At this critical moment in American history, and in world history, a moment at which the Fukuyama fuzzy fantasy of an end of history and of a magic kingdom on Earth animated by endless growth and consumption has come crashing down after hitting a stone wall of economic disparity, ethical chaos, and social contradictions. More and more Americans must face the ghoulish trinity of accumulated capital, manufactured ideology, and brutal class warfare—it no longer matters how kind or how ethnically diverse the face of that new economic system make up of investment banks and corporate media may be.
The efforts of intellectual saboteurs, paid in blood money by the extremely rich, to launch campaigns blaming the current destruction of our economy and society on socialists, attributing the transgender psychological operation carried out by Homeland Security subcontractors to a mythical “radical left,” pinning the COVID 19 scam on the Chinese Communist Party, and attributing the corporate fascism in the Democratic Party to communism, has reached a peak.
If we thought that fascism would follow a different path this time, we have discovered that the planners at corporate consulting companies and private intelligence firms lack the imagination, or the skills, to do much more than mimic what was done in Germany and Italy one hundred years ago.
Regarding our response, numbers are the least important issue at the start. The numbers of supporters for parties and candidates reflected in opinion polls are made up in response to demands from corporations. We have the truth and science on our side—and truth and science are never democratic in nature.
America, however, is still reeling from a series of betrayals that have left most educated citizens wandering in a fog, and most working Americans completely confused.
Working people are better able to identify the problems and confront them because they do not have 401K retirement accounts that demand that they accept the current fraud in order to keep living in their oversized houses.
The professors, researchers, lawyers, doctors, government officials, and employees at non-profits who took the money to promote fantasies which benefit multinationals, and who refused to stand with the workers, let alone the poor, against the blatant efforts to promote bogus ideologies in a predatory, parasitic economy, have a grave responsibility.
The harsh truth is that intellectuals have knowingly stamped the frauds of quantitative easing counterfeiting, COVID 19 military intelligence psychological warfare, 9/11, secret governance and global war, nano and bio military operations at home, the administration of prisons by American and Israeli private contractors, and the “mass shooting” false flag operations of Homeland Security with the seal of their intellectual authority.
Here Comes Revolutionary Politics
We are heading for revolutionary politics, whether we like it or not.
If we do nothing, we are heading towards a revolution in which a tiny handful of the super-rich will take over all resources, and will reduce us to fragmented groups who fight each other in bogus color revolutions over issues that are made up for us by those with a higher security clearance. In that pre-programmed revolution, dumbed down revolutionaries fed revolutionary slogans over Facebook and Instagram will be expected to follow political campaigns coordinated by supercomputers at Amazon and Google which slowly corral the entire population into the slaughter house, one algorithm at a time.
Free trade allowed the rich to destroy the economic means of working people to respond to their predations by moving manufacturing overseas, to automate and digitalize the means of production so as to eliminate the potential for workers to oppose them, and promote a wave of immigration meant to undermine unions by providing cheap labor. Ultimately “free trade” (not free for anyone by multinational corporations) made the people dependent on a money economy because they could no longer produce their own food, or make their clothes, furniture, and other tools locally.
Moreover, free trade meant that the only well-paid manufacturing jobs left were all tied to military suppliers because most manufacturing that was not tied to the military was moved overseas. That last shift in manufacturing meant that progressives in congress have to back the military, whether they like it or not, in order to preserve jobs in their districts.
The result? Most everyone these days accepts the fiction that consumption and growth, and the industrial average of the stock market, are the appropriate metrics for assessing the state of the nation. That means that the United States, with its military-tilted economy, has no choice but to find ways to wage war.
As Leon Trosky wrote, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
And the financial players are drawn to war like a moth to a candle because nothing beats war for consumption of extremely expensive machinery.
Moreover, the budgets for defense and intelligence are classified and therefore off the record; this allows for the money laundering of hundreds of billions of dollars, much of which is used to pay off public intellectuals, bureaucrats, and CEOs who support the regime.
Central to the current strategy of the billionaires for creating confusion, for creating a “politics” so divorced from reality and policy as leave citizens disgusted with the “political” without ever understanding what it means, is the binary opposition of left and right, conservative and progressive, found in all political discourse.
The terms “conservative” and “progressive” as they are used today are more about identity and feelings, not concrete policies, and there is no accurate discussion on either side of who owns what or who controls what under what pretenses. We are subject to a heated debate on abortion, gun control, church and state, trans and gay ideology, and immigration that is deliberately framed by both sides so as to avoid any real understanding, or any solution.
At the core of this binary is an intentional flattening out of politics. We are facing three-way political and ideological structures and the flattening out of a three-way structure into a binary allows the rich to control how we perceive politics, and to manipulate the “left” and “right” in the media.
First, there are three kinds of politics: conservative, progressive, and revolutionary, not two. The United States started out with a revolution and the Declaration of Independence makes it clear that revolution is a critical political method in the nation as we saw in the Civil War, and elsewhere. The Declaration of Independence also makes it clear that citizens are entitled to overthrow a government when it becomes a tyranny. This central aspect of American political philosophy has been intentionally erased, and the Constitution placed in a gold coffin.
