“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.” - Morpheus offering Neo the choice in The Matrix

In the movie The Matrix, Redpills are those whose minds have been freed from the Matrix. When you take a red pill, those who are waging a war against those who run the system (the “machines”), unplug you from that virtual world and allow you to see the truth for the first time in your life. You might have known that “something” was wrong with the world around you, but you never made the deeper connections as to how the whole system actually operated. And you certainly didn’t see an alternative to the world around you or any way to change it.

As organizers for social change, we are constantly faced with the question “what will be the ‘redpill’ for large numbers of people?” What will be the final piece of evidence, story on TV, book, event, or personal experience that finally makes someone start to radicalize? Its different for every single person. Some people radicalize due to personal experiences. Some people radicalize from education. Some people radicalize because of empathy for others and perceived wrongs going on around them. We can’t possibly know when a person is willing to step down the rabbit hole, but we can provide them with lots of opportunities to do so. Those opportunities need to be predicated on efforts that will actually make them more likely to take us up on our offer.

In The Matrix, one of the main characters, Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the two pills. But before Morpheus offered Neo the choice to be freed (we’d call it a “radicalizing experience”), Neo was selected for this opportunity because he was a computer hacker. He was actively seeking out “answers” and wanted to know more about the Matrix (a.ka. “the system” in our terms). If Neo hadn’t previously been a hacker - someone who didn’t exactly follow all the rules or buy into the official story of how things worked in the world - he quite possibly could have taken the blue pill and called it a night. A hacker is an example of one such person who might take the red pill. It doesn’t ensure they will, but it does increase the likelihood.

Whatever keeps people in line (i.e. prevents them from taking red pills), is called “hegemony”. Its the collected set of laws, processes, rules, regulations, and norms which keep people from making the connections needed to see themselves as people capable of leading free lives. How do you determine what are some of the major barriers to people changing their minds? Well, you can usually start by thinking of things that annoy the Right.

Rightwing positions which seem irrational or absurd are usually quite intentional. They are rational in that conservatives hold those positions for a reason. They know that their power is based on people following certain rules, without which other areas of their power would be challenged. When conservatives say that drugs, divorce, separation of church and state, free speech, free press, reproductive freedom, socialized programs, and gays will lead to the downfall of “Western civilization[sic]” they aren’t just serious, they’re quite right. They mean that the form of society in which they are on top will cease to exist if these things happen in increasing numbers.That’s because freedom is, well, addictive. Once you get some, you’re gonna want a lot more!

They only care about our sex lives insofar as keeping us (especially young people) scared of sex & sexuality will keep us obedient and allow them to maintain their power. They understand that drugs, and sex, and good education, and cooperative workplaces, and grassroots citizen media will lead people to take the “red pill” and free their minds. Its why they are against it.

Its also why those of us on the left need to take cultural issues seriously. Sure sex education, same-sex marriage, and  reproductive freedom are all moral issues. But they are also cultural issues that maintain the dominant hegemony. Its our job to break that hegemony. Leading campaigns against backwards laws, opening youth centers and alternative schools, and educating young people about our vision of the future should all be at the top of our priorities list. The Right will push back on these things without a doubt. We should respond to this push-back with an article alternative worldview, rooted in progressive values. If we are strategic in our efforts, we will win battles and expose the hypocrisy of the Right while we do.

In particular, revolutionary education necessarily includes (among other things):

• Sex and health education;
• Accurate information about drugs and alcohol;
• Diversity education so people shed stereotypes about other races, cultures, genders, classes, and sexualities;
• Time and places for young people to form real community;
• Information and experiences that show how solidarity, equity, diversity, and self-management are the most morally-just and efficient ways to organize society;
• Information about how the world really works, alternatives to the current institutions of society, and ideas about how they can create change.

The Left needs to take battles around culture very seriously. If we do, people will start to beg us to show them just how deep the rabbit hole goes. I guarantee it.

Hey There!

Whether this if the first time you’ve come to my site, or you’ve been here a few times before, I’d love to hear your feedback, see where people are reading my site from, learn from what you’re doing in movements, political organizing, activism, the academy, work and more.

Do you like the site? What could make it better? What would you like to hear more about? What isn’t clear enough? What could I clarify? Do you know of any resources that I might want to read or might help improve the content of my site?

I’d especially love to start communicating with more people (seriously). Post a comment on this page (even if you view if months from when I’m writing this), or send me an e-mail at brian (at) walkingbutterfly (dot) com. Lemme know where you’re from (city/state/country), what you for for a living/school/political organizing, and what you think of the site!

Can’t wait to hear from you!

Brian Kelly

brian (at) walkingbutterfly (dot) com

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far,… go together.” - African proverb

Conversations around revolutionary change almost always unearth concerns about issues of violence, repression, police, and imprisonment - and for good reason. Most obviously, these concerns are central in the minds of those who believe that a violent revolution is necessary in the United State. For those who see revolution differently, especially those who believe that a mass, popular, and largely-nonviolent revolution is possible, the questions stem from a different concern. From what I’ve seen so far, revolutionary democrats often ask: “could we really win?”

