Demand the Impossible - Bill Ayers - Part 1 of 4

2020 Reading Challenge - Day 184

July 3, 2020

Book 53 - Demand the Impossible: A Radical Manifesto
Bill Ayers (2016)
 Part 1 - page 1-42
Reading Time - 60 minutes

I bought this book in 2017, because I couldn't get it from any library and it looked really interesting. It's taken me three years to actually get around to reading it, but I'm glad I did. It seems a very appropriate book for the times in which we are living - virus, economy, racial inequity, climate catastrophe, ongoing war, etc, etc. Take your pick...

I know nothing about the author although he does seem to be a social justice activist. He organizes the book by theme and has an introduction in which he basically points the finger at capitalism as the origin and source of most of the evils in the arena of social justice. "Freedom without socialism is a license for privilege and injustice, while socialism without freedom can become slavery and brutality". It's kind of a mind blowing concept and he acknowledges that the biggest obstacle to revolution is a serious and often unrecognized lack of confidence. If we are convinced that capitalism is the only game in town then... we aren't  going to be open to going anywhere else... The author encourages us to push beyond the obvious and the settled, to envision an alternate universe with a couple of simple words... "What if..."... Because, when you actually look at the state of the world, and  the US in particular... it's actually kind of shocking. And I think... perhaps we have been the lobsters in the cooking pot... with the temperature going up so gradually that we haven't even noticed that things have gotten quite intolerable...

The chapters of the book are arranged by various themes, but there are a couple of threads that bind them all together. The first is that most everything in the world has been commercialized or capitalism-ized... It's not just  the military... it's the military-industrial complex. It's not just food... it's the food-industry. It's not just health care... it's the health-care industry... or market or whatever. And that's a bit of a shock, to recognize that everything has been market-ized... to make money. The second theme that runs through the book is the smack-in-your-face numbers of what gets spent and what does not get spent. He starts each chapter with a list of quite frightening statistics that make one wonder... who is running this show?

In Chapter 1, Ayers looks at the Military and the "What if" of disarmament. A few figures. In 2014, the US spent $609 billion dollars on the military. The US military has 587 bases in foreign countries. There are a grand total of 0 foreign bases on US soil. The US was the #1 global arms dealer in 2015. From this, we get the sense that the US spends a lot of time and money on the business of war. And make no mistake, war is a business. We might believe that having the US as the world's powerhouse keeps the world safe... but Ayers would say that is simply not true. It actually makes the world unsafer and fosters more violence around the world. The US has a long history of interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries and of supporting right-wing subversives. This would obviously be in reaction to the Soviet Union promoting left-wing radicals... so by default, the US then takes the other side. Ayers would argue that the US, with its ongoing "war on terror" is in a state of permanent war. He quotes John Dewey who said, "All nations, even those professedly the most democratic... are compelled in war to turn authoritarian and totalitarian". Yup... that's true. Saw it with Great Britain during the Second World War. But... what happens when a country is in a state of permanent war? He has a list...

• omnivorous national security and surveillance
• abrogation of privacy and civil liberties
• wide us of mass incarceration
• banality of torture, domestically and internationally
• undermining of tolerance everywhere.

We just have to look at the US to see... yup... they are there. Ayers also argues that the US is a war culture... they say that they come in peace (Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, wherever) but it always ends up as a war. A former Marine Corps Major General, Smedley Butler, famously said that "war is a racket" and had three proposals to limit war:

1. strictly limit all military forces to a defensive posture
2. hold a referendum of those who would be on the front lines before any military action is taken
3. take the profit out of war by, among other measures, conscripting the captains of industry and finances as the foot soldiers in any impending fight

Well... that might do it... And, Eisenhower did offer a warning about the military-industrial complex. War is a lucrative business... Ayers does envision a different world, a world where... What if... warriors were transformed into teachers, caregivers, farmers...

I'm a natural sceptic so I kind of look at this and wonder... yes, but. what about China and Russia and all those other countries who we, in the West, have to keep at bay. Is it too much to dream of a day when the lion lays down with the lamb and swords are beaten into ploughshares? Perhaps this virus will teach us that the time for empires and imperial policy, be it British, American, Russian or Chinese, is over. That we are all united together on this planet and need to start working together instead of competing with each other...