The wave of global popular protests that erupted in 2010 and lasted a decade were extinguished. This means new tactics and new strategies, as Vincent Bevins explains in his book “If We Burn."
"Revolutions are long, difficult projects that take years to make, slowly and often imperceptibly eating away at the foundations of power. "
While many traditional sources use the term anti-vaxxer as a pejorative and try to attach it to anti-science conspiracy it is in fact a revolutionary force years in the making. The informed base understands the deadly regulatory capture & opposes the Pharma Mafia that has transformed America into the fattest, sickest population in human history. Mounting victims of toxic food and rubber stamped, unsafe drug approvals is the revolution in the wings. Expect us.
A little knowledge can be a bad thing. Those who push the mantra of ill-health and conspiracies by healthcare are often younger and have experienced only the benefits of technological advancement. May do "their own research" which amounts to connecting on the internet with like minded individuals. Polio, tetanus, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria are all very real. Life expectancy in 1900 was around 50 years, it is now 78 in the US and higher still in other countries. One can justly criticize the financialization of our corporations but not all is conspiracy.
The "informed base" you suggest is a small fraction of those considered "anti-vaxxers". Most of the TVs know nothing of "regulatory capture" or the origins and causes of chronic disease (and don't give a rats ass about public health and oppose government intervention (i.e. regulation) and collective action).
This is what Hedges is driving at when he says that there can be no effective political revolution without theory and analysis.
Perhaps our perspectives of the informed segment are different based on experience. Mine has been over two decades in the food & drug reform area and your faithful TV watchers are jumping ship in droves and the direction of shift only one way & happening now at increasing speed whether the poll watchers sense it or not I see it happening. :~)
My analysis reflects my experience and reading. I've worked for 40 years in environmental policy. There are many of the same science, policy, political economy, and integrity issues with food and drug regulation.
I meant "AV" for your term "anti-vaxxer", not TV.
Even many of the food and drug safety reform people are poisoned by hyper individualism (e.g. health and fitness and diet, etc) and are totally opposed to public health and food and safety regulation and have some pretty twisted ideas, some echoing eugenics premises and concepts of purity. I'm now reading Naomi's Klein's recent book and shed does a good job breaking these issues down. Even some of the AV people are closet libertarians who are unwilling to even think of taking any risk - any at all - for the public good.
I haven’t watched this yet, but if Wednesday, Oct 4 FEMA 5G plan goes the way people are speculating it might be, what should we do to be safe, and keep others safe. Should we get out of town away from 5G cell phone towers? Why would they tell us it is coming? I did read that there was as much 5G blasting in Wuhan in Jan 2020 at the beginning of the Pandemic as there was all over the US? I figured someone like you, Dr. Lora Chamberlin would be someone to give us practical advice.
What I think I'd suggest you expect in the not too distant future Pamela, is another pandemic. With the climate warming as fast as it is, the microbial world is on the march as well.......and given its life expectancy, it has a time advantage.,
Not being able to distinguish between the BS of capitalist pharmacueticals and viral science seems to be a common problem these days. But while I share your despair over what big pharma and corporate big Ag has done to our medicines and our food and fear those of us given to throwing the baby out with the bathwater may have their revolutionary plans cancelled by the grim reaper.
Should please all those know it alls who've claimed population is the real problem, all these years....an American led movement determined to face their opponents head on, face clear and vaccine free. Good luck.
I haven’t watched this yet, but if Wednesday, Oct 4 FEMA 5G plan goes the way people are speculating it might be, what should we do to be safe, and keep others safe. Should we get out of town away from 5G cell phone towers? Why would they tell us it is coming? I did read that there was as much 5G blasting in Wuhan in Jan 2020 at the beginning of the Pandemic as there was all over the US? I figured someone like you, Dr. Lora Chamberlin would be someone to give us practical advice.
As a New Yorker who remembers 9-11 happened the day before FEMA planned exercise Oct 3rd I'm staying close enough to home to walk back if anything disruptive happens but doubt very much we peons will ever get fair warning of actual threats to our safety.
Having read all the comments it appears nothing works! Nothing is pure. Every form of protest and of revolutionary intent contains a lousy element. Which ultimately rules. Geesh. No wonder things are getting worse! I guess we should all sign up for the best deal to pay for our funeral expenses and in the interim watch grade B and D films on Netflix. Cooperation? Naw. Competition for the best of what’s worse? You betcha. Meanwhile. Tread water. If you can find any through the smoke and fire.
Exactly. Like....its hopeless so give up on hoping.
Not that hope alone does much.......but the slow and persistent building of solidarity, listening to each other more than we lecture...changing our values and our lifestyle...cultivating empathy through action....if there's someone alone near you, invite them over for lunch and a chat....
It is our isolation and our weird fearof/contempt for each other that is defeating us. And I'm not talking about the revolution, I'm thinking about living the best life we all can, under the circumstances.
Surely to the great goddess its not human nature to give up without a struggle??
The nothing that wants to become something is struggling to be born,,through us….and that which is born is new….meaning never was before….is new like each baby being born
Exactly. I noticed this morning on our CBC that its a black woman leading the legal proceedings against the Donald....and her address was short, sweet and too the point.
No one is above the law.
Goes to show what we might be able to expect if more women, and people of colour were welcomed into a genuinely new world order. I can't even imagine the kind of courage necessary to survive and thrive in Amerika. But obviously, some of our most marginalized, silenced and ignored people have had those characteristics.
I want to be part of midwifing something new. We get the chance with every child born into a loving and socially conscious family. Good schools and real teacher education programs would be a great start.
Treating our care givers better than we treat our military killers and our financial wheeler dealers, like the fraudulent Donald would be a borning of note also.
The myth is that bottom-up uprisings are only bottom-up uprisings. Successful revolutions are always supported by and fomented by the powerful elites that have an agenda. That agenda might be moral, but is often just in support of competition over other powerful elites.
If we look at all the American left "uprisings" since the Occupy movement, they are largely perpetrated by educated youth. These are kids programmed by a tribe of elites, that also use their media and non-profit control to gin up anger with the poor, to rebel... often without even being able to articulate what they are rebelling to achieve.
The US had a similar situation for where we are today... the Gilded Age. Similar to Jan-6, Coxey's Army march on Washington to advocate for the working class over the monopoly of the monied elites. When the group of around 500 arrived, Coxey and other leaders of the movement were arrested for walking on the grass of the United States Capitol.
Similar to Jan-6, a real grass-roots movement was put down by power yet again.
It was a potential grassroots movement whose scattered and sometimes justifiable goals its putative leader did not even share--other than the red herring of a stolen election; and it became a riot for probably far less than a majority of those present, and many of those were simply caught up in that moment by long-simmering anger and frustration.
Romantic fantasies and Les Miz aside, as long as the 1% are united, they have nothing to fear from the 99%, because the 1% hold the levers of power and will do whatever it takes to retain power.
Revolutions happen when the 1% are disunited and 1% factions (usually the losing side) start casting about for allies.
Seriously? Our belief that 1% of the population is somehow invincible is almost amusing. The 1% hold unto power because of the masses of upper class and middle class folk who cast their lot in with them....preferring to manage things for their masters.
But decades if not centuries of denigrating the people, looking down on those who do the work, and striving to leave the productive class to join that of the consumers, may make it look like its the 1% that has all the power.
Agree. Revolution requires the divide and conflict within the 1%.
Real democracy helps regulate the tyrannical control of the 1%, but we have a corrupted democracy that is driven by the 1% control of media influence of politics.
I'd cut straight to the chase and say that we live in a de facto oligarchy with vestigial trappings of a democratic republic. We get to choose between two carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppets, but the real decisions aren't left to The Muppet Show.
Richard Lachmann describes how inter-elite conflict drives social change.
Yes, but it seems to me that the lack of an independent and free media is the source of this hold on power. It is the missing fourth branch of government that has provide some constraints on the tyranny of the controlling power. Today the power owns the media.
Think of Team D as the class consciousness of the PMC (which run pretty much all large corporations) made manifest, with minorities as junior partners.
Team R fulfills a similar role with regard to Local Gentry, with white evangelicals as their junior partners.
Look at the ownership of all the large media corporations. At the top are Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, JP Morgan, etc. Same with most of the large multi-national corporations.
Madison Avenue figured out that they could make the population crave and buy almost any product. So think of the dream of politicians and Wall Street to control the entire infrastructure of constituent/consumer influence. Wall Street can force tectonic market changes that they pre-bet on. The political establishment is in on the game.
Perhaps none of us knows what the revolutions of tomorrow requires....but I'd put my money on an educated populace and stop reifying the 'absolute power' of 1% of the population.
That assumption makes the majority of human beings sound like dunces, boot lickers and just maybe, downright facistic fools dying to make the Nazi salute. Could be the case, but I have a hard time believing I'm some kind of missing link.
Off with their heads....its been too obvious for too long they don't have a clue. Look at the current waste and facile determination to fight on....in America's current proxy war.
While millions go hungry, and your debt ridden economy shuts down once again. We need to divide that conflicted fraction of humanity before we can get started????
Problem is Jenny...the know it alls have been coming for education also. I'm recommending Umberto Eco's essay on the Characteristics of Ur Fascism to everyone lately. It can be found in The New York Book Review, June of 1995....and its not at all dated. He was boy in Mussolini's Italy and learned from early experience.
Of the 14 characteristics he discusses, the last one is for me the most chilling: In fascistic countries...and states, you'll find an impoverished school vocabulary....everything is kept so simple critical thinking has trouble getting started.
Listen for more than a couple of minutes to Trump.....and you hear that repetitive impoverished language in action. As a retired teacher of English, I've found it hard to understand how anyone could vote for someone so illiterate sounding.....but I hadn't read Eco, or calculated in the war on teachers and a literate curriculum that your right wing has supported for decades.
So yes...education. But just sitting in a desk in an overcrowded, underfunded classroom isn't education...at its worst, its a form of childhood incarceration.
It's obvious I have to go back to Umberto Eco. I read his books years ago having had a European education.
"What is my right wing education," mean?
I am not stupid enough to know that reiterating the same thing over and over again means anything other than propaganda.
MY question to you Americans is this:
Why did you stop caring about Education?
Did you think that America was the greatest Country in the world and you didn't need to pay attention to Education?
Did you really think that the US was never going to die?
We lived in the US for 23yrs.
Luckily we lived in a Canyon in the LA School district........Topanga. Left wing community: Woody Guthrie and Will Geer. (Look it up)?
My daughter had the best Elementary School education.
Then she ended up in Junior School in Pacific Pallisades.....shit.
Her education stopped.
NO Geography/No critical thinking/no debates/no world history.
I was horror struck.
Over and over again she learned about G. Washington and A. Lincoln.
Book reviews: She quickly learned you read the back-cover of books and make a small contribution. She never read the books!
She was chucked out of her Art class: They said she didn't see things like normal people.
I am an artist and I was watching her development in this area and was intrigued. When she was chucked out of the Art Class I went into the school and raised hell. Nothing was done.
Since then my daughter (to my knowledge) has never drawn another picture.
We left the US when GWBush got in....we could see the writing on the wall.
My daughter got into drugs and we spent a huge amount of money trying to help her. We eventually went Bankrupt because there was so little assistance.
My daughter is fine now (and she would tell you herself) it was because we stood by her.
She now works with autistic kids in N. Carolina.
We never see her because her husband and her spend so much money on luxury.
She would tell you herself EXACTLY what education in the US she had!
What about the poor people who have NO idea what is going on and do not have the money to obtain Psychiatrists?
What I love about one line put downs Frank........is it isn't really necessary to reply to them. They indicate the contempt for anyone who thinks differently than they do...by using one of the easiest of logical fallacies. Yours is the fallacy of contradiction. I'll wait in anticipation for you to lead off next time with an ad hominem.
Newsflash: I'm not just talking Amerika here....the countries the USA sanctions in its sanctimonious belief that it knows everything are included. Cuba and Venezuela are included. The countries of central America are included....and Africa.
Food insecurity is rising everywhere....and will continue to grow, as 'wealth creators' scoop up more than their share, and the climate makes growing the food, harvesting it from the oceans etc. not only more challenging........but impossible.
Your certainties change nothing...but may well be a goodly part of why we've failed to create a more equitable, sharing and caring world.
So you think that US policy on hunger and poverty is a failure now because it does not do enough to help everyone in the world?
Yes, the Shirky Principle.
Leaving aside for the moment that the US has lifted billions out of poverty, this is the Schwab and Soros globalist hogwash that serves to destroy American sovereignty and turn it into a bottomless debt ATM for a giant global charity run by Brussels. Meanwhile in all the places in the US that liberals dominate they homeless population has exploded and keeps growing. Have you opened your house to illegal immigrants? Why don't you move to these places so in need of our help and provide some? Just curious. Or maybe yours are just the luxury beliefs of the life-meaning challenged over-educated upper middle class? You need a project and starting a business that hires people so they can take care of their own family is too hard?
There is not one thing any rational and knowing person can agree with here. I sense a social and economic malcontent with a degree advocating for yet another failed attempt at authoritarian collectivism where millions die. Fix the problem of corporatism, not lose your brain and advocate for crap communism.
I like the day off walk out.........it makes a lot of sense..especially now with precarity and minimum wages so low that people can't afford a living space on their wages anyway....
But we also need a lot of rethinking.....the more money that is floating around the less it seems everyone has....and the more expensive everything has to get for businesses just to keep their noses above water. A break from debt ridden consumerism would give us time to think about how we move forward to a better place for all of us.
Neoliberalism sure sold us the farm.........Mussolini's black shirts in expensive suits I'm thinking, got us all on this wealth creation frenzy that has left most of unbelievable debt....but still
The vacate on jets fly, the cruise ships cruise and the emissions keep rising.
