Engaging in active resistance, radical civil disobedience against capitalism, its endless wars, and all the combined evils is our only hope. A 78 year old white man in the White House who all his life has stood for nothing but white supremacy and empire is a recipe for disaster.
Our fate lies in our own hands! Thanks Chris for telling it like it is! There is no doubt the Democratic Party has allied itself with the social media companies to censor and curtail content from its critics. We publish them here when we think they make important or at least healthily provacative arguments, but they are no more saints then anybody else, and both reportedly make a LOT more money than most of the rest of us…which should raise a least a few questions for anybody who sees some value in Marx, class consciousness, unconscious bias, etc.
I subscribe to GG now, and did to Taibbi. I understand your reaction to this Hedges piece. I appreciate his work because I know about his life, his work and his journey to this point in time. Well, this is my 3rd or 4th attempt to get notifications after subscribing that many times. It was on the one prior to that that I went through the sign-up and confirmation click process in my email once again for nought. Fourth time a charm? I dunno. I just dunno. Both were already checked when I got to the comment box here.
Whatever 2. They have never been fatter, richer, more self-satisfied, and more giddy with delight over making the People of the World act like frightened children for the past 12 months than They are now. Elitists believe that They belong right where They are way up in Their exalted positions of privilege grounded in morality deficiency, and everyone else in the World belongs broke and down in the dirt.
Elitists do not have a moral sense to appeal to, or a conscience to prod Them into self-reflection or toward changing Their ways in any way. Our Times today are the completion of Their long-game blueprint and roadmap for everything in the World they have lusted for in Their multi-generational elitist quest over hundreds thousands?
For the first time in history, They can see the fulfillment of Their journey close ahead on the horizon and Their sense of fulfillment and Elitist Ecstasy washes over Them as never before. It is hard to find an example anywhere of a Nation or World? There seems to be something built into the national and human-collective software that dictates that decline must result in either utter collapse or at the least a much lowered status and World position such as the old once great Empires that are still around in name only but which are now mere shells of what they once were.
No third option seems viable. It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is an important point. The ruling class does not have control of the overall development of the capitalist system. The ruling class is itself a function of the capitalist system. The ruling class is not all powerful, and the system does not entirely serve its own individual existence. The point Hedges is making is the capitalist system itself is in crises, which gets played out in different ways.
Of course the crises the capitalist system is in has a huge impact on the ruling class as their position is challenged and put into question with rebellions to their power. BUT always remember, the ruling class does not control the capitalist system. The ruling class must serve the needs of the capitalist system or they are pushed aside.
So when people talk about crises, they are referring to the system, not the ruling class itself. There is a difference. It is not easy, sometimes is very ugly but it can be done. He means, without having some catastrophe destroy the existing system. Corrupt systems are able to resist change. There was the movement led by Ghandi that ended British rule.
Peaceful movements can succeed. It certain is a lot more pleasant. Extinction Rebellion worries me in the sense that they take a neo-anarchist approach to the crisis which is very likely to fail just like all previous anarchist experiments in the world have failed. For a system is no less a failure if the failure comes as a result of the inability to defend itself.
America only got the New Deal of the s due to the threat that strong labor unions, socialist and communist parties posed to the US capitalist system in the midst of the Great Depression. So in the midst of the current set of economic and environmental crises, the answer is to rebuild the labor movement along with real socialist parties who will not turn off and divide the working class with identity politics, but will instead focus on the class struggle and the struggle to preserve a livable planet for present and future generations.
For the choice we face is no longer between socialism or barbarism, but socialism or extinction. I agree with your general analysis. To add to it, remember that when the far left socialist and communist movements in the U. If the revolutions in Europe were not so successful and a threat to capitalism, the movements in the U.
My point is today there is no Soviet Union, there is no counter-threat of communism to capitalism in the world. There is no base of real socialism or of real revolution. Capitalists today do not need to give concessions based on a threat of a socialist base. So what is the outcome of this? What it will do is push the ANTE higher, with higher risk for both sides. But the potential for real revolution is now shifted to within the U. We need militancy, organization, and a NEW communist revolutioary path forward full of life, rebellion, and truth.
Who exactly qualifies for membership in the working class? Does Chris Hedges? Change this to real representative parties commited to democracy, which will focus on rational and fair policies and I am all in! Extinction Rebellion is a loose coalition of middle-class environmentalists without a coherent worldview.
Absolute middle class tripe. It would be wonderful if Bolivia, in league with other neo-colonies with large lithium deposits, simply withheld all lithium outputs to corner the world market, exchange it with China for their own development, but drive up its price in the capitalist world market and drive Elon Musk, his US political puppets and the Pentagon nuts. The struggle for power is not some nauseating Christian turn-the-other-cheek strategy, which only gets people needlessly killed to satisfy a tiresome middle class pacifist moralism.
Extinction Rebellion is the guarantor of defeat. And sorry to all the sensitive souls out there, a social revolution will entail civil war to carry it out and a red terror to complete, as history has shown. In these times it thus would be preferable if everyone read more of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky — ie, professional revolutionaries.
And some history of actual revolutions, particularly the Russian revolution, would also help. Not the likes of Hallam et al. In short, Hallam et al. I think the most positive thing about Extinction Rebellion is that it brings attention to ecological breakdown in the media.
The only war that can be won is the War of Information, as Hillary Clinton called it. That war is both political and cultural. What is necessary is decentralized sustainable food, energy and waste-management. This is technologically feasible. This has to be fought for both through the state in movements like Diem25; and more realistically because corporate control of the state, by communities and individuals developing open-sourced technology and relevant developments among each other more and more.
People need food and energy before anything else. It is increasingly possible to share and grow affordable local food and energy. Worker insecurity and poverty has been the main way of controlling people. It is positive that over the next decade we can get on with a lot of worthwhile work.
And of course, on its own, the revolutionary class would be smashed by the military might of the rulers. However, all successful revolutions have depended on rebellions and mutinies in the military, and the revolutionaries must do all they can to take advantage of any given situation to foment discord and such mutinies.
You are very correct. I see the far right fascist movement continuing its rolling coup to the point when the police state allows it to clean out the far left, literally and physically. Speculation in the 17th century in Britain was a crime. Speculators were hanged. And today they run the economy and the country. They have used the capturing of wealth to destroy the intellectual, cultural and artistic life in the country and snuff out our democracy.
There is a word for these people: traitors. CH: Well, identity politics defines the immaturity of the left. The corporate state embraced identity politics. We saw where identity politics got us with Barack Obama, which is worse than nowhere. He was, as Cornel West said, a black mascot for Wall Street, and now he is going around to collect his fees for selling us out.
My favorite kind of anecdotal story about identity politics: Cornel West and I, along with others, led a march of homeless people on the Democratic National Convention session in Philadelphia. There was an event that night. It was packed with hundreds of people, mostly angry Bernie Sanders supporters. I had been asked to come speak. There is a big difference between shills for corporate capitalism and imperialism, like Corey Booker and Van Jones, and true radicals like Glen Ford and Ajamu Baraka.
The corporate state carefully selects and promotes women, or people of color, to be masks for its cruelty and exploitation. It is extremely important, obviously, that those voices are heard, but not those voices that have sold out to the power elite. The feminist movement is a perfect example of this. The old feminism, which I admire, the Andrea Dworkin kind of feminism, was about empowering oppressed women.
This form of feminism did not try to justify prostitution as sex work. It knew that it is just as wrong to abuse a woman in a sweatshop as it is in the sex trade. The new form of feminism is an example of the poison of neoliberalism. It is about having a woman CEO or woman president, who will, like Hillary Clinton, serve the systems of oppression. It posits that prostitution is about choice.
What woman, given a stable income and security, would choose to be raped for a living? Identity politics is anti-politics. DN: I believe you spoke at a Socialist Convergence conference where you criticized Obama and Sanders, and you were shouted down. I have had to endure this for a long time as a supporter and speech writer for Ralph Nader.
You know we are quite outside of that framework. But I like the site. You care about things that are important to me—mass incarceration, the rights and struggles of the working class and the crimes of empire. I have read the site for a long time.
DN: Much of what claims to be left—that is, the pseudo-left—reflects the interests of the affluent middle class. CH: Precisely. When everybody was, you know, pushing for multiculturalism in lead institutions, it really meant filtering a few people of color or women into university departments or newsrooms, while carrying out this savage economic assault against the working poor and, in particular, poor people of color in deindustrialized pockets of the United States.
Very few of these multiculturalists even noticed. I am all for diversity, but not when it is devoid of economic justice. Cornel West has been one of the great champions, not only of the black prophetic tradition, the most important intellectual tradition in our history, but the clarion call for justice in all its forms. There is no racial justice without economic justice. And while these elite institutions sprinkled a few token faces into their hierarchy, they savaged the working class and the poor, especially poor people of color.
Much of the left was fooled by the identity politics trick. It was a boutique activism. It kept the corporate system, the one we must destroy, intact.
And I think the way to look at it is the difference between the lies — and the Clintons lie like they breathe in the same way Trump does. But those were tactical lies. The same way with George W. Bush: He lied about weapons of mass destruction, but when the weapons of mass destruction were not uncovered in Iraq, he didn't continue to lie about that they were there. That's the difference between Trump and the Christian right, which is, in essence, his base.
Q: In regards to Trump getting re-elected or stealing the election, as it has been suggested he might, or not going anywhere, what will happen if he somehow remains in office?
A: Don't put anything past him. He will do anything: Whether that's voter manipulation — the Republican Party has long had a history of pretty egregious voter manipulation, erasing people from the rolls.
They've got this program where if you don't vote in the last election, you'll show up at the polling place and you have been erased from the voter rolls because you didn't vote, or you won't get your mail-in ballot, which is not even legal. So, yeah, there are a series of mechanisms that they've already used and set in place, which Trump will attempt to employ.
If Trump wins, then I think you will see a very naked and frightening authoritarianism. Trump already functions for his followers as a cult leader. And remember, Trump gets a lot of money from the oligarchs because he carries water for them. The American political system before Trump took office was a kleptocracy, but now you will see just wanton, undisguised pillage, which I think is already pretty evident within the Trump White House given the personal enrichment that he and his family have made off of the office and his catering to his fellow billionaire class without any kind of restraint.
Q: Have you been surprised at how little it seems that the Republican Party has done to try to control him? A: No, because the policies of both parties, and we know this from the polls, they are wildly unpopular — the tax cuts, the catering to the oligarchic and the corporate elite, the endless wars, the destruction or assault on social services — none of it has any popularity. So politics has devolved in the United States to cultural wars, and the Republican Party long tied themselves, starting with Reagan, to this retrograde neo-Confederate, white nativist Christian right.
The party hierarchy, the Bushes, the Cheneys, look at the Christian right as the useful idiots. And that's exactly what happened. Q: In the background is the health of the American empire and what Trump and the Republicans represent in regards to its health.
How is the empire doing? A: The fatal mistake on the part of the empire was the invasion of Iraq. Now we have nearly 20 years of warfare in the Middle East, which has cost tremendous suffering, hundreds of thousands of dead, millions displaced, seeing the creation of failed states, whether in Libya or northern Syria.
And that's characteristic of all late empires, that they embrace or engage in military fiascos in a kind of desperate attempt to recover a lost glory or a lost hegemony. I also think what's happening now in the United States around the pandemic is that it has exposed to the rest of the world that the American model doesn't work.
We are unable to cope. There are very few countries, maybe Brazil, that have a worse track record than we do. So we can cope neither with a pandemic because of our for-profit health-care system, which is not about delivering health, but of course gouging the public. So as this pandemic continues to hit us in wave after wave and just spirals out of control, we're now facing an estimated , American dead by December and , by January. Tens of millions of people have already been thrown into destitution, the ruling elites are bickering over an extension of unemployment insurance, the moratorium on evictions has been lifted, which means that some 40 million Americans are at risk of being thrown out of their homes by the end of the year.
Twenty-seven million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance because health insurance in the United States is tied to employment; it is employer-sponsored. And real figures of unemployment are probably 20 per cent, because they fix the figure.
The system was hollowed out anyway by corporations and oligarchic elite so that it couldn't withstand any stress, and that I think has been exposed by the pandemic.
So the credibility of the American empire is embodied in a figure like Trump, embodied in the inability of the United States to cope with a pandemic. How much of the fact that so much of the Treasury is spent on defence and not on infrastructure and health care plays a role in all of this chaos? A: Huge, huge. This again is a characteristic of late empires.
Go back and look at the Roman Empire, there was a one-million men standing army, and all of your resources are being funnelled into it.
Editor's note: Since , the Pentagon was audited twice — and failed both times. That is completely gone. They are completely subservient to the military industrial complex that is hollowing out the country from the inside — our bridges, our roads, our public transportation, our utilities.
I live in Princeton, N. And it's all falling apart to feed essentially this rapacious military complex and defence contractors. The only thing we make any more are weapons, and that's because it's not capitalism. What do you suppose happened and did the left ever really have a shot this time around?
A: No. The Democratic Party was never going to give Sanders the nomination, and the largest and most important Democratic donors and leaders had made that publicly clear — people like Lloyd Blankfein , the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who had said several times quite openly that if Sanders got the nomination, which wasn't going to happen, he and the rest of the donor class of the Democratic Party were going to support Trump.
So they had fixed it so the super delegates , which are appointed by the Democratic National Committee and are composed of lobbyists and the Democratic Party leadership, could vote on the second round. So Sanders if had gotten enough votes on the first round, he would have been trounced in the second.
So it was organized to push out the other candidates and leave Biden alone. There were all sorts of tricks they used in that they used again in But Sanders winning was never going to happen, and I think all the publicity around AOC obscures the fact that these people on the left are utterly irrelevant, both within Congress and within the Democratic Party.
Again, the two ruling parties agree on far more than they disagree on — whether it's on trade agreements or defence spending or austerity programs or tax cuts. Biden essentially functions for the Democratic liberal elite as a kind of symbol of nostalgia for a return to what I call the pantomime of democracy. But the political rot that is now eating away at the nation is not going to be solved by elections. And, by the way, the political class has already instituted all sorts of totalitarian forms of control, from wholesale government surveillance to the revoking of civil liberties, to the use of paramilitaries on the streets of our cities — these are all part of the twisted pathologies of all civilizations sputtering towards oblivion.
So the removal of Trump isn't going to do anything. In fact, it'll probably exacerbate the lust for racial violence and white nationalism, because both parties have built a mafia economy and out of that, a mafia state. Bush, under Bill Clinton, under Ronald Reagan — to give essentially carte blanche to corporations and oligarchs to pillage and loot.
A: It will restore the decorum of our version of monarchy, and it will restore the civic religion that is built around our government power. As Chris Williams has argued, in all the so-called socialist societies of the world,. The interests of the ruling Soviet elite became associated with the interests of a state in economic and military competition with the West. In other words, the same factors that propel capitalist production—the need to compete and drive out the competition—reigned within these regimes.
Flowing directly from this came the need of each of these one-party states to constantly raise productivity and dispense with any environmental, democratic, or labor concerns in the manic drive toward economic and technological parity with the Western powers. As Stalin commented, what took the West one hundred years to accomplish, the Soviet Union would do in ten. Such critiques also point to the need to closely interrogate the perspectives of those who attempt to interpret Marx.
The bottom line is that Marx offers an explanation of and a solution to ecological crisis: capitalism prefigures ecological doom and must be abolished. Is it in defense of nature or capitalism? He said, in fact, that the entire system—not just the system of distribution but also the system of production—would need to be revolutionized once it was taken in hand by the associated producers.
What is also crucial about the socialization of labor is that it transformed labor from an individualized process into a collective process. This collective process of production has come progressively into conflict with private extraction of profits. It also important to understand what Marx meant by human needs; he not only had a critique of capitalist production but also of capitalist consumption.
He did not think that after the revolution people would be jonesing to participate in a bacchanal of unrestrained of consumerism—that is, a general amping up of the genesis of needs and the means of production to fulfill them until nature is destroyed. Quite the contrary. Marx believed that one of the human needs not being met by capitalism was the need for a direct and appreciative relationship with nature and a whole lot more free time through which to develop it.
One of the things that Marx is not often accused of saying is that we should all go back to nature. Marx and Engels did talk about removing the divide between town and country by distributing people more evenly over the land.
From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men.
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are its simple possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations. That is, as human beings, it is true, we experience needs that necessitate or constitute our metabolic relationship with nature. However, and Marx is clear about this on the first page of the first chapter of the first volume of Capital, over time these needs are socially transformed as the development of the productive forces allows us to more fully develop ourselves as human beings.
For example, we get hungry, we want to eat, and nature provides us with certain things, like those cranberries that the German peasant children used to collect before the forests were privatized. But as human beings we are also capable, in eating those cranberries, of saying to ourselves: You know, these cranberries could use a little something. I think that boiled in a pot with some water and sugar, sprinkled with a flour and butter crumble, baked for 25 minutes at degrees, and topped with vanilla cream sauce, these cranberries could be really excellent.
Just as it is a part of human nature to eat, it is a part of human nature to imaginatively conceive of how to make things better and then to be able to fully appreciate them when we do. This is not only true for food, but for music, visual arts, poetry, history, science, and nature. Its taste buds are different from yours. And it is our duty to ourselves and to our inorganic body, nature, to develop our human capacities to the fullest.
The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history. In order to accomplish this, Marx thought that what was most necessary was not a further ramping up of production but an increase in free time. In fact, Marx went so far as to believe that under communism, value should not be determined by the so-called socially necessary exploited labor, but rather by leisure.
Think of the impact of increased leisure time on our organic bodies, how much better we would be able to develop ourselves if we had more of it. Think of the impact of increased leisure time on our inorganic body, on nature. If we are not producing, we are not exploiting our relationship with nature.
Immediately, the pressure begins to ease. That is, rather than seeing human nature as opposed and antagonistic to nature more broadly conceived, Marx recognized that since the beginning of our history, human beings have coevolved with and transformed nature, just as nature has transformed us.
It is also important to note that both before and during capitalism, the transformations that humans have worked on nature have not always been negative, as Charles Mann in and the many contributors to The Social Lives of Forests make clear. Short of the extinction of the human race, which unfortunately is not an impossibility, there will be an ongoing social transformation of nature and a natural transformation of society. The question is, what kind of relationship will it be?
Those who claim that Marx was enthusiastic about increases in productive capacity made possible by technological advances under capitalism are correct; he was. He recognized that investment in technology is a requirement of capitalist competition. Without this requirement, we are significantly unbound.
Pastoralism in arid and semiarid lands is the most ecologically sustainable method for surviving in a water-stressed environment. This is why so many people in East Africa are pastoralists, and have been successful at it for so long.
The most important problem facing the society of associated producers, Marx emphasized again and again in his work, would be to address the problem of the metabolic relation between human beings and nature, under the more advanced industrial conditions prevailing in the wake of the final revolutionary crisis of capitalist society.
To this end, it was clearly necessary to learn more about the human relation to nature and subsistence, through the development of property forms, over the great span of ethnological time. Marx was thus driven back, by the materialist precept of his analysis, to a consideration of the origins of human society and the human relation to nature—as a means of envisioning the potential for a more complete transcendence of an alienated existence.
Note that in this vision there is not a jettisoning of technology but an effort to use technology in a way that is more in keeping with a healthy relationship with nature through an understanding of how that relationship was mediated before capitalism. There are those who discount traditional knowledges of all sorts because they claim they are unscientific. I disagree. I think that such dismissals are based on an overprivileging of written history and understandings of science that are circumscribed by capitalist priorities.
In addition to organizing production and thereby constructing our relationship with nature on the basis of human need rather than profit and accumulation, in a socialist society our decisions must also be, according to Marx, truly democratic.
The democratic decision-making of associated producers, the increased availability of scientific information, and the progressive development of human intellectual faculties allowed through an increase in free time—all of which Marx saw as some of the defining attributes of socialism—would mean more people participating in a more informed way in decisions around our relationship to nature.
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