It is very difficult for me to live in this culture.
I just can’t psychologically survive in the high performance society, where everyone is passionately exploiting themselves, while all life on this planet is being destroyed.
I have severe depression and anxiety disorders, and I have to take good care of myself to be able to take care of my son.
It is very difficult for people who have never experienced poverty to understand what poverty means. The constant nagging fear. The permanent stress and psychological terror of state authorities on which you are dependent, that harass you and try to keep you small and oppressed.
Now they want me to work underpaid, shitty jobs again. I already had a stroke not long ago. I can’t do these jobs and I can‘t stand the pressure.
I live in the age of the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years. And the cause of this mass extinction is our glorious western civilization.
Empire.
Indeed, almost all imperial forces have joined into one: The West.
“In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier…The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers,” writes John Pilger.
Looks like the West is encircling the strongest probable future enemies, preparing for war.
Full spectrum dominance.
The understanding of the fact that this culture is always at war, and will indeed kill all life on planet earth made me shift my loyalty and become an activist.
My loyalty does not belong to empire and industrial capitalism. My loyalty belongs to the suppressed, the poor, the dying planet.
Where are you when we need people to take responsibility for our fellow creatures, human and nonhuman, and defend them? Always working on your professional self-fulfillment, performing until you burn out.
Do you distract yourself so manically with your work, so you don’t have to see what is happening around us? That the insects disappear, the songbirds disappear, the masses impoverish?
That the West is already bombing the near and middle east to ashes and dust and prepares for more, while you try to overtake yourself, become faster and better, without even stopping once to understand the obvious fact that this system is heading for collapse?
Instead you wonder where all the refugees come from. (Of course they come for a share of the cake of our western wealth, they might even try to take your precious job! You better join one of the aspiring right-wing movements.)
Imperialism creates the illusion of wealth as far as the masses are concerned. It usually serves to hide the fact that the ruling classes are gobbling up the natural resources of the home territory in an improvident manner and are otherwise utilizing the national wealth largely for their own purposes. Eventually the general public is called upon to pay for all of this, frequently after the military machine can no longer maintain external aggression.
–Jack Forbes
Capitalism 2.0 comes with a like-button and a smiling emoji, and it will always tell you that everything is fine.
Capitalism is exploitation, but neoliberalism is the smart self-exploitation of the alienated and indoctrinated individual. Exploitation on steroids.
Indoctrination is cheaper and more efficient than violence. It is thus called “soft power.” It works with research-based psycho-politics, and the smart manipulation of human feelings and desires.
Capitalism creates an exploited class of workers that will probably organize and resist (as it did many times).
Neoliberalism creates a population of totally alienated and indoctrinated machine-like zombies, who suppress their own humanity. Each individual a perfect slave, with a software programmed in its brain. Owner Inside®.
Zombie apocalypse.
You might already be a zombie, living in your middle class-bubble or your digital hallucination, but I am still a human being, sensitive as a frightened child, with a healthy portion of empathy and love. I‘m trying to live awake and conscious in this real, physical world, and what I see is mass extinction, ecological catastrophe and imperialist wars. Trauma.
Facing the truth isn’t easy.
I carry a trauma with me from reading A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolome de Las Casas.
I carry a trauma with me from reading Jack Forbes’ Only Approved Indians. He writes: “If a creature learns to completely accept captivity or slavery, if they erase all thoughts of freedom, they can suppress the pain. But if one wants to be free, one has to face the pain; one has to agonize, to suffer, through all of the terror.”
That’s where you are. Completely accepting captivity and slavery, driving out the pain.
That‘s where I am. Going through all the terror. Trying to free myself (and the world) of this culture.
I carry a trauma with me from reading Derrick Jensen‘s Endgame.
And I carry a deep trauma with me from seeing that he is right, from seeing my fellow beings and relatives disappear, the insects, the birds, the amphibians, all of my beloved nature, in rapid decline.
I most certainly carry a lot of trauma with me from my parents and grandparents, since I was born only 34 years after World War II. I certainly carry a trauma from watching all the documentaries and from visiting the concentration camp in Dachau.
You do not understand my language. I can say what I want, but you don‘t understand. You do not even understand the language “stroke” (red alert; Individual doesn’t function anymore within this insane culture).
Government to medical complex: Repair individual and re-integrate into the machine.
Sorry, doesn’t work for me. I’m out.
I need a lot of quiet and peaceful time to deal with all the trauma. I can’t just rush through my life and work ever harder to help to accomplish the neoliberal agenda and make Europe more competitive for the global economy (that’s how the politicians sold it to us; in fact, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, as always).
Mental illnesses such as depression or burnout are the expression of a deep crisis of freedom. They are a pathological sign that today freedom often turns into coercion. We think we are free today. But in reality we exploit ourselves passionately until we collapse…
Neoliberalism is even capable of exploiting freedom itself. The performance society creates more productivity than the disciplinary society, because it makes excessive use of freedom. It doesn’t exploit against freedom, but it exploits freedom itself. Everything that belongs to practices and expressions of freedom, such as emotion, play and communication, is now exploited. It is not efficient to exploit someone against his or her will. With the external exploitation, the yield is very small. Only self-exploitation, as the exploitation of freedom, produces the greatest yield. The first stage of burnout syndrome is, paradoxically, euphoria. Euphorically I plunge into the work. In the end I collapse and slide into depression.
To be honest, I’ve never understood how people like you can do practically anything for their job, while the whole world around us is burning.
This is not a criticism of your person, but only my attempt to better understand your way of life.
I know you do have some understanding that our entire culture is based on violence and exploitation and destroys all life on the planet. Nevertheless, you do everything to be a functioning part of the machine and to live a “normal” western life.
It must be because we have been socialized in completely different ways. You belong to the wealthy middle class, and they are doing everything to maintain the status quo. They’ll still take the SUV to drive to work when the Baltic Sea is near Bonn.
It must be because they are more separated from the physical world, from the real world, than I am. They have something I never had, namely a world of their own.
It is this bubble of their middle class status that still guarantees them many privileges.
They can afford flights and holidays, they have the power and status to travel to many places in the world, and they always have enough money. The bubble gives them a false sense of security through privileges I’ve never known. They live within this bubble and do not perceive themselves as part of the real physical world around them.
For me, it always was about whether we could afford another pack of noodles or potatoes at the end of the month, or whether we could pay the rent so we wouldn’t get kicked out of the apartment. The apartment that was owned by someone from the middle class, to whom this entitlement and the rent he exploited from us gave exactly this deceptive security.
Because they live in their own bubble of privileges and “security” and not in the real physical world, the destruction, which frightens me terribly, doesn’t frighten them as much, or at least can be accepted much better, because in their perception, it somehow happens outside their own sphere.
I’ve been an outsider from the beginning, I’ve always lived on the edge. The narratives and symbols of this culture have never made any sense to me, because I have seen and experienced relative poverty, oppression and exploitation from the beginning. The pictures of slaughtered whales and the sea of blood I saw in Greenpeace magazines at the age of six stuck in my head forever.
