What should socialists do?

First of all, do what you want. If you prefer an anarchistic, Occupy-style, response to capitalist rule, do that. If you want to support progressive Democrats, fight for Bernie and his allies. Any resistance is better than no resistance, and any resistance to capitalism helps socialism.

So I will claim that, while socialists such as myself should argue for the superiority of socialism to other forms of anti-capitalist resistance, we should not claim that these other modes undermine socialism. We should treat all anti-capitalists as allies. We at least have the same goals. And if those in other modes declare hostility to socialism, our response should be "more in sorrow than in anger."

I will claim the second principle of socialism is implacable political hostility towards both the capitalists and the technocrats. The technocrats might have had a claim on the loyalty of the workers, but Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the post 1980 Democratic party have decisively and utterly abandoned the working class and made explicit their utter subservience to the capitalist class. Not only that, they have proven themselves ineffective at maintaining even their own class rule; if they cannot help themselves, they cannot do anything for the working class.

The only good reason to support a return to the technocracy is if you yourself are in the professional-managerial class and want to maintain or regain your class privilege. The technocrats will not treat the working class any better than will the capitalists: the only difference will be the capitalists' (possibly murderous) hostility to the technocrats themselves. Note that the technocrats and the capitalists share murderous hostility to socialists.

The technocrats' and capitalists' united murderous hostility towards socialism a difficult challenge. If socialists look like they are making real gains, both the capitalists and the technocrats will unite to try to imprison, murder, and torture us. Still, organization is possible even in countries more willing and able than the United States to use brutal force to suppress socialism (and other dissent). We should study those instances in detail to operate without too many of us getting killed.

Finally, I claim we socialists must actually organize workers. And we should organize the workers not to support us — we socialists are, after all, almost all technocratic class traitors — but to take power for themselves. Organizing workers for themselves, and not for us, is perhaps the most difficult challenge: by virtue of our objectively superior understanding of socialist theory, should we not have privilege to use this theoretical understanding to guide the workers? We should not: that way just lies replacing one murderous technocratic class with another. Our theory is the most flimsy barrier against repeating the brutality of capitalism, both pure and technocratic, and will evaporate at the first crisis.

Perhaps such an exercise is impossible. I myself am too old, too defeated, and too compromised, to lead a socialist resistance. The best I can do is kibbitz from the sidelines.

The current class struggle

The only true class struggle happening now is the struggle between the professional-managerial class (technocrats), represented by the Democratic party, and the capitalist class, represented by the Republican party. The working class is just along for the ride.

The technocrats seized state power in 1933 (FDR) and held it until 1980 (Reagan). After 1980, the technocrats changed orientation as more-or-less independent brokers between the capitalist and working classes and became, with Bill Clinton and later Barack Obama, the servants of the capitalist class. Surprisingly, this subservience was not enough for a large part of the capitalist class.

The capitalist class has two main factions: the first is willing to use the technocrats; the second wants to destroy the technocrats. We know they are true factions because the technocrat-friendly faction is willing to put its class interests first and work with the anti-technocrat Trump.

The technocrats themselves are all pro-capitalist: they want to help the capitalist class. They are literally dumbfounded — and have been for at least thirty years — that a substantial portion of the capitalist class not only refuses the technocrats' help but actually hates them.

Since I myself am mostly imbued with technocratic values, it's difficult for me to understand this antipathy. The independent technocrats "did capitalism" much better than the capitalist class; even the subservient technocrats did a better job managing capitalism than the capitalist class can do. The best explanation I can think of is that technocratic "competence" really is a thing, competence is what allows the technocrats to manage capitalism better than the capitalists, and the institutions necessary to develop competence cannot be "capitalized": technocratic institutions cannot be judged on any notion of capitalist profit. However, competent, a large number of capitalists just can't stand being subservient to anyone outside their class.

I suppose capitalist antipathy to the technocrats is best expressed in Atlas Shrugged, which is a polemic not against communism but against technocracy. (And it is possibly arguable that post-Stalin and post-Mao state "communism" were just different flavors of technocracy, with the Chinese version still extant.)

The most important point is that both the capitalists and the technocrats are dedicated to keeping the working class powerless; they differ only on strategy. The technocrat-friendly capitalists prefer the technocratic strategy, mostly welfare-dependency; the technocrat-hostile capitalists prefer a more thoroughly punishment-based approach. (The technocrats love punishment, of course; the anti-technocrats just want all stick and no carrot.)

The technocrats will fight as best they can for the restoration of the technocracy, or at least some privilege for technocrats in a capitalist-dominated society. I do not think they will be successful; the technocrats do not understand political power; perhaps because of their technocratic nature they cannot. The capitalists understand what the technocrats do not: you must utterly absorb or destroy your enemies; you cannot merely cripple them. In his remarks to Ron Suskind, Karl Rove (probably) outlined the difference:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Much is made of the "progressive" Democrats, i.e. Bernie Sanders and his supporters and allies. They are trying to trade on the vague memory of the Democratic party's active support of labor; and they were successful only because the Clinton technocrats simply took urban and minority labor completely for granted. To the extent that the progressive Democrats actually want to give some power back to the workers, the technocrats will ally with the capitalists to crush them. The progressives might be useful to the socialists, but the progressives will not destroy the capitalists, and even if they are temporarily successful, the capitalists will quickly regain power: the capitalists learned much from their interregnum; the technocrats and progressives have learned nothing from their loss.

Don't resist Trump, resist capitalism

The capitalist ship is sinking fast. That's just what we radicals have been waiting for, n'est ce pas? I've been arguing for a long time that a radical transformation of society is moral only if the inevitable pain and suffering of such a transformation is outweighed by the pain and suffering of the status quo. President Trump gives this argument considerable weight.

It is important to resist, but we should not resist Donald Trump per se. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Trump is not some sort of weird aberration of neoliberal capitalism: his presidency is the outcome of the actually existing institutions created by the actually existing members of the bourgeoisie and the professional-managerial technocrats. Trump is what capitalism does: we know this because we are capitalist, the capitalists have near total national hegemony, and Trump is what we actually did.

It is important to resist, but it is more important to resist in the right direction. We will do humanity no service if we resist Trump just to restore superficially bland (but deeply vicious) technocratic neoliberalism. The technocratic neoliberals gave us Trump and the coming authoritarianism. The technocrats assisted the authoritarians in undermining our republican institutions, thinking that they could control the authoritarians. They could not. They have decisively failed.

