Yet another autopsy on our democracy
Summary: 150 years ago, capitalists needed to construct the nation-state in order to demolish aristocratic rule and create the literate, regimented workforce needed for industrial capitalism... Like free markets, nation-states are not natural; they must be constructed. The Victorian-era bourgeoisie created the nation-state to enforce the free market and the horrendous conditions of the new working class.
Today, the oligarchs need to destroy the middle class nation-state in order to create international corporatism and the global surveillance state. To them, 50 years of stable middle class prosperity was merely some scaffolding that enabled the creation of the computer industry. With that industry up and running - and able to largely automate the literacy-requiring jobs that were essential to its creation - it is time for them to tear down the scaffolding and force the 99% of the First World population back to being precarious, illiterate day laborers with no government protections who can be herded like cattle, and culled with wars and starvation.
I began with a summary because this article is very long - IOW, TLDR. Don't say you weren't warned. Also, see the NOTE at the end.
----------
The Deconstruction of the Nation State at the hands of the new Praetorian Bourgoisie
Naomi Klein has covered what is happening much better than I could:
...the time for conspiracy theories has past. The conspiracies are real. These are practices now, not theories: “the deconstruction of the regulatory state; a full-bore attack on the welfare state and social services (rationalized in part through bellicose racial fear-mongering and attacks on women for exercising their rights); the unleashing of a domestic fossil fuel frenzy (which requires the sweeping aside of climate science and the gagging of large parts of government bureaucracy); and a civilizational war against immigrants and ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ (with ever-expanding domestic and foreign theatres).
(The goal of neoliberals) is all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest... It’s a program so defiantly unjust and so manifestly corrupt that it can only be pulled off with the assistance of divide-and-conquer racial and sexual politics, as well as a nonstop spectacle of media distractions.
In contrast to Ms. Klein, I want to discuss why this is happening, to place this in the context of the ongoing rule of the capitalist oligarchy and its recent toxic mutation from constructive (industrial) capitalism to destructive (financialized, looting) capitalism as a means of making a collective living.
There is plenty of writing about the oligarchy. We have names for it, such as "the .01%". We know their ruthless, sociopathic fanaticism from the stories of people like the Koch Brothers and Peter Thiel. But, we have only epithets for the non-oligarch members of the 1%. We call these footsoldiers vague, derogatory terms such as The Village, the professional classes, yuppie scum, etc. In this essay, I want to focus on the footsoldiers, whom I call the "Praetorian Bourgeoisie" (PB). This term has both historical resonance and social meaning. These apparatchiks, like the old Victorian-era bourgeoisie (OB), make a nice living doing the paperwork (these days, the computer work) and middle management for the oligarchs. The PB demographics resemble the original, Victorian size of the bourgeoisie - about 1-10% of the population. (It was only after WW2 that we had the massive class, encompassing 50% or more of the society, which we today call "middle". )
----
1. Who are the Praetorian Bourgeoisie?
I refer to them as Praetorian because, they are even more militaristic and confrontational than the OB. They think they can push even First World countries around because, as Hilaire Belloc said,
"Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not"
- or in the case of the PB, the data center and the call center. Amazon has flouted the tax laws of many countries since the day it was founded; it has used monopoly practices against Hachette and other publishers. Most of the FAAGM** have been sued all over the world for various attempts to monopolize or bundle services. Recently, we have seen an escalation in the contempt in which the PB holds governments. Companies like Uber and AirBnB openly flout the law, and when met with lawsuits and regulatory actions fight them with a Wall St.-supplied multi-billion dollar warchest. Peter Thiel openly supports this lawlessness, saying that democracy is in the way of monopoly profit.
Beyond economic belligerence, the PB have created the internet version of the Stasi. The FAAGM keep databases on everything you do, and work seamlessly with the CIA and the military. The recent hysteria about "Russian" hacking is just the GWOT power grab repeated on line, with hacking events corresponding to terror incidents. Only, it is even easier to false flag a hack than a terror incident, as we know from actual CIA code given to Wikileaks. Like the Roman Praetorian guard, the PB are a small group of highly trained mercenaries who are legitimized by and report only to an out-of-control Imperial Presidency. Also, as we are seeing with the Russian hacking BS about Trump, they are more than willing to depose an emperor who does not obey and enrich them.
There are other similarities to Victorian times. Like the OB, the PB fervently believe the hype that technology has made them omnipotent, and these underlings frantically scheme to be elevated to oligarch status. Like the OB, many of the PB hacker elite are "navvies" - people without a deeper understanding of what they are doing, but merely logic-chopping skills - who take their success (often from writing a mere couple of thousand lines of code) as a right to preach, ala Herbert Spencer, their ignorance and contempt of society as a virtue. Like the OB, they are ruthless, religious zealots for laissez faire and financial fundamentalism - the Church of Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher; they find the lower classes (everyone who is not an internet millionaire) an obnixious, whining bunch of losers (can you say "useless eaters") who deserve to be kept in their low, deplorable place in the world. With Amazon leading the way, they have recreated part-time work and the Victorian workhouse.