I'm for going back to those houseparties we had in the 60's...we're even putting up crabapple cider and beer from scratch in preparation.
“Frank Lee”, can’t you just stick to finding a rational leader? A grass roots movement has nothing to do with a dog-whistled bunch of hyper-masculine gun nuts playing into the hands of a narcissist real estate chancer who put them up to attempting to murder his Vice President while the man was legally handing over elected power.
If you want a grass roots movement, go out and campaign for third party candidacies to be freed of onerous regulation to save being stifled by the giant weeds dominating political growth. Your party’s Gaetz has just conspired to sack its speaker just so that it can do another Newt Gingrich on you and prove he has the power to stifle government altogether. Because, like all conservatives, Republican congresspeople think that running the country is a part time thing which you do with your corporations. Presumably the representatives still get paid while they, every one, head to Washington every election cycle just to shut it down. You’re going to need government to rescue you from your environment and the hordes of zombies on the fence when you run out of useable laws to keep people alive. You’ll be voting on the right to arm bears before you give a red cent to a single mother. There are 14 year-olds in Thailand now doing mall shootings in your honour. Not one of you Republicans has an idea what personal freedom might mean other than some sort of Halloween hay ride where you chase people in the dark with running chainsaws with the blades removed. It’s not enough to keep propaganda flowing against Hedges readership. One day you’ll discover the need to make sense in your own mind in order to have any effect on that readership.
Frank no doubt will rise to the bait and prove you more than right in your assessment. He has more time on his hands than brains in his head it appears. And forgive the ad hominem, but when someone comes on simply to bad mouth Chris Hedges and tell everyone who sees problems he wants to ignore that they're wrong....one loses patience.
None of those working class construction workers were armed with guns. Now, your partisan Democrat capitol police where sure armed and itching to kill an unarmed tiny woman protestor.
"playing into the hands of a narcissist real estate chancer"
At least he is a grandiose narcissist and not the vulnerable narcissists that infest your party.
"who put them up to attempting to murder his Vice President"
Lying will send you to hell after your die.
"while the man was legally handing over elected power."
Yeah well, the Houston Astros legally won the 2017 World Series.
"Because, like all conservatives, Republican congresspeople think that running the country is a part time thing which you do with your corporations. "
"Not one of you Republicans has an idea what personal freedom might mean other than some sort of Halloween hay ride where you chase people in the dark with running chainsaws with the blades removed."
What a hoot when your party is pushing a Ministry of Trust, destroying 1A and 2A rights. Destroying the lives of children by unneeded school shutdowns and promoting gender change drugs and surgery. Also defunding cops thus resulting in many more dead black. Canceling fossil fuels thus causing hyper inflation that is destroying the financial future of poor and middle class families. Spending billions to another useless foreign war. Jacking up the debt and deficit to level never imagined and saddling future generations with the bill. Opening the border to allow a flood of illegals in thus decimating communities in the border states and now that is coming to your neighborhood, suddenly it is a problem. Pushing the racist and toxic parasitic mind of woke. Yeah, you Democrats are all about freedom.
Whew! Sucks to be American it seems. Once I read both sides of the toxic name calling, I have to feel grateful I'm Canadian. The Canadian take: Trump is obviously a narcissist....and a fraudulent real estate investor by the sounds of the proceedings in New York.
The Ukrainian proxy war is going to help break your government..........but then, my understanding is that you've been massively in debt for years. What you get I suppose when you set it up so that only the middle class and the poor pay taxes....everything is for sale.........and your leaders assume they know better than anyone outside America's borders, as to how to run all the countries of the world.
Youse guys have a lot of problems....most of them of your own making. Had you kept your noses out of the revolutions in Central and South America perhaps you wouldn't have so many people at your southern borders. But will any of you, Republican or Democrat, consider that possibility??? Not a chance. Chris does include it in his analysis however.
Had you stopped yer entreproners from moving their very profitable plants to third world countries where they could take advantage of poor people of colour, you might be less in debt, and yer rust belt wouldn't be so desperate....but fat chance of admitting that either. Amerikans are never wrong, so it's obviously China's fault.
Had you butted out of foreign wars and instead built solid social programs in your own countries you'd be less in debt, the rest of the world wouldn't hate you quite as much and you'd have avoided these seasonal threats to 'shut down the government'...but hey!!! Hating government and waving flags for the death of people in far countries is just too darn much fun, better than the 4th of July even.
Had you imagined that collaboration, cooperation and sharing might be values worth emulating, rather than accusing your 'red commies' of coming for yer precious liberties, you might have a prosperous country now. But Endless profit is a much bigger part of the Amerikan Dream than Social Justice or Care Giving.
So have fun with the verbal abuse of one another....the grim certainties espoused on all sides. You aren't the first empire to over extend itself in foreign conquest...while distributing bread to its citizens at home. The Romans made the template.
Look those Losers Up and if you enjoy that read, check out Umberto Eco's essay on Fascism in The New York Review of Books...June 1995. He grew up under Mussolini and the war's aftermath, so knows a thing or two about fascism. Which seems to me, to be the road you're on.
I suspect Chris may think so too. He's a brave man and a true patriot. You should be ashamed of the hatchet job you think you can do on his reputation.
Frank Lee, you just do don’t get it. I’m not a Democrat, I’m not an American, I don’t live in America, you’ve just been offending me all the way over here in Scotland for over a year every time you write anything as I try to appreciate what other people who have also learned something from Chris Hedges have to say in the comments.
As to your last tirade, to suggest that Trump is not vulnerable when he’s just had all his New York companies’ licences to trade withdrawn for fraud, and people are suing the Michigan election officials under the 14th Amendment to prevent him from getting onto the Presidential election ballot, is a bit optimistic.
As to the Jan 6 crowd not being armed, Trump said to turn off the ‘mags’, metal detectors, because “they’re not there for me”, hoping that the mob would be armed. The Capitol police shot the woman you mention, not a construction worker amongst the other destruction workers, but an ex Air Force trained military type, while she was breaking into a secure working government area vital to the continued existence of democracy in America, where the mob whose assault she was spear-heading could have killed the policeman without the policeman being able to flee.
You’re right only in that I wanted Biden to beat Trump, and then I thought his life’s work was done and that he would hand over to Kamala Harris. Instead, he started playing giant games of chicken with Russia and China, and perpetuated Pompeo’s intent to kill Julian Assange by legal means or otherwise. This affects me. I want to know what’s going on and only Assange’s publications remain as an alternative to the narratives of governments. Ex turpi causa non oritur actio. If you’re engaged in an illegal act you can’t sue your accuser over it. Yet Assange has been held on US extradition warrant for four years without trial and has been under threat of an illegal extradition for eleven years. What do you think of personal freedom as it relates to that? He never assisted “the enemy”. The enemy is the absence of virtue and transparency in American foreign policy. Instead of going to hell for lying, they are trying to send Assange to hell, and their prospects of success in killing him affect my expectation of having any truth in journalism after that. After which we’ll have fascism in the UK as well as in the US where all your elected politicians of either party only get to Congress after public policy has been been bought and paid for by the corporations. And Hedges has explained to us that this is not reported because the billionaires also own the legacy media press.
It’s the same here. We have government ministers with four portfolios. How can they do it? They don’t have to. They have companies run by their sponsors to do it for them.
When America sneezes, Europe gets a cold. Our prime minister is a product of and a puppet for the interests of Goldman Sachs, which as Hedges tells us is a criminal organisation. If such organisations run America, they can buy us off without difficulty, which is why for me, the collapse of everything Eisenhower and Kennedy tried to put right and failed in, thanks again to the “security”!agencies that killed JFK, is so tragic and so important worldwide.
Well written and well argued. The American right needs a few lessons in how those of outside their gulag (for now) see them. The death of real journalism means nothing to them....because, for fascists, they know it all already.
Umberto Eco nails it when he says that for them, 'disagreement is treason'.
They can't engage intelligently with differences of perspective or opinion because for them, everything is the equivalent of a T or F test....two answers, one of them wrong. They are authoritarians...who ironically...know everything there is to know, and react with a kind of verbal violence to anyone who dares to disagree.
But disagree we must. We too share your dismay at the west's treatment of Julian Assange....but I guess when it comes to their foreign wars, anything they do has 'god on their side.' Another fascist convenience which makes persecuting the truth a patriotic necessity.
I can speak to the truth of what is being said here by my experience with Occupy Astoria-LIC, one of the many local offshoots of the Occupy Movement. Over the course of a year or so, we went from having local assemblies with standing room only crowds of enthusiastic people, ready to do something, to those so under attended there was no point in having them anymore. The problem was a prevalent strain of thought within the group, which held that demands were not necessary and that we should just hold demonstrations outside of the big banks and “occupy space,” like vacant store fronts, though what exactly this would accomplish - w/out a more coherent organization, leadership and specific political goals - was never clear to me.
It's a shame because these local groups, which appeared all over the country, were bringing people together in communities/neighborhoods, who had never known each other before, who all shared the same outrage over how Wall St., the banks and the complicit U.S. government had wiped out trillions in wealth that was reflected in the loss of homes, jobs etc., while their solution was to enrich themselves further off of govt bailout funds with austerity for the rest of us. It could have formed the basis for a new, independent political movement or even a party. If anyone is interested in learning more of my experience, I have posted a link to an article I wrote on the Occupy Movement that was published by Counterpunch below.
I would also recommend Aric McBay's two volume work, Full Spectrum Resistance because he echoes a lot of what is being said here but also lays out in detail exactly how to recruit and build an effective movement, as well as a lot on effective strategy and tactics. He also provides a lot of great history on effective resistance, revolutionary, civil rights and political movements of the past.
It's too bad that there was no discussion about worker self directed enterprises. Until we accept that there must be an economic revolution, hand in hand, with a political revolution, we will continue to be crushed.
"Revolutions require skilled organizers, self-discipline, an alternative ideological vision, revolutionary art and education... The successful revolutions of the past, along with their theorists, should be our guide, not the ephemeral images that entrance us on mass media."
I would not consider "revolutionaries" such as Marx, Lenin, or Mao as successful. They certainly engaged in monumental movements but as far as promoting human happiness all three were abject failures. The most successful revolutionary of modern times was Adam Smith. Arising within the Scottish Enlightenment, he certainly influenced one revolution, the American Revolution. Never once employing the word capitalism he is proclaimed as its father. Not really, he was simply describing an environment which best created human happiness. The depredations of capitalism during the early Industrial Revolution had little to do with Adam Smith's observations and were entirely due to the human behavioral patterns which have existed since humans created agriculture and civilization.
An alternative ideological vision, oh dear, that sounds like theory which then requires theorists. Did Marx come up with anything more original that the Seven Deadly Sins of Medieval Times? Vanity and Avarice have been with us since time immemorial. Wrath is all too often a result of real or imagined injustice. His theories were embraced by power elites who then succeeded in murdering millions all in the name of a human ideal. How was that any different from the Reformation, the Inquisition, or any number of jihads?
America is certainly ripe for a new progressive period and not the faux progressivism centered in our so-called elite universities. All the emphasis on LGBTQIA+, DEI, and Critical Race Theory is excellent misdirection from the core issues of economic insecurity, subsidizing the 0.01% of the wealthiest members of our civilization, a dysfunctional healthcare system, and the tremendous disparity in income across our civilization. These so-called elite institutions provided us with almost all the so-called leaders during the Age of Reagan and looking back can anyone consider them to have been successful? Successful for themselves to be sure but having a riot at the Capital on January 6th, 2021 is hardly a ringing endorsement.
The best model which eventually tamed the excesses of the Gilded Age was the Labor Movement in the US. It created the organization and infrastructure to challenged entrenched power groups. It had simple demands which were achieved in part by good luck: A member of the patrician class who did not see American Greatness in his "Class" but rather in the ideals at the foundation of this country. Both Roosevelts were revolutionaries of their time just as Lincoln was during his time. All three assailed unaccountable power structures and employed the power of centralized government to mitigate those structures.
Let us not waste time on "new" ideologies or theorists. Theory outside of hard science only has a foundation in human desire and not in the real world. Like many of our economists all that is created is a lot of arcane nonsense that can be sold for the validation of very venal political interests. Whether it is reward in heaven or a utopia on earth neither address the here and now and both can be dramatically misused.
Chris would be well served to support and extol the virtues of the current UAW strike and the various labor movements in this country. There are two burning concerns which all humanity faces: 1) Climate Change; and 2; How to share the abundance that arises from new technologies. Climate Change is new. Sharing the abundance is as old as humanity itself.
NO To Yet More Mansplaining, Whitesplaining, and Classplaining.
Rick, I was with you until that bit that seems to be de rigueur for every leftist comment nowadays. That LGBTQ and BIPOC claims are mere distractions. That economic issues should be central, usually with some call for working class interests. Asserted by mostly upper middle class white men who take for granted their right to tell the rest of us lessers what we should think and feel. Who've never had to fight to be recognized for what they are. Few of whom have ever used a tool in their lives, either.
Would you still claim the same if the letter were F?! BTW, I fit all of the the letter sets and was a blue collar worker and union activist for over 25 years. Labor is no mere armchair theoretical construct for me. Why insist on inadequate Aristotelian either/or reasoning? Forms of with us or against us. Nearly all of us who are activists regarding the issues of one of the letter sets are active in more.. It is especially galling to me as transgender/two spirit--THE scapegoat du jour for the far right, yet also subject to smug dismissal from those who should be our allies. Someday we will all be free, but right now the least among us are Black trans women. How many verboten letters in that?!