For me, there has never been a status of comfortable “normality.” I‘ve tried for a while to adapt, to become “normal,” but I just could‘t.
I know by now that normality can never exist within this culture based on violence and exploitation.
At least not for me.
But strangely enough – and this is exactly what I find so difficult to understand – the narratives and symbols of this culture still make sense to you affluent middle class, even though you are educated and know that the world is on fire. Somehow you still manage to stay within the system and serve it. And somehow you guys are doing pretty well.
I wonder what it takes to break your “normality,” to get you out of your comfort zone and do things that are not “normal.”
The fact that 90% of fish stocks have disappeared in the oceans is not enough.
The biggest mass extinction in the history of the planet is not enough.
The imminent threat of climate change to all life on planet earth is not enough.
I can‘t help myself, but it keeps me thinking of our recent history, when the good German citizens did everything to preserve “normality.” About 1000 concentration camps in the German Reich and the occupied areas, in which millions of people were systematically industrially slaughtered, were not enough to get the middle class out of their comfort zone.
The (presumably middle class) SS commander in the concentration camp was a loving family man in his spare time.
But the thing is, if the planet is destroyed, it will affect you, too. You too will lose your privileges, because when the planet is destroyed, all of us lose everything.
You too are dependent on clean air, clean drinking water and halfway decent food. This is the absolute truth, even if all other “truths” around us (propaganda, ideology, you name it…) are extremely flexible and can be adapted to the prevailing political system.
I wish you all the best and a good life inside your bubble.
Perhaps we’ll meet some day in hell, when the dystopian nightmare I already live in has destroyed your privileges and your lives, too.
Capitalism reaches fulfillment when it sells communism as a commodity. Communism as a commodity spells the end of revolution.
—Byung-Chul Han
I’m a permaculturalist. And I became a permie in the first place because I wanted to break free from this culture.
To me, permaculture was and still is highly political. “Permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening” is one of my favorite Bill Mollison quotes.
After all, what freedom can we have without subsistence, without having control over our most basic resources, our own food? “There is no sovereignty without food sovereignty,” said Native American activist John Mohawk.
I’ve been so ardent and naive. I thought that the permaculture-approach is so ingenious that it would become a mass-movement, indeed a quiet and peaceful revolution. It would free us from being dependent on the digital food they sell us in grocery stores nowadays, and from the wage economy at the same time, because we would build small, local food cooperatives that would all be sharing the surplus.
Unfortunately, time and experience shows that it’s not that easy.
One of my permaculture teachers, who taught me the concept of the food forest, often said: “I don’t understand what’s the problem for all these critical people. Nowadays, we have all the freedoms we want.” He also articulated a very strange notion about the future: “Once we have reached the number of 10 billion, human population growth will come to a halt. Thanks to Internet technology, humans will then all be connected and serve as the consciousness of planet earth.” Attendants hung on his lips when he said that, and while everybody else was amazed by this perspective of a golden future, I sat quietly, stunned.
I knew in my heart that he was wrong, but couldn’t articulate a sufficient answer to his statements back then.
It made me angry. How can one say that “we have all the freedoms we want,” while the air we need to breathe is being polluted, the greatest mass extinction in planetary history is happening, the climate is being destroyed, the oceans are vacuumed and filled with toxic garbage? In short: when the most basic functions of our planet to support life are being destroyed?
What about the freedom of having breathable air? What about the freedom of having a livable planet? What about the freedom of having a future?
I’ve given a lot of thought to his statements ever since, because they seem so appealing to many people. The Earth never supported more than 2 billion humans until Fritz Haber and Robert Bosch indeed broke the planetary boundaries with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. Nowadays, we are hopelessly overpopulated. So the number of 10 billion is purely random and nothing but magical thinking. The notion of Internet technology and humans as the consciousness of the planet is nothing more than a new fashion of the good old ideology of humans as the crown of creation. What about nature in this fantasy? With 10 billion (industrial) humans, there will hardly be anything left.
Everybody with a sane mind and a little understanding—especially a permie—should know that the trees, the fungi, the soil, the air, the water, the animals and so on, in short what we call nature, indeed is the consciousness of planet earth. Apparently, the manifest destiny of the technocrats is to eradicate what they perceive as primitive, raw, red in tooth and claw, wild and uncontrollable, and to replace nature with a “better” system of human technology.
Deconstructing that was the easy part. The hard part is his statement about freedom. With all this in mind, the primary question is: what does freedom mean for someone like him?
A friend of mine, who was lucky enough to hear Noam Chomsky speak live, told me that in the discussion after somebody asked the usual question: “What can we do about it?” Chomsky responded that he thinks this is a strange question. People from so-called developing countries would never ask such a question, only westerners, he stated. Apparently, third-world-people still have a clearer sense for suppression and cultures of resistance. “We should rather ask what we can’t do,” Chomsky said.
When I attended a talk by Rainer Mausfeld, of course someone asked the very same question. Mausfeld stated that this question shows how well the soft power techniques he’d been describing work. We can’t even imagine any form of resistance.
For more than a century, the political left’s analysis has been very clear: The suppression and exploitation of the poor (working class) by the rich (owning class), that is the very basis of capitalism, can only be solved by organized class struggle to come from the working class. This concept isn’t hard to understand. It is classic Marxism. But somehow, the ruling class has managed to completely eradicate it from the proletarian minds.
I’ve come across a lot more of what I like to call liberal lifestyle-activists. I understood that most permies chose permaculture not because they want a revolution (like I did), but because they want a more sustainable lifestyle for themselves. They believe that they are free, because they perceive their individualism and their freedom of choice as the greatest freedom, the greatest achievement of modernity. Being part of any group, class or movement is perceived as regressive. The notion of class struggle is so yesterday.
At the same time, they’re usually educated people, and they know that a lot of things are going badly wrong. But as liberals who are taking power out of the equation, and individualists lacking any concept of social group our class, they must take it all on themselves. “It is all of us who are causing the destruction,” they’d say.
As a result, the only thinkable form of political action are personal consumer choices. Buy organic soap and feel better.
A great example of this are vegans. No doubt that factory farming is horrible and has to stop. But as a lifestyle-activist, all you can do about it is to stop consuming meat. In your worldview, the problem can only be solved by everybody stopping eating meat.
For liberal lifestyle-activists, “having all the freedoms we want” can only mean the freedom to consume (or not consume) whatever we want, whenever we want, in any quality and quantity we want. This is the kind of “freedom” with which capitalism has hijacked us. If we can afford it, of course. But within neoliberal capitalist ideology, there is no such thing as a suppressed class. The poor are poor because they don’t work hard enough, or they are simply to stupid to sell themselves well enough.
“Neoliberalism turns the oppressed worker into a free contractor, an entrepreneur of the self. Today, everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise. Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed. People see themselves, not society, as the problem.”
Let’s take that infamous PropOrNot List article apart, along with the growing social media censorship surrounding it, and this whole subject of alternative media being “infiltrated” by “Russian Propaganda”—just to clear the missile strewn air a wee bit insofar as that may be possible what with hardened silos on either side.
