What are the prospects?

But I don't think the internet stuff is part of the problem. Subtract the internet and the rallies wouldn't be bigger, they'd be even smaller to nonexistent. And I've noticed that when big marches do happen, they aren't news. In the sixties, big rallies, even medium ones, were news—news to be framed in a hostile way, sure, but people were aware of them. The staunch citizens became aware that those darned kids were rebelling and nonconforming and it was just awful—but the darned kids also became aware that other darned kids were rebelling and seemed to be having a good time doing it. The media spread the word even if what it was trying to do was rally the opposition. Briefly in the late nineties, big demonstrations were news again. The rest of the time, the media's frame for street protest has been to refuse to frame it, and that's been quite effective for them.

Meanwhile, demographics have meant that ever since the Boomers stopped being youth, youth movements have had no chance at really significant impact. Gen X and all the ones since have been quiescent in part because they just weren't a big enough slice of the population to push very hard, and they seem to have known it. Any successful movement will have to be something other than a youth one. More simply though, the tactics of the Right and the money and the media and even of the spooks have pretty much worked over the past few decades. The Right's think tanks et cetera have performed well. The media have become more and more concentrated and the messages that get through have been more and more constricted. Cointelpro was evil and notorious, but it worked—after they killed the Black Panthers and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, nobody of similar stature really felt like stepping up to the plate and to the extent that they did they were unable to rally the same support. And I understand some of their agents provocateurs, divide and conquer tactics were effective as well.

What about strategy? It seems to me the success of the right and the ruling class bears the seeds of defeat. The fact is that societies set up the way the megarich want them set up are not stable. It's pretty much that simple. Economies set up for the benefit of a very few just don't seem to work well, and it doesn't seem to be possible to find a point where they're pretty unequal but still kind of work and freeze them there. To get that far you have to give the rich the ability to monkeywrench the system severely for their self-interest and enshrine their self-interest as somehow inherently good. At that point, there's no way they will draw a line and say “Enough”. Oh, a few may—f'rinstance, if you look at what Warren Buffett and maybe George Soros have been saying, it looks as if they're saying the system needs to be kept from getting more skewed than it is. But in general, they'll keep grabbing for more in a system that's set up to let them get more when they grab for it. Eventually, they cause a Great Depression or something. In the US, I'm expecting that pretty soon. In Canada, not quite as soon because we have more resources left per person to exploit and mask economic haplessness in other areas.

Until that happens, their tactical successes, particularly in terms of media ownership, make it pretty much impossible that a mass movement dedicated to major, meaningful change can succeed. Most people are getting by as well as they've been taught is reasonable to expect, and they have to work too hard to do it to have much time for politics. Our culture has been successfully atomized. I don't know about the rest of you, but around my workplace it's basically rude—not done—to talk about politics except in purely cynical terms. You can say bad things about politicians, you can complain about them, but you can't express support for any politician or political movement. Heck, that's almost true in the political blogs, at least the leftie ones.

Even if and when the failures of the current status quo become glaringly obvious, what to do remains open to interpretation, and if people have no way to get information except a near-monolithic mainstream media, Fascism rather than a democratic Left analysis could be the direction we head. The Shock Doctrine and all that. Which is where the internet comes in. The mainstream media is not going to tell the truth about anything that's inconvenient to the wealthy and powerful. And it's just going to get more and more concentrated. If we end up with one media empire in each country, the media sure isn't going to tell us about it. So the question is, how big can the nonprofessional, grassroots internet media grow? How much of the information people get will be coming from people like us at Pogge rather than CanWestGlobal? And will we dare to break our taboos by enunciating some positive political/economic visions and programs rather than just pointing out the Emperor's nudity?

The way I see it, any given one of us bloggers may have only a very minor impact. And the chance of a big, strong political movement coming out of our ramblings may be small for now. But we got a responsibility to keep going and grow this medium, because we're about all the alternative people have to the dishonest media giants. People who snark on the internet and emails aren't doing it instead of marching—they're doing it instead of nothing at all, or instead of sitting in front of the TV quietly wondering if they're the only one that has something wrong with them. And when the conditions are such that some major change is going to happen in some direction whether anyone wants it to or not, we'll have to be there weighing in, in favour of sanity and against tyranny. It may not be much, but at the moment it's what we got.