Billionaires to the Barricades
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For decades our relatively equitable societies (minus racial inequalities and other gradually ebbing social issues) have been dismantled by these folks in the upper echelons of wealth and their willing conspirators in the upper-middle class and middle class in order to arrive at the situation we find ourselves in today.
They have promoted favorable propaganda through their media organs that has poisoned the minds of the laboring classes towards collaboration, towards entrepreneurialism, and self-agency. They have defunded and neutered social institutions that worked contrary to their goals, even if innocuously like the attempts to destroy quality public education and labor protections.
They have introduced a culture of consumption in place of production and individual industry to better capture a greater share of the productive gains furnished by technological and social advances. They have turned whole sectors of life into cut-throat for-profit industries such as health care and education.
And the worst part is that they have been incredibly effective in convincing the average person that they have a better deal with a 1 in a million chance of striking it rich through individual luck than a more pragmatic chance at general comfort through social collaboration with their fellow humans. Their propaganda has succeeded wildly in programming many people to distrust government or cooperation in favor of a nihilistic anti-humanist lifestyle of consumer consumption simply because it is more conducive to social control and easing their ability to maintain their positions in society.
How then do they propose to put this genie back in the bottle, having now let it loose these past several decades?
Agreed. Remember 'Trickle Down Economics', over 30 years ago? If I understand correctly, the idea was to cut taxes for the wealthy, and their resulting increased investment would cause the economic benefits to 'trickle down' to everyone else.
The surprising results are that when you cut taxes for high earners ... they become wealthier. Wages for everyone else have been flat since then.
[1]: https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/108160
[2]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp...
1) There's a flavor of the paranoid stories that seem prominent in that community (where do they hear this?) and popular on the right wing in general. Remember when Tom Perkins wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall St Journal saying that the wealthy are facing a "Kristallnacht"? [1] The French Revolution comparison and others like it reflects a similar mass paranoia, which is dangerous.
2) It's essential to maintain democracy, i.e., that each citizen has an equal vote. As taxes and public funding have been driven down, recipients have turned more and more to the wealthy donors, with gives the donors the only vote. And as the wealthy few provide more of the funding, they have more arguments to drive taxes down further -- look at what we're doing with our wealth! The problem is, we live in a democracy; we decide by vote how we want our society to change and progress.
For a simple example, a new park in NYC is being funded by a wealthy donor; is the land use, design etc. decided democratically by the citizens or by the donor? I read that state universities in CA are forming partnerships with corporations in lieu of lost state funding; can they risk offending those corporations? Finally, the Koch brothers funded some economics institute at a U. in Florida (FL State?) and greatly influence the research, including the selection of faculty (IIRC; my memory of the story is imprecise, but you get the idea).
The militarization of law enforcement doesn't mean much, e.g. look at how they completely loose there shit in the face of one disturbed, not very clever or effective assassin like Christopher Dorner [ADDED: there's a lot of cargo culting here; giving 10 police officer M16s/M4s, SAWs and grenades does not magically turn them into an US Army infantry squad]. At the other extreme, we the people can completely swamp them in a matter of hours, but of course motivating us to do that would be quite a trick.
"Advanced weaponry" is of no use without the will to use it. As an extreme example, a few nukes could terminate ISIS with extreme prejudice and collateral damage, but I don't know of any serious "hawk" even suggesting [WAS: advocating] their use.
I have grave doubts about your closing point, "a last resort if inequality continues at this rate"; is that so bad it's worth killing millions of people to merely attempt to fix it, with many and perhaps the most likely end results further emphasizing it? For that matter, who/what groups are going to start pulling triggers?
Very good point. Air support of any kind would be unhelpful in a revolution because the government would, understandably, be reluctant to bomb the hell out of its own population/economic centers.
The "swamping" concept I was referring to was something of a thought experiment, e.g. imagine an out of science fiction effective speech broadcast to enough people that it doesn't matter that the police know "the people" are coming right now.
As for your general point, people who think about this sort of thing often focus on the old techniques like cells, one time pads, etc., subverting those listening in, etc. etc. Plus I'd add, just how effective do you really think governments are, especially against "non-crazy" people. That's the real danger I see, that "middle class" or thereabouts people like me get upset enough to take up arms, instead of the usual suspects like the Weather Underground. Note our "revolutionary" Founding Fathers, especially apropos this day after the anniversary of Declaration of Independence.
And there's a relatively new "leaderless resistance" concept where individuals not in close communications nonetheless take effective action. Again, see how "effective" for some value of effective Christoper Dorner, working alone, was. One man, or a small group, can be dreadfully effective nowadays.