The List article begins with the not-so-subtle subtitle “An Initial Set of Sites That Reliably Echo Russian Propaganda.” Let’s stop right there and ask: what is propaganda?
“Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. Propaganda is often associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups, companies and the media can also produce propaganda.”
Let’s accept that definition, because what we are talking about here is not merely what’s defined, but a full-scale, bona fide propaganda war. The List article itself satisfies this definition of propaganda in every detail, and admits as much, obliquely:
“Americans have the right to echo, repeat, be used by, and refer their audiences to Russian official and semi-official state media, including ‘fake news’ propaganda—just as we have the right to analyze and highlight that, without fear or favor.”
They’re writing US Government propaganda, and they know it—which is not to say it is untrue for that reason alone.
The fact that a piece of writing is propaganda simply has no bearing on its veracity. Let that concept sink in. Propaganda may be shoddy and obvious, but effective propaganda relies on at least a modicum of truth as a platform for its persuasive agenda, and it stands to reason that, given a democracy and freedom of speech, which is to say absent the use of force, suppression and censorship, there should ultimately be a winner in a propaganda war: the side with the preponderance of veracity. False constructs can only survive so long before collapsing of their own dead weight.
One can well argue that all writing, whether by assertion or by omission, whether deliberate or coincidental, is propaganda. A children’s fairy tale is propaganda insofar as it redirects the readers consciousness away from the systemic evils of the real world and encourages acceptance of the status quo. Every Op-Ed or opinion piece in every publication on earth which argues against a systemic evil is likewise propaganda against that system.
Here, the Russophobic propaganda of The List presents facts selectively to encourage a particular perception, using loaded language to influence the reader and to further the American deep state’s anti-Russian propaganda. It does not matter whether or not the authors have a contract with the FBI or the CIA or the DHS to do so, or whether they freely choose to echo, repeat, be used by and refer the reader to official anti-Russia bias of the official American propaganda machine. They surely cannot make any plausible claim to “objectivity.” The List is as cynically calculated a propaganda hit piece as anything in Russia’s bag of tricks. Naturally enough, in the blind box of US propaganda talking points, only content which originates from Russia is propaganda. Are they stupid, or just how stupid do they think we are?
As for the use of loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response, The List effectively seeks to shame you by framing you as a dupe, a stooge, a tool, an agent, and quite possibly a traitor if you share a piece of Russian propaganda with which you happen to thoroughly agree, and which presents an argument you believe others will benefit from reading. To an avid reader, it is of no consequence whether the behavior of a website or one or more of its writers is dogmatically or opportunistically regurgitating Russian propaganda, any more than if it were UK propaganda, or Chinese, or Israeli, or German, or Palestinian, or American.
One may take some intellectual pride in being an equal opportunity reader of propaganda, and in disseminating that which makes a compelling claim with which one, with an open mind, thoroughly agrees. Some struggle to form an opinion, too many others merely join in whatever peerage choir surrounds them. For some of us, however, text fairly withers under our gaze and gives up its propagandist ghost immediately without struggle, so content can be weighed on its merits. Far too many, especially in propaganda-saturated countries like North Korea and America, lack the basic ability to separate bias from truth, weigh opposing sides of an issue, and thus properly form a balanced opinion. That does not stop them from having one, unfortunately. The fact is that challenging ideas provoke a painful cognitive dissonance, the mind tends to close, and if it does, argument turns pointless, tribal belligerence and hatefulness set in, and intellectual rigor mortis follows. Thus it is with dogmatic capitalism in all of its guises and forms, and the guises and forms of all dogmatism, political or religious. A side is taken, an enemy is born. Let loose the dogs of hatred and war.
A great many patriotic Americans genuinely hate capitalism, morally, intellectually and emotionally, and suffer daily having to live effectively imprisoned in what is to them a transparently sick, brutal culture. Poverty is undeniably a gulag whatever one’s politics. Jobs are too often experienced as enslavement for survival. “America, my America, I have no choice but thee…” —while pretty much any country in Europe, despite being utterly capitalist, seems to those condemned to America’s barbaric culture like an oasis of civilization in comparison.
Persuasive writing demands “loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response.” Persuasive writing, indeed, all purposeful writing, is therefore propaganda. As a writer, feel free to call me a propagandist, hopefully an effective and entertaining one, no less so for employing the imagination and Eros in storytelling.
Where The List becomes offensive is in blurring the distinctions between propaganda, disinformation, and fake news. Again, propaganda is most often true, if only a partial, one-sided truth, sincerely or cynically employed as bait to alter your Weltanschauung. It is rarely malicious disinformation, and almost never a factual hoax that will inevitably backfire. However, The List offers not a single example of actual factual disinformation, defined as false information that is intended to mislead, nor a single example of fake news, defined as made-up “facts” written and published with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person. Sure, propaganda, disinformation and fake news can overlap, as do fiction and fact, but please do show us at least some example, beyond your say so, of deliberately spreading false facts or a manufactured news hoax with malevolent intent, that is false beyond disagreeing, perhaps even vehemently, with your capitalist fundamentalism. If such examples can be found, they will be found among the the right-wing junk news sites on the The List, nary a single one from the intellectual left outlets maliciously lumped in with them.
Despite the gravity of this attack on free speech in social media and its dangerously biased anti-Russia fear mongering, one may be hard-pressed to read The List (“Your Friendly Neighborhood Propaganda Identification Service Since 2016” ) without laughing all the way through. The transparency of its distortions, the barefaced and shameless pro-capitalist propaganda piece that it is, is ultimately more risible than frightening. One can hardly help being reminded of the Christmas ditty, “Making a list, checking it twice—gonna find out who’s naughty and nice…Santa Claus is coming to town…”
A great many of the alternative news outlets on The List‘s list, most likely including the one where the words you’re now reading are published, may well be on your regular reading list as they are on mine. I have not once encountered a deliberate factual falsehood, or a fabricated factual hoax. That’s not to say there is not a wide range in the quality of the writing, the editing is often lax or non-existent, the text error-prone, some little more than emotional ranting to the choir, some very few I wish weren’t there, at least in their current incarnation—but it is laughably blatant propaganda to tar every author published in The List‘s outlets as witting or unwitting Russian agents regurgitating malicious factual hoodwinking.
The light in which capitalist behavior is cast by the anti-capitalist perspective may seem shockingly untrue, and cause the capitalist true believer some uncomfortable dissonance, but these are mere matters of opinion about the nature of the facts, not the facts themselves. “The US military aggression…” may well be a loaded phrase about some American military action, but it is an opinion of that action, not an intentional lie or a National Enquirer-style hoax about some event that may not even have taken place. More and more in American society, people of every background are encountering other people “who live in a completely different world…” simply because they actually do!
The Russian government uses propaganda just as the American government does. Indeed, at least 28 governments do, America, UK and Russia foremost among them. Here are some snippets from Armies of Cyber-Troops Manipulating Public Opinion:
“The Computational Propaganda Research Project (COMPROP) investigates the interaction of algorithms, automation and politics. This work includes analysis of how tools like social media bots are used to manipulate public opinion by amplifying or repressing political content, disinformation, hate speech, junk or fake news.