Although the technocrats have failed, they retain considerable power. They hate socialism more powerfully than they dislike authoritarianism. In this antipathy they are absolutely united with the authoritarians. The workers must not gain power, come what may. And by calling themselves "progressives" for throwing a few crumbs to the workers, they will erode support for socialism.

The few socialists who have been clinging desperately to intellectual legitimacy have an opportunity, but it is important to use the opportunity correctly. If we simply ally with the technocrats and progressives, we could at best return society to 2008. Not only would such a rollback be completely undesirable (economic depression, a half-dozen wars, torture, mass murder of black people by the police, etc. ad nauseam), it is impossible: too many people have decisively rejected that society (and their rejection is right, even if we might disagree with their alternative) and its reimposition would require exactly the kind of authoritarianism that we reject in Trump.

We must focus on one thing and one thing only: all power to the workers. The rest is commentary.

Such a goal is feasible. The authoritarian strain in the workers is both shallow and thin. It's big enough that a leader of great charisma and iron will could ride it at least a temporary success, but Trump does not have sufficient charisma to inspire adulation, and he is especially weak-willed. We should fear who comes next, but we are fortunate that American authoritarianism has begun in such a ridiculous way. (Not that I am deprecating the harm Trump will do, but in the hands of someone with real charisma and real will, authoritarianism could be much much worse; Trump at least does not have world war and mass extermination in him.)

The authoritarian strain is not so great that it cannot be opposed. The workers want to be listened to, and no small few workers voted for Trump, and vote for the Republican party, not because they want an authoritarian ruler, but because they thought Trump would disrupt the authority that they rightly believe just ignores and belittles them.

We must convince the workers that no one, not Trump, not the capitalists, not the technocrats, not the Republicans, will listen to them. They must struggle not for attention but for power.

Burning down the house

Regardless of the appropriateness of the comment, there is a substantive dimension to Burt Likko's criticism of a Black Lives Matter speaker's call to "dismantle the system". The question obliquely posed in the post, and discussed at more length in the comments, is whether it is desirable to dismantle the system.

Likko does not give us the context of the speech, so we don't know the speaker's intended meaning. We don't know what system the speaker refers to, and what he means to dismantle it. The phrase might well just be a rhetorical flourish, without specific meaning. But, in keeping with tenor of Likko's post and the subsequent comments, let's take the phrase to mean a radical overthrow of the capitalist system in favor of some variant of socialism. Aislinn Pulley's article, The System That Killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile Cannot Be Reformed seems to support this interpretation.

I am a communist, and Likko and the majority of commenters at Ordinary Times seem to be sane Republicans, so it's perhaps unsurprising that I favor "dismantling the system" and Likko and his commenters do not. But declaring our preferences, or conducting an abstract normative discussion, misses the main points.

Under what objective circumstances will people actually dismantle the capitalist system? As human beings embedded in the capitalist system that might be dismantled, and who will (if we survive) inherit what follows, how can we think about the question effectively, and, on due consideration, what can we actually do about the issue?

The first question is mostly descriptive, not normative. The capitalist system will be dismantled when and if dismantling the capitalist system is in the interest a sufficiently large number of people, they become aware of this interest, and they have the will to gain the power necessary to dismantle the system.

In this sense, choosing to dismantle or preserve is a pure (as opposed to mixed) chicken game. To simplify for the sake of analysis, we can assume there are two "players": the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (and their respective allies). Because they are the existing ruling class, we say that the bourgeoisie "moves first"; thus their dominant strategy is to preserve the system. The proletariat "moves second", and because the consequences of trying to dismantle the system are worse than preserving it, the proletariat also chooses to preserve.

The goal of the sensible revolutionary is not to try to convince the proletariat to dismantle capitalism anyway and make themselves worse off in the short run; this strategy will never work. Instead, the goal is to change the game so that by dismantling the system the proletariat is better off in the short run.

The goal of the sensible capitalist is to not only preserve capitalism, but to keep the game a chicken game. They must convince the proletariat that they would be worse off by dismantling the system than by preserving it, however much privilege the capitalist class exercises. They have two classes of strategy to do so: increase the reward to the proletariat to preserve the system, or increase the punishment for attempting to dismantle the system.

The best strategy for the revolutionary is to sap the will of the bourgeoisie to impose punishment. The Soviet Union fell precisely when the Soviet Communist Party lost the will to punish the people for dismantling Soviet communism. (As it turned out, quite a lot of people were actually worse off, but thems the breaks. As some wag put it, "Everything the communists told us about communism was a lie; unfortunately, everything they told us about capitalism was the truth.")

Another strategy for the revolutionary is provoke the bourgeoisie into reducing the reward for the proletariat to preserve the system, or goad them into punishing the proletariat even if they preserve the system. This is the strategy that ISIS is using: to provoke western governments into repressing Muslims so severely that they have nothing to lose by dismantling the system, presumably in favor of some sort of Islamic theocracy.

Provocation poses considerable risk: if the proletariat believes that actions of revolutionary justify the consequent punishment by the bourgeoisie, the proletariat believes they have more to lose by dismantling the system. Hence kidnappings, bombings, and other acts of "terrorism" are so counter-productive for a communist revolutionary as to be dismissed out of hand. State repression against this kind of "terrorism" will be seen by the proletariat as justified.

Instead, the provocations must be so obviously righteous per se that the bourgeoisie lose credibility by attempting to blame the revolutionaries. The "riots" in Ferguson show the value of this strategy: protesting the actual police murder of a citizen and the state repression of black communities in the area is so obviously righteous that when they violently suppressed theses protests, the bourgeois state lost a lot of credibility by blaming the violent suppression on the organizers and victims.

All of these theoretical and descriptive considerations aside, it is actual human beings who act in political conflict, and human beings act in no small part according to moral reasoning.

The key moral question is not whether capitalism is better than socialism. For some people, capitalism is better; for others socialism would be better.

The real moral questions, the questions that each individual must ask him- or herself, are these: What am I willing to do to preserve or dismantle the system? What am I willing to suborn, to tolerate, to rationalize? Are there tactics that even if I have good reason to believe would be effective I still would not use or tolerate?

These question are made more complex because we must also contemplate them in light of the answers my opponents would give. We can see that the bourgeoisie and their allies are willing to use and tolerate assassination, murder, rape, torture, mass incarceration, the mass slaughter of civilians in war, the systematic repression of black communities, etc. ad nauseam, and they use and tolerate these means under the mantle of their own authority and thus bear full moral responsibility.

