The Split of the Take

Long before there was capitalism, and therefore long before there was socialism, humankind built civilization — a division of labor that created cities, roads, aqueducts, ships and fuckall kinds of ways to kill. For all the variation in language, ethnicity, environmental constraints and opportunities, there is one thing in common to every social organization in the history of our species: somebody has to give direction and a lot of somebodies have to follow it.
Without social hierarchy, our relative physical weakness dooms human beings to be eaten by predators. Instead of teeth, claws, strength or speed, our Darwinian advantages are opposable thumbs and language. The myth of the “rugged individualist” is utterly absurd. There is one word to describe a human being that is completely “free” of social obligations — breakfast.

The individuals who call the shots can use their position of power to hog the fruits of everybody’s common labor, but history is full of cautionary tales of Emperors being assassinated. The art of ruling over people involves two fundamental assessments — how many people do you need on your side to stay in power? How little can you give to the rest of your polity without them ganging up on your allies?

Viewed from the other end of that equation, for the vast multitude of powerless souls in today’s global “civilization,” those two questions for the ruler become the challenge of life for the ruled. What will it take to get a new ruler? How hungry do I have to be to risk trying to gang up on the ruler and his retinue?

I developed this thumbnail sketch of political economy when I was an English major as an undergraduate in the early 1970s. I was taking a class in medieval literature and learned a bit about the social order in medieval Europe. Kings tended to suffer from what a modern reader would identify as existential angst as they could never be completely sure of the loyalty of their retinues. The story of King John, son of Henry II, was all about the split of the take. The second tier of bosses, called Nobles, ganged up on Little Johnny Plantagenet and forced him to sign a deal (the Magna Carta) acknowledging that he did not have the Divine Right to split up the take any way he wanted.

King John and his successors, along with most of the monarchs on the planet, had to find a balance between sharing wealth and power with an elite while making sure that the masses did not form up a lynch mob. The Romanovs came to a bad end during World War I because the general population of Russia had lost all hope and respect for their rulers.

In the centuries since the Magna Carta, advances in communications technology have knit the world into an interlocking global culture, and there are no Emperors or Kings with personal power over their political units. Instead, there are bureaucracies and aristocratic families that tend to staff them generation after generation.

In every era, and under every putative “system” of government, so long as the split of the take seems fair to the bulk of humanity, the average person does not bother with ideology. Whether it’s the colonial rule of Britain over India, or the czarist rule over Russia, or the capitalist rule of the USA today, the powerful few can tell whatever story they like to explain their position of power — and most people will “believe” it because they don’t have any reason to worry about such things one way or the other.

Thus the Kennedy Assassination was a great tragedy and polling over the decades shows that significant numbers of people have doubts about the story they were told about it, but such thoughts never lead to any concrete action. In stark contrast to the lethargic public response to the murder of a President, the Vietnam War posed a huge problem for the powers that be as millions of families’ lives were seriously disrupted by the draft. Those powers that be (the collective and bureaucratic analog to King John) were forced to abolish the draft — and the war machine has bounced along with hired guns ever since.

Today, most progressives look at these decades of general docility while the neoliberal and neoconservative movements have established war forever for no reason, coupled with corporate control of everything, as national policy and fall into despair. The thought is that propaganda works and that stupid people refuse to employ critical thinking skills and believe all manner of stupid shit, rendering revolution impossible.

I have to agree that if you are waiting for a mass “awakening” as the bulk of the citizenry embraces the concept of socialism, you are going to be disappointed.
Nevertheless, we are watching a replay of the Magna Carta right now, as people are not content with the split of the take. It does not matter what particular ideology any given individual espouses to explain her alienation from the current regime. What matters is that more and more people realize that the story being told by the power structure is nothing but self-serving lies, akin to The Divine Right of Kings.

What I call the Asteroid Virus is obscuring just about everything now, and it will change almost everything about how we live. The most significant aspect will be that the Take itself just shrunk by about 20%, and it could well keep shrinking indefinitely.

Our corrupt political structure is staffed by hacks who do not even bother to think about what they are doing as they continue to represent the wealthy individuals and institutions that fund their campaigns and pay the lobbyists who write the legislation. So, as the Take evaporates, it is replaced by what conservatives call, quite accurately, Fiat Money -- and the bulk of it will be shoveled to the already fat and sassy.

We were already headed for revolution after all the Democratic Stalking Horse Campaigns (Pete, Bloomie, Amy and Liz) committed mass hari kari, basically apologizing for having beaten Joe Biden in prior primaries. This spit in the face of democracy took place while Sleepy Joe snoozed his way into the nomination due to nothing he said or did. All that seems like ancient history now in the Age of the Asteroid Virus -- but it gave the game away once and for all.

With the Take in free fall, and the Split going in the wrong direction, we are headed for what the nice folks in the Business Press call, "A correction."