In their most recent report COMPROP have identified how organizations, often with public money, have created a system to help ‘define and manage what is in the best interest of the public.’
COMPROP have compared such organizations across 28 countries…”
The COMPROP report goes on to expose the following:
“- The earliest reports of organized social media manipulation emerged in 2010, and by 2017 there are details on such organizations in 28 countries, including the US and UK.
– Looking across the 28 countries, every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations, while only a few of them target foreign publics. In contrast, almost every democracy in this sample has organized social media campaigns that target foreign publics, while political-party-supported campaigns target domestic voters.
– Authoritarian regimes are not the only or even the best at organized social media manipulation. The earliest reports of government involvement in nudging public opinion involve democracies, and new innovations in political communication technologies often come from political parties and arise during high-profile elections.
– Over time, the primary mode for organizing cyber troops has gone from involving military units that experiment with manipulating public opinion over social media networks to strategic communication firms that take contracts from governments for social media campaigns.”
The phrase that stands out in all of the above, which otherwise comes as no surprise whatsoever, is that COMPROP has identified how organizations, often with public money, have created a system to help “define and manage what is in the best interest of the public…” That is rich, isn’t it? Propagandists on all sides, here both the Russians and the jingoist authors of The List, are just doing what’s in the public’s best interest, which is to say they are making your mind up for you in advance because, silly child, you don’t know what’s good for you.
However, behind this big brotherly solicitude on behalf of our “best interest” there is always an implicit threat, and often an explicit one—enter the United States government:
“WASHINGTON —
U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, today chaired a hearing titled, “Terrorism and Social Media: Is Big Tech Doing Enough?” The hearing examined the steps social media platforms are taking to combat the spread of extremist propaganda over the internet. During the hearing, Thune questioned witnesses from Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook on how they are working to better identify and remove extremist content online.”
Here’s an excerpt from Thune’s opening remarks:
“These [social media] services have thrived online because of the freedom made possible by the uniquely American guarantee of free speech, and by a light touch regulatory policy. But, as is so often the case, enemies of our way of life have sought to take advantage of our freedoms to advance hateful causes.”
There is a skillful dog whistle just out of hearing in that statement, a call to lump say, every leftist journalist retweeting a critique of capitalism together with masked head-chopping ISIS propagandists. As for the “hateful cause” dumpster, if you think about it, what might not be tossed in there? It would be a shorter list to find causes which do not hate what is perceived as evil in the world, whether politics or religion or some ungodly combination of the two.
You will find a great many strange bedfellows in the “hateful” dumpster, too. Indeed, many Americans regard the ideology [theology?] of the Republican Party as a “hate crime” in and of itself, in much the same way that Republican anti-Islamists view that theology as hateful; and Republicans surely do themselves hate people and things, like Muslims and Islam, rather a lot, quite openly and without reservation, and that on behalf of a great many other causes solely in their own private vested class interest, the public interest be damned. Ditto die-hard Democrats, one must hasten to add.
There is not likely an American alive today who does not honestly and deeply hate at least something about capitalism, at least some of the time, and a great many Americans feel utterly betrayed and victimized but do not recognize the culprit to call it out as capitalism per se. There are others still who understand the capitalist system all too well, and loathe it utterly and consistently, most if not all of the time, whether propelled intellectually by study, emotionally by experience, or morally bearing witness to its endless, cynical, and systemic rot.
Most anti-capitalists can begrudgingly admit to a few things that capitalism gets right, like freedom of speech, including the rapidly shrinking freedom to utterly despise capitalism in all of its guises and forms. Communism, where it still purports to exist, as in China, has much to learn from capitalism in that single regard. Free speech is just vacant hot air venting until it becomes organized into a movement and an electoral force, a difficult thing to do, but only then does it achieve moral force in a society, and become in fact a survival mechanism for that society. To suppress it is tantamount to national suicide.
We propagandists are busy trying to bring about exactly that transformation from hot air to moral force. The “hate” of the anti-capitalist generally proceeds in fact from love of humankind, particularly those most abused by capitalism, though nearly everyone, including the idle rich (though they may not know it) are to some degree its victim. On the other hand, the hate of the capitalist generally proceeds from contempt of humankind, especially the great unwashed masses, as well as from the very real arrogance of an imagined superiority.
The American propaganda machine seems to assume, correctly if tragically, that we are thoroughly indoctrinated into its domestic propaganda, and even if we are not, we have no choice but to work “for the man” in order to survive, and that in effect achieves all the self-censorship and mind control the powers that be could ever hope for via mainstream propaganda. Foreign policy, however, seems to be another matter, and that is where the US propaganda machine knocks itself out trying to convince Americans, and the rest of the world, that its interventions and wars are just, humanitarian, and necessary given the “evil axis” of China and Russia and nations like Iran and Syria and Cuba and Venezuela in their orbit.
In terms of foreign policy, American mainstream media is the most powerful arm of the US propaganda machine, with scarcely a breach in its wall of support for “Pax Americana” and the whole can of ideological worms which that entails. Even Bernie Sanders, an eloquent spokesman for America’s domestic woes—indeed, he echoes and seemingly regurgitates much of what one may find in Russian propaganda outlets such as Russia Today and Sputnik with regard to US domestic policy—even he seems to buy into mainstream American foreign policy myths. (Perhaps that is why he is not singled out for criticism along with independent leftist publications online?)
The American political and media establishment would seem to consider domestic policy—outside of our pathetic dollar-denominated duopoly elections mind you—as fair game for foreign opposition, but US foreign policy, including our own propaganda interventions in Russia and around the world under the “jurisdiction” of the CIA—not so much. And it is apparently not so much what Russian propaganda is saying about our foreign policy, but the bare fact that it is the Russians who are saying it. What is that if not Russophobia? Or some bizarre kind of nationalist or ethnic prejudice? It’s not like Russia is any longer a communist country locked in existential battle with the United States, on the contrary:
“We are currently in some sort of crisis of capitalism, as the concentration of wealth continues apace and the general population of western countries increasingly feel insecure, exploited and alienated. It is still very hard for voices that reject the neoliberal establishment view to get a media platform, but Russia does provide comparatively small platforms in the West – like Russia Today and Radio Sputnik – which allow greater democratic freedom than western media in the range of views they invite to be expressed. So the ultra-wealthy, their politician servants and media lackeys view Russia as some kind of threat to the dominance of neo-liberalism .
There are a number of ironies to this, not least the very real deficiencies in Russia’s domestic democracy and media plurality, and the fact Russia has an even worse oligarchic capitalism than the West and has a 1% completely integrated with their Western counterparts. But despite these ironies, the Western 1% perceive Russia as some sort of threat to their dominance. This leads in to the intellectually risible attempts to prove that Russia somehow “fixed” Trump’s election, for which no solid evidence can ever be adduced as it did not happen; but nevertheless vast resources continue to be spent in trying.”
Thus we have a propaganda war with both sides pointing at the other and proclaiming, “Fake News!”
