Please take a moment to listen to what the working class and otherwise underprivileged people of greater Minneapolis are saying about life in America today.
Cop Kamala, they shot down your brother in the street. Where are your tears? Why do you linger on the side of the killers? You’re powerful now–why don’t you do anything? Your power is of the Devil if you don’t use it for good. If nothing else … if greed has truly poisoned your soul completely … think of yourself; pray to the avatar of self-interest. How many of these people do you expect to vote for you to be president, when they watched you stand by silent and with dry eyes? How can you claim to them once again that you are the lesser of two evils, and expect them to believe it this time?
Uncle Joe, they’re killing your sons in the streets and they never pay a price for it. This is your return to normal? Is this your solution to class warfare and racial injustice? What in god’s own name is wrong with you? What would you do if it was crackhead Hunter who took a bullet from your police state this time? What if it was dear Bo? The hypocrisy of your life and your system is enough to drive even your dogs foamy mad.
***
It’s not just Minneapolis. A quick search on ‘Duante protest’ brings back results from actions in Sacramento, Atlanta, all over. The sign above is from Philadelphia, and makes the deeper point. Literal murder-by-cop is bad enough. But it’s the whole system that is murderous, and the protected elites are worse killers than their hired henchman ‘protectors’ in blue by a factor of thousands. Property is theft, and piling up property and capital up to the billionaire level is murder. Abbey was right. There may have never been a good reason to trust the Owners with our lives, but to do so today, in the form of voting for corporatists or in the form of voluntarily becoming wage slaves to support the killer system with our time and toil, is willful insanity and cult-like behavior. The Apocalypse already happened and it happened inside our own heads.
***
I said Still Not Yet and I meant by that: I still am not prepared to begin talking precisely about the Human Problem’s genesis, devolving history, and solutions-if-any-exist. But I start to see that differently. It’s all of a piece ennit. Let me just gloss things briefly.
In the beginning, and for most all of human history, there was Anarchy.
Anarchy as the only right and natural way of life ended with the human choice (or evolutionary inevitability?) to stop moving and settle down permanently and live inside an immovable hut instead of a portable tent.
The motivation was greed and in the average case it didn’t look like greed, but more like ‘wanting a better life for my kids’, and solving that horrible dilemma by accepting sedentism, agriculture, granaries, herds, and the divine right of kings (and eventually county commissioners) was a mistake that condemned those same children and their children’s children to lives of slavery. This is the ultimate proof positive of Franklin’s comment that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”.
Or just omit the part about who deserves what. Give up your liberty, expecting to get safety in return, as nearly the whole of humanity has done by now, and condemn yourself to living your life without either. End up on the wrong end of a Protector’s gun, either literally or metaphorically.
And call it what you like. The Devil’s bargain. The rat race. Oligarchic capitalism. It’s water from the same sulfur spring and it’s a bad god damn deal. Even if you play the game and ‘win’, an increasingly unlikely scenario, the best you get is the illusion of liberty, on some jeep trail on the weekend, or the illusion of safety, as in a pension that can evaporate at the stroke of some ruler’s pen.
And so I say: Up the ass of the ruler class. Fuck them all. Liberty and justice for all. Right. Now.
Not chaos. Not a short nasty brutish life per Hobbes’ lie. Not gunfights with your neighbors, whether they’re cops or not.
Communal anarchy. Or, if you like, Christianity. Loving your neighbor as yourself. Turning the other cheek if he should strike it. Real Christianity, not the god hates fags kind, and not the puritan capitalist bastardization of it either. (“I’ve got mine, Jack. And as for you–I’m recycling. I’m voting for Biden. I’m giving to charity. Sorry about you having to live in your car, and sorry our cops killed your brother, but I’m only one person, and a good one. Underneath. Really.”)
Take away what one billionaire has stolen from us all, and suddenly every mother’s son has health care.
Take back from another petty tyrant, and end homelessness for good.
Take back all the ill-gotten gains and Elon’s fourth boat and Jeff’s ninth mansion, and everybody gets a living wage and a life filled with the joy of the real liberty we gave up on long ago.
Shut down the hundreds of military bases all over the world, and suddenly become paradoxically secure for the first time in your life. No more World Trade Centers.
No more slaves. No more “driving while black”.
They didn’t use money in Starfleet or the Federation, you know. You liked that show, right? Kwai Chang Caine wouldn’t accept coin. Aboard the good ship Serenity in the series called Firefly, they didn’t mount weapons. They lived aboard a perpetual unarmed trade ship, they never settled down, they were always dirt poor, and they lived glorious lives of love and adventure that any sane person would envy.
Cap personal net worth at five million. Ten million, I don’t care. Make yourself more than you need for ten lifetimes, and after that the excessive profits go back to your fellow souls of the commonwealth. Common. Wealth.
Scoff at me: Utopian! Bum! Heretic!
Let me just ask you simply and kindly what your alternative is.
Maybe you’ll tell me that we’ll avert the death of the planet with technology. Magic atmosphere dust from Bill Gates. Solar and wind from Al Gore. Refugee spaceships from Elon Musk, for pitying fuck’s sake.
Go on in the usual way, and even if your way ‘wins’, the world you live in, slave in for the Man, is still ugly and vile and unsafe and unfree for damn near everybody. It’s not a world worth saving, darlings.
Scream at me that I’m wrong. Bellow at me that the poor are always with us. Screech, about the dignity of work and Other Capitalopuritan Dogmas of Deceit. Rattle your chains as you shake your fist at me.
Your bleeding bloody broken heart knows better.
Anarchy now.