This was made clear in the Behind the Bastards two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity in which the industrialists thought the Great Depression was the good times, and were really resentful that FDR implemented the New Deal, which was a stopgap to prevent a communist revolution, since despite the troubles in the USSR, it had to be better than what we were contending with, and people were sharpening their hoes. (Those who still had hoes)
These days, yes, not only do they want you in tents, but they want you in tents in some other place, and they want you to starve even when you cannot commute to a jobsite.
I’ve noticed the guillotine memes have stopped and instead of saying how absurd violent uprising is, people are saying how this may result in violence whether or not that would fix things.
In part, killing capitalists is not killing capitalism. We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others. Retribution is only a proxy to practical justice, not justice itself. The rich should be forced to give up their wealth, not punished for their actions. They should only be killed for resisting. Violence is necessary to deal with the violent, but it will never be inherently good.
We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others.
The problem is we haven’t figured out the how, even how we move in that direction from here. As a species we made a faustian bargain twenty five thousand years ago when we started experimenting with agriculture. We migrated less, then not at all. Not everyone had to be a hunter/gatherer, and we could specialize. Societies went from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands to hundreds of millions far faster than our capacity to govern ourselves, so authoritarianism – government by force – became then norm. And when the common proletariat were tired of abuse and distrusted the promise of heaven, they the ownership class fed them promises of upward mobility.
Now there isn’t a future we could depend on. Curiously, our industrialist plutocrats are not even interested in the future of their own children, driven to feed their greed the same way a brown warbler is driven to feed a cuckoo chick that co-opted its nest. (I suspect it is, in fact, a fixed action pattern from an instinct of assuming hard times are perpetually imminent). And that greed, what informs the tragedy of the commons, will destroy our societies as we know them, and may well be the great filter we fail to navigate.
But I totally agree with you that rushing to war is no solution. In fact, I am in the choir.
I just don’t know what is the solution, and while mutual aid organizations work in that direction they do so very slowly, and US law enforcement is already catching on and seeking to disrupt those efforts. The US may not last a year before descending into one-party autocracy, and we’re already evacuating islands in Panama from sea level rise. And the world is noticing record heatwaves aren’t waiting until July, but hitting in June.
My point was descriptive: I’ve noticed the dialog is changing as per Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I’ve noticed content creators and pundits who’ve been notoriously more cautious talk more about how we really are running out of time and non-violent options, and it really does appear that our industrialist masters plan to keep on making life worse for the working class, and are trying to actively push non-workers out into the summer heat.
It’s not mine to say. I watched in Iran, fascinated how the death of Masha Amini by morality police brutality brought men out shouting and tipping Imam covers, and women came out without hijab unwilling to take it any longer. When the fundamentalists insisted, news started talking of Molotov cocktails and massacres of gunfire (and notably, a phase when the hardliners were poison-gassing girls’ schools, which I can’t understand how they imagined that was a good look.)
I have no illusions that violence is a solution. Typically violence leads to a string of brutal autocracies until everyone left is close to someone who died in conflict, and elections and public serving policy are just a means of preventing the next outbreak. But I’ve also notice the ownership class pushes unrelentingly, and violence goes from being unthinkable to being inevitable inside an hour. So it may be a fixed action pattern.
I remember a description of suicide as being like victims of tower fires who jump to their death because the alternative was burning to death. And I wonder if that is when the people are going to erupt into pogroms and massacres, when the choice is between doing that, or watching our kids die, whether shoved, hungry into the freezing cold, or packed onto the cattle trains.
It doesn’t matter which. That does seem to be the way we’re headed, whether this election season or when the global food supply infrastructure collapses.
Things look really bad, but I ultimately realized that dwelling in doom has no benefits when compared to hope. I don’t blindly hope things will work out, but I never write off the future. The future will be best if we think we will win.
This was made clear in the Behind the Bastards two parter How The Rich Ate Christianity in which the industrialists thought the Great Depression was the good times, and were really resentful that FDR implemented the New Deal, which was a stopgap to prevent a communist revolution, since despite the troubles in the USSR, it had to be better than what we were contending with, and people were sharpening their hoes. (Those who still had hoes)
These days, yes, not only do they want you in tents, but they want you in tents in some other place, and they want you to starve even when you cannot commute to a jobsite.
I’ve noticed the guillotine memes have stopped and instead of saying how absurd violent uprising is, people are saying how this may result in violence whether or not that would fix things.
In part, killing capitalists is not killing capitalism. We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others. Retribution is only a proxy to practical justice, not justice itself. The rich should be forced to give up their wealth, not punished for their actions. They should only be killed for resisting. Violence is necessary to deal with the violent, but it will never be inherently good.
We need to make a society where people cannot wield that much power over others.
The problem is we haven’t figured out the how, even how we move in that direction from here. As a species we made a faustian bargain twenty five thousand years ago when we started experimenting with agriculture. We migrated less, then not at all. Not everyone had to be a hunter/gatherer, and we could specialize. Societies went from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands to hundreds of millions far faster than our capacity to govern ourselves, so authoritarianism – government by force – became then norm. And when the common proletariat were tired of abuse and distrusted the promise of heaven, they the ownership class fed them promises of upward mobility.
Now there isn’t a future we could depend on. Curiously, our industrialist plutocrats are not even interested in the future of their own children, driven to feed their greed the same way a brown warbler is driven to feed a cuckoo chick that co-opted its nest. (I suspect it is, in fact, a fixed action pattern from an instinct of assuming hard times are perpetually imminent). And that greed, what informs the tragedy of the commons, will destroy our societies as we know them, and may well be the great filter we fail to navigate.
But I totally agree with you that rushing to war is no solution. In fact, I am in the choir.
I just don’t know what is the solution, and while mutual aid organizations work in that direction they do so very slowly, and US law enforcement is already catching on and seeking to disrupt those efforts. The US may not last a year before descending into one-party autocracy, and we’re already evacuating islands in Panama from sea level rise. And the world is noticing record heatwaves aren’t waiting until July, but hitting in June.
My point was descriptive: I’ve noticed the dialog is changing as per Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline. I’ve noticed content creators and pundits who’ve been notoriously more cautious talk more about how we really are running out of time and non-violent options, and it really does appear that our industrialist masters plan to keep on making life worse for the working class, and are trying to actively push non-workers out into the summer heat.
It’s not mine to say. I watched in Iran, fascinated how the death of Masha Amini by morality police brutality brought men out shouting and tipping Imam covers, and women came out without hijab unwilling to take it any longer. When the fundamentalists insisted, news started talking of Molotov cocktails and massacres of gunfire (and notably, a phase when the hardliners were poison-gassing girls’ schools, which I can’t understand how they imagined that was a good look.)
I have no illusions that violence is a solution. Typically violence leads to a string of brutal autocracies until everyone left is close to someone who died in conflict, and elections and public serving policy are just a means of preventing the next outbreak. But I’ve also notice the ownership class pushes unrelentingly, and violence goes from being unthinkable to being inevitable inside an hour. So it may be a fixed action pattern.
I remember a description of suicide as being like victims of tower fires who jump to their death because the alternative was burning to death. And I wonder if that is when the people are going to erupt into pogroms and massacres, when the choice is between doing that, or watching our kids die, whether shoved, hungry into the freezing cold, or packed onto the cattle trains.
It doesn’t matter which. That does seem to be the way we’re headed, whether this election season or when the global food supply infrastructure collapses.
Things look really bad, but I ultimately realized that dwelling in doom has no benefits when compared to hope. I don’t blindly hope things will work out, but I never write off the future. The future will be best if we think we will win.