The establishment that no longer is . . .

The American establishment won't tell you this, but it is in a state of collapse, whether you're speaking of Washington, Hollywood, Wall Street, Harvard Square, or the New York Times. I have never known a time when those professing to lead us are so untalented, uninspiring, unreliable, undemocratic, unproductive or untrustworthy - and many of them all of the foregoing. These two articles deal with aspects of this phenomenon that. for obvious reasons, gets little attention in the mass media. More, undoubtedly, to come - Sam Smith

This is what revolution looks like

Chris Hedges, Truthdig - Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers  into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future....

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles...

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Civilization shifting: a new leaderless era 

  
The American Empire, and the global political economy it has spawned, is unraveling—not because of some far-flung external danger, but under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It is unsustainable—already in overshoot of the earth’s natural systems, exhausting its own resource base, alienating the vast majority of the human and planetary population. The solution in Tunisia, in Egypt, in the entire Middle East, and beyond, does not lay merely in aspirations for democracy. Hope can only spring from a fundamental re-evaluation of the entire structure of our civilization in its current form. If we do not use the opportunities presented by these crises to push for fundamental structural change, then the 'contagion' will engulf us all." —Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed.

Ryan King, Mongobay - A pattern of crucial themes has begun to materialize in the search for viable economic solutions, environmental justice, and social welfare worldwide. The complex dynamics of social and environmental systems seem best conceptualized within the context of an overarching conflict between hierarchical organizations and the introduction of localized, do-it-yourself  adaptations to global change crises.

In regard to this systemic conflict between state and non-state entities, analyst and author Jeffery Vail explains, "Having spent the past nine years in the intelligence and counter-terrorism community, I am forced to conclude that our increasing failure to combat terrorism is not merely a failure of programs and policies but rather the fundamental failure of the Nation-State paradigm… globalization and multiculturalism are invalidating the Cartesian geography that is the foundation of the Nation-State laying the framework for the coming structural, epochal conflict of hierarchy vs. rhizome [from the Greek for "mass of roots"- TPR]."

Vail describes the ongoing systemic change in terms of hierarchy versus decentralized, self-organizing networks, or 'rhizome' power structures: "In order to resolve the deficiencies fundamental to the structure of hierarchy we must, by definition, abandon hierarchy as an organizing principle. We must confront hierarchy with its opposite: rhizome."

Kevin Carson of the Center for a Stateless Society says, "All proposals for 'reform' within the present system are designed to be implemented within existing structures, by the sorts of people currently running the dominant institutions. Anything that fundamentally weakened or altered the present pattern of corporate-state domination, or required eliminating the power of elites running the dominant institutions, would be—by definition—'too radical.'"....


Hierarchical human social structures are organizations in which one agent or group exerts complete power over various levels of stratified, subordinate agents. In the hierarchy, group decision making is dictated by a sole entity, and communication is hampered by those lower on the hierarchy who maintain their positions by denying anything that may threaten the system's structure. Communication, therefore, is often distorted as it flows up the chain of command or status, an unintentional side-effect of the cultural forces imposed to support the power structure and status of adherents....


Coordination and decision-making in rhizome/networked societies are opposite to those of typical hierarchical structures. Rhizomes are collaborative, collective, and determined by group consensus instead of by an arbitrarily positioned and dominant leader. The structure is alive and adaptive: ideas and guidance generally spring from that which benefits to the entire group, opposed to those highest in status.

Yochai Benkler describes the advantages of novel social and economic collaborations: Computation, storage, and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person. And these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge, and culture—in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet. What this means is that for the first time since the industrial revolution the most important means—the most important components—of the core economic activities… of the most advanced economies… are in the hands of the people at large. …Social production is a real fact, not a fad. It is the critical long-term shift caused by the internet. Social relations and exchange become significantly more important than they ever were as an economic phenomenon… it’s sustainable and growing fast, but… it is threatened by – in the same way it threatens - the incumbent industrial systems. In the ongoing Wall Street and now global "Occupations" or permanent protests, an emergent, self-organizing social scheme presents a significant challenge to the hierarchy.... The "Occupy" movements display an extraordinary range of networked self-sufficiency and leaderless organization. The open sharing, widespread connections, and redundancies of the "Occupy" movements exemplify the abilities of network/rhizome structures to adapt and generate novel, unexpected techniques and tactics.


Additionally, "Occupy Wall Street" has developed a rapidly growing system of resources and provisions including food, shelter, medicine, exercise/meditation, media, computer access, and recreation...

Most modern human culture and social organizational structures may be characterized as hypertrophic outgrowths of the basic primate hierarchy. Through competition for power, status, and reproductive rights, evolution has reared most humans as imperial apes. Group decision-making and social adhesion are subjected to the forces of the hierarchy: just as many primate troops typically satisfy their own survival necessities at the whims of an alpha male, humans tend to assume the apes 'in charge' are best equipped to satisfy the interests of the group. Human culture remains somewhat entrenched in the habits of the primate hierarchy; we tend to revere and worship the familiar and established emblems, flags, celebrities, organizations, leaders, and institutions of the cultures in which we are raised...

While hierarchy is not necessarily the sole organizational paradigm of human social structures, it seems to be the default given ample resources and stable conditions. Hierarchy, however, requires centralization of power and dependence, commonly resulting in break-down and revolution when social and environmental circumstances become intolerable for a significant portion of a society....

Autonomous, non-growth-generating social structures devoted to creating net restorative external effects may be one of the most substantial leaps in the development of human organization since the transition from hunter-gatherer groups into sedentary populations. Emerging networks and open-source movements may be among the most progressive leaps in this direction.


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