Response to 'Powerlessness'

Lê Thanh Trúc

Lê Thanh Trúc

— 10 min read
Patrick Lawrence: Powerlessness
The sensation of powerlessness, as I have argued previously, is a primary source of depression. But it is almost always an illusion.
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I think this discussion is very important – I looked through the reasons that Patrick Lawrence listed. I think there's a couple of other reasons contributing to the powerlessness in the West — especially over the western-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza (now invasion and attacks on Lebanon) but also over past foreign wars and other widespread social conditions:

Power is less public

Power has been pulled more and more and more from the public facing side: e.g. The U$A can basically just send 10s and 100s billions to Israel & Ukraine etc instantly. The ideal public president of empire is one who can no longer think (Biden) or one who happily refuses to think for themselves (Harris), pointing to the fact that there's the "permanent unelected machine" behind the scenes (description ala Glenn Greenwald).

E.g. It used to be that the public (including bourgeoisie as Chris Hedges mentions here) were among the conscripts for the US/Aus etc war against Vietnam. Forever wars have been shifted and shifted more, so it has seemingly less to do with what is publicly asked of the public.

A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.

[No Way Out But War by Chris Hedges on Substack)

Most people who are organising for Palestine and antiwar right now focus their organisation on the public facing side, like who is president/prime minister, but we're not doing much to those behind the scenes. To strike where it hurts for the people behind the scenes (military industrial complex [MIC], dual-israeli citizen billionaire zionist supremacists, etc.) well… for the MIC I think you have to basically stop paying tax to get them to stop riffing billions. I stopped paying taxes after the first year I ever paid (I don't support empire and I had dropped income). But I don’t think it's gonna start happening widespread in the US for example, until the public debt reaches past $100 trillion or something, which it probably slowly eventually will (right now it's around $35 trillion) — way too late for what's going on right now.

I am still reminded of what Martin Luther King said about the US war on Vietnam, in 1967 one year before he was assassinated:

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be -- are -- are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

On the upside, refusal to pay tax played important parts in collapses of other empires like Roman empire, so when we do see it, it will mean that the end of the American empire is nigh.

As for the zionist & jewish supremacists, they made the Holocaust Industry (title of Prof Norman Finkelstein's book) to shield themselves. And the genocide of jews is always taught as the worst thing ever to happen in the whole history of the world, for every single child who has grown up in the west since WWII, so they draw very heavily upon that to shield criticism of israel. (My mum who did not grow up in the west got it really easily when i told her about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza and now to Lebanon)

Working class collective power has declined

Working class collective power has declined: People from my area (western suburbs of Melbourne), including many working-class refugees and migrants from the Middle East, have been protesting in the city every single weekend, for a year now, but it barely got mentioned internationally in movements for Palestine circles, compared to the bourgeoisie university protests that went on for just a couple of weeks, which were heavily praised in dissident circles and on Middle East Eye etc. (Universities here are badly bourgeoisie – there have been studies showing ATAR entrance scores corresponding to socio-economic deciles in Educational Opportunity in Australia 2015 report and 2020 report.)

The remarks, published under the title “How can we build the movement for the liberation of Palestine?” insist repeatedly that such a movement must be “broad.” Portzolt stated: “All sections of society must be mobilised in the campaign. The unions, artists, teachers, school students, sports people, journalists and doctors.”

Notably absent is any reference to the working class. Under conditions where weekly mass protests have overwhelmingly been attended by ordinary working-class people, many from the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, workers do not get a mention. What Portzolt is advocating is a movement dominated by the middle-class, in keeping with the essentially right-wing political program she advances.
Australian pseudo-left promotes alliance with pro-Zionist Labor Party
The pseudo-left is increasingly open in its insistence that the movement opposing the genocide of Palestinians must be subordinated to the Labor government that has backed the Israeli mass murder.
World Socialist Web Site

Other than that, for these working class people: many are first generation migrants and don't feel like they have sway in this society (and are made to feel that way by the mainstream white aussies). And for things like labour strikes by existing unions of mainstream white aussies, they're now pretty much all exclusively about labour (pay, conditions) and never about any social protests.

The Age of Impressions

We live in The Age of Impressions - As similarly mentioned about wokeness in another article from Chris Hedges on PIB, my generation has been led to believe that tokenism has a lot of value. Many of them, who also support Palestine, believe that what they have been told about supporting the LGBTQ+ movement is how you support a social movement. Aka:

    • You put up a nice colourful flag AND You get masses of people onboard via them being passive social media followers instead of talking to them.
      • It's for real, you should see the designated star ""activist"" of my generation, Greta Thunberg, who could not more perfectly embody both of these. 
      • She lost all her Friday for Future climate protestors across 5-6+ years from 2018, because the only way she ever got them to attend was through social media, and not by local activists in each region around the world rallying people directly. And she and all of them never made any attempt to keep protestors involved, and pretty much never gave them any credit besides a few words here and there. (This is totally unlike Uhuru who I’m involved with who very regularly acknowledge their volunteers personally, and their leadership personally onboard every single new volunteer.) 
      • Her most recent big protest in September (usually fridays for future have a big global protest every september but they have seriously dwindled) was waving lots and lots and lots of flags, and breathlessly squishing as many country names and causes as possible into her post (Palestine, etc etc etc Ukraine, LGBT, antiracism, feminism etc etc)
      • Professional artists I've seen only put 🍉 on their profiles – like others, not even artistic works publicly even though they declare themselves artists… – and many other young people my age put the flag of Palestine on their profiles or whatever. And that's about it. 

