Environmental Research Foundation  [Printer-friendly version]
August 1, 2006

EXCERPT FROM 'ESCAPING THE MATRIX'

To bring us live wires back to the main topic of building a
transformational movement, and to provoke discussion, I am posting
this long excerpt from Richard Moore's new book, Escaping the Matrix
(ISBN 0977098303), pgs. 84-93. In contains quotations interspersed
within the text, beginning with one from Daniel Quinn. --Peter
Montague

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If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds,
people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with the old
vision but new programs. --Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

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The source of our crisis is the dominator culture itself.
Environmental collapse and capitalism are merely the terminal symptoms
of a chronic cancer, a cancer that has plagued us for six thousand
years. No matter what dominator hierarchy might be established, or
which group of leaders might be in charge, things would always evolve
toward something similar to what we have now. Such is the path of
domination, hierarchy, and rule by elites. There is a popular computer
game called Age of Empires. In this game, playing the role of the
ruler, you can build villages, fortify them, and set out to conquer
other villages. As the game progresses, the equipment gradually
advances, from bows and arrows, to medieval armaments, to tanks and
artillery -- but you always feel like you're playing exactly the same
game with slightly different pieces. The technology has changed over
the past six thousand years, but the game has always been the same,
with elites at the controls putting us through our paces, down through
the ages.

If we want to build a sensible society, we must base it on a different
kind of culture: not a dominator culture, but a culture in Eisler's
partnership category. We need a culture based on mutual understanding
and cooperation rather than on war and conquest, a culture based on
common sense rather than dysfunctional doctrine, on respect for life
rather than the pursuit of profit, and on democracy in place of elite
rule. After six thousand years of domestication, we sheep must finally
cast aside our illusions, recognize our condition, and reclaim our
identity as free human beings. In reclaiming our identities we will
also be redefining our cultures.

Cultural transformation is the basis of social transformation. Social
forms reflect cultural paradigms, and the dominator paradigm cannot
support social forms that are capable of dealing with the crisis that
faces us. Domination is the "old vision," and as Quinn points out, the
world "will not be saved by people with the old vision." If we want to
save the world, we must become people with a "new vision" regarding
our relationships with one another as human beings, a vision based on
mutual understanding and harmony.

We the People are the only hope for humanity. We are the only ones who
can save the world. Domination can end only when the dominated decide
to do something about it. Our own liberation, and the transformation
of our societies, are two names for the same thing, two aspects of the
same project. A partnership culture is a culture of liberation, as
well as being a culture that facilitates social harmony and economic
sustainability. Such a culture will not be given to us; we must create
it by our own initiative and our own efforts. And by the very act of
undertaking that initiative, we will be already expressing the essence
of our new culture: liberation, empowerment, and release from the
domesticating Matrix of illusions.

"That may be all well and good," you might be thinking, "but how on
Earth do we go about creating a new culture and gaining a new vision?
And how can that lead to the transformation of our societies?" These
are very important questions, difficult questions, but I believe there
are practical answers to them. Indeed, providing workable answers to
those questions, insofar as I am able, is the primary mission of this
book.

The basic problem is that We the People need to wake up and realize
our common identity as an intelligent, aware species. As a first step
in understanding what it means to wake up, let us review episodes in
which we have woken up, in the form of social movements and
revolutions. By looking at a few examples, where we have made serious
attempts to transform our societies -- sometimes with considerable
success -- there are many useful lessons to be learned.

Lessons from our long experience of struggle

Changes in society are usually initiated from the top, by elites
acting through their various hierarchical institutions. In those cases
where change has been initiated from the grassroots, that change has
always come by the efforts of a social movement. "Social movements" is
a broad category, including everything from polite reform
organizations to armed insurrections, from labor unions to
anti-globalization protests. In general, a social movement is an
attempt to give voice to popular sentiment, to provide a vehicle that
enables the members of the movement to act as a whole, to be a
collective actor in society, to have a coherent effect on society.

Quite clearly the kind of transformation we are seeking will not be
initiated by the elite establishment. If such a transformation is to
be achieved, the initiative will need to come from We the People in
the form of a social movement that is suitable to that task. That
social movement might be quite unlike previous movements, as its
objectives would be uniquely radical. But by examining various
existing and historical movements, we can gain some insight as to the
kind of movement that would be suitable for our needs.