Not necessarily. The police are vastly outnumbered. Military technology only gets you so far (see: General Custer, Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq part II) and both military and police might find themselves disobeying orders or even switching sides.
Even on foreign military missions, we (the US) can certainly take over territory quickly, such as the invasion of Iraq, but we aren't willing (or possibly able) to be despotic all-powerful overlords after "bringing freedom" didn't end the way we wanted.
That aside, a situation has to get really bad before revolution, and all its associated costs and bloodshed, would be a net positive. And that's for successful revolution, historically the results have been more spotty.
Another poster already covered the heavily armed citizenry so I will defer on that one, except maybe to say that I don't find it alarming.
Let's set aside the technical issues involving revolution; weapons, tactics, whatever. Let's just look at the basic philosophical points and high-level problems.
What exactly would be revolted against?
Is one revolting against shitty local/state/federal government that they themselves (statistically) continued to vote in, either directly or through inaction?
Is one revolting against poor treatments of minorities, especially since they've (statistically) shown themselves incapable of interacting with people whose political views they disagree with (much less people with obvious differences in skin color, economic class, or some harder-to-overlook uniqueness)?
Is one revolting against the centralization of capital? This, despite the fact that that person is (stastically) unlikely to have any of the basic but essential skills required to grow food, mend equipment, slaughter animals, write books, orate effectively, organize teams, balance checkbooks, run businesses, or write programs?
Is one revolting against the loss of control one has over their own affairs? A loss of control literally begged for every time they've let slide a "think of the children" argument or repeated some other form of fear mongering?
America today has the government and economic distribution of wealth that it deserves.
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The only revolt that really makes sense is one purely out of spite, pure juvenile hatred and rage and desire to see the nice things these folks have turn to ash because "fuck you that's why". Anything more highbrow is just trying to dress things up.
The reason we don't have armed revolutions is that we have a better mechanism for replacing the government and expressing political desires.
Yeah... I keep hearing this threat from people who really ought to know better. Inequality is a major talking point from the left, but it reflects complete ignorance of how the world works.
The French Revolution is memorable precisely because it's so incredibly unusual. Look at Mexico, India, China... almost anywhere in the world aside from Europe and North America. There is virtually no society on the planet that doesn't concentrate wealth and power among the elite one percent, gated off from the lower classes. I'm not even speaking historically -- show me a modern country on any other continent that even remotely approaches a middle class.
Also, re-distributing wealth doesn't necessarily solve the cultural problems that create inequality. Egypt massively subsidized food... and Egyptians promptly had massive numbers of children that overwhelmed even the ridiculously cheap food prices. Just this week, Afghanis threw acid in the faces of schoolgirls trying to get an education. The Saudis cling to power through massive welfare programs to pacify their increasingly fundamentalist populace. Even here in the US, cultures that discourage education and responsibility aren't suddenly going to churn out engineers and doctors if billionaires give away their wealth.
The US will just continue down the well-trodden path that the rest of the world has already blazed, where tiny pockets of wealthy elites try to shelter themselves from the increasingly lawless masses. A revolution requires organization and discipline, which is absurd to expect even before you consider the unbeatable modern surveillance of all communications and movements in developed countries. The only threat that masses pose is lawless violence, much like what we saw in the Arab Spring -- but that's not really a problem when you can concentrate the rabble outside of elite pockets. Particularly when the rabble lack a unifying religious fervor, like what you see in the coalescing identity of fundamentalist Islam across MENA and Europe.
So please stop making vague threats about the French Revolution, people. The Second Amendment is not going to help rednecks water the tree of liberty. The people are not going to surge against their capitalist oppressors as a tide of justice or whatever. At worst, less developed countries will turn into Libya... but the more likely result is India, where elites gate off the masses and let them cultivate self-destructive cultures.
Is that really necessary? You could replace that with any other class/race/cultural group and you would be banned in seconds. It needs to stop, and surely HN is a progressive enough place to help begin that process.
But fair enough. What term would you prefer we use for generally uneducated, reactionary populations that infamously believe their personal arsenals will be used to overthrow a tyrannous federal government and establish socially conservative concepts of personal liberty?
This belief in revolution certainly isn't limited to conservative reactionaries (and I mocked leftists in the next sentence), but I'm not sure it's that productive to start a tangent of personal offense rather than address the questionable idea of armed revolution.
How about "strawmen"?
I'm honestly kind of impressed.
Wherever you stand on all this, having a clear view of the various parties is essential.
Mexico's revolution was in large part about wealth and land reform [1]; Zapata's famous battle cry was "tierra y libertad", land and freedom. Many of the reforms persists, albeit in weakened form, even today. China's revolution is known as the Chinese Communist Revolution [2] for a reason. The spike in conspicuous inequality is so new in China that the newly rich quite literally need instruction on how to display their wealth [3].
