The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: How to think Page 3 of 22

Colonization, Conquest, and Our Unconscious Civilization

Let’s start with this little video of the geographical spread of China over time.

Looks like the Han conquered a lot of other people. They then imposed their culture, their writing, and over time, their language on those people.

Here’s the rule: Any people who get a significant military advantage, use it to conquer. They may not do so immediately, but eventually they do so.

The Mongols conquered the largest land empire in history. They were undefeated for generations; absolutely crushing military advantage.

The Russians, later, with the gunpowder advantage, conquered their large land empire.

The gunpowder advantage was big, but not that big. It worked in the Americas because of a plague that killed off over 90 percent of the population. Absent that, at worst/best you have a situation closer to India, though probably with a bit more successful colonization.

In ancient history, the Greeks had a huge military advantage. They knew they had it for a while before it was used by Alexander to conquer a huge swathe of the ancient world. (This is similar to the Mongols’ horse-archer advantage; they had to wait for a Genghis Khan to use it effectively.)

Shaka would have done something similar, had he been born a thousand years earlier, but he had the bad luck to run into the Brits, who posessed a much larger advantage.

We know nothing about the Druids because the Romans slaughtered them, colonized most of their lands, and made the Gauls into semi-Romans. The Christians later finished the job.

The Norse are gone because they lost a multi-century religious war against the Christians. We have weird ideas about the Norse: They were reacting to a hegemonic religious ideology that was already force-converting pagans. Charlemagne (a profoundly evil man) forced Saxons to convert, then killed them. Figured he was saving their souls, no doubt.

So the Norse built a wall across the south of Denmark (being outnumbered) and took to the seas, where they had an advantage. They raided and destroyed monasteries not just because that’s where the loot was, but because it was Christianity driving the forced conversions.

The Norse, despite their “terror,” lost. The last Norse pagans, in Iceland, converted because if they didn’t, they would have lost the ensuing war.

The industrial revolution probably created the greatest military advantage the world has ever known. It was used to conquer most of the world that was still agrarian, and where it didn’t conquer, it humiliated. The second the Japanese industrialized, they went on their own conquering spree. Mao, unifying China, immediately conquered Tibet (ironically using a claim based on the notion that, “The Mongols conquered you and us at the same time, so you should be ours.”)

Again, the rule here is simple. People are people. When a group gets a massive military advantage, they use it to conquer and colonize (Greek colonies in the ancient world were endemic.) The larger the advantage, the more conquests. In time, conquests that are unsustainable go away, and those that have largely eradicated the indigenous culture (sometimes through genocide, sometimes by just getting rid of the culture), remain, even if nominally independent. Canada, Mexico, and even most South American countries are NOT resurgences of the people who ruled the countries before Europeans showed up. Neither are most of the areas China conquered in its millenia long march.

What China is doing in Tibet and to the Uighurs, in that light, is simply a modern version of what the Chinese have done for ages.

None of this means that colonialism and conquest and cultural or actual genocide are good. They aren’t.

They are, however, our current pattern. We are living through a holding pattern right now, to an extent, only because of nuclear weapons. If a massive advantage is obtained which neutralized nukes, this pattern would re-emerge.

If we want this pattern to end, we need to figure out why it happens: What creates the enabling conditions, and we need to become a conscious world civilization.

Right now, if you look at the “greenhouse gas” curve or at the “species extinction curve” and compare it to the curve of a bunch of bacteria in a petri dish growing uncontrollably until they die in their own waste, you won’t see any significant difference.

At the civilization and cultural level, we are not conscious. We do not make choices, much as we think we do. Instead we act like any other animal, driven by unconscious impulses and drives we apparently cannot control.

None of the evils we inflict, as societies, on each other or on the other species of the world, will cease for any significant amount of time, if we do not become conscious and work to change these behaviours.

If we can’t, we will likely go extinct. If not this time around, then next. We will keep careening into absolutely forseeable problems and doing nothing about them until its too late, and one of these days, it will kill us.


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The Utility of Fear, Anger, and Hate

This video, of Senator Sinema voting no on a bill to enact a $15/hour minimum wage caused some outrage.

