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it seems to me that the information host is posting is an index of the scale and effects of conservative class warfare. it provides a good indication of what has been happening behind the screen of conservative market-libertarian ideology, behind the one-dimensional militarism, behind the jingoism, behind the demonization of the state and dismantling of regulations.
it is an index of the degree to which the right's response to globalizing capitalism is to give up trying to render the american system coherent.
"take what you can now, boys, the shit is going to hit the fan.
we dont know what to do, so taking short-term profits seem a good idea.
and dont worry about the social consequences: there is a nice extensive "security" apparatus set up to crush any and all coherent response."
so it appears that we are the enemy: those of us not participant in the feeding frenzy of the past 20 years, those of us not part of the american economic aristocracy. and who knows, maybe the right really does think at some level, collectively, that there will be a deus-ex-machina of armageddeon time to absolve them of responsibilty for the consequences of what they have been doing.
the american system is obviously very vulnerable at this point.
but that vulnerablity--and internal incoherence--does NOT automatically translate into anything like a call for revolution. we are already seeing, and have been seeing, the "management" of class warfare by state repression: anything like a direct violent confrontation with the state now would be a simple, ugly bloodbath---which would no doubt be accompanied by systematic approval across the whole of the existing media apparatus, if such a thing were to remain in place. there is nothing to prevent the orchestration of such consent, just as there is nothing to prevent other forms of suicide.
where the existing order is vulnerable is ideology.
there must be a sense that another way of doing things is possible generated--and consent for the existing order will perhaps begin to evaporate as a sense that something else is possible takes hold.
but there IS NO SUCH SENSE at the moment because folk who are politically inclined to develop such a view have not been doing so.
they are themselves caught in the same problem: the collapse of the older left tradition has created serious problems for the articulation of alternate possibilities.
what ought to happen is that folk who think that other ways of organizing are possible should stop wasting their time on messageboards and begin the long, patient work of constructing counterhegemonies.
in the french revolution, the trigger for chaos was the implosion of the state. the phases of the revolution itself can be seen as collective efforts to work out and implement alternative arrangements in the context of intense real-time pressure.
the end result was military dictatorship.
in the russian revolution, a parallel type of dynamic unfolded, and the end result was another form of dictatorship, which was substantially worse.
without some kind of sustained effort to generate political positions that outline how another type of arrangement is possible, what it might look like, what kind of collective self-organization is entailed and so on, the implosion of the existing american order--which i sometimes think the american right is preparing for---will result in nothing good.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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