Primum non nocere (first, do no harm).

What does the first rule of the medical practitioners  tell us about how we should conduct a revolution? Well, first of all, through any revolution not to make things worse for the most worse off. How? The pace of revolutionary change should not be so disruptive that the capitalist economy, as it’s undergoing transformation, cannot be kept functional until new economic mechanisms are in place and can be proven to work, or at least proven to work adequately. By doing this, it would now seem to me, we can prevent the kind of disruption and shortages that may hurt the least well off and the working class. This will take a long time. Not only is this the humane course, but it is also politically sound. A democratic and socialist revolution requires the support of the people, or at least a majority of the people. Nothing would cause us to lose support for a revolution faster than further and sustained immiseration of the poor, working, and middle classes. I don’t care about the social standing, wealth, and income of the rich; they will indeed be made worse off. Not only would it be economic disruption to suddenly yank the system out by its roots, it is the system the people themselves are culturally used to and they need time to adapt. A fully developed and dynamic (enough anyway, and sustainable) socialist democratically planned economy will take generations to realize, in my opinion. It is simply a very big ship carrying many passengers to turn around quickly.  is left of their (our) existing economy, price allocation and commodity production must be kept working. Ownership structures and “social structures of accumulation” (Michael Harrington), however, can begin to take effect, put in place, relatively quickly. The health care system, including the pharmaceutical industry, can be turned around right away, for example. So can housing and education. Wages must be raised for low-wage workers immediately and it must be made easy for them to organize and support organizations such as unions. But I do not see how all wage work can be ended in one fell swoop. Nor can I see how all capitalism, especially the smallest firms can be eradicated in one fell swoop. While the ownership of the largest sectors of the economy, such as food processing, can be changed relatively quickly, they did not evolve or were not designed with socialism in mind and cannot easily be changed into democratic allocation over a short time. It is not that they do not have the capacity to produce for all.

Regarding education, many more adults should be able to find employment in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education as mentors and class aides, or other roles teaching students; if not, all teens, for example have to look to for guidance is their peers, who are often wrong. This is an entire industry waiting to be born. More adults in the classrooms, at the schools.

It should be noted that “first, do no harm” in medical practice can mean to do nothing at all; it is better not to do heart surgery at all, for example, if their were a risk of doing more harm to the patient in the course of surgery. This is not what I mean. Medical care and pharmaceutical drugs in the United States, incidentally, are extortionary and this must end. Wealth and income inequality are the root of all social ills. The patient, our socioeconomic system, needs radical surgery.

You might remember the scene in the film version of Dr. Zhivago in which he tells his Bolshevik brother (played by Alec Guinness) that a revolution is like a surgery in which the patient has to be kept alive when, say, ‘tumors of injustice’ are cut away. I believe this is very true. The patient in our case is humankind and the natural world and the cancer of social injustice and destruction of the environment and the planet must be cut away. Well, the poetry of good, liberal doctor may have been “petite bourgeoisie” and “counterrevolutionary” according to his radical brother (in a separate hilarious scene from the film) but he had a point and a good way to make at least a partial revolutionary analogy. Where the analogy comes off the track, then, is that the “patient” of humankind will not be anesthetized but will be an active participant in the surgery and will need to support the surgery.

I cannot foresee every way in which all aspects of the economy could be reallocated to serve human need and how quickly and what pace that it can be done. It may very well prove possible that the level of technological development would allow for a faster change to a new socioeconomic system. But what is clear and good principal to follow as things manifest themselves and as we manifest them that the rule of “first, do no harm” to those we are trying to help is a good one it would do us good to remember.

The first work, before, during, and after the revolution might be more political and cultural transformation with economics second.

 

Weight Watcher’s Freestyle™ weight loss program is based on servings of any and all foods being assigned Points™ according to their nutritional content. Many foods, such as eggs, fish, and most fruits, and vegetables are assigned zero points. The most fattening foods have a higher points value than those that are not, or less fattening. Dieters paying to become Weight Watchers members and following the program are assigned a daily ‘budget’ of points, average probably around 30 points per day, as well as a weekly bank of 40 points for extras or special occasions.  In the strictest sense, this system bares a resemblance to the individual consumer in mainstream, neoclassical economics, who with a limited budget (in terms of the theory, no budget, no matter how rich, is unlimited) must use the funds of that budget to maximize the usefulness of their purchases (utility) down to the very last penny spent. This consumer, or any under a buying and selling market system, is considered a “rational maximizer” and pretty much cannot be otherwise if she is thinking only about his or her utility; remember, the theory is based on a view of human behavior as individualistic and selfish. Dieters in Weight Watchers have only their own eating habits to monitor, although much of the success of the plan can depend on the support of members in weekly meetings and online forums. Consumers under capitalism also depend on their being others to buy and sell them goods, pay or be paid wages, work with, etc., (abstracting out all non-market institutions for the moment). In other posts, I have tried to get the idea across that because of the fact of society, social forces, and that any individual person is an interdependent whole of both individual and society, it makes not only rational sense but is also highly ethical that we be concerned for the welfare of others–we are are brothers and sisters keepers, and it makes sense if one is a marketeer . . . but I am getting off the subject.

Now the Weight Watchers member will do much the same thing as the rational maximizing consumer, instead maximizing their nutritional value, satisfaction, and tastes given their limited budget of daily points. Points are an analogue to money. Although it must be said that microeconomic theory is describing the way a consumer behaves naturally when making daily economic decisions (or even those of longer periods) and is often unconsciously deciding how they will spend their money, what to buy that would give them the best value for their needs. The system is imprecise in that satisfaction or utility to consumers will vary and attempts to define a unit of utility–utils–has largely been abandoned in microeconomics, at least when I studied it. What ‘utility’ means from individual to individual varies. So mainstream microeconomic theory does make some sense in real world, describing at least some aspects of human economic decision making, but many other factors of life (such as fads) are simply abstracted out.

As it works out both Weight Watchers members (hereafter, members) will inevitably lose weight (at varying rates) if they adhere to the plan and consumers will maximize their satisfaction, as well as not go into debt, if they behave as a consumer would in microeconomic theory. The reason is the budget constraint. Consumers often overspend. Without the plan, constraints for a total amount of food in a day for a typical person are either non-existent or imprecise. Following some kind of numerically defined nutritional budget does not come natural to anyone. Sure, most may have a sort of subconscious budget in that they know when they are overeating, are hungry, are gaining or losing weight, or just knowing they might have missed a meal and snack, but until Weight Watchers’ point system came to the fore, no one assigned individual values to foods according to calories, fat, carbohydrates, fiber, and sugar. Simply guessing and ‘being careful of what one eats’ usually does not lead to weight loss.

Some big differences between the neoclassical consumer and the Weight Watchers member are, for one, the weight loss program is in only one sphere, although one of the most important and frustrating ones, of an individual’s activity. A consumer’s choices involve any involving money and most consumption goods have a price. Prices often fluctuate according to supply and demand but points are more or less set in stone–their supply is theoretically limitless, not based on scarcity, nor do points change based on how popular a particular food is. So it seems that the dieter’s system is not dynamic; a consumer’s purchases, however, will indeed change according to prices. Price of gasoline increasing? Less driving is likely and therefore money is freed up for other purchases. Points on the other hand will indeed lead a dieter to make economical choices of foods with fewer or no points–which usually tend to be healthier–but points values do not fluctuate. Points values are determined by a formula according to calories, fat, sugar, etc. The formula assigns them these values.

Income to the consumer and Daily Points Allowance to the member are different. For one thing, the allowance is meted out day to day, very short term, while consumption under limited income is carried out or planned in longer terms: a week, biweekly, yearly, etc. Weight Watchers is day to day.

The fact that Weight Watcher’s program works when adhered to faithfully is proof of the rationality of the consumer theory in a very limited context. It is also proof that the logic of economizing under a budget works in a system that has more differences than similarities to a consumer under a market-based economy. An intriguing similarity, however, is that participants in both are profoundly affected by those around them: consumers by Veblen’s “emulation” for example and members by social stigmas and romantic desires.

The biggest difference of all is effect due to the size of a budget: for a consumer, having a rich budget means almost unlimited fun and satisfaction (we’ll forget for a moment that the wealthy can be unhappy, etc.) while a larger budget means uncontrolled weight gain for the member. You see, for the member continued success means a smaller, not a larger budget at least until all the required weight is lost and then some points are added to maintain the desired weight. But a successful dieter cannot ever be rewarded with increased budget simply because the body has healthy limits. Income, on the other hand, has no such limits. Utility and satisfaction, can simply grow and grow and in fact those experiencing them have the resources to improve their health and not necessarily wreck it, as anyone eating without constraint would. Then we must get into the real world of social interaction, influences, effects, and socioeconomic and political power that comes with high income–and class–and wealth. Here we have no such parallel in the dieting world. Successful dieters that do not gain weight back some how (we might imagine) would gain social power and influence as a class. It is true weight loss helps with social esteem and confidence for many but this by itself translates to almost no power over others in society.

So in the end the Weight Watchers program has more in common with a socialism (an efficient planned and satisfactory economy) still dealing with scarcity and having to make economic choices, as any established in this epoch would. The socialist blueprint of Oskar Lange comes to mind, in which he posited rational maximizing consumers and producers (who are really the same persons) and in which “shadow prices” are determined by planners, similar to the way Weight Watchers formulators assign a points value to a given food.

