Insurrection and Utopia

“We are Eating From a Trashcan; This Trashcan is Ideology.”

It all started innocently enough. A friend asked me a question on facebook:

“How can you advocate anarchic revolution when your political vision is so far in the minority?”

The underlying premise was a good one: In a country of 300+ million, how can you call for the upheaval of society, the breaking of societal and political bonds, when so few would readily identify as Anarchists/Socialists/Communists/Leftists/Anti-Capitalists/What-have-you? It’s a question often thrown at the Left and unfortunately many haven’t fully wrapped their heads around it.

In a way it’s a watermark. For an ideology or political vision to go from outright dismissal and laughter to being asked to provide real world examples of what would be done if it came to pass is a sign of growth; it is a signal, an omen, that the winds are beginning to blow in our favor and many want to know what might lie ahead. It’s one thing to talk about “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” but it’s quite another to discuss how restaurants would be run democratically and without profit or what exactly people might “do” on a day to day level in a classless, stateless society.

Still, the question is not an easy one. We could argue that it is the one question that has always plagued and nagged the Left: “Well that’s all good and well, but how do you plan to achieve this? How does such a world become born?” Staunch Marxists rely on a religious belief in the inevitable procession of history, Syndicalists will rail about the need for increased unionization, firebrand Neo-Bolsheviks plot to simply take power and liquidate class enemies, while the newly minted faux-left “Democratic Socialists” will hem-and-haw about passing enough laws to magically change the balance of power.

All of these options present difficult problems. History has been shown to be anything but inevitable (every year since 1914 has been “Late Capitalism”), a worker-owned McDonalds is still a site of exploitation, nobody ever bothers to explain just where all these people ready to kill for the Revolution are to come from, and the ludicrous doctrine of the Sandernistas that the wealthy and powerful will simply submit to higher taxes and the rule of law is so preposterous it’s only response should be derisive laughter.

So, where are we? Where do we go from here? How are we to change the world?

I start first with a question: Whose world?

You Can’t Teach an Old Carrion-Eater New Tricks

Society, technology, language, and culture all bear the birth marks and forms of the ideological underpinnings of the system they emerged from. Marx notes:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

The Ruling Class, whether Capitalist or State Socialist, informs and projects its will and vision onto the rest of society by the sheer nature of being the dominant force in that society. Of course we can see this politically, but Marx notes this extends also into ideas, culture, anything that could be identified as a byproduct of human interaction and thinking.

The iron steel resolve and blatant disregard of human life so typical of the fearsome Bolshevik Commissar was not so much traits born as traits cultivated; ideals taken within the individual and digested. These cultivated traits came directly from the ideological call for early revolutionary Bolsheviks to identify themselves as “hards,” to be tough, to be ruthless and uncompromising in their goals; when they took state power it become propagated on a cultural level. This meme, this political trait, spiraled out and became a creature, a position, a symbolic figure to be adored/feared all onto its own. It transcended its existence as a mere “idea” or feeling about how party members should behave.

Uber, the trendy internet-based taxi service, could have just as easily manifested into the world as a collectively owned, worker-managed co-op. The internet platform itself is not that revolutionary, the people and tools to create the business were there all along and yet….it did not. Instead Uber emerged and was formed through an ideological lens that made sense to the Ruling Class and by a CEO who’s practically a poster boy for modern capitalism:

“Let’s consider how Kalanick treated his Uber taxi drivers in New York. When he was trying to convince them to break the law to boost Uber’s footprint in the city, Kalanick offered yellow cab drivers free iPhones and promised to “take care of” any legal problems they encountered with the TLC. A few short months later, when the service was forced to close, those same drivers received a message to come to Uber HQ. Reports the Verge ‘Multiple drivers said Uber called them into headquarters, claiming they needed to come by in order to get paid and would get a cash bonus for showing up. When the cabbies came in, Uber surprised them by asking for the device back, informing them that taxi service was no longer available in New York.’”

This is how Uber is evolving, this is how the entire concept other companies will build off is evolving: through actions committed under the dictate and logic of a particular ideology. Taken as gospel or rejected as too harsh new companies will only differ themselves in shades from this first “business plan” and mold their own social and economic arrangements within this ideological parameter. Even the technologies, once thought to be “pure” of politics develop along political lines.

