REVOLUTIONARY MOMENTS AND RUPTURES

Barack Obama has been called the first Internet president. He has been called the first black president. He has been called a healer for the twenty-first century. For many from the grassroots, he has been hailed as the first community organizer who brought the skills of bottom-up political organizing to the national stage in order to win power in electoral politics. It was this bottom-up organization nested into a tightly controlled core serving as the basis for welcoming and inspiring self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants that ushered in a new mode of politics.

Obama's winning strategy has completely changed the face of electoral politics, so much so that technology experts noted that the way political campaigns are organized in the United States will never be the same again. Obama and his team utilized the tools of social networking, the Internet, cell phones, and YouTube unlike any previous political campaigns.

More importantly, the political campaign took place in a period when there were profound changes in the international political system and in the nature of the US political economy. After the Second World War, the United States emerged as a hegemonic power with the US dollar as the currency of world trade. In the midst of the campaign, the financial crisis and destabilization of the financial oligarchy produced temporary panic in the ranks of the rulers. For a short moment, there was even talk of martial law and the suspension of bourgeois democratic rights.

At the moment of the collapse of the US financial system in September 2008, the tremendous powers placed in the hands of the government had a sobering effect on society, as previous economic behemoths such as AIG, General Motors, and the banks rushed to seek state subsidies. Interestingly, it was in the same period of the financial crisis that one former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Simon Johnson, stated that the bankers had carried out a coup d'état. Johnson was referring to the coercion of the US Congress to bail out the financial services sector during the greater depression that started in 2007. Congress voted over US $700 billion to prop up a banking sector that had been involved in the unregulated $600 trillion market for over-the-counter derivatives.

The cascading effects of the financial crisis have not fully reached the consciousness of US citizens. Millions are unemployed, official poverty rates have skyrocketed, and millions are losing their homes because of foreclosures. For a short time, banks and bankers continued to dominate the discussion by claiming that the "big banks were too big to fail." Yet, others who had been following their activities wrote about The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System.

To pre-empt calls for a new mode of economic organization, the financial oligarchs considered new schemes to thwart democratic participation. Not to be outdone, the crude racists in the United States are calling for a military coup. They have shouted that Obama was not born in America. They have appeared in public with guns and labeled each one of his proposed programs as Marxist/ socialist. They have sought to roll back the new thrust of citizenship that promised a multicultural and multiracial democracy.

This book is based on the proposition that a new concept of shared humanity must be the basis of social collectivism if humans are to survive the challenges of the twenty-first century. Laying out some of the elements of the revolutionary moment, I seek to question some of the received ideas about revolution, especially the idea that a revolution requires armed struggle and a vanguard party. My analysis seeks to outline the strengths of networks that arise out of the principles of self-emancipation and self-organization.

A cultural revolution that had used the codes of "dancing in the streets" and "fight the power" prepared American society for a rich cultural intervention. The powers of the film, media, and music industries in the United States are waiting for the moment when human creativity can be turned from the making of profits from mindless violence to opening up society for profound changes. Bottled-up scientific possibilities are awaiting this upsurge of human energy and creativity so that big corporations do not turn humans into cyborgs. Barack Obama was elected in a period when some scientists were promising a future of technological singularity and the deepening of genetic perdition.

There is a very small coterie of creative filmmakers and cultural workers who seek to use the artistic medium to educate and warn of the dangers of the technological fix that is trying to orchestrate the genetic and behavioral control of society. These artists and producers have exposed the possibility of film and television playing a role in reversing the dumbing-down of youth. My effort in this book is to answer a question that James Boggs asked over 30 years ago, "Why in the age of mass media, do we remain ignorant of how the social and political decisions which affect our daily lives are made?"

How can working people intervene to ensure that the chaos produced by the crisis does not devour us as humans? I will argue in this book that in order to be human we need to belong to and have a sense of community. The process towards realizing that we live in a human community will begin to break down the hierarchies that sustained capitalism over the past 300 years.

The question posed by the book is whether convergence of political, economic, environmental, military, and social challenges for American society at the time of the election of Barack Obama constitutes a revolutionary moment.

This book holds that it does.

REVOLUTIONARY MOMENTS: LESSONS FROM THE FRENCH AND CUBAN REVOLUTIONS

Generally a revolution is defined as a sudden overthrow of the existing social, economic, and political order. But revolutions such as the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the French Revolution of 1789, the American Revolution of 1776, and the Haitian Revolution of 1804 arose out of moments when the ideas supporting or propping up the old order had become unsustainable. Usually, there are events that mark the maturation of a revolutionary process, but this process begins in the womb of the old society. The maturation to the point of a critical break from the old takes place when the ideas, organization, and leadership of the...