Rage Against the Mythical Machine: The Pentagon of People Power
Press Action
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand10062004/
I am I am I am Superman
And I know what’s happening.
I am I am I am Superman
And I can do anything. -REM, “Superman"
By Mark Hand
Review of Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004, 285 pp.)
In this perverted era we’re living in, when many of the people you thought you could trust in the struggle against U.S. imperialism and ecocide are now supporting the status quo, it’s good to know there still are some clear-headed thinkers out there you can count on for inspiration and perspective.
One of the loyalists is Derrick Jensen, who in his new book, Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control, gives us the lowdown on the Panopticon, the prison blueprint that has become a model for our entire culture and a metaphor for the power relations on which modern civilization is based.
Jensen (and his collaborator on Welcome to the Machine, George Draffan) isn’t shy about reporting the bad news, even if it’s as bleak as the predictions in 1984, particularly when Orwell wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” But Jensen also has a flair for helping us discover what’s salvageable in this world and explaining how it’s possible, against tremendous odds, to tame many of our society’s horrors and, ultimately, escape the Panopticon.
Jensen packages many of his lessons inside stories about the people who keep the Panopticon operating. As Welcome to the Machine nears its climax, Jensen writes about a former high-ranking security official from South Africa’s apartheid regime who said his biggest fear about the African National Congress wasn’t the group’s acts of sabotage and violence. The greatest fear of the white government was that the ANC would convince too many of the oppressed majority of South Africans to disregard “law and order.” The former apartheid official confessed that even the most powerful and highly trained military forces in the world would not have been able to stem such a threat.
The same worries would afflict the managers of our liberal democratic institutions in the United States if large numbers of people began to ignore the dictates of the state and its corporate partners. But there’s absolutely no need for the U.S. elite to worry about a public mutiny, at least in the short-term. Just look at how the Democratic Party muted some of our leading socialist and anarchist voices and neutered the antiwar movement. As the U.S. military escalates its mass murder spree abroad in the years to come, the co-opted masses who participated in mass protests leading up to the shock-and-awe U.S. terror attacks on Iraq in spring 2003 will instead stay at home or at best “honor” the U.S. soldiers killed defending the U.S. empire.
Too many of the current-events books getting published today attempt to frame the actions of our current “leaders” as anomalous or contrary to the American tradition. Chronicling the critical events of a generation can be a beneficial endeavor as long as the writer puts the happenings in proper perspective. But if the chroniclers fail to examine the governmental and social systems that allow the horrors to continue, then the books, instead of enlightening, will prove harmful in the long-run as they divert attention away from the roots of our ruin.
As an eco-anarchist, Derrick Jensen doesn’t look to the nation-state or its legal structures for answers. Without any overt ties to a political party or repressive cultural tradition, Jensen is free to explore beyond most of our imaginations. His books are always original, taking the reader on exciting philosophical journeys.
To prepare us for the great “secrets” he reveals at the end of the book, Jensen explains how governments and corporations are all about exerting control. “They are all about converting the living to the dead because only the dead can be controlled.”
But there’s something else the state and its corporate partners have in common, according to Jensen, that you won’t read about in your standard political science textbook or progressive polemic. They do not exist. The centralizing power of the state-corporate machine does not exist.
Another secret Jensen reveals is that we can say “no” to the machine. “And we can say yes to our own lives, and to the lives of those we love.”
Until those in power, Jensen writes, discover a way to completely replace humans with machines, there will always be more of us than there are of them. “All it will take for this whole rotten system to collapse is for enough of us to learn to say no. And to say no again. And again. And again. And again.”
Until we learn to say no, our society’s emphasis on “progress” in science and technology will continue to benefit the people controlling the center of the Panopticon to the detriment of everyone outside. Throughout the book, Jensen provides us with clues to help us answer the following questions: Do science, technology and the military better serve living breathing human beings or corporations? Are societies’ power structures designed for our best interests? The interests of our families? Our communities? Our landbases?
Jensen, of course, would answer “no” to each of these questions and hopes we would too after reading Welcome to the Machine.
But he doesn’t settle for simply asking questions. Jensen, in this book, offers some how-to guidance for sparring with the machine, direction that also serves to whet our appetite for his major environmental and anti-authoritarian book that’s scheduled for release next fall.
Until we meet him again, Jensen leaves us with this nugget of inspiration:
"And when you are done with your work inside of this prison, dismantling whatever needs dismantling that you are best able to dismantle in the way that you are best able to dismantle it, you go back outside, into the sunshine or the dark of night, into the embrace of the real world. You feel happy."
Mark Hand is editor of Press Action.