Latest / Mechonomist Podcast / Pro-Palestinian Protests Have Exactly Zero Chance of Working

Transcript

Pro-Palestinian Protests Have Exactly Zero Chance of Working · Mechonomist Podcast

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I hope everybody is doing well.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say at the beginning that I totally support the pro-Palestinian
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: protesters at college campuses across the country.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're brave.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're right.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I support them.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I definitely support them.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I've been doing organizing and activism for 25 years.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: And if there's one thing that I've learned, it's that
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: the governing institutions in this country and the globe do not care what you think.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no leverage to be able to make them care.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: To tell you a little bit about my background,
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I led a movement in Birmingham,
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Alabama,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: or was one of the leaders in a movement in Birmingham,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Alabama during the Black Lives Matter years 2010 to
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: 2017.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: And,
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: we had protests,
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: we had engagement on social media,
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: we had creation of organizations,
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: so on and so forth.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we did end up getting a mayor elected,
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: but we had no power to hold him accountable to anything that he said he would do.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the same situation nationally.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Activists, if you're talking about NGOs as a
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: base of power.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: NGOs are funded by the same people that fund the military industrial complex.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: So if these NGOs were to all of a sudden be pro-Palestinian,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: anti-genocide,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: they're going to cut off the hand that feeds them.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the system has basically total political and economic control and doesn't
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: have to listen to any of the complaints of the people in power.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where Donald Trump comes from in the sense that at one point in time,
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump was independent and he could conceivably,
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: he didn't,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: but he could conceivably go in there and change things.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: At this point in time, Donald Trump is as much a part of the system as Biden or anybody else.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: So
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't see how,
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've looked at the Iraq war protests and I've looked at Occupy and I've looked at
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Black Lives Matter and none of these movements led to any sort of systemic
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: foundational change.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: They just didn't.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not like what happened in the 60s.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because in the 60s there were institutions that were independent that gave
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: protesters a base from which to operate from.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: They had power.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: At this point in time,
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: the people are utterly and totally powerless to change anything besides some sort
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: of symbolic flip-flop between Democrats and Republicans,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: which doesn't actually change anything.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: So what do we do?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a nihilist, but I see the realities of the world we live in.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to have to engage in a very different way.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if the situation is,
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: as I believe it is,
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: that the powerful have control of all the political and economic institutions on
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: the globe,
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: which I think that was their point from changing from Fordist Keynesianism to neoliberalism.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's a different blog.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's what they wanted to do.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: If that's the situation and we don't have any institutions to challenge them from,
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: then the action point now should be to create those institutions,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: to create a multiracial,
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: multi-ideological working class institutions that serve the people.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in 15 to 20 to 30 years, we'll have
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: the political and economic power to be able to challenge the institutions that are
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: dominating us right now.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's what will grow out of these protests.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the protesters will say, really didn't do anything.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll think about it and they'll be like, why didn't you do anything?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll come to the realizations because we don't have any power.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And power comes from having institutions.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: real power comes from having institutions that actually serve the people and that's
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: our point of leverage is to create institutions that actually serve the people in a
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: way that dominant institutions do not it's a long road admittedly it's a long hard
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: road admittedly
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: But that's where we have to go.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And,
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: there's people who say we should have Marxist-Leninist institutions,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: we should have anarchist institutions,
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: whatever.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, in reality, they all look the same.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to have to serve the people in some way, shape, or form.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And you're going to have to have some sort of democratic, cooperative governing structure.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And whether that's more hierarchical like Marxist-Leninism or as non-hierarchical as pirate communism,
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, it looks kind of the same.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we got a lot, we got a big hole to dig out of, a big hole to dig out of.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, I totally support pro-Palestinian protesters as students.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're smart.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Some people say, oh, these students are stupid.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know what they're talking about.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Man, y'all hadn't hung out with any Gen Z people because these Gen Z folks
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: They got it going on, man.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: First generation are raised completely on the internet.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: They know what they're talking about.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: They know what they're doing.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not discounting them.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're right to try what they're trying,
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: but I think the lessons learned from it are going to be that it's really this kind
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: of engagement doesn't work anymore.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: But
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to have to engage in a different way.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I'll see y'all next time.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, y'all.