say need help, those medics may just be trying to disrupt your operations and are subject to arrest. Every natural reaction that people might have to police using violence against them is pre-explained as potentially part of a protestor plan. Needless to say, this is a very dangerous way to train police if the purpose of the training is to do anything but defend property (but of course see the NoDAPL protests for an illustration of what the real purpose of this training is).

* Maybe I missed out on the really well planned protests, but the document assumes that some protests are planned out to a level that seems greater than any actual protest that I've been to. What they seem to have done is taken all of the best planned out elements of any protest that ever happened and merged them into one big potential protest plan. If actual protests were this well organized, protestors would be in great shape. But they generally aren't, and as a result police are largely planning for the wrong thing (if we were going to take the goals of the document seriously) or using these imaginary superprotestors as an excuse for their own increasingly militarized operations (and see above).

Edited to add: the UK is even further along.

ETA (2): "Some protesters will attempt to design fictitious media credentials to gain access to events or special consideration by law enforcement." Unless you work for the NYT or Washington Post, I'm guessing that your press pass is going to be a "fictitious media credential".

Glad to be an anarchist today

There's really one main argument for the U.S. Democratic Party: pragmatism. The lesser evil is still evil, but it is supposed to have the counterbalancing advantage that it can win, and therefore displace even worse results. Without victory, it is nothing. No large constituency loves free trade agreements, "humanitarian" wars, mass surveillance and an economy for the elites. People do have critical interests in reproductive rights, anti-racism, and feminism, but those themselves have been demoted to lesser-evil status -- no one was promising a bold new advance in reforming medical care, the prisons, immigration, or the police, but only to hold back the worst.

And now it hasn't won. On the contrary, it has lost so completely as to make it obvious that engagement with it is futile. Sanders tried what people are always (patronizingly) told to do: run within the system, pull the party to the left. He was predictably defeated by a corrupt party apparatus, and I don't see how his run is going to make any lasting difference. The groundwork for this election was laid in every respect by Obama's Presidential failure (ACA's meltdown, no good economic recovery, no pulling the bandaid off the global warming crisis quickly, no prosecutions of bankers or other action against the financial industry) and now the result is here. But of course the problem goes beyond Obama to the Democratic Party's entire political class.

I invite people to reconsider anarchism. Not because there is supposed to be some kind of blueprint for the future waiting in some dusty file somewhere. But because most peoples' thinking is wrong, and they could stand to give up on their current certainties. The left makes many errors, and has had many failures, but one thing that it generally can't do and remain the left is to dismiss large segments of the populace as racists and sexists who have to be suppressed and who have no real grievances. Try relating to people as if you are yourself and they are themselves, rather than identifying yourself with a state or a party, and then think about what this suppression really involves, who you are really trying to convince, and how. How do you get allies? What would one of the Rust Belt voters who Trump won over take from what you're saying?

The need for a left that is against all the hierarchies of unjust power is as great as ever. But the pragmatic solution of going along with the lesser evil is not actually pragmatic. It's time to toss it and go on. Political action is going to be necessary now more than ever, but people can't let that action go within the channels of a system that's failed.

Edited to add some links (not anarchist ones): Glenn Greenwald, Jeffrey St. Clair. Anarchism doesn't really have the temperament or resources for instant pundit reactions, but these will do.

Mark Bray's "Translating Anarchy" / Occupy (VI)

I recently read Mark Bray's book "Translating Anarchy", and this post will refer to it extensively. It's also the long-delayed sixth post in my series on Occupy, a post in which I'll focus on organization and ideology. (The first five are linked here).

Translating Anarchy is a worthwhile book, well worth reading as an organizer's view of OWS. But a lot of it is concerned with arguing that important organizers of OWS were mostly either anarchists or held anarchistic ideas. I already believed this, so I'm not really going to engage with this major part of the text. I read the book primarily to find out whether Bray's view of OWS at the center was similar to the one I got from an Occupy group in a college town at the periphery. In the aspects that I'm interested in, I'd say that it was. The rest of the book has helpful sections that were new to me (the chapter on the media with how the movement was expected to follow the rules of "communication with the elite" and "mimicry of the elite") and sections that I found not so helpful (a brief history of anarchism may be necessary for some readers, but tends to become a definitional exercise favoring the writer's preferred kind of anarchism). This post isn't really a review, because I'm going to focus on one particular part of the book that I disagreed with.

