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Works by Alix Olson

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Birthdate
1975
Gender
female
Nationality
USA
Country (for map)
USA
Birthplace
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
Places of residence
New York, New York, USA
Education
Wesleyan University (BA|English)
Occupations
poet

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What happened to resistance? This is the question Alix Olson and Alex Zamalin try to answer in The Ends of Resistance. The answer is in the title. It could either refer to all variations of resistance going away completely, or examining the purposes of it. Either way, it is a clouded area, thanks to neoliberalism’s dictum - anything goes, so shut up and deal with it.

Resistance, the authors maintain, is a vital and widespread facet of democracy. Ever since the ancient Greek philosophers complained about protests, the authors say, resistance has been a constant thorn in the side of government. Democracy itself is always “unruly world building.”

Fast forward to our era, when the advent of Donald Trump inspired a movement to put stickers on everything, with the single word “Resist.” People innately understand they need to resist, yet this campaign shows pretty clearly they don’t know how to do it anymore. Stickers on windows and in social media is not resistance. Real resistance involves personal action and risk.

Real resistance is demonstrating in the streets, picketing, boycotting, and blocking access. It is hammering at elected officials and holding sit-ins and encampments. It is lobbying and suing. Without them, you don’t have a real operating democracy.

What is interesting in the book is the abrupt cessation of all these activities. Right around the time of Reagan and Thatcher. Suddenly, everyone was on their own. Group-anything was out. Everyone was instantly their own brand, and that brand could not stand for group resistance, because it would damage the brand. Thatcher went so far as to claim there was no longer any such thing as society – just you alone (Belatedly, she was prevailed upon to at least add family to that). This put a damper on activists and activity.

As neoliberalism locked itself in with its slogan “There Is No Alternative” (TINA), society changed accordingly. When Obama’s Task Force on 21st century Policing reported, it showed that all kinds of societal ills had been unceremoniously dumped on the police. Things like substance abuse, homelessness and mental health were dismissed by neoliberalism and defaulted to the local police. The authors quote the Chair of the commission, saying the police “would be very happy to hand off these responsibilities.”

Worse perhaps, in prior administrations, protesters were reclassified as terrorists thanks to things like the PATRIOT Act. Police beefed up their services accordingly. They added military surplus, SWAT teams, and exchange programs to see how the Israelis kept the “peace”. Local police obtained $1.5 billion in military weapons, for use against the local constituents that they serve and protect.

So instead of action, we now see a lot of slogans, sprayed largely over social media and t-shirts. Things like “Defund the Police” and “I voted!” catch the eye, but are largely empty. Black Lives Matter was soon diluted by Blue Lives Matter, Red Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. The battlegrounds have been in marketing, and not so much the streets.

And so rights get taken away, people are abused by rules and regulations, and labor has fallen to its lowest effectiveness since unions began. No one speaks for the common good (certainly not politicians), just for themselves.

The extreme right stepped firmly into this vacuum, claiming the notion of freedom for itself. Basically, everything went upside-down. It went to what we can only hope is its extreme with the Domestic Security Alliance Council. In New York City, this group was composed of the New York Stock Exchange, banks, the FBI, Homeland Security, local governments and university administrations. It was a clearly obvious neoliberal institution designed to thwart resistance and maintain the status quo without objectors.

It got its first chance at Zucotti Park in 2011, when a totally unorganized and spontaneous group morphed into Occupy Wall Street, with its slogan “We are the 99%.” It lasted longer and got far more favorable press than the council would have liked, considering all its heavy-hitters mobilized against Occupy. It was an example of resistance that the authors came back to: one of three they concluded with.

They see perceptible change as a result of even the paucity of resistance out there today:
“Think more executives of color in Fortune 500 companies, representation in Congress, and the push to diversify the Hollywood film industry; Washington, D.C.’s mayor painting ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the street; Nancy Pelosi taking a knee during the national anthem; Joe Biden institutionalizing Juneteenth as a paid holiday – all of these have come to represent direct political action, a legitimate substitute for the calls for prison abolition, economic redistribution, and defunding the police that might source the materials of (more than) livable life for poor and working-class Black Americans.”

The book ends with profiles of three actual resisting groups - Occupy, BLM, and the anti-pipeline fighters. They have shifted public opinion, an important start. If they can keep going, they could actually affect the way the world works.

My only wish for this book is that there were more history. After telling readers resistance was already having effects in ancient Greece, they move on, without examples. I would have loved to know what people in ancient Greece were resisting, and what they accomplished by it. Are there parallels to today? This book doesn’t say.

Let there be no doubt this is a leftist analysis. The authors detest neoliberalism: “Given a predatory economy organized around an ethos and praxis of disposability, accumulation, theft, and violence, it is unsurprising that those infrastructures deemed ‘critical’ to neoliberalism are deeply toxic to life.” Nonetheless, their story of resistance seems accurate and realistic. We have abandoned actual resistance in favor of catchy slogans. Everyone is an armchair quarterback. We have taken to keyboards instead of the streets. If equality and fairness is the objective, the world needs to go back to the unruly state of actual democracy.

David Wineberg
… (more)
 
Flagged
DavidWineberg | Jan 20, 2024 |
A good collection. Much of this work is best understood in performance rather than on the page.
 
Flagged
abirdman | Jul 5, 2007 |

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