Its an important question to explore.

The Battle of Seattle

My friend Michael is a staff member at ZNet & Z Communications, which is an independent progressive media and political education organization in Massachusetts. He recently told me about what news coverage in relation to the resistance to the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle in 1999 looked like. First, for anyone that doesn’t know, the protests against the WTO were held in November of 1999, in response to the WTO’s role (along with the IMF and World Bank), in pushing countries in the Global South / Third World, into even greater poverty through “liberalizing international trade” (i.e. giving countries loans they can’t pay back, at high interest, in return for them opening up their markets to multinational corporations, cutting progressive national/regional regulations against pollution, worker/human rights violations, etc…).

What Michael explained to me, is that for the months leading up to the demonstrations, ZNet (and most left media outlets), received increasingly more news reports, calls-to-action, proposals for new organizations, photo/audio/video submissions, analysis articles, visionary proposals for the future, ideas about movement building, and so on, that people wanted to publish on ZNet. These continued to be submitted to ZNet in ever greater numbers as November 30th approached.

People were excited about building popular, democratic power. They were determined to shut down the WTO meeting and all it symbolized. They were talking about hope, change, democracy, feminism, racial justice, solidarity, and the future. Movement building was framed in positive, compassionate, and creative ways.

But when the meetings begun, something very different happened. Almost instantaneously, the talks about “peace, democracy, hope, change, vision, strategy, and a better world,” Michael said, “turned into nonstop submissions what the police were doing.”

The state repression that was brought down upon many of the protesters, caused many to allow their actions, their hopes, their story, and their message, to be silenced. Not only was the state violence harming protesters and leading to arrests, it allowed the greatest uprising against a meeting of world capitalists in history be portrayed as an ineffective mob of unruly, stereotypical leftists/protesters in the corporate media, and allowed revolution to be framed in terms of “opposing the cops” and “stopping repression” (as our main goal), in our own independent media. The Government didn’t just attack the Left, it got us to forget what we really were fighting for, it got us to slip off message, it got us to stop talking about our vision.

Could We Really Win?

Back to the question in the first paragraph I said I hear repeated a lot: “Could we really win?”

Seattle and its aftermath didn’t mark some dramatic break from a visionary, relevant, and strategic progressive movement that existed before November 1999 - that would be an exaggeration. What it did represent is a clear example of how large segments of that movement which are on-message, and talking about relevant things, can be thrown off-message, and made to lose the clarity of their focus.

What is fairly generalizable on the revolutionary left is when we talk about social transformation, we give the State much more credit than its due. That is, we make it seem more powerful than it actually is. While the United States Government is certainly one of the most violent institutions ever created, and American capitalists control some of the most concentrated institutions of wealth imaginable, the progressive movement overestimates how hard it would be to bring them down. What I mean is this: if you see revolution as a pitched (or surprise) , violent, insurrectionary battle between “The State” and “The People”, then of course you think that revolution is some impossible task (or worse, your ideology and dogma blind you from how ridiculous this idea sounds and the fact that no sane person in the U.S. will listen to you - let alone the millions necessary to win).

However if you define a revolution as a fundamental change in the defining institutions and social relations of society. If you think that to achieve that transformation you need to engage in careful, patient, yet urgent, organizing - slow, intentional growth. If you believe that if we are to attain desirable ends, we must use desirable means. If, after looking at revolutions in the past, you see that to avoid undesirable ends, we need to talk about and plan what desirable ends would look like - that is, we must think about, talk about, write about, and experiment with, visions of what a future society could look like. If you think that we need to relate to millions of people, that indeed our revolution will be a popular and widely-waged one. If you think that our revolution needs to be of the mainstream, and not against it. And if your central concern is the number of revolutionaries in the United States (let’s say 100 million people), and not the number of cops and national guard who might oppose you, then your ideas about what a revolution in the United States would look like change significantly.

You begin to see what is plainly obvious: that institutions - including those that make up the United States Government and U.S. corporations - are built consent and cooperation, much more than on than violence or repression. When asked with the question of how could a revolutionary movement possibly defeat the United States Military and urban police forces, the obvious answer surfaces: by organizing them.

I’ll end with a Gene Sharp quote, which I saw in one of his speeches on Google Videos. I’ll take the direct quote from Aaron’s blog post “On The Shaking of Governments” (brilliant post title) since he’s been reading a lot of Sharp’s stuff. Here it is:

“Is shaking a government to the point that they disintegrate and nobody is left to surrender naivete and weakness? … There is nothing weak about a technique of struggle which can take the legitimacy away from a repressive government, which can produce a defiant population uncontrollable by the police and military forces sent to repress them.”