A socialist consumer, with favorable imagination let’s grant our socialist citizen/consumer an average individual an income comparable to, say, $60,000 in our time and that incomes do not vary widely from this amount, in fact let’s put a cap at $200,000 per year income, and no individual income less than $30,000, would indeed have an income constrained in a similar way to our dieters whose points income is with certain limits, as already established. I think this proves the suitability for  and what is more or less real in microeconomic consumption theory within a society without unlimited income possibilities and with income limits—it will still work just as it does in the Weight Watcher’s situation. Socialist consumers in our dream society will indeed have to maximize given a budget constraint, but true to the ideal, they will not ever have to contend with the best rational maximizers (excluding advantages such as inheritance) having power over them and directing so much of their lives.

Again, this might be a good time to reiterate that it was complexity and not lack of incentives that brought down humankind’s first attempts to build large-scale (e.g., national) socialist socioeconomic systems. One typically hears bullshit objections to socialism such as ‘socialism won’t work because of human nature’ or ‘it kills incentives’, the latter as if human beings are like manic rats in a maze living only to get a suck at a sugar nozzle . . .

Most amateur critics of communism limit their criticism to the incentive problem:  why should people work hard, if they are provided basic needs without working?  This is a true critique, as far as it goes, but they err in thinking that the socialists and communists somehow overlooked it.  In fact, they were well aware of the incentive problem [bold added]. They expected to overcome it in one of several ways.  Some thought it could be eliminated by social pressure, as in Edward Bellamy’s famous 19th century Socialist utopian tract, Looking Backwards.  It seems naive, and in a lot of ways it was, but on the other hand, if social pressure doesn’t work, why isn’t everyone in Scandinavia on the dole? (from The Economist online: “The Power of Prices”).

What is not mentioned is that in the U.S.S.R. wages did differ according to incentivize and to attract scarce labor everyone was not ‘paid the same thing’ as many of my own countrymen and women believe. Although causes of the fall of the centrally-planned economies are many, I believe the main problem was one of information, namely something that provides information as to what, how, and for whom to produce, that can do a better job than usually unjust and shitty job the prices system does. Markets and prices supposedly do a great job of this social inequality around the world shows that it does a terrible job and something better is needed.

So in the end what works about micro theory does not have to work within the context of laissez-faire or other unlimited and equally unworkable capitalisms. Or, what is good, the way to economize under capitalism could be put to better use. It is only one relatively small example but Weight Watchers has used it with a great deal of success for decades now. While of course I am not saying that “Weight Watchers will lead the way” I am saying it is one small, but intriguing indicator that what can work in capitalism isn’t necessarily capitalist. Perhaps such mechanisms, using ‘shadow prices’ for example could be put to use under a democratically planned and maintained economy in the future.

 

 

 

Almost all previous socioeconomic systems have more in common with capitalism than its advocates and fanatics will ever admit. Social class and the behavior and motivations of those at the top of any social pyramid is one of the main reasons that the commonalities exist. The exceptions among previous socioeconomic systems to those having values similar to capitalism in history are egalitarian, small scale, perhaps as large as a tribal level, or federation of tribes (e.g., the Iroquois Confederation) and were almost all preindustrial societies. These exceptions are the opposite of those having similarities with present-day and past capitalism.

What does capitalism have in common with other systems of the past? Ambitious, self-aggrandizing individuals seeking power over others and their labor power, and thereby accumulating wealth, gaining political power, social esteem, etc., and basically to get as close as possible to the very top of the social pyramid, usually at the expense of their social inferiors, sometimes on a vast scale. These are behavioral characteristics, socially generated for the most part, but also exacerbated by particular personality types, that capitalism shares with many pre-capitalist socioeconomic systems, these being on the scale of states or nation or city-states and can be found throughout history. The unknown or undefined category in which to group capitalism if indeed such a single category exists, is one characterized by their overwhelming tendency is to treat and regard the vast majority of people within them as a means to an end, and not an end in and of each of theirselves; this is a standard of criteria that many of you might recognize as the Categorical Imperative of Immanuel Kant. The list of societies violating Kant’s Categorical Imperative would indeed be a very large category of historical and present-day socioeconomic and political systems.

My reason for bringing up these historical similarities of capitalism and earlier systems is that it sickens me when advocates and greedy fanatics of capitalism and enemies of past state socialism, and by extension, any form of socialism and its post-scarcity goal of communism, rail on about the millions of deaths caused by socialism or governments led by communist parties, e.g., the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, and that such atrocities are an inexorable feature of any kind of collectivism, democratic and egalitarian or authoritarian and even totalitarian. This line of attack is best typified by the book The Black Book of Communism, which I believe attributes 100 million deaths, including deaths from famines, to what it calls communism and or socialism. On Facebook and other media such attacks and accusations that we socialists are somehow inexorably complicit are ubiquitous and frankly presented in a very adolescent, impetuous, and inhumane manner–one gets the impression that they tally deaths not out of any humane concerns but only to win an argument or to humiliate their political opponents or to root for a system in which they profit at the expense of others. As if their was something unique about the atrocities committed in these societies–there’s absolutely nothing unique about them.  Still, millions of deaths are indeed attributable to authoritarian and totalitarian socialist or socialistic political and socioeconomic systems. A horrific example is that of “communist” China in the years 1958 through 1961 of  a “death toll of 25-40 million” due to famine and all due to the “communist” system in place there at that time, according the article “Counting the Bodies” by Noam Chomsky.

Another thing that is certain is that all of the states indicted in The Black Book of Communism did not consider themselves as having achieved communism, at least by Karl Marx’s concept of communism anyway and many if not most of these states cited in that dead end of a book (because one of its main theses is ‘don’t even try to move past capitalism’) considered themselves as Marxist.  None of these states nor their societies were were even close to achieving communism, correctly defined as a post-scarcity society of democratically shared economic abundance, full civil liberties and no state. Along these very lines we might look to Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber’s definition of socialism as “a society that replaces the state to the greatest degree possible”.

It is a terrible idea to chalk up mass deaths in the first place as if the social and political conditions brought about by either capitalism or socialism are a competitive game or contest. History is soaked in blood, causing many of us to tragically lose faith in humanity itself. Yet I am going to engage in something very much like that, not to excuse any socioeconomic system of crimes against humanity, but only to assert that millions of deaths caused by collectivist systems of all types, developed or pre-industrial small scale, are indeed dwarfed by the scale of megadeaths caused by capitalism and older systems that have so much in common with the driving force of capitalism: selfishness and the quest for power over others. What I believe is the major cause of mass killings is the concentration of political power in any kind of socioeconomic system, and that true egalitarianism and democracy, and some form of socialism and eventual communism, or some form of it,  is the only cure for it. You cannot have a decent system for a species who are of a uniquely interdependent, mutually reinforcing nature–I am trying to get at what Marx called “species being” in his earlier writing–of individual and society with a system where the individual is far too over individualized and and at the same time far too undersocialized. As many of us socialists know, it is “man” as I believe I read in Erich Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man, that must socialize himself (now we are enlightened enough to include the other half of the species) or herself.

None of us should make the fallacious argument of “you too”, meaning if I point out crimes and colonial genocides by capitalists that those by socialists or those claiming to be socialists are excused. Two wrongs never make a right, as we learned correctly as children.  I especially do not want to excuse or soft pedal any mass atrocities committed by socialists because I am one and I readily admit that some horrible and absolutely criminal things have been done: the liquidation of the Kulaks in Stalin’s USSR, being yet another example. Now  it is also true that many socialists argue that the USSR was not really socialism, the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington called it “Bureaucratic Collectivism” and that it was neither capitalist or socialist. I believe Trotskyists considered it a degenerated worker’s state and definitely a “revolution betrayed”. I am going to take the position, I do take the position, that they share enough in common with socialist theory, such as the disempowering and expropriation of a smaller class of rent-seeking, profiteering individuals in control of the means of production, that they could be considered socialist, socialistic, or at least one form of socialism, albeit a terrible example of one. Still, we need to be fair to state socialist systems or those that claimed to be socialists because much good was accomplished even it ultimately could not be sustained or was thwarted.

The subject of deaths attributable to capitalism has been breached many times, there is for example a The Black Book of Capitalism, which is a collection of essays on the subject none of which I have read. I also used an example from Chomsky’s “Counting the Bodies” cited above. My main goal here, however, is not to compare body counts of two systems to see ‘who wins’, but to explore similar characteristics of the largely socially-determined behaviors of powerful individuals and rulers of earlier systems and capitalism and come up with a new and useful category to be held in contrast to socialist goals. In doing so, perhaps we can work toward viable ethics of Marxism and Marxian ideas and political goals–something admittedly non-Marxist since he nor Engels based none of their analysis or theorizing on ethical concerns, although ethical, humanitarian, and social justice concerns are certainly at the heart of what many people admire in Marx and Marxism.

Class is a peculiar thing. Some societies have more social mobility than others. Hierarchies mean power, power of the higher echelons over the low, and to strive to achieve or to maintain these higher echelons, individuals within them need to get used to the idea, whether admitted or clear enough or not, that to stay or achieve power requires–in fact it is defined by–power over people lower down in the hierarchy. You can make them do what you need to do, subject to social mores and legal limitations. It takes ambition, a certain intelligence, egoism, vanity, talent, and often a willingness, a strong desire or predisposition, to be in control over others, and to benefit at their expense. Such individuals may exist in any and all social systems but they find the most fertile ground for their selfish and inegalitarian self-aggrandizement in societies such as capitalism. Most germane to the main topic, control or desire to control others is often achieved by violence, sometimes on very massive scales: war and the enslavement of populations by conquest. Getting and staying on top means you have to be willing to do the killing yourself or have other people do it for you.

