Strategy, Tactics, and the Internet

A GUEST POINT

Ephraim September 6th, 2009 12:45 am
We all hate what these bastards are doing, and Taibbi describes eloquently their demonic machinations, and yet we can't do a god damned thing about it. Sound like a democracy? I don't THINK so.

The infamous Gang of Six is deciding how 300 million people will or won't get any health care. We have absolutely zero input, calling or emailing our comatose Congressmen or not. All we have is our keypads. It's high time for pitchforks and torches, but that's just another cyber slogan. We won't do anything but bitch eternally. Or not vote! We can always refuse to vote!

I'm not going to vote for any of these assholes ever again, and that will solve exactly nothing. Until we ACT in the physical world, against their physical selves, nothing will change. Until ideas and outrage turn into organized, sustained, intelligent action in the real, not the cyber, world, none of this insanity will ever change. Forget health care reform, forget getting out of the Mideast, forget putting Obama's "feet to the fire" over any issue. His feet are in a big bucket of water. Ranting about all this on the web gets us nowhere. When do we start doing something that has teeth? Next millennium?

True, everything really important happens in the real world, and the Internet as a change agent has been remarkably overrated since it began. Even the seemingly simple and humble task of getting non-negligible traffic to a new web site often turns out to be a huge uphill struggle. There is a huge "atomization factor" on the Internet.

On the other hand, assuming you are intelligent enough to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and assuming you know how to efficiently navigate on the Internet, both of which are more difficult than most people know, the Internet is the ultimate information and communication source. So the Internet could at least be used to coordinate things that need to happen in the real world, such as strikes and certain administrative aspects of the unification of dozens of non-right wing parties into one Unity Party.

Think of the Internet as helpful on the tactical level as opposed to the strategic level. Strategies have to be operated both on and off the Internet, but certain tactics and certain necessary but boring administrative type tasks can be accomplished largely with just the Internet.

For example, after everyone unifies into one non-right wing party, the Internet can be used by the new party to administratively manage national strikes. (Yes, strikes do have to be managed, laugh out loud.) In Europe, strikes, sit-downs, and boycotts are usually coordinated by Unions, but since unions hardly exist in the US, strikes would have to be coordinated by something else, such as a new political party out to rescue the country from neo-slavery and economic ruination.

(Yes, I realize that the example is purely hypothetical, because the unification will most likely never happen in your or my lifetime. The Greens will stay separate from the Socialists, who will stay separate from the Socialist Workers, who will stay separate from Labor, and so on and so forth.)

[The above was in response to this article.]