How Will the State Respond to Increasingly Forceful Protests? A Preliminary Look at the Road to Rebellion in America.

(Source)

by Thomas Neuburger

I began writing this piece by considering the modern shape of rebellion, should it come, in America. That led to words on the shapes of rebellion in general which led to many more words, a chapter in fact of some pages.

Let’s spare you that for now, and do this instead. Let’s look at two short news stories, both about rebellions and the state’s response, one a nascent rebellion by the right and another a nascent rebellion by the left.

One is Covid-related and the other is not. Both occurred recently. Considering each offers a window into how a broader revolt, or several, might progress, depending on whether the left or the right is leading it.

A Protest by the Right

First, consider this:

Michigan Closes Down Capitol in Face of Death Threats From Armed Protesters Against Gov. Whitmer

On Thursday, Michigan closed down its capitol building and canceled its legislative session after online death threats made against Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

The threats were made by protesters who planned to attend a “Judgement Day” protest at the capitol. The protesters ostensibly oppose Whitmer’s statewide shutdown orders meant to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Dozens of posts in private invitation-only Facebook groups called for Whitmer to be hanged, lynched, shot, beaten or beheaded. One suggested crowdfunding sources to hire a hitman to kill her.

“We haven’t had any bloodshed yet, but the populous [sic] is counting to three, and yesterday was day two,” wrote Dave Meisenheimer in a 385,000-member Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine. “Next comes the watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants,” he concluded.

Numerous other posts referred to Whitmer as a “Nazi,” “spawn of the devil,” “wicked witch,” “Soros puppet,” “baby killer tyrant” and more, according to the Detroit Metro Times. Others promised to attend upcoming protests “armed to the death” and without face masks, threatening to attack any police officers who dared confront them.

To which the response was this:

Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel have considered banning firearms from the Capitol building but are awaiting the six-member Michigan State Capitol Commission to figure out if they have the legal authority to do so.

“There are legislators who are wearing bulletproof vests to go to work,” Whitmer told ABC News last week.

No one is talking about investigating, arresting, spying on or bringing to trial those making these death threats. The protests were warned, however, that they "could be charged with brandishing if they are threatening to others." Instead of being shut down and arrested, they forced a government shutdown — a fleeing, if you will — and the protest went off as planned.

(As a mental exercise, imagine the response by police and others if the protesters had been black.)

A Strike by the Left

Now consider this, a pre-Covid 2020 wage strike at UC Santa Cruz:

California Police Used Military Surveillance Tech at Grad Student Strike

UC Santa Cruz police utilized military surveillance equipment to surveil and police the graduate student ‘wildcat’ strike earlier this year.

The California National Guard provided military surveillance equipment to the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Police Department in order to surveil and police the UC Santa Cruz graduate student wildcat strike earlier this year, documents acquired through the California Public Records Act show.

California National Guard, the state’s federally funded military force, provided so-called “friendly force trackers,” a military surveillance technology used to track U.S. troops in military combat, to monitor pickets, according to emails dated February 11 and 13. Police responding to the strike also had access to LEEP, a federal surveillance portal operated by the FBI. The emails show that law enforcement was monitoring student protest groups and social media to plan its response.

The California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) also assisted with law enforcement response.

I said “consider the state's response” in my introduction because clearly a large part of the mechanism of the state was involved in this response — the California National Guard provided equipment to the campus Police Department, who also had assistance from the FBI and the California Office of Emergency Services.

That’s a lot of virtual firepower trained on a small group of grad students at single university, though UC Santa Cruz's reputation for radicalism may have influenced the state's response.

What Does This Comparison Tell Us?

Both of these events are rebellious acts, one by the right in protest of the government of Michigan’s Covid-19 shutdown order, the other by graduate teaching assistants who “walked off the job and withheld grades to demand an $1,412 increase to their cost of living stipend.”

Only one threatened violence though, and that one threatened quite a bit of it. Yet the state handled the wage strike much more aggressively than it handled the side that threatened death and brought guns to their events.

