Politics is Dead. The Situation Today

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There’s lots of arguments in today’s Western “politics” about how to arrange these, but nothing more.

 

 

Most, regardless of their superficial politics, still believe they personally will have a lucrative career within the productionist/consumerist system. Many believe they will someday, somehow, be rich.

 

Most, regardless of superficial politics, still believe in civilization’s infinite energy consumption forever. This includes most who pay lip service to resource limits.

 

Most, regardless of superficial politics, still believe the status quo path is the path of progress, and everything will turn out for the best as long as humanity stays the course.

 

Almost none have liberated themselves from these. That’s why no coherent social/cultural/political movement has arisen against the productionist, extreme energy system. A prerequisite for this is that a sufficient number of articulate people must psychologically burn their bridges and irrevocably renounce all religious faith in the productionist global system. But so far humanity lacks even a small cadre of writers and intellectuals who can begin systematically propagating the new and necessary truths. So far all intellectuals remain co-opted and system-coordinated. But history proves that one of the surest indicators of a coming revolutionary situation, probably a necessary precondition, is that a tangible faction burn its bridges and turn definitively against the system, and actively propagate the reasons why.

 

At the moment there seems not to be any politically radical situation on the immediate horizon. (Except, of course, for what be any objective measure is the extreme radicalism of the status quo; let’s never forget that objectively we’re the moderates, while it’s today’s governments, corporations, scientific establishment, and mainstream media who are history’s most radical nihilist bomb-throwers.) What is the situation?

 

 

1. All the evidence is that corporations are destructive in every way, and we’d be much better off without them. (Even by middle class capitalist measures, those who think a mass middle class is desirable would be better off.)

 

2. But people don’t want to know this evidence. They prefer to believe Randroid lies that corporations are the “wealth creators”, the “job creators”. Why do people, including almost all progressives and most alleged radicals, keep voting for corporate rule and otherwise supporting it?

 

3. Probably part of it is path dependency. The people, and especially the cultural/intellectual elites, have become used to corporations being the main organizational form of capitalism and regard it as too difficult to think of switching to a different capitalist mode of organization, even if in the long run that would be better. (That’s even assuming the immortality of capitalism, let alone the economic and physical fact that capitalism, and productionism as such, are mortal and will soon die of resource limits the way a fly trapped indoors becomes sluggish and dies.)

 

4. But I think the main reason lies much deeper. Although the people steadily are being liquidated economically and physically, for the moment they’re still beneficiaries of the corporate West’s system of looting the planet and humanity so that a small group can squat on the surface of the Earth as parasites. Westerners are inured to this parasite existence and don’t want to give it up. They cling to it. They don’t even want to think about the proposition that if they were to transform their lives by taking responsibility for themselves and working to earn their keep as part of the ecology, they’d be much happier and more fulfilled, and over the longer run they’d sustain a much better material existence since industrial agriculture and all other systems based on infinite fossil fuels must inevitably collapse, and because the corporations led by the banks inexorably are liquidating them anyway.

 

5. But they feel the ground shaking and sense that all this must perish, that their own parasitism is running out of time, that capitalism is mortal. This gives them two reasons to double down on corporate rule.

 

(A) If time is running out, there’s no time to spare to transform capitalism. The “longer run” of an “improved capitalism” would never have time to exist anyway, so there’s no point reforming capitalism itself. (This explains the typical falsity of all claims of alleged reformists. The very notion is self-contradicting, since why would you as a pro-capitalist plant the seed of a tree which you sense will never have time to grow?) It’s similar to those who think the rapture will come soon, so why not trash the Earth.

 

(B) Desperate times call for desperate measures, and for those committed to faith in capitalism and parasitism like I described above, the less sustainable mundane belief in the perpetuity of growth capitalism becomes, the more necessary it becomes to resort to deranged Randroid notions. This is the path from toleration of corporations, to exalting them, to seeing them as actual “persons”, along the way developing an increasingly intense superstition, bordering on religion, about money and fictive numbers like GDP, trade balance, etc. The next logical step will some form of worshiping the corporations. All this is because it seems the only way to prop up belief in the perpetuation of the parasite way of life.

 

6. This also is part of the willingness and eagerness of the scientism/technocracy cult to be coordinated by corporate rule. They too see their own perpetuation as dependent in this way. Productionist STEM types have to be Randroids in order to believe they can overcome the Earth’s strong inertia to slough them off of its surface like the parasites they are.