“In an even stronger sense, many technologies can be said to possess inherent political qualities, whereby a given technical system by itself requires or at least strongly encourages specific patterns of human relationships. Winner (1985, 29–37) suggests that a nuclear weapon by its very existence demands the introduction of a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command to regulate who may come anywhere near it, under what conditions, and for what purposes. It would simply be insane to do otherwise. More mundanely, in the daily infrastructures of our large-scale economies — from railroads and oil refineries to cash crops and microchips — centralization and hierarchical management are vastly more efficient for operation, production, and maintenance. Thus the creation and maintenance of certain social conditions can happen in the technological system’s immediate operating environment as well as in society at large.”

What’s interesting is the feedback loop this creates: technology is warped and shaped by the society(and thus dominant ideology), while at the same time the society becomes molded by the technology.

“As technologies are being built and put into use, significant alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place … the construction of a technical system that involves human beings as operating parts brings a reconstruction of social roles and relationships. Often this is a result of the new system’s own operating requirements: it simply will not work unless human behavior changes to suit its form and process. Hence, the very act of using the kinds of machines, techniques and systems available to us generates patterns of activities and expectations that soon become “second nature.”…

Winner gives several examples of technologies employed with intention to dominate, including post-1848 Parisian thoroughfares built to disable urban guerrillas, pneumatic iron molders introduced to break skilled workers’ unions in Chicago, and a segregationist policy of low highway overpasses in 1950s Long Island, which deliberately made rich, white Jones Beach inaccessible by bus, effectively closing it off to the poor. In all these cases, although the design was politically intentional, we can see that the technical arrangements determine social results in a way that logically and temporally precedes their actual deployment. There are predictable social consequences to deploying a given technology or set of technologies.”

In effect we our trapped in a web: We exist in a world not only molded and shaped by a Hierarchical and Capitalist mentality, but the very tools we use including our social selves maintain and reinforce this artifice. The ideology molds the world which molds the people which molds the technology which molds the world which molds the people, etc, etc, etc. As Slajov Zizek points out even those who wish to rebel against the system seem doomed(as if by design?) to remain within it:

“If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who ‘really want to do something to help people’ get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing.”

Even if State power is seized, if the old masters are cast out, the very throne itself acts like a cursed object and corrupts those that sought to destroy it. People who fought for the worker’s emancipation end up crushing strikes, Greens end up debating just how much depleted uranium to bury underground and how much to fire out of tanks, anti-austerity Leftists end up dispatching riot police to break up protests, the list goes on and on throughout history. The simple truth is you can take the most noble pauper and make him a king, and he may be a great king, but he must still maintain certain conditions(however unjust) by simply being king. The more he becomes attached to this position the more “pragmatism” takes over, excusing acts once thought unthinkable in the name keeping the current conditions going if only to “continue to do good things.” Hugo Chavez and Castro can speak all day of “people’s liberation” but the fact is people aren’t liberated if simply holding a different opinion is so threatening to your revolution they have to be jailed. And thus the throne lives on. While the Kings may change shape or party color the throne of the State and Capital continue to exist, continue to propagate exploitative and domineering cultural memes, social conditions, and technological apparatus.

But there is hope, even on the hinterlands of the oh-so-popular activism of today, in that seemingly bizarre behavior the State displays when people, protests, and organizations are met with overwhelming force. Why can millions march up and down streets freely “as long as they do not get close to a certain limit” of behavior? What is this Hedge, this boundary we must cross? What is this line so jealously guarded?

Push it to the Limit

Remember the Cuban Missile crises? Where the big bad Soviet Union brought us within an inch to war, ready to point nuclear warheads stationed in Cuba right at us? And how it was only through tough diplomacy and American bravado that we got them to turn around? No? Good, because it didn’t happen like that at all. The Soviets, arming an ally after a recent American-backed invasion, made the deal, not us: Remove the missiles stationed in Turkey(a country that shared a border with the USSR) pointed at Moscow and they would do the same. Kennedy liked the deal and took it. This brought horror to the Military-Industrial establishment; they saw it as backing down to the Soviets. Remember that ideology bit? They didn’t see it as two individuals avoiding nuclear war; their ideological lens would not permit them to. They instead saw it in a hierarchical, dominating dialectic: we had been submissive towards another power. But the Soviets didn’t see it that way, and neither did much of the world, and therein lay the true danger: a new way of thinking, a shift in vision had been displayed and put into practice. And this would not stand.

