#NotMyPresident? #DrainTheSwamp? The REAL Revolution Is Already Here
So you say you want a revolution? Well don’t worry, it’s already happening and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the political game that the ruling oligarchs entice you to play once every four years. As the radical decentralization transforms the economy and finance and manufacturing and the media itself, the only question is whether or not you’re taking part in it. Yes, the revolution is happening, and no, it will not be televised.
SHOW NOTE
Solutions: The Peer-to-Peer Economy
Solutions: 3D Printing
Anarchy in Action: Spontaneous Order
Dear Government, Deliver Us From Freedom
P2P Solutions: An Open Source Investigation
Solutions: Freedom Cells
Solutions: Agorism
Solutions: Make Your Own Media
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Uber? That isn’t revolution. It’s counter revolution. Here in Toronto, Mayor Tory (a former Rogers exec, ergo) had to decide what to do with this unsettling, to already harried taxi cab drivers, new element in the taxi industry. Reportedly (I don’t know enough about any of this), his son has some sort of financial interest in Uber. Anyway, Prior to the big day when a decision was going to be made whether to rein in Uber, Tory said reasonable things. There was fairness in his approach. Uber represented the jungle approach and the taxi industry without Uber was regulated if not perfect. At the last moment, Tory, who is our mayor because the (neoliberal) business community wanted him for mayor, all but allowed Uber to operate freely. The rules on Uber were minimal. The rules for the taxi industry were loosened, bringing it more into the jungle approach than it brought Uber into the regulated, fair approach. And that tracks, because neoliberal capitalists, who thrive in a jungle system that is not only deregulated, but in which the mafia capitalist sharks are perfectly happy to break whatever rules there are, if they see that as being advantageous to them, are perfectly happy with dog eat dog, each man for himself, mafia capitalism, represented in Uber.
The rest of Corbett’s report isn’t anything I have any thoughts on. There’s nothing there for me to chew on.
I am guessing that I would disagree with him more than agree. For example, One is either ruled or rules or helps with rulership. No one is outside of that. I point that out to people who feel that politics is shite and not something that they want to bother with. I always start with “That’s absolutely correct, but beside the point.” Then I point out what I thought was obvious, namely that one is either ruled or rules. There’s no ‘outside’ here, as much as James wants to believe that there is. At the same time, I very much like anarchism and the Spanish anarchists – clean in lifestyle and language and ethics – have always been high in my estimation. I absolutely hate hiearchy and the social relations that obtain in a system such as we have. I don’t believe that, outside the nuclear family unit, a human being should have power over another human being. But the idea that we can ignore the ubiquitous police state(s) and in that way make them disappear seems plain silly. We aren’t ostriches. James is a smart guy. Maybe his ideas here aren’t as silly as they look, but he’d have to say more for me to agree more.
Oh dear,my respect for James Corbett has slipped a bit with this poorly thought out arguement of a post capitalist nirvana,as if we are already there, with Uber of all globalised companies,cited as a flag waver of anti corporate choice !
No mention of the below minimum wage earnings of the unregulated,un-unionised,unprotected drivers,exploited by unseen bosses to undermine the traditional black taxi cab drivers,who did the 3yr ‘knowledge’ test,then saved up to buy and maintain their own vehicle,and pay the licensing fee and adhere to professional standards of safety and conduct.
Corbett’s arguement echoes those of the neo con cowboys for greater deregulation and unaccountability.
I too was attracted to the utopian arguements of William Morris,as he demonstrated what an ideal state in the future might look like in his ‘New Worlds for Old’ book,which was a reaction to the Peterloo Massacre and the dehumanisation of industrialism. A plea to build a metaphorical ‘Jerusalem on England’s green and pleasant land’ as envisaged by Blake and even earlier by John Ball.
We have lost that history of working class aspiration,that dream of a collective ,fairer society,united culturally and morally.
Globalisation of capital and people,the ghettoing of cities into fragmented communities,the bloody iphone that has turned a whole generation into inarticulate, mobile zombies.
We have become slaves to the new technology which we don’t own.
3D printing is great for a few but spells massive redundancies for the many.Along with increased automation by computerised robots,the future battle will be to find any kind of work to pay for all these ‘must have gadgets’ .
Mean while population increases unabated,doubling every generation in regions that are the least self sustainable and most affected by climate change.The stampede to reach the life boat countries of the developed world has begun,as has the predictable growing reaction of those fearful of their own swamping with overload.