In short, the PB combine Victorian moral hypocrisy with Roman brutality. But, there are huge differences - mostly to do with the destructive nature of computerized financial colonialism and the ever shrinking economic pie that such looting causes. The economist, William Lazonick calls them "predatory value extractors". With the exception of computer and telecom hardware vendors, the PB manufacture almost nothing; and the little they do make is outsourced to China.
What the PB have done is to enable and preside over the repurposing Wall St. into a gambling casino of leverage and derivatives; the sell-off of our industrial base for a one-time profit; and the hijacking of our politics with computerized polling and voter suppression, and targeted advertising. Basically, the PB are smash and grab looters, using computers for their breaking and entering. They can whitewash this fact with buzzwords like "entrepreneurialism" and "value creation", but its still theft. Like burglars, they maximize their short term profits with no thought for the future of the people whose livelihood they have ruined. Like the great Highland Enclosures, they are making a fortune from destroying a way of life - regulated industrial capitalism and middle class democracy - as they dismiss their victims as backwards bumpkins.
The unspoken irony in all of this is that the PB are destroying what the OB created. Of course, to the oligarchs, its not ironic; its merely another chapter in their continuing dominance over the little people. 150 years ago, the oligarchs needed to construct the nation-state in order to demolish aristocratic rule and create the regimented literate workforce needed for industrial capitalism. Today, the oligarchs need to destroy the middle class nation-state in order to create international corporatism and the global surveillance state. To them, 50 years of stable middle class prosperity was merely some scaffolding that enabled the creation of the computer industry. With the computer industry up and running - and able to largely automate the literacy-requiring jobs that were essential to its creation - it was time for them to tear down the scaffolding and force the 99% of the First World population back to being precarious, illiterate day laborers with no government protections who can be herded like cattle, and culled with wars and starvation.
** FAAGM = Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. (a.k.a, FAANG, with Netflix for Microsoft)
----
2. Why did the OB create the middle class in the first place? (A necessary history lesson.)
At the start of the Industrial Revolution, capitalists had to overcome an entrenched aristocracy of blood and title. This aristocracy was in the way of the capitalist reliance upon contract law, as opposed to social law. There is a large literature, completely ignored by the disciples of laissez faire, about how capitalists manipulated or controlled the government in order to construct and enforce the so-called "free" market; e.g.,modification of the Poor Law of 1834, the repeal of Corn Laws, etc.
Left-leaning readers are familiar with the artificiality of the free market. I want to focus on the less well-known, but similar, construction of the nation-state (as opposed to the nation), which occurred together with the construction of the free market. Like free markets, nation-states are not natural; they must be constructed. The Victorian-era bourgeoisie created the nation-state to enforce the free market and the horrendous conditions of the new working class.
There was a fundamental difference between the movement to found nation-states and 'nationalism'. The one was a programme to consturct a political artifact claiming to be based on the other...in the age of nation building (national identity) was believed to imply the logical, necessary, as well as desirable transformation of 'nations' into sovereign nation-states with coherent territory defined by the area settled by the members of a 'nation', which was in turn defined by its past history, its common culture, its ethnic composition and, increasingly, its language...The nation was not a spontaneous growth but an artefact...It had actually to be constructed. Hence the crucial importance of the institutions which could impose national uniformity, which meant primarily the state, especially state education, state employment, and military service...for new nation-states (public schools) were of crucial importance, for through them alone the 'national language' could actually become the written and spoken language of the people...schools and institutions, in imposing one language of instruction, also imposed a culture, a nationality. In areas of homogeneous settlement this did not matter...(but minorities) demanded the right to their own schools...The paradox of nationalism was that in forming its own nation, it automatically created the counter-nationalism of those whom it now forced into choices between assimilation and inferiority.
- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (1975)
What Hobsbawm says about the civic religion of nationalism is critical to understanding what the PB are up to today:
with the decline of the real communities to which people had been used...a decline which occurred because they clearly no longer encompassed...most contingencies of people's lives, their members felt a need for something to take their place. The imaginary community of "the nation" could fill this void...
Governments now reached down directly to each citizen on their territory in everyday life, through modest but omnipresent agents, from postmen and policemen to teachers and railway employees. Authorities...needed a way of welding together the state's subjects against subversion and dissidence. "The nation" was the new civic religion of states. It provided a cement which bonded all citizens to their state...and a counterweight to those who appealed to other loyalties over state loyalty - to religion, to nationality or ethnicity not identified with the state, perhaps above all to class...
What made state nationalism even more essential was that both the economy of a technological era and the nature of its public and private administration required mass elementary education, or at least literacy. The nineteenth century was the era when oral communication broke down...From the state's point of view, the school had a further advantage: it could teach all children how to be good subjects and citizens.
- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (1987) p 148-150
It seems today, that literate written communication has broken down. But that's OK, because corporations communicate via images and sounds, as Neal Postman explained decades ago. Today's civic religion is consumerism, instant gratification, constant titillation. Loyalty is to corporations - witness the pathetic Apple fanboys. Church services are conducted at rock concerts and sporting events.
