From the Project Libr8 Blog

The $350 billion bailout was pulled at the last second. Like many bloggers, I based my post on news reports that were claiming it was already passed, so sorry for the misinformation.

Still, I'm not too relieved. I think that any way we look at it, the best we can hope for in terms of a resolution is yet another modification of the same basic idea: you and I struggle to feed ourselves while paying for (among other things) the multi-million dollar severance packages of the very high-level execs who caused the problem in the first place.

Now, us anarchists shouldn't be surprised by the ruling class performing such blatant abuses of the working class, but really, this is a situation where it sucks to be right. A lot.

Whenever I hear other anarchists talk about how we can go about making a revolution start, I tell them that we don't have to. In any class-struggle situation where the ruling class is ever-constantly siphoning resources away from the rest of us, an economically motivated revolution is a given once our losses reach critical mass. History has shown us, again and again, that there's a limit to how long the common people will patiently let themselves get poorer and poorer while watching the rich get richer. The powers that be can talk about the magical, ineffable movements of the economy all they want, but it's still very plain to see which people this recession is hurting and which people continue to earn enormous personal wealth every day.

Over just the last week and a half, I've noticed something very interesting: people I know who always used to dismiss my anti-capitalist talk are starting to take a real interest in it. People on-line are reading what I write about anarchism and saying, "Yeah, that sounds like what we need right now." Most of all, people all over are losing their faith in the power of the US government to protect and restore.

Could this mean that we are reaching that point of inevitability, of revolution? I'm not going to say "yes" just yet - it's too soon, and at this point, for all the complaining, people still want to have their faith restored. Just a few very smart moves right now on the part of the politicians could set everything back on track, whereas I think it's going to take at least a few more of these kinds of egregious violations of public trust to actually start the population rioting in the streets.

If there's one thing that I can impress upon my fellow anarchists, it's this: the odds that such an occurence will turn out to be a good thing are pretty damn slim. Revolutions of this kind, of hunger and anger and fear, are not uncommon in history, but having them bring about a society that is anything other than tyrannical is quite rare. It's very popular among anarchist circles to speak as if American capitalist democracy is the worst of all possible worlds, but I would urge any of these to set aside their privellege and see that truly, it is not. We are not yet so far gone that anything would be better.

For this reason, I hope that this government can limp through these issues long enough for the people to see the flaws and act intelligently and rationally to change them. This is where we come in, anarchists: today, people are listening to us, so it's time to stop banging our heads against the wall bemoaning the impossibility of attaining the perfect world we want and start *gasp* actually talking to regular people and engaging them on their level!

Regular people are smart, you know. Smarter than us, lots of the time. There are plenty of them who don't need to be "converted" to anarchism at all, just shown that anarchism is, in fact, a philosophy which gives a name to the things they already believe.