These questions cannot be answered out loud; more precisely, no one should ever trust someone's public answer. I pose them only for my own and my readers' private reflection.

As a revolutionary, I must consider my own actions in light of these answers the bourgeoisie has made manifest.

It is of course possible and not unreasonable to support the capitalist system while opposing these acts, calling them evil (a label I definitely endorse). By all means, work against the evils while supporting the system. But I recommend a sense of urgency: the longer these evils persist, the more the exhortations to work within the system ring hollow and shrill.

Revolution or reform?

Aislinn Pulley, a lead organizer with Black Lives Matter Chicago, believes that The System That Killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile Cannot Be Reformed: "What sense would it make to ask for a kinder slave patroller when the problem is slavery itself?" Pulley asks. "The same is true of US policing now."

Pulley argues (and I concur) that violence against black people and violence against poor people is inherent to capitalism. Capitalism produces not just inequality but poverty, and its production of poverty is not because capitalists happen to be evil, but because of the structural imperatives of capitalist economic and social relations. Capitalism rewards the accumulation and concentration of wealth without limit; those who concentrate the most wealth survive and prosper. But wealth concentrated in one place entails that it must be lacking elsewhere. It is no good for homo economus if everyone is wealthy; he has no power. The fundamental incentive of capitalism is for some people to have more wealth than others, and thus have power over them.

Before capitalism, most social systems were fairly upfront about how their social system worked. Under feudalism, the lord owned the land by virtue of noble birth and force of arms, and sent his soldiers to collect his share the peasants' product to feed himself, his servants, and his soldiers. Like it or not, everyone knew exactly where they stood and why.

Capitalism, on the other hand, systematically conceals and disguises its own true nature. Capitalism can survive only so long as its ideological contradictions remain hidden and its social and economic conflicts remain suppressed. The opacity of capitalism is not so much a conspiracy per se as a structural and social-evolutionary outcome: actors and actions that expose contradictions do not make money and thus wither; actors and actions that conceal contradictions do make money and thus prosper.

Capitalism thus always finds, reinforces, and magnifies any divisions within the working classes. When the workers are divided, the capitalists prosper; when they are united, the capitalists tremble. And, given the United States' history of slavery, there is no better way to divide the workers than by race.

It's not like the Bilderberg group sent out secret orders to American police forces; it's just that if some cop or or some police force shakes down black people, harasses them, and kills a few in the process, well, they don't make the capitalists tremble, and are thus tolerated. The pundits who blame black people for their own victimization don't make the capitalists tremble, and get published.

Trying to unite white and black workers makes the capitalist class tremble, and they do not pay for what they fear. Aislinn Pulley will not be published on the Op Ed page of the New York Times or Washington Post. She will not become a tenured professor. She will not sit on the board of General Electric. She will not become a partner at Dewey, Cheatem and Howe. She will not become a federal judge. At least not unless she sells out her cause and her convictions.

She might well sell out, at least sell out her socialism. Racism is a good tool, a sharp tool, but it's not the only tool. Capitalism is not fundamentally predicated on racism. We could have a capitalist system that exploited the workers but did not use the black-white division to maintain its exploitation. There are any number of alternative tools to divide the working class: immigration, drugs, skills, education, height, weight, even eye color. Why not? We can convince children in a few days that blue eyes are good and brown eyes are bad.

I stand 100 percent with Black Lives Matter. I would stand 100 percent with them even if they were not socialist: the continued police murders of black people is evil in itself, not just because it perpetuates capitalism. If Pulley and other Black Lives Matter leaders "sell out" their socialism just to end police murders, I would not utter a peep of complaint. And, if the capitalists are smart (and they're not completely stupid) that's just what they'll do: a judgeship here, a tenured faculty appointment there, a few partnerships and boards of directors, all to preserve capitalism. If the capitalists are really smart (and they have flashes of brilliance), they'll agree to a "process" and "statements" that preserve not only capitalism but the racial divide that helps perpetuate it. It worked on Obama, n'est ce pas?

But if the capitalists are stupid (and they can be just as obtuse as the next person), they'll dig in their heels and neither successfully co-opt Black Lives Matter leaders (and other leaders) nor give up the hyper-oppression and murder of black people. I don't hope this happens, but I don't have any control of whether or not it does happen. And sooner or later it will happen: the capitalists will choose to fight to the death over something, they will lose, and we will have another opportunity to liberate all of humanity.

The Sanders revolution

Chaos is always risky. As Katalin Balog writes in An Inconsistent Triad, Sanders

construed his job [as Presidential candidate] to be the articulation of a vision of a just society, a kind of overarching social democratic Utopia, simple to explain, simple to understand. He didn't seem interested in exploring real world complexity, the delicate balance between competing values; he was not at all riveted by policy detail. He proposed to implement his program not via the nitty-gritty of democratic give-and-take and incrementalism, but via the "political revolution" whose nature has been left a little vague but which he saw himself as leading. The revolution was what was supposed to bridge the yawning gap between his proposals and what seems feasible in today's America. This view of politics and history implies a dismissal of "technocrats", meaning politicians who work in the system. Society needs to be bent to the Utopia, all at once, so to speak, not via the dithering process of machine politics. Though he never indicated that by revolution he meant anything like overthrowing the regime, he did at least flirt with the idea.

Such an attitude is fitting for youth steeped in age-appropriate contempt for the adult world, but bitter experience has shown revolution to be, almost always, a great evil, bringing forth blood, tears and terror in its wake. Sanders' candidacy evoked an earlier era of the socialist movement but that – as should be clear – is a painful dead end of history.

Balog makes some errors here. Notably, Sanders has been a sitting Senator for nearly a decade, a Congressman for 15 years before that, and was Mayor of Burlington, VT. Sanders is a career politician; I think he understands "the nitty-gritty of democratic give-and-take."

Also, I have a very different take than Balog about "technocrats": she labels them simply as "politicians who work in the system," which would seem to include Sanders, who has, after all, been working in the system at its highest levels for 25 years. In contrast, I see "technocrats" as Professional-Managerial Class academic meritocratic elitists, who haven't quite realized they lost power in 1980.

And at what point did Sanders even "flirt with the idea" of "overthrowing the regime"? The only "regime" Sanders was interested in overthrowing was the control of our government by Too Big To Fail banks, big Pharma, the Koch brothers, etc. ad nauseam. I've never seen Sanders once talk about overthrowing the republic or the Constitution. Sanders was interested only in trying to make the liberal capitalist system deliver on its own promises.