Most people throughout history I think it can be proven had and have no such ambition; they simply want to live a secure and fulfilling life in varying degrees of moderate wealth. Although I have no proof of it, I will go out on a limb and assert that most people in the present want this not only for themselves but also for everybody else. So I believe most people do not strive for the top of the social pyramid in the time but only a minority of any population are so ambitious. Of course, ambitions such as the desire to dominate and subjugate others of one’s species are a matter of degrees and we have all known petty or “small time” tyrants and bullies and many of us have worked for them, and they can be found amongst all social classes. Another point that should be made is that just because I am describing certain types or classes of individuals now or in the past does that mean that am inferring or suggesting in any way that certain “bad” personality types can be identified rooted out, purged, or liquidated and then everything would be perfect.

Many think that any sort of profiteering or economic rent seeking is “capitalist” or “capitalistic” when it really is not. Profit-seeking is as old as class society itself, and that originated with the development of agriculture, specialization, and class hierarchies. Capitalism features a vast, landless laboring population bereft of any means to their own existence and depending on a capitalist class who do own such means. In past systems, a majority working class who sold their labor in a labor market did not exist anywhere near to the extent that it has for the past two hundred or so years. There are, or course, exceptions within capitalism, such as the small business owner, or the artisan making a living doing what they love, but the fact that most of the population is alienated from the means of production, resources, and finance means that the correct name for our society is capitalism, or rather, a mixed economy based on capitalism and existing for capitalists. And capitalism is of course based on markets and market signals. Markets and market allocation stretch back thousands of years but the market being the main economic driver of economies began in the late Middle Ages, after the Crusades and the Black Death. Then the enclosure came along in the 16th Century and that was the beginning of the disenfranchised laboring classes without any means of production. That was the beginning of capitalism. In socioeconomic systems before this, command, tradition, and socially-embedded economic institutions were the driving force and markets–think ‘market day’ in an ancient or Medieval village–were ancillary and supplementary.

The ruling classes of socioeconomic systems preceding capitalism have this in common with it:  non-egalitarian profiteering and the quest for social power in varying degrees. I want to tie behavior of power-seeking and profiteering  of individuals under capitalism to that of ambitious individuals, including, say, a merchant in Constantinople endeavoring to corner the market of indigo dye in a section of the city, to profiteers and power seekers of earlier, pre-capitalist ages. I think this is fairly obvious and easy to prove, at least logically, although I will not attempt to do so in any formal way, such as with Venn or other comparison tables and diagrams, here. Again, my reason for doing this is to demonstrate that hierarchical or ‘will to power’, or ‘opportunity societies’, are far more guilty of mass murder and other atrocities than are large-scale socialist societies or nation-states.

Again, this is the opposite of egalitarian and democratic egalitarian societies, most of which are pre-industrial and were not large enough to take on state-level organization, to be a state. Surely in these egalitarian societies (we will take what I know generally of Native American societies or the islanders described in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, for example)  were not all ‘equal’ in any categorical sense; they had chiefs or chieftains, weavers or carpenters of various levels of skills, great and ordinary warriors, persons valued for wisdom, priests or medicine men (women?), and of course gender-based divisions of labor. Many members of these societies were held in far higher esteem than others. Yet these were egalitarian in the sense that all had access to the goods and sustenance produced by all, and all worked; all had access to the means of production; we can take, for example, the buffalo hunt depicted in the film Dances With Wolves. Now it is true that not all of the people in these egalitarian societies were nice all the time or were angels. They warred, they took slaves, they were what we would consider sexist and patriarchal in many ways. They raided rival tribes. But I think it is apparent, and this could be true because of their relatively small, pre-state or non-state scale of social organization, that none of these societies engaged in genocides or mass political killings on a vast scale. Was or is this because of their egalitarianism or their relatively smaller scale? I do not know for sure, but the fact that mass killing, conquest, and absorption of territories and people did begin with the advent of states and empires, and as I’d mentioned these are a feature of class societies.

It seems that the very existence of social class might lead to mass violence in order to maintain class structure and to increase the wealth and power of those at the top. The answer to this would therefore be egalitarianism and classlessness, at least to the greatest degree possible.

A few examples of ancient state violence are in order to illustrate what I am talking about, although I do not think that many are needed. Take for example, this excerpt from a review for a 2018 book by Laurel Bestock:

Violence and Power in Ancient Egypt examines the use of Egyptian pictures of violence [e.g., in steles] prior to the New Kingdom. Starting with the assertion that making and displaying such images served as a tactic of power, related to but separate from the actual practice of violence, the book explores the development and deployment of this imagery across different contexts.

Makes one think of such displays of violence in our own time, such as The Military Channel or fighter plane flyovers at sporting events.

It is easy to tell from this that certain individuals who ran the state were definitely of a certain type, and not necessarily only the hereditary rulers of the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Again, these were power and (economic) rent-seeking individuals. I suppose here as described in the title above, the search is for perhaps a class of socioeconomically formed behaviors of individuals, a cluster or complex of behaviors, into which we can include those of capitalism, or at least capitalists and adherents and/or its working class sycophants, and thus capitalism itself.

Also, in Ancient Egypt, for ambitious individuals. . .

Social mobility was not impossible. A small number of peasants and farmers moved up the economic ladder. Families saved money to send their sons to village schools to learn trades. These schools were run by priests or by artisans. Boys who learned to read and write could become scribes, then go on to gain employment in the government. It was possible for a boy born on a farm to work his way up into the higher ranks of the government. Bureaucracy proved lucrative. (ushistory.org)

Now it is true that social mobility was not very high in Ancient Egypt although it was not considered a caste system, so we can still see the feature of wanting to rise the through the social ranks, perhaps by marriage, probably with few qualms about being involved with the exploitation of slaves, farmers, and artisans, although we cannot blame them for wanting out of a life of humiliation and drudgery either, like many today they had no choice in just what kind of society they would want to live in. Still it must have been true that most were willing to step on others whether they admit or not, as we have learned from our own time.

As for examples of more specific violent deaths, slaughter, and atrocities, including mass takings of slaves through conquest in Ancient Egypt, I will leave it up to the reader to readily find his or her own examples from the abundant information on the topic, or simply look at some Ancient Egyptian art. I myself could not find any sort of ‘death toll’ although I did not look very hard.

Let us take an example from another period in history, two or three short ones should suffice for now.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, Helena P. Schrader explains that social mobility was more common then than most people realize, explaining that the best way was . . .

The accumulation of wealth was, then as now, the best means of upward mobility. Contrary to popular opinion, archeological evidence suggests that many peasants, even serfs, could through hard work, judicious management, clever marriage alliances (and luck, of course) acquire substantial land-holdings.

Wealth could also be accumulated by marrying into wealth, or even by becoming a page, squire, and then a knight, which I believe meant having some sort of connections to get one’s foot in the door, or becoming a priest. Still other ways must have existed, but I believe all of them, or all who sought to ‘better themselves’ through climbing up the social ladder must have known that they ascended out of the classes who would latter be supporting their new and better standard of living. In the Middle Ages, this sort of subjugation and exploitation was transparent unlike today. As for the overall social effects on the lower classes of the system of Manorialism and Feudalism I think it could be said without controversy–except perhaps from Ignatius P. Riley of A Confederacy of Dunces—that these were not social systems that had the human development of the entire population as their goal. So I will just state that the social climbers of that time had the knowledge of the exploitative and oppressive nature of their societies and did so or had to climb up anyway. Again I do not wish to judge them or condemn them all for doing so; it was often self-preservation.

Here again, I could leave to the dear (and probably non-existent) reader to find examples of Medieval slaughter, pogroms, and general legal atrocities for themselves. But I will leave it for now with a quote from someone whose cigar butts I would not have been fit to smoke*, Mark Twain, on the French Revolution . . .

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. ( quoted from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court).

By including this quote I only hope to aid my own assertion in this paper, not that I desire the coming revolution to be as violent as the French Revolution.

I probably need to go on with further examples with examples from the Mercantilist age, the English, Spanish, Dutch and other empires and their cost in human lives.  I will point out the writings Bartolome De Las Casas writing of the near extinction of the once thriving populations of the Caribbean natives. Closer to our own time we merely need to point out the subjugation and genocide of Native Americans by Europeans and their decedents, slavery in the United States, and European Colonialism, including the mass systematic slaughter of the Congolese by King Leopold II of Belgium. All in the name of profit at the expense and often the slaughter of others. The last example here, is derived from the Noam Chomsky’s article cited above in which the statistical work of development economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze is treated with the same ‘body count’ methods and criteria used in The Black Book of Communism:

“We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.”  (Spectrezine.com)

The category which I seek then can be one of profiteering at the expense of other human beings, and in whatever that category can be called and however it can be more precisely defined and researched, it is one filled with death and suffering caused by the rulers of the systems within it and many if not most who benefited from them.

 

 

Note: these are ideas going into a short story on which I’m working . . .

Gibraltar Pilot is a middle to upper level manager at a huge, sprawling, international firm that develops and manufactures surgical and medical supplies of many kinds. He happily works in a division of that company that develops and manufactures “wetware”, software, and medical hardware for the indentured servants of the future. These are unfortunate folks in debt who can no longer declare bankruptcy as in the past and so lease themselves out for a given number of years. What is the difference between this indentured servitude and that of the past? In 2091 the “leasers” have their personality and many other human desires of dignity and comfort put in a stage of a (for the most part) reversible disinstallation of their identity. Thus these servants, while highly functional for many tasks, although virtually none requiring any significant intellect, do not remember their families, friends, lovers, children, or their actual past lives for a specified period. Once their debt is paid, they are reverted to their former mental selves and and familial and social relationships. Problems do occur, however, and so do abuses, which are formally forbidden by law. Metabolic and physical care and maintenance is strictly enforced nonetheless.