Instead, Americans are subject to homegrown domestic color revolutions, revolutions that are funded by corporations through Homeland Security, that offer us cardboard messiahs.
We must revive revolutionary political philosophy if we want to find a way forward.
We must recognize one more triad: the three branches of government.
I am not talking about the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government that are described in the Constitution. That division of power has been rendered irrelevant by the mass privatization of government over the last thirty years.
No, I am talking about the actual three branches of governance: the politicians, the bankers, and the generals.
The politicians, not limited to elected officials, are those engaged in the political and the ideological project of giving meaning to policies that are implemented and bringing together disparate factions to reach necessary compromises to make budgets and spend money.
The bankers are those empowered to control economic relations and to create money and set its value. They have the power to determine the direction that the nation follows and to amass great wealth in the process.
The generals control the military, the branch of government that has access to officially sanctioned deadly force and that has a range of powerful weapons that can be used to intimidate and to compel at home and abroad.
In a stable political economic environment, the politicians rise to the top because they are able to negotiate between the bankers and the generals, and to offer compromises that address the needs of both. The United States has been run by politicians for a long time, granted that the other branches sometimes took direct action to defend their interests.
But when a system spins out of control, and the political economy is open for pillage, and when the citizens are ignorant (in part because of dumbed-down educational systems and smart phone algorithms) of what is being done, then the bankers rise to the top. The bankers rise to the top because they are able to pay off the politicians and generals, and the public intellectuals, through means that are often hidden from use, and the culture thus produced is one in which everything has a price.
But when the nation reaches a state of radical institutional corruption, one in which all government agencies become but extensions of corporations, or are for sale to the highest bidder, then paralysis sets in and with it comes confusion. Government cannot be effectively run if everything is transactional because no one will be able to make difficult decisions, or give direction to the process.
At that point, as is happening right now in America, the generals start to take control of the system, and to push the bankers and politicians out (although not eliminating them). The generals can do so, and establish an effective, if invisible, military government, because in a crisis force trumps money in a broken system, and it trumps even the control of institutions of ideological authority, at least for the short term. As foolish as the generals may be, they can give orders that will be followed and thus can get things going.
What Is Politics in 2024?
Let us talk about what politics really means in America in 2024.
Real politics in America is worked out through contracts for surveillance between governments and multinational private contractors.
Real politics is the negotiation of, and enforcement of, monopolies on production, shipping, logistics, distribution and retail sales held by the multinational corporations that control the effective economy in ways that can never be subject to a vote.
Real politics is the battle between private banks and private equity to control of the determination of the value of currency, and its creation by the Federal Reserve.
Real politics is the promotion of, and implementation of, war and domestic conflict by arms manufacturers, private intelligence firms, private security firms, political consulting firms, and the strategy teams of billionaires so as to create the uncertainty and instability in society that discourages resistance.
Real politics is about the control of food, water, and energy by a group of multinational firms that are owned by a smaller handful of trusts.
Real politics can be found in the orders for administration given out to departments of the federal, state, and local government in the format of classified directives, secret law, and national security letters that dictate what must be done and that demand that the true power relationships cannot be made public.
Real politics can be found in the domination of medical schools, hospitals, medical journals, and pharmaceutical corporations by a cluster of funds that are run by investment banks.
That is real politics in America and that real politics in America is never covered by the journalists.
Sadly, the analysis offered to citizens in this broken system focuses exclusively on the mythical “bad apples” with little concern for who owns what, and even less interest in the ideological structures that make this dystopia possible, or the control of information, food, and energy, and the means of production, by multinational institutions that effectively serve as the government.
The dark forces of the stone age, BlackRock and Black Stone, have thrown down the gauntlet; they have declared war on the citizens of the nation, and of the world.
They have plans to round us up in concentration camps using armed robots and drones that will replace the more reticent policemen. The only reason they have not done so far is that the banks of supercomputers calculated those scenarios and told them that the risk is still too high, that not enough citizens have been reduced to two-dimensional thinking by social media and pornography.
What Must be Done
Standing still is not an option for us because the move towards consolidated technofascism has already been charted out using supercomputers for the months and years ahead. We will be checkmated in any case if we play by the rules that are being set down for us.
We can only overwhelm these elites by transforming our culture and society, changing the very definition of who we are and how we relate to each other.
That revolution within civilization itself is something their algorithms cannot stop. But that can only happen when we stop thinking about how to play better according to the rules of the game that we are given and we start instead to make up the rules of the game ourselves. That is the true revolution, and I suggest that it is where we must start.
We must promise to help each other for a lifetime, to share our assets, our resources, and our skills among our members, and to create a community that works in a transparent, accountable, and ethical manner among us first, and in society as a whole next.
That is the strategy that Theda Skocpol argues for in her book “Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life.” Skocpol explains that the real reason that Congress and the White House have become totalitarian is that we do not have any participatory or democratic institutions left in our daily lives, in our neighborhoods.
