[Reposting my post from earlier without the preview after several requests for a more sharable version - please share!]

Ok, in response to a heavy stream of responses to yesterday's action, I'm going to try to break this down.

I'm an anarchist and I'm not going to vote for any of the presidential candidates. If in your view that means I don't have a place to say anything on this, then don't bother reading the rest of this or commenting, because obviously there's no reason for us to have a conversation. (I'll delete if you try since after decades I'm pretty bored with it.)

Unlike probably most of you reading this, I have actually been close with a few of these high level politician people and have a pretty good idea how they work. I don't love them or hate them, since they function in far too structured a position to have much to do with them personally. Through the hiker's campaign, I was proxy for two years to all-too-many conversations with the white house and state dept and spent hours a day with friends making fine calculations about how these folks - including Obama and Hillary with whom they met repeatedly - work. I worked directly with a few myself, independently, in a number of countries. And that campaign (specifically Sarah's work), as a number of articles attest, directly resulted in establishing the diplomatic channels which have come to fruition in the Iran nuclear deal, which I passionately support. (I definitely think influencing policy can be worth it - I just know that voting is about the least effective way to do it.)

For a clear example preceding that, a few years ago, I was sitting in my friend's place in Philadelphia and, 40 in hand, I answered the phone. It was the white house. They were calling for my (anarchist punk) friends with a question about their AIDS policy. My friends were active with ACT-UP, who did indeed have ideas - even politically viable ones - for what the administration should be doing with their AIDS policy. But you know why the white house called? It wasn't because ACT UP had been saying "You have my vote!" or sending in postcards to anybody. It's because, for years, they'd been part of a group publicly taking huge risks, and publicly showing their courage by locking their bodies down to desks, blocking roads, shouting down meetings, and doing every courageous thing their bodies could withstand (some died) to interfere with business as usual. Over time, not always in a single action, people realized they knew what they were talking about, including the white house - whose "experts" (the positions had been created only because of earlier generations of ACT-UP) spent more time building their networks and horse-trading than trying to stay alive with the latest regime of cocktail meds, or meeting with the front-line researchers who knew what needed to happen next, profitable or not. Here's the key - my friends didn't hate those people, just like I certainly don't hate Bernie or really care about Obama or Hillary or Trump as people. The key is, the very nature of their work as politicians puts them out of touch with developing realities, and sometimes they know it. Their job is knowing that, and trying to keep track in the latest shifts of power and discourse, the kinds of shifts that might help them win or get reelected. (If they did something else as their job, then someone else would be very ready take their position.) And because that's what they HAVE to care about, they realize, sometimes, on their better days, that those few folks on the ground crazy enough to put their asses on the line might well be more in touch with those latest shifts - they might even be making them.

If you look at the history of how real social change has happened in this or any country, it follows this kind of pattern. Social tension accumulates, people finally get fed up and figure out how to disrupt the systems of daily reproduction, and then repression comes down like Seattle rain. Soon, though, the status quo elites realize if they're not going to be fighting that same fight over and over again, they have to get the disruptors to calm down, so they tweak things and allow whatever reforms that they think will bring social peace so that they can get back to business as usual. Revolution happens when those tweaks aren't sufficient, and reforms when they are. And our discontent is what determines not only the difference, but even what reform concessions are given in the first place. The policy changes don't happen out of the goodness of anybody's heart - they're the effect of this process of forceful negotiation. Again, at some point, those tweaks aren't enough, and then the social pressure outlasts the system.

Nothing reveals the profound authoritarian mindset in this culture like the naively trustful, not functional, way we approach our "representatives." It's like following the Kardashian's love lives like you're some concerned relative (you're not.) One veteran Left feminist organizer and university professor friend I spoke with yesterday just said, "Why is everybody so upset? We're just pressuring Bernie to move left on this, which might get Hillary to follow." It's not about being "for" or "against" Bernie, and people working on that level - the level of one vote - aren't having much influence on anybody. Bernie isn't there to "have my back," as one hate mail I got yesterday insisted - he's there to gather votes and win and make promises and policies that build his constituency, like any politician. That's their job. Most of the time, given the scale and structure needed to navigate our political system, those promises are dishonest and those policies are designed to benefit those powerful enough to actually influence "representatives" through the daily routine of campaign donations, lobbying, influence bartering, and backdoor deals. (Talk to anyone who's worked in the sector, this is the daily currency.) I'm totally up for believing that Bernie or Kshama or whoever means well and is going to do this with integrity, and stand for "people before profit" or whatever through this system - I think success is unlikely given the structure of our political apparatus (Obama, anyone?) but I won't judge or get in their way. But even with them, the way to get their ear isn't to tell them you like them. And you know, if you don't think that Bernie understands all this, just watch his speeches and policies in the next few weeks, and you can bet that he's going to be trying pretty hard to say the kind of things to get us to calm down a little - maybe even putting forward concrete policy changes like holding individual officers responsible for homicidal negligence, or protecting citizens' constitutional right to film police.

Or, as I just learned while typing this, maybe he'll hire Symone Sanders, "a young, black, criminal justice advocate and supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement," as the national press secretary, and announce it six hours after Mara and Marissa disrupt his event since he hasn't said shit about what's obviously the central issue of the moment. So far, all he's done is express "support" the movement (as if that's what the movement was for), and calling for an end to private prisons (a marginal part of the problem). Oh look! And also apparently he just added a "racial justice" page to his website as of yesterday!