3. Why is the PB destroying the First World nation-state and public education?
The PB is destroying the First World nation-state because, via banksters and the MIC, it is now its own super-national entity. The corporatized Wall St./Pentagon aristocracy no longer has need of the nation-state or its systems of mass education. In the same manner in which it was constructed from above for the benefit of the business class oligarchs, and for the same reason, the nation-state is being deconstructed. The neocons started the privatization of the military, the signature cadre of the nation-state, under GWB, and it has continued unopposed. The entity formerly known as Blackwater has more say in US foreign policy than 90% of our elected representatives.
The nation-state is now disposable because the leading oligarchic corporations are bigger than most countries. The companies don't need countries anymore, so they don't need to share prosperity with workers anywhere. To the global corps, workers are disposable parts. Elizabeth Warren's on-target observation that "there is nobody in this country who got rich on their own" merely highlighted this PB fantasy of self-made-ness without causing them to reflect on it.
Corporations move their money around the world to dodge the taxes and regulations of nation-states. With the rise of computerization, they have no need for armies of educated first world workers. In fact, being educated and having civic religion patriotism about a nation-state is an obstacle to total corporate one-world government. Financialized capitalism doesn't want literate, regimented workers; it wants ignorant, anesthetized slackers and opiate-suiciding lumpenproletariat. So, not only is the nation-state under assault; but so is any kind of mass public education. Peter Thiel, the uber-Libertarian, pays people not to go to college.
The assault on public education began in the 1970s, in response to desegregation. It gained velocity in the 1980s under the guise of religious and Libertarian home schooling. In the 1990s, the corporations decided there was plenty of loot to be had in public education budgets. They saw schools as profit centers, not public goods of value to society. They turned colleges and universities into bottom-line businesses, importing cost-benefit analysis and overpaid executives, and extracting patents from government-funded research. They jacked the rates on student loans and made them non-dischargable, thereby creating a generation of indentured slaves. They replaced tenured faculty with underpaid, itinerant, teachers (most with student loans) who are paid per course, in a return to the notorious piecework practices of industrial sweatshops. They made college into an expensive lottery ticket for a real life, so that no one of meager means would dare rock the boat or choose a social, as opposed to a STEM, curriculum. Having devalued the social sciences, they let go many of those faculty members.
In short, they turned public higher education into a trade school, while returning elite private schools to their role as social gatekeepers. In the 2000s, Wall St. started heavily funding and lobbying for the complete privatization of public education, from kindergarten through college. This is the final act of the deconstruction of nation-state education. It is well underway. Since education, especially language skills are critical to nation-state identity. The oligarchs love it when the 99% can't think critically, can't organize.
In parallel to the right wing assault on education, the left wing started dis-assembling the idea of equal-before-the-law citizenship in a nation-state. What started out as color-blind Civil Rights laws and regulations was mutated by the Clinton crowd into Identity Politics, which is a halfway house between democracy and tribalism.
IP is a recipe for divisiveness, as groups compete to prove who is more victimized. What used to be a single American polity, with inclusive, coalition-forming interest groups, has become a tribalistic fracas among self-defined, exclusive minority groups. This has lead to the reductio ad absurdum of elevating the miniscule group of "transgendered" people (including, ludicrously, children as young as five) into a cause celebre overnight. Cynical observers note that the publicity for the so-called transgendered started the minute the last genuine and significantly-sized minority group, the gay community was granted equal rights under the law.
The synergy between college as a profit center and IP has turned the historical role of free speech on its head. College campuses ban speakers because they might make their students "uncomfortable", thereby causing a loss of revenue; or because they might offend an important donor. Truly, tribalism has arrived on college campuses; and the hypocrisy of so-called liberal PB intellectuals on the matter is stunning.
4. The PB has lots of practice destroying nation-states. They've been doing it in the Third World since the CIA was founded.
What is even more dangerous for First World nation-states is that IP propaganda campaigns are the major tool of hybrid warfare - Color Revolutions and Arab Springs. Hybrid warfare exploits IP, or any other de facto subdivision of the polity. Just like the first round of imperialism, hybrid warfare is out to destroy any local resistance to corporate imperialism via divide-and-conquer tactics.
Anxiety is growing in Latin America – the United States and the United Kingdom are preparing a « Spring » for them on the model of the « Arab Springs ». Of course, this time, it will not be a case of spreading war and dividing the populations along religious lines – Latino citizens are practically all Christians – but by using elements of their local identities. The objective will, however, be the same – not to replace the governments with other governments, but to destroy the States in order to eradicate any possibility of resistance to imperialism.
The goal of hybrid warfare is to destroy countries and create lawless zones of conflict between tribalistic fractions. This is US foreign policy as driven by the PB.