Dogmatic leftists proclaim the need for a "vanguard of the working class." Uh-huh. We get it; they think we're incapable of running our own revolution. Which is why, like my logger grandfather, I'm a Wobbly. (I.W.W.) I know through deep experience what working class life is, and I don't trust centralized bureaucracies; few of us do. Particularly if holding economic power, even if they purport to be acting for the common good. Historically, sooner or later it devolves to those in power fighting to hold onto power for themselves.
A thoughtful response. I deeply regret that we haven't already changed this situation on the ground though.......because part of me does agree with Rick. All my life I've wondered why we spend so much time trying to control other people's sexuality, gender, personality, temperment, etc. etc......it seems mean spirited...AND...a waste of time.
But I have to admit, the current focus on those rights sometimes seems trivial compared to what we're all facing........from the carbon induced climate emergency, the growing inequality of the few against the many, and the new willingness to find over identity issues.....to the ends of the earth it seems.........when we should have all grown up years ago and accepted that our species is wildly divergent in its desires and tastes...but also...
deeply similar in its basic needs.
We need affordable, sustainable homes that last at least a century. We need transportation grids that are more communal and less car centred. We need healthy food and farmers not entreproners in suits who import slave labour to grow that food in unsanitary and inhumane conditions. We need workers....and real work that has purpose. We need more and better schools....educated teachers. We need hospitals and medical professionals trained in our countries instead of poached from the poor third world.
There are so many vital needs going unanswered while we fret, or fetishize our identities....as an English teacher I often divide the word into its syllables in order to emphasis the I....the Dent....and the ideological uses that suffix is often put to. It's an individualistic obsession at the root of it.
I know I'm privileged to some extent, as a white working class woman, to be able to say this...but as our native people in Canada try to remind us EVERY CHILD MATTERS...and that shouldn't end when we mature. Just wish I could live to see the end of the individual policing of the differences that should shine like jewels........and the collective coming together to build this earth into the home it should be. For all of us.
But that is going to take some forgetting of the I....and some greater coming to Love of
the Us. We desperately need to raise our Empathy for all that lives. ...our two cats have some concerns also.
Ingamarie; Your reply is thoughtful. I've given up trying to be diplomatic because so few on the left, to my deep disappointment, are wiling to reflect on their own assumptions. Which often shade into dogma. Thus the de rigueur leftist denouncement of "identity politics." That this sounds so similar to denigrations from the far right goes unacknowledged.
When a leftist claims to speak in the name of the working class. I vehemently object because few (if any) such claimants are actually working class, blue collar, or union members themselves. Rendering their claim a "we know what's best for you" superiority and/or an abstract projection where their theory supersedes our real lives. The left has had more than 150 years to come up with something workable and to learn to communicate respectfully. Why would we trust people who are both arrogant and ineffective?!
Same goes for telling other people--like LGBT and BIPOC--they're secondary. Please at least refrain from pronouncements like "fetishizing our identities." As if the wave of a wand by someone not of those labels magically makes it all go away. Too much like the right wing, where minor errors (genocide and slavery) are irrelevant because so far in the past. Yeah, past...
In the U.S., Native American (Indian) treaties are on the same level as international agreements, having well-established legal standing. I realize the situation in Canada is way more complex (and in some cases worse legally than the U.S.) but the attitudes of First Peoples is similar. Few of us, given the long history, would be willing to take your word for it and cede our identities. "We're the good ones" isn't enough. I dare every leftist to go to BIPOC people and explain why you're right. Same for LGBT people; it's hardly reassuring to us that in the name of some greater good somewhere some day "the good ones" are willing to throw us trans/two spirits under the bus. Or at least won't object if said bus runs us over.
Why do leftists never consider that their denial of BIPOC and LGBT is divisive?!! Forcing us to choose between ourselves and a vague theory proclaimed by people who have yet to demonstrate they are trustworthy is an obvious NO. Coalition building and organizing, which I have actually done, cannot be achieved by expecting potential allies to conform to the demands of some group that assumes it already knows everything relevant.
So you don't think that the current emphasis on LGBTQIA+ doesn't suck most of the oxygen out of the room? Certainly, it has taken over the discussion of school boards, various campaigns, state legislatures, and the push back is growing. Are various LGBTQIA+ groups beginning to push back?
Throwing out terms like "Mansplaining" and "Whitesplaining", and "Classplaining" are not very effective arguments. Such words may feel very good but what have they achieved? Matters of identity are important to each individual; however, they are also very effective divisive tools and are often used mercilessly for division and manipulation.
Please consider that the first reaction of people to anything new or different is fear. That is virtually hard wired into our behavioral repertoire. In spite of this, people do change their views and what was once viewed as outside "normative behavior" becomes recognized as diversity and a facet of normal human behavior. Such diversity has always been there. I rather imagine that cognitive science and anthropology are providing these insights.
The question is emphasis and focus. During the period of Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War, significant strides were made. All came to naught though and the South slipped back into its antebellum structure; this lasted at least 100 years and is still with us to this day. The tool was identity politics. Poor Whites who had nothing in common with the Southern aristocracy bought into the propaganda of the southern elites. I doubt this will happen to the same degree today because I think people on whole are better educated; however, people are concerned with the positions of school boards, they are concerned with what schools are teaching, they are concerned with the continuous social experimentation being conducted in our public schools.
To label such individuals as transphobes, or homophobes, or racists, does nothing in the immediate term but play into the hands of the most cynical and manipulative factions of our power elite.
When it comes to power politics, old tricks are the best tricks. That and a very consequential election is nearly upon us. Following the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked if "we" had a Republic or a Monarchy. His answer: A Republic, if you can keep it.
So you blame the victims for being scapegoated?! Say we all meekly submit to those who assume the right to set everyone's political agenda and never said another word. Many of us cannot slip easily into invisibility and the hatred would still remain. More than that, some other group would become the enemy, like say the '50s Red Scare. As implied by my tee shirt from the Human Rights Campaign: "If They Come For Me In The Morning They Will Come For You In The Night."
The terms are not about me "feeling good," if for no other reason than they provoke the opposite. The main reason is the very distant hope that a sliver of uncertainty might get some self-assured leftist to question whether or not any of that just might apply to him. Ask women if they've ever experienced mansplaining. Go on the Native American FB pages or Black Twitter and read what they say about whitesplaining to each other. It's harsh. But then they're all stupid, easily fooled dupes, right?
As for classplaining, I've mentioned many times that I was also a blue collar worker and union activist for over 25 years. That dismissal of LGBT and BIPOC issues is being done in our name is especially offensive because it's merely more of the same dogmatic arrogance of those sure they know what's best for us peasants, too. Despite the fact that very few, if any, have actually earned a living in a working class job. To put it bluntly, I reject the claim that any non-working class elite can dictate to the working class what we should believe. MLK and Cesar Chavez were explicit about the need for a race and class alliance. They did NOT call for an either/or. Why is it so hard to consider that forcing a choice between class and race is in itself a cause of division?!!
"So you blame the victims for being scapegoated?! Say we all meekly submit to those who assume the right to set everyone's political agenda and never said another word. Many of us cannot slip easily into invisibility and the hatred would still remain."
This is not at all about blaming victims. Race, LGBTQ+, "real Americans", "small town" Americans are but tools in this game of who controls the River of Wealth.
The New Deal lived on for about 5 decades after it began. Its benefits flowed principally to the most powerful ethnic group when it came down to it but, it did lift all boats to varying degrees. It opened the door to many other progressive movements, some of which were not realized until this century.
With the arrival of Reagan, the counter revolution began and it is still in place. Its rhetorical tools were the location of Reagan's first campaign speech, "welfare queens", "socialism", and wealth "redistribution", to name but a few canards. Firing air traffic controllers was far more substantive. Given the outcome, it was all about wealth redistribution from the pocket of most Americans to the pockets of the 0.01%. The voters tend to pay attention to the shiny objects (Reagan was good at delivering bright words) and the platitudes and all the while the policies in Washington change to benefit an elite. Those policies are always about wealth.
So what have college educated DEI workers accomplished? Have their efforts helped Black or White Americans who labor? If so, how? Since government is always about wealth (the protection and redistribution thereof), I choose to emphasize that. It is something the majority of voters can align with. That is why I support the UAW's current position and I wish them success. Man may not live by bread alone but with greater wealth spread across a civilization comes greater security. More wide spread security can lead to an acceptance of more progressive thinking. I worry about this beginning of a new progressive movement being side tracked.
"Empiricists and 'hard' scientists invented skin-tone racist theories..."
Well is that is a rather biased generalization. People used to burn witches too (some places they still do). You don't have to look very far back into human history to see that ethnicity and identity have often been used as tools of dominance and manipulation. Obvious trait differences are employed to rationalize all sorts of inhumane behavior. There are opportunistic hacks for every situation. Here is an excellent example of non-gender, non-racist total BS masquerading as "theory". https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/. As with any "theory" it was proven to be false with how well it did not work in the "real world".
"Western Science actually has a short and largely nasty history at this point." There are many who would disagree with you. I certainly do. Has Western Science been misused? Most definitely. Human behavior can take almost any idea and fit it to individualized intentions. The mere fact that the population of the world has been able to expand to over 7 billion in a such a short period of time is a testament to the success of Western Science. Now with Climate Change, nuclear weapons, and basic human nature we are at a critical nexus. Surely we have the tools to destroy ourselves. We also have the tools to persevere and improve ourselves.
"We are primarily emotional creatures." Why do you think the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution created tools to overcome this aspect of human behavior. Prior to these advances we lived in a demon haunted world which was mysterious and chaotic. The models which arouse in 18th century Europe were doubtless a direct result of over 1000 years of continuous warfare and starvation in Europe. For the moment we have pretty much escaped those traps and hopefully we will continue to dodge the bullets and avoid the land mines.
"Western Scientific theory is not separate from desire or emotion (that's irrational) or more special than any other way of theorizing, and may well be more damaging historically. "
Let's look at this with Western logic (unfortunately, this thread does not support embedded images).
People have to separate the good from the bad of Western Civilization. Did it do many terrible things? Absolutely, European Expansion was a blight on the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia. I don't consider this to be due to any particular unique European trait, rather the "reach" of Europeans was far greater due to their technology. They also came with a very different set of cultural biases which arose in the turmoil of Eurasia. As such they could do more harm. We are generally unaware of the history which has preceded us though traces of past conflicts exist either through historical or biological records. China is one of the worlds oldest civilizations and it too has had a rather chaotic past. The Waring States period was decidedly brutal and the 20th century was horrific due to both external and internal issues. Most of the languages of Europe and South Asia are Indo-European, what happened to the original hunter gatherers? Some survived (the Basques and their language Euskara are thought to predate agricultural expansion from the Middle East & Anatolia), the Lapps are another example but remnants of a time before agricultural expansion are few. The genetics of the Bantu expansion in Africa support replacement more than intermixing of cultures. Humans have been a pretty unsavory lot throughout history. We are still inherently tribal creatures (and emotional).
Anthropology and anything approaching a "scientific" approach to the diversity of human existence did not even exist in Western culture until around the 19th century. Other cultures may have been more tolerant but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. One thing was uniform though, the technology resulting from the Scientific Revolution provided the means to subsume any and all opposition to the desire of those in possession of superior tools.
Perhaps we are in the process of creating a more tolerant and accepting culture. Europe has settled down by and large (at least France and Germany are not at each others throats). The sins of European expansion in the Americas is widely known and accepted as fact. Linguistics has provided the insight that all human languages are equally "modern". We know that the Mayans were very good mathematicians and in possession of mathematical concepts which were superior to those of Europe at the time.
So perfectly appropriate to criticize the faults of Western Civilization. Don't expect, however, that other civilizations are in any way more noble or fairer. As humans we share to many similar behaviors to expect much difference. The best we can do is to mitigate the devils and encourage the better angels.
The empiricism of the hard sciences and western rationalist philosophy are a big part of the problem. They are fine in their place; obviously of benefit. But they cannot address the question of meaning or purpose or of consciousness, for that matter. The best work on this is by Iain McGilchrist, a professor of English poetry who went back to med school and became a neuroscientist. He uses the very methodology and language of empiricism to show how it is inadequate.
I have a degree in botany and learned "ethnobotany" as a kid. Of course growing up on Native land, we didn't call it that. It was just stuff you learned cuz old people told you about it. When I went back to the Univ. of WA late in life, I found out people born and raised in Seattle couldn't even identify the dominant tree species. True all over North America--the colonist mind set of living on top of the land with no roots in it.
As the example of my avatar shows, I am also a Pac NW Indian Art designer and carver. I could not live without art. Really no culture can. In scientific terms, a painting is a chunk of cloth with splotches of pigment. It is from the artistic, mystical, poetic, and spiritual mode that we are able to give it meaning. And how we find meaning and purpose in life.
You may not like the empiricism and rationale approach of the "modern world" but the increase in aggregate wealth, increased longevity, and understanding of the universe is based on the hard sciences. This does not mean that art, music, etc. are not valued. It also does not mean that one cannot learn from other cultures. If anything much has been learned, sometimes through bitter experience.
Consider Adam Smith's observation on productive and unproductive labor. He stressed "productive labor" (those who make material goods of value) as having the priority. I think this stemmed from a deep sense of history and daily observations. Living as hunter gathers there was virtually no specialization. There was some music, some art, and certainly some culture; doubtless people were just as smart then as they are today. The significant florescence (diversity) did not begin until the increased wealth of productive labor through agriculture. Unproductive labor included many very esteemed professions: the ministry, the aristocracy, banking, the military, lawyers, physicians, musicians, opera singers, etc. Why? Because those professions were entirely dependent on the surplus wealth created by productive labor. The ability to create wealth (material wealth) is directly correlated with technical knowledge. Increased wealth beyond subsistence leads to at least the potential for greater human happiness.