Balog could certainly paint me with that brush, but it does not apply to Sanders. Balog implies that demanding single-payer health care, free college tuition, more unions, and serious financial regulation is not only equal parts youthful naivete and cynicism but also "a great evil" and a "dead end of history." Balog avoids lying outright, but with a Ph.D. in philosophy, the connection between Sanders and revolution cannot be unintentional.

I think this point is what infuriates me most about this election: that any opposition to absolute rule of the bourgeoisie in this second Gilded Age is tantamount to Bolshevism.

But perhaps Balog is entirely correct, and we should take her at her word: Sanders is a revolutionary, a Bolshevik, someone who really does want to tear down the regime and start over.

The regime that matters is not the republic: elections, legislative deliberation, checks and balances, the rule of law.

The regime that matters really is the absolute unconditional power of the bourgeoisie, to whom the proletariat comes hat in hand for a few scraps. In the regime that matters, all the trappings of the republic are simply theatre, a cunning illusion; the decisions that matter are made in boardrooms and mansions.

Sanders' real problem, his supporters' real problem, is that they do not yet realize they are revolutionaries.

How economists conceptualize economics

Classical economists conceptualize the economy as an ecology. It can be studied, carefully, and gently, but it cannot be actively managed. To a classical economist, the best way to take care of an economy is the same way an ecologist would advise taking care of an ecosystem: the primary goal is to keep it pristine, to keep outside forces from fucking it up. An economy, like an ecology, changes over time, but those changes are internal, "organic," and usually slow. Even when changes are not slow, the best advice is just to let the economy (like an ecosystem after a forest fire) work itself out internally. Indeed, the forest fire analogy is very apt: as best I understand ecology (which is not that well), we do the ecosystem a disservice by preventing forest fires; even catastrophic change is baked into the structure of the ecosystem. Similarly, we do the economy a disservice by preventing depressions, crashes, bubbles, etc. We lose Schumpeter's "creative destruction" by a too-stable economy.

Keynesian economists conceptualize the economy as a city full of people. A city is kinda like an ecology, but not really: no one can "control" a city, but it requires active intervention to stay alive. Individuals will work a lot of things out on there own, but there are too many areas that cannot simply work out individually. There's no magic Keynesian bullet: an economist has to really look at individual cases and situations to see when intervention or regulation is needed. But, unlike a classical economist, a Keynesian will say that we can make a case for intervention and regulation more than just those necessary to enable markets and keep the ecosystem from getting fucked up.

Central-planning communists see the socialist economy like a spacecraft. It has to be intentionally and specifically built, by experts, with all the bureaucratic management seen in any very large corporation. Just as the free market would never have got us to the Moon*, the free market is never going to get us to a socialist economy. Typical people cannot vote on how the economy works any more than they can vote on the design of a rocket engine.

*Sorry, Bob, but it just wasn't going to happen.

To be slightly less charitable, some central-planning communists see the socialist economy like an army. As bureaucratized and inefficient as all national armies are, no free-market army has ever effectively fought a war, much less run one. Similarly, although it might seem bureaucratized and inefficient, an economy run along the lines of an army should, in central-planning theory, outperform a free-market economy just as a centrally commanded, rigidly hierarchical army always outperforms an individualistic, free-market army. There are, of course, a lot of different ways to run an army, and army-paradigm communists have a lot to disagree with among themselves, but the debate there is not whether, but what kind.

All these economists say they have scientific disagreements, but the differences are primarily moral. Ecosystems are as rigidly hierarchical as any engineering bureaucracy or any army. Scientifically, physically, we can see the economy as an ecosystem, a city, an engineering project, or an army. These distinctions are not imposed by nature; they are human choices, and choices have to be seen in a moral context, not a descriptively scientific context. (Of course, a scientific understanding of psychology and sociology can tell us something about the kinds of choices people want to make, and we need an ordinary scientific understanding of the physical world to effectively implement our choices.)

Thus, whether to view the world as a classical economist, Keynesian economist, or central-planning communist economist is a choice, a moral decision, and reflective of the preferences of the economist. Hence my view that economics is an essentially normative endeavor, whose central project is explicitly or implicitly promoting one philosophical view of the economy. For example, the idea that economics should be entirely descriptive implicitly promotes the classical view of economics as an ecosystem that can be studied but not managed, which is itself a normative choice. Because I see both ecosystems and bureaucracies as rigidly hierarchical, I conclude that people choose to see economics as classical or centrally planned are those who prefer hierarchies, either because they are at the top, or because they believe they would be at the top of a new hierarchy. These preferences may be consciously suppressed (or advocates just might not understand the implications), but I think they really are there.

I see myself economically, in broad outlines, as a Keynesian. I prefer the Keynesian "economy as a city" paradigm. We can run the economy as a pure ecosystem, but I don't like the results of that: the cutthroat competition, the incessant narrowing of niches, and the relations of dominance and subordination. We can run the economy as an engineering bureaucracy, but thirty years as an engineer have taught me the limits of what an engineering bureaucracy can do, and I want to do more. And I have no interest whatsoever in anything that even looks like a military.*

*Which is not to disparage my friends who are or have been in the military. As a part of society (and leaving aside the uses to which the capitalist system puts the military, military-style organizations are fine for those who like them. I just don't want the whole economy run like an army.

However, I see myself politically as a democratic communist. Keynes notwithstanding, I believe that Keynesianism is incompatible with private ownership of the means of production, i.e. a distinct capitalist class. It's quite ironic: the capitalist class has never forgiven Keynesian economics for saving capitalism from itself. Without Keynes and Roosevelt, Western capitalism would have fallen, probably to central-planning communism, in the 1930s.

Capitalists hate Keynes because Keynesianism undermines the central capitalist premise of capitalist power over and subordination of the working class. The capitalist class is not and has never been about consumption. Even though they have built a system that is a thousand times more productive than feudalism and monarchism, most capitalists consume less in absolute terms (compare Versailles and the Hearst Castle), and therefore far less in relative terms. Capitalism has been about the inherent value of subordinating the working class to the will of the capitalist class. Keynesianism fundamentally undermines that subordination, by politically allocating economic demand to the working class, and places not the capitalist class but the professional-managerial class as the fundamental ruling class.