Finally, two great readings on nonviolent revolutions:

Globalize Liberation, George Lakey

From Dictatorship to Democracy, Gene Sharp

In capitalism, owners together with about a fifth of the population who have highly empowered work decide what is produced, by what means, and with what distribution. Nearly four fifths of the population does largely rote labor, suffers inferior incomes, obeys orders, and endures boredom, all imposed from above. As John Lennon put it, “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.”

Capitalism destroys solidarity, homogenizes variety, obliterates equity, and imposes harsh hierarchy. It is top heavy in power and opportunity. It is bottom heavy in pain and constraint. Indeed, Capitalism imposes on workers a degree of discipline beyond what any dictator ever dreamed of imposing politically. Who ever heard of citizens asking permission to go to the bathroom, a commonplace occurrence for workers in many corporations.

Capitalism’s ills are not due to antisocial people. Instead, capitalism’s institutions impose horrible behavior even on its most social citizens. In capitalism as a famous American baseball manager quipped “nice guys finish last.” More aggressively: “garbage rises.” Witness Washington’s White House.

Participatory economics is an alternative way to organize economic life.

It has equitable incomes, circumstances, opportunities, and responsibilities for all participants. Each participant in a participatory economy has a fair share of control over their own life and over all shared social outcomes. Participatory economics eliminates class division.

It produces solidarity. Even an antisocial individual in a participatory economy has no choice but to account for social well-being if he or she wishes to prosper.

It diversifies outcomes and generates equitable distribution that remunerates each participant for how long and how hard they work as well as for harsh conditions they may suffer at work.

It also conveys to each person a say in what is produced, what means are used, and how outputs are allocated, all in proportion to the degree he or she is affected by those decisions.

Participatory economics, in other words, has completely different values than capitalism and to further its different values participatory economics incorporates different institutions.

It has workers and consumers councils where workers and consumers employ diverse modes of discussion, debate, and democratic determination. In a participatory economic, there are no corporate owners and managers deciding outcomes from the top down.

It has balanced jobs in which each worker does a fair combination of empowering and rote labor, so that all participants have comparably empowering circumstances instead of 20% of the workforce monopolizing all the empowering tasks and 80% doing only subordinate labor. In a participatory economy there is still expertise. There is still coordination. Decisions still get made. But there is no minority monopolizing empowering information, activity, and access to decision making positions while a majority is made subservient by doing only deadening daily tasks with no decision making component.

In a participatory economy, each and every job, which means each and every person’s work, involves a mix calibrated so that each participant has essentially equally empowering conditions. A participatory economy has no owning class. It has no technocratic, managerial, or coordinator class. A participatory economy has only workers and consumers cooperatively creatively fulfilling their capacities consistently with each participant having a fair share of influence.

It has remuneration for effort and sacrifice, which translates to remuneration for the duration, intensity, and harshness of the work people do. It rejects remuneration for power, property, or even output. Instead of gargantuan disparities of income and wealth, a participatory economy has a just distribution of social product.

It also does away with markets which pit each actor against all others, destroy solidarity, impose class division, mis-price all public goods, ignore collective effects beyond direct buyers and sellers, violate ecological balance and sustainability, and have many other faults as well. In place of markets it utilizes a system of workers and consumers, through their self managing councils, cooperatively negotiating inputs and outputs for all firms and actors in accord with true and full social costs and benefits of economic activities.

In a short article it is impossible to make even a quick much less a compelling case for an entirely different economic system. I can only offer a brief list of participatory economics’ values and institutions. I know such brevity is vague and hard for unfamiliar readers to give substance to. But here we have no room for clarification, supporting argument, or detailed discussion. My apologies.

What I hope, however, is that readers who know from their own experience that capitalist economies routinely cause us to fleece each other, deny us having a say over our own lives or force us to dominate the lives of others, distribute massive outputs to those who do the most pleasurable or even who do no work at all and distribute meager outputs to those who do the least pleasurable and the overwhelming volume of work, will hope that participatory economics is a real alternative.

I can hope, in other words, that instead of quietly accepting rich people’s passivity-inducing mantra that “there is no alternative,” we will all seek something better, beyond capitalism, and that, moved by our aspirations we will carefully consider participatory economics on its merits. One place that you might begin, if you don’t accept that humanity is forever doomed to suffer gross inequality and hierarchy via capitalist ownership, corporations, and markets, is at the Participatory Economics website.

My good friend Joshua Kahn Russell turned me on to an AMAZING book by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Tipping Point“. Apparently I missed this one when it came out. Wish I hadn’t, but glad I read it now! It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years.

After I read it, I realized that a lot of my not-so-progressive friends and business student acquaintances love the book. If you are a progressive, read it with an eye towards seeing the basic concepts and how powerful they are - not with the expectation that you will agree with everything Gladwell says about this or that issue. The underlying concepts are groundbreaking and, dare I say, revolutionary.

You can read excepts from the book and what Gladwell has to say about the book here. I’ll definitely be reflecting on and referencing this book a lot in the future. Its definitely one to read a few times! The endnotes are even amazing!