Politics: Radical Change

by Scott Hughes

In the United States alone, almost 100,000 forcible rapes take place yearly. In the United States alone, 14 million children live in food insecure households. Globally, estimates say that 12 to 27 million people are in forced labor or slavery in the world today; most are female sex workers. Globally, 16,000 children die every day from hunger. Serious - and avoidable - social problems overrun the world.

Corruption also overruns the world. The so-called leaders and politicians use their power for personal gain, unsurprisingly. They lie too. These politicians tell us that they work on our behalf, but in reality they work on behalf of mega-corporations with special interests. These politicians, the so-called leaders, do not control the country or the world. The true owners of the country and the world use these politicians and the fraudulent government as pawns. I call the government fraudulent, because the true owners use the democratic-republic as a disguise of the real plutocratic oligarchy, which exists regardless of elections.

The true owners decide who runs in elections. They decide what commercials you see on TV. They own the news stations. They decide who goes to jail. Even if we try to turn their own tool, the government, against them, their lawyers can crush ours like a sumo wrestler on an ant.

I speak not of "conspiracy theories." I speak here of a simple and observable reality. Rich people run the world. They run the governments, and they use offensive force, coercion, and violence. For example, Big Oil and the military-industrial complex had no qualms about starting a war in Iraq that, so far, has led to the deaths of well over 40,000 innocent civilians. Remember, the over $310 billion squandered on the war goes to these companies. It takes much less than $310 billion in campaign contributions, lobbyists and bribes to buy a war. Unsurprisingly, they saw it as a good deal.

You can see the money. You can see the weapons producers giving bipartisan campaign contributions, and sometimes you can even see the actual bribes. You can see the congressmen giving these companies multi-million and even billion dollar contracts. You see the U.S. military bases in the majority of the world. In another example, you see the prison-industry buy the enforcement of victimless crimes; indeed, the U.S. has over 500,000 non-violent drug "offenders" locked up.

I repeat, you can see the money. In the United States, the top 5% have more than half the money. Globally, almost half the people in the world live on less than $2.00 a day. These types of statistics do not even come close to demonstrating the oligarchic inequality of wealth and power, because the powers that be use this meaningless paper money as a tool; they own the Federal Reserve; they print the money; they control the boom/bust cycles and inflation.

To put this in perspective, one can notice the average American family - who even consider themselves relatively well off, compared to the 1.2 billion people living on less than $1.00 a day, for example. The average American family lives in debt. These people may live in a relatively comfortable house, wear relatively comfortable clothes, drive a car, and work in places better than a sweatshop. However, they do all the work in America, but they have to pay a mortgage on that house; they have to finance that car on credit; they charge those clothes to credit cards. Even the average American family lives as indentured servants to the few rich and powerful people.

One thing we need to understand about the rich and powerful people who control everything, usually via the mega-corporations which they of course own and the monetary system which again of course they own and control... We need to understand that their so-called wealth and so-called power comes not from hard-work, intelligence, or production.

These few rich and powerful people who run this plutocratic oligarchy steal their wealth and power from the majority.

If these people simply had produced the wealth and kept it, more power to them! That's meritocracy. I love meritocracy - the wealth goes to those who produce it and who thus earn it. It makes sense to me. For example, if we're both farmers, and you work twice as hard or twice as long as I do, and you harvest twice as much fruit from your garden as I do mine, then you have twice as much fruit as I do. That sounds fair to me.

Unfortunately, the status quo is not a meritocracy.

I repeat, the few rich and powerful people who run this plutocratic oligarchy steal their wealth and power from the majority. Those who work the most get paid the least. The majority work hard, both mentally and physically, and the majority produce most everything. The few rich and powerful use force and more-so manipulation to steal the wealth from the majority who produce it. This goes far beyond the money. The money is just an illusion. The paper money is just a tool used to steal the wealth and power from the masses.

So, the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to steal and sustain their wealth and power. Unsurprisingly, they want more for themselves and thus less for us. As pawns in their system, we work as neo-slaves, while nothing happens to solve the problems facing us, such as the starvation of children, the rape of women, and the murder, assault, and robbery of innocent people.

We need radical change! The word radical literally means 'at the root.' It always reminds me of a quote by Henry David Thoreau, "there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

We need to hack at the root. We need radical and fundamental change. We need revolutionary change. We need a revolution.