If we establish democratic institutions in our neighborhood that bring citizens together to make policy amongst themselves, that set up organizations at the local level that are participatory, then such institutions, such a movement, will put pressure on the entire political system and slowly force the government to serve its role as a government.
Those interested in revolutionary change should not be so worried about what they will achieve in the next six months. They should think more about the suffering of others, about those who are starving and dying, and less about their own retirement accounts.
We should not die foolishly and we should be as wise as possible in our strategic decisions. At the same time, clinging to things, or clinging to life itself, can keep us from achieving our full potential which is so clearly demanded by the current situation. Yamamoto Tsunetomo 山本 常朝 suggests in his diary Hagakure 葉隱 that if one wishes to achieve a difficult task, facing death in the case he described, that an effective method is to imagine that one is already dead.
The reason being that at the moment one accepts death and having no possessions, or even the ability to possess, suddenly one is swept over by a wave of immense freedom. Giving up on that clinging to life means that one can focus on the essential and not be caught up in the details.
Such words are critical to us now as the powers we associated with the truth movement, and the progressives in the American political system are being rapidly reduced to the hand puppets of techno-fascism and militarism.
What do we do? Do we make some sort of a deal with these people who have lost their moral vision, and their consciences as well?
If we do our absolute best, and do so with little concern for ourselves, that action in itself will impress people whom we do not even know, whom we have never met, and they will do great things that we are not able to do. Whether we succeed is not that critical–although it would be nice. What is critical is that the goal of a peaceful and sane society can be achieved by someone.
As Confucius wrote so many years ago,
“Debugu biyoulin”
德不孤，必有鄰
“Integrity is never isolated and alone. There will always be those who are sympathetic out there”
What he meant was that if you take an action that is selfless and ethically motivated, even though it appears as if you are entirely alone, spurned by all, there will always be those, somewhere out there, maybe even among those who appear to be your oppressors, who will be sympathetic to your position.
Although this strategy is not effective for raising big money from lobbyists, or getting on corporate TV, I would argue that it is the only effective approach we have today. In fact, it is more effective than going through the degrading and demoralizing process of trying to run for office.
When John Brown and his followers in 1859 formed a provisional government that followed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they declared, without any concern for what passed for public opinion, that, according to the Constitution, slavery is not a peculiar institution but is rather a war of the landlord class against the citizens of our nation, one that must be resisted. In other words, they used the founding documents of the nation to challenge the entire corrupt system. They were captured easily at Harper’s Ferry and John Brown was later executed. But that simple action, that naïve declaration written down on paper, changed the discourse on slavery in America completely. No longer could the bogus progressive concept of slowly getting rid of slavery, state by state, convince Americans. And many, black and white, in the North and South, started to feel the system could no longer be tolerated.
When Jean Jaurès, head of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), was assassinated at a café in Paris on July 31, 1914, he was working around the clock with Hugo Haase of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany to organize, along with others in France, Germany, and elsewhere, strikes and other mass movements to stop the drive for war.
That specific effort was unsuccessful, and Haase was assassinated as well in 1918, and yet those who continued the fight for peace in Europe in the years afterwards, all the way through 1945, were directly inspired by those efforts.
When a tiny handful of men and women launched an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in April of 1943, it was totally hopeless. They were killed in a few days. But the very fact that people were able to stand up and denounce, resist, fascistic governance in Eastern Europe, and the genocide policies that had become accepted practice, transformed the mood. Suddenly resistance movements started springing up again and the spirit of that uprising shook many who had been traumatized out of their sleep so that they no longer accept wall-to-wall fascism as a given.
It was not necessary for those leading the uprising to meet with those who would carry on the resistance in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
The current narcissistic culture that permeates our society makes such actions almost impossible and therefore we are rendered paralyzed. That cult of the self that makes self-sacrifice impossible, the consumption-focused materialism in which only the visible output counts, assures that those who have no money, who are not mentioned by Facebook, Twitter, or the New York Times, are discounted from the start.
But this assumption is not natural to humans, but was rather induced by corporations to make us think of everything around us, including other humans, as products to be consumed, and to make the organization of resistance nearly impossible because people are conditioned to think as consumers, not citizens, about success that can be measured.
The truth, however, is that the most fundamental powers of justice, honesty, compassion, and charity cannot be seen by the naked eye, and they contradict the basic imperatives of growth, consumption, and production that are assumed to define the economy.
We can win this brutal struggle against the billionaires who manipulate the people using supercomputer algorithms and a bankrupt consumption culture that cruelly reduces so many to virtual robots following their most base desires.
But we can only do so at the level of civilization, of self-awareness, and of moral commitment.
If we try to play by their rules, by the assumption that the possession of things, or of narcissistic attention blasts, is our goal, then we are lost. But if we work at the metaphysical and epistemological level, defining what is and is not just, what is and is not government, then we can make the rules up for the people and short circuit this brutal takeover of humanity.
A transformation in your neighborhood, by simply having citizens make a contract to protect and aid each other, could set off a chain reaction that will transform other organizations throughout the United States, and around the world, showing that kindness, cooperation, and the truth, are by their nature bulletproof.
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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