An unfortunate coinage in the book is the phrase liberal libertarianism (sounding very similar to Bhaskar Sunkara's "the anarcho-liberal", but as a footnote explains, intending to describe people who are "less explicitly ideological and more interested in free expression and a lack of constraint"). First of all, there are already in the U.S. two contesting meanings of the word "libertarian", the usage "a right winger who believes in individual freedoms for rich people" driving out the original meaning of "an anarcho-socialist". Adding a third meaning does not seem likely to help. And, as with Sunkara's "anarcho-liberal", this is a descriptive term that the people purportedly described by it do not use. What does Mark Bray mean by the phrase? A quote from pg. 91 of Translating Anarchy: "Liberal libertarianism rejects anything that smacks of coercion even when directed toward those who are actively working against the interests of the group." Bray goes on to describe an example: the OWS spokescouncil is interrupted by notorious disrupters A and B,but they weren't the real problem. "The problem was the people who responded to [the facilitator's'] attempts to quiet him by shouting, 'Let him speak!' Without the enablers, disrupters wouldn't have had any leverage." According to the liberal libertarians, "Any attempt to silence anyone in any context was anathema. Doing so, in their eyes, would be replicating 'the system.'"

This is a case in which Bray and I see the same thing, but put very divergent interpretations on it. It's quite true that in every Occupy group that I heard of, people were "driven away in droves by disrupters" (pg. 92). But note where Bray locates the problem: with the liberal libertarian who "fails to recognize that there are times when the way to end coercion is to coerce. After all, a revolution is the most coercive thing there is, but to most anarchists it's silly to decry militant action against the state and capital as 'coercive' given the context of exploitation." That's an interesting way of describing facilitators repeatedly failing to facilitate meetings due to an unworkable meeting structure. Why do the liberal libertarians have this power to enable disrupters? Because what they are guilty of is taking OWS ideology seriously, and trying to follow ostensible OWS structure. When people joined Occupy, they were told (informally, of course) that they were now in a group in which every opinion was important, that anyone in the 99% was part of our movement, and that we operated by consensus with decisions made by a General Assembly in which anyone could speak. If the word "organizer" means anything, that's a problem of the organizers, not the organized.

I think that Bray is approaching this problem from an entirely wrong direction. Rather than getting into an argument about how "the way to end coercion is to coerce", I'd say that there's much wider agreement that freedom of association implies freedom of disassociation. People gathering to effect political and social change are doing work. Anarchism does not mean that you are stuck with the co-worker from hell. There has to be an easy way for the collective to say "Sorry, we can't work with you because you're being disruptive, goodbye." There's no need to get into a difficult and quite contested argument about revolution vs evolution, and in general start an unconvincing explanation about how coercion is necessary and coercive means can lead to good ends. Bray does write about the right of disassociation, but it's a kitchen-sink justification when it should be a sufficient one.

I got the distinct impression, reading the book, that Bray himself doesn't really agree with OWS ideology or structure. Although OWS ideology insisted that consensus decision-making needed to be used, Bray says that he worked with breakout groups of various kinds or simply decided what he thought was best to tell the press without reference to any group-agreed-on line. From pg. 194: "Yet, although many actions were planned through the Direct Action WG [Working Group], a number of the largest and most significant actions were planned in private by affinity groups before being presented to DA or the GA for a rubber stamp." If I may generalize in order to shorten this already lengthy post, I don't think that many OWS organizers really believed in OWS' ostensible structure, and routinely circumvented it.

