Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you’re on.

Class analysis is knowing who is there with you.

America has finally developed a movement for social change that seems conscious of political economic divisions that transcend race, sex or other very serious but sometimes overstressed problems. That movement offers the only solution to the inequality which grows more glaring and unjust. Calls for the 99% to take control from the 1% at the top of the financial pyramid are threatening to that ruling minority, its agents from the upper levels of the 99%, and the totally misinformed from the bottom. But those upper level agents represent the beneficiaries of divisive social policies that have brought personal gains for some, always at serious social costs to others.

This is according to the dictates of profit and loss, hardly free market capitalism. These agents often stand in strong support of socially divisive policies because those policies are good for “their” people. More often, those policies are good for “their” political and economic security.

Affirmative Action programs have enabled many previously shut out of the system to make progress and gain footholds within it, achieving professional, corporate and government positions that tend to make the upper strata look diverse, at least according to the limited definition that word has taken on in American culture.

Almost always overlooked are the shortcomings of AA programs which have set groups and individuals farther apart when action of an affirmative nature for some creates, as should be expected, action of a negative nature for those on the other side of the ledger. A system which creates profits on one side must always create loss on the other; there can be no profit without loss, as eloquently explained to his clients by a former great hero of finance capitalism, Bernie Madoff.

This basic structural truth of the system still escapes most because it is supposed to, having been taught out of reality by an education business that serves the production of individual consumers without social consciousness. This helps strengthen the competitive drive to personally consume while gulling us into thinking as first person singular egos only identifying with groups when they are minorities and thus powerless.

Though women and other minorities have benefited far more from them, the old criticism of AA programs when they were supposedly focused on so called blacks still resonates:

Send one to Yale and send ten to jail.

While the college population of African Americans is considerably higher than it was before AA programs, the population of black Americans in prison has skyrocketed far beyond that. Note also that the new upper and middle class members are called African American – despite the fact that they have been native to the USA  far longer than many, if not most, European descended people who are no longer identified with hyphenated labels unless they adopt minority status and defensive postures – while ghetto and project dwellers of the working and poorer class are still seen as “black”.

Both labels are among many used to disguise commonality among humans. They all serve to keep the divisions within society strong, even to separate alleged members of the same group ethnicity by class. The programs originated to do exactly what they have done; maintain, protect and strengthen consumer private capitalism by rewarding a minority at the expense of the majority.

We are presently seeing a struggle around Ethnic Studies programs at colleges and universities which relates to the same maintenance of minority power of the 1% over a divided 99%. What passes for academic diversity, cultural education and histories of subjugated and neglected people often turns out to be branding labels for cultural and ethnic marketing. It has served to keep groups divided into sub categories in order to prevent them from ever threatening minority power of the 1% on top.

Much neglected reality is confronted in Ethnic Studies courses, but the consumers of these studies are tracked into, and out of, programs as minorities, slated never to become anything more. By having previously unknown pains and joys of their groups preached to them they will hopefully strive to be just what their rulers want them to be: happy, proud, diverse identity groups who support the status quo by believing they are different from everyone else who lives under the same regime but can acquire professional class status within it and thus help their families and communities. In other words, stay divided from fellow citizens not seen as members of their own ethnic, racial, sexual or intellectual groups and remain democratically powerless in a class, not ethnic society.

And so we have programs in the marketplace to reward some members of some groups at the expense of most members of most groups with supposed meritocracy strengthened by success achievers allowed to rise to the upper middle strata: affirmative action. And in academia, the teaching of American history in balkanized form, with various groups ghettoized into special studies that make them separate from – but equal to, in some warped return to past racist policies ? – the great majority. Rather than teach American history as a subject in equal parts concerning settlers, invasions, discoveries, exploration, land theft, slavery, fights for survival, massacres of indigenous people and more, these become special areas only studied in special classes aimed at special groups. Result?  Warped, balkanized views of American history, divided groups and sects among Americans, and a stronger control by the 1% ruling class and its agent servants of the upper levels of the 99%.

American groups identified as minorities by virtue of their not being direct descendants of Europeans have been tracked into patterns of discrimination no longer officially acceptable. But alleged social changes that only transform certain individual members of an ethnic or other identity group and leave larger populations still operating as second class citizens while being manipulated into showing pride in the fact that they are hyphenated and not whole Americans is hardly social progress.

Ethnic studies classes were introduced as a means to allow “out’ groups to learn “their” culture and soon become “in” by having increased knowledge, pride and general academic acceptance that could lead to further affirmation, as long as action continued along officially prescribed system- enforcing lines. America’s professional class and upper middle strata has become a more diverse group in the look, sex and ethnic makeup of its component parts, but members of groups still identified as “minorities”  suffer many of the same injustices the ethnic studies classes teach them about, while instilling resentment to the society that commits the injustices and grossly mis-identifying the sources and power groups that profit from them. Which is exactly what they are supposed to do.

Thus we have “racial” animosities growing as supposed “diversity” increases, and this along class lines that do nothing to increase community, social cohesiveness and solidarity among Americans, but simply creates more division, individualism and hostility that maintains and expands animosity among the 99%.

While it is admirable to connect with sometimes ancestral cultures and often those merely a generation or two away, it can become a socially compulsive disorder to be forced into boxes of ethnic and alleged racial difference while a nation claims diversity and democracy as its credo, all the while infantilizing the first while making the second impossible.

Of course, electing a Chicano, or gay, or white, or black or Asian, or Jewish, member of congress, the city council or the presidency, can seem wonderful when reduced to minority consciousness. But from the standpoint of majority good, continuing the system of private profits accruing to ever smaller minorities at the expense of the great majority can only be seen as progress by the dim witted, the ignorant, the misinformed, or those who gather the profits: the 1%. And their agents, however racially, sexually, ethnically or intellectually diverse they may think themselves.

“Yeah, I could use a decent vacation,” I replied, figuring he’d pay for both of us since he had just set the world record for the most nose jobs in a 24-hour period.

“What vacation?” he said. “I’m setting up practice.”

“And give up catering to rich people with inflated bank accounts and deflated ethics?”

“Don’t have a choice. I’m getting laid off.”

Comstock had been a rainmaker for the Megabucks Happy Health Care Medical Center for the past decade. There was only one reason I could think of why he’d be laid off.

“Megabucks tired of paying your malpractice insurance?” I asked.

“Not just me,” he said. “Hospital’s laying off most of the staff, making the rest work overtime, and hiring outside contractors. They said it was hard to survive when the profit was down to only 20 or so million a year.”

“I didn’t realize it was that serious,” I said. “You planning to set up private practice to help the poor in Mexico?” I asked admiringly.

“Not a chance! Gonna get rich working for Megabucks!”

“You just said you were laid off.”

“Been laid off in the U.S.,” said Comstock while putting a frozen burrito into the microwave.

“Megabucks/Mexico just hired me. There’s cheaper labor down there.”

“You crazy?” I asked. “You’re the cheaper labor.”

“Obviously you don’t know American business,” said Comstock haughtily.

“Megabucks/U.S. closes its auxiliary operations, and then contracts with Mexican companies for a fifth of the cost in the U.S. They do the work, ship it back to the U.S., and Megabucks bills Blue Cross the full rate as if it was done locally.”

“So where do you fit in?” I asked.

“Just as before. Nose jobs. Breast augmentations. Tummy tucks. All the important medical procedures. But this time, I do it in Cancun.”

“To rich Mexicans,” I said disgusted.

“To rich Americans!” said Comstock. “If they want the best care, they’ll take their private jets to Mexico and then deduct the trip as a necessary business expense.”

“And what about the impoverished and middle-class Americans?”

“If they can sneak across the border, they can also get medical care.”

“What about prescriptions?”

“Megabucks contracted with some of the best drug dealers—I mean pharmacists and chemists—in Mexico. Quality is just as good and it’ll only be four or five times production costs. Unlike the U.S. there’s no TV advertising and six-figure MBAs and lawyers that require drugs to be 30 or 40 times production costs.”

“With prices that low, how do you know there won’t be mass rushes by Americans to grab everything they can?”

“Because there’s security! Every hospital and pharmacy has armed guards with the best automatic weapons smuggled through the God-fearing 2nd Amendment patriotic Southern states.”

“Is Megabucks outsourcing all its operations?”

“Keeping the ER. After tummy tucks and butt lifts, that’s the hospital’s ‘cash cow.’”

“So, then, it’ll have to keep some services like X-Ray and the lab,” I said. “Maybe even a doctor or two.”

“Too expensive,” said Comstock. “Megabucks will hire more residents and foreign-educated doctors, and work them 18 hours a day. More work, less time to complain. Residents will do anything to get experience to pass their boards. May even hire a couple of hospitalists. You know, the ones who graduated at the bottom of their class and can’t even get work in a Free Clinic.”

“I suppose they’ll also do the lab work?” I asked.

“Do you know some of those lab techs are making as much as $30,000 a year! Made sense to lay them off, too.”

“So how will the ER know a victim’s blood chemistry, or if there’s internal injuries?”

“Technology,” said Comstock. “They scan the blood here, and send digital X-Rays to Mexico. Mexican lab technicians—you know, the ones that don’t know about unions and will work for only a few bucks a day—will analyze everything, then text the results back to the U.S.”

“This sounds like it’s not only a way to maximize profits, but also a way to avoid dealing with the President’s health care reform program.”

“Obamacare!” spit out Comstock. “Nothing but socialized medicine.”

“Most countries have forms of socialized medicine,” I countered, “and they not only have good health care but affordable prices to their citizens.”

Comstock put his hands to his ears and began chanting, “We’re Number 1, We’re Number 1.”

“Number 37,” I corrected him. “The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. just below Costa Rico.”

“They’re all Commies,” replied Comstock. “Besides, that study is a decade old.”

“Last year, the independent Commonwealth Fund compared the nations of the United Kingdom against the U.S., and the U.S. ranked seventh of the seven.”

“Yeah, like Americans will go to Canada? It’s covered by snow and run by a queen who can’t even speak English.”

“You and Megabucks are crazy!”

“Possibly,” said Comstock, “but outsourcing is the American way. By the way, do you put ketchup or mustard on a burrito?”

Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Millions of people in the US work and are still poor. Here are eight points that show why the US needs to dedicate itself to making work pay.

One. How many people work and are still poor?

In 2011, the US Department of Labor reported at least 10 million people worked and were still below the unrealistic official US poverty line, an increase of 1.5 million more than the last time they checked. The US poverty line is $18,530 for a mom and two kids. Since 2007 the numbers of working poor have been increasing. About 7 percent of all workers and 4 percent of all full-time workers earn wages that leave them below the poverty line.

Two. What kinds of jobs do the working poor have?

One third of the working poor, over 3 million people, work in the service industry. Workers in other occupations are also poor: 16 percent of those in farming; 11 percent in construction; and 11 percent in sales.

Three. Which workers are most likely to be working and still poor?

Women workers are more likely to be poor than men. African American and Hispanic workers are about twice as likely to be poor as whites. College graduates have a 2 percent poverty rate while workers without a high school diploma have a poverty rate 10 times higher at 20 percent.

Four. What about benefits for low wage workers?

Ten percent of US workers earn $8.50 an hour or less according to the US Department of Labor. About 12 percent have health care and about 12 percent have retirement benefits. Nearly one in four get paid sick leave and less than half get paid vacation leave.

Five. What rights do the working poor have?

Most workers have a right to earn at least the federal minimum wage of $7.50 an hour. Tipped employees are supposed to get at least $2.13 each hour from their employer and if the worker does not earn enough in tips to make the $7.50 minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference. People who work more than 40 hours in a workweek are entitled to one and one-half of their regular pay for each hour of overtime.

Six. What about wage theft from the working poor?

Many low wage workers have part of their earnings stolen by their employers. Examples include not paying people the full minimum wage, not paying required overtime, stealing from tipped employees, or fraudulently classifying workers as independent contractors. A survey of over 4000 low wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York conducted by university and non-profit researchers found: 26 percent of the workers were paid less than the minimum wage in the previous week, a majority were underpaid by more than $1 an hour; a significant number worked overtime the previous week and were not paid the legally required overtime; many were required to come early or stay late and work “off the clock” and were not paid for it; almost a third of the tipped workers were not paid the minimum wage and more than 1 in 10 tipped workers had some of their money stolen by their employer or supervisor.

Seven. What is a living wage in the US?

Dr. Amy Glasmeier of Penn State University has created a Living Wage Calculator that estimates the hourly wage needed to pay the cost of living for low wage families in the US. It breaks down the cost of living by state and locality across the nation. In New Orleans, a mom with one child needs to earn $17.52 to make ends meet. In New York, the mom with one child should earn $19.66 to make it. If we now realistically calculate the number of people who work and do not earn a living wage, the numbers of working poor in the US skyrocket to several tens of millions.

Eight. What about jobs for the unemployed and underemployed?

The US Labor Department estimated recently that 13 million people were unemployed. Another 8 million people were working part-time but wanted full-time work. Even more millions who are not working are not counted in those numbers because they have been unemployed so long.

A study by Northeastern University found that in the poorest families, unemployment is nearly 31 percent. Underemployment is also much more of a problem in poor homes, with over 20 percent of those workers reporting they are working part-time but seeking full-time work.

Our nation can do so much more. We say our country values work. It is time to do something about it.

If the US truly values work, we need to support the millions of our sisters and brothers who are low wage workers. Steps needed include: raising the minimum wage to a living wage; protecting workers from getting ripped off; making it easier for workers to organize together if they choose to; and creating jobs, public jobs if necessary, so that everyone who wants to work can do so. Many are already working on these justice issues.

For those interested in learning more about this, see the websites of Interfaith Worker Justice, the National Employment Law Project, and the National Jobs for All Coalition.

Many of those who support grossly unequal outcomes attempt to distract the public from the critical extreme inequality in wealth and income here by stressing equal opportunity as the key. Incredibly, they seem to think that we have equal opportunity in America. However, Paul Krugman’s January 8th column, “America’s Unlevel Field“, clearly points out that the playing field in the U.S. today is definitely not anywhere close to being level.

Despite the terribly unequal opportunities that exist, Americans have generally accepted the idea of some reasonable level of wealth and income inequality. The public’s acceptance sprang from the idea that some people have special talents or make special contributions that merit greater rewards.

However, two factors have undercut this support. First, there is a weakening of the connection between reward and merit. In addition, we have now reached an obscene level of inequality that is exemplified in a report from the Heritage Institute. Based on data from 2000, the Heritage Institute showed that CEO pay for major U.S. corporations was wildly out of line with those of our economic competitors. For example the average pay for CEOs in Japan was 10 times the average worker’s wage compared to 531 times here. Of the 26 countries in the report, Brazil had the second largest inequality with a value of 57.

The obscene rise in this inequality in the U.S. is striking, going from a value of 24 times in 1965 to 42 times in 1980 to 85 times in 1990. More recent data show that the U.S. value declined from the 531 times in 2000 to well over 300 times the typical worker’s pay in 2010. Note that the comparisons are affected by how many major corporations are included in the studies. For example, another estimate for the U.S. in 2000 was 300 times compared to the 531 times mentioned above; regardless, the U.S. is way out of line compared to our economic competitors and the change over time is appalling.

The Heritage Institute report included 2004 and 2006 quotes from Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, that address both merit and extreme inequality. According to the report, in a May 2004 letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett wrote about the inadequacy of corporate governance structures among U.S. companies. “(If) Corporate America is serious about reforming itself, CEO pay remains the acid test.” Buffett added: “The results aren’t encouraging.” Buffett criticized lavish pay packages and the “lapdog behavior” of directors, calling the situation an “epidemic of greed.”

In a 2006 shareholder report, Buffett stated: “Too often, executive compensation in the U.S. is ridiculously out of line with performance.” “Getting fired can produce a particularly bountiful payday for a CEO. Indeed, he can “earn” more in that single day, while cleaning out his desk, than an American worker earns in a lifetime of cleaning toilets. Forget the old maxim about nothing succeeding like success: Today, in the executive suite, the all-too-prevalent rule is that nothing succeeds like failure.”

Extreme inequality is even more problematic when it results from questionable behavior and/or political connections. Consider that those in the financial sector, whose unethical and immoral practices almost collapsed the financial system, were not held accountable for their actions. Talk about the lack of a moral hazard! Instead, besides initially profiting from fraud, they became even wealthier due to the taxpayer-funded bailout of the financial sector.

Changes in the tax system played a major role in increasing the level of inequality in America over the past decades. For example, the corporate share of federal taxes went from 28% in the 1950s to an average of roughly 10% over the 2001 to 2010 period. In addition, the top marginal individual tax rate dropped from 91% in 1954 to 35% today. Cuts in the top capital gains taxes for long-term gains from 28% to 15% have primarily benefited those at the top of the wealth scale. Politicians have also greatly weakened the estate tax that worked to lessen inequality somewhat. These changes certainly have played a major role in creating the extreme inequality we see today.

Our method of financing political campaigns, some would call it legalized bribery, makes it particularly easy for large corporations and the wealthy to push for tax reductions and tax loopholes at the expense of small business competitors and the public. Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) and Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else, two books by Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston, provide numerous examples of this corruption and other questionable business practices by large corporations. America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? and several other books by investigative reporters and twice Pulitzer Prize winners Donald Barlett and James Steele also address how the tax code is manipulated to the benefit of the rich and powerful. In The Tyranny of Oil, Antonia Juhasz details how huge energy and financial corporations greatly profit from their corruption of the political system, and how the public bears the cost. Among her many examples are the government’s failure to enforce anti-trust laws and its creation of the “Enron loophole”.

If compensation were indeed based on merit, Americans could accept a reasonable level of inequality. However, as shown above, besides merit, income and wealth are often linked to many other factors, including the corruption of politicians.

Given the dire straits – high levels of unemployment and underemployment, homelessness, lack of health insurance, home foreclosures, huge credit card debts and college loan debts, shortages of food – that many Americans face today, our extreme inequality is intolerable. The current situation demands a drastic overhaul of our corrupt political/economic system to end and to prevent future extreme inequality. Unless we act now, control by the wealthy and powerful will be solidified.