Others have covered just how against the grain Kennedy went, and how often those who went against him howled for war. I leave the fact that one of those two combatants is dead under your feet for you to play with and ponder. I could mention that right when Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King started talking about “economic justice” and planned on occupying DC until the Vietnam war was ended he too ended up dead. Interestingly enough his family won a wrongful death suit(full court transcripts available) alleging the government killed him. But I’ll instead stick with “accepted” facts like the long history of COINTELPRO, an FBI program specializing in infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. And this wasn’t a kids games either.

“Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.

Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists. They used bad-jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences.

Legal harassment: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, “investigative” interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.

Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations. The object was to frighten or eliminate dissidents and disrupt their movements….

The FBI also conspired with the police departments of many U.S. cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago) to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes—often with little or no evidence of violations of federal, state, or local laws—which resulted directly in the police killing many members of the Black Panther Party…In order to eliminate black militant leaders whom they considered dangerous, the FBI is believed to have worked with local police departments to target specific individuals, accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them.”

Anyone who thinks this has ended is sorely mistaken. Really, really mistaken.

“Participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.”

Let me translate that for you: “We are actively studying political movements, identifying people whom might actually change things and are using propaganda techniques to change the conversations they have as well as they views they hold to better suit the military’s domestic strategy.” Let that one sink in.

Truth be told we may never fully know how deep the rabbit hole goes. But there is a unifying factor here: the State clamps down hard whenever the ongoing narrative, the ideology itself is shown not to be the only one. They’re afraid of ideas, because these things are what sparks action. The greatest threat to the system isn’t just learning things aren’t what they appear to be, but beginning to imagine a world where things are different. If something is outside the “parameters of acceptance” for the dominant ideology it presupposes that there are limitations to the system; if there are limitations to the system it can become old, worn out, made useless, and ultimately replaced.

So the Ruling Class will violently defend it’s doctrines at all costs. Can we beat such an invincible enemy, an enemy whose literally shaped us all our lives? How can we achieve that? Can we ever free ourselves and stop eating out of the trashcan of Capitalist Ideology?

Follow me down a rabbit hole of our own making, lets…

Find Each Other!

“You say you want a Revolution?” “Not exactly…”

“Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” Isn’t that what they say?

If the entire world, from human culture to technology, is the byproduct of the Ruling Ideology and is literally shaped and molded by it we must do nothing less then change everything; reform is not an option because the sheer act of of working “within the system” actually reinforces existing ideologies. That’s been the key to the whole thing: each generation fine tunes and updates the existing ideological experience, making it bearable and palatable to them and thus preserves it. It’s the reason identity politics and purely social revolutions are so eagerly supported. The people at the top don’t really care if the definition of marriage is broadened or restricted as long as we keep depending on them to do it, they don’t care if there’s a black or female president as long as we still keep electing presidents. But the moment we begin to dream or to live lives outside this mental space the jackboots come crashing down because the minute we do so we are, in effect, creating a new mental space for ourselves and others to live in. Don’t think so? It’s through this process that we ended up with the world we have today:

This is not an intended or natural element of human life; rather, it is an artificial arrangement constructed by those who wish to own the world. ‘One thing, however, is clear – Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power,’ explains Marx. ‘This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production.

This ideological battle ground is the key. It’s the reason they laughed at Occupy and than brutally broke it’s back, it’s the reason Food Not Bombs is more aggressively treated than Neo-Nazi rallies, it’s the reason why the authority of a police officer must never be questioned, it’s the reason homeless people are not allowed to build semi-permanent structures and must rely on socially stigmatized “aid.” We are confronting virtual structures, living symbols that power the entire artifice.

Money powers everything. Not having Money is bad. Obey what we deem to be Authority. Break these symbols and you break the spell we’ve all fallen under. Break the spell and you might start casting some yourself.

Because you see things like Capitalism, Hierarchy, these are things not just in the world but that live within our heads. They are ideas, constructs, “spooks” as the Anarchist philosopher Max Stirner referred to them. As long as we still have them there they’ll continue to exist out here, and if they exist out here they will mold and shape our thoughts and actions out there.

“Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought.”-Engels

How many times have you heard “this is as good as it gets?” Or “this is the only world possible?” Is this the same species that went from riding in horse drawn carriages to landing on the moon in the space of about 70 years? To imagine that we’ve hit some built-in wall in human development is insane. This, comrades, is the Spell of Ideology. Of course this is “as good as it gets” if the mental structures rattling around in your head confirm that it is indeed so. You will literally make that world, you will live it, because your mind is convinced that is what you, in the Nietzschean sense, Will to Create. We’re stuck bargaining for bits and pieces of the pie because we can’t fathom ever owning it all.

