There Must Be Something Else

The best lies are not lies but half-truths and implied half-truths are more powerful than what is directly said. We see this in our news. Leave out the part where you provoke someone to defend themselves and suddenly you have justification for further attacks found in someones defense against the initial attack. They tell you the presence of war is peace and the absence of war is violence. Our governments continuously tell us that the people shooting and killing are the ‘peacemakers’. The political narrative is distorted by lies, half-truths and rhetoric to evoke an emotional reaction without understanding a reality. The rhetoric goes further to often justify and promote this same violence and murder by re-painting it with words of patriotism, defense, freedom and other twisted rhetoric.

Patriotism is not only a part of nationalism, it is a crux of it, and often what most call patriotism is nothing more than nationalism. Nationalism is defined by as: a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. Often, it is the belief that an ethnic group has a right to statehood, or that citizenship in a state should be limited to one ethnic group, or that multinationality in a single state should necessarily comprise the right to express and exercise national identity even by minorities. It can also include the belief that the state is of primary importance, or the belief that one state is naturally superior to all other states. When governments rally around their anti-migrant war mongering praise of the nation they choose to mask this with the term ‘patriotism’, the love and devotion to the nation that is seen as ‘number one’. The belief of the so-called patriot is very much one that embraces the idea that their governments are naturally superior to all other states. This superiority is quite often falsely defined with words such as freedom, liberty, equality or rights. There is little emphasis on what those actually mean, outside of more emotional rhetoric that tends to be vague at best. There is no defined ethic or concept that all can see under a true definition. The declared belief in equality does not apply to many people groups still to this day. You must begin to question the rhetoric you are being fed. Look for the implied messages and the half-truths.

The New World Order conspiracy analysis is painfully close to the truth. Elites do work to push their agendas without public scrutiny. The World Bank, NATO, and IMF are all global institutions which leverage their power to pursue the interests of American empire and subdue rising threats from below. Globalization, a euphemism for expansionism, continues to have devastating effects on developing nations as transnational corporations ship  jobs overseas or across the border where they can exploit the cheapest labour markets. The mainstream media has evolved to serve its own interests (and thus the interests of the status-quo power structures upon which they depend). In working to maintain their dominance as  super-powers, Western nationa has transitioned from using the communist-bogeyman to the much more effective and never-ending threat of terrorism to continually increase its military might. And an appalling 1% of the world's population owns over 40% of the world's wealth, while over 3 billion people lanquish in dire poverty.

That these things are happening is not in dispute. What we have to question is the conclusions we should draw from them. This is important because we need to make sense of all these problems so we can ultimately determine our success in solving them. Blaming a few individuals for the problem leads to one set of conclusions and strategies for change. Recognising the deeper economic forces of which these individuals are only a part will lead to another set of strategies.  So let's think very seriously about the usefulness of framing all of the world’s problems around an elite group of bankers quest for world domination. If this narrative is misleading, then it will mislead everyone's efforts who take it seriously. The problem isn't "them." They are just symptoms of the deeper cause. Kill off all of the elite today and new people would jockey to take their place.

But the good news is, people are waking up, and they are rejecting the values of rulers. Capitalism is a worldwide system that over several centuries, carried their practices to every corner of the globe, destroying and displacing other traditions, usually through warfare. World history for the last five hundred years is thus mainly the story of this assault that capitalists have thrown against the world’s peoples, beginning with the peasants of Europe, in order to seize their lands and force them into wage slavery (wealth-making propertyless labourers). You should be aware that countries that came to be called communist were just capitalist states doing what capitalists always do: enslave and exploit their populations. There was always a tradition that perceived the Soviet experiment and the colonial revolutions that aped it in these terms. Now that the Soviet Union is gone, more people are realizing that those so-called communist countries were just capitalism in a different form and had little to do with the struggle against capitalism.

It is impossible to defeat our ruling class by force of arms. The level of firepower currently possessed by all major governments and most minor ones is simply overwhelming. It is bought with the expropriated wealth of billions of people. For any opposition movement to think that it can acquire, maintain, and deploy a similarly vast and sophisticated armament is ludicrous. I have nothing against armed struggle in principle (although of course we don't like it); We just don’t think it can work now. It would take an empire as enormous and rich as capitalism itself to fight capitalists on their own terms. This is something the working classes of the world will never have, nor should we even want it. It means that we have to look to and invent if necessary other weapons, other tactics. But we must be careful not to fall into the nonviolence/violence trap. Is tearing down a fence a violent act or is it resistance to the violence of those who erected the fence in the first place? Is throwing a tear gas canister back at the police who fired it an act of violence or is it resistance to an act of violence? Nonviolence is a key ideological weapon of a violent ruling class. This class uses it to pacify us; it uses its mass media to preach nonviolence incessantly. Such rhetoric is an effective weapon because we all (but they don't) want to live in a peaceful world. We must never forget that we are at war, however, and that we have been for five hundred years. We are involved in class warfare. This defines our situation historically and sets limits to what we can do. It would be nice to think of peace, for example, but this is out of the question. It is excluded as an option by historical conditions. Peace can be achieved only by destroying capitalism. A major weapon of capitalists has always been to simply murder those who are threatening their rule. Capitalists (generically speaking) are not merely thieves; they are murderers. Their theft and murder is on a scale never seen before in history - a scale so vast it boggles the mind. Capitalists make Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun look like saints. This is a terrible enemy we face. Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes war, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks; it is a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue to do so.

We can turn now to a notion of how we might want to live. Let’s assume, for the moment, that we could start from scratch to build a totally new social world, building up our neighborhoods just the way we wanted. What would they look like? What would the core social forms be? In order for capitalism to be destroyed, millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise, we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.

The content of this vision is actually not new at all. The goal socialists has always been to restore community. Marx defined socialism as a free association of producers, and the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all. The aim have always been clear: to abolish wage slavery, eradicate a social order organized solely around the accumulation of capital for its own sake, and establish in its place a society of free people who democratically and cooperatively self-determine the shape of their social world.