The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit corporation that brings together some 2,500 “top” global business and political leaders every January in a remote Swiss mountain resort. Along with the G-7, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum has a strong pro-corporate agenda and is a regular target for anti-corporate globalization protests. The latter movement is a loosely knit network of anti-corporate groups that started in Asia and Europe in the 1990s, in response to the international treaty that created the World Trade Organization (WTO). Its American counterpart was born in Novemeber 1999, when 50,000 people marched in the streets of Seattle and thousands committed civil disobedience to derail the WTO Third Ministerial meeting. Currently the WTO and so-called “Free Trade” treaties, such as NAFTA, receive scant coverage in the mainstream media. Nevertheless labor and environmental activists remain deeply concerned about the power these international treaties give corporations to overturn democratically enacted labor and environmental protections.

Since 2001, grassroots activists from all over the world have been holding a World Social Forum in a developing country (usually Brazil) at the same time as the World Economic Forum. The philosophy behind the World Social Forum is that ordinary people have an even greater need for international conferences than corporate elites. It’s only by coming together and organizing that they can resist efforts by global elites to strip them of the limited democratic and economic rights they still enjoy.

Emphasis on Global Social Unrest

When the Guardian article that accompanied the report stated that Global Risks 2012 focuses mainly on economic turmoil and social unrest (as opposed to globalization and free trade), I was extremely keen to read it. Would it mention Occupy Wall Street? It sure does, right there on page 16 under “Case 1: Seeds of Dystopia”:

Two dominant issues of concern emerged from the Arab Spring, the ‘Occupy’ movements worldwide and recent similar incidents of civil discontent: the growing frustration among citizens with the political and economic establishment, and the rapid public mobilization enabled by greater technological connectivity.

The document is full of other surprises. Unlike the mainstream media, Global Risks 2012 is surprisingly sympathetic towards the Occupy movement. The authors are deeply concerned about “dystopia,” the opposite of utopia, which they define as “a place where life is full of hardship and devoid of hope.” They go on to talk about the danger of declining economic conditions in Western Europe, North America and Japan jeopardizing “social contracts” between states and their citizens. These they define as has historic understandings that workers will be guaranteed access to health care (by North America they must mean Canada – this has never been true in the US) and decent pensions in old age.

They express concern (implying that corporate CEOs should also be concerned) about the link between global recession and increasing rates of poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, suicide, divorce, domestic violence and the abandonment, neglect and abuse of children (page 18).

They talk about the large numbers of unemployed young people around the world being a “lost generation” (page 22). Even more surprisingly, they identify huge income disparity as being one of the most serious global risks. They caution that when “social mobility” (i.e. individual ability to advance socially and economically) is attainable, income disparity can spur people to work harder. When it’s clearly not, as in the current global recession, feelings of powerlessness, disconnectedness and disengagement can “take root.” (page 19).

They conclude the dystopia section with the following warning:

The social unrest that occurred in 2011, from the United States to the Middle East, demonstrated how governments everywhere need to address the causes of discontent before it becomes a violent, destabilizing force. (page 19)

Destructive Corporate Lobbying

Global Risks 2012 also talks about destructive corporate lobbying (my translation – they use more obscure, intellectually lofty language) in trying to enact environmental and health regulations: “By their very nature, the costs involved in implementing safeguards, such as quality standards and risk mitigation practices, may give some individuals, firms or organizations reasons to lobby to minimize them and look for ways around them.” (page 22)

They are equally critical of the “too big to fail” banks: “When losses can be passed on to others – as when banks are defined as “too big to fail” – excessive risk-taking is likely to occur.” (page 22).

They conclude with the argument (making the 2008 banking crisis a case in point) that dangerously lax regulations “in just one jurisdiction could trigger global catastrophe.” (page 22)

How Will CEOs Answer the Discussion Questions?

I have to admit my favorite part of Global Risks 2012 are the “Questions for Stakeholders,” inserted at the end at the end of each section to make sure the corporate elites and the politicians who accompany them to these meetings are paying attention. I would give anything to listen in to the answers JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon, give to some of these:

• What steps can be taken to reduce income disparity? (they need to get Dimon to answer this one.)

• How can appropriate regulations be developed so that firms will undertake effective safeguards?

• How can business, government and civil society work together to improve resilience against unforeseen risks? (the report uses the word resilience, which they borrow from the sustainability movement, a lot).

• How can fostering entrepreneurship prevent the seeds of dystopia from taking root? (this wouldn’t be my approach, but at least they admit urgent action is needed)

How Global Risks 2012 Came to Be Written

The World Economic Forum’s Risk Response Network (RRN) was launched in 2004 to provide public and private sector leaders with “an independent, impartial platform to map, measure, monitor, manage and mitigate global risks.” This is the RRN’s seventh annual report. It’s based on surveys completed by 469 international experts in industry, government, academia and civil society about 50 potential global risks across five categories: Economic, Environmental, Geopolitical, Societal and Technological. Risks in each category are rated according to both the potential damage they could inflict and their likelihood of occurrence. In addition, a specific risk in each category is identified as “the center of gravity,” which feeds other risks, both within the specific category and across categories.

How 469 Experts Rated the 50 Risks

• Most likely to occur: chronic fiscal imbalances and severe income disparity.

• Economic “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: chronic fiscal imbalances (debt).

• Most likely to occur: rising greenhouse gas emissions

• Environmental “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: rising greenhouse gas emissions

• Most likely to occur: critical fragile states and pervasively entrenched corruption

• Geopolitical “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: global governance failure

• Most likely to occur: water supply crisis, followed by food shortage crisis

• Societal “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: unsustainable population growth (highly controversial, but a growing number of sustainability activists agree with this view)

• Most likely to occur: cyber attacks

• Technological “center of gravity” around which many other risks cluster: critical systems failure

Is There a Split in the Ruling Elite?

It’s clear from the spelling (using “our” instead of “or” and “re” instead of “er” at the end of words) that the authors of Global Risks 2012 are either British or Canadian. I find it extremely hard to imagine a report emphasizing carbon emissions and income inequality coming out of the US. I also think it’s it significant that three of the four companies listed as report “cosponsors” are insurance companies.¹ If Exxon had helped write this document, it would surely minimize the risk of increasing carbon emissions, if it mentioned them at all.

At times there are divisions in the ruling elite – between the banking/insurance and the energy/military sectors – over specific issues. Climate change seems to be one of them. Owing to deregulation, there is significant overlap between insurance companies, which derive most of their income from reinvesting premiums, and other financial institutions. AIG, for example, is supposedly an insurance company but had to be bailed out because they owned a substantial chunk of subprime mortgages.

It’s clearly in the interest of oil, natural gas and coal companies for consumers to continue to buy and burn up as much fossil fuel as possible. Insurance companies, on the other hand, serve their shareholders best by reducing carbon emissions. They already face growing claims losses due to a massive increase in weather-related catastrophes. In this context it makes sense for them to cosponsor a World Economic Forum risk assessment document emphasizing the need for international agreement about reducing carbon emissions. It also helps explain why Wall Street investment banker (and New York mayor) Michael Bloomberg has given a $50 million donation to the Sierra Club’s Anti-Coal Campaign.

1. Marsh and McLennan, Swiss Reinsurance Company, University of Pennsylvania Wharton Center for Risk Management, and Zurich Financial Services.

I’ll admit that I’m one of those people that enjoys reading historical accounts of depraved Roman emperors, of brain-addled czars. I really don’t know why. I’m sure it’s a sickness and maybe it will appear soon in the latest DSM9. Maybe there’s an expensive big pharma-med in production that can help.  Perhaps that’s why I allow myself to listen to the piffle that these fellows are peddling. I’ve been desensitized from reading about the sexy historic train wreck characters. The thing is, this isn’t historical, but sadly very much in the now. Hence the need for the long showers. I’m so ashamed.

We’ve progressed little when a Mitt can look at the widespread misery, that only expands by the minute, and he can simply comment that the complaints stem from jealousy. We all want to be Wall Street zombies, of course. He projects his illness on the rest of us. The Mitt has actually said this in regard to the rumblings of the many — it is all just envy. I’m not sure if he said that at the gathering the other day which necessitated the removal of a young Harvard student who looked like someone that the Mitt didn’t want there. The poor kid spent the day in jail for looking like someone. But that’s the world the Mitt lives in. You get what you want. Period. And that kid looked like somebody. That kid is just lucky he wasn’t detained indefinitely for looking like somebody. You really need to be aware of your doppelgangers and what they are up to in this high security age.

In other psychotic plutocrat news, a guy in South Florida- one John Castle, a leveraged buy-out “king” was angry that the bill after a meal was brought to his table… so he promptly broke the waiter’s finger. Of course, you never bring a king, even a leveraged buy-out one, a bill. The waiter got off easy too.

In other, trod upon worker news, one of the infamous Foxconn plants in China  had workers threatening mass suicide due to salary lies and general dehumanizing jobs recently — all necessary privations to produce X boxes cheaply.

I could go on and on.

And right now, here in the US, almost everyone who has one thing go wrong will be pushed to the side of progress, to the stench of the alley. Preferably to die there.  Fuck you, waiters of the world. We will break your fingers. We might make you homeless.  It’s all at our whimsy. We have all the cards. We will make your conditions eventually so bad that you will think death might be preferable. The world is flat in it’s misery, or we will make it so, says Thomas Friedman. Because we get what we want. Period.

And the world will stand, awash in confusion. But what happened? How did we come to such a devolved time? Perhaps we should have noticed when they treated international humans with such disregard. Of course, it would come home eventually. They convinced us that poverty was our fault and that those not wealthy had no worth. But, in truth, they are the filth, the ravenous undead feeding on the fresh life of others. Because they can never know satiety. And they never look to slow their own malignancy.  They just look for ways to continue feeding at the expense of the healthy and the clean.

And the Obamas of the age will make a point of pretending to care, their only contribution is less directly worded insults. Obama won’t say you are jealous that you don’t have the power to keep people from breaking your fingers. He will talk about the loveliness of intact fingers, and how the many before us have worked for intact fingers and someday the world will only have intact fingers. Then the roses will fall from the sky and the soaring melody will swell in the hearts of the listeners. And the broken fingered waiter will clap awkwardly in the crowd.

Flee from these creatures, find meaning in your local. Unravel what you can, including their lies that reside in your mind. Some influences are so toxic there is nothing to do but denounce and shun them. Don’t for one moment take them to be anything that promotes “a common welfare” or general decency. They are the carnivores who have convinced the sheep that they deserve to be eaten.

Could I possibly use any more metaphors?

Probably not. But above all, try to limit your exposure to them — because after all, there just isn’t enough water. Trust me.

Engels will compare his and Marx’s “bastard” progeny with the “legitimate” progeny of Herr Dühring with respect to economic production in this chapter. Dühring rejects any notion of the capitalist production system which claims that economic crises are due to the very nature of the structure of capitalism itself. That is a Marxian fantasy.

For Dühring, Engels says, “crises are only occasional deviations from ‘normalcy’ and at most only serve to promote ‘the development of a more regulated order.’” The Marxists maintain, au contraire, that crises are caused by over-production and this is a structural fault within the capitalist system itself. But Dühring rejects this and writes that the real reason for crises is, in his words, “the lagging behind of popular consumption … artificially produced under-consumption … with the natural growth of the NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE (!), which ultimately make the gulf between supply and demand so critically wide.”

To this Engels replies that the masses have been forced to under-consume throughout history and in every economic system based on class exploitation, therefore under-consumption is not some artificially produced phenomenon but something all class societies share — i.e., that the exploited class never has the value of its yearly production returned to it at the end of the year. The crises of industrial capitalism, however, only date from the the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Engels concludes, it is under capitalism that periodic economic crises come into the world and while under-consumption of the masses is a PREREQUISITE it is not the CAUSE of crises. And knowing this, he says, “tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before.”

Dühring, in fact, does not think mass markets are all that important anyway. He himself says that capitalist production happens to “depend for its market mainly on THE CIRCLES OF THE POSSESSING CLASSES THEMSELVES.” His confusion becomes only more apparent when he follows up on this by claiming that the most important industries (this is the 1870s remember) are cotton and iron production. But, Engels points out, the production of these two is entirely dependent on a mass market and the possessing class make up only an “infinitesimally small degree” of its market.

Engels then points out that capitalism, by it very need to grow and expand, brings about crises. He says, for example, in England there is just one small town (Oldham) that from 1872 to 1875 doubled its production of spun cotton [the number of its spindles went from 2.5 to 5 million] and this is just one of a dozen small towns around Manchester. Oldham, by the way, produced as much spun cotton as ALL of Germany (including Alsace). This was happening in towns all over Great Britain.

It thus shows “deep-rooted effrontery” on the part of Herr Dühring to blame the English masses for under-consumption rather than the capitalists for over-production when it comes to “the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets.”²

Engels ends his critique of Herr Dühring’s views on crises but gives a few quotes that demonstrate that Dühring has no idea about capitalism as an economic system but sees everything in terms of the behavior of individuals. If over-speculation and the unplanned building of private factories are responsible for crises we must see that as simply “the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation” of the system and look closely at “the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and the lack of private circumspection” as one of the causes.

The only “rashness” here, Engels maintains, is the habit of turning the facts of economics into “moral reprobation.” This is a problem of our times as well, not just the time of Engels. How often do we hear talk about our current crisis as a product of “greed” on the part of Wall Street bankers and that they should pay their “fair share” of taxes and such rubbish as if the decay of capitalism is a moral disorder on the part of the ruling class instead of a structural disorder that requires the replacement of the system rather than remedial Sunday school classes for the capitalists.

But all this has been treated of in the previous chapter of Anti-Dühring and Engels wants to move on (Cf. “Frederick Engels on the Theoretical Development of Modern Capitalism” in the November 2011 Political Affairs). Engels will now turn his attention to Dühring’s new system of viewing socialism which is called “the natural system of society.”

Dühring bases his system of socialism on what he calls the “universal principle of justice” which applies everywhere and is independent of historical and economic facts. This is enough to disqualify it as idealistic nonsense but Engels wants to philosophically pepper spay Dühring for having the gall to attack Marx for being unclear and fuzzy as to what type of socialism he believes in. It appears that the demands made in the name of the workers in the Communist Manifesto are “erroneous half measures” far inferior to Dühring’s ideas which represent “a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history.”

Marx, according to Dühring, thinks of socialism as “nothing more than the corporative ownership by groups of workers … an ownership that is both individual and social.” Engels is upset because this is far from anything Marx has suggested and in truth actually applies to the system that Dühring has concocted.

Dühring advocates a federation of independent economic communes which compete with one another and which have absolute freedom of movement from one commune to another. In this crazy system the wealthy successful communes will out compete the poorly run communes which will become defunct as the people will all end up moving to the well run ones.

Production within the communes stays the same as production in the past — i.e., the communes are still capitalist in nature even though controlled by the workers. So the greatly touted natural system of justice and the new socialism amounts to the fact, Engels says, that “the commune takes the place of the capitalists.”

What are Dühring’s views on the most basic form of all hitherto existing methods of production — i.e., the division of labor? With respect to the primary division, that between TOWN and COUNTRY (or industry and agriculture) he has little to say beyond some common place remarks about its “inevitable” nature and the possibility of overcoming it in the future. Thin gruel from Engels’ point of view.

When it comes to the modern division of labor in trade and industry Dühring is very vague and only says that we have an “erroneous division of labor” and that all will be remedied in the future “as soon as account is taken of the various natural conditions and personal capabilities [of the workers].” Engels doesn’t say so, but Dühring’s views here are suspiciously similar to those of Plato in the Republic and very far from the socialist analysis of Marx to which Engels now turns.

Marx tells us that in all societies where production springs up “spontaneously” (including capitalism) we discover the means of production dominate the people not the other way around. The first great division of labour saw the development of towns and cities surrounded by peasant agriculturalists. This division has doomed rural people for thousands of years, Marx says, to “mental torpidity” and enslaved the town dwellers to their own specialized trade. This “stunting” of humanity increases with the increase of the division of labor.

Under capitalism the workers become tied to their machines and to one specific function and one tool. Capitalism, Marx says in Das Kapital “converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity. by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts…. The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation.” How much this has been alleviated by the modern day union movement varies from country to country and in proportion to the percentage of workers who are unionized. The large number of working people in the US for example, that vote Republican shows that “mental torpidity” is not confined to the rural populations of Texas, Iowa or Alaska (to name a few).

It is not just the workers who suffer under the present day division of labor but also, Engels says, the “empty-minded bourgeois” chasing after profits (Donald Trump comes to mind), the lawyers dominated by “fossilized legal conceptions” and so-called “educated classes” of society plagued by “local narrow-mindedness” and “mental short-sightedness”– just think of the tribe of Sunday morning news pundits paraded before the public by all the major TV networks, or the platoons of professors giving advice about everything under the sun and hardly agreeing on anything other than that capitalism is still the best of all possible economic formations.

But how are we to overcome this division of labor and the consequent alienation of humanity from its potentials and possibilities? One way only says Engels: “in making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production.” In other words, socialism based on central planning and most importantly — a feature historically absent in 20th century socialist societies due to their premature appearance in economically backward conditions — planning democratically controlled and carried out by the working people themselves. The former alienating division of labor will be done away with as “society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed.”

Engels says that this is not just a “fantasy” or a “pious wish.” He maintains that the state of industrial development in the 1870s is so advanced that society could “reduce the time required for labour to a point which measured by our present conceptions, will be small indeed.” This figure needs to be actually quantified — but the point is all the goodies needed to live and thrive could be created with people just working a few hours a week and with no one being chained to any one boring and unsatisfying job. The growth in productivity since Engels’ day must make this even more true today.

Engels quotes Das Kapital: “The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallizing this distribution [of labor-tr] after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work….”

Modern capitalism with its constant crises and dislocations of industrial centers and working people and financial catastrophes makes, Marx says, it necessary that we posit as a “fundamental law of production, variation of work” so that modern workers have to be ready to change jobs and learn new skills or leave the labor market. This disrupts lives and threatens widespread social disorder. Only socialist planning and a system that puts people before profits can prevent society from self destructing under the contradictions generated by the present capitalist world market which, in the name of profits first and people last, fragments both human individuals and their social relations with others which inevitably results from the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

Engels also says that the abolition of capitalism and the development “one single vast plan” which harmoniously “dovetails” industry and the means of production so that the differences between town and country are overcome is a prerequisite to overcoming environmental degradation and “present poisoning the air water and land.” To this must be added the current disaster of human induced global warming which simply cannot be dealt with as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system. This problem was not seen in Engels’ day and now, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of impending doom, the various capitalist powers are unwilling to take the drastic regulatory measures needed to deal with the problem.