Whose problem was that? Bray has written about a book about how OWS was animated by anarchist ideas, and I agree with him. People on the left tend to attach the word "liberal" to anything they don't like, and Bray blames this problem on the liberal libertarians. On the contrary, I see the unworkability of OWS structure as being a direct outgrowth of anarchist ideas. Bray spends some time explaining how some people used "horizontalism", "direct democracy", or "direct action" as code words for anarchism. People took these phrases seriously. Should they have?

Anarchist organizers have to make some serious choices at this point. When the next movement springs up, are anarchists going to say that consensus flatly doesn't work for a mass movement? They should. Bray is quite aware of this problem, and writes about how Bakunin's anarchists worked by majority vote, or 2/3 for major decisions. But I'm impatient with hero worship of anarchists who have been gone for a century, and I think it's much more convincing to say that based on our recent experience of a few years ago, consensus decision-making should be rejected. And, to take aim at a few other Occupy sacred cows, that not everyone below the 1% income level is magically part of "the 99%" without regard to their beliefs, that working people may have goals and interests quite different than those that we wish to assign to them based on anti-capitalist theory and we can't really speak for them as a whole, and that not everyone who walks in off the street should have equal control of a movement in which different people do different amounts of work.

How would that avoid a return to charismatic leadership? One person in Occupy told me that what we really needed was another MLK Jr. or Cesar Chavez. This strikes me as being similar to saying that what America really needed was for Obama to be elected, although of course MLK Jr accomplished quite a lot more. People of color who I met in Occupy had often had their formative experiences and expectations set in these American mass movements, and were often very impatient with the Occupy style, preferring something more disciplined and less subject to the whim of whoever happened to show up at GA.

It's an unsolved problem, and anarchists would be better off confronting it squarely. Even the solutions that were attempted in the latter half of OWS do not seem to me to be solutions. The spokescouncils had "delegates", not "representatives". To me this appears to be a distinction without a difference. Yes, the delegates were supposed to merely bring the decisions of their groups to the council rather than making their own, and could be recalled at any time. But if these councils had ever actually made decisions, would the delegates really have gone back to their groups to get their new input on each new suggested change or compromise? No, they would have become representatives soon enough, or if they were often recalled and the decisions they were making were actually important, it would have led to confusion as the people who were familiar with the work were often replaced.

People on the left who disparage the liberal libertarian, or the anarcho-liberal or any other of what I consider to be variations of the same basic idea, always disparage the impulse towards localism. But perhaps -- rather than setting up a system that does not work and whose organizers routinely circumvent it -- it would be better to accept that horizontalism implies working within small groups. For instance, one of the staples of latter Occupy was the debate about Oakland, cast as an abstract dispute between "violence" and "nonviolence". Why was it important for those of us on the East Coast to say anything about Oakland as if our opinions were important? I trusted the people in Oakland to make their own decisions about what was right for their community. Bray writes about how OWS adopted the phrase "diversity of tactics" to cover both those who wanted to form black blocs and those who didn't, but of course this was merely a cover for necessity. There was no way in which the convinced advocates of "violence" (e.g. breaking windows) or "nonviolence" (e.g. not breaking windows) could ever really come to a consensus, not unless they were in locations where they actually had to live with what the others had done.

And if federations of local groups have to be made, barring some kind of wholly new Internet-based direct democratic structure, it would be best to accept in advance that these are pretty much going to end up as having majority voting, representatives who are called delegates, and charismatic leaders. Hey, it was good enough for Bakunin! (There, I did it.)

Take it away, Marty Lederman

First, read this Greenwald article. It describes one Marty Lederman; strong opponent of secret detention and expansion of executive power when Bush was President, and author of secret law once Obama became President allowing the President to have people assassinated at will.

What Lederman did is, in some ways, worse for the system than what Obama did. People expect Presidents to run off the rails. You don't get to be President in the first place without a strong liking for power and a lot of narcissism that convinces you that whatever you do must be right. The rest of the system is supposed to keep Presidents in check. Well, it obviously doesn't. The Supreme Court has been a joke since Bush v Gore. The Justices are, openly, appointed-for-life ideologues, chosen for their adherence to some political position or other, and the decisions on important matters don't come down to law but come down to this. And now it couldn't be more clear that the Constitution restrains nothing, that lawyers only rationalize whatever their client wants to do, and no judge will ever call them to account.

