The Big Other Doesn't Exist (Keith) by X.

“The question of revolution is a question of seizing power”
-Mao

“We must organize to take power where we can literally put our hands on it”
-Amiri Baraka

To see the immediate relevance of these seemingly radical comments we must use imagination. Power is available now. It is not a question for a revolution in some distant future. During the “People’s Campaign of 2000”* we learned power can be something as simple as a roomful of angry parents.

The New Brunswick Board of Education (appointed by the mayor) decided to use a series of trailers as classrooms for elementary school children while new schools were being built. An outrageous plan, it drew the ire of the teachers union and parents. Over a hundred people gathered at the board of ed meeting where the plan was to be discussed. The board, as is its custom, appeared on a platform, saluted the flag, pledged allegiance and then adjourned to a “closed door session” for about a half hour before returning to the platform to address the assembly. The custom is an outrage and a scandal against democracy, but also our opportunity.

After the board left the room, a hundred odd people had nothing to do but sit and wait for their return. A number of campaign organizers attended this meeting including two of our city council candidates. We decided to use the opportunity to hold an alternative meeting and while the board conspired behind closed doors, we would hold an open democratic meeting. The board had left microphones (they intended them to be used under their direction.). Our candidates turned the microphones on, power was seized. We spoke to the audience about our campaign and the question of education and invited parents and teachers to take the microphone themselves. It was a bold but simple move. Nothing stopped us but our own fears. We are socialized, in school, in families, in churches etc. to sit quietly, to give our consent to idiotic un-democratic authority. Although the system is not afraid to resort to the gun, they don’t have enough of them. They must rely on our consent, our fear of acting without authorization, our fear of acting without credentials--our instinctual submission to authority or anything that sounds like an authority. Although I am not religious, what makes Jesus so radical is the comment he makes over and over before he teaches: “You have read such and such in the scriptures but I say this and that.” Who authorized him to say “this and that”? No one. As X has been saying “there is no spoon.” This is something that we have to learn as a movement and as individuals.

Indeed, realizing “there is no spoon” is only a beginning, and on this occasion it was as far as we got. We might have been able to make more of it if we were better prepared. We could have organized the parents and teachers into a more forceful opposition, placing the question of democracy before them in its most radical fashion —self-determination, democracy means, in part, you do it yourself— nor did we succeed in moving the crowd out of protest mode, but we learned an important lesson. When the board returned they were surprised to see the people getting along quite well without them, and although they immediately restored their version of order and the meeting proceeded according to their agenda they were not able to carry forward the trailer plan, and I like to think that in the moment they returned from backstage and saw people taking the matter into their own hands they got a glimpse of their future irrelevance.

* The People's Campaign was a progressive, grassroots, independent and democratically-run campaign that ran three candidates for City Council in New Brunswick in the 2000 elections against the long-entrenched city machine. The progressive platform of the campaign was developed by surveying over 1,000 homes throughout the community and it was approved -along with the three community candidates- at an open convention of New Brunswick residents and allies. The People's Campaign won 28% of the vote in this first attempt at applying a revolutionary democratic organizing approach to an electoral campaign in New Brunswick. More discussion of the People's Campaign and its impact will soon appear on the Pirate Caucus blog. (X)

Keith, who contributed this article, was one of the three People's Campaign candidates for the New Brunswick City Council in 2000. (X)

“THERE IS NO SPOON.” Part II (X.) by X.

It is an unfortunate (although predictable) weakness of the Matrix script that it promotes a pointless individualistic outlook: Once Neo can deconstruct the Matrix and “see the code”, he is reborn as a super-hero who can bend the rules of the Matrix all by himself. Not surprisingly, the tantalizing threat/promise that Neo makes at the end of the first movie (to wake up everyone and see what happens) never comes to pass in the sequels. The original script idea is betrayed, and by the third episode the plot degenerates into the deflating martyrdom of Neo the savior. We never get to see the episodes that should have been, where more and more people awaken to revolutionary consciousness and learn how to bend the rules of the Matrix.

