Calling All Rebels

There are no constraints left to halt
America's slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are
a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners.
The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into
profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve
corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to
political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate
power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an
internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East
German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through
the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence
inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the
descent is going to be horrifying.

Those singled out as internal enemies will
include people of color, immigrants, gays, intellectuals, feminists,
Jews, Muslims, union leaders and those defined as "liberals." They will
be condemned as anti-American and blamed for our decline. The economic
collapse, which remains mysterious and enigmatic to most Americans,
will be pinned by demagogues and hatemongers on these hapless
scapegoats. And the random acts of violence, which are already leaping
up around the fringes of American society, will justify harsh measures
of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of our
democracy. The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the
information systems they control to mask their culpability. The old
game of blaming the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic
regimes, will empower the dark undercurrents of sadism and violence
within American society and deflect attention from the corporate
vampires that have drained the blood of the country.

"We are going to be poorer," David Cay Johnston
told me. Johnston was the tax reporter of The New York Times for 13
years and has written on how the corporate state rigged the system
against us. He is the author of "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest
Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With
the Bill," a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets and corporate
socialism. "Health care is going to eat up more and more of our income.
We are going to have less and less for other things. We are going to
have some huge disasters sooner or later caused by our failure to
invest. Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will collapse. There are
water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge
infrastructure disasters. Our intellectual resources are in decline. We
are failing to educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are
going to continue to pour money into the military. I think it is
possible, I do not say it is probable, that we will have a revolution,
a civil war that will see the end of the United States of America."

"If we see the end of this country it will
come from the right and our failure to provide people with the basic
necessities of life," said Johnston. "Revolutions occur when young men
see the present as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But
it will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office
who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors
in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in
the history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency,
are sowing the seeds for the destruction of the country. A lot of the
people on the right hate the United States of America. They would say
they hate the people they are arrayed against. But the whole idea of
the United States is that we criticize the government. We remake it to
serve our interests. They do not want that kind of society. They
reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that democracy is to rule and to be
ruled in turns. They see a world where they are right and that is it.
If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished. This is
not the idea on which the United States was founded."

It is hard to see how this can be
prevented. The engines of social reform are dead. Liberal apologists,
who long ago should have abandoned the Democratic Party, continue to
make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate state and Barack Obama
while the working and middle class are ruthlessly stripped of rights,
income and jobs. Liberals self-righteously condemn imperial wars and
the looting of the U.S. Treasury by Wall Street but not the Democrats
who are responsible. And the longer the liberal class dithers and
speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the more
hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American
liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any
hope for their reform. We have entered an age in which, as William
Butler Yeats wrote, "the best lack all conviction and the worst are
full of passionate intensity."

"If we end up with violence in the streets on a large scale, not random
riots, but insurrection and things break down, there will be a coup
d'etat from the right," Johnston said. "We have already had an economic
coup d'etat. It will not take much to go further."

How do we resist? How, if this descent is
inevitable, as I believe it is, do we fight back? Why should we resist
at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair? Why not carve out as
comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace of the corporate
state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs? The
power elite, including most of those who graduate from our top
universities and our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold out
for personal comfort. Why not us?

The French moral philosopher Albert Camus
argued that we are separated from each other. Our lives are
meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our
individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that "one of
the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant
confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for
it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate,
without the resignation that ought to accompany it."

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced
to the historic condition of an object," Camus warned. "But if he dies
in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind
of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object."

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the
oppressed-the unemployed workers being thrust into impoverishment and
misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global
black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural
communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And
to stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as
the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out
acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.

The power structure and its liberal
apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see the rebel's
outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for
expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for
calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality,
compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only
alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel,
however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to
stand with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with
foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television
appearances, book contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric.
The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The
rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters,
anger and courage-anger at the way things are and the courage to see
that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that
virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself.

"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career," Vaclav Havel
said when he battled the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. "You are
thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with
a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the
existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It
begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded
an enemy of society. ... The dissident does not operate in the realm of
genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for
office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the
public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if
anything, only his own skin-and he offers it solely because he has no
other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply
articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost."

Those in power have disarmed the liberal
class. They do not argue that the current system is just or good,
because they cannot, but they have convinced liberals that there is no
alternative. But we are not slaves. We have a choice. We can refuse to
be either a victim or an executioner. We have the moral capacity to say
no, to refuse to cooperate. Any boycott or demonstration, any
occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction or sabotage,
any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement and any act of
civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead
hand of authority. "There is beauty and there are the humiliated,"
Camus wrote. "Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I
should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first."

"There is a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't
take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put
your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon
all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop," Mario Savio
said in 1964. "And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to
the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be
prevented from working at all."

The capacity to exercise moral autonomy,
the capacity to refuse to cooperate, offers us the only route left to
personal freedom and a life with meaning. Rebellion is its own
justification. Those of us who come out of the religious left have no
quarrel with Camus. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence,
right about finding worth in the act of rebellion rather than some
bizarre dream of an afterlife or Sunday School fantasy that God rewards
the just and the good. "Oh my soul," the ancient Greek poet Pindar
wrote, "do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the
possible." We differ with Camus only in that we have faith that
rebellion is not ultimately meaningless. Rebellion allows us to be free
and independent human beings, but rebellion also chips away, however
imperceptibly, at the edifice of the oppressor and sustains the dim
flames of hope and love. And in moments of profound human despair these
flames are never insignificant. They keep alive the capacity to be
human. We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that
"existence is an act of rebellion." Those who do not rebel in our age
of totalitarian capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no
alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own enslavement.
They commit spiritual and moral suicide.