Among the emblematic ideas of the Neo-conservatives, features prominently the theory of “creative chaos” - developed mainly by Michael Ledeen, a former correspondent in Rome of the New Republic. It is a project aiming to “establish a state of war and permanent instability in the Middle East that would enable the Americans and Israelis to preserve their geostrategic objectives in the region, even by re-redrawing it’s map”. Neo-conservatives do not consider the stability of the world a good to maintain but instead advocate the virtues of destabilisation.
- The Saker, Neoconservatives and the Coming World
Hybrid war is not only used in the third world, but is also increasingly applied to the first world. First world nation-states must be deconstructed to cement the domination of the financialized economy. The creation of the massive refugee wave from Libya may not have been planned, but it has certainly been weaponized into an IP tactic to splinter just about every country in the EU.
5. Conclusion
Today's globalized, corporatized world is nothing more than computerized colonialism. The PB have destroyed local industry and installed a comprador class of mega-corporations. Their militarized police and data fusion centers stand ready to crush any inchoate rebellion that might arise. Their propagandists blame all problems on bogus liberal and government boogeymen. They have destroyed public education, resulting in a generation of poorly educated people who can't write a paragraph, with the attention span of the next mouse click, and a social skill set warped in an authoritarian direction by helicopter parents and disproportionate punishment for IP infractions. The oligarchs have centuries of experience at dealing with such clueless, backwards natives. They are already sitting down to the perpetual banquet of corporate feudalism.
The oligarchs didn't just "muddle through" to this counter-revolution. It is the result of high-level actions - changes to laws and regulations, analogous to the Victorian changes I mentioned - that were not merely short-sighted grabs for profit. Operations like ALEC were heavily-funded strategic assaults on democracy; and they have completely succeeded in the US. We have about as much chance of going back to non pay-to-play democracy and regulated industrial capitalism as the Victorians had of going back to the government of the Glorious Revolution. Our (America's) only way out is for the rest of the world to pull the plug on our financial and military aggression. China has the financial muscle to do that. Russia has the military muscle. Western Europe could grow a spine. That is why all of them (essentially the rest of the First World) are under assault by the neocon/neoliberal gangsters that dream of global domination.
For me, this exercise in understanding where we stand - triggered by the suicidal insanity of the sanctions on Russia - convinces me that parliamentary politics (and discussions of such, as are prominent on this board) is now useless to the 99%. Parliamentary politics presumes the elites support the nation-state, and that literate rational discourse is how politics is done.
But our political game is so rigged it isn't even a game anymore. (Is anyone at all shocked that DINO Joe Manchin decided to become a GOPer?) The incessant, lying hypocrisy of sold-out politicians cannot stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Everyone recognizes we have a rule of men, not law.
That is why censorship (we will tell you which news is "fake") has been implemented. That is why Net Neutrality is under attack, although it is defended by the powerful computer industry. The only effective national-level actions left to the 99% are boycotts (already under legal assault by the Israeli lobby), strategic work stoppages, occupation-style disruptive protests, and leaking the plans and actions of the oligarchs (on the net, because the corporate media will not cover pro-democracy leaks). Local activism has still not been systematically targetted, so there is opportunity there. Although the "sanctuary cities" fracas indicates the intention to push Federal authority down to the beat cop.
So, I will not be posting about parliamentary politics anymore. It is a mugs game. I will post about corporate repression, the encroaching police state, and the active opposition to it.
----
NOTE: After writing this, I found so many other people writing about the same topic that it seemed redundant to post this, because the essay doesn't suggest any course of action. It merely gives a historical context to our demise. That demise might seem to have happened very quickly, but it is really about the same length of time it took the Victorians to complete the shift from aristocratic rule to capitalist rule.
In the end, I decided to post the essay, because I think its important to try to teach people about history.
Comments
With a 5% favorable rating
and a clowngress as corrupt as ours we bring
you austerity Brazil in a thug named Temer
https://theintercept.com/2017/08/03/brazils-corrupt-congress-protects-it...
Trying to make it look reasonable does no
longer matter to tptb.
I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley
Chris Hedges on the leadership of the revolution
Colonized by Corporations is a column that Chris Hedges wrote during the 2012 election campaign, a time when the Occupy Movement was still discussed and other leftists movements had yet to be crushed. Here's a snip:
The falling economic state of the Veteran...
is an additional factor that the Corporate Slime haven't thought about.
Used to be you did your time, and you were taken care of.
Now... with the corporate pigs trying to grab up every penny they can, it's no longer just intellectuals who are a danger. Now, there's a whole group of angry, battle hardened people in this country who don't see why they should bow to an authority that has betrayed them in every sense of the word.
Of course, that's why veterans are the new "Terrorists".
Ugh. At times, I'm starting to think that Heinlein had it right, even when espousing an opinion that flies in the face of our most cherished national delusions.
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
Interesting point you make
They sure ignored the bunch of ex-military that went to protect the DAPL protestors. No cute interviews for those guys.
What they have done to the VA is, to quote Napoleon, "worse than a crime; it is a mistake".
Veterans tell their stories; and patriotic enlistment goes down. Instead, you get gangbangers who want free weapons and tactics training, and desperate minorities who want to get some benefits if they survive. The army is well on its way to mercenary barbarian status, ala the Roman Empire in 300 AD.