The script’s shortcomings reflect the US Left’s own inability to get past the protest/advocacy mode and to recognize a new process of revolutionary change. The movement’s narrowness of vision fails to inspire the progressive and revolutionary artists to consider the real transformation of the system outside the realm of fantasy. Since the activists of the progressive “loyal opposition” cannot conceive how to build a movement here and now that enables the great majority to take part in changing the world, the progressive artists inevitably fall back on the Hollywoodian myth of the lone champion. Not only the Matrix, but most recent big budget fiction films with a progressive or revolutionary theme such as “V for Vendetta”, “John Q”, and the despicably cynical “The Life of David Gale” all rely on a central superhero and/or lone martyr to bring about change.

It may be a good thing however, that the Matrix sequels failed to deliver on Neo’s promise to awaken the majority and “see what happens.” Because rather than watching the story, we get to live the history if only we allow ourselves to recognize that it is by working and deciding together, by practicing collaborative decision-making, by practicing democracy that people begin to recognize that “there is no spoon” and to see the astounding potential of their social power to change the system radically.

To be continued...

“THERE IS NO SPOON.” Part I (X.) by X.

Since its viral opening in 1999, The Matrix has become a very useful frame of reference (I’m talking here about the first episode in the trilogy). It is useful because it uses incisive metaphors in its bold critique of the system and because most young progressives have seen it at least once. The Matrix makes it possible to discuss key revolutionary concepts in a striking and accessible way. I’ll focus for now on two of these important metaphors and their significance to the nascent movement for revolutionary democracy in the US.

The metaphor of the blue pill and the red pill is quite often referenced by progressives and revolutionaries. It powerfully expresses the life-changing experience that progressive activists and organizers go through when they first awaken to revolutionary consciousness. It’s the realization that your very understanding of the world does not reflect reality but a misleading set of illusions deeply ingrained in your mind after years of insidious indoctrination. It’s the sudden revelation that much of what you have been told about the world consists of outright lies by the system’s agents, of dingbat craziness perpetuated through sheer ignorance and mostly of confused notions borne out of the force-of-habit of the comfortably numb. The key dialogue between the young hacker Neo (budding activist) and the underground rebel Morpheus (veteran organizer) goes as follows:

Morpheus: We are trained in this world to accept only what is rational and logical. Have you ever wondered why? As children, we do not separate the possible from the impossible which is why the younger a mind is the easier it is to free while a mind like yours can be very difficult.
Neo: Free from what?
Morpheus: From the Matrix. Do you want to know what it is, Neo? It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it? The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage... ... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The script digs further into the loaded meaning of the red pill/blue pill metaphor by making crystal clear that in an information society, we face a choice pregnant with responsibility:

Neo: How?
Morpheus: Hold out your hands.
In Neo's right hand, Morpheus drops a red pill.
Morpheus: This is your last chance. After this, there is no going back.
In his left, a blue pill.
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.
Neo opens his mouth and swallows the red pill.

This bluntly symbolic scene has an uncanny impact on progressive students whose daily practice of accessing new information challenges the absolute dominance of the “official” version of events (even if most of the “biased interpretations” -read revolutionary analyses- have been filtered out of the textbooks). It exacerbates their feeling that “something is wrong with the world” and confronts them inescapably with the newfound revolutionary’s first dilemma: To know or not to know (soon followed by its twin: To act or not to act).

Yet as powerful as the red pill/blue pill image is (and I’ve referred to it quite often), I have come to see another scene in the Matrix as containing the most insightful and instructive of metaphors: the scene of the bended spoon. Although the script’s limitations only allow the metaphor to go so far, the Matrix introduces here the fundamental concept that our “reality” is not bound by immutable rules (just as the system is not ruled by immutable laws); we can affect our world (and our society) in amazing ways that we don’t even suspect if we just learn how. The dialogue takes places in the Oracle’s waiting room between Neo and a monastic-looking child of the underground movement that seemingly bends a spoon with his mind:

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
Neo: There is no spoon?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

I can think of no concept more critical for progressives and revolutionaries to grasp than the simple lesson conveyed in that scene: The rules of the system can be bent; they are not immutable, they are not permanent, they are not absolute. And as in the movie, this is the critical concept that must be first understood and then mastered before attempting to change the system radically with any hope of success.

To be continued...