Gandhi observed that poverty is the worst form of violence. I think we all lose sight of this. That is why I question the emphasis on "theory". Outside of the hard sciences, theory is a very subjective exercise and is often adopted with almost religious zeal. In the hands of the very cynical it can be a powerful weapon of manipulation and oppression.
Improve wealth distribution and opportunity within a civilization and the environment for art, music, and the acceptance of human diversity will arise naturally.
To be clear, it's not about what I may like or dislike. I brought up Iain McGilchrist because his massively detailed scientific work demonstrates not only why rationalism and empiricism are inadequate, but how this has led to the impasse of western culture.
It's not that these methodologies aren't valuable--obviously, they are--but they are limited. They are preferred by the left hemisphere of the brain, which also thinks linearly in terms of either/or, analyzing parts, certainty, and control. In politics, we live with the consequences like Dunning-Kruger and the Best and Brightest. We will not find the solutions to problems by applying more of what caused them.
The right hemisphere should predominate because it understands the whole, connects with the body and with intuition, appreciates multiplicities, and can live with uncertainty and ambiguity. The latter two are also what atomic physics has been telling us about reality for a century now.
"They are preferred by the left hemisphere of the brain, which also thinks linearly in terms of either/or, analyzing parts, certainty, and control. In politics, we live with the consequences like Dunning-Kruger and the Best and Brightest. We will not find the solutions to problems by applying more of what caused them."
I think you are falling into the trap of correlation and causation. You seem to think that certain outcomes are a result of certain methods. I think it is more likely that the outcomes already exist as a part of the human behavioral repertoire and it is the methods that then lead to their realization. Since agricultural civilizations arose armies and weapons have been an integral part of human existence.
Get back to me after you read, as I have, Dr. McGilchrist's masterwork //The Matter With Things (Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmasking of the World)// 2021 two vol. 1589 pp of which 182 pp are references. Or if you don't want to do heavy neuroscience and philosophy, then at least look at his YT lecture series. Especially the ones where he converses with top level scientists in other fields.
By "methodologies" in the paragraph above, I was referring to how the left hemisphere of the brain operates. While empiricism and rationalism are, as I said, valuable, they are also quite limited. McGilchrist makes it clear how this is so.
Human evolutionary dogma, especially Marxist, has long insisted on linear development where cities came after agriculture. This same theory claims that urban complexities required centralized authority and thus eventually royalty. Along with that, armies. Turns out the archeological evidence--worldwide, mind you--shows that none of these assumptions are true. Look at the evidence presented in //The Dawn of Everything (A New History of Humanity )// 2021 by David Graeber and David Wengrow. At least read a few articles in the online journal "Sapiens."
I'm not going to write any more on this subject. You want to cast this as about personal opinions when there's much more involved. I certainly distrust authority and insist that we blue collar workers can read, write, and think. And yeah, everyone is entitled to opinions. However, I also recognize there is such a thing as actual expertise. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I know one when I see one. And I've done the prep work it takes to understand the important details. Same for the archeological and anthropological evidence, particularly as regards Native Americans.
That's not what he's saying and we're not limited to the Aristotelian either/or, the bane of western thinking. Acknowledging that dictatorial bureaucratic Communism has failed doesn't mean capitalism has "won." Clearly a system that treats all life on Earth as resources to be exploited for profit is insane.
Besides, we've been propagandized into conflating free enterprise and capitalism to the benefit of the capitalists (the rentier class.) Free enterprise is the privately owned production of physically real goods and services, which would include worker cooperatives and the creations of artists. Capitalism is the privileging of that abstraction known as money and its manipulation for the benefit of the very few.
Rafi, you can’t know what to expect from people where you can’t estimate that they also live by your idea of truth. Game theory tells us that initial trust in the first encounter gives the more secure long term outcome where co-operation is of potential benefit. But there are a lot of people out there who don’t admit that certain groups of humans have status enough to warrant co-operation, as they can’t think of any benefit in it to themselves or their faction. This, Jon Carver of our acquaintance’s contempt for adherents of religions notwithstanding, is the rationale for accepting a universalist mandate for the golden rule of doing to others as you would have done to yourself. It accepts the same truth for others as you recognise for yourself, but gives them status in your thinking as your own group even where they don’t recognise the same truth. It would seem to be a prerequisite for peace, and any ideas forthcoming of what peace would look like, none of us having ever had any, I think, would need to be founded on it.
I agree with what you have written. Adam Smith was engaged in a "thought experiment" and trying to understand those behaviors that would maximize human happiness. Concepts of property came from a rejection of Feudalism. The Enlightenment was a critique of the power dynamics existent in European civilization since the Fall of Rome. Rome had gone from a republic of sorts to the divine right of an emperor. That mental state has infected humanity since the development of just about any "advanced" agrarian culture.
As far as property goes well the desire for property (security) is as old as humanity itself. The issue we face is the maldistribution of wealth. The Royalists among us always seem to have an inherent instinct to grab as much as possible during periods of revolutionary economic change. It happened in the Gilded Age and it certainly returned with the beginnings of Reaganism. I consider Reagan to be the first Confederate President of these United States (Jefferson Davis failed). One of the founding economic models of the US was slavery. Slavery: Devalued labor, devalued education, was principally extractive, and held any and all power in the hands of a few. The North had a somewhat different model and employed industry to create greater material wealth but Royalists abounded within the the Northern Power Elite as well. It took the Labor Movement to get some modicum of fairness and opportunity. The Age of Reagan (still ongoing) reversed much of that.
So do I think private property has merit? You bet I do; it provides individuals with an element of security and generational wealth. Do I think any one individual should be able to buy Senators, Congressmen, and all branches of government, absolutely not. We have a very distorted form of capitalism that Adam Smith specifically warned against: the formation of cartels and the use of government to stack the deck in favor of the powerful few.
I'm very suspicious though of any "new ideology" that has not learned from the effective and practical features of the past. Ideology for ideology's sake is just a likely to end in disaster as the status quo.
Personally, I would prefer no private property. But that's simply not practical. And I don't mean what the crass materialist RealPolitik would, that the machinations of any shift might be difficult. Rather it's that I can't see any reason, other than to assume my own omniscience, why everyone else must live by my idea of Truth. Since I realize I live in in the post-Einstein world of relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty, that implies plenty of room for fuzzy edges. Besides, political changes require alliances; refusing to deal with people who don't perfectly fit some dogmatic theoretical mold is arrogant as well as a stupid strategy.
Scroll up and read what I have to say about art. And my 1st entry, in which I say I'm a Wobbly. Again, it's not either/or. I brought up the difference between it and free enterprise because it drives a wedge between the two groups. I often just state "I'm anti-capitalist" and wait to be attacked. I then ask if those who object are anti-free enterprise. Because the two are not compatible. If you want political purity, okay...but it's not helpful for coalition building.
People always leave Adam Smith out of the conversation. Everything is Marx or the opposite. Ponder this comment from Adam Smith:
"The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. When they came in to the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were, perhaps, very much alike, and neither their parents nor play-fellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talents." Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations
Talk about nature versus nurture. Here is the Demon Father of Capitalism (a word Smith never used) opining on the environment as a very important factor in human development and noting that circumstances may very well dictate outcome. Smith provided this insight almost 250 years ago. We, as a civilization, are still arguing about it. Talk about INSANITY. Royalists, of course, hate this sort of discussion; it intrudes upon their divine right of kings mentality.
@Jon Carver - What you create is yours. If I like it, I will give you a surrogate for energy (money) in payment, provided of course you are willing to sell it. You benefit, I benefit, and we keep the middleman (the rentier) out of the equation.
If that is what Rafi Simonton is advocating for then I am in perfect alignment. I would rather purchase from "tradesmen" than large corporations (I try). It is more expensive but the tools of creation are becoming less expensive (unless one is talking about microprocessors) so I think the opportunity for businesses with greater productivity and profit sharing are possible.
If you sell any of it, or are paid as a musician or writer, then in a way yes. I'm NOT saying anyone has to; it's merely a way of labelling alternative thinking. Anarcho-syndicalism has local ownership of the means of production and profits are distributed for the whole group. The means of exchange used between groups may vary. But systems of trade over very long distances has been the case for thousands of years.
#cornelwest2024 or #strikethevote. Also, #juststopoil & #stopcopcity.
Here's a brilliant "theory and analysis" discussion featuring Dr. West and economist Richard Wolff ... as truthful today as it was when it was recorded 8 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zYAH-BZZTs
Going off on a bit of a tangent here but I read "Banality of Evil" and the real revelations in that book hit me kind of slowly I think. It's so infuriatingly simple. I, you, we suffer cause someone somewhere has a plesant little life that depends on it in someway or another. I work for a bank that deliberately understaffs it's branches. Obviously that means everyone has to work alot harder. This takes it's toll on the mind and body overtime. It is no mystery what stress does to people. The sscience is in! Yet I have reigonal managers who get a bonus for cost cutting. They have a financial incentive to slowly grind us down. And not even a very big one relatively speaking. Maybe a few BMW payments? I suppose that's worth your empathy.
You got it right. "There was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 until the global pandemic in 2020". But you missed what happened. You mentioned the pandemic BUT that is where you end the thought. What happened during the pandemic. Or have you forgotten. There was a massive take over by big fascist government and pharmaceutical control. Mandates for a procedure that didn’t work. Censorship of both you and doctors, politicians etc who had a different approach. And I have heard NOTHING from you on this.
I am 83 I took 3 jabs and then I saw what they we doing-I read RFK Jr's book. I then offered the book for free to friends and I was ignored. Not just ignored but chastised. None of my friends opened the book. And none have read it. I remember saying to my wife after reading the book "It was one of the best books I have read". No comment and she still refuses to look at the book.
I have been very disappointed in you and Noam my heros.
When will you address the issues raised by Kennedy's book and ideas? When will you discuss them? And if so why not.
If the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
This is how Civil Rights-Era leaders, men and women who once did genuinely heroic things, wound up as garden variety machine politicians.
This is how fire-eating Sixties radicals were neutered and became tenure-seeking academics and mild-mannered proponents of "working within the system".
For that matter, the Tea Party started off as opposition to bailouts, and became a wholly-owned Team R subsidiary.
The bailouts were cover for some much baser motives. Take a look at these "Tea Party" people and take a guess what they might be (scroll down for the photos)
The observation about the failed movements never questioning their neoliberal indoctrination is an important point. A chief characteristic of capitalism and neoliberalism is the destruction of imagination. People have lived so long with both that they can no longer imagine any alternatives. Thus the status quo is preserved, because there's never a real revolution.
Ultimately the power of Neoliberalism is its ability to exist as the ideological engine room of a financial order very few people understand in totality, hence our inability to deconstruct it rationally and imaginatively using the very same tools Neoliberalism used to take over the capitalist model but from a workers perspective rather than a financial élite perspective. Why not reverse the Neoliberal model but from a proletarian perspective rather than a 0.1% perspective? The challenge being the completely unhinged Security State apparatus has designs on global ownership now and know how to fight dirty with all the tools at their disposal. Including draconian “laws”. Any true revolution has to first deal with these inglorious basterds
The idea that Anarchism is antithetical to Organizing is very reductionist. As Chomsky points out, the Spanish revolution of 1936 was "not a spontaneous upsurge, but had been prepared in many decades of education, organization, struggle, defeat, and sometimes victories" Bringing down the wrath "of every major power system." And that's what largely lead to its defeat, not a lack of skillful oganizing due to a non-hierarchical approach.
Anarcho-Syndicalism carries the clue in the name, syndicalism is afterall, simply French for "Union".
The black bloc is but one small tendency, and one that many other Anarchists, especially outside of the US, find highly problematic and counterproductive. It's often macho and egocentric too, but It's not particularly representative of the whole body of thinking or acting over the many decades of Anarchism. It is, however, exactly that to its many enemies.
I don't know anybody who doesn't use corporate under the rubric of capitalism. Corporations are a creature of capitalism, and in fact, its primary and most successful "invention"
See my main entry where I argue for exactly that. We working people actually can read, write, and think; we just don't always know theoretical econ jargon. Over decades, I taught myself to understand the terminology as well as how to write like an intellectual so people like the ones here would pay attention. I was a blue collar union worker for more than 25 years and I understand how grating it is to be talked down to. Or worse, ignored. If these leftie activists want us on their side, let them speak WITH us--and not just AT us. BTW, the AFL-CIO website has some good info, written in plain words, on econ issues and on organizing.
"Revolutions are long, difficult projects that take years to make, slowly and often imperceptibly eating away at the foundations of power. "
While many traditional sources use the term anti-vaxxer as a pejorative and try to attach it to anti-science conspiracy it is in fact a revolutionary force years in the making. The informed base understands the deadly regulatory capture & opposes the Pharma Mafia that has transformed America into the fattest, sickest population in human history. Mounting victims of toxic food and rubber stamped, unsafe drug approvals is the revolution in the wings. Expect us.
A little knowledge can be a bad thing. Those who push the mantra of ill-health and conspiracies by healthcare are often younger and have experienced only the benefits of technological advancement. May do "their own research" which amounts to connecting on the internet with like minded individuals. Polio, tetanus, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria are all very real. Life expectancy in 1900 was around 50 years, it is now 78 in the US and higher still in other countries. One can justly criticize the financialization of our corporations but not all is conspiracy.
The "informed base" you suggest is a small fraction of those considered "anti-vaxxers". Most of the TVs know nothing of "regulatory capture" or the origins and causes of chronic disease (and don't give a rats ass about public health and oppose government intervention (i.e. regulation) and collective action).