Historically, whenever people have organized radical change or a revolution of sorts, they choose targets and enemies. The positive success of the revolution depends on the selection of the target. For example, the French Revolution, one of the bloodiest revolutions ever recorded, seemed to lack a specific and effective target. It broke down into a witch hunt, where it seemed they would chop off anyone's head.

Many revolutions resulted in much less bloodshed. Some would still argue that any revolution results in some violence. For example, Malcolm X said, "there's never been a blood-less revolution, or a non-violent revolution. They don't happen even in Hollywood."

It's important to note that the violence or destruction that must occur during a revolution results from the violent status quo trying to save itself. For example, Professor Jose Maria Sison said, "the costs of keeping the reactionary ruling system are far higher then the costs of waging armed revolution. Exploitation and oppression exact a terrible toll on the people and are precisely what drive the people to wage armed revolution. We should be able to see the high cost of the violence of daily exploitation to recognize the necessity and lower cost of armed revolution. The people decide to wage armed revolution when they are already fed up with the unjust and rotten ruling system. In waging the armed revolution, they stand a chance of winning and instituting a just and progressive social order."

Additionally, C. P. Snow said, "when you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion."

When faced with the demands for radically progressive change and freedom, the status quo and the powers that be may violently attempt to continue exploitation. For example, take the brutal murder of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus (Yeshua) of Nazareth. To sustain, tyrants engage revolutionaries in a violent struggle. The revolutionaries may defensively fight back. However, we need to do what we can to minimize any negative effects of positive change.

There's no excuse for the kind of violence that occurred during the French Revolution or the original American Revolution, for examples. In both of those cases and many others, the benefits of the revolution far outweighed the costs, but that doesn't justify not reducing the costs more.

In the French Revolution, for example, between 18,000 and 40,000 people were executed, almost solely with the guillotine. That's a lot of people, for the country size especially. However, that's less than the number of innocent civilians killed by the Iraq war. It's just a small fraction of the over 2.2 million people currently rotting in jails and prisons in the United States, most of which have not been convicted, and many of which have been charged with victimless "crimes."

Nonetheless, we need to avoid anything like the Reign Of Terror that took those lives in the French Revolution. We need to take lessons from their mistakes and not break-down into a mad witch-hunt brutally murdering scapegoats. To do this, we must have patience, and we must utilize intelligence and voluntary organization.

Unlike those in previous overly-bloody revolutions, we need to choose our targets and our lines of attack very wisely.

At first instinct, we wish to blame and attack those few rich and powerful people at the top. However, I repeat again for the third time, these few rich and powerful people who run this plutocratic oligarchy steal their wealth and power from the majority. That means that the wealth and power that oppresses the majority comes from the majority.

We fund our own oppression. We work for and do business with these mega-corporations. We watch their news. We watch their commercials. We make and then buy all the needless petty material crap that they push on us - the mall-bought over-priced clothes, the pointless china dishes, the dumb shoes with lights in them. We have multi-page credit card bills with line after line of stupidity. We pay taxes.

We perform our own oppression, by doing all the jobs involved. It's not the few rich and powerful tyrants; they're weak, meaningless, and replaceable. If we get rid of a head tyrant, there will be a vice-tyrant right ready to take his place. It's us; we're the powerful ones. At root, we're the ones powering the machine. At root, we're the ones continuing this exploitative system that exploits us. What ridiculous foolishness! If we want to make radical - remember, 'at the root' - change, then we need to change us, because, at root, we power our own exploitation and the exploitation of our loved ones and our peers.

We are the news broadcasters. We are the soldiers in their military. We are the cops. We are the teachers in their schools. We are the workers and the shoppers in their malls. We are the workers in their factories and in their marketing departments, figuring out how to trick ourselves into making them richer. We are the prosecutors, defendants, judges, and juries in their courts. That's all us. That's not them. They're on their yachts somewhere counting their shares in the corporations that we fuel.

In the old days, when a horse escaped from a farm or ranch, the farmer or rancher rode another horse to find the would-be free horse.

While noticing our own guilt, we cannot afford to make the mistakes made in previous revolutions. We cannot look for a few single scapegoats, especially amongst ourselves. We cannot just find a few of us and throw them under the guillotine. That'll just cause needlessly self-destructive violence and pain. My comrades and I wholeheartedly support the use of defensive force when necessary. However, for success, we must understand the difference between necessary defensive force, and unnecessary self-destruction in the form of a mad witch-hunt. To that end, we must always hold ourselves and our own communities to stricter criticism than that to which we hold others.

