A change in Quantity also entails a change in Quality.
― Friedrich Engels
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
Rapacious. “They got theirs, so I better get mine. Yes, things change, and, sure this sleepy town is about to boom but that’s the way of the world…. Might as well be part of the winning team – that money making side of things. That’s all you can do.”
I just finished talking to white guy in his late forties, gassing up excavators and huge dump trucks. We’re near the Estacada High School, and he tells me the scrapping is to make room for more ball fields. The school already has fields and a football stadium. This is a town with 3,000.
According to Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, “the only value known in economics is the value of commodities”.1 Commodities are products produced, not for individual consumption by their producers, but products produced for general public consumption.
This is going to be an exercise in redefining fascism after meeting with socialists on the hundredth anniversary of the great revolution. In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term Fascism also described it as estato corporativo, meaning: the corporate state.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini
Then you have that great liberal, giver over of social goods from the rich, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once described fascism as
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.
All it takes for a society to express fear, paranoia, confusion, and a sort of mad country (riffing on mad cow disease, bovine spongiform encephalopathy) mental disease is a toxic brew of narcissism, propaganda, amnesia, planned and perceived obsolescence and a transnational economic barbarism against the collective masses, and we end up here:
The New York Times Business Page recently featured a front page article about the annual conference In Jackson Hole, Wyoming hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. It contained this interesting opening:
In the decade since the financial crisis economic policymakers, professors and protestors have gathered here every August to argue about the best ways to return to faster economic growth. This year, they gave up…instead focused mostly on making sure things don’t get any worse.
They – those Clintonistas-Kissingeristas-Friedmanistas-Obamaistas-Romneyistas-Adelsonistas-Sorosistas-Trumpistas-Zbigniew Brzezinskistas — are the deplorables. Really, for 60 years on this planet, in this precarious walkabout, I have trudged through the sooty rain of capitalism plaguing the land, as the rich and the generals call to duty the soldiers of pain, yearning to be enforcers, witnesses to the dystopia of their dreams. Money changers, bureaucrats, oh they are Eichmann’s. Israeli Jews, many Little Eichmann’s all encapsulated in post-pre-future chrysalis of genocide.
As distressed and downright feeble as organized labor appears at the moment (and no one is going to pretend that 11% density across the board isn’t alarming), there are some things that can be done to re-energize and revitalize the Movement. We shall list them in order of ascending difficulty, beginning with the easiest.