I do think a revolution is unlikely to happen in the US any time soon, but that's because we've got some tradition of taking care of people well enough that they're mostly not desperate enough to start a shooting war with the cops. E.g., during the 2008 crash, we spent zillions of dollars propping up the economy until things got better. We also have enough issues with race that we may see a race war before a class war. But it's a mistake to think it can't happen here. If we're ever dumb enough to pursue an austerity program like the one being inflicted upon Greece, where the interests of a small number of bankers are being hugely privileged over the great bulk of a nation, I would not be shocked at all to see something like Occupy Wall Street crossed with the Cliven Bundy crew.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Revolution
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution
>It should not be surprising that today more than half of its population is poor (CONEVAL, 2014), a proportion similar to the one prevailing three decades ago. Thus, more than 55 millions of Mexicans live in conditions of poverty.
>In these years, What happened to inequality? Well for anyone that visits Mexico, the words of Alexander Von Humbold (1811), more than two hundred years ago, still ring true:
>“Mexico is the country of inequality. Nowhere does there exist such a fearful difference in the distribution of fortune, civilization, cultivation of the soil, and population. …The capital and several other cities have scientific establishments, which will bear a comparison with those of Europe. The architecture of the public and private edifices, the elegance of the furniture, the equipages, the luxury and dress of the women, the tone of society, all announce a refinement to which the nakedness, ignorance, and vulgarity of the lower people form the most striking contrast.”
>As the writer Augusto Monterroso wrote in 2002 (p.60): “the unique, truly hyper-real characteristic of Mexico is its social inequality; the misery that marks the everyday life of the immense majority of Mexicans.”
>The figures corroborate this image. As Table 1 shows there is an almost 27-fold difference between the average incomes of the top and the bottom deciles. This difference is in stark contrast with the average ratio of 10 to 1 in the OECD (OECD 2014). More worrying, the top 1% of Mexico’s distribution has an average annual income 47 times that of the poorest 10% (del Castillo Negrete Rovira 2012). It is very likely that, were there numbers for smaller slices at the top, the ratios would be astronomical.
Likewise, I admire your optimism that Chinese inequality will be solved just as soon as the newly rich realize that they're Communists. I hope the future will prove you right.
Neither a race war nor a class war will happen in the US. Seriously? Even ignoring your optimistic assumptions of organized minorities (speaking as one, there are shockingly few war pacts among us), how exactly would such a revolution be organized, funded, armed, or fed? How would they conduct communications?
More to the point, what possible ideology would unite these revolutionaries? The Arab Spring had fundamentalist Islam as a unifying identity, but the US is nowhere near as sympathetic to fundamentalism... and even if it were, Christianity has proven far less conducive to the sort of grassroots-organized violence you see in MENA or South Asia. At worst (best?), you'll see the sort of anarchic lawlessness you see today in Detroit or Flint.
I'm not being sarcastic when I say I admire your idea of revolution. Many in the Arab Spring shared the same ideals, and were in for a rude awakening when their revolutions were instead dominated by religious fundamentalism and racial/cultural feuds. But the US lacks the strong cultural/religious ideologies necessary to organize armies and instigate revolutions -- which is a damn good thing, but it also limits possible plebeian uprising. Which is also a very good thing.
[1] http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/newsletterarticles/...
You seem to be saying that the revolution didn't work out as hoped. Which isn't surprising; many things don't. But that doesn't mean the revolution didn't happen, or that it wasn't motivated by inequality.
> Likewise, I admire your optimism that Chinese inequality will be solved just as soon as the newly rich realize that they're Communists. I hope the future will prove you right.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that China has already had one revolution where inequality was a driving force. That the inequality is returning is again no proof that a revolution couldn't happen.
> Neither a race war nor a class war will happen in the US.
The US has a long history of racial violence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un...
Further, unrest usually starts with the people getting the shortest end of the stick, and in the US that has a strong racial component. That sort of unrest quickly sets off white people; during Ferguson, for example, you had heavily armed white people coming to Ferguson to "help" and plenty more offering.
I agree they are unlikely to happen in the next couple of decades, though.
> the US lacks the strong cultural/religious ideologies necessary to organize armies and instigate revolutions
Keep telling yourself that. We've already had two organized revolutions in the US: the War of Independence and the Civil War. The latter of which was a war driven by race and economics.
Further, there are plenty of ideologies available on the fringe. See, e.g., Niewart's long look at the US protofacist right.
That's not what it looks like when I Google for information on the food subsidies and the birth rate.
Egyptian birth rates fell from the '60s until just recently, when they started to rise.