You Do Notice, Though, That DAPL Was Immediately Acted Upon,
in Orwellian or Obamian Fashion, as soon as they showed up.
I think the optics of a Veterans Revolt or a resurrection of the Bonus Army, is too hot to handle for the Establishment. My first thought when reading dmw's post was the Bonus Army.
That shit is lightning in a bottle. I think, right now, Drumpf actually holds the loyalty of the 21st Century Bonus Army, and I don't think that's a good omen.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
double bookmarked
... teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists without newspapers ...
Hedges is so good with words...
plus, he is fearless and committed. The commitment is spritiual, since there is no organization (such as, in the past, the Communists) to support him in his lonely battles. I believe that he draws upon his stint in the seminary for strength. Not sure if he is an atheist or not these days.
In any case, his writing skill and commitment simultaneously inspire and embarrass me. My efforts are a joke compared to his.
He Is Ridicuously On Point in Not Just Language, But on Framing
too.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Hedges segment on grassroots activism
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.
Adjunct Associate Professor Peachcreek here...
Where do I report? (Hint: the barricades might be more personally fulfilling and at the same time serve to promote the long term interests of my students.) The latter is what I thought I was signing up for.
According to J.M.Keynes, if you are an economics prof...
you might just wind up being very influential:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
Wow!
There is a lot to digest here. I need to read at least one more time and then re-read again to be able to comment. Thank you for this really comprehensive essay.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Here's the short version
The middle class democracies were constructed for the purpose of lining capitalists' pockets and keeping the rabble under control given the technology of the times. That technology required mass armies, and mass armies required limited democracy to give soldiers something to fight for.
We now have nuclear weapons, smart bombs, internet sabotage, and other ways in which a tiny elite can wage war without mass armies. The famous historian, Max Weber, pointed to the link between the kinds of weapons and the type of government. He gave the example of the Middle Ages, in which the heavily armored knight on horseback was the key weapon. Knights were a tiny elite. The government was feudalism, not democracy.
We now have new computer technology with much better control capabilities, so we can tear down the old democracies and their "inefficient" middle classes and replace them with the Panopiticcon in your Pocket world of the internet. The rich have hired the modern version of "navvies", now known as geeks, to do the dirty work.
The middle class and their political structures are as dead as the pastoral commons became after the Highland Enclosures.
Its all about money. Money is power. With computers, power puts a lock or a tollbooth on every last interaction you have. Computers are chains of silicon, and we are all the new slaves. Computers and nuclear weapons have ended democracy. With ICBMs and nukes, there is no time to hold a vote.
(Still a little disjointed, sorry.)
Simpler is Information Disparity and Leverage of Information
80 hours a week, ruling class had info on you and your goings on. They could watch you if they needed to the rest of the time.
40 hours a week, ruling class had info on you and your goings on to the minute with a spreadsheet. Your wellbeing became tied to your relationship to the banker and your boss with more free and unsupervised time and more assets; tradeoffs...
Now, ruling class has ALL OF IT! ALL. OF. IT. Information disparity is off the charts. Off. The. Charts.
anyone who harkens back to the arc of justice and whatnot; there is no historical precedent for this kind of informational and organizational disparity between tyranny and the masses -- NEVER. Modern algorithmic shit is akin to magic.
We are in real trouble.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Definitely true for people not paying attention
Probably only people with Ed Snowden level hacking skills have some chance of not being surveiled - and then only if they are willing to be completely paranoid 24/7. So, yeah, you are correct.
And just wait until they eliminate cash. It will look like a William Gibson novel then.
Have you got any ideas how to stop this? I do not fancy being in an open air jail.
I Have NO IDEA. Impugn Corporate Then Take Their Power.
They are really playing with volatile things at a volatile time.
Keeping the cork on the bottle, the hands on the leash, and your mind 3 steps ahead, just ain't gonna happen for them. They think it will, but it can't. The unknown is a given with dealing with people. People in a tighter environment, 9B here on planet Earth, for instance -- nothing is going to predict that.
For example: to me, this whole NK thing doesn't worry me in the least, sabre rattling -- at least that's what I think or thought... that blowup statue of the Drumpfian Chicken? That scares the shit out of me, lol. It is at once hysterical and terrifying, and it feels like just the kind of thing that I am talking about. Who knows when an archduke will get shot, or a Drumpfian Chicken forces our President's hand.
So, I'm banking on at least one BIG, and hopefully important finger being pointed at at Big Corporate & the Oligarchs when the music stops next time, and/or the next. I'd like that to happen a couple of times before they start locking us up. I figure this year and 2-4 years down the road. Two more business cycles. That's about all the time we got, I think.
Heh, think of the churning and profit available in a quarterly business cycle.
Peace~
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
I am really glad you posted it.
Context is everything. There isn't a doubt in my mind that they don't know what they are doing. The destruction is purposeful, all of it.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Aristocrat, plutocrat, potato, pohtato.