Engels maintains that none of these claims he is making is “utopian” but that they are logical conclusions of scientific central planning and the abolition of the difference between town and country. It looks as if the towns, or rather the great cities (such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, etc., etc., will have be abolished as well! Engels says that it “is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of.” But, “the great towns will perish.”

No, this is not Pol Pot, it is Frederick Engels and he is saying this because he envisions a complete redistribution of the population under socialism in order to get the “most equal distribution possible of modern industry.” So the abolition of the separation of town and country means the abolition of the cities. They must and will be eliminated “however protracted a process it may be.” This might just be a little too “utopian” and perhaps with the progress of science and communications since the 1870s, especially the growth of the internet, the contradictions between town and country can be resolved without offing the Big Apple.

In any event, leaving the abolition of cities aside, the point Engels wants to make is that Dühring’s view of socialism leaves out of account that building socialism will necessitate “revolutionizing from top to bottom the old method of production and first of all putting an end to the old division of labour.” Dühring thinks that the state can just take over production as is and harmonize it to people’s “natural appetites and personal capabilities.” He also thinks the division between town and country is natural and inevitable and has no plan for putting an end to the alienation and crippling of human capabilities that result from this division.

So much for Engels’ critique of Dühringian socialism’s handling of production. In the penultimate chapter of Anti-Dühring Engels will discuss the problems of distribution.

1. Anti-Dühring Part III Chapter III “Production.”
2. Engels is referring to an economic crises of the 1870s.

There would be no economy without a constant inflow of natural resources like the sun and the atmosphere, the soil, the seas, fossil fuels, minerals, etc throughput in the system. Most classical economists had their vision of a “stationary state” — the ontological destination of economic growth and development constrained by the planet’s population exploration vis-à-vis finiteness of arable land and the exhaustibility of non-renewable resources. Humanity does not produce these “fictitious commodities” but exploits them, as observed by Karl Polanyi in his pathbreaking treatise The Great Transformation (1944). Simply by holding title to a portfolio of real property, without any effort to increase their value, one could quickly turn a profit from social investments, as revealed in classical prudence. Karl Marx’s entire critique of political economy is based on the contradictions between use value and exchange value. Marx established that the soil had no “indestructible powers,” as it could be degraded leading to ecological destruction.

Marxism was never a major force in United States. The primary challenge to the classical tradition came from what has since come to be known as neo-classical economics. The classical tradition of economic thought was ably synthesized and represented by one dominant figure of the age in America: Henry George. His 1879 book, Progress and Poverty sold more copies throughout the world than any book till that time except the Bible. George propagated that conflating land into capital allowed land rent to be concealed and diluted and the undeserving windfalls accrued to “leisure class” speculators and led to depression of labour wages at the margin. Following the classical tradition, George recognized that there is no justification for the titleholders to reap the return of what society has invested. George advocated for a progressive tax because land was mostly concentrated among the wealthy. Mason Gaffney in his 1994 book The Corruption of Economics has described how most influential oligarchy in late nineteenth century America, the railroad barons exerted their manipulative power to preempt the possibility of any rent extracted from land use. Leading Economics scholars engaged in establishing the American Economic Association (AEA) were induced to change definitions and to initiate two-factor (capital and labour) neoclassical economics denying land and natural resources’ contribution in production process. To oppose and alienate George from the domain of economics had been the preoccupation to the founding members of the AEA that fetched a grand success.

Frederick Soddy, recipient of Chemistry Nobel Prize in 1921, considered economics a pseudoscience requiring a paradigm shift and offered an alternative perspective on economics, rooted in the laws of thermodynamics. Contrary to mainstream belief, economy used to draw energy from outside itself and thus incapable of generating infinite wealth. Sody’s critique has been furthered by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971). Georgescu-Roegen considered the economy as a living system that used to draw from its environment valuable or low entropy matter and energy adjusted by equal quantity of polluting high entropy matter-energy back to the environment.

Classical economics was concerned about scarcity of savings as well as dangers of overconsumption. Thomas Malthus was a remarkable exception within the classical tradition who promoted the idea that underconsumption causes recession. Based on Malthusian conviction, J.M. Keynes came forward to reverse under-consumption and oversaving during the Great Depression of the 1930s in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. (1936) that government spending and subsidized consumer spending can compensate for “demand deficiencies”. Keynesian revolution aimed at long-term growth of national income through consumption, investment, incremental capital/output ratio without considering physical and energetic realities. An American economist Murray Rothband observed that Keynes “possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.” Keynes’ misrepresented Say’s Law as “supply creates its own demand” as if it were a quotation from J.B. Say. Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) had initiated the mathematization of economics in a grand scale that provided the power to confuse the outsiders along with the economists incapable to cope with “competitive inflation of rigour”. The novelty of Milton Friedman’s essay, “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (1953), was in innovating the immateriality of background assumptions. According to another main proponent of neoclassical school of economics Robert Solow, technology has been the determinant factor of economic growth. Subsequent research has observed that Solow has failed to assess the energy processes of consumption, transformation, and depletion, though these factors are inseparable from the growth of industrial production.

Thus the treadmill of production, founded on the eternal law of capitalist circulation: supply creates its own demand, drives the expansion of production and consumption synergistically. The zero-sum game has its obvious tolls on wretched teeming millions mostly of the “other” world. Andre Gunder Frank elaborated his earlier “Development of Underdevelopment” thesis in a 2001 paper based on multilateralism and entropy on how the structure, process and transformation of the world-system generate the new wealth and poverty of nations. Entropy is dispersed from the more “ordered” regions and sectors of the global world economy to other less “ordered” regions that are obliged to absorb the entropy dissipated in their direction by the more “ordered” one. Global biophysical transformation engenders localized stresses in the forms of coastal erosion, ice melt, and infertile land and deteriorating water sources. Thus fast liquefying of Arctic cryosphere, causes matching rise in sea-beds that will result in submerging of several small-island states in Pacific and Indian Ocean by the end of twenty-first century. The catastrophic ecological crises manifested by growing human strive for higher per-capita consumption, the only indicator of economic growth, by deploying ruthlessly limited resources stored in a finite and fragile planet. Thus the project to divert Economics from the road to flourish as a disciplined study of humans’ economic activities in the broader socio-ecological context to a mere vocational training equipped with quantitative tools had been completed. A “boutique” or more aptly, a “comprador” economics had elevated to full-swing marginalising political and methodological plurality. Margaret Thatcher’s famous assertion that ‘there is no alternative’(TINA) and Francis Fukuyama’s equally famous verdict of ‘End of History…’ trumpet the advent of a particular political and economic system as the final destination of humanity’s socio-cultural evolution.

The global financial crisis surfaced in 2000s, apparently as a consequence of sub-prime housing mortgage practices in USA, has its root in growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance. As early as in 1920s, Soddy argued that the financial system could increase the public and private debts and mix-up this expansion of credit with the creation of real wealth. But growth of production and growth of consumption imply growth in the extraction and final destruction of fossil fuels. The obligation to pay debts at compound interest could be fulfilled either by inflation or economic growth. But economic growth is fallaciously measured because it is based on undervalued exhaustible resources and unvalued pollution. The myth of unlimited economic growth has all along been justified with unrealistic assumptions and “evergreen” predictions. Vested interests from late nineteenth century American railroad oligarchy to vanguards of Washington consensus have promoted the pseudoeconomics quixotically empowered to dominate academics and policy. Foucauldian knowledge-power discourse reminds us that if the values and political implications underlying the “growth business-as-usual” do not ensure how to protect the society, we can refuse to accept their imperatives and develop alternative epistemology.

The actions, moreover, have already achieved limited successes — besides having created space for Americans to come together outside of the established political system, they have rightly been credited with having stopped fee increases amongst the largest banks in the country, as well as having widely validated the American public’s fury over increasing inequality, generating massive media exposure.

Despite its impressive influence, however, the only real material victory of Occupy so far — its having stopped increased bank fees — was entirely incidental, and was in no way a conscious objective of the Occupy Movement.

The Occupy Movement therefore remains increasingly susceptible to losing its momentum if it does not achieve some tangible gains. We can be certain that if people do not see real results from the Occupy Movement soon, they will move on to something which seems to offer them more; and with our two political parties gearing up for election season, we should take this threat all the more seriously.

Concretely, what this is going to mean for Occupy supporters is to re-orient their organizing from mass, symbolic actions — such as “mic-checking politicians” and waving signs at CEO’s — to more targeted campaigns designed to win real, immediate gains for ourselves.

In order to do this, Occupiers are going to have to learn three important organizing guidelines for their campaigns, exemplified by a growing community organization out of Seattle, Washington: the Seattle Solidarity Network (or “SeaSol”).

They will have to make sure their fights are relevant, winnable, and importantly, make sure they hurt.

Make sure the fight is relevant

For social movements to not only sustain themselves, but also to grow, it’s important for them to be relevant to other people’s daily lives. They must offer something that will, at least eventually, markedly improve their quality of life.

The Seattle Solidarity Network has seen a good amount of growth in its relatively short life span because it focuses on solutions to a problem most people face: naked exploitation. Has your boss stolen your wages? Is your landlord refusing to make needed repairs to your home? Have you been discriminated against?

People — mostly working class people — identify with these problems. These problems are things we and our loved ones face daily; that makes campaigns around these issues relevant to our day to day lives, not just because it affects us and our loved ones, but because we intimately understand them.

In order to attract more people to join Occupy, organizers will have to make the case that the issues they are taking on are of great importance to others.

Make sure the fight is winnable

People need to believe they have a chance of winning something. There is no point in turning out to protest after protest, after all, if at the end of the day you don’t feel like progress is going to be made. Organizers need to achieve concrete victories in order to show people that it’s worth fighting on their side.

A brief visit to SeaSol’s website reveals that all of the fights it has taken on — over stolen wages or deposits, for example — have been rather small conflicts. That’s because SeaSol recognizes that to effectively address a problem, you must have the resources and capacity to hurt your target more than it will cost them to give into your demand.

Or, to put it even more simply: to win, you have to have leverage.

SeaSol shows this relationship — between the amount of leverage they have, and the amount it would cost a target to give in to the demands — in its “winnability graph.”

This graph, while only a vague representation of real life — where we obviously cannot quantify “units of pressure” — nonetheless forces us to really look at what our resources are, and what we might be able to achieve with them.

What if instead of using our time at Occupy to make unwinnable demands — things we are simply not yet strong enough to gain — we focused on winning a series of smaller fights? What if instead of trying to get “corporate money out of politics,” we instead tried to stop foreclosures in our cities, home by home?

With the level of participation in the Occupy movement as it stands, demands such as this are demonstrably more winnable — and consequently, help build a larger and more empowered movement.

Make sure it hurts

Once you’ve decided on a demand that people will find relevant — a demand you feel confident you and other occupiers in your city can win, you’ll want to begin fighting for it with all the resources at your disposal.

SeaSol normally approaches a fight with a few principles in mind.

First, they know that the name of the game here is pressure. Essentially, how are we going to make life very, very hard for our target until they give in?

There are a nearly infinite number of tactics you can use to put pressure on a target — it just takes some creativity. You can, for example, hurt them economically with pickets, boycotts, or blockades. You can target their social connections, and embarrass them in front of neighbors, fellow church goers or business partners with flyers, letters, protests, or sit-ins. You can even target other businesses which are financially tied to your target to put secondary pressure on them.

While there are no hard and fast rules for planning which tactics fit any given situation, the general rule of thumb is that you normally want your tactics to be sustainable (meaning you could, theoretically, continue them for a very long time), you want them to hurt your target more than they hurt you, and you want your tactics to escalate.

A SeaSol organizer put the concept of escalation this way: “it isn’t the memory of what we did to the boss yesterday that makes them want to give in, but the fear of what we’ll do to them tomorrow.”

As a campaign progresses, you want to give the target the impression that things are getting increasingly worse for them — that you are constantly escalating your fight. So while yesterday you may have simply been putting up flyers around their business, tomorrow you may be picketing their shop or disrupting a fancy dinner party.

Next Steps:This election season, as is custom, the presidential campaign will dominate most news coverage — pushing needed publicity for Occupy off the front page. Some organizers and participants in your local Occupy groups will leave to organize for Obama, and nearly every union and non-profit which up to now has been somewhat supportive of you will be going into full fledge “get out the vote” mode, attempting to co-opt your movement for the Democrats.

The only effective countermeasure against this will be to draw in new layers of support from people not yet involved.

In order to do that, you will need to start taking on fights which help and empower them.

And, of course, whatever the campaigns local Occupy groups plan to take on next, it will be important to remember these few tips: make sure the fight is relevant, winnable, and hurts.

We distinguish these colony insects from mammals which we project have much higher degrees of individuality. We like to think of herds or packs of mammals as individuals who “choose” to come together and cooperate. We generally don’t admit body characteristics of individuals as being associated with class in societal dominance hierarchies.

But humans, primates and ants and bees may be much closer than we care to admit, then we are easily able to perceive.

There is an area of scientific research which points to just how wrong we may be. It is the study of the effects of a dominance hierarchy on the health of the individual. It turns out that in mammals and birds, for example, the health of the individual, barring accidents of nature, is primarily due to the individual’s position in the society’s dominance hierarchy.¹,²,³ Here, one needs to stress “primarily”, as in by far the greatest determining factor — having a direct bio-chemical and physiological impact.¹

The dominance hierarchy in packs of monkeys, for example, determines fertility, resistance to disease, vigour, and longevity of the individual.¹

Now the dominance hierarchy as individual health determinant discovery is a paradigm-establishing discovery in medicine (if medicine is ever able to recognize it!³ ), akin to plate tectonics in the Earth sciences, Newtonian mechanics in physics and evolution in biology, but it naturally leads to a follow-up question: Why?

Is there an evolutionary advantage, for mammals say, to suffer severe individual health effects from the intra-species dominance hierarchy? Otherwise, how has individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy survived on the evolutionary time scale? Is there a use or a need for individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy in terms of species survival, or is it simply a remnant of pre-insect-divide or colony-forming cells evolution?

A first glance would suggest that the human species, for example, cannot possibly benefit from having individual health materially and negatively affected by society’s dominance hierarchy. But is this the correct conclusion?

I think not.

What is the most successful nervous-system-bearing animal species on Earth, in terms of both number of individuals and total biomass, and in terms of its transformative impact on the biosphere? Answer: Ants.⁴ And the most successful large mammal? Humans.⁵ Both live in highly hierarchical societies.

What is the sustaining biology of a highly hierarchical society of mammals? The individual must accept his/her place. All-out competitiveness of equal individuals (like a bar fight) is a recipe for disaster and does not lead to a highly stratified hierarchy. Pumped individuals who are and feel equally strong do not spontaneously organize into a stratified dominance hierarchy.

The built-in individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy is the biological (bio-chemical-metabolic) mechanism that sustains a positive feedback able to spontaneously generate a highly stratified dominance hierarchy.

If you are and feel sick from being dominated, you are not going to fight back. You are going to accept your place. The species is happy to have hoards of unhealthy individuals who will die young having spent their days doing the grunt work. What better way to stratify a successful species?

The impact on individual health also plays another key role, in addition to providing the feedback for stratification. It provides a needed mechanism of self-destruction for individuals who grow out or fall out of docility and compliance.

In a highly stratified society, individuals who cannot function must be eliminated, or they become a destructive force against the hierarchy. The police and jails would never be enough to achieve this without the built-in individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy.

As soon as the individual wants out and senses that there is no out, the individual self-destructs — rather than go on a destructive rampage, most of the time. This is called cancer and heart disease. It prevents the destructive rampage of the disillusioned individual and provides a natural end at the completion of the individual’s cycle of utility to the hierarchy, to the species.

No wonder anarchists are so few and far between! But as with any positive feedback-driven system, it is inherently unstable.⁶

1. “The influence of social hierarchy on primate health (Review)” by Robert M. Sapolsky, Science, 308, p.648-652, 2005. (and references therein)
2. “Anti-smoking culture is harmful to health: On the truth problem of public health management” Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.
3. “Is establishment medicine an injurious scam?” Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.
4. “Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.
5. “Collective intelligence does not imply individual intelligence: Technology does not come from geniuses” Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.
6. “Institutions build hierarchy between politico-cultural re-normalizations” Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.

Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a well-conceived and attractive book about the first weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement that was recently published by the Left imprint Verso Books. It reads like a journal, except the entries are not from just one writer, but a collection of several. They range from the well-known like prison activist and Black Panther Angela Davis to a young activist named Manissa Mahawaral. Edited by a small group of occupiers and the editors of the journals n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy, and The New Inquiry, this text primarily covers the scene at the Zurcotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan where the Occupy Wall Street movement more or less began. Part diary and part reflection, some of its most compelling moments come when the younger occupiers write about various realizations they have during the course of the occupation.

My favorite anecdote of this type is from an activist involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, CA. When she first began participating, she found the dislike of the police from certain members of the camp to be disturbing. After all, they too were part of the so-called 99%. However, after a few days in the camp and the violent police attacks on the Oakland camp and protests following the first raid on Oscar Grant Plaza, her understanding of law enforcement’s role in protecting the wealthy and powerful changed dramatically. “I am ashamed,” she writes. “I was so naive about the cops in Oakland, but even more than this I am furious… that the police are allowed to brutalize people….” It is moments like this where the Occupy movement becomes transcendent and more than the collection of individuals, groups and and encampments that it is. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of drawings and collages that are not only visually appealing but also clever statements about the essential issues involved.

The book is not just a collection observations from the frontlines. Also included are analyses of the economic reasons behind the movement from Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and a fascinating discussion of the history of the space where Occupy Atlanta was situated. This latter piece is also one of several pieces that discusses the role of people of color in the movement.

As one of the first of many books about the Occupy movement to be published, Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America sets a high standard. One hopes it is read by many, especially among those that couldn’t or didn’t make it to an Occupy camp before the State’s onslaught on them. This movement should not die.