People,like any commodity when in surplus, their lives become cheapened.Wars for control of diminishing resources,particularly water and arable land, become part of the Great Game which the Deep State manipulates through it’s MSM propaganda monopolies.
I am fortunate in already finding my rural bolthole to watch the impending human collision with nature from the sidelines of society.
Maybe James Corbett has too in Japan,a highly regulated,ordered,and traditional monoculture with a decreasing population that has very strict border controls.
We will both continue to shout down our own megaphones “icebergs ahead”,but from different life boats on the global Titanic.
Has Corbett come up with a P2P anarcho-agoric solution for AGW?
Didn’t think so – but AGW is a NASA/CIA MK-ultra Gladio-b mindf_ck psyop hoax designed by the NWO to enslave us.
Maybe we can 3D print a new biosphere?
These solutions are the elaborate hoax and a vote for the status quo – just so long as the Paypal donations or BitCoin keep flowing in to sunnier and sunnier Japan.
For me, these solutions aren’t so much solutions – as part of the problem.
Yay! — for uber and all other ‘monopoly’ smashing technologies that incidentally, by the magic of the competition Corbett obviously prizes, of pitting everyone against all, makes earning a living driving a taxi all that much more difficult and precarious.
Yay! — for the new artisan economy in which everything will become peer to peer, no matter where the ‘anarchistic revolutionary’ individuals live on earth, because now we can all connect by the internet trunk lines that nobody charges anyone to use (except those individuals organized as “internet providers”) and that doesn’t itself require large industrial endeavors to deploy and maintain.
No money, no problem, eh. Because it’s all a matter of choice. No, really!
If you can’t afford a ‘3-D’ printer, you can just conceptualize one from scratch and build it in your basement, and if you don’t have all the exotic materials required to manufacture your ‘3-D’ printer artisan style, you can mine and smelt the stuff right out of the ground in your own back yard, and if your don’t have a back yard in which to have access to all the raw material requisites for your ‘3-D’ printer, well I guess you are shit-out-of-luck, eh; and if you can’t afford the computer to work your ‘3-D’ printer, you can build that, too, in your basement, never mind the colossal human and material resources that have gone into and continue to be required to produce the wonder that is the ‘digital gizmo’ of a modern day computer . . .
And so it goes for pretty much everything that we depend on to live, most of which is simply impossible without large scale industrial and bureaucratic organization. It’s not modern industrial principles of organization that are ‘so 19th Century,’ but precisely the notion of self-sufficiency implied by Corbett’s notion of modern artisanal production.
Corbett is at his best when he exposes corporate and institutional malfeasance but at his absolute worst when he tries his hand at political, economic or social theorizing.
He remains — like the (capitalist) corporatist mindset he thinks he decries — every bit as ideologically enamored of the fairy tale of the self-sufficient individual who has a God given right the fruit of his private artisanal creations, to buy and sell at a profit if only on scale smaller than monopoly capital.
Revolution won’t happen by ‘opting out’ of the system of modern industrial production — which you can’t do anyhow, at least not without condemning millions to chronic penury or outright starvation (which is ironcally what we now have under capitalism) — but by preserving and enhancing ‘socialized production,’ i.e. our large scale organizations (public education systems, health care systems, large scale industry, and so on), while eliminating all ‘for profit’ production, or otherwise said, eliminating all private ownership in all of the means of production, and by additionally doing away with the “money economy” if not the accounting of ‘labour-time.’
Just to add something hopefully substantive to the discussion and in counterpoint to Corbett’s anarchist fancies: in 1934, Paul Mattick wrote what I thought was an interesting essay on how both the modern capitalist production process (which is already a form of collectivized labour if yet a means of exploitation) and the economy can be transmuted into communism, and in particular, how ‘money’ can be supplanted so as to eliminate the possibility of extracting surplus value from the general population:
What is Communism?
I admire Corbett, but he’s incredibly naive on this one. The banks are already all over virtual currency and will develop a way to take it over, a relatively simple task. They’re letting you have your fun right now, while they develop the legislative framework and because they can analyse behaviours and people often come up with interesting new strategies they can appropriate. They intent to keep control obviously. And they always do in the long run. Just look at the electric car. Firstly it was killed in it’s first inception in the 90s; this was a delay tactic so that someone like Elon Musk could come along and devise a system to milk you with “electric pumping stations” which will be required for the new generations of models. You will not be able to charge “your” car in “your” home, with “your” electricity. The model is to move everyone over to a lease, as opposed to an ownership model. We are seeing this with the mobile technology and all newer programs/app being leased from the cloud as opposed to owned on your hard drive. Soon it will become too expensive to own personal computers with hard drives, which will be driven into obsolescence, and we will be dependent on leased mobile devices. Same with cars, homes. Same with energy. And don’t think the Raspberry Pi will save you – that has an entirely different agenda people have yet to wake up to.
