Author: Alan Buddug

Today, Jeff Bezos is going into space in a rocket. That’s pretty dangerous. Overall, between 4% and 10% of rockets explode, and 19 astronauts/cosmonauts have died (not even counting those that died in a training exercise). So, who knows?

Anything could happen.

Also, there’s a lot of debris up there in space. Some jackass even put a car into orbit. Wouldn’t it be nuts if a rocket hit that car?

In other news, Monday morning’s episode of Fox and Friends included the cast of the show encouraging their audience to get vaccinated. I have to wonder if conservative leaders are starting to realize that their constituents have made up the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths, and that now, COVID-19 deaths are nearly exclusively conservatives? Given that Republicans have only been able to have any kind of power at the federal level through cheating (gerrymandering and leaning on the anti-democratic electoral college system), you’d think they’d be concerned about loosing a bunch of voters.

Hannity also supported vaccination on his show.

Despite encouraging people to get vaccinated, the Fox and Friends episode still contained the usual Republican insanity, including implying that the vaccine might not work, saying that it isn’t the US government’s job to protect Americans, and irrationally anxious opposition to wearing masks to protect immunocompromised people.

Speaking of COVID-19, the fourth wave has started in the US, and the epicenter is Springfield, MO. So that’s pretty embarrassing for Missourians, or so you’d think. Check out the map in the Time magazine article.

In the early 1970’s, several studies predicted that human civilization would end around 2050. Bootlickers responding by pointing out that the world wasn’t ending, and have continued to point out that the world isn’t ending pretty much continuously since then. However, those studies said it would happen around 2050, and follow up studies have consistently shown that we are right on schedule.

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule. by Nafeez Ahmed, Vice News

The study was published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology in November 2020 and is available on the KPMG website. It concludes that the current business-as-usual trajectory of global civilization is heading toward the terminal decline of economic growth within the coming decade—and at worst, could trigger societal collapse by around 2040. The study represents the first time a top analyst working within a mainstream global corporate entity has taken the ‘limits to growth’ model seriously. Its author, Gaya Herrington, is Sustainability and Dynamic System Analysis Lead at KPMG in the United States. However, she decided to undertake the research as a personal project to understand how well the MIT model stood the test of time. 

Oh, I’m sorry. Did I say we are right on schedule? I was mistaken. We are ahead of schedule. It looks more and more like the far right will get the Total War and the Apocalypse that they’ve always dreamed of.

“What about all these electric cars?” you might ask, or “What about all this solar and wind power?” As long as the nihilistic forces of capitalism control our world, renewable energy will always be used to increase economic growth rather than replace CO2-producing energy sources. Even though renewables continue to represent a higher and higher percentage of total energy supplies, the total amount of fossil fuels burned continues to increase. Remember, in order for humanity to survive, industrial CO2 production must become negative — it isn’t even decreasing.

Because we’ve waited so very long to do something meaningful about climate change, there is now no longer a way to move forward without a complete disruption of our way of life. We must now choose between the end of humanity and the end of capitalism.

What are your city and state doing to reduce the amount of fossil fuels burned? Nothing.

The original paper is located here, and portrays an odd division between a quick collapse and a long decline. These are essentially the same thing; Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it also took over 200 years to fall.

Though the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan has been well-publicized, and 90% of the US military has already left, the CIA will stay and continue the US policy of meddling in foreign governments, which is supported by both conservative parties, Republicans and Democrats. An article posted by NPR on July 12 laments how difficult it will be for the CIA to continue meddling without the assistance of US soldiers to protect their agents.

We will likely see a return to the CIA’s old tricks:

• Organizing antigovernment terrorists and assassins within the country.
• Shipping in organized terrorists from other states, including mercenaries.
• Sending military weapons into the country.
• Organizing protests against the government.
• Claiming that protesters are demanding an end to the anti-US government, though this is not true for most protesters.
• Financing pro-US politicians (fascists)
• Publicizing crimes of the new government and fabricating crimes.
• Claiming that anything bad that happens in the country is because the government is opposed to “freedom” though what the US wants is not freedom for Afghanistan, but rather the right of international capitalists to exercise control over the Afghan government.

For most nations that prefer to be free of US domination, the main source of internal conflict is economic struggle, which is mostly caused by a US economic policy that actively harms that nation. The CIA doesn’t carry out this part, but certainly recommends it to the US executive branch. The overarching plan of the CIA is to spin a narrative that blames all the damage caused by US economic policy on the hostile government — both within the free nation and in the context of international governments and the international press.