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Written by a larger collective of writers who modestly call themselves Writers for the 99%, the OR Books text functions as a description of life at Zurcotti Park and within the Occupy movement over the period noted above. If Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a journal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America is the literary equivalent of a wonderfully written diary. These two books are not exclusive to each other. in fact they are companion volumes that read together provide an engrossing and well-told description of one of the most hopeful protest movements to erupt in the capitalist world in decades.

The Young Lords Rise From the Pages

Speaking of attractive books to arrive recently on my bookshelf, the Haymarket Books reprint of the Young Lords 1971 book Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 certainly deserves a mention. The Young Lords Party was a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican youth that organized primarily among the young and working-class residents of New York’s Puerto Rican barrios during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Borrowing some of their style from the ideologically similar Black Panthers, this group was a dominant force in barrio politics during much of their existence. Their straightforward approach to solving some of the economic and political inequities in the barrio attracted thousands of supporters in the barrio and hundreds of powerful enemies in Christie Mansion and other edifices of power in New York. When I attended briefly attended Fordham University in the Bronx from Fall 1972 through Spring 1974 one of my smoking buddies was an active member of the group. His knowledge of Marxist theory was impressive as was his commitment to the struggle in the barrio. Needless to say, he and I had many intense discussions that taught me — as no book possibly could — the colonial situation of the Puerto Rican people and helped me unlearn years of misinformation about that island nation.

Palante is a history, explanation and discussion of the Young Lords Party from the perspective of its members in 1971. There is no bourgeois nationalism repeated in these pages. Instead, in the best tradition of other revolutionary nationalism, Palante argues that cultural and social freedom for the Puerto Rican nation is inseparable from economic freedom and a socialist revolution. For those uncertain of the difference, let me quote writer Earl Ofari from a 1969 article he wrote about the two phenomena as they relate to the black people of the United States :

“Revolutionary nationalists, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.”

The Young Lords believed the same analysis applied to the situation of the Puerto Ricans.

Looking at it today, the most striking aspect of this book is not the audacious (by today’s standards) writings calling for a revolution in the United States and an independent Puerto Rico. It is the collection of photographs. Difficult to pry one’s eyes away from, the photos herein rank up there with the best photojournalism has to offer. The struggles of the young revolutionaries and the people they worked with are evident in the faces on these pages and the places and actions set down in a darkroom forty years ago. The pride of a people realizing its power and the anger of that people realizing why and who has wronged it radiates from the stark black and white images that fill the last half of this beautiful work.

That’s because billionaires now thoroughly control an economy designed to “fabulously” enrich a privileged few by stealing the wealth that results when everyday toilers get low pay and substandard or nonexistent benefits.

Still, some regular folks, enduring painful exploitation under this reverse Robin Hood status, support rightwing con artists that FOX News and Rush Limbaugh shamelessly dupe them into backing.

It’s about as sensible as someone saying, “Jump off this bridge into those boulder-strewn, raging waters below. It’ll do wonders for your health!”

Lowering taxes for the upper crust and abolishing “onerous” government regulations on rapacious Big Business and High Finance is what they’re really asking, but the result would be just as lethal.

Let’s quit listening to manipulative propagandists’ disguised calls for our mass emasculation and complete impoverishment.

After all, further lavishing and empowering our oppressors would hardly improve our wretched lot.

When abolitionists, suffragettes, and labor organizers first emerged, parties who gained from mistreating blacks, women, and workers demonized those change-making activists.

They were slandered as being anti-American and un-Christian.

Sadly, similar charges are directed against homosexuals today, whose civil rights continue to be opposed with the same Bible-thumping false rectitude once used to defend slavery.

A bloody civil war had to be fought because part of the country couldn’t comprehend what Jesus really stood for, preferring benighted bigotry instead.

Much later, in a laudable reversal, many citizens opposed the Vietnam war because they were conscientiously convinced that napalming Southeast Asian civilians into smoldering heaps of cinders and ash wasn’t a Godly thing to do.

For holding that view, they were labeled “smelly hippies” and “Marxists.”

Today, as the growing Occupy movement protests Wall Street’s plunder of our country’s wage-earning majority, it also gets called dirty names. Exactly the same names that ’60s war resisters were called.

Given all this, could it be that the slanderers secretly wish they could still own other human beings? Or prevent females from voting? They’re certainly anti-union.

Just wondering…

Thank you, conservatives, for revealing to us that the 99% movement is nothing but a bunch of crybaby/loser/Bolshevik members of a silly “Flea Party.”

Now we no longer have to worry about capitalists getting obscenely bloated while typical workers’ billfolds virtually disappear when viewed sideways.

What a relief it is to ignore the correlation between the length of fat cats’ yachts and the shortening time many millions of us have before going hopelessly broke.

Instead, we can fulminate against “irresponsible” young people protesting exorbitant college tuition costs, and lifelong student-loan debt, as they try to become educated for jobs that likely won’t even exist when they graduate.

What’s with value-less, complaining kids these days anyhow?

Now that we’ve seen the light, we can hardly wait till Newt Gingrich becomes President and brings back child labor, which he recently advocated at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

After all, there’s nothing wrong with America that a little Dickensian discipline for spoiled brats won’t fix!

Right?

(Extreme right, actually…)

Where in the First Amendment are tents and sleeping bags prevented from being used by American citizens as they peacefully assemble in public places to seek redress of compelling grievances?

Such a prohibition doesn’t exist, of course.

But that isn’t stopping mayors of several cities from behaving like foreign despots as they attempt to quash the Occupy cause, which resists the increasingly Third World-like economic inequity that having our lives ruled by upper crust thieves has painfully visited upon countless U.S. households.

Pitiful wages, lousy benefits, and pepper-sprayed violations of basic liberty are becoming the overall norm, while exploitative oligarchs ostentatiously luxuriate in gated communities.

Winding up essentially indistinguishable from the downtrodden, tyrannized “wretched of the earth” shouldn’t be our collective fate.

Join Occupy and the 99% to demand a different, better outcome for ourselves and our progeny!

Karl Marx may not have referred to the 1% and the 99% when he wrote of those extremes in the 19th century, but they certainly capture this moment in the 21st. Americans appalled at minority domination of national wealth as they pay for endless wars, increasing inequality and vanishing public services have joined a rising global movement for democracy.

65% of the planet’s 7 billion people are poor, bringing the 21st century still closer to Marx’s words of the 19th. Humanity’s call for another world is growing louder and more insistent. The forces of reaction are working to smother that voice through their private governments and media but also through supposedly public and even progressive political circles.

In a particularly sad irony, a budding form of anarchic democracy in America grows through the “Occupy” movement, while an attempt at such governance in Libya has been crushed, at least temporarily. The NATO attack succeeded in obliterating a governing force that tried representing a majority of the Libyan people. While Gaddafi’s regime made many mistakes after its initial socialist phase, perhaps most seriously in re-aligning with the treacherous west, its Green Book attempt to create real and not simply representative democracy was laughed at by cynics but in line with anarchist dreams of power coming from collective will and not individual leadership. Many in the Occupy movement may not know what really happened in Libya, but under thought control exercised by agents of the 1% relatively few have any idea.

More important, growing numbers of people are learning that minority ruled society is the root cause of most problems facing humanity. That these problems grow more severe each day makes the increased demand for change both timely and ever more necessary. The Climate Change meetings in Durban that found the 1% ruling powers standing in the way of any change threatening their fanatic worship of private investment and belief in the market deity only showed more conclusively that democracy of the 99% must become reality to end the hypocritical sham that has gone by its name far too long.

Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly urged “the people of the world…create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.”

These solutions are impossible under the domain of private capital’s 1%. The un-regulated markets of obsessive profit seeking are like un-protected sex. Even at their best they can produce unwanted results and at their worst they may produce terminal disease, which is what present global market forces have created. We cannot opt for a temporary remission via private profiteering which carries the disease; the 99% need to consider the abolition of minority dominated market forces and the beginning of democratic control of global resources, in the interest of all the earth’s inhabitants and not just a tiny group of multi billionaires. In an alleged modern, civilized, digitized society, it’s time we end stupid mythology about hard work earning people incredible sums of money that bring them the power of gods.

How do people come by such wealth? How many packages must they deliver, students must they teach, patrons must they serve, miles must they drive, wounds must they bandage, legal briefs must they submit, floors must they sweep, children must they raise, to end up with a billion dollars? Ten billion dollars?

What sense does it make to have one human living on millions of dollars a week while billions of humans live on less than five dollars a day?

The imperial rulers maintain dominance only by virtue of military might. Without massive murder power such as was exercised in Libya and is threatened in Syria and Iran, they would already be gone and as global opposition grows that power will soon not be enough to dominate the planet. Newer threats to powerful nations like China and Russia only show the near dementia of rulers nearing the end of their reign.

But the madness of the diminishing cult, with nuclear weapons at their disposal, threatens our future, just as humanity shows signs of coming together to create a different world of peace, social justice and protection for the environment that sustains all mankind. Leaving control of social wealth in private hands would be suicide for the human race.

Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” He was correct. We need to understand that system and transform it by creating federal, state and municipal public banks, owned, administered and investing according to the wishes of the people whose funds are held by these institutions. We cannot rely on some wealthy people investing according to moral principles unknown to most of their class. They should be taxed and their money democratically invested in the societies that created this wealth in the first place. We need to create a sensible maximum wage and a higher minimum wage that guarantees survival, with a social safety net that allows no one to go hungry, experience untended illness, or live without shelter.

There is far more than enough wealth to house, feed, clothe and benefit everyone, if we simply stop squandering that wealth on minorities who use it to perpetuate a system that is bringing us closer to social disaster. Capitalism is in a crisis which will get much worse before we make it better. In order to do that we need to end inequality and begin to recognize that the survival of one is dependent on the survival of all.

Happy New Year. 2012 could be a big one.

Even before the elections, on the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, in the major cities’ (and even some of the provincial ones’) classrooms and among school teachers, people had begun talking about politics, albeit a politics which does exist as of yet. After the election farce, it was not just the usual attendees of the right-wing “Marches of the Discontented” and left-wing protests taking to the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, but even those who were previously apolitical. And this is important.

It would be wrong to claim that these elections were fundamentally more fraudulent than previous ones or even the 1996 elections in which Zyuganov conceded to Yeltsin. But this time the now-traditional vote rigging was crasser than usual and occurred under different circumstances. In order to understand what precisely those circumstances are, we have to remember who the current powers that be in Russia are. Too many people have managed to forget this, and the new generation (thanks to the liberals’ successful demolition of our education system) never knew.

20 years of pillage

The USSR was dissolved by the party nomenklatura, who then undertook to seize (“privatize”) all state property while also attempting to maintain power. The current regime is merely an extension of the Yeltsin government. During the course of the 1990s everything inherited from the Soviet Union was torn asunder — a vicious process that continued throughout the decade, engendering countless local wars, widespread crime, impoverishment, marginalization, and death. As a result, an intense feeling of hatred took hold over the vast majority of the country’s population. Various scams and tricks allowed this process to continue all the way up to the economic catastrophe of 1998 — and even for a little while after that. But then the jig was up and it was time to change the signs.

The ideological project known as “Putin” was created at the end of the 90s in order to preserve Yeltsin’s oligarchic system, but with a new face (the very same system that is being exposed in London now as the court battle between Berezovsky and Abramovich unfolds). The project’s purpose was supposedly to counteract the consequences of the “roaring 90s,” which entailed rehabilitating certain elements of the Soviet past. The old Soviet hymn was brought back, having been rewritten for the fourth time by the very same author Sergei Mikhalkov, along with red flags for Victory Day and the mass production and distribution of “St. George ribbons” [trans. note: the St. George Medal was a medal of honor given to Soviet soldiers during WWII, itself an attempt by the Stalin regime to revive Russian patriotism]. They “discovered” some positive aspects of Soviet history such as the “strong state” and the “effective manager” comrade Stalin. But in the country’s social structure and economy nothing changed fundamentally: the capitalist oligarchic system was preserved and even reinforced, even if the crew at the helm changed a little bit. The bureaucracy and big capital merged into a single class, but not everyone made it. Khodorkovskii, for instance, went to jail (as he made a wrong move in the clan war). In the 2000s, the process of class formation came to an end. The ruling class crystallized and achieved a kind of semi-permanence. The division of spoils came to an end, but this new ruling class was not capable of anything, except cannibalizing the remains of the old Soviet economic and scientific achievements.

Nevertheless, a good many people took Putin seriously, although we won’t delve into this story of public deception here, the success of which was largely facilitated by rising prices for raw materials. Throughout the Putin decade the strip mining of the Soviet inheritance continued, which resulted in its virtual destruction in all spheres: the economy, education, the sciences. Scientists emigrated or died prematurely, education and the health care system were successfully and consciously laid to waste under the pretext of “reform”, and the strategic sectors of manufacturing were dismantled by consensus between foreign competitors and our home-grown parasites. If social inequality somewhat lessened during this period, it was largely due to a certain “bounce back” after the monstrous impoverishment of the population in the 90s. Russia definitively entered the ranks of the dependent countries of the “third world”, albeit one with nuclear “red button” inherited from the Soviet Union. The “middle class” — all the necessary qualifications of this term aside – did grow in size a bit during the 00s in the largest cities, but only thanks to the expansion of the ranks of managers and servants serving the ruling class, just as you would expect in a country of peripheral capitalism.

In the Putin decade feelings of disappointment and discontent slowly accumulated amongst the masses. At the beginning of the 2000s politically naïve voters had completely different hopes: an end to the widespread thievery at the top and the destruction of the economy and the return of some kind — any kind — of social justice. But what happened was the opposite. Now these frustrations and feelings of discontent are rising to the fore. The crisis that began in 2008 and continues to this day sowed seeds of uncertainty amongst the people and detonated their hopes of “stability” (and stability, after all, was the mantra of the Putin project!).

The powers that be have gotten so lazy and so caught up with their own personal enrichment that they have become completely deprofessionalized, having lost their last competent members long ago. Even in the realm of propaganda! Take for instance the recent pseudo-exposé about “Golos” [trans. note: a Russian liberal NGO doing independent election monitoring], which supposedly is carrying out orders from the American and Swedish intelligence services to destabilize Russia and recruit young students as spies. It was the most unbelievable garbage one could imagine. By comparison, the anti-dissident propaganda films of the Andropov era, which in their own time were considered quite sloppy, seem like cinematographic masterpieces on the level of Bergman and Fillini! And so it goes everywhere and with everything now in Russia. Our GLONASS satellites and Fobos-Grunt probes are falling out of the sky, our Bulava missiles do not fly, our orphanages and nursing homes are burning down, our Bulgaria river cruise ships are sinking and our Sayano-Shushenskii hydroelectric stations are crumbling. The ruling class simply does not know how to do anything anymore; except rob, cheat and steal and then divvy up the loot.

“Elections,” “Parties,” and “Leaders”

Elections in Russia have been rigged ever since the attack on the Supreme Council in 1993 and the new constitution was passed. But before that, elections to the legislature were marked by low turnout, with just about 25% of registered voters casting a ballot. For that reason, the first act of voting fraud began with inflating the number of voters, so that the elections were not ruled void. Then, with the same purpose, they removed the “Against all” option from the ballots.

During previous elections they were already resorting to audacious acts of fraud. In fact the fraud and kleptocratic politics of the powers that be evoked protests those times too. But we need to remember how they ended.

After the attack on the parliament in 1993, all its leaders — Rutskoy, Khasbulatov and others [trans. note: parliamentary opposition leaders at that time] — managed to insinuate themselves into the new political system wonderfully well. While they were in fact the losers in that battle, they were simply the losing faction and thus occupied not first, but second place in the new system. They apparently were not worried at all about all those who died in Moscow on those fateful October days in 1993.

In 1996 Yeltsin’s victory in the presidential election was facilitated by the consolidation of the ruling class. Zyuganov, who had won the first run-off, voluntarily conceded to Yeltsin. Despite its platform and all the protests that the Communist Party (CPRF) seemingly supported, this supposedly communist party simply conceded to the powers that be — and did so as soon as it could.

The protests against monetization of state benefits and the commercialization of education are some of the most recent, yet already forgotten examples of mass public actions. In 2005-2006 these protests — far larger than the ones we see today [trans. note: this article was written before the mass actions on Saturday, 10 December] in 550 cities and towns, each with participation of tens of thousands of people. What was the upshot of these protests? Some small concessions, mostly on the local level; in other words a complete flop. This was the inevitable result because the ruling class would have had to make available a significant amount of funds to the erstwhile recipients of those state benefits — funds that they already had their dirty paws on. With today’s protests, though, the government will likely gladly allow for some repeat elections in this or that contested district, as such a concession will have no effect on anything of consequence.

Right now none of the parties — not the CPRF, not Just Russia, and certainly not the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDPR) — are willing to declare the elections completely fraudulent. We are already hearing from their representatives things like: “it would be absolutely silly to give up the opportunities that increased Duma representation will offer (CPRF);” that they will create a federal “election violation investigation committee” to “make inquiries” and that “we do not recognize the results for certain districts, but there were districts where there was no vote rigging at all (Just Russia).” These are pathetic excuses made for the sake of maintaining their Duma salaries and kickbacks. They have been making these excuses their entire parliamentary career. Certainly none of these parties has raised doubts about the prevailing political system or state of social relations. Nor have any of them promised to abolish or at least substantially amend the existing constitution, alter property relations or punish those who are guilty for the ruling class’ crimes.

You have to understand something. These clowns in parliament are corrupt to the core. They sit in parliament for ten and half years doing absolutely nothing. And they do not plan to do anything. They are all just factions of a single ruling class, utilized for the management of public perception. In no way do they fundamentally differ from One Russia, except maybe in their greater degree of civility. If you believe them for even a second (having been deceived, perhaps, by their high-profile visits to opposition protests, whereby they are simply trying to accumulate political capital for future sell-outs), they will just betray you again — just like they did ten times before.

But what about the leaders of the so-called “extraparliamentary opposition?” Can we trust them? Let’s take a look:

Boris Nemtsov — formerly a close member of the oligarchic Yeltsin “family,” and one of the architects of the 1998 default and personally responsible for that economic catastrophe.¹

Ilya Yashin — former leader of Yabloko’s youth faction, who organized MGLU student protests in 2003 against tuition hikes and later recruited students to participate in his party’s protests for a modest sum of money (in 2003 it was about 200 rubles, but later 500).

