Reddit Thread: “What does effective dissent actually look like?”

I think this sort of gets to the heart of the problem. Political dissent in democracies, even in dictatorships, to run in to the Arab Spring problem. You can push for a massive social movement and get it but then the next worst option simply takes power. You overthrow Mubarak and you get the Muslim Brotherhood. Where i live we fairly successfully took down the corrupt Liberal government only to have the Partie Quebecios come in and make everything worse. Mass movements don’t seem to be especially effective anymore. So what does effective dissent actually look like?

So you might take the Lierre Keith DGR type position and say you need look at the vulnerabilities of the existing system and strategically target critical nodes. And this is largely true, any network with a power law type hierarchical structure is going to be robust against random coordinated attacks but highly fragile at critical nodes. Or you could take the Holmgren strategy of disinvestment as a way to crash the financial system. Probably this won’t be terribly effective as it effectively is the same strategy of making random attacks from the periphery.

There’s also the problem of devoting your life to resistance. It’s a very hard path. It can be rewarding but it is a lifetime of constant struggle.

Personally I think we need what I call the two hands strategy. First of all you need to change the material conditions of your existence. You need to get your house and garden in order. You need to break dependencies. Systematically and progressively. Mostly though this means getting out of the rent or mortgage system by whatever means possible. Growing your own food is easy. Free shelter is hard. But that hand lifts you up a bit. Which is great but you still have this slow juggernaut of climate change and peak oil and mass extinction bearing down on you. But now you have a certain amount of room to move. You are less dependent on the energy system or the rental system or the financial system. This gives you more ability to resist and build effective institutions. This is the other hand. Building spectacles is for teenagers. We want to be building institutions that are better than the existing ones. Think of how the Black Panthers or the Zapatistas function(ed). They spent more time building and organizing than fighting. You have to be ready to fight. Legally in the courts. As protest. Even violently.

But it’s important to remember two things. One resistance only defines the edge or the margin of the system. It might be important to define that limit but it’s just the limit. And the social limit is a hard place to be. What defines the centre is the institutions, the guilds, the permanent effective networks that are space filling and area preserving. More interesting though is that the centre of the network isn’t where the power lies. The pivot points are more marginal, more eccentric. Barabassi has started to show that the control points in these hierarchical systems are not the centres. They are lower down. It’s the sales guy who moves between the management and branches and talks to all the people on the shop floor. It’s the minor bureaucrat who actually makes the government run. It could be the bottom up institutions that people know to go to because they are so much more effective than the government services that are constantly cut back and falling apart. The ones that actually make them less dependent and more capable of being fully realized people. The institutions that are working hard to put themselves out of job instead of trying to maintain their power. So taking the centre is not really the strategy either. It’s building the alternative that the centre has to contend with.

Which is interesting. So the two hands are one hand lifts you up and changes your material conditions. And the other hand makes it possible for others to change their material conditions through political action and institution building. Each moves up and up. Each time one hand moves it makes it possible for the other hand to lift up a bit. And if one hand gets knocked down the other hand is still there to make it easier to get back to the same place. And if and when the centre collapses and these mass movements happen there exists something that can be better than the PQ or the Muslim Brotherhood or whatever comes after the fall of the Ukraine.