The long-term result for any country living in a prolonged state of siege is that it becomes more authoritarian. As long as conservatives control the US government, the US solution to that authoritarianism will just be more authoritarianism.

Bidenists and other conservatives are very excited today because there are “anti-dictatorship” protests going on in Cuba. Here’s a paragraph from an AP News article:

Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis in decades, along with a resurgence of coronavirus cases, as it suffers the consequences of U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. An official in the Biden administration tweeted support for Sunday’s demonstrations.

Demonstrators in Havana protest shortages, rising prices by Andrea Rodriguez, AP News

Let’s break it down. The paragraph clearly states that the main reason for the economic crisis in Cuba is the US sanctions imposed on it by the Trump administration. It also points out that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected Cuba, just as it has affected everyone else. And then an official in the Biden administration tweeted support for Sunday’s demonstrations. Yet, the overall theme of the article is that Cubans are protesting a dictatorial government.

I watched a little bit of CBS News and they’re pretty fucking excited about these protests as well. Yes, at least some of the protesters are protesting the form of government in Cuba, but the main thing appears to be rising consumer prices — which were caused entirely by forces outside of Cuba. Moreover, we are also having a big problem with rising consumer prices here in the US — without having been subjected to economic warfare from a hostile empire.

The article says that a protester — protesting conditions caused directly by economic warfare from the US and a pandemic that was not caused by anyone in Cuba — held up an American flag that was quickly snatched away. I have some questions about that: Did that protester understand that the Cuban government has absolutely no responsibility for the current economic problem in Cuba? Does that protester understand that Cuba has been more or less victimized by the west since throwing off the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and that conditions there are in fact better politically than when Batista and his supporters ruled the small island nation? Is that protester really a US agent?

From Wikipedia:

In the decades following United States’ invasion of Cuba in 1898, and formal independence from the U.S. on 20 May 1902, Cuba experienced a period of significant instability, enduring a number of revolts, coups and a period of U.S. military occupation. Fulgencio Batista, a former soldier who had served as the elected president of Cuba from 1940 to 1944, became president for the second time in 1952, after seizing power in a military coup and canceling the 1952 elections. Although Batista had been relatively progressive during his first term, in the 1950s he proved far more dictatorial and indifferent to popular concerns. While Cuba remained plagued by high unemployment and limited water infrastructure, Batista antagonized the population by forming lucrative links to organized crime and allowing American companies to dominate the Cuban economy, especially sugar-cane plantations and other local resources. Although the US armed and politically supported the Batista dictatorship, later US presidents recognized its corruption and the justifiability of removing it.

The US supports freedom of other countries as long as those other countries vote to lick our boots. When another country votes for freedom (i.e., socialism and democracy), the US declares that country to be naughty and destroys the democratically-elected government, forcing that country to either suffer a dictatorship controlled by foreign capital or have a socialist revolution. If that country succeeds at its socialist revolution, it will be constantly villainized by the US press and both US political parties, who will point out that the socialist government is a dictatorship when it was the US who interfered with their democracy in the first place, forcing that country into a socialist dictatorship rather than a socialist democracy.

If you support the Biden administration, you are supporting US imperialism, and that includes supporting meddling in other countries and actively destabilizing them via economic, social, and military means. This is just one of the many reasons real progressives are deeply disappointed in mainstream Democrats who have proven themselves to be just a different flavor of conservative.

We are doing our best to try to understand the pacifist’s position on violence, but we are definitely not there yet. In general, the ethical and practical opposition to violence seems to us to be a non-sequitur coming from anyone that is participating in American society. The fact of the matter is that there is violence; violence exists. In most cases, physical neutrality (i.e., pacifism) in the face of violence allows the violence to win. Nonviolence works better as a strategy to prevent violence, but very poorly as a way to address violence that is happening now.

These, as far as I can tell, are the pacifist assumptions regarding the narrative around violence:

First, the state already has a monopoly on violence, and nothing we can do individually can change that;

Second, the state might use the threat of violence to force compliance, but will never commit murder on a scale that would be of concern;

Third, no other violent actors exist other than the state, so we should only consider whether we should use violence in relation to state violence;

Fourth, when we are choosing whether to use violence, the only the choice is between “victim of intimidation” and “violent actor”. Deterrence isn’t a thing that exists and neither is one’s personal destruction. Moreover, initiating violence is just as violent as either defensive violence or making oneself ready to perform defensive violence, and yet, benefiting from the violence of the state somehow doesn’t count as violence.

My opinion would be that every part of that narrative is false.

