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I know. Coercion seems like a bad word, and seems nasty, and it is. But it's time to face facts. Writing your congresscritters seems to have little effect on their behavior in the world of Citizens United and the Koch-blocking of reasonable legislation. Street theater is ignored - just watch the American media - they'll fawn over half a dozen teabaggers with misspelled signs, but black-out a progressive demonstration that's 100,000 strong. That's because they're making a lot of noise, but they're NOT EXERCISING POWER.
What? Did you think political battles were going to end like a Care Bears cartoon?
Blind riots, like what's happening in London, are not the way to go. They're powerful, but without direction, and accomplish nothing except destruction. But they show there's enough anger and disaffection out there that if we can harness it, get people moving in a different direction, we can build an army that's hundreds of thousands strong, that used correctly, can bring down governments and bankrupt multi-billion dollar corporations. We can break the right wing, end austerity, and get our governments responsive to our needs again, if we play our cards right.
Political power is the ability to get someone to do something they otherwise wouldn't want to do. Power is amoral. Power is what drives our society and our governments. Power is inherently coercive. If we don't exercise power, someone else will exercise it on us. Look at the Tea Party - they know this. They hold hostages in Congress and played the game of "Meet our demands or we'll crash the entire economy!"
It's time we learn how to exercise power. It's time to stop being nice.
It's time to coerce. How do we do that?
What are examples of coercive direct action?
Strikes: The classic union strike against an employer that treats its employees badly is the canonical example of coercive direct action. The workers stop working, they picket the workplace, and most importantly, they make sure no work gets done. Replacement workers are blocked from the workplace. The employer bleeds money at a prodigious rate - they've still got bills to pay, but no income because productivity is zero, and income becomes zero. The union has leverage - meet our demands, give our workers more pay, better working conditions, and good benefits and pensions, or WE WILL WRECK YOUR FINANCES. Hitting them in the pocketbooks seems to be the only way to force them to make concessions. If the business doesn't concede, they could be driven into bankruptcy.
Caveats: Of course, thanks to decades of labor laws, especially Taft Hartley, if you play by the rules, strikes are not very effective. You've got to jump through hoops just to form a union, and you've got to jump through more hoops, designed to enable the employer to filibuster and sabotage the process, before you can actually strike. The truth is that we're coming to the point where unions need to stop playing by the rules. Wildcat strikes have to be on the table, perhaps combined with a blockade for when employers fire the strikers and hire scabs.
Boycotts: The concept is simple, and in the right situation, can be effective. Meet our demands, or we get lots and lots of people to stop buying your products and services. It worked even on the Murdoch empire - after all, Glenn Beck is no longer on FOX News.
Of course, the effectiveness depends on how much resources the target has to resist a boycott, and how hard it is to maintain the boycott. As it turns out, in many, perhaps most cases, the targets, big multinational corporations, have the resources to ignore a boycott, and the corporations have such wide varieties of products and services, that people who intend to boycott violate the boycott unintentionally buying something that they think is unconnected to the target, but is. BP's the classic example of a failed boycott. What are you going to do - drive past the BP station and do business with Exxon? There's a responsible corporate citizen for you - soooo much better than BP. The entire oil industry is bad, and people need to gas up their cars, no matter how much they hate the oil companies, so maintaining that boycott is nearly impossible.
Blockades and Sit-ins: Here, the objective is obstruction. Meet our demands, or we block you from doing what you want. Blockade Walmart, and prevent customers from entering the stores and buying stuff. MLK Jr. organized sit-ins where black people sat in at white-only restaurants, which not only occupied seats at the restaurant, but made the atmosphere so toxic, thanks to the reactions from racist whites, that nobody in their right minds would go out to eat there. The French block freeways during their strikes, by parking tractors and trucks on them, and dumping big piles of manure in the road. With enough people, and strategically placed blockade points, one can drive an entire nation's economy to a screeching halt! Now we're talking.
Caveats: They're illegal. Get over it. But understand that this is likely to get state-sanctioned and corporate-sanctioned heavily armed thugs out to try to break your blockade. If you don't throw the first punch, the resulting violence can also be broadcast and used to bolster the cause. But people participating in blockades are likely to get arrested, hurt or worse. Sometimes, it's worth it. This is why we need very big numbers to pull them up - a squad of riot cops can break a blockade of dozens, but a crowd of thousands that's erected barricades is much harder.
Cyberwarfare: This is relatively new. Anonymous has a great campaign going - you can download LOIC and join if you want. Use all the technical dirty tricks you have at your disposal to shut down your target's Internet presence, steal incriminating and embarrassing information for wide broadcast, make life difficult for their IT department. It can conceivably cost them a lot of money - in damage to their systems, in IT costs in putting things back together, in bandwidth expenses, and in opportunity costs, especially if you take down an online store and prevent people from buying.
Caveats: If you get caught, the feds will send you to PMITA prison. This is essentially the equivalent of a sit-in or blockade, but while the former might get you a few days or a month in jail if you're especially naughty, the feds will try to put you away for 6 months to a year.
That's the trick - we need to be looking for the metaphorical gun to point at the heads of our political opponents. The time for theater is over.
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