Aleksei Naval’ny — by his own admission, a “Russian nationalist,” was expelled from Yabloko for nationalism, is aligned with DPNI (Movement against Illegal Immigration [trans. note: a nativist group whose politics are akin to those of the U.S. "minuteman" groups]), is a regular participant in the fascist “Russian marches,” yet despite these well-known facts, is hailed by the Russian liberal press [trans. note: and the Western media as well² ]. He is warmly received at the U.S. State Department (and here is one case where the dullards in Putin’s propaganda team are not lying). Let’s be very clear: fascists and nationalist populists have never defended the interests of the working class — they simply exploit them.

And now voicing their support for the protests are the former Putin PR rep Marat Gel’man and Chubais and Gaidar’s old pal from the privatization team Alfred Koch (and the assassin of Gusinskii’s old NTV station). All of these characters are from the same group of 90s-era parasites.

None of these people will hesitate at any moment to sell the protesters out for their own economic interests or for the sake of political capital. Once again, they are just a fraction of the ruling class. A fraction — but nothing more than that. Their struggle is one between clans. That is not ours!

Elections, elections…

What is their program? Under which slogans are they calling people into the streets? A protest under the slogan “I’m for honest elections” — such a protest constitutes an a priori defeat. Any election presided over by these forces simply cannot be “honest”. Any federal level election these days is a farce. Therefore, they will only result in the usual fraud. The only exit from this impasse is to create an extra-systemic opposition. It is pointless to hold “honest elections” or support the corrupt politicians from CPRF, Just Russia, LDPR or Yabloko. It is imperative that we begin to engage in some do-it-yourself politics, outside the pre-drawn lines of the powers that be and in direct contradiction of parliamentary cretinism.

“Honest elections” according to prevailing constitutional and electoral rules will only lead to replacing Putin with a Zhirinovskii [trans. note: the literally clownish leader of LDPR] or Sobyanin [trans. note: current mayor of Moscow and Putin protégé] or the half-fascist Naval’ny. How are they better? There will be no radical concessions on the part of the powers that be. These are people who have stolen billions of dollars, all stored away in foreign banks, and built palatial estates on the Black Sea Coast (as both Putin and the Patriarch have done).³ They have no intention of giving up these things.

“Honest elections” will in no way solve the most pressing problems of the country. They will not change Russia’s position as a raw material-supplying appendage of the West. They will not revive our devastated and thoroughly stripped manufacturing sector — not to mention our high-tech industries (robotics, electronics, aviation, biotech, etc) because we already lack the human resources necessary for it. They won’t resurrect those millions of our countrymen and women who went to an early grave, driven there by the ruling class.⁴

They will not repair our now thoroughly broken health care system and will not make it once again free and universal. “Honest elections” will not resuscitate our de facto destroyed and utterly profaned education system. They will not eliminate mass alcoholism and drug addiction or our AIDS and hepatitis epidemics. They will not undo the country’s monstrous, shameful social inequality, as a result of which some people are already killing themselves and children out of hunger (just read the news!⁵ ), whereas others are buying islands, mansions, yachts and soccer clubs for millions of dollars. Those “honest elections” will not change anything except to replace one set of snouts in the offices with another – and yet all exactly the same.

What is to be done?

The problem, of course, is not with the elections, but with capitalism. If some fools still think that all our woes stem from the fact that we do not have the kind of capitalism they have abroad (ours is the “wrong capitalism” or “underdeveloped capitalism”), just let them have a look at what is going on abroad: an economic crisis, the collapse of the financial system, declining production, mass unemployment, riots in the streets, three million families have been tossed out of their homes in the U.S. alone (and this the richest capitalist country), and the impending meltdown of the Eurozone. The peripheral countries are being hit even worse by all this.

Political rejects like Yashin, Navalny, Nemtsov, Limonov [trans. note: leader of the National Bolshevik movement, a "left-leaning" nationalist group] and others are all hoping to ride atop this wave of spontaneous and so far ideologically formless protests into the political “big leagues” (just like Zhirinovski and his ilk managed to do 20 years ago right before the collapse of the USSR). Why help them in this endeavor? A repeat of 1991 (and 1993 and 1996 and 2005) — this is the same damn rake. The country’s economy will not withstand a second 1991; there is no Soviet material reserve left to tap. It has already been devoured and pillaged. Our entrance into the WTO is literally on the horizon, which assumes, by the way, a second edition of “shock therapy” — and right now would be a great time from the ruling class’s perspective to have an occasion to tighten the screws even further.

The substantial uptick — even under the conditions of vote rigging — in the share of votes for the CPRF and Just Russia speaks to the fact that socio-economic issues are important to the voters. And it’s precisely socio-economic issues that should be in the slogans of the protesters: against joining WTO; against capitation financing of schools;⁶ against the demolition of health care and education. But so far there is not even a call for progressive taxation of the rich [trans. note: Russia has a flat tax of 13 percent]! And the current “leaders” of the “opposition” are keen on keeping even this modest demand under wraps. Therefore there is no point in following them.

If you want change — do not bother to choose between Putin and Zhirinovski, Medvedev and Navalny or Zyuganov and Nemtsov. Do not entrust your fate once again to another new, wonderful “daddy.” Instead work to create structures that reflect your own social interests. Certain comrades on the left have already claimed that the current events are a “revolution”, an “uprising”, a “revolt” and see in them the specter of a Russian Tahrir Square. This rrr-revolutionism and exaggerated self-ascribed importance is not only laughable, but shameful even. It is inexcusable to mislead the youth (who are still not all that politicized) with talk of easy fixes. In Moscow there are eleven million people, but only about seven thousand took to the streets, whereas those in the provinces remained mostly passive and indifferent.

The only thing that could save Russia (or any other country occupying the periphery of the capitalist world system) from further degradation, decay and decomposition is the overthrow of the capitalist system itself, in other words: socialist revolution. That is a worthy cause for which to live and struggle. Socialist revolution, however, will not take place by the will of some petty provocateurs like Naval’ny or Yashin, who, please note, do not strive for revolution – they actually fear it. They simply want to amalgamate themselves with the same class to which Putin, Medvedev, Abramovich, Deripaska and the like belong and join them in robbing and oppressing you. Do you really need this?

If you really want to go to protests, go with your own slogans and signs — ones that reflect your own interests, not the interests of opportunists like Naval’ny and Yashin. May we suggest some?

“Give us universal, equal and free education and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Give us universally accessible and free health care and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Down with the ruling class funded trade unions of FNPR! Give us free and independent trade unions!”⁷

“Down with the pro-capitalist new Labor Code! Bring back the Soviet-era KZoT!”⁸

“Down with the political police! Abolish the OPONs and the “E” Center!”⁹

“Down with clericalization of the state and schools! We demand full separation of church and state!”¹⁰

“Give us student stipends that will allow us to actually study full-time, not part-time and let the oligarchs and bureaucrats pay for it!”

“Hail to the new, democratic constitution! Power to the people, not the oligarchs and bureaucrats!”

And demand that they give you the opportunity to pronounce those slogans. If they do not, you will be taken advantage of again by the opportunists and parasites.

Do not rely on elections or career politicians to solve your problems. Career politicians are professional con-men and flimflammers. If you wish to defend your rights and your interests, create blocks of resistance to oligarchic and bureaucratic caprice at your places of work, study and residence. Fight against the introduction and/or increase of tuition and medical fees; against the closing of hospitals, schools and daycare centers; against the demolition of parks for the more churches; against the imposition of religion and obscurantism in schools; against low salaries, speed-ups and overtime; against the thievery of the utilities companies. Begin with these small things as there is no other choice!

Letting off steam and venting your frustrations at protests will not change your situation one bit. The bureaucrats and capitalists couldn’t give a damn about your angry shouts on the street. They will not lower the exorbitant utility fees, they will not increase the paltry salaries and pensions, they will not resolve the housing problem, they will not abolish the OPK¹¹ or the university entrance exam, they will not reinstate free universal health care. We need to engage in concrete battles for very concrete things.

The choice is this: class struggle or replacing one set of parasites with another. No other choice is available.

The process whereby one realizes his or her interests and fights for them is not an instantaneous one. It is not just attending one or several protests. In our country the people have for too long stopped thinking and acting in line with their own interests. But this here is the only chance to actually change things for real. Do not let yourself step on the rake again!

1. Anatolii Lantov, “‘Stoprotsentnaya lozh’ Borisa Nemtsova,” Politoline, December 27, 2010.
2. Foreign Policy magazine named Navalny one its "Top 100 Global Thinkers" for 2011. See "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers," Foreign Policy, December 2011. The New York Times also featured a rather laudatory article about Navalny, although to its credit, it did include a disclaimer about his politics: "Five years ago, [Navalny] quit the liberal party Yabloko, frustrated with the liberals’ infighting and isolation from mainstream Russian opinion. Liberals, meanwhile, have deep reservations about him, because he espouses Russian nationalist views. He has appeared as a speaker alongside neo-Nazis and skinheads, and once starred in a video that compares dark-skinned Caucasus militants to cockroaches. While cockroaches can be killed with a slipper, he says that in the case of humans, ‘I recommend a pistol.’ See Ellen Barry, “Rousing Russia with a Phrase,” New York Times, December 9 2011.
3. For some pictures of his palatial estate on the Black Sea shore. Putin’s personal wealth is estimated at $40 billion. See “Sostoyanie Putina mozhet dostigat’ 40 milliardov dollarov,” Novy Region 2, November 16, 2007.
4. In his study on Russian mortality in the 90s, epidemiologist Neil Bennet stated that “the Russian mortality crisis of 1990-95 represents the most precipitous decline in national life expectancy ever recorded in the absence of war, oppression, famine, or major disease.” He estimated that between 1990-1995 there were 1.36 to 1.57 million premature deaths, with approximately 70% occurring amongst men. This calamitous drop coincided with the economic reforms of that same period. See N. Bennet et al., “Demographic Implications of the Russian Mortality Crisis,” World Development, 26.11 (1998): p. 1921. Boris Kagarlitskii likewise notes that, “During the Civil War, from 1918 to 1920, the Russian population fell by 2.8 million. During the years of Yeltsin’s ‘first presidency’ alone, the decline was 3.4 million.” See Boris Kagarlitskii, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neoliberal Autocracy, London: Pluto Press, 2000, p. 3.
5. In January 2010, a women who had been laid off and couldn’t afford to buy food suffocated her children and then hanged herself. See Irina Gollay, “V Chelyabinske zhenschina zadushila detey iz-za bednost”, Komsomolskaya Pravda, January 25, 2010, .
6. The capitation financing scheme is explained by a local teacher and activist of the Communist Party K. Ladogin thusly: “The term “capitation financing of educational institutions” means that every middle school student in the country will get an equal amount of funding. This money will go to the school where the individual student is studying. The schools must now actively promote themselves to attract more students. The school principal should therefore become a financial manager and the vice principal a “representative of the government within the school – in other words a commissar and should “insinuate himself into the teacher collective”. He is also charged with conducting monthly testing of the students and send the results up the ladder.” See K. Ladogin, “Uchitelya dolzhny otgovarivat shkolnikov ot postupleniya v vuzy,” Skepsis, September 17, 2007, .
7. In a recent article for the Russian Analytical Digest, Irina Olimpieva provides this useful summary of the current labor union structure of Russia:

   Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Russian labor movement has been divided into two continuously warring camps—the “official” unions, affiliated with the Soviet-legacy Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FNPR) and the so-called “free” or “alternative” labor unions. Free labor unions differ from official unions in many respects, including their militant nature and conflict-based ideology, grass-roots methods of labor mobilization and organization, the economic resources that they use, and their forms of membership and leadership. Today two different modes of labor interest representation exist at the same time: the distributional mode employed mainly by the official unions and the protest mode, which is more typical for free labor unions. While official labor unions continue to dominate the organized labor scene, in recent years they have faced growing competition from their alternative counterparts. Overall, the dominance of the distributive
   system, based on cooperation between the employer and union, over the protest model signifies the preservation of the strength of management in labor relations, squeezing unions to the sidelines in serving workers. Accordingly, labor relations based on market mechanisms have not replaced the previous administrative system as many observers had once anticipated.

   See Irina Olimpieva, “‘Free’ and ‘Official’ Labor Unions in Russia: Different Modes of Labor Interest Representation,” Russian Analytical Digest 104 (October 27 2011), p. 2.

8. The new Russian Labor Code, passed in 2002 eliminated many rights long held by Russian workers and their unions (the old code was inherited from the USSR) such as overtime compensation for working over 40 hours. After the passage of the law, respected legal specialist and pro-labor activist Vladimir Mironov was moved to comment that “The practical meaning of the new labor code is that it gives the employer the legal right to force his employees to work as long as he wants. The worker gets nothing in exchange – not even token compensation.” See V. Mironov, Uzdechka dlya trudyashchikhsya, VMN, (11.01.2002), which can be read here: . See also Aleksandr Yelagin, “New Russian Labor Code Allows Employers to Gut Workers’ Rights,” Socialist Action (July 2000).
9. OPON (formerly OMON) is more or less the Russian equivalent of the U.S.’s SWAT team and is frequently deployed to break up demonstrations and/or intimidate protesters. Center “E” is the Russian Interior Ministry’s notorious “Center for Extremism Prevention,” which Amnesty International has accused of stifling dissent from journalists and activists under charges of extremist activity and using torture to extract confessions from criminal suspects. For a recently published evaluation of Center E’s performance over the last three years, see Pyoter Sarukhanov, “‘Eshnikov’ bez raboty ne ostavyat,” Novaya Gazeta, October 10, 2011.
10. In 2007 a course on Russian Orthodoxy was introduced in public schools. See Clifford J. Levy, “Welcome or Not, Orthodoxy Is Back in Russia’s Public Schools,” New York Times, September 23, 2007. See also “Otkrtoe pismo nauchnykh sotrudnikov protiv vvedeniya OPK v shkolakh i teologii v universitetakh i VAK,” Alternativy, April 4, 2008.
11. OPK stands for Fundamentals of Russian Orthodoxy Culture, a new course that has been introduced into the Russian public school curriculum.

Historically, the system has proven so demeaning to the majority of the population that the elite, from time to time, have, as a last resort, due to fear of a popular uprising, introduced a bit of socialism into the system, allowing a modicum of swag to funnel downward, and, as a result, the ranks of the middle class have been expanded. For a time, the bourgeoisie are bamboozled by the sales pitch that one day they will be affluent enough to be freed from the taxing obligations of a dismal, debt-beholden existence, when, in fact, they sowed their fate (like those swindled by opening their bank accounts after receiving email from parties claiming to be momentarily cash-strapped Nigerian royalty) by their own greed i.e. by their self-imprisonment within their own narrow, self-serving view of existence.

These stultifying circumstances will level an atmosphere of restiveness and nebulous rage. In general, the middle class can be counted on to detest the poor…blaming those born devoid of societal advantage and political influence for the impoverished circumstances that were in place long before the happenstance of their birth. Moreover, in a bit of noxious casuistry, as despicable as it is delusional, all too many members of the middle class have been induced by grift artists, employed by the ruling elite, to blame their own declining social status and attendant beleaguered existence on the poor.

“Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.” — John Donne

This has proven to be an effective, time-tested grift: Because as long as the animus of the middle class remains fixated on the poor, the criminal cartels known as the economic elite can continue to ply their trade. Of course, in reality, by their greed and complicity, what the middle class has gained is this: trustee status in the capitalist workhouse.

Although, there is no need to fret: The run of neoliberal capitalism is about over. Don’t mourn: This late stage, rapacious, mutant economic strain has leveled destruction on community and the planet itself as well as the hearts and souls of too many of those imprisoned within its paradigm.

At this point, the situation comes down to this: paradigm shift or perish.

The hour is amenable to reevaluate, reorganize and re-occupy. Doing so will prove helpful in withstanding false narratives.

Apropos: As of late, in my hours spent at Liberty Park, I’ve been witness to increasing numbers of tourists wandering in and repeating derisive, right-wing distortions regarding the OWS movement and its participants. For example, they are a collection of whiny college students who want taxpayers to be responsible for picking up the tab for their student loans because they are too lazy and spoiled to work off their debt. These tales are variations of the old canards involving welfare queens, mouths gleaming with taxpayer financed gold teeth, arriving at grocery stores lounging behind the steering wheels of late model Cadillacs, and proceeding to purchase steaks and fifths of gin with food stamps.

Ronald Reagan spoke of this mythical figure often, affording her near supernatural powers: She, through indolence, guile and a welfare state-bestowed sense of limitless entitlement, was the near singular cause of the nation’s economic woes; her very existence, not only depleted the U.S. Treasury of dollars, but drained the U.S. free enterprise system of vitality and the very will to compete. She was a succubus who arrived in the socialist haunted night to feed on and zap the very virility of capitalism.

Because of the wealth inequities inherent to capitalism, in order to prevent social unrest, the system is reliant on creating false narratives that foster misplaced and displaced class resentment. These tales are very potent, because they serve as palliatives for the enervating states of shame inflicted on the population at large by their enslavement to the free market. Accordingly, because the vast majority of the populace are deemed “losers”, due to how the system is rigged, techniques must be created and maintained to displace the rage, borne of a sense of powerlessness, that grips the system’s exploited underlings.

OWS is beginning to change the narrative, align it with reality–and that is an alarming development for the 1%; hence, the retooled, amped up propaganda campaign we’re seeing signs of at present.

This is the reality the 1% endeavor to obscure: Capitalism is a pyramid scheme; by its very structure, only a few will ever receive its bounty that is wrung out of the exhausted hides of the vast majority. Fact is, capitalism, the neoliberal variety or otherwise, has never worked as promised; its innate structure ensures exploitation and inequity. Therefore, time and time again, adding aspects of socialism (e.g., New Deal era programs and reforms) have saved capitalism from itself. But, after a time, the plutocrats regroup and begin anew to launch a big money-financed, slow motion coup d’état of government (e.g., the Reagan Revolution).

