Where’s the Rest of our Country?
Phillip A Farruggio
In the 1942 epic film King’s Row actor Ronald Reagan ( of all people ) played a down and out working stiff (Drake McHugh) who just had his legs amputated due to an accident. He was under anesthesia and did not know this. Thus, when he came to, he uttered that famous line:
Where’s the rest of me!?”
This is a very appropriate query for all of us working stiffs as to the nature of this current economic state of affairs. For decades this Military Industrial Empire has been whittling away at our safety net…from ALL sides!
Funding for so many necessary services has been continually cut to the bone, while the empire keeps funding that militarism beast to the tune of over half of our federal tax revenue. No one or rather so few seem to care. At least Drake McHugh’s friends did when he screamed that famous scream.
We have a Two Party/ One Party system that equally kneels at the altar of empire. Wall Street, Big Banking and the Pentagon call for more war related instruments of destruction and invasion.
Meanwhile, the Republican vs. Democrat political scam will have many ‘food fights’ over many issues, but never about the ones which could actually help pull back this empire. Yet, when it comes to saluting the flag and honoring our ‘brave warriors’ these two parties cannot give enough in way of accolades.
Well, the flag is MY flag too! As far as our ‘brave warriors’, well, our military personnel should never have been sent to ANY of those places in that hornet’s nest called the Middle East. What many other nations realize (even our empire’s allies), is that our illegal and immoral invasions and occupations have given rise to insurgencies/terrorists throughout the Middle East.
Plus, and most important, is that the entire refugee crisis throughout Europe was instigated by Washington’s schemes to reprint the map of that region. While performing these non heroic deeds, our taxpayers are footing the bill. To keep one soldier in Afghanistan costs you and me taxpayer at least one million dollars a year! Think how many more first providers we could hire for that money.
Think of how many teachers, library books, infrastructure repairs that one soldier’s pay could finance. Multiply that by thousands of such military personnel and then add the cost of all those WMDs (one Apache Helicopter costs $55 million…just one!) and see how insane we are as a culture. Does anyone care?
The empire narcotizes us with sports and electronic gadgets up the Kazoo. Of course, as the 18th anniversary of 9/11 is upon us, they make sure we see lots of camouflage wearing military personnel all over. They stand at the openings of the football stadiums as the players enter the field. They have the honor guard to bring out the flag and prepare for the anthem. Then everyone, sadly even most of the black NFL players, cross their hearts and solemnly honor this empire. Why? Well citizens of the Fifth Reich, we are at war!! Maybe we need Grouch Marx to come out and lead the hoopla.
Phillip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his works posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, ,Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, , Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected])
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Dear Bevin:
To recognise the futility of continuing to follow the same diadic capitalist/socialist economic rationality of growth: whilst expecting different results for the bourgeois socialist few …think of the bioshpere as a client, and the economic calculus of the capitalist/socialist diadic as their personal trainer. This PT gets paid, not by the hour, but gains profit only by increasing the maximal heart-rate of the client. Their rate of return (profit margin) is proportional to the net increase they can achieve and sustain in the short term. It is not a hard and fast scientific metric, but currently the heart-rate is at 170% of maximal output (70% ecological overshoot).The laws of motion and growth vectors of the current economic calculus require that heart-rate to increase to 175%, 180%, 200% (a new planet is required) …how long do you think the client will last? Or the capitalism/socialism that existentially must keep pushing beyond the max? And what of their rationalisation of growth?
A new economic rationality would obviously require that maximal output to degrow to at most 100%: but that is still too high. 85% would be better. As another rough metric: currently, Earth Overshoot day falls on May 8th in the UK. That means our resource use is unsustainable from that day to the end of the year – over 7 months. A new economic rationality would need to push that date into at least December, but ideally …to May 8th the following year. That would require more than nationalising a few natural monopoly utilities.
Globally, we tripled our extractivist resource consumption between 1970 and 2010. Can we triple that again by 2050? Or triple the already tripled amount again by the end of the century? We are among 16% of humanity that consumes 80% of the resources: will we increase our bourgeois socialist consumption forsaking all others? Shall we tell the Unborn that we have monetised their future for our pseudo-prosperity today? What of the pretence to morality of ethical, universalist, statist capitalism? Is it any real concession, or is it just to generate a counterfeit feelgood factor while we live in a stolen future today?
“The old world is rapidly changing, those interested in building a new world and helping to design it should join in.”
I agree. Only ask yourself, do Labour really stand for the Unborn Many, or just for the bourgeois socialism of the current existing Few?
A few thoughts; most of us who want to revolutionize society agree, it seems to me, that the only way to affect real change is to wake our communities from the capitalist “spectacle” and when they waken, lead them to the sunny uplands of a post revolutionary Utopia.