Genuinely going off the grid is becoming virtually impossible in many states, and this move is quietly growing thanks to ALEC. People are legally being forced into leasing contracts with the electricity companies if they want to generate “their own” electricity from solar or wind. This is already happening. They are currently doing everything they can legislatively to stop you being independent on almost every level.
The byproduct of the intentionally generated subprime fallout is that huge swaths of land have been bought up cheap by institutions. They will not resell, they will rent/lease the land, a model British people are very familiar with, since most of the land has always remained in the hands of the aristocracy, including most of Central London. So even if you have a fantastic ideal for a tiny house community in Maine, good luck. A deregulated rental cartel will screw you for all you are worth. You can’t work around the system unfortunately, unless you are planning on adopting the Amish or monastic model. Then, they might ignore you.
And you cannot work around the Internet. They developed it, they have the keys to the kingdom. They want people to believe that there is freedom and anarchy accessible online, but that is nonsense, an utter illusion. I predicted everything that Snowden proved in 2012 back in 1995 when I was introduced to the WWW, because it was so damned obvious. These were set up as nets in the other sense of the word – they are fishing nets, for consumers, but more usefully to lure idealistic anonymous wannabes, criminals and oddballs that can be turned into intelligence assets. And the way the Internet is going, trying to organize alternative communities online will be constantly hampered once net neutrality is completely removed and we will be kettled into some latter day version of America Online. The web is a wonderful way to degenerate, as the current election has shown. Psy-ops 101. Corbett above all knows this so I’m surprised he feels there will be anything but cosmetic “independence” of which Uber is a perfect example. And good luck with that Uber nurse trying to set your kid’s broken bone, by the way.
I am fully for people leaving the broader harnesses of the system, which are mostly psychological. We plan to do it when we soon retire. We’ve already been moving in this direction, but it’s bloody hard work, and the chances that you could actually make a surplus at it are remote for most kids raised in the current immediate gratification system. It sounds great, but talk to people who are actually doing it. I watched the kids on Corbett renting a house, planning to make a living at urban farming. There was no indication that they had even spoken to any independent farmers, or people living off the grid, and of course you knew that their folks must have forked up the money etc for them to get the rental in the first place. Kids did this in the 70s once that “revolution” failed and there was a comparable financial implosion; they soon came running home to get corporate jobs and vote Reagan.
Oh yes, “the revolution” of internet dudes.
Suggested corrective reading: Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov.
Suggested counter-consideration: women have been in the “sharing economy” for, well, ever. It sucks. To tip more and more contemporary work into the erratically compensated informal sector is not going to liberate anybody. To imagine that all of the work that gets done to create a human society can be gizmodified into delightful equity and efficiency: ha ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ah ha (wipes eyes).
Yes let’s task rabbit childcare, eldercare, all of the work (and it is work) that requires humble loving commitment in order to be done well; that will turn out great! God forbid that there should be any generalized public framework to support support work and make it visible and render it less hidden and thus less liable to exploitation and abuse.
Or wait is there a 3D printing app that’s gonna resolve that?
James Corbett is the most disciplined, most thorough, most humane and educated commentator in the entire sphere, with the most integrity and highest degree of intellect and analytical skill.
This is just a casual post-election comment from him – for his many works of real substance, go to –
https://www.youtube.com/user/corbettreport/featured
and especially watch “Trillions: Follow the Money.”
He is so good that he is a threat to the MSM and its Deep State oligarch owners, who have probably sponsored some of the clone/disinformation sites popping up, eg ‘report corbett’ etc, which are clearly ripping off his traffic making him harder to find.
You’ve graciously orated what I have had lingering in my head for decades. We the people are who make the choices. Independently we can explore and discover new and more down to earth ways to coexist, sharing with others our dreams and hopes for the kind of world we want to leave to our future generations. The revolutionary mediums for interactions are indeed available. Investigate and share your mindset with those who both inspire and grow through the exchange of a human to human Cyberspace.
What fucking crap … what choices will have the people of syria or iran have when trump attacks them because his zionist jewish advisors want israels neighbours destroyed prior to eretz israel