Most titles are inherited, which freezes out everyone not related by blood or marriage. (Encouraged fratricide and patricide, too, but I hope those days are over.) However, Sir Paul McCartney did not inherit his title. He got it because he paid a heck of a lot of taxes into the British Treasury. And he paid a lot of taxes because he very, very rich. Perhaps not as rich as Warren Buffet, George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein, David Koch, Bill Gates et al., but 1% nonetheless.
The American Revolution left some of the richest colonists deciding what the US would be like and who would govern it. And who would be powerful, whether or not holding office. (e.g., John Hancock.) But, they don't get titles--well, actually, some of them do get titles for life, much like Sir Paul--President, Senator, Governor, etc. Same shite, different country, just no gold coach. Well, not yet.
That was more than
I could get thru, arendt, but thanks for the post!
For me it simply boils down to "They" want it All, while leaving nothing for the 99%. Not happy with having it all, they want the rest of us to have nothing. There are no jobs in this country becuz "They" don't want anyone of the 99% having one. Simple as that. Doesn't have a damn thing to do with "economics" or "business environment." Even more, Middle Class jobs bring a sense of stability not only to community but to government, and "They" want none of that. This simply is a War Against the Poor, and we're all poor if we're not in their Club. And, as George Carlin said, "you ain't in it." It's French Revolution time with Marie suggesting, "let them eat cake." Whether or not it brings forth the torches and pitch forks remains to be seen.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Yeah, it was too long, and therefore ineffective
Let me try the short version.
The middle class democracies were constructed for the purpose of lining capitalists' pockets and keeping the rabble under control given the technology of the times.
We now have new computer technology with much better control capabilities, so we can tear down the old democracies and their "inefficient" middle classes and replace them with the Panopiticcon in your Pocket world of the internet. The rich have hired the modern version of "navvies", now known as geeks, to do the dirty work.
The middle class and their political structures are as dead as the pastoral commons became after the Highland Enclosures.
Its all about money. Money is power. With computers, power puts a lock or a tollbooth on every last interaction you have. Computers are chains of silicon, and we are all the new slaves.
Is why they need
to kill "net neutrality," and likely will.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Computerized colonialism
Computerized colonialism, indeed. This is what it's coming down to ... at least, that's the Big Idea, as G.H.W. Bush put it.
Stopping it is the problem. It can be stopped, perhaps by China and Russia as mentioned in the essay. It could also be stopped by fate -- as in a global economic crash, even though there are dangers galore in that scenario.
Thank-you you for your effort in writing this essay, arendt. You have given "... a historical context to our demise" that is not only accurate but rare. It's also very valuable.
Thanks, again.
Thorough, but disappointing
This was a thorough, thought-provoking piece of writing.
However, I find it disappointing that the author felt it necessary to include this:
This has lead to the reductio ad absurdum of elevating the miniscule group of "transgendered" people (including, ludicrously, children as young as five) into a cause celebre overnight. Cynical observers note that the publicity for the so-called transgendered started the minute the last genuine and significantly-sized minority group, the gay community was granted equal rights under the law.
I've got to admit I'm befuddled at why it was necessary to include, in an otherwise excellent analysis, a statement dissing an entire segment of the America population.
Wouldn't it have been possible (in fact, desirable) to mention the destructive nature of identity politics without gratuitously passing judgment on something about which the author is not adequately informed?
"Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep ... Don't go back to sleep."
~Rumi
"If you want revolution, be it."
~Caitlin Johnstone
Let me repost something I wrote earlier
My stance is about numbers, about triage, about applying the very limited resources of the progressive movement effectively. IP does the opposite of that.
Identity Politics is now promoting the equivalent of “orphan diseases”
The IP crowd has lost all sense of proportion or priority. Here is a plea for funds for a minority of a minority - transgendered illegal immigrants.
Defend and Protect Transgender Undocumented Women: Free Ms. Gonzalez
Here are the numbers for this IP poster child:
US population (2014) = 320 million
# of illegal aliens ~= 11 million
So, all illegal aliens are ~3.43%.
The “estimate” I have heard for the prevalence of transgendered is ~1%.
So TIAs are 1% of 3.4%, as I said, a minority of a minority. Translating that into the units used by health statisticians, 0.034% is 34 per 100,000.
Let’s compare that number to what epidemiologists classify as rare, or “orphan” diseases.
So, Truthout’ example (34/100k) is the exact statistical equivalent of a charity raising funds for an orphan disease (18-47/100k).
Now, I have great sympathy for orphan diseases, and great hope because of personalized medicine. Nevertheless, unless I know someone with said orphan disease, I tend to give my charity to the big killers, like heart disease, lung cancer, and Alzheimer’s.
Politically, I feel the same way. I have great sympathy for minorities of minorities. But, I don’t know any of them. So, I tend to give my money and my mindshare to the big political killers: neoliberal looting and austerity, out of control police and intelligence agencies, the bloated and aggressive military.