It's easy to shrug cynically and say, what did you expect from lawyers. But cynicism is too easy here. When Yoo and company were writing for Bush, they were an aberration. Even Ashcroft refused to do everything his President wanted. But now lawlessness has been normalized. There is no reason to think that any important decision about war, torture, surveillance, imprisonment, or assassination is ever going to be governed by anything but secret memos again.

We are currently imprisoning a higher percentage of our population than any other country on Earth. The rich are immune from prosecution for rich-people crimes like defrauding people out of their houses; the poor can be thrown in jail for any number of activities involved in being poor. Democratic legitimacy has gone from being a farce, a bought-and-paid-for property of lobbyists and PACs, to being simply irrelevant. The President can have anyone imprisoned at a black site, or killed, for secret reasons that presumably involve the accusation of being a terrorist. The President can declare war on Libya without even bothering to pretend to consult anyone. The population welcomes this, even people like Josh Marshall are perfectly willing to take the government's word that someone "was essentially waging war against the United States from abroad" without any of those messy trials or presentations of evidence that ridiculous documents like the Bill of Rights say we're supposed to have.

We no longer have a legitimate state. I'm tempted to write that what we have is an oligarchical anarchy -- anarcho-capitalism as it really is, not how its deluded advocates think it would be -- but that just confuses the issue, probably. In any case, law is now just something that you have to watch out for, not something that you have to take seriously at any intellectual or moral level.

Our elites are incompetent at even running a corrupt system in their own interest. It's likely that the system will collapse in one way or another, not because of anything that people do purposefully, but just because it will get increasingly unable to respond to reality, just as everyone knows what we have to do in our current economic crisis (and in our current global warming crisis) but somehow no one can do it. When we pick up the pieces afterwards, I hope that we don't try to put together the same fantasy that we had before.

Occupy Wall Street

From experience with how people reacted to Wikileaks, I think that I understand how this works now. Occupy Wall Street seems to me to be an unreservedly good thing. But most everyone who comments on it prefers to think of it as a platform for What They Are Doing Wrong. If anyone reading this is still unfamiliar with it, there are some convenient links here, though you should probably start with the We Are the 99% Tumblr.

First, the archetypal, much-derided media response from Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times on 10/3/2011:

I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

[...]

As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group — at least not yet.

Everyone loves this quote because it's so obviously and cluelessly corrupt. A reporter gets a call from the C.E.O. of a bank, asking whether he's in danger, so of course the reporter goes to check it out for him. You couldn't get a better illustration of the relationship between the wealthy 1% and the media. But there's another aspect that's less commented on. The "not brutal, not yet" phrasing functions to reassure the reader that this group of people could "turn brutal" any time that the C.E.O. gives Sorkin another call and tells him to report it that way. But there's also a certain obvious disappointment to it. Why aren't they being good anarchists and providing him with better copy? They'd better get some big black round gunpowder bombs fast or Sorkin will have to write about them as clueless hippies, which is not as good a career builder for him.

The mainstream left, meanwhile, is full of lectures about how these people should never have stepped outside without a list of demands and an organizational chart and a charismatic leader suitable for media profiles. Most of this stuff is too tepid to be worth quoting. Some of it is a bit better, but heavy on experienced people saying how Occupy is likely to fail without the advice and work of people like those experienced people: Rich Yeselson's article, say. One of the best and most sympathetic of them was David Atkins' Democrats: A necessary but insufficient condition post at Digby's blog, which I actually largely agree with. I certainly agree with:

Ultimately, the institutionalists need to allow the Occupy Wall Street protests to develop organically without attempting to convert them into electoral activism in any form. Supporting the protests is perhaps the most important thing progressives can be doing right now.