These technologically created indentured servants do not “have a life” during their period of servitude. For example, they basically work, eat, and sleep during their lease period, or whatever I end up calling it. Of course they only have vague feelings about who they actually are in the world and their suspended life. They are given a new name and identity during their servitude.

Some who enter this servitude might not be drowning hopelessly in debt. They may want to pay for college, a new child, a home, or even a wedding. Shorter terms are available.

©2018, Jacinto Abril, All Rights Reserved

“The machine throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought”.  (Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise)

IT and telecommunications technology has a grip on us and changes our behaviors, often for the worse. This will allow powers greater than us in society, i.e., the rulers, to change us using this technology and shape us to their ends. No one can doubt this is already happening. One example is people texting and driving in spite of the danger involved; another is how our online behavior is surveilled by commercial interests who then sell information or a profile of your buying habits to merchants. While there has been a lot of protest much of this has been taken in stride or simply taken by most people today. They can do little about it so they go on with their lives. Somehow it seems like the technology itself leads to the acquiescence. This will continue to happen especially as the development of said technology is not democratically planned and mass participation of eventual users plays no part in products being developed. Today the very idea seems outlandish and impossible, but is it not rational to desire a system in which the end users of a technology, especially one changing their way of life, have a say in how it is developed. The smart phone is useful, yes, but how many of us would have wanted it ten years before it was widely marketed if we knew then it would be a constant addiction, obsession, and distraction?

These are notes for dystopian fiction idea I hope to develop further. It is about how IT and telecommunications technology has crept into our lives and how quickly it changes the way we behave and live. It is about how we have lost our privacy, are spied upon, monitored, and how quickly we came to accept this and how much more we will give up as we become captive to technology to which we did not assent. The ideas for it came about one and a half to two years ago, mainly inspired by IT/Internet mental integration in the dystopian novel The Feed and my readings and study of Marx and other economic philosphies. It was not put in any fictional form until the previous blog post. It is based on a general idea about how IT and telecommunication technologies and devices change the social and individual behaviors of their users, mainly because they are directly integrated and interfaced with our minds and bodies. Employees are thereby monitored closely at work by their employers who compile detailed statistics and an overall profile similar to today’s credit rating. This is the ultimate invasion of privacy, the human mind and body but people must acquiesce to it if they want paid work, especially the better-paid and more prestigious jobs. Employment has become physically and mentally exhausting. It is also the sad culmination of the seeming and sometimes understandable acquiescence to the steady erosion and loss or our collective economic and civil rights. How the common people are forced to suffer more and more.

Persons with higher employment ratings, especially from a young age, can attract investors who will pay for further education and training in exchange for a percentage on future income and wealth. In fact, many poorer members of society agree to fund their education this way. Gibraltar Pilot is probably one of these persons.

The fictional middle manager Gibraltar Pilot lives and works in a North American socioeconomic system very different from our own. It is a world that has changed drastically for the worse. It  is a world with an entirely different concept of human and political rights in which those who must work for a living (in far greater numbers than in our own world, or nearly everybody) are considered not to have any intrinsic value as individuals. They have value not as an end but only because they are means to something else: a tolerable standard of living for themselves but more importantly that they are a means to to greater wealth, capital, and power that is in turn used to oppress them further and further. Freedom and the humane concepts of the Enlightenment are dead and buried. Human beings have no worth except that derived from the powerful economic entities and institutions that employ them, for to these they owe their existence and all the blessings of civilization. Individuals have literally become statistics and this has become totally natural to them so much more than we today see our personal worth As Mr. Pilot (in my previous post) described in his introductory bio for his Master’s seminar, employees, or “associates” are comprehensively profiled according to their work performance statistics and are paid according to them. It is a very highly developed “piecework” labor system on an almost global level. An employee profiling and rating system similar to, but even more crucial than, current credit rating systems such Experian are used by companies on an international scale. The system can be gamed and corrupted but this is rare and does not characterize the system as a whole. It is highly reliable and accurate for the most part.

What does characterize this dystopian world is runaway socioeconomic inequality.  The most horrible thing about it is that those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic system are truly convinced that they deserve their fate, and this to a far greater and more complete fashion that can be imagined today. This is because their entire working life is subject to scrutiny and quantification as it has never before been possible. A readout or profile will convince them of just how poorly they supposedly done, in easy to understand statistics and graphs (in formats ingrained from elementary school–now all corporately owned, of course) that explain just how small a part they play in the scheme of things. Key to this is the fact that all media is in private and very pro-business hands. Here is a society where the “manufacture of consent” has become highly sophisticated art and science. In fact, it is one of the pillars of G. Pilot’s world. This has been brought about very innocuously through marketing science, early 21st Century public research firms, etc. This is crucial because, even though this is a world of near full employment, the vast majority of jobs still suck and do not pay very well, and never will no matter how much one’s genuinely hard work is monitored, quantified, and rated. Some of the compensation individual workers in such menial categories will thus have to be non-monetary: norms of social esteem, high regard by one’ peers, civic awards, vacation paid at a lower rate, etc. This will carry with it real social standing.

The employment rating system is all a scam because persons are only rated as individuals and they are assigned income and any power totally on that basis. It totally devalues the social and historical concept in which production takes place. Since society or any kind of sociality dismissed or downplayed–the triumph of the mistaken ideal of “society does not exist”–workers are atomized and forced to focus on their individual effort and not about what large-scale production in the firm, industries, or societies as a whole–social labor, according to Marx.

Because of the system of labor control, or the maximization of labor power, in Marxian terms, productivity and economic growth have soared in this dystopian world, but far worse than is the case today, most people do not benefit from it.

In spite of what Gibraltar Pilot says about “what’s left of government”, something very much like a privatized state exists in his world. This is a demonstration of a concept I have been ruminating about: in large-scale socioeconomic and political systems, some form of overarching or centralized power will exist–be it public or private, democratic, plutocratic, or authoritarian. Furthermore, oligopoly and monopoly are the long-run fate of capitalism, not a world of small firms in competitive markets. Capitalists and their firms seek to overpower and dominate their rivals and markets. This of course makes a mockery of the laissez faire or marketeer’s utopia of no centralized political authority and total ‘liberty’. Someone is always their to fill the vacuum and empower themselves and their allies by dominating vast swaths of society or maybe the whole thing.  When you finally ‘get government off our backs’ you get powerful private entities ‘on your back’ and these will be far worse than even nominally or partially democratic governments have ever been. It will be the “oligopolists” of Jack London’s The Iron Heel. If you want a current example of this power vacuum left by a powerless and ineffectual government you need look no farther than Mexico and her ‘Narcostate’. Pilot’s world will have learned these lessons of history, however, and will have an extensive security apparatus similar to Margaret Atwood’s “CorpSecCorp” of her MaddAddam trilogy.  Or this security apparatus could turn out to be the last of the public sector, as might be national defense in the world of 2091.

Is this world of 2091 still the United States of America? I don’t know.  Is it still called that it will exist and operate under an entirely new constitution that strips away the humanist trappings and pretensions of the current one. If democracy still exists in this world it will be even more of a sham than it is today or will be a one-party state. Probably it will be dropped altogether under some rationalization that it had become ‘unmodern’ or archaic or quaint. You hear this sort of language today, as when Alberto Gonzalez called the Geneva Convention as “quaint” or as I recently heard that unions are “unmodern” (I don’t remember where but that was the word), or when you hear people today opine that ‘unions were needed at one time but they’re not needed today’.  Worse yet, you hear it when Donald Trump declares the press, as crucial to democracy as the brain is to the human body, “the enemy of the people”. Democracy itself will suffer the same fate, I’m afraid, and nothing will be worse than people letting real political power and control of their destiny slip out of their hands in the name of dishonest and corrupt claim to ‘efficiency’ or ‘streamlining’ or ‘modernizing’ that will surely be part of a campaign to destroy what highly inadequate–and in many ways ceremonial–democratic institutions we do have. It will be the death of our collective self-esteem and the completion of our oppression. Don’t worry though, they will find a way to make this oppression highly enjoyable and marvelously entertaining. In no other way can it be sustained, although the system will be very brutal to those that dare refuse to be a part of it. Fun if you do, painful or deadly if you don’t. In fact, it will lower your employee rating, diminish your life chances, lower your pay even more, etc.

 

©2018, Jacinto Abril, All Rights Reserved

My name is Gibraltar Pilot, and I am a Cybermentor. I teach IT systems to be more intelligent, or rather to utilize the AI that they already have. I am a machine guide and also a trouble shooter, but my main job is to act as a liaison between cybermanagement AI and the actual warm bodies that work for our firm.

When I was off work the other day, and I’d logged off (an old term) I really got to thinking about something. Of course, if I had not logged off I would not have gotten very far thinking about anything not work-related. Certainly not for very long. Even if I did the efficiency lapse would gone into this weeks stats and might eventually blight my overall score and deduct (albeit slightly) from my compensation. This was what I thought about: how did companies make a profit at all in the past, given how employees had such mental leeway during work hours?

