by achrilock
capitalism
Let me break it down for you, make it real simple. America itself is one giant prison, and the key to the lock is that bubble of ‘civility,’ of ‘civil society’ that Biden talks about, that the oligarchs and their politician pets, from the president down to the university administrator, use to dignify what is, at its core, an extremely exploitative and violent system. That’s what holds it together for them, and what allows them to commit so many crimes for which there are no enforceable laws.
And it is the same system, here or in Gaza, using the same command and control nodes and intelligence networks and financing and propaganda. Even now, the same mechanisms of the state, corporate and federal, that were used under Trump to attempt to crush the 2020 BLM and antifascist protests are being used to analyze, categorize, and disrupt opposition to the state and what the state chooses to do with your tax money. Right now, they’re taking names, infiltrating, mapping.
So there aren’t really political or legal solutions to this problem because both parties serve the same masters, and the system itself is a victim of its design. It will always be what it is, a machine that uses violence and intimidation to turn suffering into capital, here or abroad. What is needed is not to hide in bubbles of your own, but to expand. General strikes, non-payment strikes, everyone in the streets, every day, until their bubbles collapse to the size of a green zone in every city.
You, not genocidal old rich people, say what goes. If one climbs up onto a pedestal and starts threatening you or telling you what’s what, and you don’t like it, pull that person off the pedestal, and do it to the next one, and the next, and the next, and to any underlings they would send against you. When nobody’s brave enough to climb up there, destroy the pedestal. That’s what victory looks like. That’s what freedom looks like. Only then can you even start to imagine justice.
What’s funny in a wry sort of way is that the protests aren’t even like the uprisings of 2020. They are just small groups of registered students, at good schools, saying ‘we don’t like US involvement with Israeli apartheid, war crimes, or ethnic cleansing.’ And the political establishment, on both ‘sides’ of the corporate coin, is losing their shit as if the whole country is burning.
It’s because the 2020 crowd could be easily dealt with long-term within the confines of the political and economic machinery. They could pay lip service to ‘equal rights’ and ‘social justice’ and ‘democracy’ and all the other liberal anti-Trump talking points, and then they could put those marginalized communities out of sight again when they were no longer useful. Now it’s the future leaders and functionaries who are calling out the very nature of the whole system.
And, power is freaking over it. Not because the people or their presence in public are particularly dangerous, but because their message is extremely dangerous to the way this country works. America isn’t about freedom or justice or equality or opportunity. It’s a very centralized, imperial, dishonest, exploitative construct that cares nothing for life or for right and wrong. The slightest breeze can and will blow it over and expose the lie of the whole thing, and the powerful know it.
And, season 2 of ‘Star Trek: Picard’ made it move a little in my pants for me, too, but space is a hole in the sky where governments pour your money to make you forget about what the oligarchy is doing to you and your planet down below. Been that way since the Cold War. Empire and distraction. And that money isn’t going to some public, far-seeing program for human advancement and improvement. They’re giving that money to totalitarian capitalists, some of whom are fascists. Wake up, babes.