I don't so much agree with the contention that real change can only happen with Democrats in power, frightened by activists on the left into doing the right thing. That could have happened a couple of years ago. I think it's too late now. Real change can only happen when the system collapses in one way or another. Atkins' post is nicely symmetrical with Ian Welsh's "I’ll just note that Occupy Wall Street is necessary and insufficient. That is, the revolt of the students and the young intellectuals is necessary. It must occur. It is insufficient."

None of the above is to disrespect the Occupy movement. I’m a big believer that they’re doing something important and that they deserve props for putting themselves on the line. Their embrace of apparently leaderless leadership is a master stroke of organizing, and indicates they understand that any visible leadership will be destroyed, smeared or co-opted. This is all good, but it is useful for those of us on the intellectual margins to disengage our emotions, keep our hopes in check, and look at the state of play dispassionately.

This is better, but it still treats the people in Occupy as a way station towards the radical cadres that supposedly need to happen in the eye of the dispassionate, intellectual observer. Which, structurally, is no different from any of the other comments of the form "I admire their naive energy, but they'll only be what we need when they turn into X."

The most comical example of radical scolding was probably the "Anarcho-Liberal", as seen, say, in Bhaskar Sunkara's article here with Cyrus Lewis following on here:

Some things were broadly shared by “anarcho-liberals”: an anti-intellectualism that manifested itself in a rejection of “grand narratives” and structural critiques of capitalism, abhorrence for the traditional forms of left-wing organization, a localist impulse, and an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action. The worst of both worlds, the “anarcho-liberal” can neither manage the capitalist state nor overcome it, and aspires to do both and neither at the same time.

That kind of piece is instantly familiar. The people we don't like should get a group name chosen by us, not one that they use. (Attaching "liberal" to anything means Very Bad Indeed.) If people begin to "proclaim a new politics of 'rhizomatic' and horizontally organized multitudes" (quoting from Cyrus Lewis) that means that they are anti-intellectual -- only people who read real leftist works are intellectuals, evidently, not poseurs who read Deleuze and Guattari. And of course these Anarcho-Liberals are individualistic and therefore unconnected to real political action. It would be so easy to write a parody counter-article, declaring people who write for Jacobin the "New Neo-Socialists", as people who must have a grand narrative even though it has proved false, as those with a condescendingly described gift for rigor in the service of nothing real, and with an incoherent attachment to mass politics while having far less connection to the traditional forms of left-wing organization like unions or political parties than Occupy does. But one paragraph is more than enough already.

What's actually going on? One of the best articles -- because it's an interview, probably -- was this one. Here'a a quote from David Graeber:

July 2nd. That was the first actual meeting. What happened was AdBusters put out this call for these protests. We had heard there was supposed to be a general assembly on July 2nd. So I just showed up. But it was a rally, not an assembly. Some Marxist groups had set up stages and megaphones and was making speeches and were planning a march. So we said we don’t need to do this. We pulled a small group together and decided to have a real assembly.

So we wandered over to another part of the area and began a meeting and people kept migrating over. But we had a problem because we only had six weeks. AdBusters had already advertised the date to 80,000 people. And their date was a Saturday. You can’t really shut down Wall Street on a Saturday. So we were working under some significant constraints. We assembled 80 or 100 people and formed working groups for outreach, process, so forth and so on. And we began meeting every week

Parts of this are instantly familiar from the Bush-era protests against the Iraq War, during which a lot of leftist hand-wringing occurred over whether people should march in protests organized by A.N.S.W.E.R. But something different happened here. One group put out a call, and the usual Marxist groups were there with their one remaining, antiquated skill set: stages and megaphones and march planning. And people just wandered off and organized on their own. The existing leftist leadership, such as it is, is ineffectual at all levels, and there is no point in following them any more. Graeber again:

You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature. And it’s a way of juxtaposing yourself against these powerful, undemocratic forces you’re protesting. If you make demands, you’re saying, in a way, that you’re asking the people in power and the existing institutions to do something different. And one reason people have been hesitant to do that is they see these institutions as the problem.

