Resistance
Who knows where the next Rosa Parks [the African-American
woman whose refusal to sit in the back of the bus ignited the
Montgomery bus boycott in 1955] will sit down and spark a
movement?
Rosa Parks is a very courageous and honorable person, but she
didn’t come out of nowhere. There had been an extensive
background of education, organizing and struggle, and she was more
or less chosen to do what she did. It’s that kind of background that
we should be seeking to develop.
Union membership in the US is very low, but it’s even lower in
France. Yet the support for French general strikes—which shut
down cities and, at one point, the whole country—was
extraordinarily high. What accounts for that difference?
One factor is the power of business propaganda in the US, which
has succeeded, to an unusual extent, in breaking down the relations
among people and their sense of support for one another. This is the
country where the public-relations industry was developed, and
where it’s still the most sophisticated. It’s also the home of the
international entertainment industry, whose products are mainly a
form of propaganda.
Although there’s no such thing as a purely capitalist society (nor
could there be), the US is toward the capitalist end. It tends to be
more business-run, and spends a huge amount on marketing (which
is basically an organized form of deceit). A large part of that is
advertising, which is tax-deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of
being manipulated and controlled.
And of course that’s only one aspect of the campaign to
“regiment the public mind.” Legal barriers against class-based
solidarity actions by working people are another device to fragment
the general population that are not found in other industrial
democracies.
In 1996, Ralph Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket,
and both the Labor Party and the Alliance held founding conventions.