Work stoppage as a strategy of effecting political ends (such as impeaching improperly elected presidents)

Blogdom,

As an admirer of certain aspects of James Madison's thought, I exercise caution before suggesting any strategy of activism meaning to effect political ends directly rather than improve a democratic/republican system so that it may effect them by an approximation of the ultimate idealized law of the greatest good for the greatest number. As careful readers of Madison know (but Noam Chomsky pretends not to know) Madison's strategy for effecting this gain in aggregate welfare was two-fold; to allow representative government, but not pure democracy, at the highest level, and to have two fundamental layers of government, state and national. Pure democracy in which each question be decided upon by a show of hands, he reckoned in part, was mobocracy, in which a collective decides what to do according to the law of crowds: each part is ignorant of most necessary information and the whole cannot be guaranteed to directly simulate the knowledge its' parts lack. An invisible hand of politics in which the opposite is true is ludicrous to intuition and most forms of reason, and besides that, empirically unprovable given ever-changing definitions of "the good." Madison called the actual mechanism of crowd decision faction formation, a name which implies at least a prisoner's dillemma-like achievement of less than optimal gain from each man competing for himself, and at worst all forms of extra-legal manipulation contrary to the basic premises of government for the people, by the people, and of the people. However, recognizing holes in the theory (there must be holes in any theory), and the lack of competition rendering a parliament an uncontested authority in any single-layered and purely republican government, he allowed considerable leverage to states, and allowed them to have purely democratic (and thus potentially mobocratic) elements, with a supreme court holding ultimate jurisdiction over the propriety of their laws.

As many say today, states (and somtimes cities) are laboratories of new ideas. This is an interesting twist on both Madisonian and economic ideas: a small number (50 max, currently) of tested laws to choose from, developed naturally (mobocratically) in a republic-controlled environment, as an alternative of a market of untested ideas too large to count. I think Madison would be proud of this line of thought: first because empirically tested ideas are information to go on other than instinct, and second because it allows for democratic elements without the perils of pure democracy. And its' no surprise: the idea is the brainchild of a people reared in a system he played a very important role in fashioning.


Democratic mobocracy, however, may very well be the best way to decide upon questions everybody does have the necessary information about given a failure of a globally republican government. When in the course of human events does activism indisputably become necessary? When the republican form of government defeats itself, such as in a rigged election. Therefore, I suggest activism in the face of any future stolen election.



It having been demonstrated "beyond a reasonable doubt" with Bayesian statistical and elementary probabilistic means that an election has been rigged, extra-legal means of action are appropriate. In its' broadest outline, needing details (feel free to comment if you're out there), this is the one I suggest.



A work stoppage, or general strike. May everybody who believes the United States has crossed the line into dictatorship refuse to work until corrective legal measure is taken or new elections are held, (whichever is more democratic-republican under the circumstances), at the risk of their job. Labor is the power of the people. Demonstrating is useless. The only hope of a bloodless revolution should revolution become necessary (such as in the case of a massively rigged election) is to cripple the economic system for political ends.

This is not a question of whether the ends justify the means. It is a question of whether one mean can be used to effect an end of a different kind, which can only reasonably be answered in the positive.



To make this stoppage practicable, rather than a fanciful idea, it is necessary to reduce the number of jobs lost, or for each individual the probability they will lose their job. This requires making deals with factions one doesn't respect. Such as the most abusive of corporations, etc. Natural principles reveal that, once the strike has achieved its' ends, most people will be rehired, as the cause of the strike is the enstatement of a man who will then be the president-elect, which it is in business's interest to please, and, if the strike has enough adherents, there won't be pools of same-skilled alternate employees to hire. This "most" isn't good enough to ensure safety, especially if the arguments behind it aren't known. So steps need to be taken to put at least a few major corporations on the side of the strikers: in other words, to make the companies themselves part of the stoppage, with means of labor, money, reasoning, or whatever else may work.