THE STATE’S MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE

Political arguments frequently take an amalgamation of people, assign it some characteristic and then pretend that the amalgamation has that characteristic, while the individual people do not. The point of this pattern of logic appears to be to let the individual people get away with bad behavior and to pretend that there’s just nothing that we can do about the amalgamation’s bad behavior. The most common example I see of this is the idea that corporations are somehow independent of the wealthy people who run them, having motives and even logic that are distinct from one another. It’s a lie.

Similarly, the idea that “the state” has a monopoly on violence ignores the fact that the state is made up of a whole bunch of people, and those agents of the state who are also agents of violence are individuals with free will. Even in a hypothetical nation where the state has a complete monopoly on violence, the state doesn’t really have any such thing because agents of violence are (for the time being) people.

As I said, a state with a monopoly on violence is hypothetical; there is no state that has a complete monopoly on violence. A state typically has a goal of monopolizing violence, and the state is threatened by anyone who presents a plausible threat to that monopoly (even on a very small scale). Most states have overwhelming force at their disposal, but may not be able to employ it based on social factors — including opposition by some other state (which is, again, an amalgamation of people).

In the US, gun owners vastly outnumber the military. There are approximately 22 million gun owners in the US, but only 3 million active duty military and fewer than a million police. Yet, even unarmed people are sufficiently effective to challenge a government’s monopoly on violence if there are enough of them and they are organized.

What’s interesting is that the phrase “state monopoly on violence” comes from the social sciences, where it meant “the concept that the state alone has the right to use or authorize the use of physical force” or “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (emphasis mine). It did not mean that the state factually has a monopoly on violence. Our opinion is that the state’s use of violence is only legitimate if that state is truly democratic, and that the US does not count as democratic with its competing teams of psychotic elites manipulating the electoral process.

The state monopoly on violence is an illusion that the ruling class would like us to accept. The state’s use of violence is not legitimate.

STATE VIOLENCE IN PRACTICE

If we are talking about the US, the threat of state violence is ever-present and so is the actual application of that violence. Police kill about 1000 people per year, shoot far more than that, and Black Americans are killed much more often by the police than other groups, giving police killings the flavor of a slow-motion genocide. Incarceration is a form of violence and though incarceration rates for Black men are dropping, they are still roughly three times that of white males.

Things get a lot more bloody when you try to figure out how many people the US military kills per year. I say “try” because good luck finding those figures; you can find “civilians” killed or US military deaths, but what is the total number of non-Americans killed by America each year? I can tell you that, for example, over 300k Iraqi civilians have been killed by the US military since 2001, but I cannot tell you how many other people were killed; the implication is that people who fought against the western invaders were not people at all.

If we look to the past behavior of American governments, we can see:
– Concentration camps for immigrants coming to our southern border, distribution of stolen immigrant children to American families;
– Fabrication of the “War on Drugs” with the intent of destroying the lives of Black civil rights activists and anti-war leftists;
– The placement of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War 2;
– Local law enforcement participation in extrajudicial murder of Black people;
– The enslavement of Black people spanned the period from 1619 to 1865 (the idea that Britain might encourage slave revolts in the colonies was one of the arguments used in the Declaration of Independence);
– The genocide of North American natives began in the late 1400’s and continues to this day.

In conclusion, the idea that the state might use the threat of violence to force compliance, but will never commit murder on a scale that would be of concern is completely outlandish — particularly in the context of the United States of America. To be clear, US governments (including state and local governments) are at all times actively killing marginalized people and are entirely capable of participating in genocidal activities at any time.

OTHER VIOLENT ACTORS

There are many groups of far-right maniacs in the United States and any one of them could attack a civilian target at any time. In addition, there’s an even more likely scenario involving a single far-right maniac that happens on a regular basis (virtually all mass shooters are proponents of far-right politics or at the very least acting out a far-right narrative). To suggest that we only need to think about state violence when we are considering whether or not to prepare to defend against violence is absurd.

To be fair, even though far-right violence is frequent at the national level, the probability of any individual in the US experiencing far-right violence remains low. However, it is a long-standing goal of the far right (which means at least 1 in 10 Americans, and more than that in a state like Missouri) to destabilize the country, murder all their enemies, and then re-make the country as a fascist dystopia. I don’t mind conversing about how likely they might be to actually do that, and I certainly appreciate the fact that only a couple thousand of these loons showed up for the insurrection on January 6, 2021; however, I also believe it would be foolish not to prepare for an attack that is more generalized, organized and sustained.