And then we write this.
“Capitalisms problem is that man and work are defined by the same logical set of conditions. They are both recent co-inventions: which have been co-defined as contingencies and artifacts of capitalism. Organisation around the relations of production, or organising around work defines the capitalist social system: just as defines us (as determinants of the competitive work-ethic capitalist social ‘pecking’ order). Organisation around work is therefore also organisation around hierarchically dominant rule. The capitalist aporia is how to roboticise labour without making us redundant, and therefore unrulable. Organisation around free-time is a stake to the heart of capitalism: we might spend our leisure time reading Marx, or Gorz, or Gramsci.”
The author is, of course, quite right.
But if you think that any member of the Working Class, most of whom read the Sun or Mail, follow the football, bet on the horses and the like is going to understand or make any sense of it, you are much mistaken. This is not a criticism of the author, it’s just an observation from a lifetime working as a manual labourer. And yes, I am a socialist; it’s just that I believe that any narrative offered to encourage change must speak to the Working Class experience in their language.
I sympathise. I am never quite sure exactly what Big B is getting at in these posts.
But it all seems to add up to the discovery-reassuring to exploiters everywhere- that we are doomed. The only hope lies in billions of individual spiritual journeys at the end of which a billion people will have silly grins on their faces. And nothing will have changed because it cannot change. Because any attempt to change society will only lead to state capitalism. The cycle is endless.
In reality much has changed since the Webbs drafted Clause IV and the Labour Party Conference liked the sound of it. In the meantime we have (as a people) seen nationalisation and it looks a lot better than the alternatives. We have seen the Morrisonian model of management- the new boss as old boss ‘writ new’- and most socialists see the need for something better, something democratic.
The ideology of neo-liberalism, celebrating private property, may still dominate the Academy and intellectuals but it is regarded very cynically by the large majorities which favour a socialised (rather than profit driven) NHS, and the public ownership and control of energy, water resources, public transport and, I suspect, education and all public services. There appears to be a groundswell of opinion in favour of socialist solutions to capitalist problems. And this despite the increasingly frenetic propaganda campaigns of a ruling class that has dropped all pretence of interest in free debate and the publication of all points of view.
Where this will end up nobody-except the cynic- knows. Nobody knows because what happens in the end depends on what happens next. Or, to be more precise, on what we do.
One thing is certain if we operate on the basis that there is no hope, all our inherited institutions being poisoned by past failures, the Labour Party bound to sell out, Union organising bound to lead to Business/Gangster/ Bureaucratic treacheries, democracy nothing more than a means of selecting traitors to betray us, than nothing will happen. Except that we will have our fates decided for us by those who gave no conception of acting in the interests of any interest broader than their individual selves.
Despair is the enemy, Cynicism is his philosophy and giving up without a struggle is his advice.
And anyone who doubts that capitalism is in real difficulty. should listen to the capitalists and their mouthpieces. And, in particular, note the real panic which is behind their constant attacks on Jeremy Corbyn and the mild socialist reforms which he espouses. The old world is rapidly changing, those interested in building a new world and helping to design it should join in.
CF, Bevin:
From the introduction of Andre Gorz: “Critique of Economic Reason”:
Written in 1988.
Which more or less sums up where I am coming from, and where I would be going. If and when I can catalyse the [r]evolution!
I totally sympathise with my friend above. Not least, that as a common labourer (carpenter), I too have spent many a lunch hour reading Gorz, Guattari, Freire etc …dreaming of a socialist utopia, only to look up at the copies of the Sun, Mail, and Express (as CF paints the scene) and thought, “What is the point?” But it keeps me sane.
It is all very well painting me or my POV as defeatist, or whatever …but the economic rationality of capitalism itself has precipitated its own crisis of modernity: not me. All I point out is that capitalism cannot overcome its own contradictions and save itself. Not with the same application of the rationality of growth and accumulation that precipitated the current crisis of crises.
And Bevin, what you call socialism is a mirror-capitalism: an instrumentalised exploitative organisation around work and profit and hierarchical rule …and all the dehumanisation, structural violence and imperialism that entails. It’s not an alternative, merely a prolongation of our purgatory.
Capitalism, and its near derivative socialism (other brands of authentic socialism are available to the new rationality) are already dead: dead cat bouncing down the road for a decade now. Only a $40tn dollar injection of QE liquidity into the capitalists pockets has kept it alive long enough to continue to cannibalise itself. There is no investment whatsoever in the future: only self-maximised short term extraction of our wealth by violent re-appropriation and dispossession. I do not feel that I have to own the cynicism of the capitalist to point this out …the psychopathic cynicism is the capitalists Reason alone.