 

7. And it goes toward the leftist tendency to regress to bourgeois ideology where it comes to scientism and technocracy. Since most Western leftists, just as much as any other Westerners, are physical parasites at the expense of humanity and Earth and want to be parasites, they too theologically must believe in the immortality of growth capitalism. They’ll continue to pay lip service to “liberating” all the machinery for the people; this explains the reactionary adherence of many of them to Marxism long after its disproof by history. But this is the same scam liberals run, pretending to want power for the people, really wanting it for themselves, and really to conserve the power of the existing elites. They’re really just talking about sustaining their own parasitism, by serving as misdirectional propagandists for the corporate system.

 

But rather than directly genuflect before the corporations the way the liberals and STEMs do, the pseudo-radicals launder their corporatism through scientism/technocracy. But since the corporations control science and engineering (as per Historical Materialism 101, as any real leftist would know), it amounts to the same thing.

 

8. All of which explains the great popularity among liberals, leftists, as well as many conservatives, of any version of “we can save the earth, avert the worst of climate change, attain socioeconomic equity/justice, within capitalism.”

 

 

Because all of these beliefs are false, because it’s all based on the plunder and destruction of humanity and the Earth, because it’s all evil, and because it’s physically impossible to sustain; because in all these ways the fundamentals are rotten, the result, for those committed to the “politics” of wickedness and impossibility, must become increasingly deranged, self-destructive, and eventually suicidal.

 

One predicted result is the advent of the likes of Trump. Trump is the logical product of the system. Not just Republicans, but Democrats, and all adherents of electoralism as this system has it, voted 100% for Trump.

 

As they are evidently committed to doubling down on this exact same course, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, they’ll soon vote unanimously for far worse than Trump. It’s hardwired into their pathology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scabs

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The EU’s Green Party, they of learning to love nuke waste trains:

 

We are convinced that strong and truly independent European institutions like the EFSA (the food safety authority), EMA (the medicines agency) and ECHA (the chemicals agency) are crucial for defending public health and building public trust in the EU.

 

We abolitionists are committed to demolishing all public trust in Monsanto and its allied globalist agencies. We see here how so-called electoral “alternatives” are offering no alternative whatsoever. The problem is religious belief in corporate normative regulators as such. The problem is fundamentalist belief in “regulating” corporate cancer poisons rather than abolishing them. These people are not part of the solution. They are part of the problem.

 

Never has it been more true of anyone than of today’s civic flat-earthers that they learn nothing and forget nothing: They still want “public trust in the EU”, public trust in the EFSA, and in the EPA, in corporate electoralism and the technocratic regulatory state as such.

 

It’s congenital with them. Humanity must find the wellsprings of its resurgence elsewhere.

 

 

 

 

The Vote Was Unanimous for Trump

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The status quo is impossible.

 

1. Fossil fuels are finite, and this one-off ahistorical extreme level of energy consumption is now reaching its end, never to be repeated. Humanity soon shall resume historical levels of energy consumption. Therefore the extremely expensive, luxurious, high-maintenance civilization dependent upon this extreme energy consumption will collapse. In particular, industrial agriculture will collapse, thereby dooming to famine any civilization which has not transformed to agroecology.

 

2. Ecosystems at every scale are at their breaking point. Climate change, poisonism, and the general destruction of biodiversity are reaching their kinetic climaxes for civilization. This fragile hothouse flower shall not withstand general ecosystem collapse. Again, the most directly catastrophic effect will be the collapse of industrial agriculture, dependent upon the environment as it remains in spite of all its attempts to lift itself outside of the Earth.

 

3. The corporate technocracy system is committed to totalitarian tyranny. Even if capitalist civilization were physically possible to sustain, the people are being liquidated politically, economically, and eventually physically. We see the global campaign to drive all people legally and physically off the land. This portends their literal disappearance from the planet. This campaign has been most aggressive across the global South but increasingly is liquidating the Western middle class as well. Their liquidation may be more gradual so far (but it’s accelerating), but their final destination is the same as that of the South’s people of the land: Famine and pandemics amid the shantytowns.