I can only guess that this part of the narrative assumes that government law enforcement will take care of the problem. We’ve just seen quite clearly that they are likely to fail. The majority of law enforcement officers are proponents of far-right politics (based on who they choose to leader the unions) and do not see far-right mobs as their enemies; they sometimes even assist the far-right mob — they will definitely protect them. In contrast, we have clearly seen how law enforcement will violently attack a demonstration that leans left (Occupy movement) or even just to the center (BLM) and allow far-right attackers to commit violence against such a demonstration.

Related: White Supremacist Links to Law Enforcement Are an Urgent Concern The author of this piece says that the number of white supremacists in law enforcement is “small” yet seems to be using an extremely strict definition of white supremacist (self-identification as such), when we should understand that nearly all Republicans are technically white supremacists.

When we consider that law enforcement in the US has a history of breaking the law to uphold white supremacy, it then becomes very hard to discern the difference between law enforcement and a right-wing mob. Even when the police intend to succeed in resisting a right-wing mob, they often fail because those above them also do not interpret such a mob as a threat and don’t provide adequate resources.

If the far-right succeeded in starting the second civil war that they’ve been promoting for decades now, would the US government even stage an organized defense? Or would they instead just make a bunch of speeches about how this disorder needs to stop for the sake of the economy? These aren’t really rhetorical questions because we can see right now that the Republicans are actively denying that their people sacked the US capitol.

OUR CHOICES REGARDING VIOLENCE

Our choices regarding violence are not nearly as clear-cut as they might seem at first.

If a violent person threatens you, and you comply because you are fearful, you are a victim of intimidation, and that’s a choice you can make — to be a victim.

If you decide to initiate violence, you are a “violent actor” and that’s a choice you can make. Obviously, initiating violence against another person is wrong.

If you decide to make a sincere stand, clearly indicating that a violent attack will be defended with violence, that’s another choice you can make — and it works. It works because fascists are narcissistic cowards, and they don’t want to be hurt or die — but most of all they don’t want to be humiliated. Intense aversion to humiliation is a trait that spans across different types of fascists; for example, the oft-cited fear that ISIS has of facing women in combat.

If you fail to implement some kind of defense, then it is entirely possible that you will be permanently injured or killed. Fascists get more excited about hurting someone who they perceive as weak, and refusing to defend yourself will be interpreted by them as weakness. Letting them destroy you just lets them continue on to attack another person. The easier it was, the more excited they will be about doing it again. Allowing them to hurt you does not make them hurt you less.

Moreover, there are a lot of systems in American life that at first glance are not violent, but upon closer inspection are definitely a form of violence. Examples include keeping the hungry from getting adequate food, keeping housing empty when there are people living on the streets, and borders that abuse and incarcerate people who try to cross them.

When we get into the details, things get even more muddy. For one thing, we are all participating in the violence of the state because we benefit from it and fund it. The state is our paid hitman out there executing innocent people to maintain a society that benefits us. Even most of us who are victims of state violence are also benefiting from it. To extract yourself from responsibility for state violence would require that you radically change your lifestyle, or actively work to destroy the state’s capacity for violence.

We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens.

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

The pacifist narrative indicates that even defending oneself against direct violence is unethical. I would make the opposite argument. If we are allowing violence to work (in the sense that the violence results in the violent person attaining something they want, even if it is just satisfaction), then we are increasing the probability of future violence from that person. (It is true that we should always use the least amount of violence that is effective.) Martyrdom sometimes works as a strategy but only because the people are so enraged by the martyr’s death, that they destroy the responsible party with violence (though such violence may be indirect).

If we aren’t preparing to defend ourselves against violence, we are, again, emboldening violent people to use violence to get their way.

CONCLUSION

Violence exists. The state monopoly on violence is an illusion that the ruling class would like us to accept. The state’s use of violence is ongoing and not legitimate. State violence is extreme and always has the potential to become more genocidal in nature. In addition to the state, there are many other violent actors, and the state is likely to choose to either ignore or support their violence. We have the choice to either defend our communities or embolden violent actors by allowing their violence to be effective.

Sixty years of climate change warnings: the signs that were missed (and ignored) by Alice Bell, The Guardian

We are now living our ancestors’ nightmares, and it didn’t have to be this way. If we are looking to apportion blame, it is those who deliberately peddled doubt that should be first in line. But it is also worth looking at the cultures of scientific work that have developed over centuries, some of which could do with an update. The doubt-mongers manipulated positive forces in science – such as scepticism – for their own ends, but they also made use of other resources, exacerbating generational divides, exploiting the scientific community’s tendency to avoid drama, and steering notions about who were legitimate political partners (eg governments) and who were not (activists).

