Real Leftists Know Capitalism Is Too Evil to Reform

“Human Rights Not Corporate Rights”/“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”: another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma images, as relevant now as when it was new. (The more conventionally journalistic pictures were published by Reader Supported News as the story developed in 2011 and 2012.) Pentax MX, 100mm SMC Pentax f/2.8, Fujicolor 800, exposure data not recorded; posterization by Gimp Image Editor. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view full size.)

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(Note: Apparently when I boasted last week of feeling too healthy to work, I called down the wrath of the gods. That very night I was smitten by a nasty bug, which kept me bedridden six days and for which I am still taking antibiotics.) 

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SOMETIMES WHEN I write a comment for some other website, the result is so relevant I have no doubt it should be included here. Far more infrequent is the comment that expands into its own Outside Agitator's Notebook essay, and the comment that does so in such a way it suggests its own illustration from my stock photo files is downright rare. But that is what happened when I involved myself in a discussion about capitalism that was sparked by Charles Pierce's most recent report on how the breathtakingly outspoken but tragically ineffectual Sen. Elizabeth Warren is living up to her poignantly defiant post-election pledge,  “I won't just be your senator, I'll be your champion.” Pierce's piece,  titled “Senator Warren Won't Be Taking Your BS,” was picked up by Reader Supported News from Esquire magazine on 5 July, and is well worth reading, not the least for its combative joy. But as I was quick to point out in the subsequent discussion – though I said it there in far more gentle terms – anyone who still truly believes capitalism can be reformed is either in stubborn denial of the past 80 years of USian history or is suffering from clinical dementia.

In this context, Sen. Warren's heroic efforts – and they are indeed so heroic, some of us who remember the fates of Sen Paul Wellstone and Sen. Robert Kennedy have already begun to fear for her life – are a morality play, (yet another) teachable moment in the nature of capitalism. It is capitalism, remember, that seeks its ultimate fulfillment via fascism and Nazism: think not just of Hitler and Mussolini, whom Wall Street financed into power, but of the imperial USian puppets Francisco Franco, Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza Debayle and Augusto Pinochet, not to mention Ngo Dinh Diem and the Shah of Iran. Now, today, it is capitalism matured into fascism that, albeit without the strutting dictators, has been elevated into the ruling ideology of the United States by the Mein Kampf equivalents written by Ayn Rand. (“Mein kampf” means “my struggle,” which beneath its specific historical identity is nevertheless the same theme of übermenschen versus üntermenschen that Rand later spelled out in her own tedious prose.) And now in its strident opposition to Sen. Warren's humanitarian courage, it is the Randite brand of capitalism-cum-fascism that is revealing itself by its ever-more-brazen embrace of the traditional fascist paradigm. Nothing more need be said about a federal policy that – as if to punish any youth of the 99 Percent who dares aspire toward a college education – deliberately condemns entire generations to choose between lifetimes of indentured servitude or “voluntary” service to the empire in its cannon-fodder legions.

Hence when a reasonably articulate poster on the Charles Pierce thread wrote of “peaceful protest” as a means of forcing capitalism to “respond to the 'priorities of the people,'” I replied with what to me is the most painfully obvious lesson of all USian history: that capitalism will never “respond to the 'priorities of the people.'” Why? Because capitalism, by definition, responds only to the priorities of the One Percent to produce more wealth at maximum profit – which invariably means maximum wretchedness imposed on the 99 Percent. Thus the only way to achieve the "priorities of the people" is to abolish capitalism. Which (necessarily revolutionary) step the USian 99 Percent is too viciously oppressed and fearfully bigoted and greedily self-absorbed by trinket materialism to ever dare take, peacefully or otherwise. Forget Occupy; stop fantasizing about progressive resistance movements that will never again be allowed to develop beyond the political equivalent of embryos, their partial-birth abortions the precise fulfillment of the domestic Gestapo purpose of the USian total surveillance state. Note instead the obvious examples of the South and the flyover midlands. Observe how so many 99 Percent USians cut their own throats economically by habitually voting for reactionary politicians and causes. And note too how the same trends have metastasized far beyond their signature domains.