This is what Hedges is driving at when he says that there can be no effective political revolution without theory and analysis.
Perhaps our perspectives of the informed segment are different based on experience. Mine has been over two decades in the food & drug reform area and your faithful TV watchers are jumping ship in droves and the direction of shift only one way & happening now at increasing speed whether the poll watchers sense it or not I see it happening. :~)
My analysis reflects my experience and reading. I've worked for 40 years in environmental policy. There are many of the same science, policy, political economy, and integrity issues with food and drug regulation.
I meant "AV" for your term "anti-vaxxer", not TV.
Even many of the food and drug safety reform people are poisoned by hyper individualism (e.g. health and fitness and diet, etc) and are totally opposed to public health and food and safety regulation and have some pretty twisted ideas, some echoing eugenics premises and concepts of purity. I'm now reading Naomi's Klein's recent book and shed does a good job breaking these issues down. Even some of the AV people are closet libertarians who are unwilling to even think of taking any risk - any at all - for the public good.
https://rumble.com/v3lhaey-is-oct-4-a-fema-run-domestic-radiation-bioterrorism-attack.html
I haven’t watched this yet, but if Wednesday, Oct 4 FEMA 5G plan goes the way people are speculating it might be, what should we do to be safe, and keep others safe. Should we get out of town away from 5G cell phone towers? Why would they tell us it is coming? I did read that there was as much 5G blasting in Wuhan in Jan 2020 at the beginning of the Pandemic as there was all over the US? I figured someone like you, Dr. Lora Chamberlin would be someone to give us practical advice.
What I think I'd suggest you expect in the not too distant future Pamela, is another pandemic. With the climate warming as fast as it is, the microbial world is on the march as well.......and given its life expectancy, it has a time advantage.,
Not being able to distinguish between the BS of capitalist pharmacueticals and viral science seems to be a common problem these days. But while I share your despair over what big pharma and corporate big Ag has done to our medicines and our food and fear those of us given to throwing the baby out with the bathwater may have their revolutionary plans cancelled by the grim reaper.
Should please all those know it alls who've claimed population is the real problem, all these years....an American led movement determined to face their opponents head on, face clear and vaccine free. Good luck.
Please read From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr Gene Sharp.
Please tell us why.
https://rumble.com/v3lhaey-is-oct-4-a-fema-run-domestic-radiation-bioterrorism-attack.html
I haven’t watched this yet, but if Wednesday, Oct 4 FEMA 5G plan goes the way people are speculating it might be, what should we do to be safe, and keep others safe. Should we get out of town away from 5G cell phone towers? Why would they tell us it is coming? I did read that there was as much 5G blasting in Wuhan in Jan 2020 at the beginning of the Pandemic as there was all over the US? I figured someone like you, Dr. Lora Chamberlin would be someone to give us practical advice.
As a New Yorker who remembers 9-11 happened the day before FEMA planned exercise Oct 3rd I'm staying close enough to home to walk back if anything disruptive happens but doubt very much we peons will ever get fair warning of actual threats to our safety.
Having read all the comments it appears nothing works! Nothing is pure. Every form of protest and of revolutionary intent contains a lousy element. Which ultimately rules. Geesh. No wonder things are getting worse! I guess we should all sign up for the best deal to pay for our funeral expenses and in the interim watch grade B and D films on Netflix. Cooperation? Naw. Competition for the best of what’s worse? You betcha. Meanwhile. Tread water. If you can find any through the smoke and fire.
Exactly. Like....its hopeless so give up on hoping.
Not that hope alone does much.......but the slow and persistent building of solidarity, listening to each other more than we lecture...changing our values and our lifestyle...cultivating empathy through action....if there's someone alone near you, invite them over for lunch and a chat....
It is our isolation and our weird fearof/contempt for each other that is defeating us. And I'm not talking about the revolution, I'm thinking about living the best life we all can, under the circumstances.
Surely to the great goddess its not human nature to give up without a struggle??
The nothing that wants to become something is struggling to be born,,through us….and that which is born is new….meaning never was before….is new like each baby being born
Exactly. I noticed this morning on our CBC that its a black woman leading the legal proceedings against the Donald....and her address was short, sweet and too the point.
No one is above the law.
Goes to show what we might be able to expect if more women, and people of colour were welcomed into a genuinely new world order. I can't even imagine the kind of courage necessary to survive and thrive in Amerika. But obviously, some of our most marginalized, silenced and ignored people have had those characteristics.
I want to be part of midwifing something new. We get the chance with every child born into a loving and socially conscious family. Good schools and real teacher education programs would be a great start.
Treating our care givers better than we treat our military killers and our financial wheeler dealers, like the fraudulent Donald would be a borning of note also.
Be well.
The myth is that bottom-up uprisings are only bottom-up uprisings. Successful revolutions are always supported by and fomented by the powerful elites that have an agenda. That agenda might be moral, but is often just in support of competition over other powerful elites.
If we look at all the American left "uprisings" since the Occupy movement, they are largely perpetrated by educated youth. These are kids programmed by a tribe of elites, that also use their media and non-profit control to gin up anger with the poor, to rebel... often without even being able to articulate what they are rebelling to achieve.
The US had a similar situation for where we are today... the Gilded Age. Similar to Jan-6, Coxey's Army march on Washington to advocate for the working class over the monopoly of the monied elites. When the group of around 500 arrived, Coxey and other leaders of the movement were arrested for walking on the grass of the United States Capitol.
Similar to Jan-6, a real grass-roots movement was put down by power yet again.
many were shot, killed and beaten, and not just for walking on the grass.
Jan 6 was no "real grassroots movement" - it was a riot.
It was a potential grassroots movement whose scattered and sometimes justifiable goals its putative leader did not even share--other than the red herring of a stolen election; and it became a riot for probably far less than a majority of those present, and many of those were simply caught up in that moment by long-simmering anger and frustration.
Blind sages and the elephant. Whatever floats your boat.
Romantic fantasies and Les Miz aside, as long as the 1% are united, they have nothing to fear from the 99%, because the 1% hold the levers of power and will do whatever it takes to retain power.
Revolutions happen when the 1% are disunited and 1% factions (usually the losing side) start casting about for allies.
Seriously? Our belief that 1% of the population is somehow invincible is almost amusing. The 1% hold unto power because of the masses of upper class and middle class folk who cast their lot in with them....preferring to manage things for their masters.
But decades if not centuries of denigrating the people, looking down on those who do the work, and striving to leave the productive class to join that of the consumers, may make it look like its the 1% that has all the power.
We give it to them. Not the other way around.
Of course the 1% divide and conquer. Of course they usurp power.
It works.
Agree. Revolution requires the divide and conflict within the 1%.
Real democracy helps regulate the tyrannical control of the 1%, but we have a corrupted democracy that is driven by the 1% control of media influence of politics.
I'd cut straight to the chase and say that we live in a de facto oligarchy with vestigial trappings of a democratic republic. We get to choose between two carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppets, but the real decisions aren't left to The Muppet Show.
Richard Lachmann describes how inter-elite conflict drives social change.
Yes, but it seems to me that the lack of an independent and free media is the source of this hold on power. It is the missing fourth branch of government that has provide some constraints on the tyranny of the controlling power. Today the power owns the media.
The media basically parrots the PMC line.
Think of Team D as the class consciousness of the PMC (which run pretty much all large corporations) made manifest, with minorities as junior partners.
Team R fulfills a similar role with regard to Local Gentry, with white evangelicals as their junior partners.
Look at the ownership of all the large media corporations. At the top are Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, JP Morgan, etc. Same with most of the large multi-national corporations.
Madison Avenue figured out that they could make the population crave and buy almost any product. So think of the dream of politicians and Wall Street to control the entire infrastructure of constituent/consumer influence. Wall Street can force tectonic market changes that they pre-bet on. The political establishment is in on the game.
Perhaps none of us knows what the revolutions of tomorrow requires....but I'd put my money on an educated populace and stop reifying the 'absolute power' of 1% of the population.
That assumption makes the majority of human beings sound like dunces, boot lickers and just maybe, downright facistic fools dying to make the Nazi salute. Could be the case, but I have a hard time believing I'm some kind of missing link.
Off with their heads....its been too obvious for too long they don't have a clue. Look at the current waste and facile determination to fight on....in America's current proxy war.
While millions go hungry, and your debt ridden economy shuts down once again. We need to divide that conflicted fraction of humanity before we can get started????
BALDERDASH.
Yes I agree with one point and I keep making it.......Education.
Problem is Jenny...the know it alls have been coming for education also. I'm recommending Umberto Eco's essay on the Characteristics of Ur Fascism to everyone lately. It can be found in The New York Book Review, June of 1995....and its not at all dated. He was boy in Mussolini's Italy and learned from early experience.
Of the 14 characteristics he discusses, the last one is for me the most chilling: In fascistic countries...and states, you'll find an impoverished school vocabulary....everything is kept so simple critical thinking has trouble getting started.
Listen for more than a couple of minutes to Trump.....and you hear that repetitive impoverished language in action. As a retired teacher of English, I've found it hard to understand how anyone could vote for someone so illiterate sounding.....but I hadn't read Eco, or calculated in the war on teachers and a literate curriculum that your right wing has supported for decades.
So yes...education. But just sitting in a desk in an overcrowded, underfunded classroom isn't education...at its worst, its a form of childhood incarceration.
Firstly thank you for engaging with me.
It's obvious I have to go back to Umberto Eco. I read his books years ago having had a European education.
"What is my right wing education," mean?
I am not stupid enough to know that reiterating the same thing over and over again means anything other than propaganda.
MY question to you Americans is this:
Why did you stop caring about Education?
Did you think that America was the greatest Country in the world and you didn't need to pay attention to Education?
Did you really think that the US was never going to die?
We lived in the US for 23yrs.
Luckily we lived in a Canyon in the LA School district........Topanga. Left wing community: Woody Guthrie and Will Geer. (Look it up)?
My daughter had the best Elementary School education.
Then she ended up in Junior School in Pacific Pallisades.....shit.
Her education stopped.
NO Geography/No critical thinking/no debates/no world history.
I was horror struck.
Over and over again she learned about G. Washington and A. Lincoln.
Book reviews: She quickly learned you read the back-cover of books and make a small contribution. She never read the books!
She was chucked out of her Art class: They said she didn't see things like normal people.
I am an artist and I was watching her development in this area and was intrigued. When she was chucked out of the Art Class I went into the school and raised hell. Nothing was done.
Since then my daughter (to my knowledge) has never drawn another picture.
We left the US when GWBush got in....we could see the writing on the wall.
My daughter got into drugs and we spent a huge amount of money trying to help her. We eventually went Bankrupt because there was so little assistance.
My daughter is fine now (and she would tell you herself) it was because we stood by her.
She now works with autistic kids in N. Carolina.
We never see her because her husband and her spend so much money on luxury.
She would tell you herself EXACTLY what education in the US she had!
What about the poor people who have NO idea what is going on and do not have the money to obtain Psychiatrists?
In my opinion you are 'talking down' to me!
Millions don’t go hungry. Geesh. The Shirky Principle at work.
What I love about one line put downs Frank........is it isn't really necessary to reply to them. They indicate the contempt for anyone who thinks differently than they do...by using one of the easiest of logical fallacies. Yours is the fallacy of contradiction. I'll wait in anticipation for you to lead off next time with an ad hominem.
Newsflash: I'm not just talking Amerika here....the countries the USA sanctions in its sanctimonious belief that it knows everything are included. Cuba and Venezuela are included. The countries of central America are included....and Africa.
Food insecurity is rising everywhere....and will continue to grow, as 'wealth creators' scoop up more than their share, and the climate makes growing the food, harvesting it from the oceans etc. not only more challenging........but impossible.
Your certainties change nothing...but may well be a goodly part of why we've failed to create a more equitable, sharing and caring world.
Have a nice day.
So you think that US policy on hunger and poverty is a failure now because it does not do enough to help everyone in the world?
Yes, the Shirky Principle.
Leaving aside for the moment that the US has lifted billions out of poverty, this is the Schwab and Soros globalist hogwash that serves to destroy American sovereignty and turn it into a bottomless debt ATM for a giant global charity run by Brussels. Meanwhile in all the places in the US that liberals dominate they homeless population has exploded and keeps growing. Have you opened your house to illegal immigrants? Why don't you move to these places so in need of our help and provide some? Just curious. Or maybe yours are just the luxury beliefs of the life-meaning challenged over-educated upper middle class? You need a project and starting a business that hires people so they can take care of their own family is too hard?
There is not one thing any rational and knowing person can agree with here. I sense a social and economic malcontent with a degree advocating for yet another failed attempt at authoritarian collectivism where millions die. Fix the problem of corporatism, not lose your brain and advocate for crap communism.
I like the day off walk out.........it makes a lot of sense..especially now with precarity and minimum wages so low that people can't afford a living space on their wages anyway....
But we also need a lot of rethinking.....the more money that is floating around the less it seems everyone has....and the more expensive everything has to get for businesses just to keep their noses above water. A break from debt ridden consumerism would give us time to think about how we move forward to a better place for all of us.
Neoliberalism sure sold us the farm.........Mussolini's black shirts in expensive suits I'm thinking, got us all on this wealth creation frenzy that has left most of unbelievable debt....but still
The vacate on jets fly, the cruise ships cruise and the emissions keep rising.
I'm for going back to those houseparties we had in the 60's...we're even putting up crabapple cider and beer from scratch in preparation.
“Frank Lee”, can’t you just stick to finding a rational leader? A grass roots movement has nothing to do with a dog-whistled bunch of hyper-masculine gun nuts playing into the hands of a narcissist real estate chancer who put them up to attempting to murder his Vice President while the man was legally handing over elected power.
