Why Tyranny?

Something exciting is happening on Facebook in the last week, where a groundswell of candid photos from Occupy Wall Street and other cities, blog articles, declarations, and personal observations have become the norm and the cascade of banal cuteness has finally abated. It is engaging to see so many people engaged. Social networking has reached a high-water mark.

But the outcomes to these movements is no where guaranteed if we look at the present and at history. Just today, the mainstream news is celebrating the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American, killed by a drone in Yemen. On the orders of Pres. Obama, this citizen - without a trial of any kind - was targeted for murder, "on or off a battlefield." Reading the reports carefully you can glean why, like bin Laden, no trial could have been held.

Words like "reportedly," "possibly," "credited," and "linked" would not have withstood a fair and open court hearing. So, true to our Southern Justice roots, the US just goes out and lynches al-Awlaki, thereby adding to its list of war crimes.

Of course, history is a brutal panorama of vicious campaigns against those who seriously challenge the power base, who seriously attempt to dismantle a system celebrated in the founding Federalist Papers that "those who own the country should run it."

Civil Rights activists, labor organizers, socialist, anarchist, communist party insurgents, anti-war militants have all been infiltrated, discombobulated, and targeted for extermination by the state - with great success: witness the pathetic state of our labor-unions, which are more collaborationist than changing the social and economic order, which was their birthright. This reformist tendency in our labor movement is simply because there is "no there there:" the militants were driven out by law or killed.

For the current movement against neoliberalism and globilization to succeed, we must be engaged in whatever capacity with the present, while seeing far into the future. We must anticipate the state may tolerate auditoriums and parks filled with critics bearing home-made signs; the state does not as easily tolerate its destruction - even at the hands of the majority.

We must also anticipate in these broad-based, mass gatherings, which are beautiful to behold, are a range of political ideas, from libertarian socialism to Ron Paul Tea Party activists, all with legitimate gripes against an horrific system.

If these movements grow, expect the Tea Party to want to assume the helm as the rightful leadership. Given their closer proximity to state power structures, the establishment will maneuver to back them, and whatever "revolution" that happens will be on those reactionary lines with some reforms made to neoliberalism only.

A friend asked me the other day why I describe my workplace as a tyranny. The word struck him as something ancient or better suited to a foreign country. Hierarchies are always at great risk at becoming tyrannies, be they in the home or at work, more so when the work imposed is antithetical to human needs.

When so many garments must be produced by a few tired hands, or so many passengers processed through a security checkpoint by a few understaffed officers, or food processed by a time clock by underpaid cooks, you must have someone's boot on the worker's neck at all times. That boot must inflict pain on those who do not produce fast enough.

That is a tyranny.

Fidel asked in his indictment of the US-backed dictatorship: "How can an unpopular regime, inimical to the interests of the people, stay in power unless it is by force?"

The same could be asked not only of our present governments, which increasingly oppose peoples' desires but also equally important, this can be asked of our workplaces, which are tyrannies.