Which leads to a couple of questions:

• Consider a world in the not too distant future in which right-wing protests do turn violent and people are shot, some by protesters who may even be the instigators.

What does a right-revolting world look like from the standpoint of the government’s response?

• Next consider a world in which a left-led rent strike or debt strike or Covid-fueled health-and-safety strike turns violent, not because of the protesters, who are generally less violent than Trump-fueled mobs (see above), but in a clash between protesters and counter-protesters, or protesters and police whose propensity for violence in these cases is well known.

Police using pepper spray on peaceful Occupy protestors at UC Davis

What does a left-revolting world look like from the standpoint of the government’s response?

The World of Tomorrow

Revolt in today's America today will never become a Battle of Lexington world, a pattern established in the first of our revolutions. But it could devolve to a world of protests-gone-bad — or protests-forcefully-disallowed if they’re coming from the left — all when the pressure cooker of life in a donor class–controlled state becomes not just onerous, but economically impossible and medically life-threatening.

I don’t have answers to the questions above, but I do know which questions I suggest you ask if you want to start to answer them:

• What does a right-led rebellion look like in its early stages? How does the state respond? Are those revolts tacitly encouraged?

• What does a left-led rebellion look like in its early stages? How does the state respond? Are those revolts violently suppressed?

• What if both rebellions occur in parallel? How would police-abused left  respond to coddling of violence by the right?

We’re closer than ever before to a world in which many on both sides have stopped believing that government cares to fix the shared tragedy of their lives, and both sides are closer than ever before to doing something about it.

Thomas Jefferson correctly wrote that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Yet when revolt does breaks out, it does so suddenly, often chaotically, and then the country becomes a place most people won’t want to live in, yet can’t escape.

We're approaching fast the next phase of revolt in America, whatever shape it takes. We're long past that day in November of 2008 when promises of "hope and change" were a cause for optimism. The dashing of that hope, in fact, is itself a cause of despair. The outcomes of the elections of 2016 simply confirmed what both sides already knew, that no one, certainly not the donor-run state, is on their side.

So count me among the group that fears what's coming. The arrogant rich, those who control both parties and the state, will never ever stand down, rolling the dice instead on the chaos that will follow. I fear the world their hubris will create.
  

Stephen Hawking on What Killed the World of the Jetsons. Prelude to Thoughts on a Guaranteed Jobs Program

The Jetson's life in one is which so little work is done by humans that leisure time has expanded exponentially and no one is poor. In the image above, even the robot maid has robots to serve her. What's the unspoken assumption behind the Jetson's world?

by Gaius Publius

the swarthy Furies stalk the man
gone rich beyond all rights
–Aeschylus, Agamemnon

I'm about to start writing about the new proposal from Stephanie Kelton and her colleagues at the Levy Institute on the guaranteed jobs program, a proposal, by the way, that's starting to get some serious notice.

But ahead of that work I want to consider an extreme case, but not an unlikely one. What if, in the future, there simply aren't enough jobs for everyone? What then?

Put more simply, what's the underlying assumption behind the world of the Jetsons? The late Stephen Hawking, in his last Reddit AMA appearance, has the answer.

Technological Unemployment

Here's what was asked of Stephen Hawking in that last AMA session by one Reddit questioner (emphasis mine):

I'm rather late to the question-asking party, but I'll ask anyway and hope. Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment, where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can perform them? Some compare this thought to the thoughts of the Luddites, whose revolt was caused in part by perceived technological unemployment over 100 years ago. In particular, do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done? Thank you for your time and your contributions. I’ve found research to be a largely social endeavor, and you've been an inspiration to so many.

A fascinating question. But first a note: Technological unemployment is the term for exactly what we mentioned at the beginning, "the loss of jobs caused by technological change." As Wikipedia explains, "Such change typically includes the introduction of labour-saving 'mechanical-muscle' machines or more efficient 'mechanical-mind' processes (automation)."