If you want a grass roots movement, go out and campaign for third party candidacies to be freed of onerous regulation to save being stifled by the giant weeds dominating political growth. Your party’s Gaetz has just conspired to sack its speaker just so that it can do another Newt Gingrich on you and prove he has the power to stifle government altogether. Because, like all conservatives, Republican congresspeople think that running the country is a part time thing which you do with your corporations. Presumably the representatives still get paid while they, every one, head to Washington every election cycle just to shut it down. You’re going to need government to rescue you from your environment and the hordes of zombies on the fence when you run out of useable laws to keep people alive. You’ll be voting on the right to arm bears before you give a red cent to a single mother. There are 14 year-olds in Thailand now doing mall shootings in your honour. Not one of you Republicans has an idea what personal freedom might mean other than some sort of Halloween hay ride where you chase people in the dark with running chainsaws with the blades removed. It’s not enough to keep propaganda flowing against Hedges readership. One day you’ll discover the need to make sense in your own mind in order to have any effect on that readership.
Frank no doubt will rise to the bait and prove you more than right in your assessment. He has more time on his hands than brains in his head it appears. And forgive the ad hominem, but when someone comes on simply to bad mouth Chris Hedges and tell everyone who sees problems he wants to ignore that they're wrong....one loses patience.
"bunch of hyper-masculine gun nuts"
None of those working class construction workers were armed with guns. Now, your partisan Democrat capitol police where sure armed and itching to kill an unarmed tiny woman protestor.
"playing into the hands of a narcissist real estate chancer"
At least he is a grandiose narcissist and not the vulnerable narcissists that infest your party.
"who put them up to attempting to murder his Vice President"
Lying will send you to hell after your die.
"while the man was legally handing over elected power."
Yeah well, the Houston Astros legally won the 2017 World Series.
"Because, like all conservatives, Republican congresspeople think that running the country is a part time thing which you do with your corporations. "
Well, this is embarrassing for you. The donations are going to Democrats. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizations
"Not one of you Republicans has an idea what personal freedom might mean other than some sort of Halloween hay ride where you chase people in the dark with running chainsaws with the blades removed."
What a hoot when your party is pushing a Ministry of Trust, destroying 1A and 2A rights. Destroying the lives of children by unneeded school shutdowns and promoting gender change drugs and surgery. Also defunding cops thus resulting in many more dead black. Canceling fossil fuels thus causing hyper inflation that is destroying the financial future of poor and middle class families. Spending billions to another useless foreign war. Jacking up the debt and deficit to level never imagined and saddling future generations with the bill. Opening the border to allow a flood of illegals in thus decimating communities in the border states and now that is coming to your neighborhood, suddenly it is a problem. Pushing the racist and toxic parasitic mind of woke. Yeah, you Democrats are all about freedom.
Whew! Sucks to be American it seems. Once I read both sides of the toxic name calling, I have to feel grateful I'm Canadian. The Canadian take: Trump is obviously a narcissist....and a fraudulent real estate investor by the sounds of the proceedings in New York.
The Ukrainian proxy war is going to help break your government..........but then, my understanding is that you've been massively in debt for years. What you get I suppose when you set it up so that only the middle class and the poor pay taxes....everything is for sale.........and your leaders assume they know better than anyone outside America's borders, as to how to run all the countries of the world.
Youse guys have a lot of problems....most of them of your own making. Had you kept your noses out of the revolutions in Central and South America perhaps you wouldn't have so many people at your southern borders. But will any of you, Republican or Democrat, consider that possibility??? Not a chance. Chris does include it in his analysis however.
Had you stopped yer entreproners from moving their very profitable plants to third world countries where they could take advantage of poor people of colour, you might be less in debt, and yer rust belt wouldn't be so desperate....but fat chance of admitting that either. Amerikans are never wrong, so it's obviously China's fault.
Had you butted out of foreign wars and instead built solid social programs in your own countries you'd be less in debt, the rest of the world wouldn't hate you quite as much and you'd have avoided these seasonal threats to 'shut down the government'...but hey!!! Hating government and waving flags for the death of people in far countries is just too darn much fun, better than the 4th of July even.
Had you imagined that collaboration, cooperation and sharing might be values worth emulating, rather than accusing your 'red commies' of coming for yer precious liberties, you might have a prosperous country now. But Endless profit is a much bigger part of the Amerikan Dream than Social Justice or Care Giving.
So have fun with the verbal abuse of one another....the grim certainties espoused on all sides. You aren't the first empire to over extend itself in foreign conquest...while distributing bread to its citizens at home. The Romans made the template.
Look those Losers Up and if you enjoy that read, check out Umberto Eco's essay on Fascism in The New York Review of Books...June 1995. He grew up under Mussolini and the war's aftermath, so knows a thing or two about fascism. Which seems to me, to be the road you're on.
I suspect Chris may think so too. He's a brave man and a true patriot. You should be ashamed of the hatchet job you think you can do on his reputation.
Frank Lee, you just do don’t get it. I’m not a Democrat, I’m not an American, I don’t live in America, you’ve just been offending me all the way over here in Scotland for over a year every time you write anything as I try to appreciate what other people who have also learned something from Chris Hedges have to say in the comments.
As to your last tirade, to suggest that Trump is not vulnerable when he’s just had all his New York companies’ licences to trade withdrawn for fraud, and people are suing the Michigan election officials under the 14th Amendment to prevent him from getting onto the Presidential election ballot, is a bit optimistic.
As to the Jan 6 crowd not being armed, Trump said to turn off the ‘mags’, metal detectors, because “they’re not there for me”, hoping that the mob would be armed. The Capitol police shot the woman you mention, not a construction worker amongst the other destruction workers, but an ex Air Force trained military type, while she was breaking into a secure working government area vital to the continued existence of democracy in America, where the mob whose assault she was spear-heading could have killed the policeman without the policeman being able to flee.
You’re right only in that I wanted Biden to beat Trump, and then I thought his life’s work was done and that he would hand over to Kamala Harris. Instead, he started playing giant games of chicken with Russia and China, and perpetuated Pompeo’s intent to kill Julian Assange by legal means or otherwise. This affects me. I want to know what’s going on and only Assange’s publications remain as an alternative to the narratives of governments. Ex turpi causa non oritur actio. If you’re engaged in an illegal act you can’t sue your accuser over it. Yet Assange has been held on US extradition warrant for four years without trial and has been under threat of an illegal extradition for eleven years. What do you think of personal freedom as it relates to that? He never assisted “the enemy”. The enemy is the absence of virtue and transparency in American foreign policy. Instead of going to hell for lying, they are trying to send Assange to hell, and their prospects of success in killing him affect my expectation of having any truth in journalism after that. After which we’ll have fascism in the UK as well as in the US where all your elected politicians of either party only get to Congress after public policy has been been bought and paid for by the corporations. And Hedges has explained to us that this is not reported because the billionaires also own the legacy media press.
It’s the same here. We have government ministers with four portfolios. How can they do it? They don’t have to. They have companies run by their sponsors to do it for them.
When America sneezes, Europe gets a cold. Our prime minister is a product of and a puppet for the interests of Goldman Sachs, which as Hedges tells us is a criminal organisation. If such organisations run America, they can buy us off without difficulty, which is why for me, the collapse of everything Eisenhower and Kennedy tried to put right and failed in, thanks again to the “security”!agencies that killed JFK, is so tragic and so important worldwide.
Well written and well argued. The American right needs a few lessons in how those of outside their gulag (for now) see them. The death of real journalism means nothing to them....because, for fascists, they know it all already.
Umberto Eco nails it when he says that for them, 'disagreement is treason'.
They can't engage intelligently with differences of perspective or opinion because for them, everything is the equivalent of a T or F test....two answers, one of them wrong. They are authoritarians...who ironically...know everything there is to know, and react with a kind of verbal violence to anyone who dares to disagree.
But disagree we must. We too share your dismay at the west's treatment of Julian Assange....but I guess when it comes to their foreign wars, anything they do has 'god on their side.' Another fascist convenience which makes persecuting the truth a patriotic necessity.
I can speak to the truth of what is being said here by my experience with Occupy Astoria-LIC, one of the many local offshoots of the Occupy Movement. Over the course of a year or so, we went from having local assemblies with standing room only crowds of enthusiastic people, ready to do something, to those so under attended there was no point in having them anymore. The problem was a prevalent strain of thought within the group, which held that demands were not necessary and that we should just hold demonstrations outside of the big banks and “occupy space,” like vacant store fronts, though what exactly this would accomplish - w/out a more coherent organization, leadership and specific political goals - was never clear to me.
It's a shame because these local groups, which appeared all over the country, were bringing people together in communities/neighborhoods, who had never known each other before, who all shared the same outrage over how Wall St., the banks and the complicit U.S. government had wiped out trillions in wealth that was reflected in the loss of homes, jobs etc., while their solution was to enrich themselves further off of govt bailout funds with austerity for the rest of us. It could have formed the basis for a new, independent political movement or even a party. If anyone is interested in learning more of my experience, I have posted a link to an article I wrote on the Occupy Movement that was published by Counterpunch below.
I would also recommend Aric McBay's two volume work, Full Spectrum Resistance because he echoes a lot of what is being said here but also lays out in detail exactly how to recruit and build an effective movement, as well as a lot on effective strategy and tactics. He also provides a lot of great history on effective resistance, revolutionary, civil rights and political movements of the past.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/23/reminiscences-of-a-wall-street-occupier/
It's too bad that there was no discussion about worker self directed enterprises. Until we accept that there must be an economic revolution, hand in hand, with a political revolution, we will continue to be crushed.
"Revolutions require skilled organizers, self-discipline, an alternative ideological vision, revolutionary art and education... The successful revolutions of the past, along with their theorists, should be our guide, not the ephemeral images that entrance us on mass media."
I would not consider "revolutionaries" such as Marx, Lenin, or Mao as successful. They certainly engaged in monumental movements but as far as promoting human happiness all three were abject failures. The most successful revolutionary of modern times was Adam Smith. Arising within the Scottish Enlightenment, he certainly influenced one revolution, the American Revolution. Never once employing the word capitalism he is proclaimed as its father. Not really, he was simply describing an environment which best created human happiness. The depredations of capitalism during the early Industrial Revolution had little to do with Adam Smith's observations and were entirely due to the human behavioral patterns which have existed since humans created agriculture and civilization.
An alternative ideological vision, oh dear, that sounds like theory which then requires theorists. Did Marx come up with anything more original that the Seven Deadly Sins of Medieval Times? Vanity and Avarice have been with us since time immemorial. Wrath is all too often a result of real or imagined injustice. His theories were embraced by power elites who then succeeded in murdering millions all in the name of a human ideal. How was that any different from the Reformation, the Inquisition, or any number of jihads?
America is certainly ripe for a new progressive period and not the faux progressivism centered in our so-called elite universities. All the emphasis on LGBTQIA+, DEI, and Critical Race Theory is excellent misdirection from the core issues of economic insecurity, subsidizing the 0.01% of the wealthiest members of our civilization, a dysfunctional healthcare system, and the tremendous disparity in income across our civilization. These so-called elite institutions provided us with almost all the so-called leaders during the Age of Reagan and looking back can anyone consider them to have been successful? Successful for themselves to be sure but having a riot at the Capital on January 6th, 2021 is hardly a ringing endorsement.
The best model which eventually tamed the excesses of the Gilded Age was the Labor Movement in the US. It created the organization and infrastructure to challenged entrenched power groups. It had simple demands which were achieved in part by good luck: A member of the patrician class who did not see American Greatness in his "Class" but rather in the ideals at the foundation of this country. Both Roosevelts were revolutionaries of their time just as Lincoln was during his time. All three assailed unaccountable power structures and employed the power of centralized government to mitigate those structures.
Let us not waste time on "new" ideologies or theorists. Theory outside of hard science only has a foundation in human desire and not in the real world. Like many of our economists all that is created is a lot of arcane nonsense that can be sold for the validation of very venal political interests. Whether it is reward in heaven or a utopia on earth neither address the here and now and both can be dramatically misused.
Chris would be well served to support and extol the virtues of the current UAW strike and the various labor movements in this country. There are two burning concerns which all humanity faces: 1) Climate Change; and 2; How to share the abundance that arises from new technologies. Climate Change is new. Sharing the abundance is as old as humanity itself.
NO To Yet More Mansplaining, Whitesplaining, and Classplaining.
Rick, I was with you until that bit that seems to be de rigueur for every leftist comment nowadays. That LGBTQ and BIPOC claims are mere distractions. That economic issues should be central, usually with some call for working class interests. Asserted by mostly upper middle class white men who take for granted their right to tell the rest of us lessers what we should think and feel. Who've never had to fight to be recognized for what they are. Few of whom have ever used a tool in their lives, either.
Would you still claim the same if the letter were F?! BTW, I fit all of the the letter sets and was a blue collar worker and union activist for over 25 years. Labor is no mere armchair theoretical construct for me. Why insist on inadequate Aristotelian either/or reasoning? Forms of with us or against us. Nearly all of us who are activists regarding the issues of one of the letter sets are active in more.. It is especially galling to me as transgender/two spirit--THE scapegoat du jour for the far right, yet also subject to smug dismissal from those who should be our allies. Someday we will all be free, but right now the least among us are Black trans women. How many verboten letters in that?!
Dogmatic leftists proclaim the need for a "vanguard of the working class." Uh-huh. We get it; they think we're incapable of running our own revolution. Which is why, like my logger grandfather, I'm a Wobbly. (I.W.W.) I know through deep experience what working class life is, and I don't trust centralized bureaucracies; few of us do. Particularly if holding economic power, even if they purport to be acting for the common good. Historically, sooner or later it devolves to those in power fighting to hold onto power for themselves.
