The obviousness of revolt
America, great calamity of the world.
Now, there was for the past 40 years this thing called "dollar hegemony," in which the rest of the world was obliged to buy oil in dollars. In such a way, foreign capital was obliged to accumulate dollars and dollar-denominated assets, and the US government was allowed to print as much money as it wanted and the rest of the world was obliged to maintain its value. $22 trillion was manufactured out of thin air this way.
But what did the government spend its freshly-printed money on? Weapons systems. In fact, the Pentagon doesn't know what it does with the money lavished upon it. At at some point soon the party will all end, there will be a dollar panic (concurrent with the worsening of climate change), and the American economy will look like the economy of Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last. We already look that way to anyone who has been to Norway, even with dollar hegemony.
Now our politicians, the ones who pass the spending bills for all this without so much as a peep of dissent, are today all worthless. Each and every one of them. What else would account for the phenomenon of Bernie Sanders, a man who in 2015 promised us:
- College for all
- Environmental action
- A higher minimum wage
- Higher taxes for the rich
- Breaking up the big banks
Before the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, which is to say before 2015, none of the other worthless hacks in DC had the courage to promote anything remotely approximating Sanders' platform. Also, once upon a time, Sanders used to promote the notion of a "political revolution." We still need one. But we need a political revolution not merely in electing nice Democrats to office, but rather in terms of the culture of American politics as a whole. The model of the Zapatistas deserves some recognition in this regard: promoting a democratic political culture will mean creating new, democratic relationships between ordinary people, as opposed to the relationships between people and money which dominate American politics today. Final goals will remain unachievable as long as the relationship between individuals is stale.
There will of course need to be security checks to detect agent provocateurs, FBI spies, NSA hackers, CIA front organizations, and other such representatives of reactionary culture. Dissent is dangerous because the spooks are supported by a culture of narcissistic property owners whose notion of pleasure is to call the cops to complain about people they want to be illegal (but who aren't). (Seriously, isn't that what Neighborhood Watch is about -- criminalizing "suspiciousness"?) American politics and America in general would not have reached its current state of Third World decrepitude if its culture, never mind its political culture, was not rotten through. We can start with simple acts of kindness: donating to food banks, for instance, as starter actions for a Food Not Bombs.
Today we need to look at conformity and revolt in terms of a new political calculus. Conformity is sure death by climate change. Revolt, on the other hand, merits a new cost-benefit analysis, the one being done today by the gilets jaunes in France.
Comments
Beautiful.
Yes!
This more than anything else
We now have multiple generations of Americans who are totally unaware of their potential power; and completely unaware of what it means to be a democratic individual in our so named democratic society. Moreover, we are unaware that the antithesis to our supposed democratic tradition, that being an authoritarian mode of living and culture, has almost completely usurped our democratic way of living. We are addled so completely by the mass distraction and manufactured dissonance mainlined into our brains 24/7 that we cannot see this de-facto authoritarianism we are living under that you so succinctly describe.
If there ever was a time and a reason to spill some tea, we have collectively arrived at the moment. It is too bad that Wall Street co-opted and bastardized the term Tea Party. A new symbol will be needed. New modes of connection will have to be activated. Democracy as a way of life will have to be re-learned. We are doing this here, for sure. How it gets done to scale with all the forces arrayed against that eventual end remains a mystery.
If we are to be Radical as we must, we need only look to our democratic selves. This is what is feared most by TPTB and it is what they have worked so hard since the New Deal onward to prevent from happening. Democracy IS Radical in the eyes of those who wish to preserve their staus-quo gravy train. A fully engaged and active democratic citizenry with the self reinforcing feedback loop between individual and society is what we must now achieve once and for all.
Democratic (egalitarian) ends can only be achieved through democratic means. Opponents of the status quo from the left have always been handicapped by this essential fact. But it remains the ONLY way to reach what has yet to be achieved anywhere on earth. We've come close, but we've been thwarted every time. We must get it right this time.
Thank you for a very frank and thought provoking essay. You are right to say conformity is death. I will add that Democratic Revolt is life.
A greed money is the sword
How to re-value lives in a dynamic democracy may require a major disconnect from dollar driven desires. To value health, helping, community, peaceful resistance, integrity and honesty has no price tag in a new economy. Perhaps we should cut the bonds of dollars' worth in building a new value system of action in preserving life and encouraging growth, not in terms of dollars made or dollars saved, rather in lives and environs saved and enhanced.
Will still need a coin for trade. I'm trading dollars for .999 pure one ounce silver rounds with whatever is left over after paying the bills in electronic money. Take the reigns of value away from the banks and wall street will float away in it's own bubble. Or so one can hope.
@QMS Cornell West is making
Cornell West is making this argument in his own very powerful way. We've lost our way.
We need to find it by being authentic and tenacious in our search for deeper truths within us and set aside the distractions of neoliberal culture.