So, again, the suggestion is: put down your placards and stay home from work in the case of a clearly illegitemally elected president. There are not enough compliant soldiers to enact the Taft-Hartley act on the scale I'm suggesting. The weapon of the people is labor, as known by Gandhi, a rather succesful non-violent revolutionary, whatever else he was, and all his followers. This is the answer given unjust regimes, regardless of the situation and whether you're a Wall Street Broker or a day-laborer, a citizen or not.

A retraction ala Beethoven

I am no longer planning to vote for Barack Obama or supporting his candidacy for a simple reason: I find it dangerous to say in any capacity within public life that one would invade a part of a sovereign state that happens to have nuclear weapons on "creditable intelligence" that Al Qaeda (the base) has a base there. The creditability of "creditable intelligence" has a poor track record to say the least, besides which, causing a potential nuclear standoff in any way, shape or form is insanity the likes of which has not been seen from the White House (to my knowledge) since another charismatic but inexperienced leader some forty-five years ago brought the world to the brink of annihilation for a fortnight. In other words, all the JFK comparisons are more on the mark than their supporters imagine, and this is bad because he was a lousy president until the day he got shot, at least in this most important of respects.

Of course, Mr. Obama probably says all this not out of plain inexperience, seeing as even little young inexperienced me knows what's wrong with it, but because it's what a portion of undecided voters wants to hear more than the other portions might be turned off by it. It still appears appropriate to me to call it inexperience and mean something other by that word than a euphemism for demagoguery because experience would teach the said candidate not to say under pressure what under more normal circumstances he or I both already realize should not be said. Any candidate who sleeps in the White House on Jaunary 20th-21st 2009 will find upon waking up that his or her diplomatic record as a president retroactively stretches back to the wild days of his or her campaign. Since diplomacy is the number one job of a president, I'm taking everything said about it right now very seriously. And voting Clinton with some reservations.

It seems to me that the Soviets were as "insane" in actuality as any nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Pakistan would be if it came to exist, and it seems untenable to me to strike nuclear-armed enemies no matter who they are, what they do, or what they say they "believe". They could use the things! Simple enough, but it seems that game theory and other strategic thought as informed and altered by historical example has largely been replaced in our times by a political "language game" I call "pro-Bush, anti-Bush." Whether you're with him like Romney or against him like Obama, the cowboy has largely decided the backbone of publicly acceptable reasoning for the worse. in particular, he has undermined the Kennan et al. framework of international diplomacy with unthought garbage allegedly drawn from the work of Leo Strauss (a bad writer and besides that a Plato, Maimonides, and Spinoza commentator rather than a political strategist).For the record, this here publicly unacceptable commentator endorses the following theses: A) Kennan et al.'s manner of diplomacy was based on strategic (game-theoretical, for any economists out there) considerations of how to wage cold war given a set of weapons and any state out there threatening our country with them, and their day is on that account not over if it ever began. B) Communism and Islam are both "religions" whose stated and real goal is to inform politics, so if we dealt with one crop of madmen we can deal with another similarly. The only difference is that Islam is purportedtly "stateless." This I find to be purported but not factual. Radical Islam exists only insofar as states harbor it, and this includes both the Islamic republics and the so-called secular dictatorships that tolerate Islamic factions, brotherhoods, and other organizations. That's a big list with question marks, but it's still less dangerous than the good old Soviet Union. So why not render unto Caesar what deters Caesar, whether the Caesar calls himself communist or Muslim? C) If Al Qaeda is really a stateless enemy, rather than a multi-state enemy as I argue, tough talk about getting at one of its arms is assassination by starfish mutilation (the other arms regenerate). Either we're dealing with a nihilistic army of shadows that means to bring about Armageddon for virgins in the sky or we're dealing with states and alliances thereof, but in either case, Obama's gesture is a bad move.

So, like Beethoven ripping up his dedication of the Eroica symphony to Napoleon upon his invasion of I forget which German state, as a Palinodist retracts a poem with another, I offer this argument.