Hactivism: The Nonviolent Revolution

It’s hard to be a cynic. I do appreciate the fact that it prevents me from occupying myself with ultimately futile activities. However, cynicism can too easily turn into hopelessness, which begets apathy. I don’t want to be apathetic. How do I reconcile my ideals and my desire for social change with the reality that the ideologies and relationships that constitute power permeate every single aspect of life, including institutionalized movements for change? Including revolutions?

I am opposed to violence. Violence is a function of structures of inequality. It is the basis of patriarchy and slavery and capitalism. Yet, is it possible to transform our world without violence? How?

I don’t believe in the “political process” – whatever that means in reality. There is no boundary separating corporate and financial interests from the institutional apparatus of sanctioned violence and social coercion that is the state. Trying to re-shape the system from within the system is like trying to dry yourself off in the shower. When is the last time that a boycott or a petition created lasting, meaningful social change? Even the protests that constituted the so-called “Arab Spring.” What is fundamentally different in Egypt or Tunisia or Libya, aside from greater poverty and more weapons floating around? Yet, if I take violence and politics off of the table, what is left?

I have long held that technology would be the “creation of the system that ultimately destroys the system.” I have talked a bit about the potential of the internet, in particular, to subvert and escape global capitalism. Yet, I have never given too much thought to hacking, as an aggressive action against the system. It’s getting hard to ignore these days. For one thing, we now live in a world where cyber attacks and cyber security are a solid reality. We have WikiLeaks providing us with classified documents. And we have groups like Anonymous, who hack corporations, governments, and other groups to make social/political statements.

We don’t need weapons to dismantle capitalism. Its entire infrastructure is digitally based, and totally vulnerable to cyber attack. We don’t need to engage in endless debates about the nature of power and the government, trying in vain to convince people that democracy is a sham. Hackers can pull away the curtain and show us who’s really back there and what they are doing.

The only problem is that, currently, hactivists tend to be stuck in the old mindset. They employ a “rights” framework and fight for isolated “freedoms.” They protest against particular governments – governments that are under the thumb of industrial powers, no less – without seeing the larger forces that are responsible for the actions of these governments. Overall, they retain a very reformist attitude, and they are not able to keep sight of the larger picture: the particular articulation of capitalist relations, liberal discourses, bureaucracy, and governmental power that orders global and local social structures.

Hactivism could be a very effective nonviolent form of resistance. It just requires a very clear definition of the enemy, and a will to complete transform society.

Are Boycotts Still Useful?

After Israel’s latest assault on Palestine, it seems there has been greater interest in Palestinian solidarity groups and movements like Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS). The idea of the latter is to treat Israel as the World Community treated South Africa during its Apartheid years, hoping that the results will be similar. There are two interrelated matters to take in to consideration when it comes to BDS: Israel’s role in the global hierarchy and the value of boycotts in general in the modern world.

The position of Israel is the most crucial issue, so I will start there. Not infrequently, both in unofficial forums in the U.S. and the whole gamut of “officialness” in foreign media sources, I have come across people from the Middle East (and sometimes other parts of the world as well) express the almost-cliched anti-Semitic truisms: Jews control the banks and the media, they pull the strings of Western foreign policy, there is a reason why “everyone” has a problem with the Jews, etc. Obviously there are many Jewish anti-Zionists and anti-Zionists who are in no way anti-Semitic; however, in denouncing Zionism one must take great care not to unintentionally provide support for or feed into the misconceptions of the anti-Semites. When one emphasizes the power of Israel and isolates its evil from the global capitalist system of which it is a part, then one runs the risk of reinforcing the ideas about Jews Running the World and Jews as an Evil People.

It is certainly important to call attention to the reality of the situation in Palestine, as Western media and public discourse are very one-sided. Yet, this attention should also highlight the context of European colonialism, American neocolonialism, and global capitalism. These forces are responsible for nurturing Zionism, guiding it in particular directions, using it to secure global structures of power, and of course, funding and arming it. Just like poor whites in the American South who were inculcated with racism to suit the needs of politicians, Israel is in a sense “only a pawn in the game” (lyrics courtesy of Bob Dylan).

So the question (which can apply to all boycotts) is, why Israel? It seems a bit like cherry-picking. The U.S. has enslaved more people (particularly if you include the humungous prison population) and caused more death and suffering worldwide (including direct support for the Israeli occupation). Why not boycott all goods produced by U.S. companies? In fact, since all corporations exploit human beings (and are complicit to varying degrees with slavery and poverty), why not boycott all capitalist-produced goods? Once again, to single out Israel is to make the Jewish nation appear as the greatest evil in this world when it certainly is not.

But those questions bring me to my second point. One of the first instances of the boycott was employed by Quakers and free blacks in the United States as a reaction to slavery. At that time, it probably was not possible to see the development of capitalism, and certainly the institution of slavery was (and still is) foundational to the capitalist system. In that sense, the boycott really was aiming high. The participants did not want to personally profit off of slavery; thus, it was a general, principled stand rather than a fight against anyone or anything in particular. The problem with boycotts now is that they are directed at specific actors: a certain corporation or set of corporations. All capitalists play by the same rules. If you do not want to personally benefit from capitalist exploitation, then it doesn’t make any sense to single anyone out. In fact, it may end up just putting impoverished people in a more vulnerable position (as I once heard a Bangladeshi Walmart employee say, “But we need the jobs!”). What we need is an effective way to challenge the entire global capitalist system – a way to extricate ourselves from it and call attention to the reality of its mechanisms. When we boycott these days, we are sending the message that we are just concerned about “bad guys,” but the truth is that we are fight against a bad system.