In a way, it is difficult to think of a time when employees were really free to have any attitude and mindset they wanted at work, that is, if you’re thinking about from the owner’s point of view anyway. Imagine that employers were paying for work time in their very own workplaces and yet their employees mental energies could totally be directed elsewhere, wandering all over the place, daydreaming, whatever. How did these companies of the past make any profit? Well, they made money in spite of not having what employers now have at their disposal, and that is what most of us, the ones with the better jobs anyway, are all interfaced. Those old companies, “corporations”, as they were called, are the foundation of all that we have now. We still owe them a debt of gratitude, even if they were grossly inefficient.

As human-IT interface and communication advanced, little by little it became possible for us to know, not exactly what people think, their actual articulated thoughts (for that would be an invasion of privacy) but we did know exactly whether their mind was on work at any given moment and how hard they were doing that work. At first, such interface and monitoring equipment was intrusive and bulky and required the wearing of interface hardware, a “collar” they used to call it, although it was worn on the arms as well as part of the head and neck. Many considered it an insult to their dignity. So the technology got better and now an associate’s EMPLOYEE GUIDANCE INTERFACE can be imbedded under the skin anywhere above the armpits and they’re ready to go. This guidance system measures brainwaves and other forms of tell-tale energies emanating from the brain, central nervous system, and other organs such as the eyes and ears. No one is ever forced to have the implementation surgery.

Nowadays, when someone goes to work for a production facility, they’re work is supervised in a bio-technical sense and we know just how much they are actually working–and whether that coincides with measurable physical output–and with far few actual supervisors. Of course, it is illegal for IT and AI equipment to directly supervise a human being but they actually do much of the work and provide all the profiles of each associate. This is where I come in by teaching the AI to give me the information, associate profiles which are transmitted to an employee statistical system, an international network outside of interference from what is left of government, which all productive firms who subscribe can share.

What is an Employee Statistical Profile (ESP)? That of course can be reduced to a single number: Production Above Replacement, or PAR, and that is what any single hired worker can produce for a firm compared to the average productivity of workers in any given sector. While some consider that the most important statistic, there is much more to an associate profile than that. For example, we want to know, that even if an employee has an impressive PAR, she may or may be able to do even better given a gentle push. This employee may be a slow starter in the morning, so we monitor TPE, or Time to Peak Efficiency, so we know just how long it takes her to get up to her best and most productive at work. So that is part of our own job working with her; no electronic “prodding” or shocks or reminders from her EMPLOYEE GUIDANCE INTERFACE system, as many in the past imagined the system would be turn out to be–these detractors and critics were dead wrong about the humanity of our system. My job in particular, being a veteran (even though I never earned my MBA!) is to teach the AI how to guide our managers in their training of our associates. It might all seem a bit stilted in actual training sessions with our employees but the best managers, like me, give it the most human touch and can even make it funny. But the training strategy is all the AI’s. Legally and humanely, to be frank, you just need an actual warm body to do it. A lot of our training is done online, of course, as this seminar is, but no one is supervised by a machine, directly anyway.

Getting back to my employee example, the AI devises a training module on lowering her TPE and get her up to her best faster. We don’t stop at TPE as you all know. Sometimes our mental and physiological interfaces of our employees indicate that although they putting in a lot of effort given their cerebral hemispheric activity (I won’t get too technical here) and their metabolic functions on my display, they are just not getting a lot done. That is we also have output to effort levels the best of these being high indicated levels of metabolic and mental effort leading to good results for the firm. Everyone, at work anyway, really is an open book, to use a quaint expression. We know if their mind is on their work and their implanted devices show us exactly how much it is. We even know when your daydreaming and even if you are daydreaming about sex, although we know none of the details, nor should we.

In the past, a lot of workers daydreamed on the job or simply occupied their minds with thoughts irrelevant to their work on company time. This problem is getting closer and closer to being eradicated—you will have your “mind on your job”, as they used to say, and why anyone would want an economy full of people who didn’t is completely beyond me, as I’d implied in my introductory paragraph. That is why I love what I am doing. They used to talk about “making a difference” which was very vague and socialistic until we all really learned what mattered, and that is keeping our privately run and owned firms profitable as much as is humanely possible and this is the very driving force of our wealth in which everyone who plays a part has a part. I in fact do pretty good as my performance statistics are quite high . . . but, uh-hum, I digress.

Now we KNOW just how hard everybody who works works because of their Employment Statistical Profile. We know who are the best people to hire because of this ESP. But we cannot always hire the best ESPs because they are often more expensive and these people are more scarce than you can imagine. And we save a lot of funds in that we do not have to go through extensive hiring and interview processes as our predecessors did because our system is so much more to the point and an ESP tells you exactly who you are hiring.

Nowadays, we know exactly how much employees are giving, we quantify it and create a statistical profile of everyone in the workforce and everybody has learned to give it all they’ve got. They can’t help it now and they’re all the better for it both personally and financially! Another reason I firmly believe and what I am doing and why this program will help me do it even better is that we make individuals better: they learn how to concentrate and stay focused and that is a good in and of itself. Does that not in and of itself discredit the so-called intrusion and “de-humanization” accusations of critics and cranks past and present? No, we made people stronger and more able, even when they are not on company time. Besides, anyone can opt out of the ESP rating system at any time, albeit their personal employment prospects won’t be the best because the best employers are all integrated into the employment ratings system. Not only here but just about any other country to which they might move. It is truly a cross-border system who works hard and has a good rating–and your interface equipment does not lie–can make something of herself.

Earlier in the century and sometime afterward many were predicting the end of “work” and the advance of automation and robots and about how that was going to make the average person superfluous but all of that never came to pass. Except during downturns, we have very close to full employment. Work is here to stay. And it is kind of hard to admit because it is very strict but it all turned out for the better for everyone. To hang on to the ideas of the past would be the common ruin of us all. As we learned in business school: It is better, cheaper, and more profitable to society to automate the people themselves than to pay for the automation that will make them superfluous. Of course automation is in widespread use yet never to the point where it was imagined in the past. Can you imagine the costs to producers in society of so many unemployed? Nobody wanted to pay for the proposed guaranteed income and it came to be viewed as a form of theft from the producers and highly immoral anyway.

I apologize for going to much into my work and not of myself yet I am proud of both.

©2018, Jacinto Abril, All Rights Reserved

Throughout human history it has been recognized that powerful interests of all sorts, be they Pharaohs  and their priests, kings and the nobility, commercial interests, dynastic families, corporations, emperors and their imperial bureaucracies, conglomerates, the state administering society in the interest of the most powerful and wealthy interests, as well as it being a power unto itself over society, and the intermediate social strata that do the administrative work overseeing the creation of society’s wealth and goods and services by the middle and lower classes. What is astounding as that this fact, that there are rulers and ruled, is ignored when discussing the justice of the social structure and the distribution of wealth and income in North American and similar and not-as-similar societies in the present. It is is as if in the present we have all gotten beyond the oppressive class structures of the past, a level playing field exists, which is of course a bunch of malarky and characterizes reactionary and conservative social philosophy. Sadly, class oppression is worse than ever in the United States, as wealth and income inequality lead to social situation of a powerless majority and powerful minority or oligarchy, who have almost total control over the all aspects of government, running it in the name of big business, mainly, the vastly overblown and parasitic financial sector. Or as John Dewey said, “politics [government] is the shadow cast by business over society”.

Probably the worst of these reactionary social philosophies these days is so-called libertarianism, an inaccurate self-declaration by its adherents if there ever was one. In case you did not know, modern libertarianism is based on laissez faire, or free market, minimally or unregulated, capitalism. This means a socioeconomic system of little environmental, work safety, consumer safety regulation, as well as a minuscule to no social safety net, all of this of course resulting in very low taxes–its greatest point of attraction to many. Libertarians believe that minimal taxation and regulation–and no minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, among other desired eliminations–will lead to greater wealth for all members of society as businesses can employ more people without regulatory and tax burdens, they will in turn have income to spend on goods, services, and investments such as home ownership, etc. Their main strategy for replacing the present functions of government, such as the creation and maintenance of infrastructure, is to privatize it, as they believe that private ownership and management is always superior to public.

Yet an important motivating factor and cause of the libertarians is the regulating and taxing state is oppressive. It is oppressive because it is an unneeded institution that must exist by taxation on the owners of capital, entrepreneurs (the exclusive “producers” in their vocabulary) and that these noble people need to be set free and do the good they do for society. To them the state, or what most might call ‘the government’ is a perpetuating and self-serving monster living at the expense of the productive business person, and that the social safety net is merely something the politicians of the state do in order to win votes of the lower classes, and thus keep them and their political class in power. Thus the state and almost all it does must be cut to the bone. Since private property is the most sanctified concept in libertarianism (as long as it is “legally”, but not morally acquired, and usually not “earned” in any realistic sense of the word), government legal institutions that protect it, as well as law enforcement will remain very firmly in place–this is a part of the government they love. Law enforcement will also of course put down any popular insurrections against private property, and the direction of society dictated by those who own most of it, who of course, do so in their interests.

While the state, in our country, the federal, state, and local governments, is undoubtably powerful and full of reasons to be wary of its power, I think it is a terrible idea to replace the present institutions of the state with private interests performing those functions. One, private institutions are just as susceptible to corruption as those of states; they distort public purpose into the profiteering of their owners, e.g., private prisons seek to jail more juveniles to be more profitable; and three, they eliminate unions of public workers and the voice and better wages and benefits they provide them, replacing them with low-wage workers with few perks.

Worst of all, however, is the fact the the power of the state is taken over by private interests, or as is the case nations without strong states, or central government, power is society is taken over by criminal interests, as is the case in beloved Mexico.