Juneteenth is now a national holiday. Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the United States; it marks, specifically, the anniversary date of the June 19, 1865, announcement of General Order No. 3 by Union Army general Gordon Granger, proclaiming freedom for slaves in Texas.

The ease to which our national legislature created this new holiday seems really weird given that there is simultaneously a hyper-aggressive movement among Republicans to make it illegal to teach the full story of US history (see “critical race theory“). I can’t know what’s going on in their heads, but I have a few ideas.

Republicans think of Juneteenth as a gift from white people.

While normal people would see the end of enslavement as only the beginning of a very long process of making things right, Republicans see it as a glorious gift that white people gave to Black people — a gift that not only erases all of the evils of enslavement, but that makes white people somehow noble. In truth, ending slavery was literally the least white people could do and the behavior of white people since then dramatically tarnished the meaning of that act.

Republicans think that Republicans ended slavery.

Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and so clearly Republicans ended slavery, right? No, not at all. First off, the two political parties were much like they are today, with one side overtly evil and the other side more worried about playing nice with evil than about doing the right thing. The abolitionists — the people we’d call dangerous leftists today — were disgusted with both sides, which is why abolitionists like John Brown took matters into their own hands and forced the beginning of the Civil War. It was only after the war was in full swing that the Republicans (under the leadership of Lincoln) decided it was a good idea to end slavery. Despite the fact that John Brown was executed before the war began, the shape of the conflict and its effect on slavery was precisely what he had intended.

Next, we have to consider the fact that today’s Republican party is not the same as the Republican party of 1865. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Republican party developed the Southern Strategy, which was to appeal to southern white racists in order to compete more effectively in electoral politics. They did this by using “dog whistles” — phrases that are overtly racist when a racist hears them, but vague or meaningless when a non-racist hears them. In essence, the Democratic Party and Republican Party completely switched places on the subject of racism during this time. At the time when slavery was ended (1865), the Republicans were the liberals, and the Democrats were the conservatives. From the lens of today’s politics, Lincoln was a Democrat. Calling the Republican party “the party of Lincoln” is intentionally deceptive, and everyone who calls it that knows exactly what they are doing.

Third, any time we give an institution credit for something we hide the fact that it is individuals that make change. An institution is just an amalgamation of individuals. All of the individuals who chose to end slavery are long dead; no one alive today deserves the credit for it, even if they happen to belong to an institution that shares the name. It’s like the Ship of Theseus problem, but the new ship is racist.

Creating a national holiday doesn’t change anything.

Republican politicians like the idea of creating a holiday because it doesn’t change anything.

It is the material conditions under which people live that really matter, and creating a holiday does absolutely nothing in that regard. Performative gestures like this are the preferred method of dealing with problems for neoliberalism, because keeping material conditions the way they are is one of the most central goals of neoliberalism. Actual reparations for the evils of slavery would be extremely disruptive. Moreover, thanks to systematic racism, white people are more likely than Black people to occupy the kinds of jobs that will actually have Juneteenth as a paid holiday; if you aren’t off work and being paid to be off work, it really isn’t a holiday for you.

It’s still a nice gesture, and I appreciate it in that regard, but we have to keep our perspective on the true significance of that gesture.

Congress created this holiday out of fear.

Ever since the first slaver looked around and realized that he was outnumbered by his victims, racists have been terrified. Today, conservatives have a deep-seated fear that “urban people” will pour out into the predominantly white suburbs and murder everyone they see, which made the demonstrations during the Trump era particularly panic-inducing for them. Conservatives are right now huddled in their McMansions clutching their AR-15’s, convinced that at any moment, BLM or Antifa supersoldiers are going to show up at their door. The creation of the Juneteenth holiday is an attempt to pacify these supposedly-ultra-violent mobs. Importantly, a majority of Democratic party politicians are conservatives who share this fear — that’s part of why the Democratic party is (as a whole) so resistant to creating positive change.

Conclusion

Republicans were happy to create a national holiday as a gift from white people to Black people that celebrates Republicans having ended slavery, because it doesn’t change anything and might pacify the violent mob of the left. For the next 100 years, Republicans will defend their racism by saying, “Look, we all supported the creation of Juneteenth as a national holiday!”