A vast disparity of wealth within a nation will all but ensure this societal trajectory. But that isn’t going to happen, this time. The planet cannot endure the assaults wrought by a system that requires exponential growth to be maintained. The run of capitalism is nearly over. A more sustainable economic system, based on horizontal rule, is being developed, globally (e.g., the Icelandic model).

The vertical structure inherent to capitalism brings about the self-perpetuating reign of an insular elite who choose to go the route of empire and, by doing so, overreach and bring themselves down, but only after much unnecessary suffering, exploitation and death–the calling card and ground level criteria of imperium.

Yet, often within a declining empire, even as the quality of life grows increasingly degraded for the majority of the populace, questioning sacrosanct beliefs, such as, the myth that capitalism promotes societal progress and personal advancement, by means of the possibility of upward class migration, proves to be a difficult endeavor for many. The reason: Even given the degraded nature of life as lived under late capitalism, the act of taking stock of one’s situation–beginning to question how one arrived at one’s present station in life–will engender anxiety, anger and regret.

Apropos to the shame based Calvinism of the capitalist state: If I was duped in a rigged game, what does that say about me? The narrative of capitalism insists that if I work hard, applying savvy and diligence, at fulfilling my aspirations then I would, at some point, arrive in the rarified realm of life’s winners.

But if success proves elusive, then my flawed character must be the problem–not the dishonest economic setup–and miasmic shame descends upon me. Yet I can count on rightwing media to provide the type of provisional solace proffered by demagogues i.e., imparting the reason that folks like me can’t get ahead is because scheming socialists have hijacked my parcel of the American Dream and delivered it to the undeserving thereby transforming my shame into displaced outrage.

And that must be the case; otherwise, it would behoove me to make the painful admission that I have been conned…have co-signed the crimes committed against me. Worse, I would be compelled to question all my verities and beliefs–all the convictions I clutch, regarding, not only the notions that I possess about myself and the methods I’ve adopted in approaching life, but also, the social structure that influenced my character.

Imagine: If you had to re-imagine your life. Imagine, how the act would unnerve your loved ones, threaten friendships, even endanger your livelihood.

What an unnerving task that would prove to be…an ordeal certain to deliver heart-shaking anxiety, devastating regret and nettling dread directly into the besieged sanctuary of what is suppose to be the inviolable precincts of my comfort zone.

“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.” — Albert Camus

Accordingly, I might turn to Fox News and other well-rewarded, professional dissemblers of the political right, imploring them to dissolve my doubts and dread. To escort and ensconce my troubled form back into my comfort zone by telling me the problem is not the iron boot of the corporate state upon my neck; rather, my oppression stems from the barefoot hippie lefties of OWS “who need a bath and a job”; it is their odious presence in our lives that has subdued my happy capitalist destiny by the pernicious act of laying down an effluvia (more demobilizing than pepper spray) of patchouli musk and has caused capitalism itself to weaken into an enervated swoon.

Yes, this has to be the case: The cause of my oppression. Those America-hating Occupy Wall Street hippies are actually the hidden hand that controls the global order and who possess a craven desire to smelt down the gleaming steel of the humming engines of U.S. capitalism into creepy, Burning Man statuary, who want to hold 24/7 Nuremberg-style rallies in the form of annoying drum circles.

In reality, it is those dirty hippies who are actually “The Man.” Withal, hippies crashed the global economy and pinned the blame on the selfless souls who ply their benign trade on Wall Street.

Now, you know why conservatives harbor such animus towards hippies. Don’t claim that Fox News et al–those selfless souls–who only desire to protect the glories of the present order, and who only have your best interest in mind, didn’t try to warn you.

“I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” — Mark Twain

The second half of the essay will detail the politics of CTD, the regime which has moved furthest from the notion of a sovereign representative democracy. We will clarify the differences and similarities between traditional military-civilian and fascist dictatorships and the up-to-date CTD, focusing on the ideology of apolitical expertise and technocratic rule as a preliminary to an exploration of the profoundly colonial hierarchical chain of decision making.

The penultimate section will highlight the reason 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 consumated 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.

In the concluding section we will evaluate the polarization of the class struggle in a time of colonial dictatorship, in the context of hollowed out electoral institutions and radical regressive social policies. The essay will address the twin issues of struggle for political freedom and social justice in the face of fiat rule by emerging technocratic colonial rulers.

What is at stake goes beyond the current regime changes to identifying the most basic institutional configurations which will define the life chances, personal and political freedoms of future generations, for decades to come.

Decaying Democracies and the Transition to Oligarchical Democracies

The decay of democracy is evident in every sphere of politics. Corruption is all pervasive, as parties and leaders vie for financial contributions from the wealthy and powerful; congressional and executive positions have a price tag; each piece of legislation is influenced by powerful corporate “lobbies” which spend millions writing the laws and engineering their approval. Prominent influence peddlers like the US felon Jack Abramoff boast that “every congressperson has their price.” The vote of citizens counts for nothing: the politician’s campaign promises have no relation to their behavior in office. Lies and deceptions are considered “normal” in the political process. The exercise of political rights are increasingly under police surveillance and active citizens are subject to arbitrary arrest. The political elite depletes the public treasury subsidizing colonial wars and pays for their military adventures by eliminating basic social programs, public agencies and services.

Legislators engage in vitriolic demagogy in virtual Punch and Judy puppet conflicts as public displays of partisanship while in private they feast together at the public trough. In the face of the discredited legislative institutions and the overt, gross buying and selling of public office, executive officials, elected and appointed, seize legislative and judicial powers.

Decaying democracy evolves into an “oligarchical democracy” as executive officials rule by fiat; overriding democratic rules and ignoring the interests of the majority. An executive junta, of elected and non-elected officials, resolves questions of war and peace, allocates billions of dollars or euros to a financial oligarchy, and reduces living standards of millions of citizens via class-biased “austerity packages.” The legislature abdicates its legislative and oversight function and submits to the executive junta’s “accomplished facts.” The citizenry is assigned the role of passive spectators – even as anger, disgust and hostility spreads and deepens. Isolated voices of dissenting representatives are drowned out by the cacophony of mass media contracted prestigious “experts” and academics shilling for the financial oligarchy and advising the executive junta. No longer do citizens look to the legislatures for relief or redress from the executive siezure and abuse of power. To fortify their absolute power, the oligarchies emasculate the constitutions, citing economic catastrophes and all pervasive “terrorist” threats. A vast and growing police state apparatus, with unlimited powers, enforces constraints on civic and political opposition. As legislative powers are sapped and executive authorities enlarge their sphere of action, the remaining democratic freedoms are curtailed via “bureaucratic restrictions” on time, place, and forms of political action. The purpose is to minimize the critical minority from mobilizing a sympathetic majority. As the economic crises worsen and the bondholders and investors demand higher interest rates, the oligarchy extends and deepens their austerity measures. Inequalities widen, exposing the oligarchical nature of the executive junta. The social bases of the regime narrows. The well-paid skilled workers and middle class employees and professionals begin to feel the acute erosion of wages, salaries, pensions, working conditions, and future career prospects. The narrowing of social support undermines the junta’s claim to democratic legitimacy. Faced with mass discontent and discredit and with strategic sections of the civil bureaucracy in revolt, factional strife breaks out among rival cliques within the “official parties” of government. The “democratic oligarchy” is pushed and pulled in several directions: it decrees social cuts but can only find limited support in implementing them. It decrees regressive taxes but cannot collect them. It launches colonial wars but cannot win them. The executive junta alternates between force and compromise; robust promises to the international bankers and then, under mass pressure, backsliding.

Over time oligarchical democracy is no longer useful as to the financial elite. Its democratic pretensions no longer can deceive the masses. Prolonged elite factional warfare erodes its willingness to impose the financial oligarchy’s full agenda. At this point oligarchical democracy as a political formula has run its course.

The financial elite are ready and willing to discard all pretenses of ruling via democratic oligarchs. They are seen as willing but too weak; too subject to domestic pressure from factional rivals and not willing to proceed to savage cuts in social budgets, even greater reductions in living standards and working conditions.

The real power behind the executive juntas comes to the fore. The international bankers discard the “native junta” and impose non-elected bankers to rule – dubbing their private bankers as technocrats.

The Transition to a Colonial “Technocratic” Dictatorship

The naked rule by foreign bankers is disguised by an ideology which describes it as rule by technocrats who are experts, apolitical and above private interests. The reality behind the technocratic rhetoric is that the officials appointed have a career of working with and for big financial private and international interests. Lucas Papdemos, the appointed Greek Prime Minister, worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and, as head of the Greek Central Bank, was responsible for cooking the books covering up the fraudulent budgetary accounts leading Greece to financial disaster. Mario Monti, the appointed Prime Minister of Italy was employed by the European Union and Goldman Sachs. These appointments by the banks are based on their total loyalty and unstinting commitments to impose the harshest regressive policies on the working populations of Greece and Italy. The so-called technocrats are not subject to party factions, nor remotely responsive to any social protests. They are free of all political commitments … except one, to secure the payment of the debt to foreign bondholders – especially the loans owed to major European and North American financial institutions. The technocrats are totally dependent on the foreign banks for their appointments and tenure in office. They have not a smattering of a political organizational base in the countries they govern. They rule because, foreign bankers threatened to bankrupt the countries if they were not appointed. They have zero independence, in the sense that the “technocrats” are merely instruments and direct representatives of the Euro-American bankers.

The “technocrats” by the nature of their appointments are colonial officials explicitly appointed at the behest of imperial bankers and sustained by them. Secondly, neither they nor their colonial mentors were elected by the people over whom they govern. They are imposed by economic coercion and political blackmail. Thirdly, the measures they adopt are designed to inflict the maximum pain by totally altering the basic relation-between labor and capital, by maximizing the power of the latter to hire, fire, fix salaries and working conditions. In other words, the technocratic agenda imposes a political and economic dictatorship.

The social institutions and political processes associated with a democratic-capitalist welfare state, corrupted by decadent democracies, eroded by oligarchical democracies are threatened with total demolition by the emerging colonial technocratic dictatorships (CTD). The language of social regression is full of euphemisms but the substance is clear. Social programs regarding public health, education, pensions, and disabilities are slashed or eliminated and the “savings” transferred into tributary payments to foreign bondholders (banks).

Public employees are fired, their retirement age extended and their salaries reduced and their tenure eliminated. Public enterprises are sold to foreign and domestic capitalist oligarchs with services curtailed and employees shed. Employers shred collective bargaining agreements. Workers are fired and hired at the whim of the owners. Vacations, severance pay, starting salaries and overtime pay are drastically reduced. These pro-capitalist regressive policies are dubbed “structural reforms.” Consultative processes are replaced by the dictatorial powers of capital – “legislated” and implemented by the appointed technocrats. Not since the time of Mussolini and fascist rule and the Greek military junta (1967-1973) has such a regressive assault on popular organizations and democratic rights taken place.

Comparing Fascist and Technocratic Dictatorships

The earlier fascist and military dictatorships have much in common with the current technocratic despots regarding the capitalist interests they defend and the social classes they oppress. But there are important differences which disguise the continuities.

The military junta in Greece and Mussolini in Italy seized power by force and violence, outlawed all opposition parties, press trade unions and closed the elected parliament. The current “technocratic” dictatorship is handed power by the political elites of the oligarchical democracy – a “peaceful” transition at least in its initial phase. In contrast to the earlier dictatorships, the current despotic regimes retain the hollowed out and emasculated electoral facades, as rubber stamp entities to provide a kind of “pseudo-legitimacy,” which beguiles the financial press but fools few public citizens.

From the very first day of technocratic rule the key slogans of the organized movements in Italy was, “No to a government of bankers”; while in Greece the slogan that greeted the puppet pragmatist Papdemos was “European Union, IMF, Get Out.”

The earlier dictatorships began as full blown police states, arresting pro-democracy movement activists and trade unionists before pursuing their pro-capitalist policies. The current technocrats first launch their vicious all-out assault on living and working conditions, with parliamentary assent and then in the face of sustained and determined resistance by the “parliaments of the street”, proceed to escalate police state repression by degree … practicing incremental police state rule.

Policies of the Technocratic Dictatorships: Scope, Depth and Method

The dictatorial organization of a technocratic regime is derived from its policies and political mission. In order to impose policies that result in massive transfers of wealth, power and legal rights from labor and households to capital, especially foreign capital, an authoritarian regime is essential, especially in anticipation of sustained resistance. The international financial oligarchy cannot secure “stable and sustainable” long term extraction of wealth with any semblance of democratic governance, even a decaying oligarchic democracy. Hence the last resort for the bankers in the EU and USA is to directly appoint one of their own to push, shove and impose a sequence of comprehensive large scale, long-term regressive changes. The mission of the technocrats is to impose an enduring institutional framework which will guarantee long-term, high interest payments based on decades of impoverishment and popular exclusion.

The mission of the “technocratic dictatorship” is not to put in place a single regressive policy of short duration, such as a salary freeze or dismissal of a few thousand school teachers. Their intent is to convert the entire state apparatus into an efficient press to continuously extract and transfer tax revenues and income from workers and employees to bond holders. To maximize the power and profits of capital over labor, the technocrats grant the capitalists absolute power to fix the terms of labor contracts, as far as hiring, firing, longevity, hours and working conditions.

The technocrats “method of rule” is to have an ear only for the foreign bankers, bondholders and private investors. The decision process is closed and limited to the coterie of bankers and technocrats without the least transparency. Above all, under colonial rules the technocrats must ignore the protestors if possible or, if necessary break heads. Under pressure from the banks, there is no time for mediation, compromise or delays as was the case under decaying and oligarchical democracies.

Ten historic transformations dominate the agenda of the technocratic dictatorships and their colonial mentors.

1) Massive shifts in budgetary allocations from welfare to bond and bank payments.

2) Large scale changes in income policies from wages to profits, interest payments and rents.

3) Highly regressive tax policies, increasing consumer (VAT) and wage taxes and lowering taxes on bondholders and investors.

4) Eliminating employment security (“labor flexibility”), increasing the reserve army of unemployed to lower wages, intensifying the exploitation of employed labor (“higher productivity”).

5) Rewriting labor codes, undermining the balance of power between organized labor and capital. Wages, working conditions and health issues are taken out of the hands of rank and file unionists and put in the hands of technocratic “corporate commissions.”

6) The dismantling of a half century of public enterprises and institutions and privatizing telecommunications, energy, health, education and pension funds. Trillion dollar privatizations are windfall profits on a world historic scale. Private monopolies replace public and provide fewer jobs and services without adding any new productive capacity.

7) The economic axis shifts from production and services for mass consumption in the domestic market, to exports of specialized goods and services to overseas markets. This new dynamic requires lower wages to “compete” internationally but shrinks the domestic market. The new strategy translates into an increase in hard currency earnings from exports to pay the debt to the bondholders but results in greater misery and unemployment for domestic labor. Under the technocratic “model,” prosperity accrues to vulture investors buying lucrative but financially strapped local producers and real estate on the cheap.

8) The technocratic dictatorship by design and policy aims at a “bipolar class structure” in which the bulk of the skilled workers and the middle class is impoverished and suffers downward mobility while enriching a strata of local bondholders and business owners who cash in on interest payments and the low cost of labor.

9) Deregulation of capital, privatization and the centrality of financial capital leads to greater colonial (foreign) ownership of land, banks, strategic economic sectors and “social” services. National sovereignty is replaced by imperial sovereignty in the economy as well as politics.

10) The unified power of colonial technocrats and imperial bondholders dictating policy concentrates power in a non-elected power elite. They rule with a narrow social base and no popular legitimacy. They are politically vulnerable, therefore, constantly dependent on economic threats or physical force.

Three Stages of Technocratic Dictatorial Rule

The historic task of the technocratic dictatorship is to roll-back the political, social and economic advances gained by the working class, public employees and pensioners since the defeat of fascist capitalism in 1945. The unmaking of over sixty years of history is no easy task, least of all in the midst of a deep ongoing socio-economic crises, in which the working class has already experienced severe cuts in wages and benefits and the number of young unemployed (18-30 years) throughout the EU and North America ranges between 25 to 50 percent.

The proposed agenda of the “technocrats” – parroting their colonial mentors in the banks – is ever more severe reductions in living and working conditions.The proposed “austerity” occurs in the face of growing economic inequalities between the wealthy 5% and the bottom 60% between Southern Europe and Northern Europe. Faced with downward mobility and heavy indebtedness, the middle class and especially their ‘educated children’, are outraged by the technocrats call for even greater social cuts. Outrage spreads from the lower middle class to business and professionals on the verge of bankruptcy and loss of status.

The technocratic rulers, constantly play on mass insecurity and fear of a “catastrophic collapse” if their ‘bitter medicine’ is not swallowed by the anguished middle classes who fear the prospect of sinking into the working class or worse.

The technocrats call on the present generation to sacrifice, to commit virtual suicide, to save future generations. With gravity and humble posturing they speak of “equal sacrifices”, a message belied by the firing of tens of thousands of employees and the selling of billions of euros/dollars of the national patrimony to foreign bankers and investors. Lowering public expenditures to pay bondholders and entice private investors erodes any appeal for “national unity” and “equal sacrifice” ..The technocratic regime strives to act decisively and quickly to impose its brutal regressive agenda, the rollback of sixty years of history before the masses have time rise up and bring them down.

To preclude political opposition the technocrats demand “national unity”, (the unity of bankers and oligarchs), the backing of the decadent electoral parties and their leaders and their total submission to the colonial bankers’ demands.

The technocrats’ political trajectory will be short lived given the draconian systemic changes and repressive structures they propose, the best they can accomplish is to dictate and implement policies and then return to their lucrative sanctuaries in the overseas banks.

Technocratic Rule: Stage One

With the unanimous backing of the mass media and the full backing of the powerful bankers, the technocrats take advantage of the downfall of the despised and discredited politicians of the past electoral regimes. They project a clean government image which speaks to a regime which is efficient and competent, capable of decisive action. They promise to put an end to deteriorating living conditions and partisan political paralyses. At the onset of their rule the technocratic dictators exploit the justified popular disgust with privileged “do-nothing” politicians to secure a measure of popular consent or at least passive acquiescence from the majority of the citizens drowning in debt and in search of a “savior.”