 

Therefore the rational, sane course of action is to commit to building movements toward the necessary new cultural, agronomic, socioeconomic, and political forms. The rational, sane course is to build Food Sovereignty and agroecology.

 

Conversely, any mode of action or support for the status quo is irrational and insane. Any such action or support, however superficially “moderate”, implicitly seeks the most extreme insanity since in its death throes the corporate system will resort to literally any measure it can, no matter how extreme in its violence, to maintain its power and existence. Prior to these death throes the system’s attempts to prop itself up will manifest in ever greater political and economic volatility, which comprise a direct cultural mirror of the ever greater physical volatility generated by climate chaos and poisonism.

 

 

In all these ways the masses feel the ground shake beneath their feet.

 

And they feel how the corporate system is destroying their economic existence.

 

And they sense how the system itself is tottering.

 

All this musters tremendous free-floating fear. Left to itself this fear-itself makes most people inherently timid, conservative, desperate to believe in the very status quo which afflicts them. Most are desperate to believe the very thing which is most insane and self-destructive for them to believe, that they don’t feel the ground shake beneath their feet. This desperate will to self-delusion drives the masses to their own volatility and implicit extremism corresponding with that of the elites and the physical environment.

 

This was the situation for the 2016 US plebiscite on the corporate globalization system. One’s choices were to vote Yes to the status quo in all its chaotic extremism, or No.

 

 

Let’s look at the major subdivisions among the Yes vote.

 

*The Clinton vote was the most conservative vote. Superficially this was the most acquiescent status quo Yes vote. This was the most obvious way to say “I like the status quo and want nothing to change.” This most pure status quo vote seemed the safest, most conservative way to vote Yes and refuse to acknowledge the ground shaking. Thus the voters refuse to face reality, they flee into fantasy, and they vote for the system’s volatility, which led to Trump.

 

*Most absurd were the Sanders and Stein fantasies. Ironically this mode of voting Yes indicates the most active, conscious affirmation of the status quo, since it takes the form of constructive criticism. One votes this way to say, “I like the status quo but have thought about it and want some changes.” These voters are more likely to pay lip service to reality, but are still unwilling or unable truly to face reality, reject the status quo, and commit to what’s necessary. Thus they too ultimately refuse to confront the crises, they flee to fantasy, and they vote for the status quo volatility which created Trump.

 

*Then we have the de jure Trump vote. Some of the wealthy and some die-hard cultists may fail to feel the ground shake and voted only for a change of parties. Some feel the ground shake and may vaguely want some kind of change but are uncommitted enough that the corporate system still could manipulate them into voting Yes to it. Most are like the others and refuse to face reality, and these voted most directly for the most volatile manifestation of the system-driven chaos. Regardless, the de jure Trump vote was the same vote as the others, the refusal to deal with reality and the will to prop up the fantasy, and the binge, to the bitter end.

 

All three of these Yes modes are modes of the refusal to liberate oneself, refusal to acknowledge and confront reality, refusal to commit to the necessary ideas and actions, and the desperate clinging to the electoral religious fantasy. Thus they all voted for whatever result the plebiscite coughed up. They voted unanimously for it.

 

It wasn’t inevitable that the wheel would land on Trump and not Clinton. The vote was close enough, a few breaks this way or that and it could’ve landed on her. But all the voters voted Yes. This was the only vote possible.

 

 

And then there’s the No vote. There may be some non-voters who are so vegetative that they don’t feel the ground shake and don’t care. Most of the No voters recognize that there’s no point to the rituals of the system and have given up on these. But they haven’t committed to the necessary movement action.

 

Then there’s the small group of affirmatively conscious anti-voters like myself. Most of these also haven’t committed.

 

Objectively the people are aware that it all matters, it all counts, abstention is not an option. The Yes voters are those who react by doubling down, digging the hole faster, “committing” by denying reality. The No voters are those who have stopped digging, even if most don’t yet exert themselves to climb out of the pit. But in principle it’s they who may be able to climb, whereas those who can only look downward and dig faster are unable even to think of climbing.

 

They’re the ones who dug up Trump. All of them. And what will they dig up next, if we don’t climb up out of the pit and fill it in behind us?

 

 

 

 

 

“No Place to Go With Your Vote”

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Where can I GO with this thing?!

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Here’s a quote I saw in an internet comment: “I have to say that I think the duopoly is also part of the problem with holding politicians accountable, sometimes there is no place to really go with your vote.”