Yes, exactly. Yes, it's easy to score cheap shots against this: it's idealistic, it's undisciplined, it won't last. Is it really more realistic to say that a list of demands for reform of the banking industry would do better? Or that people need to pass through this way station on the way to being good Democrats, good radicals, good whatever else has already failed?

It's not supposed to last. If Occupy Wall Street lasts, it will have failed. We have plenty of organizations that have lasted, long after they should have gone away. Occupy Wall Street's success is now, and has already happened.

ETA: police riot.

ETA: And here. I don't get the left's liking for Jon Stewart as reporter. If a comedian is the only person in the media who can say anything true, then that's not a good thing. But still, he's the only one saying it.

You can't leak out a social relationship

Of the recent flood of Wikileaks articles, this one at 3 quarks daily by Robert P. Baird is like catnip to me for its references to langpo (did my three readers know that I think of myself as a poet? probably). But at any rate, it sets out quite well three possible theories of what Wikileaks could be doing:

1. "the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes 'information wants to be free' as its gospel"

2. "The traditional argument for transparency is that more information will allow a populace to better influence its government."

3. "What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims."

I think I've criticized the first of these two sufficiently already. For the first, I'll just note that Wikileaks has a copy of the hacked CRU Emails. They weren't the ones to release them, as far as I know, so it hardly matters -- but still, when people go on about the benefits of techno-libertopia, I didn't think that they had in mind as one of those benefits that right-wing politicians would generate a storm of lying propaganda whenever a climate scientist used the word "trick" in an Email to another one. Naturally, people who actually have to fight against corporate propaganda in that area take a dim view of this kind of triumphialism. For more, see The Limits of Techno-Politics post here. The release of information is, by itself, apolitical, and doesn't make political content until someone uses it for something.

For the second, it should be obvious to everyone now that information is not power. Everyone knew that e.g. the justification for the Iraq War was a sack of lies. No one could do anything about it. Those levers of democratic power have long since been broken, if they ever existed. This article, for instance, takes Wikileaks to task for interfering with within-the-system public advocacy (before it, amusingly, becomes a press release about FAS's accomplishments), but what has that advocacy really accomplished? It talks about stockpile secrecy, for instance. All right, the size of the American stockpile of nuclear weapons has moved from open secret to acknowledged fact. Does that bring us any closer to getting rid of any of those weapons? No.

But I don't know if I've addressed the third. This is really the theory under which what Wikileaks is doing makes the most sense. As Baird writes: "If this sounds like sabotage, well, that’s sort of the point." Josh Marshall, in a post that reminds me what an establishment reporter he's becoming, writes "this seems more like an attack on the US government itself than an effort to inform American citizens about what their government is doing on their behalf."

At first glance, this seems like a common form of radical activism: "things must first get worse before they can get better." Everyone knows the problems with that: things get worse and stay worse. Or they get much worse than anyone anticipated. Making the American government even more paranoid than it is may not be a good idea. That would be the first line of criticism if you thought that this was likely to be effective in the form proposed.

But will it be effective as sabotage? I don't think so. I don't think that the important secrets of the government really were in the system that the leaked cables came from, which 3 million people reportedly had access to. But more importantly, I don't think that contemporary systems of power really rely on secrecy in any decisive way. Leaks are part of the ecosystem, and often appear as a tactic in attempts to embarrass people within the hierarchy. But no leak has the power to change policy. Power is held through arrangements of financial and military power, not through conspiracy. Sure, people find it comfortable to buy a media apparatus to put some glitter over the bare workings of the machine. But the hallmark of politics in our time is the non-denied truth. Did the last President of the U.S. openly have people tortured? Yeah, sure. He says so in his book. What are you going to do about it?

The title of this post is taken from "You can't blow up a social relationship", a somewhat well-known anarchist tract. In that sense, it's about my belief that it's futile to try this kind of informational sabotage. The government of the U.S. depends on people continuing their habitual social relationships, not on beliefs that can be changed by the revelation of the contents of diplomatic cables. And the government does not depend on protected channels of conspiratorial information in order to achieve competence at reacting to circumstances. It's quite clearly incompetent and is bungling every challenge of the contemporary era already. We will be out of Afghanistan not because our government will conspiratorially decide when that would be best, but because we will be driven out as the rest of our empire implodes.