Joseph McMoneagle in his book “Mind Trek” talks about how before a Remote Viewing session the investigator would spend about an hour talking with the subject about various psychic and paranormal topics. The reason? It prepped the subjects mind into believing Remote Viewing was possible. If they thought it was quite real and possible they, as if by magic, were able to do it. Beginner’s usually had better luck than trained users because they lacked the mental data to disprove or doubt the whole experience.

The witches and wizards amongst you should have bells and whistles going off in your head.

We’re talking about people moving their consciousness outside of space and time to view events, places, and people, all through a tiny shift in ideology; in believing such a thing was not only possible but probable. If this recognition of probable possibilities can do THAT, what kind of world can we create with it?

Towards a New Utopia

“So the paradox is that it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on Earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism, which means that we should reinvent Utopia, but in what sense? There are two false meanings of Utopia. One is this old notion of imagining an ideal society, which we know will never be realized. The other is the capitalist Utopia in the sense of new perverse desires that you are not only allowed but even solicited to realize. The true Utopia is when the situation is so without issue, without a way to resolve it within the coordinates of the possible, that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space. Utopia is not kind of a free imagination. Utopia is a matter of innermost urgency. You are forced to imagine it as the only way out, and this is what we need today.” –Slajov Zizek

Let me give you an example of how this dreaming works. Driverless cars are being tested and developed. Uber’s costs are primarily paying the driver. No driver and the cost goes down immensely, so low in fact it will be cheaper to simply grab a self-driving car for a ride then actually owning one.

So we have two potential futures:

A) Rentable self-driving cars become the wave of the future, eliminating vehicle ownership. You cannot get anywhere without paying a fee for it, the companies can charge whatever they like, and the minute a big car crash happens they will decry person-driven cars as “dangerous” and lobby the State to ban them on major roads “for our safety,” thus creating a privately-owned technological monopoly. All transit becomes commercialized and a matter of transactions.

B) We create socially funded free transportation for all.

Both options are entirely possible, both sitting in that hazy realm of possibility so frequently added to and pulled from by the magically inclined. Which one will be born? The one that is summoned by the prevailing ideology. There are literally thousands of these questions answered everyday on the micro and macro level, questions we may not have even thought to ask; the world is created at each second, so too it’s future.

So we must begin to dream again, to evoke and invoke a world as yet unborn; we must remake our utopia. We must imagine and desire a world beyond capital and devoid of hierarchy, as impossible as it sounds, because by dreaming it we unconsciously strive towards it. And it’s been done successfully before. Let your forgotten history be recalled by the great Murray Bookchin.

The Paris Commune ran an entire city based on neighborhood councils with the communicative speed of horseback; Mahkno’s Ukraine created freely run Anarchist communes and schools, all without police, jails, or borders; areas of Anarchist Spain completely abolished money altogether, actually living “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” These are things we’ve been told time and time again were impossible, went against “human nature,” and yet there they stand, only being overcome when the literal weight of the world was put against them…because they knew, just as the Powers That Be do today, to admit them victory would call the entirety of “what’s possible” into question.

The Zapatistas and Rojava cantons are proving the power to dream, that the unconscious sorcerous summoning of new worlds is still as dangerous and effective as it once was.

Partisans of a World Not Yet Born

So we dream new worlds. Is that enough? You can burn candles all day to get a new job, you still have to actually looking. Is revolution the answer? Max Stirner didn’t think so.

The revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on ‘institutions’. It is not a fight against the established […] it is only a working forth of me out of the established.

What is “the revolution?” It’s a dream that has no legs to walk one, a fight we’re always going to have at sometime in the future. The dream betrays itself. By always seeing it as in the future we damn it to be so, it will also be some hazy future off in the distance, a utopia of a future conflict to possibly change things. Dangerous thinking lies here! We are dreaming of a future possibility, a mere chance to change things rather than changing them now. “Ho ho, just you wait. When the revolution comes around things are going to be different. Yessir. Now, how may I take your order?”