Yes certainly the perspective cuts both ways—a far lengthier list of American mass media outlets spewing forth pro-capitalist propaganda and US jingoism, often government-supplied, could surely be compiled. Most mainstream media regularly dispenses, not only propaganda, but disinformation—especially via the omission of facts—as well as using loaded language to make a predominantly emotional appeal, and in a few extreme cases outright factual hoax news can be found, as in funky pro-capitalist stalwarts like the National Enquirer and some Tea Party publications. An Oxford University study notes:
“The [Donald] Trump Support group consumes the highest volume of junk news sources on Twitter, and spreads more junk news sources, than all the other groups put together. This pattern is repeated on Facebook, where the Hard Conservatives group consumed the highest proportion of junk news.”
Celebrity, escapist, and “junk” news coverage in general, whether or not it is actually fabricated news, fills up a consciousness that might otherwise encounter something meaningful, instead of a fantasy confirmation of the great American delusion: “I am not an exploited proletariat, I am temporarily embarrassed millionaire” (to paraphrase John Steinbeck). Celebrity culture in particular is a broad hoax perpetrated on Americans in that it hogs the cultural news, occupying virtually the whole cultural space. All escapist media, whether print or film, serve the deflective and tranquilizing purposes of propaganda.
So, where do we stand? If everything is propaganda, then nothing is? Is it then just a matter of distinguishing quality propaganda from the shameless and shallow kind? Don’t you have to pick a side eventually?
The government of the United States, as a creature of its corporate lords, is ratcheting up the pressure on the public to pick a side so they can acquire absolute hegemony over your thinking, and harass or terrorize you if you resist. Can they really be so afraid of truth on the fringes of media? It certainly does look so. House and Senate intelligence committee leaders have pressured social media executives to compile lists of accounts within their services which disseminate “Russian Propaganda,” and to their shame the technology companies have enthusiastically complied.
Twitter, Google and Facebook representatives have been summoned before the Senate Commerce Committee, like wayward school children to the principle’s office, to be chided on their laxity in keeping the hegemony of American propaganda intact for “the public good.” And they have acceded to this pressure without question.
Here’s the letter Twitter has sent out to offending accounts like our own EpiphanyOnWallStreet @NineInchBride account, which opposed both “Shillary Clinton” and “Donald tRump” in equal measure in 2016:
Dear EpiphanyOnWallStreet,
As part of our recent work to understand Russian-linked activities on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we identified and suspended a number of accounts that were potentially connected to a propaganda effort by a Russian government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency.
Consistent with our commitment to transparency, we are emailing you because we have reason to believe that you either followed one of these accounts or retweeted or liked content from these accounts during the election period. This is purely for your own information purposes, and is not related to a security concern for your account.
People look to Twitter for useful, timely, and appropriate information. We are taking active steps to stop malicious accounts and Tweets from spreading, and we are determined to keep ahead of the tactics of bad actors. For example, in recent months we have developed new techniques to identify accounts manipulating our platform, have improved our process for challenging suspicious accounts, and have introduced new measures designed to identify and take action on coordinated malicious activity. In 2018, we are building on these improvements. Our blog also contains more information about these efforts.
People come to Twitter to see what’s happening in the world. We are committed to making it the best place to do that and to being transparent with the people who use and trust our platform.
Twitter
The double-speak is one up on Orwell’s 1984: “Information Quality Initiative” is used for intimidation and the implied threat of censorship for speaking truth to power, while “the public good” is here again invoked “to detect and prevent bad actors from abusing our platform.” If you follow their blog link you’ll find several offensive but ultimately iinnocuous tweets by such “bad actors” specifically regarding the election of 2016, which, as commonplace as these or similar tweets are among real Americans, compel one to believe the days of free speech in America are woefully numbered. According to twitter, our account has been so foolish as to retweet one or more of the accurate comics unfavorable to Clinton.
“If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise, we do not believe in it at all,” as Chomsky has so ably pointed out. That’s democracy, the worst of systems—but for all the others. All voices have the right to be heard, no matter how sick or depraved. These will surely fall by the wayside in the course of time, and the idea that some aggregate of these shallow, tasteless efforts at exciting right-wing nut jobs to vote for Trump has actually led to putting the scoundrel in office is risible at best, at worst a naked excuse for forcible intimidation and suppression of free speech in America.
It is worth noting that the Russians only preferred Trump, as did so many Americans, because Clinton was perceived to be the worse war-monger. For the Russians she was plainly a greater existential threat to them, but also, I suspect, the Russians foresaw the degrading spectacle of a Trump presidency, and the laughing stock militarist America would become in the eyes of the world. It is also worth highlighting that their propaganda, being not only hysterically anti-Clinton, but preposterously pro-Trump, has exposed itself to the American left as utterly authoritarian by aligning with the capitalist obscenity that is Donald Trump.
This friendly “big brother” alert “for your information only” from Twitter management, under pressure from the Senate Commerce Committee, is itself “anti-propaganda” propaganda just as The List article is, and uses much of the same language in its defense. The recent Mueller indictments of Russian Twitter-bot propagandists show that “witting or unwitting stooges of Russian propaganda” surely do exist, especially within America’s political right oddly enough, but there is not likely a single anti-capitalist (i.e. “left”) American writer within these grey-listed publications or among these censured social media accounts, and ultimately, even the content promulgated by ideological “stooges” may contain valid arguments insofar as they go. It seems the problem for American propaganda is not that there exists Russian propaganda, but that their modest effort is effectively stealing its own native right wing audience and base out from under them. That is unacceptable.
On the other hand, it would surprise me not at all to learn there are Russians who can extract some truthful perspective from the CIA’s hypocritical critique of the Russian capitalist oligarchy via the Voice of America and similar propaganda incursions into their domestic culture, just as Americans can learn and grow in their understanding of the root of America’s evils from Russia’s exportation of anti-capitalist (or even anti-Clinton) propaganda, hypocritical as it may be given their capitalist (and militarist) autocracy at home. Let information flow freely without advantage or disadvantage, that’s the only way democracy can work.
Many if not most of the publications on The List feature sterling and thoroughly American leftist writers, often with an internationalist perspective, and none of these writers are “unwittingly” regurgitating Russian “propaganda” that is not painfully and incisively true from their own perspective. This simple fact is clear and bears repeating: If the truth about capitalism is sown by a hireling of the Russian government, it is no less true. If a lie about capitalism is sown by American mainstream media it is no less a lie.
American culture places an extreme emphasis on the right to hold an opinion with next to none on the actual ability to form one. We are, as a people, uneducated for democracy, which is to a large extent why we do not have one, and why the powers that be feel obliged to rely on censorship: people can’t be trusted to think for themselves. If Americans have neither the moral nor intellectual capacity to distinguish truth from lies, good argument from cheesy propaganda, enter the “anti-propaganda” propagandist and “censor-as-a-public-service” to tell them what to believe.
Thankfully there is a large and ever growing number of Americans with no such moral or intellectual deficit, who have educated themselves for democracy since the system does not. It is the abject betrayal of mainstream media, including National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System and other purportedly civic non-profit media venues, which fails to provide a viable platform for the legitimate American anti-capitalist voice, that in turn gives rise to the profusion of non-commercial alternative news outlets noted in The List.