Egypt's large food subsidies started in the '70s, and do not appear to have had an affect on the birth rate.
Certainly the rate of increase has slowed -- which is an accomplishment, relative some other countries' quadrupling of population since 1950. But Egypt has still gone from a desert country of 28m in 1960 that relies on the extortion of diminishing water supplies from Ethiopia to... a desert country of 82m in 2012. The Arab Spring was directly related to the higher price of heavily subsidized bread in North Africa due to a minor spike in corn prices that year.
Even if the birth rate fell flat today (and as you noted, the opposite is happening), can you honestly predict any future for Egypt other than Malthusian failure? The Aswan dam was specifically built in a rare fit of foresight of this exact future... and relies heavily on Ethiopian/Sudanese submission to Egyptian riparian rights. I think it's fair to say that Egypt is extremely overwhelmed by its population growth.
Especially since all of their wealth comes from having figured out how to keep a larger portion of the product of labor than labor itself.
In other words "spread the cheer around".
The mythical mafia does this in popular culture as well by apparently buying Turkeys at Christmas time (for example) and helping people out in small ways and building trust. That trust allows them (in theory) to get away with the crimes that they commit (among other reasons). I say "mythical" because this is a popular cultural observation of mine, not some fact backed up by research. But I have found it to be true that people tend to look the other way if their palms are getting greased.
In case it's not entirely obvious it is also one of the reasons (along with tax benefits) that the rich give to charity causes. The good will gets those in power to look the other way.
Maybe that's a good thing, and it's only the governance model that is at fault (private ownership).
Or perhaps we should look closer at the externalities involved. Why is it that you can own a limited resource, like land, and profit from it. Shouldn't the exclusive control over a limited resource come with a cost?
Capital makes money by unpaid labor.
A woodshop is inherited by an heir. The carpenter comes in and creates furniture - let us say tables. The material for the table - wood, screws, varnish etc. cost $80. This would also include other costs - if a saw blade costs $100 but is good for 100 tables, then that 1/100 of a sawblade ($1) is included in the $80.
The table sells for $100 in a store attached to the woodshop. So all totalled inputs are $80, and the labor from the carpenter produces $20 of wealth per table.
The carpenter produces two tables an hour, and works for eight hours a day. So the carpenter creates $320 worth of value a day. The carpenter keeps all the wealth he creates for the first six hours a day - his daily take home pay is $240.
However, the carpenter is not paid for his labor for the last two hours a day. He is working for free, with all wealth generated going to the heir. This is surplus value he is generating, which is expropriated by the heir. This is where the profit comes from.
All modern rentier wealth is generated through these means. In the case of farmland, it is similar to the woodshop and carpenters, except we have workers, mostly of Mexican descent, working unpaid at the end of the day picking fruit in the Central Valley for those who took control of the land after Commodore John Sloat sailed his warships into Monterey Bay in the 1840s.
If the farmowner rents houses to the braceros, it is the same process, just one but removed. The landlord is not working for rent, the person doing the work to create the wealth is still the renter, it is just one level of abstraction. Usury is similar - moneylenders don't work for the wealth - they collect interest from those who do. Ultimately the value of all commodities derive from the work needed to create it. It doesn't take a lot of effort to collect and commoditize rainwater, so water is cheap. To find and mine gold takes more effort, so it is more expensive.
The social relationship of expropriation of unpaid time is what is important. It is all social relationships. There are no signs pointing down from the heavens saying who owns what. If it did, the farmland taken in California at gunpoint would belong to the Indians and Mexicans who lived there, not the heirs of that thest 175 years ago. With the profits derived from the labor of fruit-pickers, the theft continues to this day. As it does in the air-conditioned offices of Kifer Road and Market Street.
I.e. it's not about how hard or long one works. It's about working effectively.
Scenario A: "I want to make iPhones. All you people at Apple, and all you people at FoxConn, get to work."
Result: iPhones and wealth.
Scenario B: "I want to make iPhones. I wish I had some laborers."
Result: Nothing.
Scenario C: "We workers want to make something. Mr Jobs, we hire you as our manager. Get to work, and sell these things."
Result: maybe iPhones, maybe what we have today, maybe something else.
Ideas and management are great and necessary, but not sufficient and not exclusive.
As Gould said: "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."
Hell, most of our industry is based, in one way or another, on the slim hope that out of all of the other companies destroying user privacy and selling data that our company will be the one the market deems worthy of lots of funding and investment.
Occupy Wall Street should have set up a guillotine. Just to send that message.
Unless you're talking about secret assassinations carried out by traffic accident or similarly deniable means, months after the fact to prevent a PR problem, out of spite rather than to silence. I'm not sure what could be done about that sort of thing.