We know from the late 1940s to the 1970s that when the working class has a lot of economic demand, the economy performs extremely well; the problem is not that economically independent workers won't work; they will work, and work hard. The problem is that economically independent workers cannot be subordinated. Economically independent black people cannot be discriminated against. Economically independent women cannot be sexually and socially subordinated. People with economic independence demand rights: autonomy, dignity, and respect. The economically independent cannot be controlled and subordinated to the will of the capitalist class. And that's what capitalism is really about: the power of capitalists to subordinate the working class to their own will.

Something else must be found. The capitalist class has decisively wrested control away from the professional-managerial middle class. They now face only the forces of inertia is dismantling the Keynesian political allocation of economic demand. However, as we are seeing even now, when they finally manage to do so, they will face the problem of the falling rate of profit and capitalist over-accumulation. With nuclear weapons, they can no longer rely on war to address over-accumulation. As we have seen in both Russia and China, it doesn't take all that much time to revolutionize even the most authoritarian-submissive population. Ironically, as capitalists increase the subordination of the working class, they will make the working class more susceptible to revolution, by making them more disciplined and accepting of authority in general. A revolution is inevitable; capitalism is snatching defeat from the jaws of the victory the Keynesians handed them.

There's no predicting the outcome of a revolution. The best I can do is put myself into a position where, if a lot of things break my way, I can be of some use to the winners of the revolution. I hope that's enough.

Peter Dorman on the S-word

According to Peter Dorman's The S-word (Socialism), Capitalism suffers from four flaws. First, Dorman complains that capitalism emphasizes extrinsic motivation over intrinsic motivation; we cannot do without some extrinsic motivation (people need to do what needs to be done, regardless of what they want to do), but we should be moving towards increasing intrinsic motivation (people doing what they want to do). Second, Dorman asserts that capitalism entails a lack of equality. We are not, of course, all the same, and perfect equality is unobtainable (and undesirable), but we could be much more equal than we are today. Third, Dorman claims that capitalism seems to erode the sense of social control over our lives. Markets are one form of social control, and for some things, like making the right kinds and numbers of shoes, markets are probably the best form of social control. But there are a lot of things, such as global warming, that markets are failing badly to control. Finally, capitalism necessarily creates a small privileged class, the 0.01%, that command most of society's resources. Most reforms seem to founder on the opposition of this class. Dorman believes there are good arguments for both incremental reform and wholesale revolution to address these problems of capitalism. There is, he asserts, a continuum of levels of change; but there are qualitative as well as quantitative differences as we increase the scope of change. I concur mostly with Dorman's evaluation; I differ with him only in that I do not think capitalism can be reformed.

Of course, for those of us such as myself who have abandoned the idea that capitalism can substantively change, the argument for revolution looks a lot stronger. The top 10-20% or so control almost all of the social surplus. It is they who make the vast majority of decisions about what and how much we will produce; the bottom 80-90% are just trying to stay alive in the world the capitalist rule. No social reform will succeed that fails to offer one faction in the top 10-20% a substantial advantage over their intra-class rivals; a reform that threatens, even obliquely, the fundamental social authority of the capitalist class to rule absolutely, e.g. financial regulation, will be ruthlessly and violently suppressed. Our society will decline in liberty, well-being, autonomy, and dignity until we completely destroy the authority of those who own money. Indeed, to my mind, the question is not if we will smash their authority, but when.

But there's a more important question even than when: who will take power from the capitalist class? Bad as they are, the capitalists are not the worst class ever to rule the world. Those who protect the capitalists against their most obvious extra-class opponents, the socialists and communists, risk empowering the fascists and theocrats, who have power bases nearly immune to rational inquiry. The fascists and theocrats can be defeated, but only when the intelligentsia are united against them. If capitalism had a hope of surviving and not destroying itself, that would be a good argument for supporting capitalism despite its flaws, but when it is clearly degenerating, it is time to find and argue for a new system.

In the post, Dorman claims he is agnostic about specific social structures, but the character of social structures and institutions are precisely the sort of thing we need to be thinking about. It is all well and good to say that we want more intrinsic motivation, more equality, more social control, and a less differentiated class structure, but how can we construct our social structures and political-economic institutions to actually deliver those objectives? Fundamentally, I am trying to figure out how we can construct our social, political, and economic institutions to most effectively deliver what Dorman and I both want.

Naivete

Naivete

Sunsara Taylor on revolution

Sunsara Taylor points out that the revolution in Egypt is not over. Indeed it has only barely just begun, and may well never achieve its ends. The Egyptian people have deposed Mubarak, and good for them, but the underlying power structures remain, for which Mubarak was just a figurehead. Without a revolutionary leadership, it might well be, as The Who sings, "Meet the new boss, Same as the old boss."

It used to be that if you caught the eye of the US, with "democracy" you got to be part of the exploiting countries, instead of the exploited. If you didn't, you had "democracy" only so long as you paid your tribute to the Empire. If you even hinted at independence, you'd have a CIA agent on your doorstep dropping ominous hints. "Nice democracy you got there. Shame if anything happened to it." Now, even the US as a country barely gets to be one of the exploiters; I don't think Egypt has much hope of rising to the top.

It remains to be seen whether the people of Egypt really want to change the objective conditions of their country, or if they just want exploitation and oppression in a more congenial wrapper.

Ah well. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and a world without Mubarak is better than one with him, no matter how you slice it. On the other hand, one step does not a journey make. The people of Egypt have won a great victory in only a single battle. The war for real freedom, real independence, real liberation remains to be fought.

The ethics of revolution

Archvillain ask some perspicacious questions about the ethics of revolution:

The Barefoot Bum is one of the blogs I read regularly. Despite the fact that he and I agree on very little, I enjoy reading the output of intelligent minds such as his.

One particular point on which we disagree is communism. He is an avowed communist, and I am more of a rational anarchist (to steal a term from Heinlein). I am not particularly wedded to capitalism, but I tend to believe a capitalist system of some sort allows greater freedom for individuals than communism. Under communism, the individual is subservient to the society as a whole. I don’t like the idea of being a servant to anyone.

Recent articles have dealt with the need to overthrow the capitalist system in order for a communist system to be put in place. Since people are unlikely to spontaneously evolve a culture which would allow the peaceful transition from one to the other, Barefoot Bum postulates a revolution to make it happen. To his credit, he makes some very cogent observations about the necessity for the actual revolutionaries to avoid being part of the new ruling party, and points out the very real hazards of any revolution. Even more to his credit, he acknowledges that any such revolution would be made by a small fraction of the population, and may therefore merely repeat the cycle of ruling elites being overthrown by small groups which become the new ruling elites. This sort of intellectual honesty is hard to come by- especially on the internet.