Twitter’s email is, in no uncertain terms, a chilling tap on the shoulder from FISA-abusing deep state security agencies evangelizing the Russophobic rhetoric from The List: Is It Propaganda Or Not?—which, despite the question mark, has plainly decided that it is, not only “propaganda,” but disinformation and cynically constructed “fake news” master-minded by evil Russians using silly, gullible you as their stooge and mouthpiece. You’re on the naughty list.
Recently Twitter has been busy catching up with Google and Facebook’s algorithmic censorship based on this infamous List. Not only have they stooped to the scare tactic of the above warning letter, but now they are overtly deleting or suspending more and more accounts under the guise of their being Russian bots—or supportive of them. They have also taken to playing this clever game of “zeroing out” an account’s Following list as a punishment to certain accounts. This causes your followers to unfollow you in return as they become aware you have “unfollowed” them, which is what Twitter has done to you. (Don’t fall for it. If you follow an account and suddenly you find their Following list drops to zero, don’t unfollow, unless you want to be Twitter’s “stooge.” Their Following list will be reinstated at some point later on with you still in it.)
Now that some 677,775 US Twitter accounts have been singled out to receive this “we’re watching you” email—coal in the stocking from our malevolent corporate Santa Claus (incidentally, make of it what you will, that number is a hair under 1% of the current 69 million active users in the US). If these users persist in opposing mainstream media’s jingoism with critical truth from the only sources extant—Russian or otherwise—what then is next? A Pinochet-like “virtual disappearance” of all 677,775 voices on the Twitter platform?
We’ve got your number, they’re plainly telling us, we can kill your account in a blink if we choose, and feel patriotic about doing so. Perhaps they’ll be supplying government security agencies with your account data, if they are not already, which may or may not produce a knock on your door by FBI or DHS agents some quiet evening—curious about something you tweeted yesterday, or a year ago… (A native-born American citizen, I was myself visited one quiet evening, not by two or three, but a gang of four FBI agents on a fishing expedition over a separate but similar First Amendment issue…this sort of scare tactic, an abysmal waste of taxpayer money, is already going on!)
America tragically seeks to become a closed-mind, a pro-capitalist and anti-Russian hegemony, the “marketplace of ideas” be damned no less here within our cynical duopoly than in North Korea, China, or the former Soviet Union.
The answer to abusive authority is to refuse to buy into their threats, veiled or explicit. They threaten because they are themselves fearful. Laugh out loud at their “best interest of the public” propaganda (this drives them crazy). Tell them flat out you refuse to live in fear of them or to join them in complicity. Howl against their algorithms, demand the government cease leaning on these corporations for ever greater thought-policing.
Whether writer or reader, declare yourself a truth seeker, wherever that takes you, whatever its source. Make The List your reading list! Read and tweet and share its articles widely. Should micro-blogging and alternative news sharing on social media prove no longer viable, we shall find or found other means to be heard.
Stephanie McMillan:
Thank you for being determined to investigate and understand the different aspects of this catastrophic situation that we are facing. Especially I want to thank those of you here who are doing something about it, or thinking about doing something about it. It is very important that we do. I am going to get into some of the more structural aspects.
Want to join a movement fighting capitalism?
Deep Green Resistance is recruiting. We are a political movement for liberation and revolution. We aim for nothing less than total liberation from capitalism, extractive economics, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, industrialism, and the culture of empire that we call civilization.
We all know that capitalism is killing the world. In order to stop it, we can’t just keep resisting its effects. Capitalism doesn’t care if we protest on street corners a thousand times. That just proves how democratic they are. The solutions are not to be found within its framework. And they are even less to be found at the individual level. We don‘t actually have any power as consumers, I‘m sure most of you here already know. They would like us to think we do, but we can‘t buy or refrain from buying our way out of this. It‘s a social system, a class system, and it can only be addressed at a level of collective organized class struggle.
We need to understand capital, how it works, the mechanisms that keep it in place and are at the core of its functioning.
Capitalism is a mode of production, based on the exploitation of labor and the generation of surplus value. This means that workers are paid a certain amount of wages for a day‘s work. But what they produce is worth more than that. The extra value is called surplus value, and the capitalist just steals it. This is what all profit is based on. This is what private property is all about. It is considered normal for the social means of production, the factories, land, everything that produces all the things that we all use, that these are privately owned, and for those owners to simply take whatever is produced in them.
Understanding capitalism.
Capitalism is not just an economic process, but the whole way that our society is arranged. It’s an ensemble or matrix of social relations, and these comprise three main fields: the economic, the political and the ideological. The economic field is determinate, profit is the point, and everything else is set up to solidify the relations of production that keep it coming. Capitalist ideology, centered on competition and individualism, is designed to make the way we live seem normal and inevitable. It‘s forced on us by its institutions, school, the church, the nuclear family, media and culture. Why would we need advertising for example, if they didn‘t need to convince us to participate? Ideological domination is unrelenting conditioning and indoctrination to naturalize capitalism, to make us compliant, passive, greedy and self-centered. To make us identify with it, instead of understanding it as the enemy that it really is.
Political domination.
Political domination, the job of the state, has two main aims: the first, performed by the government and its laws, is to regulate within and between classes, to keep the flow of capital smooth and free of obstacles. The second is for when ideological domination fails. When we can no longer accept living this way, the state turns to cohesion through terrorism. This function is performed by the state’s armed forces, its military and police. If we don‘t comply, that’s when the guns come out. We saw that with the Occupy movement. The entire purpose of this setup is economic, the accumulation of wealth for a small minority of people–those who own the means of production, namely the factories, tools, land.
Ownership and control.
This ownership was not ordained by a God, nor is it because capitalists are smarter or worked harder than anyone else and earned that right. It‘s because they took it. They started with trading, which many societies considered and understood as thievery, since it‘s the exchange of unequal values. This is still the way that mercantile capitalists accumulate wealth. They continued with land theft, backed up by war and genocide, which is still going on today as we all know. I just got back from Haiti a few days ago and saw huge areas of land that have been stolen from small farmers and towns people, their houses just bulldozed over without warning, so that the government could bring in foreign investors to build industrial parks and tourist resorts. They justified this by saying that the people will get jobs. They‘d be able to work in the new factories and hotels. That‘s the standard way that capitalists have been getting their workforce for the past 250 years.
Oppression and control.
The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, reproducing it and driving it forward, is capital versus labor and the production of surplus value for private accumulation. This process is what produces class divisions, class domination and class struggle. Classes are groups of people, defined by their role in social production. There are those who own and control it, and those are usually not the same people who are exploited in the process. Besides exploitation, capitalism also uses oppressive practices like racism and patriarchy, and has terrible effects like ecocides and war, which we all have to deal with. It‘s a social system that dominates all of social life, and all the dominated classes and social groups struggle against this in their own ways. But the core of it is embodied in the struggle of workers against exploitation.
Value and ethics.