Does it matter that I think that Wikileaks will be unsuccessful at this form of sabotage? No, not really. There are many recent articles criticizing Wikileaks for being newcomers, amateurs, for not knowing what they are doing. For instance, Greenwald here has a dialogue with a critic of Wikileaks, and Greenwald's defense basically agrees with the charge of amateurism but involves saying that Wikileaks is getting better at redacting the names of informers from its released documents and so on.

Well, of course the people who do Wikileaks don't know what they are doing. No one knows what they're doing! Some people know how to act within the expectations of the system, that is all. And they confuse this with knowing what they are doing. I don't think it's important that Wikileaks may be acting under what I think is an incorrect premise. They are still taking nonviolent action in something that might well turn out to be a right direction. It's better than doing nothing.

Wikileaks is, at least, helping to demolish the more important myth, the myth of American government in general. Look at all of the media and political gasbags calling for Assange to be arrested, killed, jailed for treason, or whatever other violent and stupid fantasy occupies their heads. No one can possibly justify that within the framework that American politics runs on in theory. It's tribal politics. Once people get over their Two Minute Hate, one more little bit of the facade of American exceptionalism will have fallen and shattered. And that's all to the good.

Edited to add: this event around Wikileaks is also revealing the hollowness of the capitalist Internet as enabler of change. Every familiar large company for Internet transactions -- Amazon, Paypal/Ebay, Visa, Mastercard -- has frozen or banned Wikileaks.

Also, oh please:

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism.

If Assange wasn't currently imprisoned without bail on some trumped-up charge, this would be a "get over yourself" moment. But he is, so he can bloviate about scientific journalism if he likes. No one else can though.

Why I'm no longer a liberal

I was born in 1964. Therefore, my first political memories are of the aftermath of Nixon. By the time I got to vote, the U.S. was into the Reagan years. Since then it's been what I understood at the time as a long period of reaction. I didn't feel betrayed by Clinton, as many on the left did: it was too clear that he really was restricted in what he could do.

What was the political ideal of liberals in those years? Well, obviously there were many different ideas. But I don't think that many people really were waiting for a charismatic leader. At least in the circles in which I moved, it was a combination of community organizing and technocracy. One day the dam of reaction would break, and we'd be able to implement policies that actually made people's lives better. Then they'd see that which politics they supported really did make a difference.

That dam broke with Obama's election. Oh, it wasn't because of anything we did, or anything he did, it was because Bush screwed up so badly. Still, we had the Presidency and both houses of Congress. Yes, Obama is really a centrist, not a liberal, but he was as liberal as we were ever likely to get.

That's the last I want to mention Obama in this post, because what happened next really, I think, wasn't just his individual failure. What did we get? Well, let's just look at one really important fact. We got coverups of and immunity for torture. We got, in fact, continuing torture of people in the custody of the state, justified with the full Bush era legal justifications that amounted to anything that the President said was legal, was legal.

Don't believe me? Try here. It's the Kafkaesque news of torture victims who could not pursue torturers in court, because the fact that they had been tortured was a state secret, because it made the U.S. look bad. Or want more on Executive power more generally? Try this, about our official assassination program.

Why did this happen? Let me dismiss a few of the arguments I've heard. It wasn't because of GOP pressure. The GOP was already calling the President a traitor and soft on terror and, for that matter, a Kenyan, so they had already reached maximum rhetorical saturation and clearly weren't going to back down no matter what he did. It wasn't because of Congress. These were executive decisions, ratified by our judiciary. It certainly wasn't because no one understood that the issues were important.

And it wasn't really an individual failure either, I think. It was too widely supported. It was one of those moments that reveal the truth about political systems, via an inexplicable failure for something to occur. Somehow, despite everyone in power saying that they were against torture, we got torture. This is one of the moments when you have to realize that the system is running into a constraint that people don't want to talk about but that nevertheless exists.