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That’s a common sentiment and superficially seems reasonable enough, but even so it strikes me as peculiar.

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By now such a thought reads to me as if it’s meant literally: One’s vote is a physical thing one is carrying, like a bomb with a lit fuse, and one must physically go somewhere safely to dispose of it. Thus if there’s only two or three bomb-proof receptacles where you can deposit your bomb, you must choose one of them. Or it’s like a barrel of toxic waste one accumulated which one has to dispose of somewhere.

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I’ve never thought of my vote, or anyone’s vote, in such a way. It’s only a potential, and if there’s no way to render it kinetic, it doesn’t exist anyway. In that case to go through the ritual anyway is just idle fantasizing or entertainment or whatever.

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No place to go with your vote? But that doesn’t exist as any real thing, so you don’t need to go anywhere with it. Free yourself. Let it go.

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The fact is, electoralism under corporate rule has zero to do with democracy and political participation. On the contrary, corporate electoralism is anti-political, the consumerist version of politics. It is to true participatory politics and democracy what McDonald’s is to fine cooking and cuisine. Electoralism has been the subject of systematic indoctrination and propaganda precisely in order to help discredit and suppress true politics and democracy. By now it’s succeeded even in eradicating the very idea of these, and almost everyone inertially, without a thought, takes it for granted that voting is the essence of democracy, the beginning and the end. But this is nothing but one of the biggest of big lies.

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Freeing our minds is the first step toward liberating our actions toward the goal of true freedom. We can start by taking it as axiomatic that anything the government, corporations, mainstream media, mainstream churches, academia, NGOs, celebrity flacks, or anyone else “respectable” wants us to do, is absolutely something we mustn’t do. Or, in such a case as belief in the electoral cult, which we must stop doing.

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In saying this I don’t mean there’s never a context for voting. I mean that voting can be meaningful only as the tactical extension of a fully coherent and strategized anti-corporate movement and campaign which exists and operates from outside the system.

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Only when we have created the place where we are, will we then have a place to go.

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Free As A Bird

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Freedom is the most ambivalent ideal. It offers the great promise. (The promise of what? This by definition, or lack of definition, can never be answered. The very mutability is the promise and the source of what warmth it has.) It also promises danger. It often brings persecution. Freedom is so ambivalent that almost no one truly loves it, but only for himself and those he identifies as his, and will persecute the freedom of others. Most of all those who hate all freedom but Mammon’s devilish perversion of freedom, which is the license extended only to those who accumulate sufficient markers of the beast, money and property, which then become the intoxicants and weapons of this perversion of freedom. But in fact this is not freedom at all but universal enslavement to the markers.

 

Yet even those who love some measure of freedom, and even the few willing to go all the way and truly be anarchists, must love with ambivalence. The truly free are always doomed to some measure of outlawry, and indeed the outlawed of medieval times were often called “free as a bird”. Is an outlaw, is a runaway slave “free”? In the end the exercise of freedom, the faith-in-action of freedom, is always the quest to attain freedom. Freedom can never be a noun, only a verb. It is never a place, only a striving.

 

This recently has been borne in most unequivocally, there’s no there here and no striving to get to any other “there”. The vileness of the circus, everyone reveling in dementia, with even those who affect superiority over it really doing this only as their pose in the thick of it, their own cultism/fandom demonstrated by their fixation, indistinguishable from that of a paid hack….

 

It’s horrible to have it flaunted constantly even when you’re making the effort to avoid it. It’s horrible forcibly to be made aware of the basic evil of those you know personally and who you’d normally think are better than that. But few, if they can’t be good, at least have the decency to be “apathetic”, as the term goes…

 

To be sure, most of them exemplify the “banality of evil”, and their cheering for the Democrat (or in a few cases Republican) Party is based on stupidity, short-sightedness and ignorance more than conscious malignity. But that doesn’t change the fact that, at least among middle class Westerners with formal education and internet access, all ignorance is willful ignorance. Whatever they don’t know is because they don’t want to know and don’t care.

 

This is what Nietzsche thought was the most excruciating evil of all, the day to day petty evil of an atomized society completely submerged in Mammon and suffused to the core with the ideology and temperament of Mammon. (Or, as it is called in economic history, the bourgeois ideology.)