And if the chance does come around, what then? We inherit a world soaked in a conflicting ideology, a machine geared impossibly away from the kind of lives we seek to create. And since THE revolution has occurred we become immediate conservatives; there is no room for things to adapt, to change, to grow, because the “Event” in Zizek’s terms has already happened. We become the kings, queens, and keepers of the very thing we sought to destroy. The physical map may change but the mental co-ordinates are still the same. From Anarchopdia:

“Stirner recognises the importance of self-liberation and the way that authority often exists purely through its acceptance by the governed. As he argues, “… no thing is sacred of itself, but my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgement, my bending the knee; in short, by my conscience.” [Ibid. p. 72] It is from this worship of what society deems “sacred” that individuals must liberate themselves in order to discover their true selves. And, significantly, part of this process of liberation involves the destruction of hierarchy. For Stirner, “Hierarchy is domination of thoughts, domination of mind!,” and this means that we are “kept down by those who are supported by thoughts” [Ibid., p. 74], i.e. by our own willingness to not question authority and the sources of that authority, such as private property and the state.”

We can have no change, no “revolution,” if the old order and old systems we seek to destroy are still acting as “spooks” in our heads. Any physical change in the balance of power must first be won in the world of ideas: a Jungian, Alchemical, inner-revolution. Freed from the “spooks” of capitalism and hierarchy the newly awakened individual recreates the world around her on the basis of a new ideology. Mahkno writes:

“The free man, on the other hand, has thrown away the trammels of the past together with its lies and brutality. He has buried the rotten corpse of slavery and the notion that the past is better. Man has already partially liberated himself from the fog of lies and brutality, which enslaved him from the day of his birth, from the worship of the bayonet, money, legality, and hypocritical science. While man frees himself from this insult he understands himself better, and once he has understood himself, the book of his life is opened to him. In it he immediately sees that his former life was nothing but loathsome slavery and that this framework of slavery has conspired to stifle all his innate good qualities. He sees that this life has turned him into a beast of burden, a slave for some or a master over others, or into a fool who tears down and tramples on all that is noble in man when ordered to do so. But when freedom awakes in man, it treads all artificialities into the dust and all that stands in the way of independent creativity. This is how man moves in his process of development…

“The man of protest, who has fully grasped his identity and who now sees with his eyes fully open, who now thirsts for freedom and totality, now creates groups of free men welded together by the ideal and by the action. Whoever comes into contact with these groups will cast off his status of lackey and will free himself from the idiot domination of others over him. Any ordinary man who comes from the plough, the factory, the bench of the university or from the bench of the academic will recognize the degradation of slavery. As man uncovers his true personality, he will throw away all artificial ideas, which go against the rights of his personality, the Master/Slave relationship of modern society. As soon as man brings to the fore the pure elements in his personality through which a new, free human community is born, he will become an anarchist and revolutionary. This is how the ideal of anarchism is assimilated and disseminated by men; the free man recognizes its deep truth, its clarity, and its purity, its message of freedom and creativity.”

Utopian Insurrectionists

So, putting it all together, what is it we must do?

We must be crafters and dreamers, builders and thinkers. We must learn to identify the prevailing ideology and how it infects and moves in us as well as others, even objects and concepts. Then me must break those bonds within that mental space; we must kill our Inner Fascist. And when we do that, and the symbols of Capitalism, State, and Hierarchy have been disenchanted we can begin to evoke our Utopia, our dreams into reality. We can engage in conversations and do things that challenge the prevailing ideas of what is possible; we can fight for and create liberated spaces where this world can begin to manifest.

There are ways to do this today. Here’s 42 of them. We can start our Insurrection now.

Rather than dogmatically hold on to one method or tactic or we should instead follow Stirner’s advice to “have no wish to become a slave to my maxims, but…rather subject them to my ongoing criticism” as the struggle continues to evolve. We have no idea how things might change or in what ways things might manifest, when situations might become more heated or more cool. Rosa Luxemborg stated there were no “perfect” or “objective” times for any historical condition, they only appear so when viewed as something in the past; that each “premature” attempt at the working people seizing power existed to further train the people as a whole, who could only reach the “mature conditions” necessary for widespread societal change by the very education gained in these earlier, “premature,” struggles. We must regain that old revolutionary patience, fighting for a world we may never get to see; but while we live, rather than simply “reacting” to things or trying to “fix” the world, we need to build our own.

Any action that moves towards a new way of thinking, by it’s sheer existence, forces others to have an interior conversation with themselves. This descent into Spookland causes long-held and prevailing ideas to be questioned or thrown away altogether. Ideology informs and molds reality. Change one and you change the other. Victor Serge in “Birth Of Our Power” described the situation in a conversation between his characters:

Rather than wait for a future conflict to bring the chance of change we must act and fight as if the world of our dreams is but a hair’s breadth away today.

Because if we do, one day we’ll wake up in it.