A thoughtful response. I deeply regret that we haven't already changed this situation on the ground though.......because part of me does agree with Rick. All my life I've wondered why we spend so much time trying to control other people's sexuality, gender, personality, temperment, etc. etc......it seems mean spirited...AND...a waste of time.
But I have to admit, the current focus on those rights sometimes seems trivial compared to what we're all facing........from the carbon induced climate emergency, the growing inequality of the few against the many, and the new willingness to find over identity issues.....to the ends of the earth it seems.........when we should have all grown up years ago and accepted that our species is wildly divergent in its desires and tastes...but also...
deeply similar in its basic needs.
We need affordable, sustainable homes that last at least a century. We need transportation grids that are more communal and less car centred. We need healthy food and farmers not entreproners in suits who import slave labour to grow that food in unsanitary and inhumane conditions. We need workers....and real work that has purpose. We need more and better schools....educated teachers. We need hospitals and medical professionals trained in our countries instead of poached from the poor third world.
There are so many vital needs going unanswered while we fret, or fetishize our identities....as an English teacher I often divide the word into its syllables in order to emphasis the I....the Dent....and the ideological uses that suffix is often put to. It's an individualistic obsession at the root of it.
I know I'm privileged to some extent, as a white working class woman, to be able to say this...but as our native people in Canada try to remind us EVERY CHILD MATTERS...and that shouldn't end when we mature. Just wish I could live to see the end of the individual policing of the differences that should shine like jewels........and the collective coming together to build this earth into the home it should be. For all of us.
But that is going to take some forgetting of the I....and some greater coming to Love of
the Us. We desperately need to raise our Empathy for all that lives. ...our two cats have some concerns also.
Be well.
Ingamarie; Your reply is thoughtful. I've given up trying to be diplomatic because so few on the left, to my deep disappointment, are wiling to reflect on their own assumptions. Which often shade into dogma. Thus the de rigueur leftist denouncement of "identity politics." That this sounds so similar to denigrations from the far right goes unacknowledged.
When a leftist claims to speak in the name of the working class. I vehemently object because few (if any) such claimants are actually working class, blue collar, or union members themselves. Rendering their claim a "we know what's best for you" superiority and/or an abstract projection where their theory supersedes our real lives. The left has had more than 150 years to come up with something workable and to learn to communicate respectfully. Why would we trust people who are both arrogant and ineffective?!
Same goes for telling other people--like LGBT and BIPOC--they're secondary. Please at least refrain from pronouncements like "fetishizing our identities." As if the wave of a wand by someone not of those labels magically makes it all go away. Too much like the right wing, where minor errors (genocide and slavery) are irrelevant because so far in the past. Yeah, past...
In the U.S., Native American (Indian) treaties are on the same level as international agreements, having well-established legal standing. I realize the situation in Canada is way more complex (and in some cases worse legally than the U.S.) but the attitudes of First Peoples is similar. Few of us, given the long history, would be willing to take your word for it and cede our identities. "We're the good ones" isn't enough. I dare every leftist to go to BIPOC people and explain why you're right. Same for LGBT people; it's hardly reassuring to us that in the name of some greater good somewhere some day "the good ones" are willing to throw us trans/two spirits under the bus. Or at least won't object if said bus runs us over.
Why do leftists never consider that their denial of BIPOC and LGBT is divisive?!! Forcing us to choose between ourselves and a vague theory proclaimed by people who have yet to demonstrate they are trustworthy is an obvious NO. Coalition building and organizing, which I have actually done, cannot be achieved by expecting potential allies to conform to the demands of some group that assumes it already knows everything relevant.
So you don't think that the current emphasis on LGBTQIA+ doesn't suck most of the oxygen out of the room? Certainly, it has taken over the discussion of school boards, various campaigns, state legislatures, and the push back is growing. Are various LGBTQIA+ groups beginning to push back?
Throwing out terms like "Mansplaining" and "Whitesplaining", and "Classplaining" are not very effective arguments. Such words may feel very good but what have they achieved? Matters of identity are important to each individual; however, they are also very effective divisive tools and are often used mercilessly for division and manipulation.
Please consider that the first reaction of people to anything new or different is fear. That is virtually hard wired into our behavioral repertoire. In spite of this, people do change their views and what was once viewed as outside "normative behavior" becomes recognized as diversity and a facet of normal human behavior. Such diversity has always been there. I rather imagine that cognitive science and anthropology are providing these insights.
The question is emphasis and focus. During the period of Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War, significant strides were made. All came to naught though and the South slipped back into its antebellum structure; this lasted at least 100 years and is still with us to this day. The tool was identity politics. Poor Whites who had nothing in common with the Southern aristocracy bought into the propaganda of the southern elites. I doubt this will happen to the same degree today because I think people on whole are better educated; however, people are concerned with the positions of school boards, they are concerned with what schools are teaching, they are concerned with the continuous social experimentation being conducted in our public schools.
To label such individuals as transphobes, or homophobes, or racists, does nothing in the immediate term but play into the hands of the most cynical and manipulative factions of our power elite.
When it comes to power politics, old tricks are the best tricks. That and a very consequential election is nearly upon us. Following the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked if "we" had a Republic or a Monarchy. His answer: A Republic, if you can keep it.
Denying identity Is Itself A Cause Of Division
So you blame the victims for being scapegoated?! Say we all meekly submit to those who assume the right to set everyone's political agenda and never said another word. Many of us cannot slip easily into invisibility and the hatred would still remain. More than that, some other group would become the enemy, like say the '50s Red Scare. As implied by my tee shirt from the Human Rights Campaign: "If They Come For Me In The Morning They Will Come For You In The Night."
The terms are not about me "feeling good," if for no other reason than they provoke the opposite. The main reason is the very distant hope that a sliver of uncertainty might get some self-assured leftist to question whether or not any of that just might apply to him. Ask women if they've ever experienced mansplaining. Go on the Native American FB pages or Black Twitter and read what they say about whitesplaining to each other. It's harsh. But then they're all stupid, easily fooled dupes, right?
As for classplaining, I've mentioned many times that I was also a blue collar worker and union activist for over 25 years. That dismissal of LGBT and BIPOC issues is being done in our name is especially offensive because it's merely more of the same dogmatic arrogance of those sure they know what's best for us peasants, too. Despite the fact that very few, if any, have actually earned a living in a working class job. To put it bluntly, I reject the claim that any non-working class elite can dictate to the working class what we should believe. MLK and Cesar Chavez were explicit about the need for a race and class alliance. They did NOT call for an either/or. Why is it so hard to consider that forcing a choice between class and race is in itself a cause of division?!!
"MLK and Cesar Chavez were explicit about the need for a race and class alliance."
I agree, it is a natural alliance. So far it has not been realized.
"So you blame the victims for being scapegoated?! Say we all meekly submit to those who assume the right to set everyone's political agenda and never said another word. Many of us cannot slip easily into invisibility and the hatred would still remain."
This is not at all about blaming victims. Race, LGBTQ+, "real Americans", "small town" Americans are but tools in this game of who controls the River of Wealth.
The New Deal lived on for about 5 decades after it began. Its benefits flowed principally to the most powerful ethnic group when it came down to it but, it did lift all boats to varying degrees. It opened the door to many other progressive movements, some of which were not realized until this century.
With the arrival of Reagan, the counter revolution began and it is still in place. Its rhetorical tools were the location of Reagan's first campaign speech, "welfare queens", "socialism", and wealth "redistribution", to name but a few canards. Firing air traffic controllers was far more substantive. Given the outcome, it was all about wealth redistribution from the pocket of most Americans to the pockets of the 0.01%. The voters tend to pay attention to the shiny objects (Reagan was good at delivering bright words) and the platitudes and all the while the policies in Washington change to benefit an elite. Those policies are always about wealth.
So what have college educated DEI workers accomplished? Have their efforts helped Black or White Americans who labor? If so, how? Since government is always about wealth (the protection and redistribution thereof), I choose to emphasize that. It is something the majority of voters can align with. That is why I support the UAW's current position and I wish them success. Man may not live by bread alone but with greater wealth spread across a civilization comes greater security. More wide spread security can lead to an acceptance of more progressive thinking. I worry about this beginning of a new progressive movement being side tracked.
"Empiricists and 'hard' scientists invented skin-tone racist theories..."
Well is that is a rather biased generalization. People used to burn witches too (some places they still do). You don't have to look very far back into human history to see that ethnicity and identity have often been used as tools of dominance and manipulation. Obvious trait differences are employed to rationalize all sorts of inhumane behavior. There are opportunistic hacks for every situation. Here is an excellent example of non-gender, non-racist total BS masquerading as "theory". https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/. As with any "theory" it was proven to be false with how well it did not work in the "real world".
"Western Science actually has a short and largely nasty history at this point." There are many who would disagree with you. I certainly do. Has Western Science been misused? Most definitely. Human behavior can take almost any idea and fit it to individualized intentions. The mere fact that the population of the world has been able to expand to over 7 billion in a such a short period of time is a testament to the success of Western Science. Now with Climate Change, nuclear weapons, and basic human nature we are at a critical nexus. Surely we have the tools to destroy ourselves. We also have the tools to persevere and improve ourselves.
"We are primarily emotional creatures." Why do you think the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution created tools to overcome this aspect of human behavior. Prior to these advances we lived in a demon haunted world which was mysterious and chaotic. The models which arouse in 18th century Europe were doubtless a direct result of over 1000 years of continuous warfare and starvation in Europe. For the moment we have pretty much escaped those traps and hopefully we will continue to dodge the bullets and avoid the land mines.
"Western Scientific theory is not separate from desire or emotion (that's irrational) or more special than any other way of theorizing, and may well be more damaging historically. "
Let's look at this with Western logic (unfortunately, this thread does not support embedded images).
1. Population of the world. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1006502/global-population-ten-thousand-bc-to-2050/
2. Life expectancy dramatically increased since 1900. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
3. Abject poverty dramatically decreased since 1970. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty
People have to separate the good from the bad of Western Civilization. Did it do many terrible things? Absolutely, European Expansion was a blight on the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia. I don't consider this to be due to any particular unique European trait, rather the "reach" of Europeans was far greater due to their technology. They also came with a very different set of cultural biases which arose in the turmoil of Eurasia. As such they could do more harm. We are generally unaware of the history which has preceded us though traces of past conflicts exist either through historical or biological records. China is one of the worlds oldest civilizations and it too has had a rather chaotic past. The Waring States period was decidedly brutal and the 20th century was horrific due to both external and internal issues. Most of the languages of Europe and South Asia are Indo-European, what happened to the original hunter gatherers? Some survived (the Basques and their language Euskara are thought to predate agricultural expansion from the Middle East & Anatolia), the Lapps are another example but remnants of a time before agricultural expansion are few. The genetics of the Bantu expansion in Africa support replacement more than intermixing of cultures. Humans have been a pretty unsavory lot throughout history. We are still inherently tribal creatures (and emotional).
Anthropology and anything approaching a "scientific" approach to the diversity of human existence did not even exist in Western culture until around the 19th century. Other cultures may have been more tolerant but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. One thing was uniform though, the technology resulting from the Scientific Revolution provided the means to subsume any and all opposition to the desire of those in possession of superior tools.
Perhaps we are in the process of creating a more tolerant and accepting culture. Europe has settled down by and large (at least France and Germany are not at each others throats). The sins of European expansion in the Americas is widely known and accepted as fact. Linguistics has provided the insight that all human languages are equally "modern". We know that the Mayans were very good mathematicians and in possession of mathematical concepts which were superior to those of Europe at the time.
So perfectly appropriate to criticize the faults of Western Civilization. Don't expect, however, that other civilizations are in any way more noble or fairer. As humans we share to many similar behaviors to expect much difference. The best we can do is to mitigate the devils and encourage the better angels.
Science and Art
The empiricism of the hard sciences and western rationalist philosophy are a big part of the problem. They are fine in their place; obviously of benefit. But they cannot address the question of meaning or purpose or of consciousness, for that matter. The best work on this is by Iain McGilchrist, a professor of English poetry who went back to med school and became a neuroscientist. He uses the very methodology and language of empiricism to show how it is inadequate.
I have a degree in botany and learned "ethnobotany" as a kid. Of course growing up on Native land, we didn't call it that. It was just stuff you learned cuz old people told you about it. When I went back to the Univ. of WA late in life, I found out people born and raised in Seattle couldn't even identify the dominant tree species. True all over North America--the colonist mind set of living on top of the land with no roots in it.
As the example of my avatar shows, I am also a Pac NW Indian Art designer and carver. I could not live without art. Really no culture can. In scientific terms, a painting is a chunk of cloth with splotches of pigment. It is from the artistic, mystical, poetic, and spiritual mode that we are able to give it meaning. And how we find meaning and purpose in life.
You may not like the empiricism and rationale approach of the "modern world" but the increase in aggregate wealth, increased longevity, and understanding of the universe is based on the hard sciences. This does not mean that art, music, etc. are not valued. It also does not mean that one cannot learn from other cultures. If anything much has been learned, sometimes through bitter experience.
Consider Adam Smith's observation on productive and unproductive labor. He stressed "productive labor" (those who make material goods of value) as having the priority. I think this stemmed from a deep sense of history and daily observations. Living as hunter gathers there was virtually no specialization. There was some music, some art, and certainly some culture; doubtless people were just as smart then as they are today. The significant florescence (diversity) did not begin until the increased wealth of productive labor through agriculture. Unproductive labor included many very esteemed professions: the ministry, the aristocracy, banking, the military, lawyers, physicians, musicians, opera singers, etc. Why? Because those professions were entirely dependent on the surplus wealth created by productive labor. The ability to create wealth (material wealth) is directly correlated with technical knowledge. Increased wealth beyond subsistence leads to at least the potential for greater human happiness.
