A Revolutionary ‘Sound bite' (BKH)

international | anti-capitalism | other press Wednesday August 03, 2005 14:11 by Brent Herbert

Bring revolutionary clarity which is required to overcome and destroy counter revolutionary mass confusion, the product of the propaganda attacks and deceits of this current ruling system.

A Revolutionary ‘Sound bite'
Intro
Everyday I find myself wondering ‘where do we go next' or ‘what has to be done.' Sometimes there does not seem to be anything that needs to be done, it feels ‘finished'. But I have what I will call ‘the revolutionary spirit' and if there is something that has to be done, I know it, because in the course of day, something will cross my path which will whip into a state of what I will call ‘revolutionary agitation', this occurring when I encounter something which strikes me as being really dangerous for the revolution. What happens next is that I enter into that phase of ‘revolutionary struggle' where I grab onto that thing that must be done, and I can't let it go, or stop thinking about it, until finally I come up with ‘a revolutionary solution.' The ‘revolutionary spirit' tells me that I only need to do those things which demand to be done, so therefore there is no point in ‘busy work', and I always know when there is something that fits that criteria, because of the sudden plunge into that revolutionary agitation and that revolutionary struggle that follows.

Such an experience happened again earlier today when I paid a visit to the D.C. Indymedia site, and read a page entitled The Scotland G8 Protests (a critique).
http://dc.indymedia.org/feature/display/126899/index.php
To summarize the message that I extracted from the piece, the author suggested that not much seemed to be accomplished when it came to reaching out to John and Jane Doe, so therefore really it was just one more protest which followed what seem to be becoming the rituals of protest, with much of the activity consisting of ‘rising to the bait' (they put up a fence, we tear down the fence) combined with empty symbolic gestures such as busting the windows at Starbucks. As for the ritual of ‘rising to the bait' here we see the revolutionary as reactionary (they set the agenda, we respond, they decide to meet, we decide to protest the meeting). As for the busting of those windows, this symbolizes the busting up of the ideology represented by the targets, but as the author suggests how much damage does such a symbolic breakage actually cause. I would suggest myself that people do such things as bust a windows at Starbucks when they do not know how to go about busting the ideology, thus causing them to resort to symbolic destruction since they cannot destroy the thing in reality, making window busting a means of expressing and then venting this frustration. The author concludes that not much was really accomplished here, and the piece then leaves an answered question hanging in the air - ‘where do we go from here? Since this is not what we need what do we need? What should we be doing now/'

Having this question left hanging in the air, especially when it was posed by a revolutionary anarchist, stirred me into a high state of revolutionary agitation, since we cannot have anything other than resolute action based on a crystal clear understanding of the current situation, otherwise the revolution will be crushed and destroyed by the currently rising tide of fascism, where no such lack of resolve or doubts or lack of a clear agenda is found to exist.

Such a problem demands a solution, since we cannot have revolutionaries going around wondering what they are supposed to be doing, or asking how they can actually reach John and Jane Doe instead of simply participating in what increasingly seems to them to be the rituals of the protest movement. After struggling with the problem I finally achieved some clarity on the issue and I realized that what we need is a simple ‘handout' which takes the ‘sound bite' approach to explaining the revolutionary side of the story, and I also understood that this is not impossible since when you clear away all the clutter what is happening here is not really all that complex, and so therefore it is possible to explain it simply and clearly in a short amount of time, so as to achieve the maximum impact. Furthermore working on such a simple ‘sound bite' might also help to bring the state of ‘revolutionary clarity' to those revolutionaries who still have not entirely shaken off the effects of mass confusion, which is the intended product of all capitalist propaganda, and thus should have no place within the mind of the revolutionary.

Since the target audience for such a summation would be John and Jane Doe, I feel that it is critical to avoid using that revolutionary jargon that you so often find peppered throughout the papers distributed by revolutionary groups, and which is a major turn off for people, for the use of this terminology means that not only are you not speaking to them in their language, but rather presuming to speak to them in your language, which then leaves the impression that what you are saying is dogmatic, and that you are a zealous advocate of doctrine rather than a teller of truth, and given how people have grown accustomed to being accosted by religious types who also insist dogmatically on using the correct terminology and so on, coming across in the same way doesn't help your cause.

The following is intended as an example of how in one pamphlet it might be possible to cover all the ground that needs to be covered, to say those things that need to be said, to bring revolutionary clarity which is required to overcome and destroy counter revolutionary mass confusion, the product of the propaganda attacks and deceits of this current ruling system. The story is simple in its constituent parts, and for this reason there is really no reason for a revolutionary to ask ‘what do we do' or ‘what do we say' since the answers to these questions should be obvious and the solutions therefore are simple, and not impenetrably complex....