 

Well, at least this situation has the virtue of clarity. To take another point from Nietzsche, try to prove your enemies did you some good. So in one sense I owe a debt to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and the whole vomitous crew. They, and the lunacy they’re still capable of generating amid a modern civilization after all these years of their self-evident insanity, failures and crimes, is the final proof that this is a terminal case. There’s nothing left but evil and what’s been co-opted by evil in any institution, any idea that has anything to do with this civilization. I no longer believe we can redeem from this shipwreck the idea of democracy the way I used to believe. Whatever may exist of positive democracy and participatory politics in a post-oil, post-capitalist world will have to evolve anew with no taint carried over from the modern Babylon’s funhouse mirror images of “democracy”. Those who want to be agents of this evolution will have to write and preach this way.

 

The only thing we can redeem from the wreckage is the science of agroecology, though this exception proves the rule since it is not new but rather the form contemporaneous with modernity of the evolution of thousands of years of human ingenuity in getting our daily bread. It turns out that agriculture as commonly known was wrongly seen as the final form rather than perhaps a necessary transition. The final form, which offers the only solution for bread, health, freedom, and happiness, is agroecology’s middle form between agriculture and horticulture, its fruitful melding of empiricism and science.

 

And so the great task is neither to “reform” modernity nor even to explore its alleged transition to new forms. Physically, culturally, spiritually, the great fossil fuel binge has been a unique, ahistorical experience which temporarily broke with the normal path of evolution. This normal path is now about to resume. Therefore the task requires a much greater arc of thought and word and action which will survey the greater evolution, make history its province, and search out the true threads which flow unhindered from the best aspirations of the past to the best ambitions for the future. This is the only reformation, redemption, renaissance, revolution, and restoration. Those who will be part of this true natural, historical, spiritual evolution will write and preach from the aspect of a thousand years hence, and a thousand years ago.

 

To be sure, the fundamentalist cult of false election is an aspect of modern Mammon. This cult didn’t exist prior to the advent of fossil fueled modernity and the rise of capitalism. Thankfully we can expect it will perish with these.

 

As Jesus said, it is impossible to worship God and Mammon, the murderer of all human values and holy faith. We add, it is impossible to exalt freedom and Mammon, the murderer of all freedom and exalter of psychopathic license for those who have sufficient money. Finally, it is impossible to cherish the good and Mammon, the murderer of all love, all friendship, the killer of all that makes us human.

 

Well, if a prophet is doomed to have no honor in his own country, then it’s no surprise I have no honor or help or support or friendship in the depths of modern America, Babylon, the ground zero of Mammon. Here I must accept that I’m alone. My time and place is only there and there, where “there” exists. Not here.

 

 

 

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False Election By Demonic Corporate Power, True Election By Grace and Human Power

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In whatever manifestation, the movement is the vine.

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And yet, are we too not in the position of primal humanity trying to decipher and influence the uncanny wilderness? Facing the malign immensity of totalitarian corporate domination, we face either demonic evil or the most inhuman robotic callousness. Facing the corporate global war, the extreme corporate campaigns of violence, rapine, plunder, and environmental destruction, the corporate eugenic technologies of biological, chemical, and psychological warfare against all of humanity, all of life itself, facing this even secularists seem to regard these corporations with religious awe, as demons, and have absolutely no rational clue about what to do.

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That’s why even those who want to oppose these abominations have no ideas at all nor do they seem even to be looking for new ideas. They only sit inert and stare in awe. All they can think to do is regurgitate long-failed ideological formulas which stopped having even the most superficial relation to reality decades ago at the latest. Most of all they continue performing the electoral rite, because this still resonates with some childhood intimation. By now it’s practically the Enlightenment equivalent of race memory. People garble meaningless mantras about voting and government which have slipped all the old moorings and float without rational plan or purpose as dead ships with ghost crews.

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Nothing has ever been more clear than that anyone who still has belief in the false election does so with neither a plan nor a clue.

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The one and only true election is the election by which the people demonstrate their grace through their faith-in-action. In secular political philosophy this is called positive freedom, in Christianity it’s called being born again to the Holy Spirit and living this Spirit. Either way it’s the election by grace, and the only way forward to an affirmative revolution which has now become an absolute historical, ecological, spiritual Necessity.

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