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Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's
original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been
made, through disobedience and rebellion. --Oscar Wilde

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Let's first take a look at the anti-globalization movement, a movement
whose sentiments are largely in harmony with the kind of
transformation we have been discussing. The movement understands that
unbridled capitalism is destroying the world, and the movement seeks a
radical shift towards democracy, justice, and sustainability. In its
World Social Forum gatherings, the movement strives to develop a
coherent vision and effective action strategies. The movement has many
thousands of committed activists worldwide, who are willing to
participate in movement events at considerable expense, and sometimes
risk, to themselves. Is the anti-globalization movement an appropriate
vehicle for achieving global transformation?

The movement is extremely encouraging, in that it indicates how large
the constituency is for social transformation, and how committed that
constituency is to thoughtful activism. And the movement provides a
forum in which that constituency can build networks, team how to
organize itself effectively, and build a sense of movement coherence.
But we cannot avoid the observation that the results on the ground
have not been encouraging, nor is there any particular sign that
outcomes will improve. The WTO and IMF continue to wreak their havoc,
bioengineered crops spread, the war machine rolls on, human rights lie
shattered on the ground, and destruction of the biosphere accelerates.

The movement is being ignored politically and it isn't showing signs
of developing into a truly mass movement. It is a very large choir,
but ifs not a quorum of the congregation. In its current form it is
unlikely to have even a restraining effect on our descent into
oblivion.

Nonetheless, if a transformative movement is to arise, the people in
the anti-globalization movement will certainly be part of it. In that
sense, we should perhaps think of the anti-globalization movement as
in fact being our transformative movement, but still in latent form,
missing some unknown element. When such a new element comes along, the
potential of the anti-globalization movement is likely to be
transformed. In search of such a "new element," let us move on and
consider another movement, one from history.

About a century ago, just prior to 1900 in the U.S., there was a
movement that provides a closer model for the kind of movement that
might bring about transformation today. Its goals were not quite
transformational, but they were radical, and they did represent a
challenge to the ascendancy of monopoly capitalism. This movement did
have a vision of a significantly reformed system, a strategy for
bringing about change, and an effective program for expanding its
constituency. It began as the Farmers' Alliance, was later known as
the Populist Movement and the People's Party, and it became a very
significant actor in American society. In 1890, for example, Georgia
and Texas elected Alliance Governors, and thirty-eight Alliance
members were elected to the U.S. Congress (Zinn, 277-289).

The Farmers' Alliance began in 1877 as a self-help movement in Texas,
organizing cooperatives for buying supplies and selling crops. The
cooperatives improved the farmers' economic situation, and the
movement began to spread throughout the Midwest and the South. By
1889, there were 400,000 members.

This was a thinking movement as well as an action movement. Howard
Zinn, in A People's History of the United States (which I've been
paraphrasing in this section), writes: "The Populist movement also
made a remarkable attempt to create a new and independent culture for
the country's farmers. The Alliance Lecture Bureau reached all over
the country; it had 35,000 lecturers. The Populists poured out books
and pamphlets from their printing presses." Zinn goes on to cite from
another source: "One gathers from yellowed pamphlets that the agrarian
ideologists undertook to re-educate their countrymen from the ground
up. Dismissing 'history as taught in our schools' as 'practically
valueless,' they undertook to write it over -- formidable columns of
it, from the Greeks on down. With no more compunction they turned all
hands to the revision of economics, political theory, law, and
government." And from another source: "...no other political movement
-- not that of 1776, nor that of 1860-1861 ever altered Southern life
so profoundly" (Zinn, 286-287).

There is much here that makes sense for a transformational democratic
movement. Our current systems are supported by cultural mythologies,
and "writing it over" is a good description of what needs to be done
if the Matrix illusions of the old culture are to be exposed and the
culture of a new society is to be developed. The emphasis on education
of the membership shows a respect for popular intelligence, and it
builds a shared cultural perspective that enables a movement to act
with increasing unity and coherence. The emphasis on outreach and
recruitment is necessary if a movement hopes to grow large enough to
bring about significant changes.

The Populist Movement arose due to economic problems that were being
faced by farmers, and the movement set out to find practical ways to
solve those problems. If a movement makes demands, then it is
affirming that power resides elsewhere -- in that person or agency
which is the target of the demands. If a movement creates solutions,
then it is asserting its own empowerment; it is taking responsibility
for its own welfare. The emphasis on economics in particular is also
appropriate to a transformational movement. Economics is the basis of
most social activity, and it is in the realm of economics that
solutions can be found to our social and environmental malaise.