One of my favorite Led Zeppelin songs is “The Immigrant Song”, that telling the tale of the ancient Norseman’s brave oceanic migration to the “western shore”, presumably of North America. I’ve come to see another powerful but less-remembered rock song as an immigrant song for our times, however . . .

It was a Monday
A day like any other day
I left a small town
For the apple in decay
It was my destiny
It’s what we needed to do
They were telling me
I’m telling you
I was inside looking outside
The millions of faces
But still I’m alone
Waiting, hours of waiting
Paying a penance
I was longing for home
I’m looking out for the two of us
I hope we’ll be here
When they’re through with us . . . (for complete lyrics click here . . . )

Sometimes the lyrics of a song and the power of a song itself can give you a different perspective, really put you in someone else’s shoes. One of these songs somehow got in my head today and I remembered what a great and seldom-heard-today rock song it is. I’m talking everything: it’s hard rock, menacing guitar riffs and rhythm and a rocking horn section that is a perfect fit for its epic, metropolitan struggle of one against all, all crafted around a brilliant vocal setting the perfect tone for its lyrics. Then it hit me somehow that these are lyrics that are playing themselves out in real life out all over our own country and in many part of the so-called First World and will only increasingly do so in the coming decades. The human phenomenon I speak of is immigration, mainly undocumented, much of it not, and the forgotten hit song, as many of you quickly recognized, is “A Long, Long Way From Home”, recorded by the aptly-named (but surely inadvertently so) Anglo-American rock group Foreigner. The song was written by lead guitarist Mick Jones, vocalist Lou Graham, and saxophonist/keyboardist Ian McDonald, according to Wikipedia.

The lyrics of this song are probably not intended to be about international immigration, as the protagonist leaves his wife, significant other, and all he has known in his “small town for the Apple in decay”, a clear allusion to our biggest city.  Although not specifically expressed, this indeed seems to be move of economic desperation, income, as it “was our destiny, it’s what we needed to do, they were telling me, I’m telling you”. As moving and dramatic and tragic as this song is, the meaning and aptness of the lyrics is even more so when seen though the mind of a foreign immigrant even more desperate and alienated–“the millions of faces, but still I’m alone”–not able to speak our language and thus usually suited only for those jobs at those jobs at the bottom rungs of our social ladder, relegated far below the values of wealth and success we value so highly. Such immigrants know exactly where they stand in their new world.

It is worth pointing out that the line ” . . . it’s what we needed to do, they were telling me, I’m telling you” sounds fit to be the urging of friends or family members that the best or only chance they have out of economic difficulty is to migrate to a country with better opportunities–go north, usually. I never saw this song in this way until now. The songs we love become a chronology and often an emotional history of our lives. The best of them tell stories and teach us with lyrics told by another but to things with which we are familiar and can viscerally relate. Many of you remember “A Long, Long Way From Home”. What I hope is that a song beloved and culturally and emotionally relevant to you will help you see others that are often despised in an entirely different and humane light. Try imagining the protagonist of the song, the song being about, a person of color, a person of Indian descent, or Mestizo, a person with brown skin who out of economic desperation came to this country to grind out a living for his or herself and loved ones counting on them to do so. This is exactly the plight of the man in the Foreigner song yet probably few of us imagined that man to look like the man in the picture above.

Rock music fans, hard rock and metal in particular, I’ve come to realize, see things through a white cultural lens even though the origin of the music is in the blues and early rock and roll, both African-American art forms. As we know, it largely took white artists on both sides of the pond to popularize it into the lasting worldwide phenomenon that it became. Do many U.S. rockers realize the the bands of your lives have fanatical followings throughout Latin America? For example, one live recording of “Enter Sandman” by Metallica made in Mexico City was at times close to being overwhelmed by the loud, mass reaction of those in attendance. We see, I suspect, the protagonists our our songs, those for example, betrayed by a lover or a boss, as largely white characters. Yet these and other themes portrayed in the music us rockers listen to suffer many of the “slings and arrows” of life along with its joys and triumphs that almost anyone in the world would, especially when they are culturally similar to us. Being “A Long, Long Way from Home” in an alien world is one of those themes, and casting a different and deserving protagonist in your mind’s eye when you listen to the song will help you to see the humanity of desperate others who don’t look quite like you do.
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We are under Fascism now.

The quote in the title, for those of you not old enough to remember, was from a famous and frequently shown TV commercial of a woman’s manicurist, named Madge, soaking that client’s fingers in a bright green liquid. The woman is mildly appalled when the trusted Madge reveals that she’s been softening up her client’s fingers in water infused with Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid. Well, she never would imagined a professional manicurist would use dishwashing liquid as a pre-treatment! But Palmolive is that soft on a woman’s hands, “even while you do the dishes”, supposedly.  There’s your explanation, younger ones.

Like that poor woman getting the manicure back in 70s, I’ve got to tell you that you’re soaking in something, and its not to get you ready for a manicure, it’s Fascism.

Look at just this partial list of fascist characteristics readily apparent to all who are paying attention.

An ever-growing tide of racism and white supremacy disseminated by a Rightwing media for decades now, and which now has a deranged, ignorant, and yes, highly-racist, warmongering megalomaniac as its titular head. Rightwing media that have worked very hard to make racism cool and edgy and anti-racists as fuddy-duddies, weenies, Debbie Downers, and conformists, as they have been enabled to do since the end of the Fairness Doctrine. Voter suppression on a national level and very little national awareness and even less outrage, in spite of the courageous work of the NAACP, Greg Palast, and other individuals and groups fighting against it. A militarized society that sees war as a form of entertainment and national pride, as a sort of sporting event in which our side is sure to win, since there’s no danger to its spectators cheering it on, unlike those on receiving end of our war-making. Everywhere are people who feel chills and a sense of purpose in the most rank and cretinized forms of patriotism–waving and posting flags as if that means anything but a dangerous conditioning to worship and to find the utmost existential purpose in loyalty to them, without any true understanding–no more–the actual disdaining of the principles for which they supposedly stand because national superiority is their true god and only vision of the future. The proud, jingoist proclaiming of ‘Merica, and ‘American Pride’, ‘Proud to be 100% American’ and other such everyday things that have become so normal most people don’t care or notice.  Fascist street gangs and a white supremacist movement. Scapegoating of immigrants, who by many are seen as a sub-human menace. Hate crimes on the rise against Jews, Muslims (even those who are wrongly perceived to be Muslims), immigrants, and people of color. The most powerful military with the greatest reach and establishment the world has ever seen, ardently supported as a sacred expression of the National Will. Civil liberties disappearing, and again, a good portion of the population wanting to see them disappear as the terrible and disobedient thing they supposedly are. Savage resistance to the equality of women and the celebration of those who abuse and exploit them as something funny and all just good fun. The end of privacy and a surveillance state. Police departments militarizing in order to ruthlessly suppress the groundswell surely building against decades of economic and racial inequalities and socioeconomic oppression in the loss of labor rights. The indisputable dominance of corporations in everything we do, in our very minds and culture, as corporations constantly train us in the ways of selfishness and the triumph of the individual as the only way of relating to each other and so in the of ordering of our socioeconomic system, substituting petty pleasures and a worldview that comes to a screeching halt at the chain-link fence at the front and back yard. Social isolation, atomization, and alienation brought on not just by the commercialized culture but by the very devices we use. Little solidarity with those who share your economic and social situation, no matter how much they have in common and how irresistible they could be is they worked together to overthrow their oppressors. The impossibility of collective and civic action for the masses of people, most of whom it seems are fatalistic now at whatever personal tragedies befall them and are trained from their earliest schooling , workplaces, and in media and entertainment that they have only themselves to blame. Low voter turnout because the political system and life stays just as bad for most people no matter who is voted into office.

When is it time to call it what it is? I say that time is now. I think it is a waste of time to debate whether that Donald J. Trump is a Fascist, or that we are headed toward Fascism, when so much of what is known as fascistic is already here. If this current Fascism–admittedly in an early stage–is to grow into something that most persons would recognize as such, a recognition that usually takes place when put under arrest for your views or skin color, or in a concentration camp, then future historians will judge this time, specifically, the election of Donald J. Trump, as the black dawning of the American Fascist period. They may even delineate that period as the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, because of the wave of patriotism and jingoism resulting from it which made it so much easier for the George W. Bush administration to deceive the nation into believing a third-rate power like Iraq was an existential threat to the United States that must be preemptively invaded. The scariest result of ultranationalism and militarism as dominant national values and the only unifying vision of the future for so many has been that so many are willing to follow a textbook fascist leader and demagogue like Donald J. Trump. They did so because they had no where else to turn and the condition for a leader like Trump are ripe. Our response to 9-11 helped to set the stage for this.

We are in Fascism now. It is dangerous and useless to wait for Fascism to truly arrive, or to say, ‘well, I really would not call this Fascism yet’, as one waits for a cake to finish baking. Social processes just don’t work that way and they always take a lot of time. Fascism is a process and we are already well along enough in that process to call it what it is and respond accordingly. Fascism is a social and popularly supported process that is developed over time as the result of elites wanting to keep economic and racial superiority within a severely unequal and hence oppressive socioeconomic system. Fascism is of course ultranationalist and so is imperial, in that one’ superior nation is only so in comparison to others. It is competitive. Since the globe and its resources are finite, the imperial aggression of Fascism means that other nations and people must suffer and lose out so the superior nation can continue to be glorified. This is the ultimate flowering and inevitable outcome of nationalism: war, death, and destruction, all the more for those who proclaim these as their most cherished values in the first place, for Fascists are as dangerous to the nation they rule as to the nations they victimize. According to Umberto Eco, who wrote about Fascism as something that has been with us throughout history in many guises, yet still recognizable, Fascists are doomed to lose wars because they simultaneously overestimate and underestimate the strength of their enemies, e.g., in Italian Fascist propaganda, the English were both overfed softies while the British Empire was a threat to the Italian people.

