It's coming back around again.

So I might give this a go. Vlogging was ok, but it's so fucking tedious. Script for however long at least 10 minutes, record for 10 minutes, edit for 10 minutes, upload for 10 minutes, do all the other shit. Easily takes an hour just to say anything of significance. So fuck that. Text is the new medium.
Anyway, here's my brief post just so you finally get something out of me.

Right wing ideologies seep into our thought processes in surpising ways. In my old, deleted YouTube account I made a video called Pro-Traumatic Revolutionary Disorder about the prominence of the idea that what is required to "turn people revolutionary" is for them to be abused by an alpha male character (e.g. Tyler Durden from Fight Club or V from V for Vendetta). The title of the video was a pun on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which would more likely be the result of the interactions portrayed in V for Vendetta (for example) then the kind of anti-authoritarian epiphany portrayed in the movie.

While most people can recognize the macho posturing in these boy fantasies, I noticed a more subtle and more prominent manifestation of this which kind of excited me a bit cause it's the perfect counter to the "no body wants to do anything" whining that's prevalent almost everywhere.

I was talking with one of my friends and she was saying that the reason the people we know don't protest more is because they are comfortable with their white middle class privilege. Because they don't have to fight to survive they don't care about the world. This is something which I had agreed with until I suddenly had this thought.

The 60's/70's is seen as the time of uber-revolution. It's the ideal that every radical wants to return to so they could be in the streets with 100 000's instead of 10's. But this wasn't a time of hardship. People had it way, WAY, cushier in the 60's/70's then we do now. In Australia, we had free university education, we had a better health care system, we had a less punitive, more widely available welfare system.

Today everything has withered away. It didn't "toughen us up". It didn't make us more revolutionary. We just got trounced.

I think their are two big reasons for this

1. The capitalists have forever won the battle with the unions. Now that capital can be pulled out of a country and moved to another country on a whim, the unions have no bargaining power. Only industries that must be localized (building, teaching, nursing) have power and even many of these can be undermined via other methods. Casualisation for instace.

2. The increasing destruction of face to face communities, mean that we don't know each other as well as we used to. That bond is essential for social movements. You've got to trust each other to take risks together and you've got to know each other in order to do that. Consumerism has replaced community. We need to fix that before we can fix anything.

Strong community bonds are the fertile soil that rebellion grows in. We can keep trying to make better and better seeds (political programs) in an attempt to Monsanto our way out of the problem or we can try rehabilitating the soil.