The Populists, being largely conservative farmers, were closely
connected to place, and their movement was in part an expression of
localism. The movement built up its constituency region by region,
rather than by seeking isolated members spread throughout the society,
as does the Sierra Club or the anti-globalization movement today. To
use a military metaphor, the Populists captured territory and then
consolidated that territory through education and by implementing its
solutions in that territory. It was an inclusive movement, in the
sense that the Populists appealed to the great majority within their
territory. They were therefore able to win elections there and gain
some degree of official political power. Such a territorial emphasis
is very appropriate to a transformational movement. Within a captured
territory -- a region in which people generally have become part of
the movement -- the vision and culture of the movement has an
opportunity to flower and to find expression in ordinary conversation
among people. The culture has a place to take root and grow, and
people's sense of empowerment is reinforced by being in the daily
company of those who share an evolving vision -- and who are in effect
collaborators in a shared project.

The Populist Movement was also an expression of localism in another
way. At the core of the Populist political agenda was a set of
economic reforms. Those reforms represented an attempt to stem the
ascendancy of centralized big-money capitalism and reassert the
interests of locally based farms and small businesses. The Populists
were calling for fundamental reform of the financial system, the debt
system, and currency policies. They wanted to give local communities
and regions enough economic viability to be able to take
responsibility for their own welfare.

In their relationship to the political process, the Populists again
have much to teach a transformational movement. They began as a
grassroots organization oriented around self-help, not as a movement
attempting to influence the political machine. They were successful at
their self-help endeavors, and they expanded their focus to
recruitment and territorial expansion. Only when they had achieved
overwhelming success at the grassroots level did they turn their
attention to the ballot box. In this way they were able to achieve
some measure of political power without compromising their objectives
in the horse-trading that characterizes competitive politics. They
were able to integrate politics into their tactical portfolio and also
retain their integrity and focus as a grassroots movement.

But ultimately the Populists faltered and collapsed, and we have as
much to learn from that experience as from their earlier successes.
They ran up against an unavoidable barrier, one that all radical
movements must run up against eventually -- the limit on how much can
be accomplished in the face of establishment opposition. In order to
promote their economic reform agenda, and encouraged by their
electoral successes, they decided to commit their movement
wholeheartedly to the political process. They joined forces with the
Democratic Party and backed William Jennings Bryan in the election of
1896. The Populists had then placed themselves in a no-win situation.
If the Democrats lost, the movement would be defeated and shattered;
if the Democrats won, the movement would be swallowed up in the horse-
trading of Democratic Party politics.

The reactionary capitalist establishment responded vigorously to this
opportunity to put a final end to the upstart Populist movement.
Corporations and the elite-owned media threw their support to the
Republican candidate, William McKinley, in what Zinn calls "the first
massive use of money in an election campaign." Bryan was defeated, and
the Populist movement fell apart. The establishment was taking no
chances: even diluted within the Democratic Party, the Populists
represented too much of a threat from below, they were too successful
at providing a voice for We the People. Democracy had raised its ugly
head, and elites chopped it off at their earliest opportunity.

Any transformational movement that wants to go the distance must be
prepared to resist the seductive siren call of electoral politics -- a
siren whose voice becomes even more appealing after the movement has
made some significant progress. As the Populists' earlier experience
showed, politics can be used successfully to consolidate gains made on
the ground, particularly if the expansion program employs a
territorial strategy. But when electoral politics is allowed to
dominate movement strategy before the territory of the movement
encompasses the entire electorate -- then the hope of ultimate success
has been lost. Either the movement will be destroyed abruptly, or it
will die a slow drowning death in the quicksand of factional politics.
In the next chapter we'll look more closely into the nature of our
electoral political system.

Any transformational movement must also eventually run up against the
barrier of establishment opposition. As with the Populists, it makes
good sense for a transformational movement to focus initially on what
people can collectively do for themselves, without confrontation and
within the constraints of the existing system. This is how the
movement can be built, and how a culture can be fostered based on
common sense, self-reliance, and democratic empowerment. But the
movement's self-help progress will eventually be frustrated by the
economic and political constraints of the established system, and
that's when the movement needs to decide what it's really about.

