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Syndicate
Lessons from the Crackdown
Where does this guy get off referring to those gentrified elements of the left as tools of the power-elite.
The Centurian from Mark 15:39!! No wonder about his failure to provide an example!
Phone surveillance software maker tries to silence whistleblower
The Stasi never dreamed of possessing the technical capabilities for surveilling millions of peoples' personal lives like this. It's hyperfascism run amok.
Alas, Emannuel Goldstein is slain from the foundations of the netherworld. It's a nightmare, and you're in it.
The government has some checks on its actions. Corporations have no such restraints. Look at the World News Murdoch story and imagine that the boardrooms of many major corporations are filled with people with the same distain for democracy and peoples rights.
There is no collective 'us' on one side, and a relatively smaller collective of 'them' on the other, although it certainly cannot appear that way when inhaling pepper spray, or when tasting a swing of the riot baton from other 99%ers. The fate of the hypothetical 99% and 1% are bound together, and only the 99% has the inherent power to cut the bindings. Neither can perish if the other is to maintain its current consistency. If the one percent were to be strung up on the lamp posts, and as desirable an outcome as that might be for some, the 99% would briefly disappear to become the 100%, until such a time, and in short order I would argue, as a newly reconstituted 1% emerges within the existing structures of governance, or within the potential variants which are required to support and direct governance.
With the way humanity typically engages in the political, new cycles of repression and revolt are inevitable and historical facts. Even as Marxism summoned people to appropriate the means of their subjectivity, namely the mechanisms and structures of work, such occurrences to date have only ever resulted at best in maintaining people as subjects within a system of quotas, surpluses and shortages, supervised by loyal individuals better 'suited' to such tasks; while being pandered to with recognition by supervisors and the political class alike as the best industrial furnace worker, or the most prolific widget maker, even if it means your poster adorning the factory wall...is in itself essentially nothing but another means of control.
The collective 100%, at least in the western context, has done nothing but build, support, maintain, widen and deepen everything that some have otherwise managed to be convinced and rightly so, to despise. The 99% and the 1% remain fused into one of several available paradigms, which for a significant percentage of them includes varying degrees, depending on ones relative position or station, of remaining unconvinced against all evidence of the system's detrimental effects, at least enough to despise it in the same way as the more politically astute say they do. Another alternative involves coming around enough to view Capitalism's unchangeably destructive nature, and seeing no viable way out except through cyclical and ritualized processes which are designed to promptly dispose of the applicant back to square one without ever making substantive progress; the fact of which remains oblivious to those who insist that another turn of the mouse wheel will make all the difference in the world if we would only apply ourselves within the system to the desired outcome. Then there are people who ditch out completely, having recognized the game for what it is, but who are nonetheless mired in the collective muck.
Expecting a pension from government for instance, within any conceivable modern economic construct, and having them provide one on the basis of ensuring the very bare essentials of survival, against the threat of an ‘or else' from the populace [and wasn't that the original purpose of social safety nets?...a stipend from the appointed managers of society...where in return the rest of the population would leave them in peace to continue their supposed work on our behalf?] on today's globalized terrain means supporting the ever widening and deepening processes of Capitalism and its attendant environmental effects, along with easy choices it seems these days between the exigencies of profit and the welfare of populations in general.
good one SJ...
The New Authoritarianism: From Decaying Democracies To Technocratic Dictatorships and Beyond
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/11/28/the-new-author...
"This essay explores major ongoing regime changes that have a profound impact on governance, the class structures, economic institutions, political freedom and national sovereignty.
We delineate a two-stage process of political regression. The first stage involves the transition from a decaying democracy to an oligarchical democracy; the second stage currently unfolding in Europe, involves the transition from oligarchic democracy to colonial-technocratic dictatorship.
The penultimate section will highlight the reasons why the imperial ruling classes and their national collaborators have overturned the pre-existing 'democratic' oligarchical ruling formulas of 'indirect rule' in favor of a naked power grab. The turn to direct colonial rule (a coup by any other name) was consummated by the major financial ruling classes of Europe and the US.
We will evaluate the socio-economic impact of rule by imperial, appointed colonial technocrats, the reason for rule by fiat and force over the previous process of persuasion, manipulation and co-optation.
What is at stake goes beyond the current regime changes to identifying the most basic institutional configurations which will define the life choices, personal and political freedoms of future generations for decades to come.."
I think Chomsky had mentioned something about human nature, a slightly optimistic and perhaps mythical elaboration of which having been recorded long ago, comparatively speaking, in the Foucault debate up thread. But pensions and social spending can hardly be described as a co-optation by Capital. It seemed as though these things were the preferred choice of the planners in society, from that of continuing to shoot desperate people in the streets who might have otherwise been persuaded by Soviet style communism. They were calming devices more than anything else. Nowadays though control is nearly complete, and alternate repressive measures are available. You just have to make people go away with a few arrests, bloody noses or lacerated spleens, and in any event there is no alternate theory or viable practice to experiment with, or indeed permitted to be entertained within contemporary corporate politics.