is popular uprising. Those do happen, but only under very brutal or offensively unjust rules; they don't require organization because people collectively have enough of the government. There are no needs, demands, plans--simply to get rid of whatever power structure has participated in dehumanizing them.

Generally, after a few days or weeks, one of two things happen:

1) they peter out themselves. Sometimes, the government will be moved by self-interest to establish some reforms, but nothing too exciting.

2) They are successful in toppling the power structure. Generally, however, because the uprising had no plans and no real or good leaders with goals in mind, they are co-opted by unscrupulous power hungry people quite easily. Some change may occur, but not popularly based, and not in the interest of the people who took matters into their own hands.

Take a look around the world, and tell me that this isn't exactly how almost every uprising has played out--from Palestine to Cuba to Congo.

Review ondelette's post regarding the Stages of Revolution.

Look around you at the communities you are part of and have been an organizer within. Yes, it's hard. No, it's not impossible. All over the Bay Area there are all kinds of Resistance and Revolutionary cells, all kinds of Action Committees for this and that good cause. It's chock a block.

What you want to know is not how "I" would organize what's already there. You want to know what would be successful in forcing positive change, revolution if you want to call it that, on a resisting and often pig ignorant Public that doesn't care about most of the shit we fret and fume over all the time.

And I'm telling you nothing would accomplish it at this point. Not going to have a Revolution. It's not going to happen. Not NOW.

What can happen and is happening is a growing trend toward local/regional autonomy. Not independence yet. But definitely autonomous action.

That's no substitute for the change that needs to happen, but it's a start.

For it to get much farther, though, there needs to be a common ideology, and we're so far from that it's laughable.

Ondelette asks whether the blogosphere is analogous to the "leafletting" stage of Revolution. Seems self-evident, but there is no common ideology on the "left" -- an actual resistance to "ideology" in fact -- and so it's usually a lot of voices with no common message.

And as for your insults, Mister, you can cram it up your ass. ;-)

Have a nice day. At least you aren't buried in fog.

You just don't know what you're talking about. And if you did have any interest in making any of these changes come about--even your anarco-syndicalist vision--you'd take some pains to get informed. I did, and it is painful. Giving up these delusions is not easy, trust me.

I'm not a Marxist, much less a Marxist Leninist or a Trotskyist. I wouldn't know what to do in a condition of Democratic Control of the Means of Production. Head for the hills, probably.

But I've found a few ideas of value in the course of grappling with the writings of Karl Marx.

One if them is the notion of Praxis- the point where the ruled lose both their illusions about the system under which they live, and the cynical alienation that prevents them from recovering their own autonomous power from those who order their lives, and charting a more positive course.

When enough people in a polity do that- then you can have a revolution.

That is the revolution, as far as I'm concerned. Not a matter of political or economic ideology- more like a mass graduation onto personal empowerment and responsibility, within a moral and ethical framework that refuses to tolerate the criminality of the powerful within institutions any more than it tolerates criminality on the street.

But Praxis requires the dropping of "false consciousness." Seeing the facts for the facts, and the truths they point toward. That's a critical precondition. And this country ain't there yet.

So, if there is a Revolution out there, it's obviously still at the "consciousness-raising" stage.

Not much more to say right now than that, other than that I think there are effective ways to raise consciousness, and ineffective ways, and the revolutionists need to sort themselves out about which is which.

What works is a tricky question.

What doesn't work is more clear to me. Harangues, for one thing. Manipulations, for another. And there's a difference between actually finding opportunities to raise consciousness, as contrasted with opportunism- a difference that's typically lost on anyone who's an ideologue, of any sort.

Exactly. And I'm not surprised it makes you furious.

The time for rising on the left has passed. Some of us gave it a shot when it might have made a difference. When the Busheviks were still weak and frail. It was futile. It was futile in part because those we were relying on for support, guidance, and leadership either had been or were in the process of being co-opted. Or they were really after entirely different goals anyway.

Whoops. Live and learn.

The potential for rising NOW is on the Right. With a fury like none before.

The Revolution has already taken place. It started in earnest in 1981 with the advent of Reaganism in the White House. It is consolidating and perfecting itself right now as we contend with one another. Anything at the national level that jeopardizes THAT Revolution is subject to revolt from the Right. Capice? No? You don't get it?

Prate away about how I don't know what I'm talking about then...

about how "I" don't know what I'm talking about from people who haven't a clue to what I've been commenting on this thread about.

You're mostly reacting to things I haven't said or written. And I don't have time to slap you all around. The fogged in airport awaits.

For now, I'll have to leave it at this:

PDA: It's "DFH" to you, Mister, thank you very much. "Hippie" indeed. Harrumph.

"We are stardust, we are golden,

We are caught in the devils bargain,

And we got to get ourselves back to the gaaaa-aaa-rrrr-den."