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How well we know all this! How often we have witnessed it in our part
of the world! The machine that worked for years to apparent
perfection, faultlessly, without a hitch, falls apart overnight The
system that seemed likely to reign unchanged, world without end, since
nothing could call its power in question amid all those unanimous
votes and elections, is shattered without warning. And, to our
amazement, we find that everything was quite otherwise than we had
thought. --Vaclav Havel, 1975

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At that point the movement can either take the blue pill, and settle
for temporary reformist gains within the elite's political circus, or
it can take the red pill and face the challenges of the real world --
of power and engagement. As much as some of us may be enamored of a
win-win, love-your-enemy approach to the universe, we must face the
fact that the currently entrenched regime is determined to stay in
power, ruthless in its tactics, and resourceful in its application of
its many means of suppression, subversion, and co-option. Though we
may carry universal love in our hearts, the strategic thinking of the
movement must at some point focus on the principles of effective
engagement. The Populists have little to offer us here. A better model
for this phase would be the non-violent grassroots movement against
British rule in India, led and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi is most renowned for his non-violence and for his universal
empathy for all people, including even the British oppressors. Those
are wise principles for any transformational movement that must engage
an armed establishment, and that seeks to create a just and democratic
society. But Gandhi is also renowned for his strategic acumen, and we
can learn much from that aspect of his work. Like a skillful Go
player, he was able to set up situations where the British felt
compelled to respond, yet any response they chose would undermine
their position. They had to choose between yielding ground to the
movement or else engaging in suppressive measures that could only
serve to build greater sympathy and support for the movement, as
exemplified in the famous 'salt march to the sea.' The point is not
necessarily that a movement should emulate Gandhi's specific tactics,
but rather that creative and realistic strategic thinking is
absolutely essential to successful engagement.

Gandhi's movement did succeed in its immediate objective of ousting
the British occupiers, but it failed to achieve Gandhi's deeper vision
for a new kind of harmonious and democratic society. The leadership of
the movement was concentrated too much in him personally and after his
assassination his followers reverted to traditional political
patterns. His movement was in the final analysis a hierarchical
movement, with himself at the top as the benevolent guiding light.

A successful transformational movement -- which seeks to establish a
democratic, non-hierarchical society -- would be best served by taking
a non-hierarchical approach from the very beginning. Goals, means, and
strategy would be better developed at the grassroots level, and the
movement culture should facilitate the exchange of ideas and
solutions, thus building a self-reliant and holographically led
movement -- and a movement that is not vulnerable to collapse due to
leadership decapitation.

The Populist Movement too had a hierarchical leadership structure, and
this limited its transformational potential in several ways. In the
long run hierarchy is the bane of democracy, so in that sense the
Populists were from the beginning not pursuing a path toward a
transformed democratic society.

The wisdom of the Populist movement was limited by the cultural
perspective and prejudices of the relatively small leadership cadre.
In particular, the rural, farmer-based leadership limited the growth
of the movement to what we might in some fairness call their own kind
of people. Although movement activists sympathized with urban
industrial workers, and expressed support for their strikes and
boycotts, the culture of the Populist leadership did not lead them to
bring urban workers into their constituency, to make them part of the
Populist family. From an objective strategic perspective, it is clear
that this was a fatal error of omission. There was a natural alignment
of interests, based on mutual exploitation by monopoly capitalism, and
an effective joining of forces would have propelled the expanded
movement onto a new and much higher plateau of political significance.

Any movement, which aims to create a transformed and democratic
society, needs to keep this in mind: when the new world is created,
everyone will be in it -- not just the people we agree with or the
people we normally associate with. A movement must aim to be
all-inclusive if it seeks to create a democratic society that is
all-inclusive. Is there anyone you would leave behind, or relegate to
second-class citizenship? If not, then you should be willing to
welcome to the movement anyone who shares the goal of creating that
new world.

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The future arrives of its own accord; progress does not. -- Poul
Henningsen, Danish designer and social critic

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Our Transformational Imperative

We the People have found our identity and common purpose many times in
the past: on the fields of Lexington and Concord, at the gates of the
Bastille and the Czar's palace, in the struggle against British
occupation in India, and in movements like the Populists. We have a
tradition to learn from, and there are many wrong turns we must avoid.
Martin Luther King used a phrase that sums up one of the most
important lessons we need to take to heart, Keep your eyes on the
prize. If we want a world that is democratic, and sustainable both
economically and politically, then we must stay true to that vision.
Only a thorough and radical cultural transformation can rid us of the
dynamics of hierarchy, domination, and elite rule.