America needs to torture people. Our system literally can not function without it. There can be no crackdown on it by elites, because our security apparatus is thoroughly implicated in it, our military is thoroughly implicated in it, and, to tell the truth, a near majority of ordinary people really want other people to be tortured. It's been a method of social control in America right from the start, with slavery, and continued through Indian genocides, lynchings, the Philippines, the Cold War, and the way we treat criminals in our prisons. Reagan had people tortured, mostly in Central America, so did Bush I, so did Clinton (the beginning of "renditions", if I remember rightly). Bush II made it official policy. Obama -- I suppose that I have to mention him again after all -- continued and reinforced it as official policy, making it thoroughly bipartisan.

What's been the liberal response to this? Well, take it away, Brad Delong:

Social Studies 50th Anniversary Symposium: Is There Hope for the Rule of Law in America?

That was the question asked by Denver University Professor Alan Gilbert during the morning panel.

Here is the answer I gave, as best as I can reconstruct it:

The question is: "Is there hope for the rule of law in America?" My answer is: No.

[...]

By 2001 with a Republican as president John Yoo had reversed field 180 degrees. He was making a very different set of false claims about what the law of America had been. He was then claiming that the president's commander-in-chief powers contained within them prerogative powers to torture and kill outside of legal procedure that would have astonished George III Hanover, and even exceeded those of William I Conqueror. When William I Conqueror tortured or killed, he agreed owed his barons at least an after-the-fact accounting of why if not any before-the-fact procedural checks.

Backed by John Yoo and company, George W. Bush claimed that he did not owe even an after-the-fact accounting. And Barack Obama holds to the same line.

So I see no hope.

Now, one of DeLong's often repeated phrases is "The Cossacks work for the Czar", meaning that you can't blame political decisions on underlings. Given that, I don't see why anyone should care about Yoo. He's been a convenience for two administrations, that's all. If not him, someone else would have been found. But pass on. Is there hope for the rule of law? No. That's the opinion of a middle-aged, middle class, respectable economics professor.

So, why liberalism? Everyone knows that it's failed. But they hold to it ... why? Without rule of law, really, why bother?

I don't think that there's anything to be gained by holding on to liberalism after it's failed in such a way that reveals that it never could have succeeded. I don't see anything in our remnant of a Constitutional order that is worth defending. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life working for liberal ideals that are fruitless.

Has conservatism won, then? No, of course not. No variant of conservatism is going to get anything that conservatives want. Not a smaller government, not the establishment of religion, not the suppression of non-white people. All of that is impossible for various economic and demographic reasons. Effectively, what happened is that everyone in my generation failed, all of us together. The only people who won were a tiny sliver of the super-rich -- but although they certainly have a political ideology that supports them, they don't have a political philosophy as such. Only an economic interest, one that their own success is going to subvert.

Leftism lost, for a variety of reasons, in the generations before.

What's left? Personally, I suspect that I'm going to end up as some variety of anarchist. I see no point in going into what exact type: politics is meaningless for me unless it involves practice, and I don't know of any group of anarchists I can work with locally, yet. Of course anarchism is quixotic. It has no chance, and even if it did succeed in America, the immediate effect would be to let a thousand death squads bloom. No matter. My being a liberal quite clearly had no practical effect either. The actual events are at this point turned over to the next generation. If I'm not going to affect them, I might as well not bother to be respectable, or pretend to believe in something that I no longer believe in. I always had an attraction to a form of (oh, all right) anarcho-socialism, but I figured that if it happened, it was probably going to happen a long time from now, after productivity had gone so high that it was really too much trouble to exclude people from the necessities of life. Better to be a liberal now, I had thought, and be involved in politics that had a chance of making some difference in the short term. But it doesn't have that chance to make any difference.

It's annoying, becoming a 46-year-old anarchist. I could deal with it better if I'd been one from my youth, but now, face it, it's both silly and annoying, having to start over with basic political books... I mean, these are the days in which I'm supposed to comfortably live off the seed corn I'd planted and settle into being a pillar of the community.

So much for that.