Another valid comparison is resource limitation. Orphan diseases are so because there simply isn’t enough money to fully fund all research on all diseases. We set priorities. If you want to be brutal, we do triage. But, in the real world, money is finite. The same is true for leftwing political causes (although untrue for the infinitely funded rightwing). I have set a priority. Transgendered anybody is a far lower priority than the big three I named above. TIAs are completely invisible to my limited time and resources.
Does this make me heartless? Some kind of crypto rightwing asshole? Only if you haven’t woken up yet to the racket that Identity Politics has devolved to: a divisive, more-victimized than you, oppression-measuring contest.
So, I would love to hear others’ reactions to Truthout’s plea.
Identity politics is now a growth industry with a large
consumer base well addicted to "fighting" for the "rights" of people (and whales) they don't know. It was needed to fill the void created in the 1980's when liberals stopped fighting for the rights of everyone. With Idpol, all energy is focused on one subgroup who then wins their right to fully participate in a democracy that no longer exists. I don't think this was part of a grand conspiracy, I think that liberals as a whole just got tired of being the only ones fighting for something that should be precious to all and against an implacable, unscrupulous enemy ("We have met the enemy and he is us.") If liberals were tired then they look stupefied now and act it. But Idpol keeps trundling along. Once the current group is "righted up", then there must needs be another. Presented as "achieving democracy one group at a time" Idpol can now be seen as a cruel hoax that actually pits one group against another: usually, it is the (pick any) group against the right-wing white males who consequently feel put upon as well. Unfortunately, Idpol makes it impossible to approach those who identify with the right-wing white males (the core group is, of course, unapproachable) with the reminder that it was once their democracy,too, and that they are better off sharing power with us than swearing fealty to the spirit of Wendigo.
Agree. n/t
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Well said.
And, once it sinks in, nothing more need to be said about it. But, of course, it will be. As you say, nothing can be done about it directly, so rather than do nothing we prove it all to ourselves over and over again. Maybe computer colonialism relies on the fact that when we turn the puter off we clear memory. We get up the next morning and do what we have to do for the redcoats by trading our time for some one else's money and then go home and turn the puter on looking for more proof and agreement. Sometimes we get to see it so clear (as I did here) that it is incontrovertible; the writer has laid his musket on the log, taken dead aim and pulled the trigger, the readers shout that it is a straight shot and react with relief and exultation and rage at the enemy, but ....there is nothing there. Each time we get to the same point and no further. Like a collective Ground Hog Day for progressives. Ah, well, it is late and I must to bed...there is always tomorrow...
I have reached the "nothing more to say about it" stage.
As you say, once you see it, there is nothing more to say or do.
As I concluded:
I anticipate your future posts
This statement and your synopses below feel like granite.
Time to put one's affairs in order.
Excellent essay. The Big Picture is there, if you want it.
You covered it all pretty much. As you say Hedges has been the clear voice on the totality of this for a while.
Yesterday I watched on a picnic bench outside of a supermarket three middle-aged people, drinking commercial "refreshment" drinks loaded with sugar, heads down buried in their smartphones.
Huxley's theory seems to have won out over Orwell's. In a fuller way, the masses have more successfully been duped, instead of become targets of the surveillance state and its oppressive enforcement, by gadgets, pills, cheap disposable goods, and 24/7 mindless entertainment and distraction.
May sound like a cynical take on us proles but I don't think so. It's information overload on the interwebs. There's so much disinformation and obfuscation and subliminal and outright forceful marketing, etc. But if you dig enough, and most importantly stop wasting time on social media threads filled with self-aggrandizement and superfluous "news" about one's life (and even more importantly completely turn off all MSM), there are communities (like this one) to help navigate the morass and to find the sources who are telling these truths and seek to be clear-headed dissident voices needed for people to understand how they've been getting screwed.
Imagine if those folks sitting on those benches were all reading C99, Counterpunch, Jacobin, Truthdig, the Real News, etc. They just might start talking to one another about things that mattered, and then meeting to talk about it further while expanding the circle of people equally hungry for the truth. And then it starts...
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
I've seen the same zombified folks
Sometimes I want to grab the smartphone or tear off the headphones and say "get a life, wake up".
I have definitely thought Huxley was more right than Orwell. Neal Postman wrote an entire book on this topic (Amusing Ourselves to Death) back in the 1980s. As you say, it is the Big Picture that has (deliberately) been lost. Most people are passionate about deck chair rearranging. Very few are screaming about the iceberg dead ahead.
Am aware of Postman but really need to read him.
Written almost 35 years ago, but could be looking at us right now, with a few tweaks with specifics about social media. In general, it's exactly where we are today but in even deeper.
The thing that I think I will most lament about this era is the sheer wasted opportunity of the internet's potential. Farcebook has to be the Great Missed Opportunity. Finally there was a personal forum for people to connect and discuss things in a mass way, for probably the first time. And what dominates/gets the most traction? Wedding and pet photographs.
Bill Hicks: "Go back to bed, America..."
"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"
- Kurt Vonnegut
@Mark from Queens
Seems like you read the intro, at least.
