Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
"Dissatisfaction with the social and political world can take many forms – everything from resignation and escape to covert resistance and sabotage to full-blown collective action. It is only sometimes that such dissatisfaction expresses itself as what we have come to understand as protest: collective public action that aims for social or political change. The past year has seen a great global wave of protest movements, among which the Arab Uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street movement are only the most well known. But what can protest accomplish in highly complex societies? What are the limits of protest?
"
-
I can think of at least three important limitations. The first is perhaps the most obvious: though, as I noted above, the protest repertoire is large and protesters constantly innovate (the Egyptian protests succeeded in part because of innovative ways of deceiving the police, building up a movement, and identifying promising political opportunities), they are in a race with other actors who are not sitting tight. Develop a tactic that exploits a vulnerability in the political opportunity structure – like the “Occupy” tactic we have seen spread in the past year – and opponents on the other side of the issue will often enough develop something that, if it doesn't entirely counteract the effectiveness of your tactic, will certainly render it less effective. Revolutionaries are creative, but dictators can be too.
-
The second important instrumental limitation of protest is also pretty obvious, and has to do with the scarcity of the most important resource that voice requires to be effective: time (or, more specifically, coordinated time). Protest works to focus attention; it concentrates the diffuse and uncoordinated dissatisfaction of many into a unified chorus, and amplifies this dissatisfaction in ways that attract the attention of publics that might share some of these dissatisfactions, and of political coalitions that can act to change the circumstances giving rise to them. But in the short run, the attention budget for all issues of interest is limited; attention can be shifted, not created, since we are a finite number of human beings who live only a finite amount of time.
- 2 more annotation(s)...
Journal issue on politics, communication, revolution, and social media.
"Interchangeability of parts breaks the coupling between scaling and manufacturing capacity by substituting supply-chain limits for manufacturing limits. For a rifle, you can build up a stockpile of spare parts in peace time, and deliver an uninterrupted supply of parts to match the breakdown rate. There is no need to predict which part might break down in order to meaningfully anticipate and prepare. You can also distribute production optimally (close to raw material sources or low-cost talent for instance), since there is no need to locate craftsmen near the point-of-use.
So when interchangeability was finally achieved and had diffused through the economy as standard practice (a process that took about 65 years), demand-management complexity moved to the supply chain, and most problems could be solved by distributing inventories appropriately."
-
Both Moore’s Law and Hall’s Law in the speculative form that I have proposed, are exponential trajectories. These trajectories generally emerge when some sort of runaway positive-feedback process is unleashed, through the breaking of some boundary constraint (the term break boundary is due to Marshall McLuhan).
The positive-feedback part is critical (if you know some math, you can guess why: a “doubling” law in a difference/differential equation form has to be at least a first-order process; something like compound interest, if you don’t know what the math terms mean).
Loosely speaking, this implies a technological process that can be applied to itself, improving it. Better machines with interchangeable parts also means better machine tools that are themselves made with interchangeable parts and therefore can run continuously at higher speeds, with low downtime. Computers can be used to design more complex computers. This is not true of all technological processes. Better plastics do not improve your ability to make new plastics, for instance, since they do not play much of a role in their own manufacturing processes.
This is the inner, technological positive-feedback loop (think of an entire technology sector engaging in a sort of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; a major sign is that the most talented people turn to tool-building: Blanchard and Hall for Hall’s Law, people like the late Dennis Ritchie and Linus Torvalds for Moore’s Law).
-
But the technological positive-feedback loop requires an outer financial positive-feedback loop around it to fuel it. You need conditions where the second million is easier to make than the first million.
This means tycoons who spot some vast new opportunity and play land-grabbing games on a massive scale.
Both Hall’s Law and Moore’s Law led to wholesale management and financial innovation by precisely such new tycoons.
For Hall’s Law, the process started with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the hero of A. J. Stiles’ excellent The First Tycoon, who figured out how to tame the strange new beast, the post-East-India-Company corporation and in the process sidelined old money.
It is revealing that Vanderbilt was blooded in business through a major legal battle for steamboat water rights: Gibbons vs. Ogden (1824) that helped define the relationship of corporations to the rest of society. From there, he went from strength to strength, inventing new business and financial thinking along the way. Only in his old age did he finally meet his match: Jay Gould, who would go on to become the archetypal Robber Baron, taking over most of Vanderbilt’s empire from his not-so-talented children.
Vanderbilt was something of a transition figure. He straddled both management and finance, and old and new economies: he was a cross between an old-economy merchant-pirate in the Robert Clive mold (he ran a small war in Nicaragua for instance) and a new-economy corporate tycoon. He transcended the categories that he helped solidify, which helped define the next generation of tycoons.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
"In The Institutional Revolution, Douglas W. Allen offers a thought-provoking account of another, quieter revolution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and allowed for the full exploitation of the many new technological innovations. Fundamental to this shift were dramatic changes in institutions, or the rules that govern society, which reflected significant improvements in the ability to measure performance—whether of government officials, laborers, or naval officers—thereby reducing the role of nature and the hazards of variance in daily affairs. Along the way, Allen provides readers with a fascinating explanation of the critical roles played by seemingly bizarre institutions, from dueling to the purchase of one’s rank in the British Army."