If we want to make radical change, then, I repeat, we must change ourselves, because at root we power our own oppression. We must utilize non-participation, protest, and organization. Remember, we have all the power.

Politics: Non-Participation

If we power our own oppression and if we oppress ourselves, then we can stop that oppression simply by stopping. If we fuel the machine, our non-participation starves the machine. We need to stop working for and doing business with the mega-corporations that oppress us. We need to refuse to work for low pay, and we need to refuse to work for companies with business practices that hurt us or our communities. We need to stop paying taxes. We need to stop using paper money. We need to stop funding, working at, and going to government-run public schools. We need to stop enlisting in the government's military, and stop funding the government's military. (Indeed, the blood of those innocent causalities of the needless Iraq War stains the hands of American tax-payers.) We need to stop buying fast-food, such as McDonalds. We need to stop shopping at their malls, doing business with their banks, and using their credit cards. We need to stop borrowing money from them, because that's an illusion; we have the wealth and power; they need to borrow from us!

Politics: Protest

Since we have all the power, generally we do not need to resort to violence or coercive force. We can organize our power in the form of non-violent protests, and exercise our freedom of speech. With exceptions, for the most part those who resort to violence usually do so as compensation for weakness. Take, for example, bullies and fringe terrorists. Little kids tend to use violence for this reason, where as older, more intelligent, and more powerful people tend to use wit and non-violent stubbornness. For when a person or a group is truly wise and powerful, wit and stubbornness are usually more effective.

We need to adapt our protest methods to the particular protest situations. We have at our disposal marches, rallies, road-blocks, etc., and if necessary and appropriate we can use defensive force in the form of people's armies and community militias, such as the Zapatistas have done. No matter what protest method we use, we need to find and protest any act of offensive harm against us, our loved ones, and our communities. The trick here is to collectively protest any act of offensive harm against any person, so that we have a large group protesting any offensive act of harm against even one of us. Rather than just protest our own individual victimization, we need to voluntarily unify and use our voluntary solidarity to protect all of us from victimization. In that way, if any one of us or small number of us meets with potential victimization, we all protect that smaller person or group.

Politics: Organization

In the same way that we can use our power collectively in protest, we need to organize our power in alternatives to the oppressive elements of the status quo. Similarly, we need to use our organized power to non-governmentally solve the problems that face us, which includes not only those inflicted directly by the oppressive status quo, but also any other problems ignored by the oppressive status quo and ignored by our negligent self-interested leaders. Thus we can use our power to solve the problems facing our particular communities, including such problems as poverty, hunger, rape, murder, assault, and illiteracy. Mainly, we need to create non-governmental alternatives to the pseudo-solutions and destructive services offered by the government and mega-corporations. For example, we have the power to create our own small, private, and non-governmental schools. We have the power to setup our own neighborhood watches to protect innocent people from victimization, including police brutality and misconduct. We can setup our own trade networks to actually provide the services that our communities actually need, including defense, education, babysitting, legal services, healthcare, and financial services. By organizing directly and avoiding paper money, we eliminate many opportunities for tyrants to steal our wealth.

We have the wealth and power. We just need to recognize that, and act accordingly. We need to work in a way to retain the wealth and power in our own communities, and we need to use that wealth and power to solve the problems of our own communities.

Whatever we do, we need to never emulate the tyrannical tactics of those who rob and oppress us currently. We need to never utilize offensive force, coercion, or violence. Even if we ever feel it necessary to use defensive force and coercion, we need to diligently ensure that we never use offensive force, coercion or violence. Many revolutionary movements fatally saw the self-destruction this mistake can cause. Take for example the Soviet Union revolution that ended up putting Stalin in power, and led to the slaughter of millions of people. If we do not diligently and successfully avoid ever using offensive force, coercion, or violence, then we cannot successfully eliminate it. This point is so important that I end with it. Nietzsche warned, "he who fights with monsters should take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

For freedom, justice and peace - in that order,

-Scott Hughes

Scott Hughes runs a Self-Defense, Safety, and Security Blog as well as a Hunger and Poverty Blog. He also owns The Online Book Club, The Hunger And Poverty Forums and SpokenWordArt.com.