It should be noted that among the most politically aware and social conscious minority, the bankers resort to a colonized “technocratic regime” cuts no ice: they immediately identify the technocratic regime as illegitimate deriving powers from foreign bankers. They affirm the rights of citizens and national sovereignty. From the beginning, even under the cloak of emergency powers, the technocrats face a core of mass opposition.

The bankers realistically recognize the technocrats must move quickly and decisively.

Stage Two: Technocrats’ Shock Policies

The technocrats launch 100 days of the most egregious class warfare against the working class since the military/fascist regimes. In the name of the Free Markets, the Bondholder and the Unholy Alliance of political oligarchs and bankers dictate edicts, and laws are passed, immediately firing tens of thousands of public employees. Scores of public enterprises are rushed to the auction block. Job security is abolished and firing without cause becomes the law of the land. Regressive taxes are decreed and households are impoverished. The entire income pyramid is turned on its head. The technocrats widen inequalities and deepen immiseration.

The initial euphoria greeting technocratic rule is replaced by bitter reproaches. The lower middle class looking for a paternal dictatorial resolution of their condition, recognize “another political swindle”. As the technocratic regime races to fulfill its mission to the foreign bankers, the popular mood sours, bitterness spreads even among its ‘passive collaborators’. There are no crumbs from the table of a colonial regime empowered to maximize the outflow of state revenues to bondholders.

The compromised political oligarchy tries to revive their fortunes and “questions” the particularities of the technocratic “tsunami” smashing the social fabric of society. The scale and scope of the dictatorship’s extremist agenda and the ongoing build-up of mass frustrations frightens the political party collaborators, while the bankers urge them on to bigger and deeper social cuts. The technocrats in the face of the burgeoning popular storm begin to cower.

The bankers call for greater backbone and offer new loans for “keeping the course.” The technocrats bunker down – alternating between pleas for time and sacrifice with promises of prosperity “around the corner.” Mostly they rely on constant police mobilization and de facto militarization of civil society.

Mission Accomplished: Civil War or the Return of Oligarchical Democracy?

The outcome of the “experiment” with a colonial dictatorial technocratic regime is difficult to predict. One reason is because the measures adopted are so extreme and extensive, that they unify almost all important social classes (except the top 5%) against them at the same time. The concentration of power in an “appointed” elite further isolates them and unifies most citizens in favor of democracy against colonial submission and unelected rulers. The measures approved by the technocrats face the unlikely prospect of full implementation, especially by civil servants and public employees facing firings, pay cuts and reduced pensions. The across the board cuts undermine “divide and conquer” tactics. Given the scope and depth of the downgrading of the public sector and the indignity of serving a regime clearly under colonial tutelage, it is possible that breaks and fissures will take place in the military and police apparatus especially if they provoke popular uprisings which turn violent. The technocratic juntas cannot ensure that their policies will be implemented. If not, revenues will falter; strikes and protests will scare off predator buyers of public firms. The big squeeze will undermine local business, production will decline the recession will deepen.

Technocratic rule is by its nature transitory. Under threat of a mass revolt the new rulers will flee to their overseas financial sanctuaries. Local oligarchical collaboraters will hasten to augment their billion dollar euro overseas bank accounts in London, New York and Zurich.

The technocratic dictatorship will make every effort to hand power back to the oligarchical democratic politicians with the proviso that they retain the regressive changes in place. Technocratic rule will end up with “paper victories” unless the overseas bankers insist the “return to democracy” operates within the “new order.”

The application of force could boomerang. The technocrats and democratic oligarchs renewed threats of an economic catastrophe for non-compliance will be counter-manded by the reality of real existing misery and mass unemployment. For millions the living catastrophe resulting from technocratic policies will outweigh any future threats. The rebellious majority may choose to rise up and overthrow the old order and take its chances in an independent democratic socialist republic. One of the unforeseen consequences of imposing radical colonial appointed technocratic dictatorship is that it clears the political landscape of parasitic political oligarchies and lays the groundwork for a clean break. It facilitates renouncing the debt and reconstituting the social fabric of an independent democratic republic.

The serious danger is that the discredited politicians of the old order will demagogically attempt to seize the democratic banners of the “anti-dictatorial anti-technocrat” struggle to bring back what Marx called “the old crap of the previous order.” The recycled political oligarchs will adapt to the “restructured” new order of eternal debt payments as part of a deal to maintain the ongoing process of unending social regression. The revolutionary struggle against the colonial technocratic rulers must continue and deepen, to block the restoration of the democratic oligarchs.

Norman Solomon has concluded it isn’t either/or. A prominent writer and leader in left movements for decades, Solomon is running for Congress in the hopes of being practical and remaining principled.

“Since I first went to a protest at age 14 in 1966 — a picket line to desegregate an apartment complex — my outlook on electoral politics has gone through a lot of changes,” Solomon said. “First I thought politics was largely about elections, later I thought politics had very little to do with elections, and now I believe that elections are an important part of the mix.”

Solomon argues that when the left has treated elections as irrelevant, the result has been self-marginalization that helps empower the military-industrial complex.

“The view that genuine progressives should leave the electoral field to corporate Democrats and right-wing Republicans no longer makes sense to me. I used to say that having a strong progressive movement was much more important than who was in office, but now I’d say that what we really need is a strong progressive movement AND much better people in office,” he said. “Having John Conyers, Barbara Lee, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McGovern, Raul Grijalva, Lynn Woolsey in Congress is important. We need more of those sorts of legislators as part of the political landscape.”

The 60-year-old Solomon had been considering such a strategy, and when Woolsey announced she was not running for re-election in her northern California district, he entered the race with the goal of staying true to his left political views, and winning.

“I’m skeptical about election campaigns that abandon principles, but I’m also skeptical about campaigns that have no hope of winning and that are only for protest or public education,” he said. “There are more effective ways to protest and to educate.”

Solomon said that if elected he would strive to change the relationship between social movements and members of Congress.

“Progressive movements and leaders in Congress should be working in tandem,” he said. “I want to strengthen the Congressional Progressive Caucus and help make it more of a force to be reckoned with.”

Solomon said that a re-invigorated Progressive Caucus could be more effective in fighting for the human right of quality healthcare for all; ending the perpetual war of the warfare state, what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism”; pushing back against the power of Wall Street; replacing corporate power with people power.

Solomon is most widely known for his media criticism and activism, through his “Media Beat” weekly column that was nationally syndicated and his work with Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. In 1997 he founded the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts for which he served as executive director for 13 years.

Solomon became more visible in mainstream media through his trip to Iraq with actor Sean Penn on the eve of the U.S. invasion, part of anti-war efforts to prevent that coming catastrophe. Solomon’s 2005 book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, and a companion film drew on his media and political expertise to analyze the war machine. (Full disclosure: I found the book and film so compelling that I brought Solomon to my campus to speak.)

Polls indicate that Solomon is competitive in a Democratic primary that includes a state assemblyman, a county supervisor, and two business people. Penn is supporting Solomon’s campaign, which has also received endorsement from U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers. Fundraising is always a struggle, especially since he committed to “corporate-free fundraising.”

“By raising more than $250,000 from more than 2,000 different people, we’ve shown that we can raise the needed funds without a single dollar from corporate PACs,” Solomon said. “But we need to raise a lot more, and the month of December will be crucial — end-of-year totals will be seen by many as a self-fulfilling gauge of our capacity to gain enough support to win.”

Solomon believes that citizen frustration with concentrated wealth, and the political dominance that big money buys, is opening up new possibilities for progressive candidates.

“Our campaign is very much in sync with Occupy Wall Street,” he said. “Issues that I’ve been talking about from the outset of this campaign last January, and for many years before that, are part of the OWS focus — Wall Street’s undemocratic power, the widening disparities between the rich and the rest of us, the need to eject corporate money from politics.”

Solomon has described his politics as “green New Deal,” arguing for a vigorous government role in providing quality education, adequate health care, consumer protection, civil liberties, and environmental safeguards. For leftists, two questions hover: Can a candidate go beyond liberal positions and articulate anti-capitalist and anti-empire politics during a campaign? If elected, can a member of Congress stay true to those principles? Movement activists are wary of left/liberal politicians who push their rhetoric toward the center to get elected and then end up advocating centrist policies.

Solomon said he identifies with a phrase Penn used at a campaign rally: “principle as strategy.”

“I intend to stick with principles, what I believe and what I’m willing to fight for,” Solomon said. “The quest is not for heightened rhetoric, it’s for deeper meaning, with insistence on policies to match — economic populism, human rights, civil liberties, ending wars, and working for social equity.”

Though that agenda suggests radical change, Solomon said he doesn’t use the term “radical,” opting instead for terms such as “genuine progressive,” “progressive populism,” and “independent progressive” to describe himself and his campaign.

“The term radical can be understood as ‘to the root,’ but what it conveys to most of the public is that we are extreme and the status quo isn’t,” he said. “But look at the huge disparities between rich and poor, catastrophic climate change and destruction of ecology, inflicting massive suffering, extreme violence of war, and on and on. I would say the status quo is extreme.”

The sorry History of five hundred years of capitalist ‘Progress’ points to the Conclusion that, by its very Nature, Capitalism cannot expand without devouring Workers’ Lives and chewing up the Natural World — no more than a Shark can survive without gorging on fresh Flesh and Blood.

The original Breeding Ground of Capitalist Sharks was Western Europe, where they set about devouring the Commons, knocking down the Peasants’ Cottages with the thrashing Tails, hanging the Homeless as ‘Vagabonds,’ driving free Yeomen Farmers off the Green Land into Dismal Factories, devaluing the Labor of Women, and persecuting them as Witches.

Capitalist Sharks were sighted off the American Shores as early as 1492, ravaging the Caribbean. In their savage Hunger for Silver and Gold, they nearly exterminated the Native Peoples. So the greedy Colonial sharks were obliged to replace dead Native Americans with ever fresh supplies of Black Africans, kidnapped and sold to be worked to Death as Slaves. In their Home Waters, the voracious European White Sharks grew larger and hungrier, battening on Generations of toiling Men, Women and Children, sucking in and chewing up their Substance through fourteen daily hours of Dreary Labor in soot-darkened Satanic Mills or under the Lash on their American Plantations.

Naturally, as the Capitalist Sharks grew their Appetites increased, and by the end of the 19th Century ravenous full-grown Imperial sharks were swarming in a Feeding Frenzy, driven by a desperate Urge to devour the teeming Populations and fabulous natural Wealth of Africa and Asia.

As the 20th Century dawned, the Imperial Sharks began attacking each other (as sharks in a Feeding Frenzy will). The larger Capitalist Sharks naturally overcame the smaller, and the surviving Giants continued slashing and biting each other around the Globe, thrashing up blood-tinged Foam across both Oceans. Soon the various National Species were forming into great Schools for the purpose of Mutual Aggression. Political Ichthyology distinguishes at least four such Schools: the Freemarketus omnovorus, the Fascii viciocii, the Stalinea rapacea, and the Theocraticus ferocius.

After each Orgy of Mutual Destruction, the surviving Species enjoyed a few prosperous Years of fat Feeding until leaner Years drove them to new Hecatombs.
But by the 21st Century, the older Species of European White Sharks were being challenged in their former Feeding Grounds by younger breeds of fast-growing Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Russian and Brazilian capitalist Sharks, better adapted for preying on the local varieties of Fish and increasingly more competitive. Soon new Oceans were churning with Blood, but with so many Sharks competing, the supply of big Game-Fish was soon depleted, and only the Masses of Little Fish were left to prey on.

The most successful Capitalist Sharks tempered their Ferocity with Guile. As the pickings got slimmer, these smarter Sharks adopted Protective Coloration to lurk in Shallow Shoals where they could sneak up on the Littler Fish (the only ones left) and devour them. Some clever Capitalist Sharks painted themselves Green. Others pretended to be Vegetarians the better to lull their Prey!

The Political Ichthyologist Doktor Bertolt Brecht of Berlin had predicted this phenonmenon as early as 1930: ‘If sharks were men there would be an end to all little fish being equal, as is the case now. Some would be given important offices and be placed above the others. Those who were a little bigger would even be allowed to eat up the smaller ones. That would be altogether agreeable for the sharks, since they themselves would more often get bigger bites to eat. And the bigger little fish, occupying their posts, would ensure order among the little fish, become teachers, officers, engineers in box construction, etc.’

Following in Herr Dr. Brecht’s august Footsteps, your Humble Author has spent the past fifty Years patiently collecting Specimens of ‘vegetarian’ Shark behavior among both Left-finned and Right-finned Species from every corner of the Globe.¹ These Anatomical Descriptions are designed to help the Reader recognize the different Species as they swim across the Aquarium of her TV Screen. This ‘Taxonomy of Capitalist Sharks’ is his modest scientific Contribution to the Cause of the Working People and other Small Fry in the Class Struggle (which the Rich have been waging against the Poor as a one-way affair for far too long!).

Recent studies in Political Ichthyology have identified seventeen new species of Vegetarian Sharks, including the Oxymoronic Clean-Coal Shark, the Great Green Oil-Derrick Shark, the Elusive Trickle-Down Economics Shark, the Philanthropic-Billionnaire Shark, the Humanitarian War Shark, The Compassionate Conservative Shark, the Safe Nuclear Power Shark, the Slippery Shared-Sacrifice Shark, and the Change-You-Can-Believe-In Shark.

These Corporate Sharks pretend to be Vegetarians, but never forget they really are Man-eating capitalist Sharks! No point in trying to get them to give up Human Flesh or even go on a Diet, as Liberal Reformers urge us to do. They can’t. It’s not in their Nature.

Today, these ‘Vegetarian’ Species are flourishing, despite the increasing Mistrust of the Little Fish, some of whom even want to ban Sharks of any kind from entering the Shoals (!) Indeed, through Natural Selection the surviving Little Fish have become smarter, and today Little-Fish Scientists and Whistle-Blowing Blowfish have been trying to understand why so many Little Fish continue to be fooled by their Predators’ apparently transparent ‘vegetarian’ Disguises. The reason is that the Corporate Sharks have evolved glowing, Multicolored Media Eyes with which they are able to hypnotize their Prey. Corporate Species also inject a poisonous green Substance called ‘Campaign Contributions’ into the Small Fish General Assembly — effectively paralyzing its Members.

These same Corporate Sharks also fatten different Species of Judas Goatfish, bred to mislead the other Fish. For example, the Demagogic Goat-Fish divide the Little Fish by tricking different the Species into fighting each other — Whitefish against Black Bass, Smoked Herring against Smoked Salmon — meanwhile blaming division on the crafty Hooked-Nose Gefiltefish. At the same time, VoteForMe Goatfish are bred to ‘represent’ the Little Fish by luring them into the waiting Jaws of Lurking Privatizer Sharks (who of course swallow up everything including the Schools where Fish Children learn to swim). There are also innocent-looking Do-Gooder Goatfish which lurk in NGOs, Think-Tanks, Universities, Trade-Union Bureaucracies and Left Parties as well.

The Irony of this situation is that the Billionaire Sharks and their pet Judas-Fish cry ‘Class War!’ every time some Liberal Little-Fish dares pronounce Forbidden Words like ‘Taxing’ and ‘Spending.’ Nonetheless, many Little Fish secretly suspect that the Billionnaire Sharks don’t want to see their bloated Corporate Profits spent on Fish-Nursuries, Fish-Schools, Fish-Nests, Fish-Food and Clean Water. Meanwhile, Neo-Liberal Privatiser Sharks have nearly devoured the Undersea Commons in the so-called ‘Developing Oceans’, and now their Gaping Jaws are taking great Bites out of the Public Goods of the ‘Advanced’ Oceans.

Today, Capitalist Sharks, first sighted off South America in 1492, continue devouring the Planet, penetrating every remote Corner of the Earth, privatizing the Water, fouling the Air, cutting the Trees, killing off the Creatures and enslaving the People in their ever-increasing Hunger for more Profits. These Profit are deposited by the Capitalist Sharks in Fish-Banks and inflatable Underwater Bubbles, and in 2008 one of them exploded, plunging the world’s Oceans into Dark Depression.

Meanwhile, the Waters were growing warmer as a result of years of Frenzied Thrashing by Capitalist Sharks, and the heat destroyed the Coral Reefs on which the Little Fish Feed. Soon there would be no more Little Fish for the Capitalist Sharks to feed on, but this did not stop their Frenzied Thrashing for Profits. From this Somber Observation, Political Ithyology draws that Inference that Capitalism is no more likely to reform itself than a Man-Eating Shark is likely to embrace Vegetarianism.

This Inference points to an unavidable Conclusion. The Billions of us Small-Fry need to to turn the tables by uniting globally and waging Class War on the Billionnaire Loan Sharks who rule the World. The name of the Game is ‘Billions vs. Billionaires.’ Numbers are the Small-Frys’ trump suit. “We are many, they are few” the Poet Shelley famously wrote (anticipating the ‘99 percent-ers’ by 200 years). As for Strategy, if there is one chance in a hundred of winning this Game, Planetary Self-Organization is the card for us to play. Not by fighting capitalist Terror with Terror, capitalist Violence with more Violence (in any case, they have all the guns) but through Solidarity and militant, united Resistance.²

Sound like a pipe-dream, Dear Reader? Just remember: Thanks to the Internet, mass global Civil Disobedience can be organized in Real Time. The Day when all us Little Creative-Working-Fish wake up and go on a Planetary General Strike will be the Day when the Power of the Bankers and Corporations dissolves into thin Air. That day could be Tomorrow.³)

1. Beware of ‘Vegetarian’ Sharks! Radical Rants and Internationalist Essays (Illustrated, Praxis, 2008. Free downloads here.
2. Interested in joining a multi-player, online videogame called Billions vs. Billionaires? B&B is a Wiki set up for people interested in translating ecotopian visions and revolutionary class struggle tactics into entertaining popular foms designed to go viral and help save the world. Become part of phase one: ‘Collective Creation.’
3. These lines were written in August 2010. Five months later, the ‘Arab Spring’ spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, Syria, and beyond — inspiring workers in Wisconsin (USA) to fight back against the Right-Wing capitalist offensive. Ironically, Arabs were ‘teaching democracy’ to Americans. The Fall brought Occupy Wall Street, which then went viral around the world. What will the next ‘tomorrow’ bring? (For a glimpse of a possible future.

