It’s Too Late For A Workers’ Revolution
The plutocracy would sooner nuke us than share
Bad news, America: we will not be turning the tables. Corporations and billionaires are embedded in all things threatening — police, military, three-letter agencies. And let’s not forget the resources they command: multinational corporations, commercial banks, central banks, multinational insurance agencies, major pension funds, and investment banks and funds. They will prevail easily in the kind of workers’ revolution that many dream of as a last hope. Hell, they’ve defeated us already.
Consider the vast spending on surveillance and data-mining technology, and artificial intelligence, that flowed from the USA Patriot Act and a post- 9/11 mentality that permitted the integration of law enforcement, national security, intelligence, and military support agencies. The United States got into the surveillance and data-mining rackets in a big way, throwing around the kind of money that only governments can raise.
Congress and the Bush Administration poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Silicon Valley’s R&D budgets. This was a Moon-shot magnitude collaboration and its payoff was a leap in data mining bandwidth — and AI competence and pervasiveness — by several orders of magnitude. The so-called security industrial complex was born. It grew so rapidly that by 2004 the National Security Agency (NSA) had the ability to monitor all of the telephone and email traffic routed through the United States, which it did at will, without warrants. There was a years-long court struggle over its legality, but in 2007 the Bush Administration canceled the program voluntarily.
It was replaced with another NSA product, code-named PRISM, which relies on commercial data providers. This system works because Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Apple, et al. have the ability to monitor all of us all of the time. The power to scrutinize human lives in minute detail that we’ve entrusted to private-interest behemoths is unprecedented. Any totalitarian Soviet surveillance state would have sacrificed a generation of its first born for a mere taste of the data we voluntarily surrender to information brokers and advertisers as we go about our daily routines using Google, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SMS, WhatsApp, Pinterest, imgur, Skype, Zoom, Steam, Origin, Twitch, Amazon, PayPal, Netflix, eBay, Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, OnStar, TikTok, Web mail, Tinder, Grindr, Uber, and Lyft; not to mention several hundred-thousand minor phone apps and casual games.
The bots sifting our communications in search of violent intentions and extremist views are married to the same invisible, electronic pimps and touts that guide us toward goods and services, entertainment and games, news and information, and virtual communities tailored to our personal idiosyncrasies and patterns of consumption.
Your experience of the world is censored and curated in ways you would never suspect, and the bots are learning all the time. We’re at a point where it’s reasonable to wonder if any of our beliefs are truly original, uncontaminated by AI influence.
Corporate entities control nearly all of the world’s information and they feed it to us selectively, in service of their interests. We can’t physically fight a plutocracy composed primarily of Silicon Valley titans, the defense industry, the entertainment industry, and Wall Street firms. They’re all protected by government agencies.
Those guys would nuke a small American city to keep us in line if they could get away with it. Naturally, the plot would leak almost immediately; but if it were practically feasible, there would be no moral impediment, no reluctance on ethical grounds. I can easily picture Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg in a bidding war to decide which of them gets to press the button.
Don’t imagine that the plutocrats have any fear of violence in the streets. September 11th was a hell of a lesson: all of their really important stuff is protected with military-grade security now. Much of it resides deep underground in heavily fortified campuses that look like office parks.
They’ll put down a violent struggle without breaking a sweat. They’ve got all the brainwashed meat in uniform they need, plus a mass surveillance and propaganda apparatus of immense power. They’ll gladly tell us what to think. Have you ever wondered why Americans appear to have lost their enthusiasm for BLM protests? It’s because compliant media outlets circulated images that made the protestors look disreputable to the lightweight liberals who woke up and flirted, briefly, with the idea of racial justice. It doesn’t take much to intimidate barely-middle-class suburbanites paranoid about slipping down a rung socially — people who agonize over getting a tasteful little tattoo in a spot easily covered because some future job interviewer might notice it.
First things first
The Republicans and the Democrats have got us balkanized around social issues that cover every possible grievance except economic justice. Poverty-level, dead-end gigs are the cost of glory on the partisan battlefield these days. The big three social issues are abortion, guns, and the environment. We’ve been conditioned to believe that if we yield an inch on any of those fronts, catastrophe will follow. Whether you wish to preserve abortion rights or curtail them, impose new gun control laws or repeal the ones we have, protect the environment or coddle the industries threatening it is of no consequence. The tiniest movement toward the other side’s position must be halted, even at the cost of decent career opportunities and a national minimum wage suitable for an adult.
Our preoccupation with “official” social issues has kept us disorganized and poor. That is the ghetto of partisan competition in which we’ve been segregated by the media, politicians, and their powerful clients. They’ve chosen the issues for us: ones guaranteed to keep us angry at each other and preoccupied with political bait so that the elites can swindle us with little resistance.
The only way forward is to unite the lower-income ranks, the working poor both left- and right-leaning, within a third political party focused on economic justice. Forget about reforming the Democratic or Republican parties; they serve only the elites despite their vague populist overtures. We need a political party that will speak for the former working class — today’s working poor — and represent their interests zealously.
We might end up with a three-party system involving lots of pendulums swinging and improbable temporary coalitions, but we would begin to tame the plutocrats and corporations with pressure from a sturdy coalition big enough to mount strikes with meaningful consequences.
We have got to put economic justice and equality first and everything else after. We can worry about guns and baby angels and green energy once we’ve secured the right of collective bargaining for every worker, and ensured economic equality and justice for every citizen regardless of age, race, or sex.
When I say economic justice is paramount, I don’t mean to dismiss the grievances of women and minorities; I mean only to assert that unequal access to housing, education, and job opportunities are a consequence of unjust hiring policies and employment conditions.
Social justice is the most important virtue of all, but it is the child of economic justice. Ultimately, we have only those rights and privileges that we can afford to exercise.
So, first things first.