Workers are the ones who face capital in their daily struggle for existence, in an inherently antagonistic relationship. They are the only ones able to offer an alternative to capitalism. Other classes can resist, but can‘t break the framework. So, if we‘re to actually destroy capitalism, the working class needs to lead all the dominated classes in a revolution to overthrow the capitalist class. We are all social agents, born into a structure that we didn‘t create. We are inserted into the existing relations of production, funneled into particular social slots, serving the various requirements of capital. Capital confines our relationships within a framework of relations between things. And it treats living beings, including humans, as objects. It has no moral or ethical framework, because it‘s not alive.
Nevertheless, it does have a motion, drive and imperative of its own. Its only aim is self-expansion. Even capitalists are merely stewards of capital and have no control over it. If they have an attack of conscience, an attempt to moderate it, then they are replaced. Sociopaths are drawn to this role; in fact a higher percentage are found in this class than in the general population. Because to serve capital in this way requires a lack, or total suppression, of empathy. Capital has no subjectivity and it doesn’t recognize it in others. But it is animate, thorough and embodied in its representatives. It has imbued them with its own sociopathy.
Value and growth.
Surplus value is generated only in industrial production, when labor power is exploited in the process of converting raw materials, otherwise known as the living world, into commodities. And that‘s why it‘s ecocidal. Other forms of capital expansion, such as mercantile and finance, create inflated bubbles of fictitious value through unequal trade and speculation. All that must be based on the production of physical goods. For example, China builds twelve to twenty-four ghost-cities every year, mile after mile of malls with no businesses in them and houses with no people living in them. And those empty buildings serve as repositories for capital investment, objects to hold value and to speculate on. Surplus value must be re-invested as new capital, or it will degrade, it will lose value.
We have a choice.
Capital will do whatever it takes to prevent its own devaluation, including all forms of brutal oppression, endless wars, total disregard for the needs of any living beings, stripping us of subjectivity, and turning us into functions for its own reproduction, even up to annihilation of all life on earth. This would of course mean its own destruction as well. Marx understood this when he said that class struggle will lead to either the overthrow of capitalism and the elimination of class domination in general, or the common ruin of contending classes. We still may have this choice to make, but that window is closing. We each need to make our choice now, and do the work required of us in this very intense and pivotal historical period.
The work of understanding the structural crisis and vulnerabilities of the system that we‘re facing, plus the work of organizing our forces so that we can become strong enough to weaken and ultimately destroy it.
Derrick Jensen: For eight years, Stephanie and I have had a bitter, bitter ideological battle. It‘s so bitter that we‘ve written a couple of books together and have become very dear friends. The question, that Stephanie and I have been having a great time slightly disagreeing on, is whether capitalism creates sociopathological behavior, or whether it took sociopaths to create a rationalization for their pre-existing issues, and to create a system that rewards this terrible behavior. And I don‘t really have an answer and I think the truth is, that they are mutually reinforcing, that once you get a system in place that starts creating sociopaths, then they will create additional rationalizations for their sociopathological behavior and additional ways to reward themselves. Especially when those in power are those who make the rules for those in power, then of course they‘re going to codify their pre-existing issues.
The tragedy of the commons.
I want to say one more thing. The tragedy of the commons just pisses me off. That essay by Garrett Hardin in 1968, it’s such a lie. He basically says that the tragedy of the commons is that if you have a common area, that it will eventually be destroyed. He says this is because if you have a community area where the village is allowed to, say, run a hundred sheep, ten families and every family can run ten sheep. Then what‘s going to happen is that one family is going to run eleven sheep, and then another is gonna run eleven sheep, and then eventually the commons will be destroyed. But this is complete bullshit. What that is, is a tragedy of the failure of community.
If you have a community, and everybody knows that they can run ten sheep, if somebody runs eleven sheep, the other members of the community come to them and say: Dude, that is not a good idea. And if the person does it again, they’d say: Dude, that‘s a really bad idea. And if they did it again, they‘d burn down their house. So, what he is describing is a situation in which your community has already been destroyed.
No matter how talented he was, if Jimi Hendrix would have been playing his music in the 1920s he would not have found an audience. You have to have a receptive audience in order to have something become popular. So if you have a purely functioning community in the first place, and somebody says “Hey, I‘ve got this great idea! Everybody acting selfishly will create a greater good for our entire community!” they would say “You are nuts.” The only way you can have people go “wow, that’s a great idea!” is if they are primed for it.
Spreading ideas/propaganda.
In 1992, the year that Clinton was elected, he did this one speech that had this great moment where he said “I want to try to show that Adam Smith‘s invisible hand has a green thumb.” It was great, because the entire audience was silent. And then he said: “I thought that was a really good line,” and everybody is like “Oh, yeah!“ This is just one of the ways that propaganda works. First, and everybody knows this, is: “Adam Smith‘s invisible hand? A green thumb? You‘re fucking nuts!” But then when it‘s repeated, and of course if you have the NY Times take it up, and then if you have the neo-environmentalists take it up, and then if you have all these other groups take it up, twenty years later, everybody‘s like “Oh yeah, of course green capitalism will solve everything.”
That‘s all.
Charles Derber:
95% of environmentalists in America believe that the solution to the environmental crisis is more capitalism. I had the quote from Tom Friedman, who made that argument very powerfully. He said there is “father capital and mother earth.” The two most powerful forces in the world to be married together will solve all our problems. Why this text is super important is that you‘re going up against a myth, a deeply embedded myth in the society. That the solution to climate change is more capitalism.
Derrick Jensen:
I would actually agree, that there is father capitalism and mother earth, and it‘s a deeply abusive relationship in which he is beating the shit out of her and raping her on a daily basis, and what she needs to do is put a gun to his fucking head and kill him.
Stephanie McMillan:
There is really no way to reform it or fix it. It is not a system that has gone too far or that has run off the rails. The rails are constructed that way, the whole system is born that way. It’s not something that can be restrained or reformed or fixed. It is not broken. It‘s doing exactly what has been predicted for the last 200 years.
The accumulation of capital is an inevitable process.
The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the monopolization of production, that‘s all part of how it works. And the only way that it can be gotten rid off is if we organize and become a powerful social force, more powerful than the lies, wealth and arms of our enemy. We have to first recognize it as our enemy. A lot of people don’t, because we are ideologically very dominated, and we’ve been conditioned for generations to accept this as normal.
Working together.
The propaganda that there is no alternative, that everything else has failed, that nothing else will work, this is our only choice—we have to break out of that. Yes, there have been attempts at other systems that have failed. But these were babies, trying to learn how to walk. And if they fell down, are we going to say “this baby is never gonna grow up and learn how to walk?” We have to learn from the mistakes of people who have tried different things, modify that according to our current situation, and collectively figure out a different way to live. We evolved as collective beings. We are not like this. This capitalist society has turned us into unsocial creatures, but we are social creatures, we are cooperative. This is our nature.
Organizing.