Peter Bohmer has been an organizer and participant in the struggle for social and economic justice since the 1960s. In recent years, his political activities have taken him to Venezuela, Cuba, Greece and a number of US cities. He teaches political economy and has been a faculty member at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA since 1987.

Peter and I go back over twenty years. The conversation that follows is but one of many we have had since we met. We share it as a springboard for thought and discussion. At the same time, we do not claim any special knowledge and pretend to no higher wisdom. We hope that the dialogue is received in the spirit of revolutionary camaraderie.

Ron Jacobs: Do you remember last spring you said in an email (during the Arab Spring stuff before NATO and Libya) that this could have the same impact as 1968? Can you briefly explain that perception?

Peter Bohmer: I was very inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt beginning at the end of last year and early this year, 2011. The growing numbers in the face of murderous repression, the courage, the participatory democratic process of the occupiers, and the call in their statements and in the actual occupation for democracy and economic and social justice really resonated with me and captivated me.

Movements and uprisings tend to spread within and between nations as people begin to feel that there are alternatives to resignation to the status quo and the sense of powerlessness that so many people feel. When I said that I hoped 2011 would also be a world historic year, I thought it was somewhat likely these movements and upsurges would burst forth first in countries where there was growing economic inequality and poverty, where austerity programs were in place and where the majority of the population had no power over the direction and policies of their country. I thought of places as ripe for major rebellion such as Greece which I had visited in September 2010 where the IMF and the European Union was increasingly calling the shots and particularly in other nations in North Africa and the Middle East where the people were following what was happening in the region’s largest country.

Although the resistance to budget cuts in Washington Stare where I live was somewhat limited, I also thought it possible that the examples of the occupation in Egypt and the labor led protests in Madison against their Tea Party Governor, Scott Walker’s frontal attack on State workers and their unions would spread throughout the U.S.

RJ: And now we have the occupy movement, which seems to be inspired by the events in Tahrir Square. Despite it’s indecisiveness in its agenda, it has captured the hopes of many and the wrath of most of the corporate right wing. I have concerns about what I consider a lack of focus but at the same time there is a part of me that understands that the current political understanding of people in the US would reject something more directed. In fact there are those in the occupy movement that lump unions right up there with corporations. What this says to me is that they are confusing union leadership with the rank and file and misunderstanding the role of unions in a capitalist economy, not to mention an unawareness of that history. Nonetheless these types of political misconceptions exist. Is the movement a step forward?

PB: As a result of observation and participation in the still-growing “Occupy Movement”, an alternative to the pervasive feelings of powerlessness and resignation are emerging. There has been for quite some time in the United States widespread opposition to the growing inequality of income and wealth, to total corporate control over all parts of our life, to global warming, to a government that tortures and is totally beholden to Wall Street, to homelessness and losing our homes, to unemployment and underemployment, to growing debt and poverty, to the imprisonment of over two million people, to militarism and endless wars, and this list is incomplete. At the same time, resistance although greater than reported in the mainstream media has been somewhat limited and ineffective. The importance of this movement is that active resistance is increasingly being seen as valid and the right thing to do. There is a growing feeling beyond the occupiers that hopelessness and escape or maybe voting for the lesser of two evils are not the only options.

Common to the growth of powerful social movements have been people who are willing to resist the status quo and take a stand who by their bold actions strike a chord with much larger numbers of people. This causes them to then change for at least a period of time the organization and activities of their lives and also change their values and ideology towards a less self-centered and me first system of belief and towards solidarity and cooperation, and towards a commitment to economic and social justice. This is happening right now, something is in the air.

Having a physical space which people occupy makes this movement visible and also possible for new people to join it. In Olympia, Washington, it is creating dialog and community between homeless people, young people, anarchists and other activists, retired people, etc (many people belong to more than one category). Although in Olympia and in many other places there are no visible demands and somewhat limited discussion of what kind of society we want and how to get there or what we want in the short and medium run, occupiers needs for food, shelter and increasingly health care are being addressed and increasingly met as is the question of self-government. So to say, this occupation is not political is a very narrow definition of political.

RJ: If the occupy movement is at the forefront of left-oriented popular struggle, how do we move forward? What might forward look like?

I’ve been in a few occupation/liberation actions over the years, as have you. In fact, I think we were involved in two or three together. Anyhow, whether it was Peoples Park in 1979, a campus building sometime in the past few decades or the Occupy encampments in our respective towns, the fact is these actions usually end. Many of the ones I was involved with ended with some kind of compromise agreement between the bureaucrats involved and the occupiers. Peoples Park ended with a temporary truce and the park still a park. As I involve myself and observe the Occupy movement, I am also doing what I can to make it into something beyond the occupations. However, I am not sure what. We saw one possibility at the end of the Oakland Strike day when folks took over the foreclosed Travelers Aid building in Oakland’s downtown. Although the timing was obviously wrong (it’s not a good idea to occupy a building while the cops are down the street ready to kick ass), the impetus behind the action makes a lot of sense. In fact, I have been a part of discussions about squatting foreclosed buildings here in Vermont and also with folks online in other parts of the world.

A sidebar to this is how long can the occupations remain meaningful before they become like so much graffiti in the minds of the supportive observer?

PB: As of today, November 7, 2011, most of the occupations are maintaining their momentum. This is a very positive accomplishment. For example, in Olympia, many people in Occupy Olympia are looking ahead to November 28, 2011, to confront the Washington State Legislature when it is being called back into a special session by the Governor Gregoire, a Democrat, in order to make further cuts in a State budget that has already severely reduced needed spending for health care, for education at all levels and for poor people. Occupy Olympia is committed to maintaining the occupation of a downtown park at least until the legislative session and possibly beyond.

Nonetheless, as Michael Albert pointed out in his ZNet article, “Occupy to Self-Manage,” occupations and the related general assemblies, the decision-making group for most occupations, tend to decline over time in numbers and enthusiasm. So it is key to bring in new people and create an atmosphere that is welcoming of new people so that we do not wither away. Let us not unconsciously exclude people who have not been part of the left or activist communities. It is also important that we use our occupied sites as a base to for actions and education outside of our sites.

We need to consciously make movement building one of our goals of this phase of the Occupy Movement. This means developing organizations, institutions, and people who have a deepening analysis and critique of capitalism, with growing capacity and skills to confront this system, and to put forward and win non-reformist reforms. Hopefully this will last beyond these set of occupations. By non-reformist reforms, I mean reforms that meet people’s expressed needs, that build our understanding of the limits of capitalist reform, and that also build our capacity to struggle for and win more fundamental and radical transformation of this oppressive and unsustainable society.

For example, Occupy Olympia is trying to develop a set of tents where there would be free medical care, traditional and non-traditional, on-site. This would meet an important need and also point towards a system of free and universal health care as a basic human right. A next step could be to demand and/or occupy indoor and permanent space that could be used a free health clinic, to provide quality health care and also does popular education in the broader community that healthcare should not be a commodity.

I like the idea of creating housing by squatting in unoccupied buildings as you suggested in Oakland. Whatever we do must be done in a way that large numbers of people beyond the occupation understand and support our actions. That will increase the likelihood that if there is police and government repression our movement will grow rather than become isolated.

Overcoming defeatism and resignation and furthering community and beliefs in the importance of collective action is happening, that is a great start. We do not have the power during this period of the “Occupy Movement” to create a participatory socialist society nor even to seriously reduce the obscene inequality of income and wealth in this country. Hopefully some limited short-term goals will be won.

It is a long struggle. Building healthy networks, institutions, organizations within and between communities and cities; that create the basis for a more conscious, powerful and visionary and radical occupy movement in the not too distant future is a goal. It will make this current movement worth the time and effort and commitment of so many people throughout this country and beyond. Most of the specific occupations of space may come to a close in the not so distant future but the movement can and should continue.

RJ: There are those that say part of the reason the movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was able to be as effective as it was is because the establishment media covered it. Most the time, the coverage was negative, but the coverage itself spread the word and highlighted injustice. Since then, most of the movements against capitalism and its symptoms (war, poverty, environmental degradation, etc.) have been mostly ignored by that press. Occupy seems to be changing that. Perhaps it is because there are so many young middle class people involved, but nonetheless, the coverage is there. Consequently, the numbers may not be as big, but the message is reaching further, at least for now. Meanwhile, there are the new Internet social media. What’s your take on the role that these various media play today?

PB: Certainly in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the mass media coverage of the protests, Black Freedom, anti-Vietnam war and the TV images of the U.S. war against Vietnam, and of the women’s liberation movement contributed to the growth of these movements. Probably even more important was a vibrant “underground” and radical press such as the Black Panther Party newspaper which was national, the Guardian which was also a national weekly newspaper and papers in many, many cities such as the Berkeley Tribe, the Old Mole (Cambridge, MA), the San Diego Street Journal and OB Rag (San Diego), and the Fifth Estate (Detroit). There were also important papers by the women’s liberation movement such as Off Our Backs, and the GI movement and a news service that provided news and graphics for these papers, Liberation News Service. These papers had significant circulation. They were an integral part of the new left and other movements of that period. Today these types of movement papers are few and far between although for example in Olympia, Works in Progress, plays that role to some extent. On the other hand, social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, play an important role in spreading the word about actions although providing less context and analysis than the “underground” papers of the 60’s and early 70’s. Democracy Now today plays a very important and positive role in providing an alternative analysis to the mainstream media and in covering social movements such as the Occupy movement. So do websites such as Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, ZNet, and Alternews (among others). They lack some of the boldness and creativity of that earlier “underground press” but are very valuable. We need to tell our own stories.

The mainstream media has given a lot of coverage to Occupy Wall Street and the growing national movement. Although much of it is negative, it does as you say spread the word and has helped publicize the obscene economic inequality in the United States. I am not sure why it has gotten so much coverage. Its novelty may be a factor.

RJ: These last several months of worldwide anger organized against the neoliberal capitalist economy reminds me of a number of historical events. 1968 is but one. The Occupy movement is somewhat reminiscent of the IWW’s free speech crusade when their insistence on exercising their free speech rights by setting up soapboxes on street corners throughout the US West and the subsequent arrests and harassment by police exposed the myth of free speech in the US. Could this be that spectre that Karl Marx wrote about? Immanuel Wallerstein wrote in his book Antisystemic Movements about the years 1848 and 1968 as failed revolutions that ultimately changed the world’s consciousness in greater ways than the revolutions that preceded them (France 1789 and Russia 1917). “The fact that they were both unplanned and therefore in a profound sense spontaneous explains both facts,” he writes. “The fact that they failed and the fact that they transformed the world.” Perhaps the events of the past year and a half–from Greece to Egypt to Tunisia to Britain to Europe and North and South America–will be perceived similarly. I think it is much too early to tell. In the meantime, there is a growing surge of calls to converge for a number of actions in the spring.

PB: I think we are at the beginning of a huge upsurge, the beginning of a transformative social movement not just a movement that made a big splash for two months and then fades quickly. There will be setbacks. From what I saw and read, the demonstration in New York, today November 17th, was huge and powerful. The occupation of land may be winding down because of repression, the weather and fatigue but hopefully the Occupy movement will find new forms and really blossom in this coming spring. The high unemployment and poverty rates in the United States are not going to improve and may get worse. They are going to worsen in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and many other countries. The causes for action are not going to go way nor is the anger nor is the growing understanding of the need for collective action. We are part of a global movement. That capitalism is being named as the problem by many of the participants, not just the banks, is very exciting. Also necessary and beginning to happen although clearly a lot more needs to is a slowly growing awareness that anti-racism and the need for all forms of equality, economic, gender, racial, LGBT, is central both inside the movement and in the greater society.

The coordinated repression of many of the occupations, e.g., NY, Portland, Oakland, is clearly connected to the fear that much of the economic and political elites have of the potential power of this movement. Because of the widespread anger and the resonance this movement has with growing numbers of people, police brutality has rather than scared people increased participation. Bold and creative actions need to continue and grow. So does popular education of participants in these occupations and of the rest of the 99% in the causes of the economic and social crisis and of all forms of oppression. Equally important is further discussion of what kind of society we want and how to get there in the short, medium and long run. We need to consciously build organizations and institutions that can improve people’s lives now, particularly those suffering the most, while also building the capacity to revolutionize this society.

The movement is much bigger than those who have been occupying various sparks and sites. It includes those who have in ways big and small contributed to it, e.g., bringing food down to the occupiers, discussed and supported it at union meeting. One challenge here in Olympia and the Pacific Northwest more generally is to be more inclusive, to welcome and listen to and reach out and include more people who identify with the goals of the Occupy Movement but do not feel comfortable at the sites or the marches or direct actions.

It is a very exciting time to be alive. There is something in the air that I haven’t felt for a long time. In spring, 2013 I intend to co-teach a full time program at the Evergreen State College comparing and contrasting the liberation and social movements of 1968 to 2011 in the U.S. and globally. There will be a lot to examine for 2011 and we still have six weeks to go. I am confident 2012 will be hotter than 2011.

Power to the People!

RJ: I myself think it’s a bit early to tell if this is the spectre that Karl wrote about or if Wallerstein is correct. The underlying politics of the movement are too muddy right now. As far as I have seen, the relationship between the US wars and occupations and the 1% has only begun to become part of the conversation. This relationship needs to be addressed and brought to the forefront of the movement.

There are those in the movement who are anti-leftist (and I don’t mean the various non-left anarchists) and many more that haven’t consciously considered left politics. However, I can’t help but agree with you when you say it is an exciting time to be alive. This is especially the case after the events of N17 in New York, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Indeed, although the numbers were smaller here in Burlington, VT., the spirit of resistance and hope present across the nation and in Greece and Italy on N17 permeated the march and teach-in here, as well. I concur: Power to the People!

The popular perception is that the ordinary people have been living “beyond their means”, a false and invidious conventional wisdom which masks the real nature of the crisis. For it is the elites across Europe and the Americas who have benefited most from the European Union, built on Reaganite neoliberalism, which in turn was fashioned to meet the needs of business. The neoliberal policies of all Western governments, “left” or “right” during the past three decades are the direct cause of the current highly skewed income distribution – by some accounts, worse than in any previous era of human history.

The supposed generous patriarch of this big happy family is Germany, with its hard workers and tidy streets. But while the Aesopian Greek hares are told they must tighten their belts and make do with less health and education, the fact that the Greek arms imports continue to grow — importing German weapons and “defence” systems (against what threat?) — is not mentioned. And it is not only weapons, but consumer goods from Germany that have displaced Greek products in the anonymous Euro-market, as Greece increasingly becomes northern Europeans’ decadent playground, albeit with more than its fair share of un- and under-employed.

As long as banks were lending freely to governments to finance this fool’s paradise, the lower classes were not made to feel the pinch, and the system kept chugging along. Now that government debts and bank reserves have approached their limit and reckless banks are going bankrupt, the struggle is on over who should pay for the untenable system. Since the economic elites are also the political elites, naturally they want the broad people to pay with social service cuts, reduced and delayed pensions, regressive sales taxes and the like. The intense propaganda campaign now underway is to convince the poor in the Euro-laggards that they are the guilty ones, not their own elites or the Euro-elites in Frankfurt or Berlin or wherever.

The EU was a project to end the prospect of war in Europe and to gather the broken pieces of shattered empires into a workable collective economic-political force in the world. To a surprising extent it succeeded, but without facing hard choices and a frank debate about who benefits. As the problems sharpen, any sense of collective goodwill evaporates, and chauvinist, even racist parties gain rapidly in popularity, hearkening back to faux-halcyon days of distant imperial privilege. But as history shows, the ability of individual European countries to extract surplus from colonies is not guaranteed indefinitely. The same goes for the ability of Germany to lord it over its Euro-partners. As the knives come out, the very existence of the European project comes into question.

The rich standard of living that Europe has enjoyed over the past few decades is directly a result of first the import of Third World workers (to a large extent Muslim) and then the incorporation of the ex-Socialist bloc after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As the financial crisis plays itself out, these immigrant workers, the very ones who have served Europeans so well, are now targeted and racially profiled, as the elites try to deflect attention from their own hidden role in the ongoing crisis. This is the First World/Third World extension of the above argument about Euro-laggards, with the victims no longer the Greek hares, but Nigerian and Egyptian immigrants.

A similar tale can be told for the US , with its large immigrant population, its Tea Partiers and Islamophobes, unable or unwilling to face the underlying problems resulting from decades of neoliberal policies. In the Americas, it is China that provides the manufactured goods which are paid for by US treasury bonds piling up in Chinese bank vaults, and no one in particular is accused of being the carefree Aesopian hare — state governments merely use their deficits as the deus ex machina — but the pattern is the same.

As the people who have woken up to the reality are arrested and booted out of Trafalgar Square, Zuccotti Park, Chapman Square (Oakland) and dozens of other city commons around the world, the long cold winter of discontent sets in. However, the problems are going nowhere and the people are just waiting for the next opportunity to express their outrage.

The toppling of governments means nothing in this scenario. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Greece’s George Papandreou only handed over power on the explicit understanding that the “fresh faces” would carry out the austerity plans imposed by the EU heavyweights. Berlusconi’s replacement is 68-year-old, ex-EU commissioner Mario Monti, an economics professor steeped in the dogmas that brought Italy to its current impasse. Papandreou’s replacement is ex-European Central Bank vice president Lucas Papademos who immediately announced, “Our membership of the euro is our only choice.” Not much thinking outside the box from these folks, the very ones who got their people into their present fix.

Some Americans at the top are already awake. The 138 members of “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength” (0.005% of all US millionaires) have been lobbying President Barack Obama and congressional leaders for a year now pleading with them: “Please do the right thing, raise our taxes.” Not surprisingly, no response from a president and Congress beholden to the 3.1 million other millionaires — the proverbial 1%.

Occupy Washington DC published their no-brainer proposals 17 November: redistribute income through progressive taxation, end the wars, expand health care, democratise business. This will end the budget deficit overnight, create full employment through stimulating local demand, eventually ending the foreign trade deficit, making America strong and once again the envy of the world. But, of course, Congress is captive to the current military industrial complex, and can and will do nothing.

The slow-motion drift into oblivion is surreal. Clearly momentous changes are in store for both Europe and America, and the sooner thinkers and actors get to work coming to grips with hard, cold reality, the better for the people — and for the elites, who are living on borrowed time, too. How long before the revolution?