This type of Democracy is Radical because it requires enormous change to our institutions, economic and social, in order to meet the existential threats we are staring at.
Same today as is was when this was written in 1938:
Democracy is Radical
John Dewey had it right in '38
Still applies. Thanks for the link. Good read. The notion of public collective intelligence is perhaps being co-opted by Obamas' domestic propaganda act. Now run by the googlemicrosoftfacebooktwitter wing of DHS. Can we re-think the purpose of mutually beneficial shared experience outside of the empire?
To quote Bait and Switch Obama
Yes We Can.
We need to get away from "trade"
as quickly as possible right now. We can speculate all we want about the role of trade in the forthcoming utopia, while the immediate reality demands less trade and more of what the anarchists call the "really really free market."
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Indeed democratic revolt is life.
nmi
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Authenticiy
It's why it doesn't matter if Booker, Harris, etc like bernie's platform or not.
Right.
It's why they should ALL be tossed from office. Find people with new thoughts in their heads to elect instead.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
I knew we were in trouble when shows like
Cops and America’s Most Wanted started showing up in prime time tv schedules. Not that I thought it’s a bad thing to get really bad people off the street but because I saw it as a way for ‘law enforcement’ and the media to turn us into a bunch of vigilantes spying on each other. Remember “If you see something, say something”?
For example:
This is the honest to God’s truth. My second husband, now deceased, was a professional musician. And in the end succumbed to all their stereotypical ‘vices’. Which was sad because he played at Carnegie Hall when he was 16. But I digress...
One night we get a call from the lead singer in the band he was playing with at that time. Brad was the world’s biggest drama whore and everything was always a reason for him to get all freaked, but he was really in Sarah-Bernhardt-Bad-Drama-Squared mode when he called and told Gary that the FBI was looking for him. OMG!!! By the time Gary got off the phone Brad had him going too. Brad was talking wire taps and the whole nine yards. Brad had STUPIDLY told the guy he didn’t have Gary’s contact info and was convinced he’d get in trouble for lying. And this is where I had to step in before those two numbskulls really got themselves in trouble. I knew nothing that the FBI would be interested in was going on on our end but the FBI guy refusing to tell Brad why they wanted to find Gary just added to the hysteria. So I told doofus to get right back on the phone and tell the guy he called around and got our number. It was about 15 minutes later when Agent Whomever called back.
Now do you remember when People Magazine did an article about the Unabomber, who’s identity was still unknown, and printed this artists sketch?
Well, what happened was someone read that article and turned Gary in as being the Unabomber. My first, and only, reaction was hilarious disbelief. And the FBI dude must have done a thorough background check on both of us because he seemed embarrassed and apologized for the kerfluffle but “he had to check out every tip” they got.
That’s when I knew that the ‘plan’ to get us to look at each other with suspicion and paranoia was working.
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
Another thing that cop shows are showing people
is that it's okay for them to just break into people's houses without warrants or how it's okay for cops to beat confessions out of people that they arrest for no reasons.
Shows like Chicago PD is the recent one, but there have been many more like it. As Mark stated, the younger generation's don't know what our country was like before our government and police forces got so corrupted. The long term thinking of the PTB has been very patient.
The propaganda that people are constantly exposed to has rewritten our country's history just as well as Winston did when he did in Orwell's book.
And you're right that Bush's "see something, say something" turned the country into narcs who would turn on their friends and neighbors. But now people are doing it the easy way. They are buying Amazon Alexa and other spying type devices that will spy on themselves even after people tell them that is what it's doing. The Amazon ring is a camera on your doorbell that every intelligence agency can get access to which just helps the PTB spy on us. I had a conversation with someone about how this is such a bad idea and I was told that we don't have an expectation of privacy when we're in public. Whoosh!
Do you think that FBI guy had a warrant to check your background? Or got one if it was needed? Yeah me neither.
Our ancestors fled from the tyranny of king George's and here we are than 3 centuries later doing exactly what he did. Or close to it. The Boston tea party was because Britain was giving favorable taxes to the East Indies company and now our government are doing this to businesses like Amazon and other companies. Long way baby doesn't apply anymore.
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
We have a new motto now...
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
It sure looks that way --
in a world of dead-ends. Mainstream politicians, corporate oligopolies, an economy for the greater glory of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and the Walton family, uptight little American towns with outlandish property values...
We can do better.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Gilets Jaunes are for environment....
The money quote from jobu's last link:
That's what it is about; that is what started the protests in the first place.
You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again you did not know. ~ William Wiberforce
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America, great calamity of the world.
"America, great calamity of the world" you say?
Calamity is what we do best. We are exceptional at calamity. We even invented calamity capitalism. And the means by which to create calamity to capitalize on. We have winning calamity!
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein
Enjoyed the essay and comments
Don't have anything profound to add, but really appreciated this essay and the comments. Thank you!
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
re: the zapatistas
'The Revolutionary Autonomous Zapatista Movement in Chiapas: a Primer', 2/28/2018