Wikipedia continues: "Historical examples include artisan weavers reduced to poverty after the introduction of mechanised looms. During World War II, Alan Turing's Bombe machine compressed and decoded thousands of man-years worth of encrypted data in a matter of hours. A contemporary example of technological unemployment is the displacement of retail cashiers by self-service tills [automated checkout machines]."

It's hard to imagine a world without enough jobs if you're living reasonably comfortably in the U.S. But consider India, to pick just one example. What could possibly happen in the Indian economy that would allow its 1.3 billion people — a population four times the U.S. population — all to live "reasonably comfortably"? India already doesn't have enough good jobs for its people — and that's before considering the the pressures of automation.

Considered globally, there are already not enough jobs in the world for all the people in it.

But the problem posed by job-killing automation (robots, in the popular imagination) still needs a solution. What if, even in developed countries, the average number of working hours available is fewer than eight per day, perhaps far fewer?

This is Stephen Hawking's answer, and it's the same solution in the future case of mathematically too few jobs as in the present case (emphasis mine):

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

In a world where more and more people are squeezed by fewer jobs, lower-paying jobs, and the relentless flow of newly created wealth into fewer and fewer hands, the only solution is, as Hawking says, "wealth redistribution." The alternative is stark: organized society will simply crumble into poverty — and in my view, rebellion.

The Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet: How Will Elites React?

I've been saying that both the U.S. and the rest of the world are in a "pre-revolutionary state." Hawking, in an earlier Guardian article, says something similar. He calls the increasing inequality "socially destructive," and for that and other reasons names this "the most dangerous time for our planet":

The concerns underlying these votes [Brexit and the election of Donald Trump] about the economic consequences of globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining.

This in turn will accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world. The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also socially destructive.

We need to put this alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality, in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit might have appeared to represent.

Hawking identifies the solution. He does not call for reaction and resistance by the ruled, since he considers the Brexit vote and the election of Trump already to be reactions to inequality. He calls instead for intelligent response by those with actual power, the elites themselves:

What matters now, far more than the choices made by these two electorates, is how the elites react. Should we [he considers himself, correctly, one of the "cultural elites"], in turn, reject these votes as outpourings of crude populism that fail to take account of the facts, and attempt to circumvent or circumscribe the choices that they represent? I would argue that this would be a terrible mistake.

I agree with his last statement above. I've been putting it this way:

It's up to the rich to stand down. It's up to police to stand down. It's up to the predators to stop feeding on us, eating our money, our labor — and in the case of the torturers in our "security" community — our pain, which they give us to please themselves.

If the rich are determined to extract the last drop of blood ... expect the victims to put up a fuss. And don't expect that fuss to be pretty.

When all power belongs to the state and the rulers who guide it, the people can only make their needs known. And if those needs are ignored, all they can then do is destroy the world of their betters, prior, perhaps, to taking power themselves, an event which often never occurs. In the face of elites resistance, especially extreme resistance, only destruction of the old will allow the powerless to create the new, if that's indeed what they do.

Prise de la Bastille, Jean-Pierre Houël, Bibliothèque nationale de France (source; click to enlarge)

The most orderly modern form of "taking power for themselves" occurred in 2016 — the electoral rebellion against the Clintonist-Obamist neoliberal rulers of the Democratic Party by people supporting Bernie Sanders. That revolt was put down, as Party elites pulled every lever available to retain control.

There may be one more orderly, electoral attempt in 2020 — or not; the choices may be miserable. But if it does occur, unless elites stand down, unless the next electoral rebellion is permitted to succeed, the popular response to failure won't be electoral and could be decidedly disorderly.

Hawking, the "enormous optimist," puts the problem faced by the elites more politely: "We can do this, I am an enormous optimist for my species; but it will require the elites, from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the lessons of the past year. To learn above all a measure of humility."

I, the less-than-optimistic, nevertheless agree with him. It does indeed take "enormous optimism" to think that a class defined by their hubris will learn "a sense of humility." Jamie Dimon, beware.

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