By the capitalists own credos: the reversal of QE (QT + rate rise) will likely precipitate the current meta-ontological crisis: a process that is underway and the contagion is already spreading (from Turkey into Italy and Spain, for instance).
To propagate a universal humanity and finally transcend the need for crises: we need to re-invent our entire ‘economic reason’ away from organisation around production – capitalist or socialist – to an ecosphical post-capitalist organisation around life and leisure: in balance with Nature. Any belief that we can somehow continue with the redundant rationality that precipitated the current economic and ecological crisis is emblematic of the current crisis. We need universal humanist ecological values of our own, stripped of the self-repressive Cartesian capitalist instrumental Reason, and born of a new transcendent Reason …dare I say an ontologically holistic embodied Reason generative of a universal emancipatory humanism …(I can’t be the only builder in the country who can use the word ‘ontology’!)
Bur first we need to shake our complacent heads and look up from the soporific and hedonistic ground and realise that our livelihoods and social welfare are in clear and present danger: that might galvanise a few more builders, and baristas, and Deliveroo drivers who unknowingly face redundancy and the Uberisation of their humanity …and the redundancy: not just of work, but of mind …
So how shall I tell that to the lads on site?
Thanks for that. I’ve just started Chris Hedges new book “America: the Farewell Tour”, I think it could be of some interest.
“And Bevin, what you call socialism is a mirror-capitalism:..”
No. In many respects and for reasons which you well understand, this tendency in Socialist politics has long existed.
What is new, being born in many respects, is the rediscovery of the overwhelming importance of democracy and the development of a mass movement including millions of individuals conscious of the reality that capitalism and the solution of the problems facing us -as individuals, families, nations and as a species with responsibilities to preserve the planet- are irreconcilable.
That, to put it very simply the abolition of private property and an end to political and social inequality are mandatory. These are things which experience is teaching us all, including the hundreds of thousands of Labour Party members. Most of what you share with us confirms these lessons.
It has taken more than a century for socialists to learn that there is no alternative to democracy,, that the Leninist short cuts and the Fabian conceits of easing socialist ideas into dominant positions, and all the various permutations of deference towards expertise and submission to the party can only lead, and have invariably led, backwards to another capitalism with a thin coat of new paint on it.
@ Bevin
As you say:
Never. in the History of Politics has the MSM attacked the Leader of the Opposition – in such a prolonged, unremitting manner as they have Jeremy Corbyn. Which proves categorically that his honesty and policies are a threat to their very existence..
And also leads us directly to the conclusion that the US and UK MSM presstitutes are paid agents of the Deep State Establishment Corporatocracies on both sides of the pond and beyond.. Telling the truth would be the end for them.
Absolutely agree; we are experiencing what we laughingly think of as our democracy being undermined daily by the BBC and our national press.
In the case of the worthless and I believe now unreformable BBC, made worse by the fact we are forced to pay for the lies and propaganda we’re subjected to.
9/11 was a tragedy for social democracy.
9/11 will live in infamy
9/11/73 Allende and democracy murdered.
it’s architect Kissinger who is still fetted was there ever a more longlived bloodied monster?
Bombing the bejesus out of Cambodia cost him not a moment of sleep. A discredit to his species, no matter what that species might be.
We are already a techno-redundant superfluity to the AI-capitalist system. But capitalism does not know how to re-order itself to accommodate the armies of the unemployed that would create – without losing control. Being made UBI infantalised possessions, and concensually-controlled wards of the state (dissensus is punishable by withdrawal of the rights of social credit) is one terrible solution. Being paid for socially utilitarian work, or having an allowance for vital, but hitherto excluded work, patriarchally designated ‘womens work’ is another, but equally terrible and dehumanising solution. Monetising motherhood could only have ever have been a mans idea?
Capitalisms problem is that man and work are defined by the same logical set of conditions. They are both recent co-inventions: which have been co-defined as contingencies and artifacts of capitalism. Organisation around the relations of production, or organising around work defines the capitalist social system: just as defines us (as determinants of the competitive work-ethic capitalist social ‘pecking’ order). Organisation around work is therefore also organisation around hierarchically dominant rule. The capitalist aporia is how to roboticise labour without making us redundant, and therefore unrulable. Organisation around free-time is a stake to the heart of capitalism: we might spend our leisure time reading Marx, or Gorz, or Gramsci.
So we are being maximally employed in alienating and dehumanising McBullshit jobs: up to 70hrs a week auto-excluded from the mundane existential focused solely on the freedom contained in the desultory diminutive pay-packet …that buys us back but a few hours of life. And because we, the precariat collective, are so inculcated by capitalism that our only value and status is determined by our work ethic contribution to the state and society, our job description is our pseudo-self, and our time (temporality, where Being IS temporality) is a commodity for sale (or commodity exchange for a brief downtime flirtation with freedom). In the end, it is our very Beingness (Being qua Being) is for exchange …for what?
