Anonymous Comrade writes:

"J20 Inaugural: A Day of Vulnerability for Power"

No one needs reminding that the latest episode in the demolition of American “democracy” has been a hard blow to those in that unfortunate land who are still awake and clinging to sanity, as well as to everyone in the rest of the world, for whom this election is obviously no laughing matter either. However a day of real and unavoidable vulnerability for the Bush junta and its claim to a popular mandate is approaching.

Inauguration day — January 20 — is that moment of condensed, ritualized spectacle toward which all the machines for the production of consent and legitimacy still have to aim. On this day the succession of power — and thus the processes behind it — must expose itself to view in order to become its own self-affirming image, and this moment of exposure cannot be avoided. For this reason January 20 is a real opportunity to denounce that which threatens us and possibly to do it damage on its own symbolic terrain.That the more than 17 million people who all over the world protested to stop the US-led invasion of Iraq before it happened were apparently ignored reminds us of the limitations of popular demonstrations — even massive ones — when they are not backed up by a sufficient resolve not to accept an insufferable situation. But even though they failed to prevent the war, they did succeed in placing restraints on the way the US military could conduct it. We now know that, conservatively, more than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the course of their “liberation” (The Lancet, 29 October 2004). We also know what top-down signals to troops that “the gloves are off” have led to. But as repugnant and unacceptable as these realities are, the American doctrine of overwhelming force would almost certainly have been even more heedlessly and destructively applied had the US been able to claim global approval for its invasion and occupation. The protests of February 15, far more than the official statements of governments, made that claim impossible.

I know I am not the only one who has concluded from the experience of the five years since Seattle that it is always worthwhile to abandon a position of passivity and paralyzed isolation by joining others in the streets. This is true for many reasons, but among the most important are, first, that we learn there to recover our capacity for collective thinking and action and, second, that no one can predict what may happen when people reassert their desire to make their own history.

Unlike the tongue-clicking media anchors and commentators who did not bother to conceal their astonished condescension concerning the appearance and behavior of Palestinian crowds as Arafat’s body was helicoptered in to Ramallah, I found it both moving and encouraging to see how easily a spontaneously gathered and leaderless multitude overcame all attempts by its official representatives to exclude and control it.

And whatever may be its other shortcomings, Michael Moore’s most recent film did at least remind us, by recovering suppressed film footage from Bush’s first inauguration, that on that occasion some Americans knew how best to answer a stolen election and official insistence that all is well. One hears that the US state is preparing to deploy tanks and combat aircraft in Washington to prevent angry citizens from egging and mooning Bush again. That may be, but I doubt that even such crude attempts to intimidate dissent will succeed in deterring the most determined Americans from creatively registering their disgust in the capitol.

Moreover, nothing can stop the rest of us from doing the same wherever we are. On this day of objective weakness for the ruling junta, self-organized and unorganized protests in as many American cities and towns as possible and marches on American embassies in the rest of the world could effectively contest the culminating ritual of an illegitimate power. That is the least we can do in the interests of our own survival, and I hope it is not at all the most we will do. Anyone willing to spend twenty minutes on the Internet can learn how many groups are already planning protests in Washington and other places.

Whether one chooses to join in the actions of one of these organizations or form a local affinity group of like-minded friends, it is in any case clear that this is not an inauguration to watch on television. As a trenchant critic of the spectacle long ago remarked: “Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act; such must be the condition of the spectator.”

I cannot end this without an observation concerning the aims that could be articulated through widespread demonstrations on January 20. We are now well aware of the exit poll anomalies and manipulable computers that — along with so-called felon lists and the other tricks and abuses perennially employed at polling places — cast real doubt on the official results of this election.

It would be a strategic mistake, however, to focus inauguration day protests on a limited demand for the redress of any specific electoral grievance. Nothing would be more futile and in the long run demoralizing than to beg the state for another “investigation” or for computers at least as transparent, secure and dependable as the ones recently used in the Venezuelan referendum. (Worst of all, after an election in which everyone who did vote was forced in the end to merely vote “for or against Bush,” would be to call for miserable Kerry and his irredeemable Democratic Party to save us.)

The strength of direct popular protest lies rather in its capacity to register a more generalized and unanswerable refusal — in its repudiation of resigned waiting for partial concessions and reforms. Those remain the lure and recuperation they have always been. Protests on January 20 should aim at expressing discontent with the whole US electoral system and its claim to still be the model of democracy, for the simple reason that no power produced in this way can be legitimate. This is not a matter of arguing about what we already know: about just how far a system is dominated by concentrated corporate power or just how rigorously it excludes and criminalizes all real alternatives. It is rather to assert, through the far more direct democracy of joining others in the streets, that one stands with those willing to actively demonstrate their withdrawal of consent. When such a refusal becomes a visible fact impossible to conceal, the state’s continued claim to legitimacy rings hollow and becomes its strategic weakness. (I say this knowing that a sizable part, perhaps even a third, of the American public does viscerally support Bush and probably will continue to do so whatever comes. But a third does not a mandate make, and division over this is far preferable to resigned submission to a trumpeted false unity.)

What happens afterward will be up to us. But if we show up in our real numbers on January 20, in the United States and globally, then at a minimum it will be more difficult for this regime to launch the new assaults and witch hunts it is now preparing to put in motion. It will, no doubt, attempt to carry out its plans whatever happens on inauguration day. But it should have to do so openly, with unmasked cynicism and without the convenient cover of a “popular mandate ” that never existed and that cannot exist in any truthful way under conditions of pseudo-democracy.