Nobody saw the riots coming, but the reaction to the riot is something that has been predicted for decades – the all-out police state clampdown on free speech in the Western world. Evoking unfriendly comparisons to the Iron Lady, the Cameron regime has already sentenced 2 Brits to lengthy prison sentences – for creating Facebook event pages for supposed riots that never took place. News aggregates and talking head shows have been equally unanimous in suggesting that access and use of social media and even the cell phones they’re used on need to be restricted (Apparently the playing field between thieving poor and thieving rich isn’t unequal enough already.
Derided by “free nations” just months ago as a tactic used only by tottering despots and authoritarian regimes, flipping the kill switch on the free access of information in America went from fascist wet-dream to cold hard reality last week in San Francisco.
It had all the makings of the Tottenham riots – a protest forming around a poor man executed by police in a city that is historically teeming with unrest – and so the San Fran Bay Area Rapid Transit did what any arm of the imperial police state is now considering a “necessary security precaution” – they shut down the mobile boosters in their subway stations.
Briefly breaking into headlines with the help of the same “Commander X” that offered questionable support to Orlando Food Not Bombs activists last month, the press reaction was typically dreadful, although not quite as bad as the “evil Britains gone wild” smears. The San Francisco Examiner actually went out of its way to criticize a government official who spoke out against the shut down, using the typical “security over freedom” cop-out. But for the most part, the story of the first recorded instance of the US government restricting communication sources in order to prevent a free assembly sank like a rock. Americans are fully conditioned to roll with yet another blow to their illusion of living in a free nation.
San Francisco Examiner Media File
The BART officials did have one thing right, of course – the fire of populist rage is coming home to roost in America eventually, and just like in every other country that has experienced it in the last year, it will be dealt with a draconian homogeneity that only a global imperialist regime can deliver. It may not fall to Obama but eventually the American government will be exposed and derided in public just as in countries across Africa and Europe. What role will Americans then play? Will they rally behind the bailouts and secret wars, or finally realize that their struggles are not based in ethnicities, ideologies, and policies, but rooted in a globalized economic and military system of theft that the world’s underclass must defeat?
A response to “The Empire Pulls Out All The Stops to Control the Tottenham Age”
What a cursory, open-minded perusal of history shows us ad nauseum is that ruling class Power consistently uses all the tools available to undermine efforts to challenge its legitimacy or authority, which is why I’m surprised that One Struggle would put its stamp of approval – if it in fact did so – on this commentary which, while rightly sounding an alarm, has it tuned to a pitch which deafens us to history’s complex but discernible rhythmic patterns. Whether progressives are having a few moments in the sun or whether they’re down – especially when they’re down! – and the reactionary agenda is ascendant as is currently the case, the State always gets in its kicks to the ribs. While the title of this piece evoked “The Empire Strikes Back” for me, we couldn’t reasonably ascribe an act of ‘striking back’ to an empire which is striking us constantly.
Nor has The Empire pulled out all the stops in this Tottenham age – I think we’d agree that ‘pulling out all the stops’ would look far worse than the current crackdowns – though what it is doing may, along with lots of other reactionary tendencies which need to be defined more systemically, be showing us new levels of nasty in the context of this advanced phase of financialized free market Capitalism, fracked and threaded throughout with proto-fascistic highlights as it is. While we can’t ignore those glaring threads of gloom, we can’t be seduced into seeing them as the whole tapestry, reacting to the glitter, forgetting that the revolutionary task is to develop the means to tear up the tapestry. It might, of course, be worth asking whether what happened at that BART stop was some break with the pattern, some new level of State oppression, some turning point in the assault on the working class. Without, of course, ignoring the ugliness, even the overt totalitarian tendentiousness of the specific instance – I was viscerally disgusted by it – I’d have to say that it was not.
Following the tendency in this piece to overstatement beginning with its title are assertions like “But for the most part, the story of the first recorded instance of the US government restricting communication sources in order to prevent a free assembly sank like a rock.” Sink it has – and the collusive media is as symptomatic of political reality as BART’s immobilization of the mobiles – but looking at “the first recorded instance” claim, it just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when we understand it for what it was, namely another terrible instance of suppressing dissent, the same old product stamped “New and Improved”. More precisely, it was a very disturbing case of the neutralization of a tool for organizing dissent; the demonstration, itself, was not suppressed.
It wasn’t nearly as disruptive as countless cases throughout history in which suppression of communications yielded far more devastating consequences, let alone all the instances of outright brute force assaults on peaceful dissent which, it could be argued, also exemplified “restricting communication….” Suffice it to say this case simply demonstrates that just as there was never a Morse code revolution there won’t be a Twitter revolution. (And why would we even want to rely on a tool which, with a flip of the switch, can be shut down by the State or, what’s worse and already rampant: they keep it on, kick back, and listen or read!) To be overwrought at the discovery that the State controls the machinery is like being “shocked, SHOCKED, that there’s gambling going on” in the casino. But this commentary can’t even boast Captain Renault’s self-conscious wink and nod.
No, there’s been no “all-out police state clampdown on free speech in the Western world”; no transformation “from fascist wet-dream to cold hard reality….” Not that these events – State murders of innocents, co-optations of communications – aren’t disturbing to the max and potentially chilling, but we have to ask what good does it do to define events in ways which suggest responses based in a tactical orientation in lieu of a strategic one.
Whether or when that “fire of populist rage” comes home to roost; what form it takes; whether the reactionaries maintain the upper hand as they presently do; whether Capitalism marches on, recuperating itself, for another 50 or 100 years; whether real Fascism sprouts along the path……these are questions the answers to which will be determined to a large extent on whether sufficient numbers of us, outside of all the institutionalized sectors, can organize mass autonomous resistance, a goal which I understand to be One Struggle’s. And getting there has to be based in a clear grasp of our context, the task, and of our strength/weakness – and understanding that tactical responses, no matter how well organized or publicized, won’t qualify our reactive activism to be taken as some western version of the Arab Spring.