For those wondering, I have no particular love for the government as currently operated. That said, I am willing to work with the established guidelines to modify and improve the way our country is run. Going back to Ed Howdershelt’s Four Boxes (There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order), in the event we, the People, have to open that Fourth Box, I will not be joining in any putative communist revolution.

Let me correct a few misconceptions. I most definitely do not construe communism to entail that "the individual is subservient to the society as a whole." I do not believe that such a construction is even coherent, much less desirable; the assertion contains the fallacy of reification. "Society" is an abstract entity; the word labels statistical and emergent properties of the collection of individual properties. An individual cannot actually be subservient to an abstraction, and individuals cannot be subservient to an abstraction that is defined (indirectly) by their own properties.

I prefer to define collectivism in general in terms of Prisoner's Dilemma kinds of mutual benefits that are in tension with individual benefit. Collectivism is the position that we need social structures and institutions that are in some sense coercive to achieve mutual cooperation instead of mutual defection. Since there are a lot of situations where the Prisoner's Dilemma does not apply, collectivism in this sense is not strictly incompatible with individualism. In this sense most individuals are not subservient to anything; the social structures exist for their own benefit, and rational people have a reason to prefer a social structure that promotes their own benefit through mutual cooperation over one that can be expected to fall into mutual defection to their own detriment.

I would contrast collectivism with "radical" individualism: Where the Prisoner's Dilemma does exist, mutual defection is preferable to any coercive social structures that promote mutual cooperation; if individuals want to achieve mutual cooperation, they need to find a non-coercive way of doing so.

The concept that "since people are unlikely to spontaneously evolve a culture which would allow the peaceful transition from one to the other, Barefoot Bum postulates a revolution to make it happen," does not reflect my views with perfect accuracy. I think the culture will "evolve" (by the looser, internally teleological standards of cultural and social evolution) to make communism desirable or at least unobjectionable to most people. The capitalist ruling class will not, however, voluntarily surrender its own power and privilege; they will, like every ruling class before them, use increasingly violent and oppressive means to maintain their own power. When the people themselves strongly desire change in the fundamentals of our system of government, we will have to fight a revolution to overcome the violent resistance of the capitalist ruling class.

The above being said, some of Archvillain's critical questions remain valid. What constitutes "sufficient" popular will to justify a revolution? It seems relatively clear that at the extremes the question is obvious that there is some such thing as "sufficient popular desire". If only the King and dozen armed guards wish to preserve the monarchy, and millions of people want some sort of democratic republic, there seems to obviously exist sufficient popular will to overthrow the King despite the violent resistance of his guards. Similarly, if millions of people adore and respect the King, and are happy under his rule, the dissatisfaction of a dozen revolutionaries seems to obviously fail to justify a revolution. The question becomes: how does the justification work in the "middle"?

There isn't a simple answer to this question, and the justification does not depend in a linear way on the quantity and quality of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the population. Still, it's one thing to try to influence the popular will in nonviolent ways, but not just I myself but every self-professed communist revolutionary I know believes that only the existence of popular will in some sense directly justifies actually picking up weapons and shooting back at people. Popular will is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to justify revolution in a philosophical sense. The popular will could exist for a revolution we might consider "bad" in some abstract sense, but even if the dozen outlying revolutionaries were correct in some abstract sense, the lack of popular will would fail to justify revolutionary action. A revolution is very different from a coup d'etat.

To no small extent, radical changes in society are accompanied by a degree of irrational hysteria, which is in direct proportion to the immediacy and severity of the existing regime's violent oppression. The British government was unwilling and unable to employ Romanesque oppression to maintain control of the American colonies, so the American revolution proceeded with relatively less hysteria than other revolutions. Even so, there was still a degree of hysteria and irrationality. Revolutions under conditions of more immediate and disciplined oppression — e.g. the French, Russian, and Chinese — exhibited relatively more hysteria.

Revolutionary agitation and propaganda cannot by itself create this hysteria. People become hysterical when they are profoundly dissatisfied and see no rational resolution of their dissatisfaction. And people do not become hysterical or dissatisfied with the conditions of their society and its institutions just because they read a pamphlet or listen to a guy on a bullhorn. Revolutionary propaganda can succeed only in giving form and focus to dissatisfaction that is already there. Revolutionary propaganda can succeed only in transforming resignation and fatalism to hysteria. There is little good that can be said for hysteria; the sensible, humanistic revolutionary such as myself claims only that hysteria in the service of revolution is better than resignation in the service of slavery and oppression.

I concur in a sense with Howdershelt's exhortation, but I consider it rather as a truth. People will in fact do what they can to reform their society; when adequate reform is impossible, sooner or later sufficient hysteria will take hold of its own accord, and the people will find the use of the fourth box acceptable. I would love to be proven wrong, but I am a revolutionary only because I do in fact believe that meaningful, adequate reform is not possible. I see the development of hysteria and desperation against a violent, oppressive regime as inevitable; I see as my task to influence that hysteria and its aftermath in positive ways beneficial to the people of the society that will emerge and humanity in general.

The ethics of revolution

In comments, Archvillain asks some pointed questions about the ethics of revolution:

In the course of this revolution, more than one group of revolutionaries may rise to prominence. What would happen if those groups had differing political and economic goals? In my opinion, the two most likely possibilities are balkanization or another protracted civil war.

Do you think either of these possibilities would be likely to be in the best interests of the people?

Observation: Only a fraction of any population actually gets involved in any given revolution. The overwhelming majority only wants the fighting to stop.

Given this observation, the nature of all post-revolutionary societies is toward a ruling elite. Doesn't this imply that your desired revolution will merely repeat the same cycle of creating a new ruling class which would invariably grow ever more oppressive?

To rephrase a bit, I see three questions here. First, a revolution is a chancy thing: by definition the ordinary mechanisms of legitimacy have broken down. There are no guarantees that the outcome will be desirable, much less optimal. Given the enormous risk, is it ethical to contemplate revolution? Second, a revolution is always the intention of a minority: Is it ethical to foment revolution, given that it will proceed without intention of the majority of people? Third, Does every revolution inevitably lead to a new ruling class, which will eventually become oppressive and require yet another revolution?