Do watch it, it’s short.

Perhaps it makes you angry. If you earn less than $15/hour or care about anyone who does, it probably should.

In our society we demonize negative emotions. The person who doesn’t get angry wins the debate. You’re not supposed to be scared.

And hate, well hate is the worst of all emotions, to us.

But all of these emotions have a purpose.

Fear is supposed to alert you to danger.

Anger is supposed to tell you someone has done something they shouldn’t have (which is why it often comes right on the heels of fear).

And hate, well, hate is supposed to tell you someone is a long term threat.

So, you should fear people like Sinema (she was one of eight Dems who voted no — she just got flack for taking so much joy in it) because they are a danger to you: They want you to be poor, and therefore always in danger of hunger, homelessness, and ill health.

People like Sinema should also make you angry, because they do inappropriate things. (See above).

And yes, you should hate them, because they are a long-term threat to your well-being.

Fear, anger, and hate are working when they ping the appropriate targets. When elites redirect those emotions to people who aren’t a threat to you (Saddam Hussein, say) then they are inappropriate.

They should also be graded appropriately. Even if you think, as an American, that Putin stole the 2016 election (uhmmm), he isn’t nearly the threat to you that your own politicians are. It isn’t Putin who spent 40 years dropping wages through the floor, sending young men and women to war, and destroying American civil liberties.

Likewise, it always amuses me when I talk to helicopter parents and they tell me, “But it’s so much more dangerous today than it was when you were a child.”

No, it actually isn’t. It’s much less dangerous. Moreover, almost all danger to children comes from trusted adults, including relatives, teaches, coaches, and family friends, not from strangers. But people hear on the news about exceptional cases (which are exceptional because they are very rare) where strangers hurt children and think it’s common, when, actually, it’s extraordinarily rare.

In a society where elites control the media, and media determines perception of benefit and danger, people’s fear, anger, and hate calibrations are way off. They fear people who are of little threat to them, and identify with their despoilers (Obama, Trump, Clinton, Bush, Pelosi, the list goes on).

They think spectacular bad events are common (stranger-child attacks) and discount the actual danger (Uncle Bob, or Dad.)

In this context fear, anger, and hate are bad. So are love and trust of partisan authority figures. Remember all the fools worshiping Cuomo, who has always been a vile piece of human garbage.

So one of the first tasks, for sanity, and in order to make good decisions, is to re-orient our emotions. To point hate at long term enemies (our politicians) rather than at our neighbors or foreigners who aren’t a threat. (Unless you’re Iraqi, or Yemeni, say, in which case, well….)

The world has a lot of dangers. They almost always come from the people you trust, whom you shouldn’t. Learn who’s actually trustworthy, and who is a danger.


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The Core Social Principles of Ideologies

Every ideology has a few core principles: guiding lights, or pole-stars, which believers should use to guide themselves.

The fundamental proposition; the IDEAL, of Confucian government, is that the rulers should govern as if they are benevolent parents. If they do not do so, they are not legitimate, but tyrants.

The fundamental proposition of feudalism and related ideologies is that some bloodlines are better than others, and those from those bloodlines deserve to rule.

The fundamental proposition of capitalism is that money is earned by providing “utility” and that those who have money have it because they have done the most good. This easily turns into oligarchy, “those with the most money are the most virtuous & should rule.”

The fundamental proposition of democracy is that all legitimacy comes from the citizenry (people) and that they should rule, sometimes by selecting others; sometimes directly.

The fundamental proposition of Westminster style democracy (parliamentary) is that “Parliament is Supreme!” It can do whatever it wants, and one Parliament cannot tie the hands of another one. (Treaties have been used to try to get around this, doing so is illegitimate.)

The fundamental proposition of American enlightenment democracy is that everyone is equal. It was originally phrased as “all men”, but that is an error requiring correction, and much of American history is about the attempt to properly live up to the proposition.

The fundamental social teaching of Jesus, was that we should help the least of us, and that great wealth is an evil.

Buddhism, to my knowledge, doesn’t have a great deal of governing philosophy, but the proposition is that life always involves suffering and that we should try and end or reduce suffering as much as possible, including in animals.