Where is the rest of me? Where is the rest of society? We are for sale or rent in to privatised ownership, and the welfare infrastructure of society that we have been contributing to, for the common good …is also privatised, owned offshore, and rented back to us ….so we have to work 80hrs a week to claim back some totemic ownership of what we have already paid for …with our very time and alienated Being.
Can anyone see where this is going yet?
And, socialism, as it has come to allow itself to be defined – is a mirror-capitalism – and thus offers no real alternative solution. It is confined and defined by the same set relations of production (no longer committed to Clause IV statist nationalisation of the means of production – which is not the same as the collective autonomy and inclusivity of satisfaction of common ownership). This amounts to the very same organisation around dominant hierarchical rule. Socialism and private sector privatised property rights are not compatible. The hybrid is an alienating statist capitalism.
There are alternative freedoms – and true socialisms – beyond the scope of worked to the bone, exhausted imagination, collapsed into the uni-dimensionality of mirror-capitalisms. The paradox is that the millennial couple, both working flat out in the meaningless existential, to barely afford the deposit on the only vastly inflated (many multiples of its use-value) asset they can aspire to, a house (and the limited autonomy and constrained freedom that entails) …are too close to nervous breakdown to imagine the post-capitalist future.
When we wake up to ask: “Where is the rest of me?”; “Where is the rest of society?” …we will already be fully owned.
@ Big B
There is a far more sinister plot to control us, which as you identify, not many have even considered.
Which began in the progressive era of the late 19th/20th century.. Eugenics: The set of beliefs and practices which aimed at preserving and improving the genetic quality of the human population, which played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States prior to World War II and Nazi Germany.
Eugenics was not only considered a method of preserving and improving the dominant groups in the population, but the Slaves which enabled the controllers to get more for their money..This continued until the late 1960’s when they realised that computers and Ai was going to be the future and not homo sapiens..
Since the 60’s why do you think there has been so much focus on alternative sexual states? And a bombardment of licentious literature and deviant porn, which many of our children have had access to, thanks to the internet!
First there was Women’s Lib and the Birth Pill , which reduced the’ need’ for men in their lives, hoping this would cut down the birth rate, and it did the job for a while. There are now more single parents than there are married… but then with the advent of Ai and robots the controllers realised that the need for a human was no longer going to be necessary, except as slaves to the robots or cannon fodder foot soldier in a foreign land. (for now)
Hence the focus and encouragement of Homosexuality, and now the latest cult Transgenderism, which should reduce the population exponentially. And make the final cull far less problematic. This movement is causing so much confusion and psychological problems, especially in children, that many are considering and committing suicide, which fits the agenda perfectly.
12 minutes of an Interview with filmmaker Aaron Russo talking about his meeting with Rockefeller in 2001,(six months ‘before’ 911), discussing NWO. the fraudulent ‘War on Terror.’ RFID chips, Phone chips to track your movements, Cards with chips to cut off your money if you don’t conform?
Full version here. It is 1.30hr long but worth EVERY minute.
Here is an excellent article about the TAVISTOCK institute, founders of MKULTRA and their Eugentic programme and mind control.. .but, you will have to set aside your Russophobia to watch it. with an open mind.
.
Maggie: I’m well aware of the AI-cybernetic technocracy rising …and the scientific mathematicisation of self: with the hermeneutic death and anti-meaning that entails. Philosophically, it is the ultimate expression of the anti-logic of Descartes …developed by Frege, Cantor, Russell, North Whitehead, early Wittgenstein, Quine …which is a waste of a century of philosophy in anti-humanist pursuit. And a gift to the Master power principle.
I also know it is doomed to failure: which is not to be complacent. Consciousness is biological embodiment: you cannot separate body and mind, no matter how intelligent AI becomes. Which is perhaps more terrifying: an algorithmic robotocised military police and surveillance state, for instance.
Given ones individual powerlessness to stop it: one can only hope it ends in failure …but that won’t prevent the vast drain of resources in the development.
Personally, it pisses me off that the griefwalker precariat devolve their power and responsibility into internalised thoughtlessness …a bit of critical foresight and solidarity of the oppressed …currently becoming the cyber-oppressed: might see the bastards off!
Then we could build a future around universal humanist, not computerised machine values.
I hate to seem picky but it applies to the whole world doesn’t it? We’re- the 99%- getting “taken to the cleaners” so it’s not just what Sarah Kendzior calls “Flyover Country” people- it applies globally… part of the difficulty is we are all separately complaining when if we acted as a cohesive group we might be able to effect some real changes… the two party system has got most separate countries tied up in knots: Signed, sealed, delivered.