Related: 14 House Republicans Voted Against Making Juneteenth A Federal Holiday

Last month, the man who serves as both Chancellor of the University of Missouri and current President of the University of Missouri System (Mun Choi) declared that everyone must go back to work in-person on May 17. MU is the biggest employer in our area, so this has set the tone for every other employer. Between the university proper and MU Health Care, MU employs over 13,000 people in a city of about 120,000. Columbia is by far the biggest city in the area. (Edit: We believe Mun Choi’s order was just him passing along the order from the State of Missouri for all state workers to go back to in-person work.)

Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, with conservatives having sabotaged pandemic protocols like social distancing, mask wearing, and avoiding public places, thus having created the opportunity for COVID-19 to mutate faster than vaccines can be developed, manufactured and distributed. In fact, it appears that humanity may have basically failed at this point and that the worst is yet to come with COVID-19’s many children spreading faster than the original version of the virus. (This is a complicated issue, though, and though the situation isn’t really getting better, it also isn’t getting worse.)

We went back to in-person work anyway. In the fall, we will go back to in-person school as well. Why?

Many workers — the ones actually producing material goods — have to physically be at work. But again — why do office workers need to be in the office? I mean ever, under any conditions — nevermind the pandemic.

It’s a good question.

The answer is not “efficiency”.

When we first figured out that a huge portion of our workforce could do their jobs from home, the reaction from many people was outrage — as in, “I could have been working from home this whole time and you made me drive into work every day for nothing, you fucking assholes.” Next, though, people began to realize that there was efficiency to be gained by people working from home — both profit efficiency (the efficiency of bean counters) and resource efficiency (real efficiency). For example, they realized they would need less office space, parking spaces, and a great deal of other overhead associated with a person sitting for 8 to 10 hours in a space. They realized that many of the costs of having an employee could be externalized to the employee — and externalizing costs is one of the highest goals of the neoliberal bureaucrat. It’s literally what they think about during sex. Moreover, there were real savings to be had in terms of less electricity used and less gasoline burned.

These are the answers I’ve found for why we went back to in-person work:

• Satisfying the insanity of American conservatives
• Re-establishing the neoliberal dominance hierarchy
• Satisfying the anxiety of the managerial class

These are all basically the same thing. Both far-right conservatives and near-right neoliberals love a dominance hierarchy, and it’s really hard to maintain one if the people who require domination are off galivanting in their homes, free from the oppressive eyes of their assigned dominants.

While capitalism has a natural tendency toward creating a dominance hierarchy that alienates workers from their work and facilitates a class of lazy, evil jackasses who don’t really do any work, it is just a tool that is secondary to the primary source of our societal problems. Bad people choose capitalism because they understand that it will facilitate their sinister goals, and while it is very hard for a tool like capitalism to be benign, it is people who chose the tool and chose how to use it.

Maintenance and expansion of the dominance hierarchy that aids bad people is the primary goal of our society — even above the needs of the capitalist system. When the needs of the psychopaths and narcissists that run our society conflict with the goals of capitalism, it is the needs of the psychopaths and narcissists that are satisfied first. The place where this toxic hierarchy is most literal is the management hierarchy inside a corporation.

I understand that people like to talk about how a corporation is inherently toxic — that somehow the emergent properties of the corporate structure are contrary to what every single person in the entire corporation would do. The assumption is that all people are good so they can’t possibly be choosing the evil of the corporation. Well, that’s not accurate at all.

Corporations are run by a board of directors; they are people and they decide what the corporation does. There’s no behavioral phenomenon that is beyond their control. They have nominal responsibility to stockholders, but can always just claim that whatever they did was ultimately in the best interest of the stock price. That board of directors is made up of ridiculously wealthy assholes who all sit on each other’s boards. In this way, they use the façade of the corporation to prop up a dominance hierarchy based on their own narcissism and psychopathy — and then when they are called out for the corporation’s bad behavior, they shrug and say that the corporation did stuff without their input because it has a mind of its own. It doesn’t.

In short, capitalism (and it’s internal sub-structures, like corporations) facilitates and protects a hierarchy ruled by narcissists and psychopaths. They certainly see capitalism as a means of “creating wealth” (stealing wealth from working class people), but wealth itself is part of the capitalist machine and a tool of domination.

Chris Hedges talks about the managerial class quite frequently; at first, I was dismissive of his tendency to blame everything on them, but upon closer inspection, he’s completely correct. The whole point of the managerial class is to maintain and facilitate the dominance hierarchy, and then to take credit for the accomplishments of their underlings. In turn, the manager’s manager takes credit for their accomplishments. The management hierarchy is the simple capitalist hierarchy (capitalist vs. worker) but with a number of internal iterations. You can imagine a company with 100 employees where a single man named Carl is doing all the actual work, but the CEO claims all the credit; between them lie 98 middle managers, each taking credit for the work of the person below them.

