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This Is Our Land: The Rebirth of Mass Resistance

Now here’s the thing about domination: it is never absolute. When capitalism is most reckless, it is also most vulnerable.

(Note: This piece is adapted from the author’s January 23 and 24, 2017, addresses to Colorado College and Ithaca College.)

Maintaining power in a society as grossly unequal as the United States has become is not easy. It can be accomplished, however, through demagoguery and the manipulation of reality.

Truth is, modern capitalism has entered a deep phase of crisis. Predatory finance and globalization have produced unprecedented concentrations of wealth. Neoliberal policies have eliminated basic democratic protections, gutting welfare programs, dismantling the public sector and decimating unions. Millions of workers face extreme insecurity. Climate change has reached apocalyptic proportions.

Meanwhile, the US has become a plutocracy, a political system controlled by a tiny elite. The structures of representation prevent ordinary citizens from affecting real change. A vast surveillance state tyrannizes the population. The quest for domination leads to endless oil wars, which in turn spawn more terrorism and instability. The US is a bloated empire slowly collapsing under its own weight.

Naturally, such conditions produce tremendous anxiety. Many working Americans feel a profound sense of dislocation. Their lives have grown more precarious amid the massive upward distribution of wealth. They recognize the underlying corruption of the political and economic apparatus. They are not ignorant; they know that the system has lost legitimacy. And they are understandably outraged at the social turmoil their families and friends have endured.

But they lack coherent explanations for the growing contradictions of society, and for the disorientation and fear that they experience every day. A more critical consciousness might drive them to revolt. Without such a critique, they simply stagnate. Their anguish and resentment festers. Their communities disintegrate. They lead parochial lives, hypnotized by an insipid popular culture and by the false promises of nationalism and fundamentalism.

Along comes Donald Trump. He provides a narrative of restoration. He peddles an aggressive brand of patriarchy. He supplies an explanatory framework: The Muslims — they have caused your suffering. The immigrants. The Blacks. He ignites the imagination. He is vulgar. But his coarseness is a welcome departure from the refinement of an arrogant political establishment. He is lying. But in a climate of desperation, many Americans view his lies as the only weapons they possess, and collectively they hurl them at the power structure they detest.

Now here’s the thing about domination: it is never absolute. When capitalism is most reckless, it is also most vulnerable. As it commits atrocities, it fertilizes its opposition. The outrage against austerity that helped fuel Trump’s victory has also galvanized progressive movements around the world. From France to South Africa, people have taken to the streets to denounce a system that serves only giant corporations and banks, privatizing profit and socializing agony.

In the United States, resistance has taken many forms. Occupy Wall Street. The Bernie Sanders campaign. The Fight for a $15 minimum wage. Regardless of their short-term outcomes, these struggles made real contributions. They offered an alternative to political acquiescence. They revitalized grassroots traditions of dissent. And they promoted the kinds of structural analysis that enable people to understand and confront inequality.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is one of the most promising expressions of the popular resurgence. BLM is a diverse and decentralized movement, yet at its best, it exhibits the egalitarian impulses that have long galvanized the Black liberation struggle. BLM rejects hierarchy and elite leadership. It encourages participants to organize themselves. It harnesses the creative forces of disruption. It exemplifies radical democracy.

Like many of the struggles of the 1960s, it also reflects a broad commitment to human rights. BLM is a response to state terrorism and a form of “ethnic cleansing” practiced by police. However, the movement also addresses the larger problem of human disposability. By recognizing anti-Black violence as an acute symptom of an underlying crisis, BLM goes beyond reform to question the very foundation of our political and economic system.

The continued vibrancy of BLM suggests that even in the cultural desert of Trump’s America, ordinary people can resist political manipulation and develop a potent critique of social realities. We have entered a traumatic period of history, but this moment can be generative. If we can free ourselves from debilitating social myths, if we can revive a radical, collective consciousness, we can begin to forge a more humane social order.

Such an undertaking will not fulfill some innate democratic creed. It will require the construction of a new mass movement in one of the world’s great centers of bigotry and violence. And there will be casualties.

But if marginalized people choose the path of liberation, then even today, in what may prove to be the early stages of mass struggle, we can say to our oppressors, forthrightly:

We know who we are. We are the resistance.

You can attempt to repress and silence us. But you cannot enlist us in your regime of lies.

We are the citizens of the occupied land. This country lies in the shadows, but its territory is vast. It has no flag. It has no army. It has only our bodies. Our Brown bodies. Our Black bodies. Our queer bodies. Our battered bodies. Our raped bodies.

We are the colonized. And this is our land. We are Indigenous, though some of us have only just arrived. We are workers. We are welfare mothers. We are prisoners. We are homeless.

We are poor. We are undocumented. We are the colonized. And this is our land. We will not be your scapegoats. We will not be your subjects.

We are an occupied territory. But we do not want nationhood. We do not want your chauvinism. We do not want your militarism. We do not want your misogyny. We do not want your prisons. We do not want your empire.

We are tired of lies.

We are a new people. We see clearly now. We have cast off the scales. We will never return to the sidelines. We will liberate this colony with the force of our outrage and our dissent.

Long live the new land.

We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.

As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.

Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.

As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.

At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.

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