Trump is a man for these times. He is not as dumb as he looks and acts, as disgusting as that obviously is. No, he knew, as many who supported him, many, such as Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the owners of the nation, et al, and have worked to bring into existence the ugly situation described above, that this is exactly the right time for a person like himself. The ground was very fertile and the current political system does not work for most people.  That is when many people look to something different. Since the U.S. population and society are so individualized and do not have much social solidarity, nor much time for political activity, a form of Fascism is exactly what is appropriate and serves the interest of the rulers of society, the rich and powerful. The rulers are afraid and that is why they must train us to coalesce around the only form of collectivism that serves them: nationalism, ultranationalism and finally Fascism.

Fascism does not have to look like other fascisms of the past. It will morph according to cultural and historical conditions. At its heart it is social-Darwinist, competitive, and elitist. It arises in a time of trouble for the ruling classes. It is the ultimate expression of their order with them on top and will use violence and the overthrow of democratic institutions and rights to get it, even though they cannot get rid of them all at once. Many, such as my ability to write this, may be with us for a few more years, but eventually, they must be eliminated for Fascism to mature. You may be asking: ‘How? How will the people allow this to happen?’ The thing is that many of the general population want this to happen or do not care if it happens, as Fascist movements of the past have indeed shown. Hitler and Mussolini were elected then deformed their political systems to their Fascist wills with the help of Fascist movements, parties, and their allies in business and organized religion. Things are so bad, e.g., many working folks are crushed by debt because of their shrunken wages and salaries, extortionist medical fees, lack of well-paying jobs, etc.,  that many more are willing to take a chance on a demagogue like Trump; many of these are alarmed about the perceived destruction of their world of white racial and cultural superiority and blame those peoples they despise for their precarious and hopeless economic situation. Of course, the blame should be placed on those that have the most managerial powers over society, its class superiors and owners and be definition its rulers. They “have mismanaged” as Ernest Everhard of Jack London’s terrifying and visionary novel of Fascism, “The Iron Heel”, said, and they have been running society into the ground and profiting handsomely as they are doing it.

The trap in which many are insnared is called “personal responsibility”: a harmless and sensible-sounding phrase used by conservatives, the Live-and-Let-Die “libertarians”, and ultra-individualists, to justify ever-worsening social inequality. This is one of the main reasons that so many see no connection between their personal lives and the political and economic system. This is why we are so vulnerable to what may happen. Which, of course, no one can really tell for sure, as signs of the groundswell and change, such as Black Lives Matter (which I consider Civil Rights 2.0) and the popularity of Bernie Sanders, of whom I have known and admired a very long time and would have never guessed would become a beloved and (rightly) trusted figure on a national level.

Still, let me pose a scenario. Suppose that a movement bolstered and built around a controversial idea, widely disseminated by mainly Rightwing media but gradually more accepted by the mainstream, that democratic institutions are outdated and inefficient. One recent example of this line of thought is Trump calling the U.S. justice system an inefficient, ineffectual “laughingstock” in his impatience for swift punishment of suspect Sayfullo Saipov in the aftermath of the deadly terrorist attack in New York City on October 31st.  Democracy, its elitist enemies, ideologies, and politicians will declare, while we want to keep it, must be updated and streamlined, made more responsive and efficient. Along with a streaming of our system of justice, or due process, it must be made more friendly to business and entrepreneurs with less environmental and labor regulations, much of which has already been done, by the way. Such a streamlining would inevitably place much more power in the hands of the executive. Such a movement probably already exists but I will not confirm that now and it might be considered “fringe” if it did.  But not altogether. I had mentioned voter suppression is already widespread and that right after 9-11 was an idea about in the media and parroted by many individuals that we would have to ‘give up many of our rights in order to be safe’ and this was a mainstream phenomenon. In fact, radio stations, again, owned by powerful Rightwing corporate interests, such as Clear Channel, self-censored. Now suppose this idea and movement rears its head in a time such as now where there is an autocratic and megalomaniacal fascist president, such as today. Needless to say, many of  Trump’s followers, and they are legion, are not not ardent supporters of democracy and popular rule, equality, etc. Remember as he was being nominated most were chanting “Yes You Will” as he outlined his agenda which is a far cry from the “Yes We Can” motto of Barack Obama’s campaign. Now imagine, that as a beleaguered U.S. President, that a crisis, probably of his making, such as war in North Korea, which he has tacitly threatened with nuclear annihilation and genocide, or another massive ISIS or Al-Queda terrorist attack, occurs. Another crisis to Trump might be his imminent impeachment, where he will refuse to relinquish power, democratic opposition to such a move by Trump is widespread and a state of emergency is declared. Another war or state of emergency would be the precipitating event and a tantalizing opportunity to remake society as is described in Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, where she quotes Milton Friedman . . .

It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine: ‘Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable . . . (p. 166).  (Taken from blog.kloppmagic.ca, “Favorite Quotes from “The Shock Doctrine”)

He may have adequate support for the defiant and bold move of refusing to leave office already (a majority of the population is not needed), which would include many police departments, a fraction of the military, Fascist organizations such as the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, et al, to even “temporarily suspend the Constitution” (similar to the coup d’etat that established the dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale“), almost total civil intimidation, jail or even kill politicians and civic leaders who oppose him, and take power. Then the Fascism we have now will look like what most people would recognize as such.

No one, ever less so this author, can accurately predict the future. Hopefully, Trump can be removed from office legally or he resigns. I merely want to give an example of how what we have now could get far worse. Unlike the allegory of the frog put into a pot of water coming to a boil, we need to recognize the danger we and our children are in and jump out. Fight against the Fascism we already have now to keep it from getting worse and dooming this country, its society, and many in the wider world for generations to come. In an era of nuclear weaponry it could even mean the end of civilization in its present form, for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, or its complete destruction with no chance for regrowth or revitalization.

 

The shockwaves of the events of August 12th, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia continue to reverberate throughout the country like the aftershocks of a great quake. Decent people everywhere mourn the tragic death (terrorist murder, really) of Heather Heyer, a courageous fighter for the antiracist cause. More imposing right-wing demonstrations are scheduled in cities traditionally thought of as liberal and left-leaning.

What prompted me to write this essay and blog post is that I heard Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism*on the NPR program Fresh Air on August 23rd. It was a discussion that should be more widely held given all the racism and other right-wing extremism being so widely manifested by the election and administration of Donald Trump. It is concerning the militia movement, which first came to the fore in the administration of George Bush in the early 90s but has roots stretching back farther than that.  As many of you remember, theirs was an ominous and puzzling presence in Charlottesville on August 12th and at other recent demonstrations. When I first saw reports of them at the demonstration I thought that must have been openly allied and providing armed protection to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but later I learned that they claimed to only be defending the free-speech right of all demonstrators. I believe this is ultimately not true. They are definitely taking a side and it’s not hard to see what side that is. To find out why please read on. The NPR discussion mentioned above really gave me a lot to think about. Much of what I discuss as fact in this essay is taken from the answers Mr. Pitcavage gave in the interview on Fresh Air.

Almost all of the Charlottesville news and discussion that I have heard has been concerning the toxic and odious white supremacist, neo-Nazi side, the anti-racist counterdemonstrators that include the militant -Fascist group known popularly as Antifascist or Antifa, and of course Trump’s infamous equivocation of these opposing sides. The other significant force at work there was of course the patriotic militia movement. The patriotic militia movement (hereafter ‘militia movement) in the United States started becoming larger and more powerful in the early 1990s, died down early in the last decade and then swelled with new membership and activity with the election of Barack Obama. This alone says to me and many others that they indeed have a white-supremacist bent, or at least some overriding fear of people of color and the so-called Browning of America (see my post “Donald Trump’s Big Fat Wall of Racism and White Supremacy”). The driving force of the movement is based on conspiracy theory, according to Mr. Pitcavage. The main conspiracy, according to its membership is what they call the eminent coming of a totalitarian “New World Order” which is a shadowy, world totalitarian government that has already taken over much of the world and now has its sites aimed at the only bastion of freedom left, the U.S., as they see it. The reason they are such firearm enthusiasts, or commonly and rightly known as “gun nuts”, is because they are organizing, training, and preparing for an armed struggle against this impending New World Order, helped by the complicity of the existing U.S. federal government, attempting to impose its rule on our country and importantly to them, nullify the Second Amendment and other rights and come door to door to confiscate everyone’s firearms. To many advocates of gun ownership this is the only way that personal liberties are to be maintained against the abuses of any strong central government (a point that is highly debatable), not just the New World Order and hence to lose gun rights means the loss of all liberties. If they did not fear an outside, globally dominant New World Order, their conspiracy theories would probably involve the existing federal government as they are strongly antigovernment, period. Another well-known conspiracy theory that propels the militia movement is the coming internment of law-abiding citizens by the forces of this coming order, for which the concentration camps are already secretly being established. The militia movement posits itself as an in situ resistance force to the New World Order. There is only one problem: Pitcavage states that absolutely no evidence for the New World Order as militia members describe it exists. 