Not working is one of the goals of capitalism. Workers under capitalism are working to retire — the sooner the better. Managers are working “smarter not harder” which means pushing tasks off on underlings and then taking credit for that work. Yes, conservatives like to go on and on about the value of hard work, yet their stated goal the entire time is to retire or become rich, and both of those things mean not working. What they really mean is that they expect submission to the narcissists’ dominance to be rewarded. When most people see a person who is high up on the hierarchy not working, they call them a success; when they see someone at the bottom of the hierarchy not working, they call them a failure. The difference between the goal of capitalism (not working) and the goal of the underlying hierarchy (reward for submission) illustrates that capitalism isn’t the bedrock of our society.

Under this system, many people have jobs primarily so that a manager can have underlings even though that is not at all efficient. I’m not kidding. If you’ve ever had a bullshit job, this is why that job existed. A bullshit job is a job that the person doing the work realizes is completely unnecessary, and yet they’re getting paid for it. Bullshit jobs can have low pay, but more often than not, they pay pretty well — the higher the salary of the underling, the more status that gives their manager.

David Graeber calls this “managerial feudalism“: Employers need underlings in order to feel important and maintain competitive status and power.

Manager anxiety comes from the fear (mostly subconscious) that people will realize that the manager is unnecessary. This dovetails with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) perfectly in that narcissists have an enormous amount of anxiety regarding people realizing that they aren’t as amazing as they pretend to be. Importantly, this includes the narcissist worrying that their inflated image of self will be destroyed and they themselves will have to accept that they are not better than everyone else.

A culture of narcissism happens in any society ruled by narcissists because the ideas of the ruling class will inevitably be the ruling ideas (to paraphrase Marx). A side-effect of living in such a culture is that otherwise good people will support and facilitate the narcissistic structure because they’ve been led to believe it is good, correct, and inevitable. That’s why we sometimes have a “good manager” — a person who protects the employees below them from abuse while simultaneously working for the benefit of the entire corporation (a very socialistic approach). But make no mistake — a good manager is an anomaly that will either be destroyed (if they stick to their ethics) or re-purposed to help the narcissists.

I’ve been trying to make sense of this whole “back to in-person work” thing for a while, but it was The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses’ Brains by Ed Zitron that really allowed me to get some clarity about it. I suggest you check it out. I suspect that Ed is like me — not a professional writer but rather a person stuck in a corporate environment who produces writing in their free time — because that piece could use some editing. However, it also contains gems like these:

We incentivize management as a control mechanism rather than a motivational and organizational mechanism in an organization, meaning that most middle managers are glorified cops.

Cops are not really necessary. Their purpose is to ensure compliance with a dominance hierarchy.

Middle managers are often graded on the work of their team, which means that they are actively incentivized to steal work and do little of their own.

Just as the capitalist claims the value of the work done by working class people, the manager claims the value of the work done by their underlings.

The reason that remote work is so threatening to a lot of corporate thinkers is that it largely devalues the middle management layer that corporate society is built on. When you’re in person, a middle manager can walk the floors, “keep an eye on people” and, in meetings, “speak for the group.” While this can happen over Zoom and Slack, it becomes significantly more apparent who actually did the work, because you can digitally evaluate where the work is coming from.

In a corporate environment, the main reason we have meetings is so the manager can re-assert their dominance; it’s much easier to do this in person. This means you can quantify how bad your management hierarchy is by how often you have meetings, and you might even be able to figure out who the worst managers are if you can determine who is insisting on all these fucking meetings. (In contrast, anarchists have meetings to determine consensus and share information.)

Zitron’s essay is fantastic, but there are hints at the same truths in the mainstream press. For example, Fortune published The psychology behind why some leaders are resisting a hybrid work model and you can see that the writer almost gets it. For example:

A major factor in leaders wanting everyone to return to the office stems from their personal discomfort with work from home. They spent their career surrounded by other people. They want to resume regularly walking the floors, surrounded by the energy of staff working. They’re falling for anchoring bias. This mental blind spot causes us to feel anchored to our initial experiences and information. 

I have to laugh thinking about all those sad managers jonesing for the rush of walking past submissive workers nervously glancing over their shoulders and typing faster to seem more productive. They feel “unanchored” because the dominance hierarchy they love is gone — instead, the employees are at home enjoying egalitarian relationships with their family members and simply doing their jobs rather than worrying about some asshole’s ego.

