We are living at a time of historical significance. We feel it in our bones, and it relentlessly gnaws at our consciousness. The familiar is rapidly unraveling. The transition to whatever is to come is disquieting and disorienting, and we don’t know how to respond. We cannot grasp these events because the ethical codes of conduct and morality in which they occur are outside of the psychological norms of healthy human beings.
Information is bombarding our senses so fast that we cannot assimilate it. We cannot keep up. The geopolitical landscape is constantly shifting. We are overwhelmed, distracted by an avalanche of news that weighs us down. This is by design. The deluge of information gives us no time to process; it keeps us on the defensive, on edge, reacting. Such a posture prohibits us from being proactive.
At such times, it is easy to feel disempowered and at the mercy of circumstances. That is exactly how the power elite and the corporate propaganda mills want us to feel. They want us to feel divided and alone, defeated and humbled. We feel a sense of hopelessness and despair rising in us like lava in a magma chamber. Conflicted emotions and righteous indignation make us want to erupt, but somehow we remain passive and compliant. We take the path of least resistance because it is easier than alternatives that require more of us, even though they could potentially yield better results.
We hesitate at the brink of possibility, believing that the wealthy possess all the power and that we have none. If we believe what they tell us, we are doomed, and we will have only ourselves to blame.
The sense of powerlessness promotes acceptance of governmental misconduct as the norm. Feeling powerless leads to passivity, to surrender, and to defeatism. It permits the forces of evil to carry out their grim work in the public eye without serious resistance. Our passivity facilitates their efforts.
The most powerful and prominent men and women in America and Europe, as the Jeffrey Epstein files reveal, are not as high and mighty as they would have us believe. They are not, as they pretend to be, Gods among mortal men endowed with rights and privileges of divine origins that are denied to the rest of us. They would have us believe that they are our supreme masters and we are their servants.
The power elite masquerade as noble men and women, but if truth be told, sadists and pedophiles are not fit to rule anyone. They belong in prison.
So much for the perceived elevated status of the rich and powerful. We, not they, are the producers. We do the work and pay the price in their hegemonic wars, but they own the means of production, and we have no voice in the government. The fault is partly our own.
We want citizenship to be easy and clean. We believe that if we cast our vote for some candidate or other, we have discharged our civic duty. In reality, as history demonstrates, it makes little difference whether you vote Democrat or Republican. They are two sides of the same coin. Both are funded by the same sources.
The political duopoly in America consists entirely of capitalists. We oscillate between Republicans and Democrats, thereby unwittingly maintaining the status quo in perpetuity. Workers are essentially selecting their oppressors each election cycle by replacing one capitalist with another, and so the malignancy metastasizes.
Democrats and Republicans need each other. They need someone to blame, and that is how the working class is divided. We vote in the absence of choice. Choosing between competing evils is a false dichotomy that leads to the same dead end. It does not provide an alternative to evil. So we vote in the absence of choice for a democracy we don’t have and probably never will, and now here we are, up shit creek without a paddle.
We have two broad choices in addressing systemic corruption, injustice, and grotesque inequality: resistance or acquiescence.
In 1849, Henry David Thoreau published an essay of historical significance: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay his poll taxes because he saw that they supported the institution of slavery in the war with Mexico. Rather than acquiesce to what he considered evil, Thoreau chose a path of principled resistance. He did so at considerable risk to himself, but he knew that freedom wasn’t free. Thoreau considered principled action, in his case, civil disobedience, to be the moral duty of every American citizen.
Later, Thoreau noted that he felt as if he had been the only man in Concord to pay his taxes. Thoreau could have taken the easy way out, but he chose not to.
Thoreau clandestinely conducted runaway slaves onto the underground railroad to Canada, where freedom awaited them. Had he been arrested, Thoreau would have faced serious punishment, and the course of American history might have been altered.
Thoreau’s acts of performative consciousness profoundly affected Dr. Martin Luther King during this nation’s civil rights marches of the late fifties and sixties. Dr. King read Thoreau’s treatise while serving time in jail in Birmingham, Alabama.
Similarly, Mahatma Gandhi, who led the fight for India’s independence from the British Empire, used Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience as his moral guide in the non-violent fight against British Colonialism. Both Dr. King and Gandhi ultimately won their struggles for justice against long odds. Then, as now, performative conscience wins the day, but it requires more from each of us than merely casting a ballot.
If the citizens of a nation find the actions of the government to be offensive, immoral, or unjust, they are under no obligation to obey said government, especially when that government breaks the law and shreds the Constitution and acts against the will of the people and the public good.
Principled action is the antidote to despair. Collective action of the working class is self-empowerment. It does not ask anything of government or power; it independently asserts its own power, its own individual and collective sovereignty, and it procures its own emancipation from the ruling class and its corrupt institutions. It takes what rightfully belongs to it.
In times like these, when the very foundations of civil society are under siege, the people must not put their faith in political institutions that have been corrupted by money and power. The struggle for democracy requires class consciousness. Justice will not be achieved in the voting booth. It must be won in the streets through class struggle, through national strikes and other acts of civil disobedience. It must come through iron-clad worker solidarity and coordinated class struggle.
Resistance to fascist dictatorship must emerge from a class-based grassroots movement built from the ground up. Rather than choose sides along party lines, either liberal or conservative, workers must organize along class lines. As things stand now, workers, who constitute the great majority of the population, have virtually no representation in government. Money talks, and it buys influence with the legislature and the President. It is Robin Hood operating in reverse. It takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
The oligarch’s government is not acting with the consent of the working people and the poor. It has become predatory and cannibalistic. It responds to the demands of the power elite, and it does so by oppressing the working class that built this nation. It has become ugly and increasingly violent.
We are in the midst of a class war. That is what this struggle has always been, and always will be, until the workers take power.