We have to organize and collectively build a movement, a mass movement that is strong enough, that is led by a politicized, revolutionary working class, and overthrow them. Take over. Take over the political system, get rid of it and institute our own, which is going to be built in the process of the revolutionary struggle; and we need to take over the means of production and convert it to—instead of profit—human needs that are in line with the requirements of the natural world. That is not an impossible dream. That is something that we would naturally do, if we weren’t being prevented by a class of people who controls everything and enforces that control with their armed might. If we can be strong enough, organize enough to break through that arms might and control society ourselves, we can do a lot better.
It is not going to be utopia, of course. There is going to be a lot to work through in the process and afterward a lot of conflict among the people. But that’s not an antagonistic conflict; we can work it out. The real antagonism is between all of us and those few at the top, who are preventing a decent society from coming into being and who are killing us all.
Charles Derber:
The conversation we‘re having is not a conversation that‘s on the plate in the United States. You tell me, how often you have seen in the New York Times or CNN or even MSNBC, any of the mainstream media, a conversation about whether we should have or get rid of capitalism? You‘re seen as freaking crazy if you raise this question. The idea is not only that capitalism is the only good, it’s the only possible way of organizing society. That‘s the bad news. And it’s really bad, because the ideological forces of control have consolidated around this idea. It’s only in very small niches and communities where this kind of question would get on the table without being laughed off.
Community is important.
When you actually question people about what they believe, it turns out they believe that capitalism is pretty fucked up. They think that capitalism is putting money into Washington and into political processes in a way that is pretty sociopathic, they are pissed off about the bailing out of the banks, they believe that people who work in McDonalds or in nursing homes deserve a living wage, they believe that unions are good things and that community is important, and they believe in the essential need to protect the environment. So, there is a resonance. When do people become receptive to ideas?
There is a counter-culture.
The contradiction that we‘re dealing with is, on the one hand you can‘t even talk about what we‘re talking about today. Capitalism is the only reality that the ideological apparatus of the country will accept as a dialog. And in a sense, there is a resonance to that. There aren’t masses out in San Francisco even who are saying “We want to talk about class revolution or about capitalism,” who would embrace what Stephanie just said. On the other hand, when you carefully interrogate people about what it is they believe on real issues, they want healthcare, good education for their kids, to save the environment for future generations. There is a counter-resonance, a counter-culture, but it operates under the formal mechanism of politics which has become spectacle- and money-driven.
The practice of resistance.
Somehow the practice of resistance and social change has to be diving under the surface of that resonant, controlling ideology, and finding the way to speak to the parts of people’s lives that are telling them everything is wrong in the society, that we need drastic change. We have to be really smart, and I mean that in an emotional way. We have to find a way to viscerally hook into the deep discontents that people are experiencing about their lives, and about their communities, about their kids’ prospects, about their own prospects. It‘s a little bit like an abused child.
You take an abused child, and you try to pull them away from their parents, and they will run to the parent who has been kicking them, and hold on to their knees and say “Don‘t take me away!” I think the body politic in the United States is operating a little bit like that. They know that they’re being abused, and they’re holding on for dear life to the abuser. And what a resistance movement has to do is to provide a source of safety and community that will allow people to realize I can let go of that and actually get rid of it, because it has been destroying my life.
Derrick Jensen:
A lot of environmentalists begin by wanting to protect a specific piece of ground, and they end up questioning the foundation of western civilization. And that‘s because they start by asking “Why is this land being destroyed?” and then they start asking “Why would any land be destroyed?” and then they hear that the needs of the economy are in opposition to the needs of the environment and they ask “Why would you have an economic system that is in opposition to the environment?” There is that huge split between grassroots environmental activists and mainstream activists. And the split is where their fundamental loyalty is.
Grassroots Activism.
With the grassroots environmental activists, the ones that I knew and grew up with is, their emphasis is always biocentric. And the loyalty of Tom Friedman is to capitalism. I keep thinking about the line by Harriet Tubman: “I freed hundreds of slaves, but I could have freed hundreds more if only they had known they were slaves.” It‘s the same thing with capitalism. One of our jobs in this pre-revolutionary phase is to help people to articulate the understanding that they already have, that they are enslaved by the system but they don‘t yet know it, just like the slaves Harriet Tubman tried to free didn’t know it.
Connection.
Charles Derber:
The young people in the country have a feeling like what Derrick is talking about, that their connection to their world is being destroyed. At some level it is translating to an understanding, that this is a symptom of something fundamentally wrong in their way of life. That the environmental destruction and climate change, as terrible as it is, is a symptom of something even deeper. Which is the way we’ve constructed our civilization and our way of life. This is the realm of possibility. But they have to go a long way in their movement, from that very gut-level understanding to being able to articulate the connections that at some level they feel.
Stephanie McMillan:
I agree that people are discontented. They understand that something is wrong. We can‘t go out and just talk about capitalism in abstract concepts at the start. I go out a lot and talk with people, pass out flyers and stuff like that, trying to organize. I start out by saying “It’s really difficult to survive under this system, where a few people take everything and we can’t even make a living,” and everybody is like “Yeah, it‘s horrible!” And I say, “We have to organize to do something about it. We have to fight back against this!”
Building connection.
“Yeah we do!” is a very common response. How do we crush it? I talked about it in very general terms, but a lot of people really want something more concrete. There is no easy formula for it. In order to make a political change—and a revolution is a political change—we need the ideological change first. In order to have a revolution in reality, we need to be able to imagine it in our minds. Organizing people means building relationships. If you can‘t find an organization that you agree with just start one. A conversation with one person, that’s how it starts. And then you find another person, and if you can’t find one or you don’t know one, then go out in the street and start talking to people. You don’t have to have all the answers, you need to open the conversation and you need to have regular meetings.
I know people don‘t like that, but you really need them. And you need to have study, and you need to have action. And that action is widely varied. Even going out and talking to people, that‘s an action. That’s how we start. There is no easy way to do it, there is no way around the tedious work of putting yourself out there. There is no other way to do it.
Derrick Jensen:
How do we crush the system? The North won the civil war before it started. Germany lost WWII before it started. The way you win war is by destroying the enemy’s capacity to wage war. That‘s the point of war. And one of the things we need to do—well, we need to recruit first, there is like fifteen of us—but one of the things we need to do is to destroy capitalism’s ability to wage war on us and on the world. We‘re not quite there yet.
Resisting change.
One of the really big barriers to recruitment is a wonderful metaphor that somebody told me. I was asking a fisheries biologist about blowing up dams, and the fisheries biologist was saying that a flood is a natural process. Every time a river floods, it changes course. It breaks her heart, because all these fish, the frogs and the trees who were in the old channel die. But she said that‘s what rivers do, they change course all the time.
There is a phrase that just stuck with me so hard—every time a river floods there is short term habitat loss and long term habitat gain. And as soon as she said that to me I got chills, thinking Why do we stay in bad relationships? Because we are afraid of the short term loss for long term gain. Why do we stay in bad jobs? Because we are afraid of the short term loss for long term gain. I am not in any way attempting to dismiss the terror involved in the collapse of any system, which is completely dreadful. But that’s one of the biggest things that is holding us all back, because of the very real prospect of terrible short term loss in exchange for the very obvious long term gain that will be gained by getting rid of capitalism.
