A Focus group. That’s what George Walker Bush dismissively labeled the massive eruption of global protest against the invasion of Iraq on February 15, 2003, as a war were a product to be tested for consumers, and the people who would be forced to pay in blood and sweat for it only able to intervene as human lab rats whose comments were understood as symptom rather than as input. Of course, Bush has focus groups he does listen to – lobbyists for industry, Karl Rove and his campaign strategists, et alii. Arlene Dávila titles the final chapter of her study of “ethnic” marketing, Latinos Inc, in which she interrogates the structures of knowledge and power which govern what questions are asked and what answers are heard/possible in advertising focus groups “The Fuck Us Group,” and it is from her that I derive my title for this post, because I think it’s pretty clear that it’s the global us who, if you’ll forgive my masculinist syntax for a moment, are about to get fucked.
The thing is, Bush can only govern if we let him. Electoral politics have failed the left. We can only get what we are organized to take. What we need to do now is organize massive resistance to global capitalism and those who work to engineer a future in which being human is a privilege rather than a right. What we have lost at the ballot box, we need to reclaim in the streets.
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