Gandhi observed that poverty is the worst form of violence. I think we all lose sight of this. That is why I question the emphasis on "theory". Outside of the hard sciences, theory is a very subjective exercise and is often adopted with almost religious zeal. In the hands of the very cynical it can be a powerful weapon of manipulation and oppression.
Improve wealth distribution and opportunity within a civilization and the environment for art, music, and the acceptance of human diversity will arise naturally.
To be clear, it's not about what I may like or dislike. I brought up Iain McGilchrist because his massively detailed scientific work demonstrates not only why rationalism and empiricism are inadequate, but how this has led to the impasse of western culture.
It's not that these methodologies aren't valuable--obviously, they are--but they are limited. They are preferred by the left hemisphere of the brain, which also thinks linearly in terms of either/or, analyzing parts, certainty, and control. In politics, we live with the consequences like Dunning-Kruger and the Best and Brightest. We will not find the solutions to problems by applying more of what caused them.
The right hemisphere should predominate because it understands the whole, connects with the body and with intuition, appreciates multiplicities, and can live with uncertainty and ambiguity. The latter two are also what atomic physics has been telling us about reality for a century now.
"They are preferred by the left hemisphere of the brain, which also thinks linearly in terms of either/or, analyzing parts, certainty, and control. In politics, we live with the consequences like Dunning-Kruger and the Best and Brightest. We will not find the solutions to problems by applying more of what caused them."
I think you are falling into the trap of correlation and causation. You seem to think that certain outcomes are a result of certain methods. I think it is more likely that the outcomes already exist as a part of the human behavioral repertoire and it is the methods that then lead to their realization. Since agricultural civilizations arose armies and weapons have been an integral part of human existence.
Wrong on both accounts.
Get back to me after you read, as I have, Dr. McGilchrist's masterwork //The Matter With Things (Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmasking of the World)// 2021 two vol. 1589 pp of which 182 pp are references. Or if you don't want to do heavy neuroscience and philosophy, then at least look at his YT lecture series. Especially the ones where he converses with top level scientists in other fields.
By "methodologies" in the paragraph above, I was referring to how the left hemisphere of the brain operates. While empiricism and rationalism are, as I said, valuable, they are also quite limited. McGilchrist makes it clear how this is so.
Human evolutionary dogma, especially Marxist, has long insisted on linear development where cities came after agriculture. This same theory claims that urban complexities required centralized authority and thus eventually royalty. Along with that, armies. Turns out the archeological evidence--worldwide, mind you--shows that none of these assumptions are true. Look at the evidence presented in //The Dawn of Everything (A New History of Humanity )// 2021 by David Graeber and David Wengrow. At least read a few articles in the online journal "Sapiens."
I'm not going to write any more on this subject. You want to cast this as about personal opinions when there's much more involved. I certainly distrust authority and insist that we blue collar workers can read, write, and think. And yeah, everyone is entitled to opinions. However, I also recognize there is such a thing as actual expertise. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I know one when I see one. And I've done the prep work it takes to understand the important details. Same for the archeological and anthropological evidence, particularly as regards Native Americans.
That's not what he's saying and we're not limited to the Aristotelian either/or, the bane of western thinking. Acknowledging that dictatorial bureaucratic Communism has failed doesn't mean capitalism has "won." Clearly a system that treats all life on Earth as resources to be exploited for profit is insane.
Besides, we've been propagandized into conflating free enterprise and capitalism to the benefit of the capitalists (the rentier class.) Free enterprise is the privately owned production of physically real goods and services, which would include worker cooperatives and the creations of artists. Capitalism is the privileging of that abstraction known as money and its manipulation for the benefit of the very few.
Rafi, you can’t know what to expect from people where you can’t estimate that they also live by your idea of truth. Game theory tells us that initial trust in the first encounter gives the more secure long term outcome where co-operation is of potential benefit. But there are a lot of people out there who don’t admit that certain groups of humans have status enough to warrant co-operation, as they can’t think of any benefit in it to themselves or their faction. This, Jon Carver of our acquaintance’s contempt for adherents of religions notwithstanding, is the rationale for accepting a universalist mandate for the golden rule of doing to others as you would have done to yourself. It accepts the same truth for others as you recognise for yourself, but gives them status in your thinking as your own group even where they don’t recognise the same truth. It would seem to be a prerequisite for peace, and any ideas forthcoming of what peace would look like, none of us having ever had any, I think, would need to be founded on it.
I agree with what you have written. Adam Smith was engaged in a "thought experiment" and trying to understand those behaviors that would maximize human happiness. Concepts of property came from a rejection of Feudalism. The Enlightenment was a critique of the power dynamics existent in European civilization since the Fall of Rome. Rome had gone from a republic of sorts to the divine right of an emperor. That mental state has infected humanity since the development of just about any "advanced" agrarian culture.
As far as property goes well the desire for property (security) is as old as humanity itself. The issue we face is the maldistribution of wealth. The Royalists among us always seem to have an inherent instinct to grab as much as possible during periods of revolutionary economic change. It happened in the Gilded Age and it certainly returned with the beginnings of Reaganism. I consider Reagan to be the first Confederate President of these United States (Jefferson Davis failed). One of the founding economic models of the US was slavery. Slavery: Devalued labor, devalued education, was principally extractive, and held any and all power in the hands of a few. The North had a somewhat different model and employed industry to create greater material wealth but Royalists abounded within the the Northern Power Elite as well. It took the Labor Movement to get some modicum of fairness and opportunity. The Age of Reagan (still ongoing) reversed much of that.
So do I think private property has merit? You bet I do; it provides individuals with an element of security and generational wealth. Do I think any one individual should be able to buy Senators, Congressmen, and all branches of government, absolutely not. We have a very distorted form of capitalism that Adam Smith specifically warned against: the formation of cartels and the use of government to stack the deck in favor of the powerful few.
I'm very suspicious though of any "new ideology" that has not learned from the effective and practical features of the past. Ideology for ideology's sake is just a likely to end in disaster as the status quo.
Personally, I would prefer no private property. But that's simply not practical. And I don't mean what the crass materialist RealPolitik would, that the machinations of any shift might be difficult. Rather it's that I can't see any reason, other than to assume my own omniscience, why everyone else must live by my idea of Truth. Since I realize I live in in the post-Einstein world of relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty, that implies plenty of room for fuzzy edges. Besides, political changes require alliances; refusing to deal with people who don't perfectly fit some dogmatic theoretical mold is arrogant as well as a stupid strategy.
Scroll up and read what I have to say about art. And my 1st entry, in which I say I'm a Wobbly. Again, it's not either/or. I brought up the difference between it and free enterprise because it drives a wedge between the two groups. I often just state "I'm anti-capitalist" and wait to be attacked. I then ask if those who object are anti-free enterprise. Because the two are not compatible. If you want political purity, okay...but it's not helpful for coalition building.
People always leave Adam Smith out of the conversation. Everything is Marx or the opposite. Ponder this comment from Adam Smith:
"The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. When they came in to the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were, perhaps, very much alike, and neither their parents nor play-fellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and conveniency of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great difference of talents." Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations
Talk about nature versus nurture. Here is the Demon Father of Capitalism (a word Smith never used) opining on the environment as a very important factor in human development and noting that circumstances may very well dictate outcome. Smith provided this insight almost 250 years ago. We, as a civilization, are still arguing about it. Talk about INSANITY. Royalists, of course, hate this sort of discussion; it intrudes upon their divine right of kings mentality.
@Jon Carver - What you create is yours. If I like it, I will give you a surrogate for energy (money) in payment, provided of course you are willing to sell it. You benefit, I benefit, and we keep the middleman (the rentier) out of the equation.
If that is what Rafi Simonton is advocating for then I am in perfect alignment. I would rather purchase from "tradesmen" than large corporations (I try). It is more expensive but the tools of creation are becoming less expensive (unless one is talking about microprocessors) so I think the opportunity for businesses with greater productivity and profit sharing are possible.
If you sell any of it, or are paid as a musician or writer, then in a way yes. I'm NOT saying anyone has to; it's merely a way of labelling alternative thinking. Anarcho-syndicalism has local ownership of the means of production and profits are distributed for the whole group. The means of exchange used between groups may vary. But systems of trade over very long distances has been the case for thousands of years.
#cornelwest2024 or #strikethevote. Also, #juststopoil & #stopcopcity.
Here's a brilliant "theory and analysis" discussion featuring Dr. West and economist Richard Wolff ... as truthful today as it was when it was recorded 8 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zYAH-BZZTs
Going off on a bit of a tangent here but I read "Banality of Evil" and the real revelations in that book hit me kind of slowly I think. It's so infuriatingly simple. I, you, we suffer cause someone somewhere has a plesant little life that depends on it in someway or another. I work for a bank that deliberately understaffs it's branches. Obviously that means everyone has to work alot harder. This takes it's toll on the mind and body overtime. It is no mystery what stress does to people. The sscience is in! Yet I have reigonal managers who get a bonus for cost cutting. They have a financial incentive to slowly grind us down. And not even a very big one relatively speaking. Maybe a few BMW payments? I suppose that's worth your empathy.
Thanks so much for writing this - lets hope people read it, think, and organize and act accordingly.
You got it right. "There was a decade of popular uprisings from 2010 until the global pandemic in 2020". But you missed what happened. You mentioned the pandemic BUT that is where you end the thought. What happened during the pandemic. Or have you forgotten. There was a massive take over by big fascist government and pharmaceutical control. Mandates for a procedure that didn’t work. Censorship of both you and doctors, politicians etc who had a different approach. And I have heard NOTHING from you on this.
I am 83 I took 3 jabs and then I saw what they we doing-I read RFK Jr's book. I then offered the book for free to friends and I was ignored. Not just ignored but chastised. None of my friends opened the book. And none have read it. I remember saying to my wife after reading the book "It was one of the best books I have read". No comment and she still refuses to look at the book.
I have been very disappointed in you and Noam my heros.
When will you address the issues raised by Kennedy's book and ideas? When will you discuss them? And if so why not.
Richard Romano
If the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
This is how Civil Rights-Era leaders, men and women who once did genuinely heroic things, wound up as garden variety machine politicians.
This is how fire-eating Sixties radicals were neutered and became tenure-seeking academics and mild-mannered proponents of "working within the system".
For that matter, the Tea Party started off as opposition to bailouts, and became a wholly-owned Team R subsidiary.
The bailouts were cover for some much baser motives. Take a look at these "Tea Party" people and take a guess what they might be (scroll down for the photos)
http://www.wolfenotes.com/2009/09/corporate-republican-manipulation-of-moran-nation-green-is-the-new-red/
I used the word "neutralize", which embraces, among other things, murder.
Brilliant. I wrote something similar a while back:
America's Intifada Must Dig Deeper
https://bit.ly/Americas-Intifada
The observation about the failed movements never questioning their neoliberal indoctrination is an important point. A chief characteristic of capitalism and neoliberalism is the destruction of imagination. People have lived so long with both that they can no longer imagine any alternatives. Thus the status quo is preserved, because there's never a real revolution.
Ultimately the power of Neoliberalism is its ability to exist as the ideological engine room of a financial order very few people understand in totality, hence our inability to deconstruct it rationally and imaginatively using the very same tools Neoliberalism used to take over the capitalist model but from a workers perspective rather than a financial élite perspective. Why not reverse the Neoliberal model but from a proletarian perspective rather than a 0.1% perspective? The challenge being the completely unhinged Security State apparatus has designs on global ownership now and know how to fight dirty with all the tools at their disposal. Including draconian “laws”. Any true revolution has to first deal with these inglorious basterds
The idea that Anarchism is antithetical to Organizing is very reductionist. As Chomsky points out, the Spanish revolution of 1936 was "not a spontaneous upsurge, but had been prepared in many decades of education, organization, struggle, defeat, and sometimes victories" Bringing down the wrath "of every major power system." And that's what largely lead to its defeat, not a lack of skillful oganizing due to a non-hierarchical approach.
Anarcho-Syndicalism carries the clue in the name, syndicalism is afterall, simply French for "Union".
The black bloc is but one small tendency, and one that many other Anarchists, especially outside of the US, find highly problematic and counterproductive. It's often macho and egocentric too, but It's not particularly representative of the whole body of thinking or acting over the many decades of Anarchism. It is, however, exactly that to its many enemies.
I don't know anybody who doesn't use corporate under the rubric of capitalism. Corporations are a creature of capitalism, and in fact, its primary and most successful "invention"
Believe it or not, another Civil War will have to be stopped by the 1%. https://youtu.be/27Q17eO1B7Y?si=uqQLHPhgVIJ7qVLs
Chris I just want to say this to you:
IF you want to get your message across to the average possibly 'working class' citizen you need to start talking in SIMPLE words.
This begins with A:...........
B:...........
I am fed up with intellectuals trying to talk to uneducated people. Even I am having trouble with your pages and I am far from stupid.
YOU teach in University.right?
Try talking simple to the working class. It might work?
See my main entry where I argue for exactly that. We working people actually can read, write, and think; we just don't always know theoretical econ jargon. Over decades, I taught myself to understand the terminology as well as how to write like an intellectual so people like the ones here would pay attention. I was a blue collar union worker for more than 25 years and I understand how grating it is to be talked down to. Or worse, ignored. If these leftie activists want us on their side, let them speak WITH us--and not just AT us. BTW, the AFL-CIO website has some good info, written in plain words, on econ issues and on organizing.