It only makes sense then that the World Revolution of 2011 should have begun as a rebellion against US client states, in much the same way as the rebellions that brought down Soviet power began in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia. The wave of rebellion soon spread across the Mediterranean from North Africa to Southern Europe, and then, much more uncertainly at first, across the Atlantic to New York. But once it had, in a matter of weeks it had exploded everywhere. At this point it’s extremely difficult to predict how far all this will ultimately go. Truly historical events, after all, consist of precisely those moments that could not have been predicted beforehand. Could we be in the presence of a fundamental shift like 1789 – a shift not only in global power relations but in our elementary political common sense? It’s impossible to say, but there are reasons to be optimistic.
"In the United States, I think the specific move that needs to be made is the recognition that the rank-and-file hostility of Tea Party adherents and sympathizers towards “big government” has an intimate, potentially generative connection to the possibility of a wider mobilization against the powers-that-be, that this is the cognate American form of the energy that’s flowing into protests in India, in Egypt, in the European Union. Which in turn requires a less knee-jerk response by progressives about the wonderful things that government can do or already does. It’s true that government action at all levels of American life could do a great deal of good, that it already secures many fundamental rights and protections, that we are dependent upon that power in so many ways. But when our first response to a fierce, wild and often reactionary anger at “government” is to recite a litany of its benefits, I think we disclose too much our own desire to retain an intimate access to acting within as well as against a deeply entrenched political class. "
"Horkheimer described the book's theme in his foreword to the five volume series:
The agitator's technique of persuasion, the mechanism of mediation that translates inchoate feeling into specific belief and action make up the theme of that volume. As mediator between the world and the individual psyche, the agitator molds already existing prejudices and tendencies into overt doctrines and ultimately into overt action."
Rosa Luxemburg’s letters have been published in English before, but this collection, of which about two-thirds are newly translated, has delivered to us a real, recognizable human being. In the previous volumes, Luxemburg often seemed uniformly heroic; here we have her in all her strength and all her frailty. And it is in the letters from prison, more than in any others she wrote, that she emerges as one of the most emotionally intelligent socialists in modern history, a radical of luminous dimension whose intellect is informed by sensibility, and whose largeness of spirit places her in the company of the truly impressive. To one old comrade she writes, “To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life ‘on the giant scales of fate’ if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud…the world is so beautiful, with all its horrors, and would be even more beautiful if there were no weaklings or cowards in it.”
-
From earliest times, Luxemburg had felt existentially homeless. She believed that “home” was to be found in a cause great enough to make world and self come together in a common effort to renew the human race. That effort, of course, was socialism. At the same time, she understood—really understood—that socialism had to be made, on a daily basis, from the inside out, through the internal struggle of people to humanize (that is, “socialize”) themselves, even as they worked for radical change. She knew instinctively that if socialists closed down inside, they’d become the kind of people who, devoid of fellow feeling, would make police-state socialism. This was Luxemburg’s single most important insight—that socialists must remain empathic beings throughout their revolutionary lives. Otherwise, she asked, what kind of world would they be making? Whom would it serve? And how would human existence be bettered? This meditation never left her; in fact, as the years went on it grew in size and depth. Out of it, ultimately, comes her opposition to war, her criticism of Lenin, her analysis of why she reads Tolstoy in prison instead of Marx.
And it all begins—and ends—with Leo. It was with Leo that she hungered to see this great ideal of hers come to life, with Leo that she wanted to make, in the here and now, a socialist home within themselves, through the nourishment of mutual love. Leo, however, would not play ball—and Rosa could not give it up. Hundreds of letters passed between them. For years on end, his are cold and inexpressive, consisting solely of political advice, criticism and instruction, while hers are saturated with bitter objection to his emotional stinginess.
-
Right now I’m as touchy and skittish as a hare. Your slightest gesture or inconsequential remark makes my heart shrink and seals my mouth…. I’ve had so many thoughts to share with you…. I don’t know, I don’t know how to behave, I can’t get control over the way I am in our relationship. I don’t know how to do it. I’m not capable of taking firm hold of the situation…so much love and suffering have accumulated in my soul that I throw myself at you, throw my arms around your neck, and your coldness pains me—it tears at my soul, and I hate you for it—and I feel I could kill you.
Differentiates some of the categories that connect social media and political change.
"What did the American Revolution look like? Nathaniel Hawthorne imagined it as an angry face, painted so as to appear divided in two. “One side of the face blazed of an intense red, while the other was black as midnight,” he wrote. "
"This negotiating tactic does an excellent job of uncovering the actual global demand out there for America's intervention & stabilization services. A lot of anti-interventionists (and sheer Bush haters) want to pretend that's a myth and that there is no such demand for the American Leviathan, but the truth is, there's plenty of demand out there. The question is US bandwidth, which Bush-Cheney narrowed considerably. "
"At its best, revolution is an urban phenomenon. Suburbia is counterrevolutionary by design. For revolution, you need to converge, to live in public, to become the public, and that’s a geographical as well as a political phenomenon. The history of revolution is the history of great public spaces: the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution; the Ramblas in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War; Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 (a splendid rebellion that was crushed); the great surge that turned the divide of the Berlin Wall into a gathering place in that same year; the insurrectionary occupation of the Zocalo of Mexico City after corrupt presidential elections and of the space in Buenos Aires that gave the Dirty War’s most open opposition its name: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers of the Plaza of May."
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in revolution
-
AP European History Unit 5 - Industrial Revolution: Politics and Social Change
Industrial Revolution and So...
Items: 78 | Visits: 46
Created by: Mr Maher
-
AP European History Unit 8 - The Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union
Russian Revolution and Sovie...
Items: 28 | Visits: 50
Created by: Mr Maher
-
AP European History Unit 3 - Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment
Scientific Revolution and th...
Items: 31 | Visits: 48
Created by: Mr Maher
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo