Yearly Archives: 2019

The Great Unraveling Begins: Distraction, Lies, Infighting, Betrayal

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The good news is renewal becomes possible when the entire rotten status quo collapses in a putrid heap.

There are two basic pathways to systemic collapse: external shocks or internal decay. The two are not mutually exclusive, of course; it can be argued that the most common path is internal decay weakens the empire/state and an external shock pushes the rotted structure off the cliff.

As Dave of the X22 Report and I discuss in The World Is About To Change & It’s Going To Be Glorious, we are in the early stages of terminal internal decay.There are a number of dynamics shared by decaying empires/states:

1. The ruling elites lose the moral imperative to sacrifice for the good of the empire/state. Instead they use the power of the state to further their own private interests and agendas.

2. The ruling elites start “fudging” reports (i.e. lies are presented as truths) and promoting narratives to mask their self-aggrandizement and the erosion of the nation/empire under their self-interested rule.

In other words, the elites know the public would resist their leadership if the truth were widely known, so the ruling elites devote tremendous resources to massaging the news to distract the public from reality and reflect positively on their self-serving leadership.

Since the weaknesses of the empire are being hidden, they cannot be addressed, and so rot that could have been fixed early becomes widespread and fatal.

3. Flush with the state’s wealth and power, the ruling elite splinters into warring camps which squander the empire’s remaining wealth on private battles over which camp will rule what appears solid and eternal–the empire.

4. As the elites battle it out, the nation/empire falls apart as the leadership’s focus is on internecine conflicts over the spoils of the empire, rather than on preserving the foundations of the empire’s wealth and security.

5. As the truth inevitably leaks out, the public grasps the enormity of the elites’ betrayal of the nation and the public interest. Faith in the elites and the institutions they control plummets, and the Great Unraveling becomes unstoppable.

6. In a last-ditch effort to save their wealth and power, the elites distract the public with Bread and Circuses– “free money” in various guises (Universal Basic Income, Modern Monetary Theory, etc.)–and the distracting Circus of political theater and a surfeit of entertainment.

Whether the elites or the public are aware of it or not, America is well down the path to terminal internal decay: Distraction, Lies, Infighting, Betrayal.

The good news is renewal becomes possible when the entire rotten status quo collapses in a putrid heap of broken promises, dysfunctional institutions, blatant lies, unpayable debts and cascading defaults.

Social Media and the Society of the Spectacle

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By Kenn Orphan

Source: CounterPunch

“The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.”

― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

― Edward Bernays, Propaganda

“We think we’re searching Google; Google is actually searching us. We think that these companies have privacy policies; those policies are actually surveillance policies. We’re told that if we have nothing to hide, then we have nothing to fear. The fact is, what they don’t tell us and what we are forgetting, that if you have nothing to hide, then you are nothing, because everything about us that makes us our unique identities, that gives us our individual spirit, our personality, our sense of freedom of will, freedom of action, our sense of our right to our own futures, that’s what comes from within. Those are our inner resources. That’s our private realm. And it’s intended to be private for a reason, because that is how it grows and flourishes and turns us into people who assert moral autonomy—an essential element of a flourishing, democratic society.”

― Shoshana Zuboff, author of Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization 

“Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”

― Edward Snowden

Recently I was rereading some of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. I was reminded of how essential this work by the late French Marxist philosopher is to today’s age of social media. Debord’s understanding of how the forces of capital shape our collective experiences and thoughts speaks to our time where algorithms dominate the trajectory of the psyche against a craven backdrop of what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin has described as “inverted totalitarianism.”

Every day we are bombarded with the imagery of empire and capital. It is relentless. Our minds have become both a marketplace and a commodity to be traded. And it is a lucrative industry with Facebook and Google as prime examples. Their data collection and surveillance typify a conjoining of the state and capitalist economy; and they have carved out insidious new spaces in the human brain to coerce self-imposed censorship and conformity to the prevailing consumerist global order.

This social conditioning is a process which requires mass compliance. The infamous propagandist for industry and vaunted “father of public relations” Edward Bernays understood that. It takes time to manipulate the multilayered strata of the human psyche, especially in regard to large populations of people. But history is replete with tragic examples of its successful implementation by powerful interests. Today those interests lie squarely with capital and empire; but the effects are the same, distraction, censorship, alienation, coerced, compliance with the norms of the status quo and the numbing of the critical mind.

Debord said, “Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.” This profound observation is even more important today. The state, via mass media, informs us of the villains and phantoms they believe we should fear. Other, far more destructive, deadly and oppressive threats such as the continued proliferation of nuclear arms, catastrophic climate change, collapse of ecosystems, dangers to public health from industrial pollutants, vastly unequal, racist and brutal economic and legal systems, militarism or plutocratic tyranny can then be relegated as non-issues, or at least lesser ones.

Most people on the planet will not suffer or die from a terrorist attack, but they are very likely to be severely affected by the other issues mentioned above. Imagery on portable screens that virtually everyone in the West and around the world has access to communicates messages that may speak to some of these dire or existential problems, but they do so in an abstract manner that divorces the observer from the subject.

As Debord observed, this kind of culture of spectacle informs our personal relationships as well. Whether one is “present” on social media or not has become a sort of litmus test of ones presence in life itself. “Likes” or emojis have replaced and truncated language to such an extent that now older forms of communication are often looked at with novelty, suspicion, or even disgust. What’s more is that emojis in social media, particularly Facebook, have been employed all too often as tools of ridicule or even harassment of weak or vulnerable people. But what is perhaps the most striking about the current social media age is its repetitive narrative of self-aggrandizement. One so repetitive and hypnotic that it almost appears invisible. The “selfie” and “status update” are examples of the unending drive of social media to create a false sense of self to present to the world. Of course this self must conform and be well adjusted to consumerist society in one form or another lest it be tagged for “mental health issues,” subversive thought or behavior, or simply be rendered unnoticed or unimportant by society in general.

Indeed, I am certain Debord would be horrified at the age of social media. At no other time in human history has there been a greater confluence of authoritarian dominance or social control implemented in such an intimate and ubiquitous manner. Unlike Debord’s time, social media provides a new medium to not only socially condition the masses but for the corporate state to gather what was once private information about those masses via their personally owned devices and apps.

That it masquerades as a form of democracy is equally disturbing, especially since at its core it represents the policing of thought and dampening of dissent. He wrote as if penning a prophecy: “The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his “mirror image.””

This spectacle reigns supreme in today’s social media culture. It is essential to its formulation and operating guidelines. Under such a paradigm history must be sterilized of analysis and ultimately atomized into unrelated instances to make an eternal present, divorced from any transformative potential. Therefore corporations and industries which have long records of polluting the environment or lying to the public about the safety of their products can continue to expand and even be celebrated by the corporate owned media. Religious institutions with long histories of abuse, patriarchy and repression can maintain their status as trusted institutions. The military can repeat the lie over and over that it is noble despite a history drenched in the blood of well documented atrocities and ongoing crimes. The United States and many other nations can keep calling themselves democracies despite quite obvious facts that strongly refute that designation. The mere notion of revolution then is made to be farcical or even dangerous. After all, how could revolution ever be seen as necessary within a democracy?

Social media does not necessarily signal the death of democratic freedom, but in its current form and under the aegis of capital it is certainly a nail in its coffin. This is because under such circumstances it is incapable of being anything other than a means for capital accumulation for the corporate state and a platform for its narrative, and it will do this through ever more invasive, censorial and repressive means. As Edward Snowden pointed out, people are less free when they feel that they are being observed. This is especially so when the observer is the state. Several studies have indicated that there is a sharp decline in certain online searches among the general public following any indication that government agencies are logging those searches, even if those citizens have not committed any crime. And the chilling effect is not unfounded. One incident involved an innocent couple who were visited by counter-terrorism police after searching Google for pressure cookers and backpacks. Since the internet has become the world’s public library, the implications for democracy are as dire as they are clear.

Unplugging from any of this isn’t easy, nor is it necessarily virtuous, but there are ways to divest from its social control personally and collectively. There are also ways to use it which defy its dominant algorithms. Détournement, which merely means rerouting or hijacking in French, is one of those ways. This involves inverting the imagery or messages of capital and empire to illustrate and even amplify their mendacity. It has a long history of effective use in bending the dominant narrative to one which reflects reality.

All of this is not to say that technology or social media are inherently bad, but to recognize that much of it has become a vehicle for a rather pernicious authoritarianism. And its danger lies in the fallacy of its benign appearance. Whether it be Google maps or one of countless other “helpful” apps one uses on a daily basis, surveillance capital becomes a means of controlling behavior, transactions, choices, as well as determining which members of society present a threat to the order. In other words, conformity is strongly reinforced while any form of dissent is rendered dangerously subversive. But although the algorithmic maps to our collective psyche are being endlessly drawn by programmers and their corporate and state masters, we still have the agency to navigate these landscapes with our eyes open. And indeed, the best tool we possess will always be that critically informed dissent the powerful so fear the most.

SHENPA AND THE TIBETAN ART OF NOT GETTING HOOKED

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By Azriel ReShel

Source: Waking Times

Shenpa is the Tibetan word for attachment. According to Pema Chödrön, shenpa would better be translated as “something that hooks us”.

There are two levels of shenpa, the reaction to a pain that surfaces within us and the escaping of pain that is within us. Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, refers to shenpa as the charge behind our thoughts, words and actions, and the charge behind our likes and dislikes. Shenpa is what motivates our habitual patterns and our addictions.

Shenpa is also vibrant in the moment when someone puts you down, says something you don’t like, or even makes an innocent remark which is misinterpreted by your inner lens of pain, and you erupt forth like a volcano. We can even feel the eruption coming, and see the moment of choice; that split second where the forked road appears and we can choose which pathway to follow, and yet we usually take the volcanic one, regretting our reaction after.

So Why do we Get Hooked?

We all experience shenpa. It’s at the root of our escapism from our own suffering. It’s what we turn to in order to ease our pain; distract ourselves from the world. It’s also how we react when someone pushes the button holding our pain hostage.

I have been having my own shenpa journey with my ex-partner. Mostly I’m good at ignoring the barbed comments, or negative stories about me that my children tell me when they arrive back from being with their Dad, but sometimes I succumb. And even as I drag myself into what I know will be an energy draining conflict I’ll regret, I go racing along that silver pathway. And of course, it always ends badly. I regret wasting my time or my energy either defending myself or falling into the trap of believing something will be different and it never is. So why does this happen? It is the peculiar field of the involuntary response of shenpa. We take the bait while swimming along nicely in life, even though we know we’ll be caught and in the frying pan pretty damn soon.

Pema Chodron says we could also call shenpa ‘the urge.’

[It is] the urge to smoke that cigarette, to overeat, to have another drink, to indulge our addiction whatever it is. Sometimes shenpa is so strong that we’re willing to die getting this short-term symptomatic relief. The momentum behind the urge is so strong that we never pull out of the habitual pattern of turning to poison for comfort. It doesn’t necessarily have to involve a substance; it can be saying mean things or approaching everything with a critical mind.

This is the addictive nature of shenpa we all know so well. Our escape from reality and voyage into mindless practices, like eating an entire box of chocolates, or binge drinking. It sets us on a cycle that ends with negative consequences.

At the subtlest level, we feel a tightening, a tensing, a sense of closing down. Then we feel a sense of withdrawing, not wanting to be where we are. That’s the hooked quality. That tight feeling has the power to hook us into self-denigration, blame, anger, jealousy and other emotions which lead to words and actions that end up poisoning us. ~ Pema Chodron

Interestingly, shenpa is also present in the so-called ‘good’ addictions. You know the yogi who does two-hour ashtanga classes daily and loses their ananda (bliss) if they’re not on the mat. We all have attachments, that’s human nature.

Pema Chodron says that shenpa thrives on the underlying insecurity of living in a world that is always changing. We get caught in wanting things to be a certain way, to always be that way. Our partner is especially loving towards us and then we expect and want every experience to be just like that. But that’s not how life works. We get caught in the desire for sameness. It can happen with meditation practice too. We have a wonderful, transcendent and beautiful meditation and we then measure all subsequent meditations against this one practice, feeling disappointed or disillusioned when the mind won’t rest and we can’t reach that same state again.

Shenpa brings us back to the ever-changing present moment. As we accept whatever comes at us, with unconditional acceptance, we become unattached and life flows more gracefully.

Learning to recognise shenpa teaches us the meaning of not being attached to this world. Not being attached has nothing to do with this world. It has to do with shenpa — being hooked by what we associate with comfort. All we’re trying to do is not to feel our uneasiness. But when we do this we never get to the root of practice. The root is experiencing the itch as well as the urge to scratch, and then not acting it out. ~ Pema Chodron

Overcoming Our Attachments

To overcome shenpa is to have radical mindfulness, integrity and a deep connection with yourself. It requires constant communication and most of all – listening. It is a wonderfully powerful practice.

It is like the spaces in music, the pause between the in-breath and the out-breath. The exceptional moment that can change everything. And when we bring awareness to this moment, we can change the course of relationships, events and our personality. When we catch ourselves before the angry outburst, or in that thought that comes before reaching for a cigarette or the next block of chocolate, we can heal old patterns and change the way we experience our lives.

Pema Chodron says the Tibetan word for renunciation is shenlok, which means turning shenpaupside-down or shaking it up.

In practicing with shenpa, first we try to recognise it. The best place to do this is on the meditation cushion. Sitting practice teaches us how to open and relax to whatever arises, without picking and choosing. It teaches us to fully experience the uneasiness and the urge, and to interrupt the momentum that usually follows. We do this by not following after the thoughts and learning to come back to the present moment. We learn to stay with the uneasiness, the tightening, the itch ofshenpa. We train in sitting still with our desire to scratch. This is how we learn to stop the chain reaction of habitual patterns that otherwise will rule our lives. This is how we weaken the patterns that keep us hooked into discomfort that we mistake as comfort.

We won’t always get it right and there will always be charges and more layers, but basically shenpa is pointing us to the places deep within us that are calling out for healing and loving attention, so we can return to the self. Gathering yourself up like an old friend, and reaching for a cup of tea and a cookie, you can welcome those long forgotten places and begin the journey back to wholeness and inner peace.

Saturday Matinee: Hard To Be A God

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Source: Kanopy

When legendary Russian auteur Aleksei German died in 2013, he left behind this extraordinary final film, a phantasmagoric adaptation of the revered sci-fi novel by the Strugatsky brothers (authors of the source novel for Tarkovsky’s Stalker). Hard to be a God began percolating in German’s consciousness in the mid-1960s, and would actively consume him for the last 15 years of his life.

He brought the film close enough to completion for his wife and son to apply the finishing touches immediately after his passing. Taking place on the planet Arkanar, which is in the midst of its own Middle Ages, the film focuses on Don Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik), one of a group of Earth scientists who have been sent to Arkanar with the proviso that they must not interfere in the planet’s political or historical development. Treated by the planet’s natives as a kind of divinity, Don Rumata is both godlike and impotent in the face of its chaos and brutality.

Running Time
179 mins
Year
2013
Kanopy ID
1173813
Filmmakers
Aleksei Yuryevich German
Features
Dmitriy Vladimirov, Laura Lauri, Leonid Yarmolnik
Languages
Russian

Watch the full film here.

People Who Publicly Fret About Assange Rape Allegations Are Lying

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

A few hours ago I stumbled across a tweet by Huffington Post UK editor Basia Cummings which made my blood boil. Actress and activist Pamela Anderson had just spoken to the press with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson about their visit with Assange at Belmarsh prison, decrying the WikiLeaks founder’s cruel treatment and unjust prosecution. Basia Cummings took this opportunity to call her social media followers in to make fun of Anderson’s clothing.

“Pamela Anderson arrives at Belmarsh to visit Julian Assange wearing… a bespoke cape/blanket referencing ‘Cromwell’ and free speech’. It’s a look,” Cummings said.

But what really got me were the comments the tweet elicited.

“Is it possible to unwank over someone?” asked one user.

“Pamela Anderson arrives at Belmarsh to visit Julian Assange to supply him with some material for his cell wank bank,” said another.

“Cum blanket,” said another.

“She banged Kid Rock. Enough said,” said another.

This is just a small sampling from a quick skim. There are many, many others. I won’t quote them all.

I found this so deeply illustrative of the way mainstream liberals throw every value they claim to stand for right in the garbage as soon as it becomes an obstacle to their petty partisan attacks. They all warned that Trump was campaigning on a platform of xenophobia, homophobia and demagoguery, but as soon as he was elected they began launching phony Russiagate attacks which themselves were rife with xenophobia, homophobia and demagoguery. Liberal pundits who rightly criticized Bush for his unforgivable invasion of Iraq now attack Trump for being insufficiently hawkish toward Russia and its allies. These mindless automatons don’t actually stand for anything beyond blind partisan loyalty.

In the same way that they will happily wipe their asses with any of their pretend values the second it becomes politically convenient to do so, mainstream liberals will also fabricate grave, solemn concerns about things they never actually cared about before as soon as it can be used as an angle of partisan attack.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf began her excellent 2010 essay titled “J’Accuse: Sweden, Britain, and Interpol Insult Rape Victims Worldwide” with the words, “How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden’s treatment of Julian Assange is a form of theater? Because I know what happens in rape accusations against men that don’t involve the embarrassing of powerful governments.” Wolf argued that “men are pretty much never treated the way Assange is being treated in the face of sex crime charges,” and she was absolutely correct.

As a survivor of multiple sexual assaults, I have found it unspeakably infuriating the way this same patriarchal imperialist system which has allowed rape culture to thrive throughout the entirety of its existence has suddenly become deeply, deeply concerned about plot hole-riddled and completely unproven allegations against a man who just so happens to have published humiliating truths about that very same imperialist system. This same warmongering power structure which has never given a shit about women beyond our ability to fly a stealth bomber and squeeze new recruits out of our vaginas suddenly has the full force of its propaganda machine whipping liberals into a hysteria about allegations of acts that aren’t even illegal in the nations those liberals live in. Acts that these liberals have never even thought about pushing to make laws against in their own governments.

Do you know how you can be absolutely certain that anyone you see on social media rending their garments about Assange’s Swedish allegations is completely full of shit? Because no matter how hard you search through their post history, you will never, ever find any similarly enthusiastic push to ban the actions that Assange is accused of in their own government. In their own land, where their own daughters and sons will be impacted. They focus solely on shaky allegations against a target of the CIA and the Pentagon which are alleged to have happened in Sweden, a nation with very different sexual consent laws than the nations of these English-speaking concern trolls.

Without conceding that any part of the unproven allegations against Assange are true, it’s important to note that the United States, from which many of these Assange haters express their grave concern about Assange’s Swedish accusations, has no laws whatsoever about non-consensual condom removal, and other western judicial systems are barely even beginning to touch on the subject. None of these nations convict men for initiating sex while the woman is half-asleep, as Assange’s rape allegation asserts, and virtually every woman you know has had sex initiated with her by a sexual partner while she was half-asleep. Yet none of the blue-checkmarked journalists you see calling Assange a “rapist” on social media have ever written any articles demanding that laws be passed in their own countries calling for women to receive legal protection from this.

The people pretending to care about these allegations do not care about rape, and they do not care about women. I recently had my Twitter privileges suspended by someone who called me a “rape apologist” for not automatically subscribing to the “believe all women” meme in the case of a known CIA target, and, when I informed him that I myself am a rape victim, this man called me a liar. I went off on him, and he reported me. This man has never cared about rape or women, and it’s entirely likely that he’s done things to women that push the same boundaries on sexual consent he’s accusing Assange of doing, or worse.

I suspect that goes the same for a lot of the concern trolling Assange-hating men I encounter online whose suddenly holier-than-thou position on initiating sex with a sleepy woman you’ve just been intimate with probably does not line up all that well with their own sexual past. I mean, let’s get real. I’m a woman, my friends are women, I’ve been in a lot of book clubs and mom’s groups and out on a lot of girl’s nights and I know that if you want to get a conversation really fired up, just mention how annoying it is when a bloke wakes you up prodding you with his dick. It’s relatable and a rich vein to mine anecdote-wise. This is a universal experience for a western woman, and yeah, I think it’s rapey and gross and I would love for it to stop, but don’t pretend you care about that now any more than you did before you realized it was a way you could smear Assange. Be real. If you weren’t campaigning for it to be outlawed in your own state or country before, you need to at least be making noises about it now first, and you know and I know that that simply isn’t happening.

In fact, as the years pass, it is becoming entirely possible that the publicity around the allegations against Assange will not change one thing about rape law in any of the western countries which pretend to be so outraged by it other than to be considered a useful hack for smearing a journalist for exposing the patriarchal imperialist system under which rape culture continues to thrive. It has been nine years; nothing has changed. I think we can safely say that after nine years and no change that this has never been an honest concern for the health and well-being of the women involved and for women in general, because if it was then those laws would be ubiquitous across western democracies. Yet again, the suffering of women will be used by the powerful to hide their crimes and entrench more deeply the suffering for the women who work tirelessly as human shields protecting their children from the effects of war and poverty in a predatory capitalist system which is incapable of valuing women’s work.

Of course we should want these things to be illegal. Of course it should be illegal to deliberately have unprotected penetration without consent. Of course it should be illegal to initiate sex without fully awake and enthusiastic consent. Of course we should all want to live in a world where everyone is protected from any sexual interaction happening without their permission. But these people are not interested in creating that world. These people are interested in supporting the same rapey power establishment which has no regard for the sovereignty of entire nations, much less the individual sovereignty of womens’ bodies. They pretend to be on the side of women, but they are actually on the side of the worst aspects of patriarchy, because they have formed an egoic identification with the political structures which are built upon those aspects. That’s what concern trolling is.

This is just one of the many ways in which authentic feminism, authentic advocacy for the real interests of real women, has been co-opted for the benefit of a depraved establishment which has never cared about women and never will. We see it in the way the mass media celebrates women ascending to leadership positions of the military-industrial complex and the National Guard, and the way the presidential candidacy of a woman who embodies all the sickest aspects of the patriarchy was billed as a path to victory for feminism. The healthy impulse to elevate a gender that had an enslaved status in our society since the dawn of civilization has been hijacked by perverse agendas, and it needs to be reclaimed.

Whenever you see anyone claiming to be deeply, deeply concerned about the Swedish allegations against Assange, ask them what they’ve been doing to fight for legal changes which protect women from the things Assange is accused of doing. Then watch them squirm.

For more info on the gaping plot holes in the “Assange is a rapist” smear, check out this section from my mega-article Debunking All The Assange Smears.

Why Are American Communities Dying?

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By Tom Chatham

Source: Project Chesapeake

Most Americans who have been around for a while know life is nothing like it used to be. When someone wanted a job one was found with a little bit of searching. Today jobs are difficult to find, especially in small communities.

When I was growing up in the 70’s, there were several car dealers in my community. There were three tractor dealers and too many mom and pop stores to count. Today there are two used car dealers and the nearest tractor dealer is twenty miles away. So how is it that we now have more people, but fewer businesses to employ them?

A nations wealth is derived from having a product to sell. That wealth needs to circulate in towns and cities to compound the wealth effect and create jobs and businesses. When wealth is not created or it is siphoned off to other places, the wealth effect can not happen, and in many cases goes into reverse. A community needs a certain amount of service related jobs to function but it also needs some type of production jobs to bring in money from the outside. This can be mining , agriculture or manufacturing type jobs, but they must exist to insure a healthy economy.

America has two major problems today. A large amount of our production is done outside the country eliminating production jobs in local communities and many of the small local businesses that kept wealth within communities have been supplanted by large corporations that siphon wealth out of communities and send it to wall street.

In the past when a small business made profit, that profit was kept in the local community because that is where the owner lived. Now, that profit leaves the community never to be seen again. With less money to circulate within the community the businesses that depend on people spending their extra dollars, have fewer customers and eventually go out of business. With fewer jobs there is that much less money circulating and the economic situation spirals down until nothing is left.

These days corporate businesses and government jobs make up the major part of many local communities. In many cases if it were not for the government jobs, many communities would no longer exist. So what do you think would happen if the government suddenly no longer had money to pay those workers? What would happen if corporate profits dropped to the point where corporate stores decided to close and cut their losses?

To some extent we are seeing this happen now in many places. Corporate stores moved in and drove small local businesses out. Then when the profits dried up the corporate stores closed leaving the community with no jobs or products to buy. With no capital in the local communities to rebuild small businesses, the people simply drive to other areas to do their shopping.

The corporate cronies and government laggards control most of the money flowing through communities now and they want to keep it that way. Any attempt to rebuild local businesses is met with luke warm results. Any business that might make a difference is either killed outright or regulated into oblivion before it can get off the ground. The county where I live has all but abandoned local businesses. The bulk of their income comes from property taxes generated by vacation homes and retirement homes of retired government employees. As long as the government pensions and paychecks continue, they see no reason to change the status quo. The result is that the younger people leave as soon as they can and the average age of the population continues to get older. As with many places today, this area has no future.

Where I live is a microcosm of the nation. Corporate and government entities continue to siphon what little money there is out of communities and just as small communities are dying, the nation will soon follow if current trends do not change. A return to small local economics is the only way to reverse some of the damage and keep our communities livable. But, do not be deceived. There is no way to undo all of the damage that has been done and even if we survive, we will only be a shadow of what we once were as a nation.

Stick to the Plan

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Illustration by Mike Faille

Reclaiming central planning from the clutches of corporations

By Brendan James

Source: The Baffler

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

–CCA Chairman Arthur Jensen, Network

WHAT DO JEFF BEZOS AND JOSEPH STALIN have in common? A certain supervillain chic. Cold-blooded austerity. Iron discipline. A penchant for back-breaking output targets. A healthy appetite for terror.

Yet perhaps their most surprising overlap is that the General Secretary and the chairman of Amazon, Inc. built two of history’s largest centrally planned economies. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising: What embodies the trademark Bezos-ethos of “Get Big Fast” better than the Five-Year Plan? Thanks to its cutting-edge logistics and coordinated supply chains, Amazon last year clocked a GDP of $230 billion[*]. To Jared Kushner’s recent demand that “the government should be run like a great American company,” let all communists raise a fist of solidarity!

In fact, write Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in The People’s Republic of Walmart, Amazon is just one of thousands of firms, big and small, that centrally plan their inputs and outputs. Of the top hundred global economies, around sixty-nine of them are businesses, not countries; most, if not all, are internally planned. (Sears, which over the last decade broke its firm into an “internal market” of competing units thanks to CEO and Ayn Rand-devotee Eddie Lampert, is conspicuously absent from this list.) Despite the collapse of the USSR and the global gospel of markets that spread in its wake, it seems planning is still working all around us.

The problem is that planning is not working for most of us. Yes, automation and “Big Data” have conjured cheaper goods for consumers—unfortunately, most consumers are also laborers who remain ruthlessly exploited. As the promise of new technology expands each day, workers sleep while standing or collapse from heat exhaustion. Planning, once a revolutionary tool meant to reduce labor time and eliminate exploitation, has become just another vulgar mechanism for maximizing the profits of unelected, authoritarian, union-busting, planet-cooking, superrich vampires. The People’s Republic of Walmart makes the case that the left should reclaim the radical demand for a democratically planned economy and repurpose this corporate apparatus for the flourishing of all. Far from a dry pamphlet on logistics theory, the book raises crucial questions about justice, technology, and our capacity to build a new world in the face of economic and climate catastrophe.

The planned economy was supposed to have gone extinct three decades ago. The Soviet Union gasped its last breath, American capitalism sprayed a bottle of Cristal, European social democracy ordered another latte, and China pressed a big button labeled “Market Socialism.” But if you really put the time in, you could probably get a wonk from the Hoover Institution to grudgingly accept that government planning still beats the market in the realm of certain public services, such as health care or fire departments. The knives come out, though, when this approach is proposed for things like housing, pharmaceuticals, energy, or, heaven forbid, consumer goods in general.

What may surprise newcomers, however, is that many self-described Marxists are wary of planning, too. Despite being thanked in Phillips and Rozworski’s acknowledgements, Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the left-wing magazine Jacobin, identifies as a market socialist. In a 2013 essay sketching an agenda for the left, Jacobin’s executive editor Seth Ackerman conceded that markets are necessary, so perhaps we’d best just find a way to socialize them. Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology and, along with Sunkara, one of several co-authors of The ABCs of Socialism, dismisses planning as a dead-end: “We can want planning to work, but we have no evidence that it can.” One of the left’s “worst legacies” has been to “identify socialism with central planning.” Market socialism, we’re told, is communism for grown-ups.

Everyone from the market socialist to the Austrian economist has taken one side of an incredibly sexy academic exchange known as the “socialist calculation debate.” The argument should be familiar: market transactions provide producers with essential information about what consumers and other producers need, and therefore how much to make. To try and calculate (that is, plan) this galaxy of interdependent inputs and outputs is impossible in a fluid economy. It’s a matter of information, you fool. And like it or not, market prices are the best way to collect the information we need to map out supply and demand.

A rich tradition of heterodox economics, mathematics, and computer science has materialized to answer this problem of calculation. But it is modern processing power, dwarfing the bandwidth available in the twentieth century, that truly rebukes the argument above. Consider computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott who, in about two minutes, using only university equipment, claims to have run models that were able to optimize an economy “roughly the size of Sweden.” You get the feeling that the mammoth data centers at Amazon, Ford, or Foxconn might be capable of even more impressive calculations. And besides, to insist communist theory prove some perfect equation is either disingenuous or missing the point. The question is not whether planning is mathematically pristine, but whether it can allocate better than the market.

The answer, to return to the material world, is yes it can. It’s true that under capitalism firms plan internally but compete with each other, a dance that keeps companies innovating new ways to capture surplus and, sometimes, inadvertently benefit regular people. This dynamic would not occur naturally in a planned economy; one cannot just seize Amazon or Walmart, socialize it, and call it a day. Phillips and Rozworski apparently recognize this (there is an entire chapter in The People’s Republic of Walmart titled “Nationalization Is Not Enough”) and point to an interesting line of thought from economist J. W. Mason: Banks tend to operate as a privatized Gosplan, where the slush fund of finance capital flows to whichever firm a group of Brooks Brothers-clad planners decide deserves investment, regardless of profitability. Market competition, in other words, is hardly the divine engine of innovation if so many firms are, as Mason writes, “born new each day by the grace of those financing it.”

Even so, could planning replicate the market’s capacity to innovate? Ford’s former CEO Mark Fields certainly seemed to think so, declaring in 2016 that his company would soon “be able to use analytics to anticipate people’s needs, as opposed to people trying to tell us what they want.” And to the perennial taunt of the lizard-brained conservative—“I love seeing idiot millennials protest capitalism on their Apple-made IPHONES”—one may point out it was largely the market-immune Pentagon and Department of Energy, not Apple, that developed the batteries, algorithms, touch screens, and microprocessors our right-wing friend uses to tweet about the Muslim Caravan. Once again, none of this is to celebrate the actual decisions or practitioners of planning as it exists under capitalism, but to recognize its power and how else it might be put to use.

So much for feasibility. Still, the left has good reason to harbor deeper techno-skepticism. When most of us hear the phrase “data collection,” we think not so much of social justice but of Facebook selling our personal information, NSA surveillance, and racist models of “predictive” policing. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks catalogs state policies that placed welfare applications, housing allocation, and child welfare investigations under algorithmic control. The results have been catastrophic for the poor and working class, of every race and gender. Algorithms, after all, are written by humans, and prejudices operate just as easily in digital form as they do in twentieth century analog—perhaps even more so. Phillips and Rozworski acknowledge this reality and rightfully urge vigilance. If planning is to make use of such technology, we must make sure not to bake this poison into the cake.

But hope lies in the very recognition that technology is a political construct, rather than some transcendental, neutral force. If we can program the reinforcement of hierarchies, we can certainly work to program their destruction. (There’s already encouraging research as to how to account for problems such as “disparate impact.”) As Eubanks writes, “if there is to be an alternative, we must build it on purpose, brick by brick and byte by byte.”

Beyond algorithmic justice, the real specter haunting socialism is, naturally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose record in planning was less than exemplary. While capital-C Communism brought about modern industry, literacy, and social security, Phillips and Rozworski don’t deny the ultimate failure of the Soviet experiment. The October Revolution was contorted and compromised by a world war, a civil war, imperialist invasion, economic backwardness, another world war, and a half-century of military competition with the United States. For the sake of the revolution, democracy was indefinitely postponed. Even if Soviet and East German firms were just as or more efficient than their Western counterparts, this arrangement still resulted in workers resisting work and managers lying about output, i.e., bad information. (In a particularly cruel irony, Gosplan bureaucrats even took to sabotaging new computerized approaches to planning, lest they personally lose their political clout. Their unlikely co-conspirators were “reform” minded crypto-capitalists who worried the algorithms would actually succeed, leaving planning in place forever!)

For Phillips and Rozworski, it wasn’t communist planning that led to authoritarianism and disaster, but authoritarianism and disaster that led to bad planning. “Democracy,” they write, “is not some abstract ideal tacked on to all this, but essential to the process.”

A few years ago. Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty cast the very idea of Soviet planning as its hero, wherein it falls from grace, as all tragic heroes do. There’s no need to understate that tragedy, but it ispossible to overstate it. Let’s not forget what happened after the victorious arrival of the market in the former USSR: production of consumer goods, industrial output, and human life expectancy all cratered. A new class of homeless citizens emerged, frozen to death in streets, alleyways, and parks. We often discuss the millions of deaths in the Stalinist 1930s. We don’t discuss the millions of deaths in the post-Communist 1990s. Unsurprisingly, recent polling revealed that a majority of those surveyed in Russia still regret the collapse of the USSR and its planned economy. (In 1996 they nearly voted in Communist presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov until—get this—right-wing hucksters colluded with a hostile foreign government to help install a widely unpopular and corrupt buffoon through a media campaign that peddled rank propaganda.) The Soviet experience was a lesson, all right, but not quite the one many smug market fetishists would have us believe.

And if all that can happen to a superpower, imagine what faced Chile, the would-be socialist alternative to Soviet technocracy: in 1970, buoyed by the support of the working class, Marxist president Salvador Allende was elected and set about building a nation-wide, participatory planning network. This novel approach was predictably stymied by a U.S. economic blockade and finally snuffed out by a CIA-backed military coup in 1973. Still, the pioneering spirit of this moment was poignantly captured by Eden Medina in her wonderful study Cybernetic Revolutionaries. What happened next is a depressing cliché: Chileans were placed under the rule of a distinctly not-left-wing dictatorship and enrolled as fresh test subjects in the mad laboratory of the market.

How will that same market treat the workers of tomorrow who fall victim to imminent waves of automation? Is the market really compatible long-term with progressive policy goals like universal basic income, or full employment? Will the market really permit the end of mass incarceration? Then there’s the C-word: last month we learned that potentially catastrophic climate change is now beyond prevention, and that even if we swore off carbon tomorrow, by 2099 the Arctic will still be 5°C hotter. The expression “glacial pace” doesn’t quite mean what it used to. In light of this, The Atlantic, official mouthpiece for the death god Nyarlathotep, predictably suggests that “any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs.” Not to be outdone, the New York Times last month published an op-ed titled—no shit—“Can Exxon Mobil Protect Mozambique From Climate Change?”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Converting industries to renewable energy, Phillips and Rozworski argue, is wholly within the power of America, India, and China. But, wouldn’t you know it, the principles of commerce just aren’t incentivizing them fast enough! Carbon-free agriculture is a trickier feat, but certainly less tricky as a state-sponsored venture freed from market meddling, à la Sputnik or the Manhattan Project. Climate reporter Kate Aronoff suggests: “If you create a successful drive to nationalize [the fossil fuel industry] or rapidly scale back their power that will create a real precedent for other industries . . . then you can nationalize Monsanto. Have that be the crux of a populist demand of a climate movement.” There are different schools on the left when it comes to ecology (Phillips, science writer by day, has been criticized for consumerist, growth-happy “ecomodernism”), but one hopes we can all agree that smashing the existing energy market is a necessary step.

More than any other crisis of capitalism, ecological calamity is the most self-evident reason to abandon the dumb, short-sighted, animal logic of the market for a rational and humane plan. It has been, to quote the superior critique of capital, Gremlins 2, “a complete failure of management.” And if the history of capitalist crises is any guide, the odds are that climate change will produce a bigger, bulkier, more controlling state no matter what. Before things really start to crack up, we may want to pick whether that state runs on egalitarian principles or the fascist death drive. Does anyone who doesn’t own a yacht called Fountainhead truly want to cede that decision to the invisible hand of the market?

To their credit, Phillips and Rozworksi return throughout the book to the necessity of mass mobilization. Planning is not One Weird Trick to Achieve Socialism. Unless we simply want state-capitalist profit optimization, the real thing will require continuous and brutal class struggle. It will require experimentation, failure and, as Marv Alpert once said, tenacious defense. Any hope of success lies in a rejuvenated, robust and, yes, global people’s movement to shatter the political, legal and physical barricades put up by governments and capital. But planning must be part of the agenda.

Here the cybernetic concept of feedback is useful: the very idea of a plan, of giving everyone control of their own lives, is just the kind of revolutionary notion that can energize, inspire, and keep such a movement alive. The final line of Spufford’s Red Plenty need not be read as the end of a dream, but the real beginning of history: “Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?”

Hope for the best, of course. And plan for the worst.