I don't have any easy answers to these questions, but they are questions that I think anyone seriously contemplating the possibility and desirability of a revolution must think deeply and carefully upon, and proffer serious and considered answers.

A Declaration of Revolution

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the people of a nation to seize political and economic power from a privileged minority, and to employ that power for the common benefit of the people of that nation and of all humanity, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the seizure.

We know through scientific study that our political and economic institutions are the common property of all humanity, to be exercised not for the benefit of a privileged few but for the common benefit of all. Our rights and freedoms are not merely noble-sounding abstractions; they must ever be physically built and maintained through the labor of each and every human being. Their benefits, therefore, deservedly accrue to each and every human being. The just powers of not only the government but also the administration of the means by which we secure our sustenance and material prosperity derive from the consent and participation of the people. Whenever the institutions of a society become destructive to those ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish those institutions and create new institutions to secure not only their liberty and happiness but their sustenance and material prosperity. The institutions of a society, embodying the experience of millions of people over centuries, should not be overturned lightly. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to seize power and create institutions of political and economic governance to secure their own liberty and material prosperity. The history of the Capitalist Class in the United States and the world at large is a history of grievances and usurpations, all having not only the direct object of tyranny and slavery over the masses of humanity. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Capitalist Class and its captive government have created a financial crisis that is impoverishing not only the United States but the entire world.

They have stolen the savings, pensions, and homes of millions, even those who have done nothing contrary to the Capitalist Class's own rules.

They have demanded the labor of future generations only to cure the ills caused by their incompetence, ineptitude and greed.

They have thrown tens of millions of people out of work, and forced hundreds of millions more to work harder and longer only to receive less; not because there is no work to be done but because the work to be done does not accrue to the privilege, power and status of the Capitalist Class.

They have poisoned our air, our land and our water, incontrovertibly the property of all humanity.

They not only threaten the very survival of hundreds of millions of people by the scientifically incontrovertible danger of global warming caused by human industrialism, but dither and prevaricate while a catastrophe may yet be averted or mitigated.

They have kept secret or demanded outrageous ransom for scientific and technical advances, advances that rest on the cultural, intellectual and scientific progress of a hundred generations, incontrovertibly the property of all humanity.

They have pursued wars of aggression, killing thousands of their own citizens and millions of innocent civilians in the countries they have illegally and immorally occupied, devastating city, town and countryside, and usurping their economic and political self-sufficiency and independence.

They have compromised or destroyed outright the political liberties guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. No longer are the people "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

No longer do the people enjoy freedom of speech. The Capitalist Class controls all speech, lying and concealing the truth to propagate its own privilege, and imprisoning or impoverishing those whose only crime is to speak the truth.

No longer may we peaceably assemble, nor demand a redress of our grievances, but that we must endure the violence and oppression of the police and the hostility of the courts.

They have fomented discrimination and division: racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination on religion, language and culture, all to weaken the people and turn them against each other instead of their common foe.

They have waged a brutal war of occupation against their own citizens, especially African-American and Hispanic citizens, imprisoning more people, and more people of color, than any other society.

They still seek to deny the most basic human right, the right to control one's own body, to women; they seek no less to enslave half the human race to their reproductive organs.

They have abandoned the physical and economic infrastructure of the nation and the world, allowing to decay its roads, bridges, tunnels, transportation, electric power, water and sewage treatment.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our peaceful protests have been answered by brutality, our elections by subversion and corruption.

As a single individual, I do not have the authority or power to go beyond enumerating these grievances; I can only encourage the citizens of the United States and the people of the world to take possession of what is theirs, by natural, scientific and Constitutional right.

Why I'm a revolutionary communist

I'm a revolutionary communist, but not because I have some burning desire to change the world or any real grievance, personal or social, against the capitalist system. At heart, I'm very conservative: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And if a system can creep along, grinding down only two thirds of the population, I have some sympathy with the argument that the system ain't broke enough to replace it entirely. Not because I'm indifferent to the suffering of billions, but because any student of history knows the terrible costs of revolution to those selfsame billions, even when revolution is inevitable or obviously justified.

I'm a revolutionary communist because I see the portents of catastrophic failure of liberal capitalism. If liberal capitalists were to say with truth that they were actually improving the lives and well-being of all humanity, however slowly, my innate conservatism would side with them. And indeed for most of my life I really did side with them. I've always been a "progressive", wanting to ameliorate the conditions of all humanity, but I accepted — not entirely blindly — the foundations of capitalist society, especially the private ownership of capital and the small-r republican style of government.

But for most of my life, from the mid-1970s to the present, the well-being has declined for most humanity, including all but the highest levels of the capitalist class and the professional-managerial middle class. It's more apparent in hindsight than it was at the time, especially since personally I had found a niche where my own well-being and standard of living almost effortlessly rose over two decades.

I'm of course irritated and displeased that I personally have been unceremoniously ejected (twice!) from the professional-managerial middle class, and my change in status has led me to question a lot of assumptions about liberal capitalism, but I don't nurse much of a grievance. I'm a resourceful and clever guy, with a good personal support system. I know I'll do reasonably well; I won't face homelessness and starvation. And I'm enjoying my life more, much more, on $25,000 a year than I did only a few years ago on $180,000. If the liberal capitalist system as a whole were working, I wouldn't be at all aggrieved by the changes in my personal fortunes, even though these changes were thrust upon me, since even in a time of crisis I'm still doing quite well by my own standards.

But the system as a whole isn't working. What's happened to me is happening in one way or another to a hundred million people in the United States, and a billion around the world, and most of them have neither my enormous social privilege nor the "philosophical" resources I happen to have developed. And there are only a very few slots to avoid a personal catastrophe for someone such as myself to find as much by luck as by cleverness, diligence and talent. I'm selfish enough to keep my privileged slot, but I'm observant enough not to assume that because I personally (at least presently) found a slot that a slot exists for everyone, if only they choose to take it.

I'm a revolutionary communist in no small part because a revolution is already underway. I'm not really fighting against liberal capitalism; I'm fighting against the Randian reactionary revolution that's overwhelming liberal capitalism. It's been a "slow" revolution, because it was a revolution against a political-economic system that — while very far from perfect — was working fairly efficiently and making real gains for a hundred million people. The first thirty years of the Randian revolution was spent in an effort to undermine liberal capitalism. And the last bastion of liberal capitalism in the capitalist ruling class — the liberal billionaires and their representatives in the "progressive" wing of the Democratic party — show no sign of even understanding, much less resisting, this revolutionary tide.