The last serious global protest was the probably Occupy movement in the early 2010s, which was pre my generation, and even that devolved:

[From interview with Lee Fang by Niccolo Soldo, italics emphasis mine]

You came of age during the Occupy Protests.  Gen Xers like myself never believed that we could change the world for the better, because we were lectured to by our parents in the 80s about how they stopped the War in Vietnam through "peace and love", just as they drove off in their shiny new BMWs to go talk to their stock broker and see how their investment portfolio based around Michael Milken's junk bondswere doing that month.  You guys were imbued with idealism, and Occupy rode a groundswell of increasing dissatisfaction with the disastrous Dubya Presidency.  This was a decade of consumption, greed, and arrogance, and Occupy rose to the challenge....then everything went sideways.

I was initially taken with Occupy. I traveled the country reporting on Occupy Wall Street protests in Nashville, DC, Las Vegas, Sacramento, San Francisco, and a few other cities. At the time, I naively saw the moment as something powerful and transcendent, a rebuke to the weakness of Obama rolling over for the banks and the austerity-obsessed conventional wisdom in D.C. – a forceful vengeance for the betrayals around the bailouts. I met a lot of very sincere protesters – people crushed with insane levels of student debt, normal middle-class folks tired of completely stagnant politics that favored the very wealthy, and regular people with a visceral disdain for the uneven justice system that favors those with the best lawyers and lobbyists.

But the experience also gave me a dark preview of what was to become of the American left. The anarchist mindset took over, with many occupy encampments deciding to proceed with only unanimous consent, a rule that was easily gamed by Bob Avakian ‘tankies’ and random junkie drifters screaming incoherently into the microphone. Extreme victimhood generated a culture of accusations and cancellations within the camps. People even got raped while sleeping in tent cities that started to resemble skid row more than a utopian political project. The movement lacked any coherent policy ideas or political strategy, and quickly devolved into a grift for a few media-savvy activists. It accomplished nothing other than serving as a looking glass into the future, showing us a preview of the pathologies of every other left-identified protest movement that came to pass over the next few years.

I’m biased. I wanted a social democratic movement with coherent beliefs and a desire for state action to enact fair tax policies, reasonable redistribution of resources, and a forceful check on corporate power. Instead, Occupy gave us a new flavor of lefty libertarian narcissism, of brand-building hucksters who got drunk on empty slogans, burn-it-all down nihilism, and made-for-social media viral moments – a great tactic for building out Twitter follower counts, but not that great at fixing anything in society. The same ethos later powered #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and much of the extreme climate-related movements years later.

I believe that Prof Norman Finkelstein (lifetime political scientist and activist for Palestine, Vietnam, more) also had these similar veins of criticisms of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement (and the woke movement) before the genocide on Gaza. He writes about it in his book I'll Burn that Bridge When I Get To It.

(The title of that book refers to the fact that even after Prof Finkelstein was effectively silenced by all mainstream media and academia for his work on Palestine, and the last group to support him were student activists for Palestinian through the BDS movement, he would burn bridges with them too, because they are the kinds of people who also support pointless identity politics including on Palestine.)

I will add another point that the essential reason you cannot create any social change with movements just comprising the bourgeoisie is BECAUSE THEY DON'T CONTRIBUTE ANYTHING SUBSTANTIAL TO SOCIETY.

This is exactly why you see climate protesters from Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion in particular feeling the need to throw soup on paintings or chain themselves to roads.

Because if these kinds of people withdrew their labour, it would make absolutely zero tangible difference to society. Whereas if mass workers organise and strike from work, society basically stops running.

It's why it makes zero difference when grammar school students organise skipping a day of class every few terms for the school climate strikes. (I saw these people in the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.) Similarly when students block other students at the elite universities from attending classes on the encampments for Palestine.

That's why when they say "business as usual must end", they don't actually know how to make that happen! So their only idea is to block other people from going to work (via chaining themselves to roads) or blocking the other bourgeoisie from their weekend gallery visits or blocking other fellow elite students from attending classes.

Other than that, right now Prof Norman Finkelstein has said that Gaza is gone. (He is also author of Gaza, An Inquest into its Martyrdom which extremely extensively documents all Israeli military operations and more on Gaza until the book was released, which was in 2014 I think). 

He pointed to South Africa mentioning in its legal submissions for genocide in Gaza that if Rafah was invaded, it was over. Rafah was the last part of any semblance of society in Gaza. And it was invaded. There is 45 million tonnes of rubble, or in that order of magnitude, which Patrick Lawrence mentioned too, which will take at least 10-15 years to clear out. And Israel does not allow cement into Gaza as part of the blockade since 2006, and they will clearly not rebuild Gaza.

He says that Israel sees that it has a "now or never" chance to invade Lebanon, with the combination of the 1 year anniversary of Oct 7, the US election, and the pager and walkie talkie explosions. Israel has better air capabilities but very poor ground capabilities. And Israel ended up completely begging Condoleeza Rice to get the UN resolution to end the last Israel-Lebanon 33-day war in 2006 when 3 days of ground invasion began. He said that Hezbollah, the party of God, will absolutely take the chance to avenge their brothers and sisters in Gaza. For Iran, Hezbollah is the last line before israel gets to them, so he said Iran will probably not let Hezbollah fall – but that was a few days ago before Israel killed so much of the leadership.

We absolutely, completely and utterly failed Palestinians in Gaza. I attended the first protest for Palestine here in the days immediately after israel began bombing Gaza in October last year. Then I became extremely ill and completely unable to function in major aspects of life for months (psychotic episode, suffering hallucinations), with recovery stretching many more months beyond. All I could do was write. I still feel I failed them.

It is the worst of all massacres – refugees and children locked up in Gaza for their lifetimes, kept under total blockade and worst conditions for 17-18+ years, and bombed and bombed and shot and shot.

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