 

The busy Pacific Northwest seaport city of Tacoma, Washington provides an especially repugnant example. I have lived here twice, the first time from 1978 through 1982, the second time since 2004, and I will no doubt die here. Though I have harped long and bitterly on the manner in which an overwhelming majority of Tacoma and Tacoma-area voters were persuaded by the meme “transit is welfare” to destroy their own local public transport system, it is a story that demands far more widespread notoriety than ever I can provide. The destruction was inflicted via two elections, the first in 2011, the second in 2012. The earlier election resulted in a 55-45 landslide defeat for pro-transit forces. It should have taught transit advocates the alleged pro-transit majority within the city of Tacoma is too Ayn-Rand hateful toward public-transport users to get off its socioeconomically bigoted arse and vote to sustain a service desperately needed by local lower-income people. Nor is this condemnation unfair; voting in Washington state takes only the physical effort required to mail in a ballot, and the class and racial conflicts inherent in the election were made obvious from the beginning of the 2011 campaign. But transit advocates remained blind to the realities underlying the defeat – a textbook example of how suppression of the historical truth of class-struggle cripples accurate analysis. Hence they merely hoped for the best in 2012, persisting in their refusal to acknowledge the bipartisan magnitude of local hostility toward lowest-income peoples – never mind the huge irony that most of the anti-transit voters are themselves only a little better off. While the second outcome seemed misleadingly close – in the unofficial results available to me on 25 November 2012, the anti-transit majority was only 695 votes – an additional 15,400 so-called “under-votes” indicate the real anti-transit majority is much larger. (Under-votes are otherwise filled-out ballots cast by people too disdainful of transit and transit users to mark a preference on the save-transit measure.) Not only do the under-votes echo the ruinously low turnout in the February 2011 results; for that very reason they seem to provide an accurate yardstick for measuring the true magnitude of anti-transit sentiment. That this is a valid hypothesis is substantiated by (A), the entire Seattle-Tacoma region's 44-year anti-transit history (at least seven of at least nine proposals rejected since 1968, a result documentably linked to xenophobia and bigotry), and (B), by various statements made by the voters themselves, typically to the effect “I won't vote against the poor, but I don't believe in coddling those people with welfare either.” Thus the anti-transit vote becomes a microcosm of the class hatreds that now characterize the USian political macrocosm. It is also probably the national unveiling of the newest and perhaps most vicious form of gentrification the Randite forces have yet conceived. 

I have been told the local transit authority used the approximately the same reasoning about the significance of the unprecedented number of under-votes when it made its own determination that further electoral efforts are pointless. In other words – particularly given the region's anti-transit history (which, by the way, proves its haughty claims to environmental enlightenment are rank hypocrisy if not Big Lies) – there is no antidote to the class-warfare poisons stirred up by the “transit is welfare” meme. Despite the hardships characteristic of the (permanent) oppressiveness of the USian economy and the increasingly zero-tolerance totalitarianism of the total-surveillance state the Ayn Rand fascists have imposed for their own protection, the USian masses remain hopelessly reactionary. They continue to identify with the oppressor, imagining that with but a little good luck, they too can be magically elevated into the One Percent aristocracy, never mind even the mainstream propaganda media now admits entry to such circles is by heredity only. Thus – ultimately because its Working Class refuses to recognize itself as such – Tacoma and its environs have already become notorious for their lack of adequate public transport. Indeed their self-inflicted shortcomings are the worst in all the comparably urbanized locales of the United States – and therefore they are the worst in the entire industrial world. If long-range projections are correct, the area will within a few more years have no local transit at all. When that happens, tens of thousands of women, men and children will be forced to move elsewhere. The dispossessed will include students, low-wage workers, elderly and disabled people, any others who cannot afford the skyrocketing costs of automobiles and are not physically strong enough to ride bikes nor desperate enough to risk their lives pedaling amongst road-raging motorists already infamous for their deadly hatred of bicyclists. Which is – or so I strongly suspect – precisely the compulsory exodus the local Ruling Class intends. 

Originally I intended to end this piece here, but then another poster on the Charles Pierce/Sen. Warren thread supposed I was too young to remember when the capitalists – terrified into a temporary false-humanitarianism by the Soviet Union and the socialist revolutions it represented and fostered even amidst its own huge failures – made sure “life was affordable.” Yes, I replied, I remembered that era very well, never mind the affordability was shared only by those who were male, heterosexual, Caucasian and/or not residents of some urban ghetto, rural shantytown, backwoods shack or First Nations reservation. Indeed, born in 1940 as I was, I lived at the apex of the so-called "American" Dream – the irony quotes demanded by the fact the Dream never much extended beyond the USian borders. Thus, thanks largely to my father, I was also educated in economic reality, which means I was taught to recognize capitalism as infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue (and therefore the closest approximation of Absolute Evil our species has yet evoked). I also learned to see the Dream for what it was: a capitalist Big Lie, the modern equivalent of the politically savvy Roman emperors' panem et circenses. Like the free bread and the spectacular events in the Coliseum and its myriad smaller-city counterparts, the Dream and its sequel the New Deal was intended only to opiate enough of the masses long enough to ensure the permanent brain-death of their revolutionary instincts. That's why – once the One Percenters had taken back all the power they lost during the halcyon years of Communism and socialism – the New Deal and the Dream itself were terminated forever, as was the so-called "American" experiment in constitutional governance. Now, with the capitalists once again free to be their innately savage Ayn Rand selves, it's back to business as usual: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us. 

LB/6 July 2013 

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