Thanks for the awesome Bill Hicks clip. Says it all.
I'm glad you posted this.
This is an excellent and original summary of where we are now. As for the fact that many others have written similar things-- what you here is so important that it cannot be said in too many different ways by too many people.
Your essay is so good that I encourage you to re-post it outside of this supportive but isolated amen-corner bubble. It deserves a wider audience!
The marriage between capitalism and democracy is over. –Slavoj Zizek
Thank you for the Zizek quote.
It is pithier than the David Korten quote I use:
@arendt This is a whole other
This is a whole other topic, but I have always observed that the peak of our middle-class based civil society nation-state also coincided with the threat of world Communism as an alternate to Western capitalism. To what extent were the goodies given to the masses in the USA and Europe meant to keep them happy enough not to go Commie? It seems to me that capitalism's rampage accelerated after the Soviet Union fell apart.
Has anyone written about this?
The marriage between capitalism and democracy is over. –Slavoj Zizek
I've never seen anyone's name attached to the theory...
But I have certainly seen a lot of writing to the effect that we were shamed into the Civil Rights movement by the Communists, especially after the Nazis used our race laws as the model for theirs - a fact the Commies were not shy about mentioning.
Again, I suspect the same was true about unions after Roosevelt died. Roosevelt strongly supported unions, no Commies needed. But as soon as he was gone, the reactionaries passed Taft-Hartley. I'm sure that the example of the Commies (before all the truly bad shit about Stalin and the Gulag came out) was useful to the union movement.
But, by the 60s, the union movement was fossilized. Unions were famous for beating up hippies and anti-war protestors, for waving American flags, etc. They became their own worst enemy. There is a labor historian, Thomas Geoghegan, who says the unions dug their own grave.
Here's a good article on Communism and Civil Rights
No idea about the website or the author. Haven't read the whole thing. Writing style seems a little clunky. But, here are some snips that reference real historians:
Make Sure You Go Back and Finish When You Have Time, @Wink
Seminal piece, IMHO. You should post it on Medium too.
Not to diss or down this place, but a piece like this should be posted in an apartisan place.
Medium does a fine job of this. C Johnstone is well served posting there, I think.
But shit arendt. Amazing piece, man. Spot on!
I do think the shorthand is an issue, and I quibble with some of the names, but shit, man -- amazing piece.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
I'm too burned out to be on a partisan board.
It is knives out, all the time. You never know when one comment, one nuance, one example can be twisted into some Jesuitical attack on the entire post.
But thanks for thinking it deserves it. IMHO, it is way too wordy, and the main point about the assault on education goes missing.
Not Very Wordy for a Common Thread Thru 200+ Yrs of History. nt
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
I need to make the public education apsect more prominent.
and tie that into the IP/hybrid war.
I should write something about this signature story of IP garbage:
The LA Times, a paper of record, gives this thing a "Lindbergh kidnapping" level of pathos. Meanwhile, Eli Broad is busy trying to privatize the entire LA school system. You can find a lot of leftie articles about that:
L.A. School Communities Resist Take Over by Charter Schools’ “Hurricane Eli”
Union leaders, former LAUSD board president attack Broad charter plan
What does the LA Times have to say?
The article never discusses the protests. It parades a who's who of privatizers, and corporate endorsers.
----
And examples like this are why I say that IP is a dangerous distraction. The LA Times just wasted its resources on this ridiculous nonsense about the parents of an 8-year old who want to use their child to make some kind of point. I feel sorry for the kid. I also guarantee you that this kind of sensationalism is guaranteed to continue to poison any potential alliance among parents of all gender orientations who just want good schools for their kids - schools not owned by Eli Broad, Bill Gates, or any other member of the Billionaire Boys Club.
Please do not ever deprive us
Please do not ever deprive us of your input merely because the topic has been covered by others.
Not only is a knowledge of history essential; so are different individual perspectives, details, emphasis and areas within subjects. And, speaking for myself, I'd hate to miss out on any of your essays merely because other good ones have been recently written/discussed.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
That's mighty kind of you
But it could have just been vanity on my part. I thought, everyone from Chris Hedges to Caitlin Johnstone has already done way better than me on this. Why waste the effort?
In the end, I thought the public education angle was different enough to justify posting. But, I feel that I "buried the lead" on that one. I've been trying to highlight it in the comments.
Good to read this. When I first encountered it I was too
tired (in transit) and thought I would get back to it. Then joe shikspak called it excellent in a comment in the Evening Blues. Finally today I was ready.
Though 68 I still have some idealism and optimism that has been whittled down over the years. I have had this nagging feeling for years that we were under siege then have learned about ALEC, the horrors of the private prison 'industry' and now the public schools going the same way. Now with the Republicans in charge of so many state legislatures, US Senate and House, and the Presidency a perfect storm is underway.
My wife and I have discussed that the rampant consumerism of US society had to be stopped in some way, but destroying what little safety net we had was not something we wanted to see. At all. Worth working to stop....
A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.