Spokespersons on the scene for the militia movement present in Charlottesville said they were establishing themselves there as a peace-keeping force and to defend free speech. This was tolerated by law enforcement largely because Virginia is an open-carry state. I personally think it had no business establishing themselves there at the demonstration and counterprotest but that is not to be discussed further here. What I do want to explore now is how it fits into the current political situation and what its future place is in it.

Them militia movement claims that it is distinct and different from the white supremacists whose free speech it was there to defend. They are adamant that they are not neo-Nazis and not racists. Some, very few, militia members in various states are even people of color. Still, many militia are very anti Islamic and anti-immigrant, the latter on display as many militia groups have taken it upon themselves to “guard” the U.S. southern border (PBS Frontline: “Guide to the New Militia Movement”, May 2017). Now this seems perhaps that we should take them at their word about them wanting to keep the peace and so forth but hold on because they share more than a few similarities with those from whom they claim to be separate. But according to Pitcavage, a lot of crossover exists between the two sides. Please also note that members of the militia movement or individual militias do not establish themselves to be peacekeepers at demonstrations  for Left or Liberal causes, such as the anti-war movement, pro-labor actions, Black Lives Matter or other civil rights actions, or any for the Trump resistance. They have never been known as fighters for free speech as an ideal–the Second, not the First Amendment, is their main concern–but it seems that they were interested in protecting the free speech of neo-Nazis and other white supremacists on that day in Charlottesville. I do not remember if any of the Left demonstrators welcomed their presence or benefited from it, but concerning the former, I tend to think not, to put it lightly.

According to Pitcavage, the militia movement is absolutely pro-Trump and were ecstatic when he was elected. Here is where the crossover of belief systems gets the most dangerous. Trump is their champion.  He will protect their gun rights and is not in anyway a multiculturalist like their mega-demon, Hillary Clinton apparently is. Trump is an nationalist / fascist / racist who wants to “Make America Great Again”, meaning as it was before some modest progress in racial equality had been made, or when whites felt ever so much in charge. This is the appeal across the Right. It appeals to the angry and poor whites, drowning in debt, working shitty service sector jobs with little or no health insurance who blame Big Government, Latin American immigrants, and other minorities for their problems. Certainly, I feel empathy for these members of the working, middle and poor classes, but their blame is totally misplaced. Again, members of the militia movement claim not to be racist, but please notice that most of them bought into Trump’s racist, white-supremacist agenda enough to be celebratory when he was elected. Some of course, such as the Three Percent United Patriots (Mother Jones, “I Went Undercover”, Nov./Dec. 2016) are openly racist. I tend to think that almost all of Trump’s ardent supporters, including the minority ones, are indeed racist. They are just not out in the open about their aims and beliefs as the neo-Nazis and their repulsive kind are. The militia movement is indeed a right-wing movement, and let’s face it: Racism lives on the Right, even among most who consider themselves merely conservative. Even though not openly allied (at least not yet) they are on the same side. It is a difficult thing to say, but I believe the racism of militia members who claim not to be racist is in fact is not the crude, open racism of the neo-Nazi or KKK member, but a more sophisticated, respectable kind. It is the racism of people that deny they are racist when called on it yet continue to do things–like vote for Trump or see African-Americans as inherently lazy or criminals–that do harm to all people of color. For example, a respectable middle class person who shall remain nameless once argued that the proof of inherent black criminality is found in the disproportionate percentage of their incarceration. That of the many militia members claiming not to be racist is akin to the racism of the respectable, country club Republicans and other loathsome personalities. In the typical militia member’s case, we might call it a sort of mainstream folk racism, the kind fed upon and metastasized by AM right-wing and conservative talk radio. It is simply denying their racism while their actions show different.

To say the militia movement is well-armed is an understatement. Will we continue to see them more and more in the public square? Probably. Because at this conjecture the militia movement now sees Antifa as its most visible enemy, a vanguard if you will, of the New World Order, although Antifa is nowhere near as organized (Pitcavage considers it more of a “network” than an organization) and its members are not characteristically or ever known to be armed with firearms. Antifa, as we know are a definite and militant presence in many public political events. In their conspiratorial way, militia members believe that some Antifa are even trained in Syrian terrorist camps and well-funded by their other mega-demon, liberal philanthropist George Soros. Mark Pitcavage concluded that the main reason that the militia were in Charlottesville that day was not so much to protect free speech but to provoke and confront Antifa. Many if not most of the 500 different militia groups in the U.S. believe that Antifa are the shock troops of the New World Order. Again, no actual evidence exists for this ridiculous but extremely dangerous notion. Since they want to confront Antifa they definitely see them as a threat and probably perceive them to be much better organized and even armed then they are in reality. It is not clear that by wanting to confront them that they mean to provoke them into a violent battle in which the better armed militia would win, thereby neutralizing their new enemy, or to imply intimidate them, making Antifa less effective or disbanded entirely. Hopefully, any kind of blood bath can be avoided.

Remember that the militia movement, or least many parts of it, has not always acted like a defensive force. Many times its members have been busted planning attacks using improvised explosives. More information can be found on the ADL site under the title “Extremism, Terrorism, & Bigotry: The Militia Movement”. One other stalwart source on the militia movement and its offensive operations is one Ms. J.J. MacNab, who “travels the country, leading training seminars for law enforcement on militia and other right-wing extremists. She says the groups have committed or planned hundreds of violent attacks”(PBS Newshour: “Why Militia Groups are Surging Across the Nation”, April 19th, 2017).  The threat posed by right-wing extremist groups is real and growing and they are capable of intensive and highly destructive violence. While perhaps not including those groups present at Charlottesville the movement as a whole is getting scarier and they are pumped up and filled with new conspiracies of tyrannical government military takeovers by the likes of right-wing maniacal personalities such as Alex Jones and even tacitly supported and encouraged by right-wing Republican politicians (Newsweek: “Right-wing Extremists are a Bigger Threat to America Than ISIS”, February 16, 2016).

As we’d cited earlier most of the militia movement as well as other right-wing armed extremists fervently support Donald Trump. This is the first time since the beginning of the modern militia movement at least, that the far Right has found so much to support in a U.S. President, who got elected on a racist platform. We have scattered throughout the nation well-armed and extremist groups in support of Trump given who given what we know about them gives extreme cause for concern when speculating just how they will support him. It is indeed strange to consider that many very rational and intelligent people in reliable media and elsewhere describe Trump as a fascist, and fascism is a system of strong oppressive government if there ever was one, why so many on the anti-government right support him.  What could they possibly see in him? They see in him finally a president, not who is anti-government like them, no, but one who shares their backward-looking, reactionary world-view and will protect their excessive Second Amendment rights. Certainly Trump is no small-government president nor did he campaign like one. He has never been an ideological individualist like many on the Right, including free-market libertarians, are. Therefore, I am in agreement–and increasingly disturbed, because the situation is unlike anything I have ever know before in this country–with an article appearing in Politico which describes the militia movement as ultimately not neutral but in fact absolutely partisan in that and ready to take their struggle to a new level in that…

…evidence has mounted over the past six months that the militias have gravitated decisively toward one side in the street battles that have played out recently in cities across the country. Indeed, during these first months of Trump’s presidency, these loose-knit organizations making up America’s militia movement are losing their anti-government ideological purity as they grow increasingly close with a segment of the right wing from which many in the recent past had generally kept their distance. Their presence as a private security force for an increasingly public coalition of white nationalist factions—Ku Klux Klan followers, neo-Nazis and “alt-right” supporters—has transformed a movement that has already demonstrated a willingness to threaten violence (“How Militias Became the Private Police for White Supremacists”, Politico.com, August 17th, 2017).

They are probably strategically smart enough to avoid any well-coordinate confrontation on a wide regional let alone national level with the U.S. military or even law enforcement in its various levels of tactical ability. As well-armed as they are they do not have the firepower to compete. Nor do I see their battle against Antifa developing into open armed warfare between the two sides or including any would-be members of an armed left.  Instead, they will carry out a smaller scale struggle in the public sphere, both literally and figuratively, because theirs is also a battle for public sympathy and support going all the way up to the halls of state power. They may in time become, ironically, a paramilitary force on the side of a truly oppressive fascist state, and this time not an imaginary one.

The fact that law enforcement now considers them a far greater threat then Islamic extremist terrorists, that they are capable and have a record of carrying out violent quasi-military or terrorist operations, and most importantly, have become a well-armed and organized force within the reactionary and fascist modern Right movement, makes the patriotic militia movement more dangerous than ever before. I do not recall a time when such a grass-roots, well-armed movement existed, so well-prepared for open conflict and definitely taking sides in a time when the country is so polarized. Perhaps in the heyday of the KKK in the 1920s when their membership numbered four million. For them to take sides in such a volatile time might signal the beginning of more active and violent operations unofficially in support what the Trump regime hopes to accomplish. One form it may take for the near future is the intimidation of dissent against Trump, as many may fear to take place in protests attended by well-armed militia because of the possibility of a bloodbath, which would probably be the result of rogue militia members or simply because of accidental gunfire, as supposedly happened at the Boston Massacre. This is a particular danger because although organized and networked, the militia movement has of course no central command, their ideologies vary, e.g., some are indeed openly racist, and therefore make their own decisions. In other words, we cannot guarantee how any particular militia is going to proceed.

* You are going to have to link to the transcript and podcast by cutting and pasting the bold letters as your Google search terms. I tried but could not make a link to it. Please also note that I do not meant to endorse the ADL except in its campaigns against antisemitism, racism, and its Extremism pages which are an excellent resource for these times. Particularly, I do not support their stance on Palestine.