Zinn’s observation has never been more true than in this election year, when the two candidates running under major party banners have the fewest redeeming features of any presidential candidates in my lifetime.

I have no moral qualms at all against strategic voting in self-defense. Until a few weeks ago, I was inclined to boycott the election altogether. I thought and still think that Hillary Clinton is godawful and had considerable sympathy for the Sanders insurgency. But a handful of recent developments like revelations by the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal” and the howls of fascist bloodlust at the GOP convention have convinced me that Trump’s threat goes beyond the ordinary and reaches Germany 1932 levels — or maybe Greg Stillson in “The Dead Zone” levels. So yeah, I’m willing to vote Clinton if my state is close just to avert that threat.

But the choice is still one between merely godawful and apocalyptically bad. Trump is a rallying point for outright fascism by social reactionaries and racists who want to reverse the tide of history. Trump openly threatens, in rhetoric unmatched for authoritarianism since Giuliani held office in New York, to use the full power of the state to harass and shut down his critics in the press.

As for Clinton… Well, the prominence given to retired Gen. John Allen’s jingoistic ravings were featured at the Convention, and the fact that delegates chanting “No more wars!” were shouted down by mindless barking of “USA! USA!”, says it all. She’s more hawkish than Obama. She’s fully committed to Obama’s program of murderous drone warfare and legal persecution of whistleblowers, and agrees with Trump on the substance of his stances on mandatory encryption backdoors and Internet surveillance. On issues like the Trans Pacific Partnership, fracking and the Keystone pipeline she has — reluctantly and with great equivocation — responded to pressures on her left flank by making leftish sounding noises. But nobody outside the most sycopanthic “I’m With Her!” Kool-aid drinkers expect her to honor them once elected. If her economic policy team isn’t made up of appointees from Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, I’ll eat my shorts.

So the outcome of this vote will, at best, slow down the rate at which the American government gravitates towards plutocracy, police statism and global corporate Empire.

It’s pretty unrealistic, when you get right down to it, to expect anything else. The American state is part of a complex of institutions whose job is to prop up corporate capitalism and enforce white supremacy, and the two major parties — including the establishments and finance systems that filter the candidates you’re allowed to choose between in the primaries — are very much a part of that system.

That’s not to say that political action is useless — but its main purpose is to run interference, to deter state repression, and to safeguard our primary task, which is outside the realm of electoral politics: actually building the kind of society we want to live in.

Insurrectionary and revolutionary approaches to systemic change, and Old Left approaches like Leninism and Social Democracy, take a strategic approach focused on capturing the centers of political and economic power and using the state to transform the socio-economic system. Such approaches require a verticalist organizational model based on institutional mass and hierarchical structure — for example centrally coordinated mass political parties, establishment lobbies and NGOs.

But this model of influencing or capturing the state is becoming less and less relevant as a growing share of functions performed by governments and large corporations become obsolete.

In the 19th century the economy became dominated by the giant corporations that could afford the increasingly expensive machinery required for production. And around these giant corporations, there grew a complex of other centralized, hierarchical institutions like government agencies, universities, charitable foundations and public school systems for providing the corporations with organizational inputs they needed or stabilizing their functioning within the larger society.

Today we’re experiencing a reversal of that transformation. We have a set of tools for building a cooperative, horizontally organized counter-economy under our own democratic control. Permaculture and other intensive farming techniques can produce far more food from far less land than the giant agribusiness operations on their stolen land. Open source micro-manufacturing tools, like routers, 3-D printers, cutting tables and the like that can be produced for $1000 or less apiece, mean that a small shop with CNC tabletop machine tools worth six months’ factory pay can do the former work of mass production dinosaur industry. Self-organized networks are far more efficient, as coordinating mechanisms, than the old institutional bureaucracies with their Taylorist work rules and Weberian job descriptions.

Put them all together, and you’ve got a junkyard dog counter-economy that can not only operate on a tiny fraction of the enormous piles of stolen capital and land of the corporate economy, but — because of its high-overhead and bureaucratic ossification — run circles around it in agility.