The Fortune article talks about how the managers are just sure that their employees love being dominated and are truly desperate to get back under the watchful eye and loving guidance of their patriarch. It’s gross. Overall, though, it describes managers desperate to reassert their control (dominance) of employees on behalf of the people above them.

Another concern — which comes in a distant second to maintaining the dominance hierarchy — is that capitalism wants to claim the total value of the worker while they are working. They don’t see you as a person paid to accomplish a particular set of tasks, but rather as a resource that they own completely during your contracted work hours. (That’s why they want 100% of your life if you are salaried.) If you are doing anything that is not directly related to providing value to the corporation — even thinking or having emotions about non-work things — that is a violation of the capitalist’s ownership of you. You aren’t a person, but rather a labor resource.

Managers are claiming that they are very concerned that people are doing non-work activities — including working a side hustle or developing a new business — during their work day. (See, for example, the tweet from Jeremiah Owyang at the top of Ed Zitron’s essay.) If we take a very strict view of how capitalism wants the world to be, the worker who is doing non-work stuff during the work day is violating the whole contract of capitalism (as I described it above). However, my opinion is that this anxiety about whether or not workers are devoting their whole person to the corporation is really cover for what managers really care about: Maintaining that dominance hierarchy — especially, maintaining the illusion that managers are necessary. Again, you could call this managerial feudalism.

Beyond explaining the rush to get everyone back to in-person work, I hope this helps to explain why neoliberals and conservatives cooperate with one another so often. Neoliberals claim to be working toward a perfectly quantified and rational capitalist hierarchy (supposedly free of irrational prejudices), while conservatives clearly support more traditional hierarchies (and love those irrational prejudices), but both are actually supporting the same culture and hierarchy of narcissistic dominance. The differences in how they see the hierarchy are more a matter of perception — like a Rorschach test — rather than a reflection of real material differences in those hierarchies.

I’ve focused on internal management hierarchies here, but the same logic of re-asserting dominance applies to all kinds of “getting back to normal” — including things like restaurants opening back up for eat-in dining. Conservatives like to eat in restaurants because it gives them the opportunity to dominate someone. They want the school system to take care of their kids because they want to be served and they don’t want to take care of (serve) their children. It’s all about re-establishing the dominance hierarchy — a dominance hierarchy designed for and by narcissists.

The idea of a culture of narcissism transcends Marx’s historical epochs (primitive communal, slave, feudal, capitalist) because it reveals a common thread running through them all — a thread that must be cut if we’re to truly rise above barbarism. If we fail to address the culture of narcissism — and keep allowing narcissists to rule us — a revolutionary change will always result in a new set of narcissists in charge, which means a new historical epoch rather than a resolution of that cycle and the establishment of a more democratic system.

There’s a growing movement in the USA at the state level to create new taxes targeting electric vehicles with the intent of reducing or even eliminating them in favor of fossil fuel vehicles. It is part of the general insanity of conservatives that they’ve decided that electric vehicles — which are now generally superior to gasoline and diesel vehicles — are somehow a threat to their conservative ideals. Burning fossil fuels is apparently a manifestation of one’s dominance over nature and other people.

This weird take on electric vehicles points up that very important division between American elites:

On one side, we have the neoliberal futurists, convinced that moving forward with technology and treating market capitalism as a religion (with the invisible hand of the market as its god) will solve all human problems while maintaining an elite (including Musk, Bezos and Gates, but certainly many others) who are somehow better than us despite being clearly morally bankrupt and generally idiotic. They all love Tesla’s ultra-quick luxury cars. They’re less concerned with climate change than they are with achieving the mythic future they’re all way too excited about.

On the other side, with less money but greater numbers, are conservatives, which would be more accurately called neofeudalists, steered by all of the values we associate with fascism: power by any means necessary, a steady stream of blatant lies, open hostility toward democracy, and glorification of a mythic past during which all their perceived enemies either didn’t exist or were under their complete control. They’re the ones who think “rolling coal” is a sign of patriotism and that EV’s are going to make men gay.

(The left is on neither of those sides.)

Below is a video from Transport Evolved where they analyze the bullshit arguments conservatives are promoting to try to convince people to support their plan to tax EV’s out of existence. Transport Evolved has the most grounded and thorough reporting on electric vehicle news that I’ve seen. Transport Evolved certainly has neoliberal politics, but is left of the center-right Democratic party and the luxury EV crowd; they care both about the climate and the ability of normal people to afford reliable transportation.