My major "conservative" objection to revolution — even a "good" revolution — is no longer operative: whether I like it or not, a revolution is underway. And it's a bad revolution, a revolution that is explicitly intent on making life worse for all but the handful of people at the very top, a revolution in which I can see the portents of intentional genocide and mass-murder on a Hitlerian scale. The Randians will find that people are more resilient than they think — the mediocre in large numbers have surprising resources — and will not implode in self-destruction as quickly as they think. There will be, I think, increasing motivation and will to accelerate that destruction, and actively perpetrate it to achieve the purity of values that is the heart of the Randian reactionary revolution.

The Randian revolution too is doing all of the morally questionable work of any mass movement, especially destroying the social institutions — e.g. church*, family, neighborhood, labor union — that give individuals a sense of "belonging" and solidarity, and forcing those individuals into one mass movement or another to find that solidarity. Indeed this morally questionable work might prevent me from supporting any mass movement de nuovo; but given that a bad revolution has already destroyed these institutions, and only a competing mass movement can resist and finally overthrow the Randians, these moral issues are eased, in exactly the same sense that a physician has more moral license to experiment on a patient — with her consent — who is suffering and moribund: the first canon is "do no harm", but what more harm can be done?

*The role of churches in providing belonging and solidarity for frustrated individuals within a system and the changes necessary to for churches to organize frustrated individuals into a mass movement to implement a new system are complicated. That the role of churches can be so easily co-opted lies at the heart of my specifically atheist contempt of religion in general.

A revolution is already happening. I am not so much to foment revolution but to foment a counter-revolution.

Social Security and saving

I really don't understand the push to "reform" Social Security.

Social Security and Medicare must do precisely the same thing: reallocate today's consumption of today's production from today's working people to today's retired, disabled and sick people today. That's all we can ever do. We have two choices: reallocate some of today's consumption from working people to retired people, or let retired people starve. If we are unwilling to do the latter, the only "choice" we have is what kind of accounting fictions we'll use.

The idea of "saving" in any sense for any reason is — unless you're actually stockpiling cans of food in the basement — nothing but an accounting fiction. When an individual, business or government saves money, they are not saving anything physical. They are merely creating the social permission to wait until tomorrow to allocate tomorrow's consumption from one use to another. Saving money is essentially saying: I will let you consume today more of today's production in return for the promise that I can consume tomorrow more of tomorrow's production.

How much we consume today of today's production has no effect whatsoever on tomorrow's production. If you do not eat the chicken today, it will, metaphorically speaking, just spoil by tomorrow. More literally accurate, if you work one fewer hour today, there will not be a magical extra hour added to the day tomorrow that you can work.

Saving is different from investment. Saving is just not consuming for any reason; investment uses today's production to make production tomorrow more efficient. When we use up 5,000 labor hours to build a car, we make moving from one place to another more efficient for someone for the next 10 years.

During the past 40-50 years, we have been collecting more in Social Security taxes than we have paying to beneficiaries: we have been reducing workers' consumption more than we have been increasing retirees' consumption. We have not been "saving" the difference; it is physically impossible to save the difference. All that workers have produced over the last 40-50 years was used up one way or the other when it was produced: either consumed, invested or wasted.

By redirecting excess Social Security taxes into the Social Security Trust Fund (which AFAIK consists entirely of Treasury securities, i.e. loans to the regular government) we have been (hopefully) investing the production those taxes represent. We've been (hopefully) building schools, roads, hospitals, etc. — things that make our economy more efficient overall. Had we not invested this surplus, our per-capita productivity today would have been considerably smaller. Yesterday's workers consumed less yesterday so we could invest more yesterday to be able to produce more today.

When someone tells you they want to reform Social Security and Medicare, they're telling you only one thing: they want to take this increased productivity and consume it themselves while allowing the workers — who sacrificed their own short-term consumption to increase productivity — to starve and die when they can no longer work.

The capitalist ruling class really is literally trying to kill us. When will people realize that violent revolution is a matter not of ideology or preference, but of pure self defense?

Force or subversion?

Raymond Chen quips:

The mother of a colleague of mine came to visit from Canada. For some reason, the United States requires visitors to fill out a questionnaire asking them whether they are a drug dealer, whether they are a Nazi war criminal, and this question:

Do you advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force or subversion?

The sweet old lady studied the question for a while, then circled force.

The immediate inevitability of revolution

In the 2008 election, the Democratic party faced as close to ideal circumstances as a partisan political party can possibly face: The final term of the worst president ever, a war even more unpopular than Vietnam owned by the opposing party, an economic crisis completely, unequivocally and undeniably the responsibility of and effect of the opposing party's policies, and a charismatic, accomplished and intelligent presidential candidate. They were rewarded by the presidency, an historic legislative majority, and the opportunity to quickly seat a new Supreme Court justice.

And what have they accomplished? Zero. Zip. Nada. We're still in Iraq and Afghanistan. We still have record unemployment. The pathetic "the best we can say about it is it's just barely better than nothing" health care bill is still uncertain to pass. The Democratic party just lost a special election in Massachusetts, one of the great bastions of liberalism and the Democratic party.

The Democratic party has not only failed as the representatives of the well-established policies of liberal and progressive capitalism, they have failed to show minimal competence even as a partisan political party. Stupidity? Weakness? Cowardice? Betrayal? Treason? I don't know, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is success and failure, and the Democratic party is failing orders of magnitude more deeply than the Republican party under Richard Nixon's presidency.

The question is not whether there should be a revolution. The revolution is under way even as we speak, a an unholy alliance of Klansmen, Nazis, Christian fundamentalists, and Randian "capitalists" who have already overthrown capitalist constitutional liberal democracy, a revolution that is at most three years (and possibly less than a year) away from seizing complete power. Only one question remains. Will there be a counter-revolution? And there's only one person who can answer that question: You.

In the next one to three years, there isn't going to be a sideline, and there will be no popcorn. Much as I might dislike polarization, there isn't going to be a middle ground: you'll either be part of the resistance or part of the regime. And it won't be the resistance who will be forcing the choice: the fascist regime will make damn sure you have to compromise your human morality just to survive. Will you? Will you die or go underground rather than compromise your principles? I can't tell you how to chose, because I don't think I can demand that you die or risk death for what I personally think is important. I know how I personally will choose (and if my posts here suddenly stop, check the underground or the concentration camps), but how you will choose is between you and no one but your God or your conscience.