Throughout most of history, class exploitation was based on physical control of access to the means of production, which were scarce and expensive. The propertied classes enclosed the land and then extracted rents from those who lived and worked on it. They used their accumulated stolen wealth to build factories, and with the help of their state’s police and military controlled the terms on which the working class, robbed of its property in the land, was allowed to work in them.

Today, when the physical means of production are becoming radically abundant and cheap, and the most important productive resource is the knowledge and social relationships of workers themselves, capitalists must instead enforce, not physical control of the means of production, but legal monopolies on the actual right to produce.

The capitalist state’s central strategy, through instruments like TPP and other “Free Trade” Agreements, is to impose ever more draconian “intellectual property” laws that enforce legal monopolies on the very right to produce: on the right of associated labor to apply general intellect to physical nature, without the permission of the corporations that “own” those human relationships and knowledge. And the biggest threat it faces is networked, horizontal movements like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and assorted movements to hack “intellectual property” in culture, software and hardware; hence the rapid growth in the machinery of the surveillance state.

But even here, the capitalists and their state find themselves at a disadvantage. Because of the agility of networked organization and the stupidity of hierarchy, the technologies for circumventing monopoly are always three steps ahead of the technologies for enforcing it.

So if you feel the need to vote in order to avert the immediate threat of fascism, by all means do so. But the state and the class system it enforces are doomed in the long run. And in the meantime, we have a new society to build.

Photo by Darron Birgenheier

The post Vote If You Must… Then Do What Really Matters appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“The rule of law maximizes injustice. The rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people. We ought to begin to recognize this. What we are trying to do is to get back to the principles, the aims and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority.”

Watch this video with a strong call to arms. The following text is extracted from Sophie McAdam’s article on Damon’s speech.

Matt Damon, a lifelong friend of Howard Zinn and his family, read excerpts from a speech Howard Zinn gave in 1970 as part of a debate on civil disobedience.

“I start from the supposition that the world is topsy turvy. That things are all wrong,” begins actor and writer Matt Damon in this powerful speech calling on people to question authority.

“The wrong people are in jail, and the wrong people are out of jail,” Damon goes on. “The wrong people are in power, and the wrong people are out of power. Wealth is distributed in such a way as to not just simply require small reform, but a drastic re-allocation. All we have to do is to look at the state of the world today, and you can see it’s topsy-turvy. You might watch TV and think it’s ok, but you just have to detach and come back, and you’re horrified.”

Damon then references the theme of the conference, which is ‘civil disobedience’. “As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you’re saying our problem is civil disobedience,” He says.

“That is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.”

“Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of their governments and have gone to war. And millions have been killed because of this obedience. We recognize this from Nazi Germany,” Damon says, referring to blindly obedient citizens as “herd-like people”. “We know that the problem there was obedience. That the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed. That was wrong. People should have challenged it, they should have resisted. And if we were only there, we would have showed them.”

Or would we? There’s food for thought.

Damon’s message is that blind obedience to authority is not necessarily the ethical choice. Obedience can’t replace your moral compass. In fact, it’s the root cause of all the millions of young lives wasted in senseless wars throughout the ages.

“The rule of law maximizes injustice. The rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people. We ought to begin to recognize this. What we are trying to do is to get back to the principles, the aims and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority.”

Damon advocates disobeying laws that do not serve the greater good or go against basic morality: those new, but increasingly common injustices, like jailing the kind-hearted people who feed the homeless or prosecuting people for collecting rainwater. Like trying to sue those who choose to grow vegetables on their lawn, or making parents’ lives hell for preventing them from giving cannabis oil to their sick child–  a child whose life could be saved if the plant were decriminalized (…globally). Damon thinks we should stand up against all these injustices and more.

But, he says, it doesn’t stop there. Above all, we must stop obeying the call of corrupt, lying leaders to go fight against other innocent human beings in endless, bloody wars that simply make no sense, and don’t benefit anyone except the arms dealers, the rebuilding contractors, and the oil corps. We must stop making war, and we must stop believing that to honor the fallen we have to buy into the government and the mainstream media’s glorification of war.

Comment and share if you agree.

Photo by Siebbi

The post Matt Damon: In Defense of Civil Disobedience appeared first on P2P Foundation.