Walkers of the World: Die!

Ryan Harvey is posting videos from the worker occupied capital building. Incredible stuff. The police have been ordered to remove protesters from the capital building at 4 O'clock today. While some (as above) have joined the protesters and are refusing the orders, it appears that others may well kick the people out. A vital revolutionary moment: are they Cops or workers? Each will have to make his choice.

Videos have shown joy reigning from Tahrir to Sanaa to Madison. Anger brings the crowd together, but the revolutionary crowd cleanses anger of its impotence, self-destruction, and futility, and reveals the truth: anger is happiness repressed. Remove societal denial and anger expresses itself as laughter, not violence.

I was a fool, believing in the joyous revolutionary expression of violence as the main tool. Where it is defensive it is right, but the idea that violent revolution is the only possible revolution comes from an impotent (if accurately targeted) rage. I can only speak for myself in this moment of revelation, but my belief in violent revolution had many critical weak points: a desire for self-destruction, suicide by cop; a misogynist appraisal of the possibility of class war; reading critical revolutionary material which at its newest was over 40 years old; the fascistic action movie fantasy that one man with a gun can change it all; the meeting of a personal failure, laziness viz responsibility, with a revolutionary theory that eschews work for pleasure; a knee jerk contrarianism to the pacifism that so badly failed our parents; a mythologizing of myself to hide my own existential meaninglessness.

If you look closely, you will see almost all of these failings emerge from the self-idolatrous bourgeois myth of the college student: I accepted violence into my heart when I was materially the furthest I would ever be from it. No one is more impotent, coddled, and confused than the American college student.

The people of the Middle East are holding a daily master's class. The people of Wisconsin reinvigorate democracy. No revolutionary violence except defensive violence. The strength of the people, silent, present, engaged, and joyous, is enough to overthrow any tyrant.

When change is power's mantra, consistency is strength.
When day old news is old news, we must become ancient.
When brevity is king, we must speak in paragraphs.
When discourse is a wall of noise, silence is power.
When the system is fast, fluid and strong as the wind, the people must become a forest.