http://attempter.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/globalization-brief/

By “technology” I meant modern technology which transcends being a tool, but which in dialectical turn becomes dominant over humans themselves, forcing them to conform to it as least as much as it obeys them.

I don’t have a clear rule for when that changeover occurs, although there too fossil fuels seem to have been the critical input.

As far as technology’s dictatorship over humanity, I’m also not certain what’s the proportion of technology’s own inertia (even many anarchists implicitly admit they’re slaves to this or that modern technology and can’t imagine life without it), and what’s the result of strategic deployment by elites.

At any rate, the latter is politically the most important point, so that’s the one I focus on.

I do think that the conscious philosophy and intentional practice of positive democracy is our best bet to overcome such age-old sources of conflict.

Technology is merely “know-how”. Mastering a craft, art, or skill. Writing, pencils, and books are “technologies”. Banging open a pine nut using a rock is “technology”.

Maybe the technologies you take issue with have the characteristic of not being widely accessible or “democratic”. Those, I would agree, tend toward the suspect. However, much as genetically-modified foodstuffs or atom bombs are horrid technologies, so is the universal cheap-and-easy-to-set-up waterboard (just to re-introduce our medieval theme!).

I haven’t seen anyone on this blog defending the totalitarian regimes of Stalin or Mao. What I have seen are people trying to open up the eyes (of Americans, for the most part) to the fact that state capitalism is, also, its own kind of totalitarianism.

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If you’re concerned about reality subverting mumbo-jumbo, meanwhile, I can’t say that I’m all that sorry for your displeasure. The Church has been a horrific tool of oppression and exploitation all on its own: the excuse for the existence of another pointless parasitical class, offering the downtrodden scraps of hope in an afterlife, in order to distract them from the one currently on offer. Christian churches are profoundly authoritarian and generally pride themselves on their refusal to challenge, if not their outright support of, right-wing/corporate governments and the status quo. (I say right-wing, only because left-wing totalitarian governments did away with them as institutions.)

Not to say that there aren’t some good religious people involved in social justice movements. This is a favorite quote of mine: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why are they poor, they call me a Communist.” -Hélder Câmara

The Middle Ages may have a special spiritual significance for you, Jim, but I see them as marked by expansionist Crusades (which the US is currently re-enacting), the wholesale torture and murder of “heretics” and “witches”, the novel idea of exempting the clergy from taxes, the expropriation and special taxation of Jews along with edicts of total expulsion (England, Spain), etc., etc., etc. If these are the “roots of Western humanity”, then I’m re-thinking my attitude towards Round-Up.

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I’d like Russ, in his honing, to see if he can address the questions I posed earlier: can the re-localization that we must undergo occur without falling prey to violent and energy-sucking tribalism, racism and religionism? Can we create a new positive appreciation of place? of limits as positive challenges? Of spiritual work as an internalized individual process rather than an externalized group process? Can we agree that we are all of one blood, and that we are all connected to and dependent upon a single life-giving entity, which is not supernatural but completely natural: the actual earth we are standing on?

And of course it’s in total contrast with any form of socialism or democracy.

In the post-oil neofeudalism being planned, most workers will return literally to this land peasant status. (This will be necessary to replace fossil fuel agricultural inputs.) But in general we’ll be tied to our “job” serfdom through systematic debt indenture. The result will be the same socioeconomic and juridical status as that of the medieval serf.

I don’t know if you read this post

http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/part-4-the-full-fury-of-the-new-feudal-war-the-intended-end-state/

but it makes most clear what I mean by neofeudal.

So I think it does bear comparison with the worst of our modern tyrannies. It’s the modern, corporatist totalitarian form of the old feudal structure.

And I know the feudal history you mention. My descriptions here, pejorative as you say, refer to the fact that today’s kleptocracy wants to restore the most tyrannical economic and political features of feudalism. They want the worst of all worlds.

In fact, somewhere I wrote that this neo-feudalism is far worse than the medieval variety, because it would be imposed on a population with no organic, native cohesion, no connection with the land, no practical knowledge of it, and lacking even whatever consolation medieval Christianity offered.

It’ll just be the direct exploitation and brutalization of a helpless, confused aggregation of atoms.

That’s what the criminals intend. So we need to work to defeat that, on every level.

BTW, did you mean to post this comment in this thread, or in the one about corporations and feudalism?

Many feudal arrangement stemmed from the fact of a vast social insecurity as a result of the breakdown of the Roman Empire. Also, kingship in the sense it had prior to the renaissance, was far from the absolutist monarchies that came later and were immediately prior to the modern world.