Communism’s core proposition is that the means of production should be controlled by the masses: that power should not be a consequence of wealth or property.

Once you’ve identified the core proposition of an ideology, you use that as your pole star, moving ever towards it. You’re not a communist if you allow private concentration of wealth to control the economy or don’t keep control of economic activity in the hands of the workers in specific and the people in general.

All founders make mistakes and their disciples and heirs make more. It is your duty, if you follow a great ideology, to correct those errors. In Confucianism this includes Confucius’s treatment of women. In American democracy, systematic inequality and disenfranchisement.

In Buddhism this would be indifference to suffering because, hey, there’s no self anyway, amiright? In parliamentary democracy, it is believing the supremacy of Parliament either can be used against the people’s interest OR trying to bind Parliament and thus the democratic will.

If you have an individual philosophy or code of conduct/honor, it too may have a polestar. Mine is truth. In matters of public import, I try not to lie, because I believe we can’t make good decisions if we believe wrong things.

I also try to correct. I try to be open to being wrong, without being so open-minded I accept nonsense. Just had a long conversation with a friend that convinced me I had misunderstood some important things about the modern left. I was grateful to learn where I had been wrong.

Use this post as a spur for thought. What are the polestars for various ideologies? What are your polestars in various parts of your life.

Bonus: if there’s more than one polestar, where do they conflict or help each other and when?


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Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked?

One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school.

What?

This has struck me as crazy, because I don’t seem to have childhood amnesia. I didn’t like school, and I remember that almost no kid I ever met, even those who did, preferred school to days off.

But I shrugged until I read this teacher’s account of asking her students how their time off was.

Surprise, almost all of them were happy they had had the pandemic time off.

School is, well, mostly bad. It teaches things slowly, it mostly trains obedience, and it’s a social horror show. When we say social dynamics are like high school, we never mean anything good, and there are dozens of movies about how awfully students treat each other.

And most of what is taught in school and university is quickly forgotten. I used to amuse myself by asking recent university grads what they had learned, most of them could barely remember anything. Since I was widely read, often I knew enough to ask basic questions about their discipline, and they wouldn’t know the answers.

School is no different: information which is not used or found important, is lost, and it is lost quickly once the final, externally imposed, exam, is over.

Parents want their children to go back to school because it’s a babysitting service, and since we’re not paying parents to stay home, they need someone to take care of their kids. And yes, some may be falling behind or finding distance learning hard, but a decent system could make that up well enough.

But the idea that the kids themselves miss school, except in the sense that they can’t see their friends (which is pandemic related, and if it’s not safe to see them outside of school it isn’t safe to see them in school) is laughable.

It’s fairly obvious that the way we do school is terrible. It doesn’t teach knowledge quickly; the knowledge isn’t retained well, it destroys curiosity and natural desire to learn and it mostly has the effect of making children who should be outside running around into good little slaves: people who have learned to sit down, shut up, and do what teacher (or later, boss) says, the way they want it done.

It’s a wage-slave factory and that students come out with some actual knowledge is a secondary issue (if it wasn’t, effective illiteracy statistics wouldn’t be constantly  high.)

Effective traumatic conditioning makes you pretend that you enjoyed it. And that’s what school is: a way of taking the juice of life out of you and destroying your ability to make independent decisions and love learning.

We forget that, because what was done to us was horrible and all our trusted adults were onside with it. So as with horrible parents, we have to pretend they did it because they loved us.

Maybe they did, since they think being a slave is good, since most of them (us) are slaves, and we must believe that whatever we do is good.

But, at the least, let us not forget something simple. Most kids prefer not being at school to being at school. And if you have honest recollection of your childhood, you probably did too.


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Why People Bully & A Better Way

Fundraising note: we’ve hit about $7,500 and are getting close to the end of the 2020 fundraiser. This puts a little over $500 short of tier 2 in the concepts series:

Three more articles, this set most likely on the conditions that create golden Ages, including one on how to create an ecological Golden Age (what we need next.)

We’re $3,500 from tier 3. It’s an amount we’ve raised in the past, but I know that this year has been very tough for people. If you value my writing and can afford to subscribe or donate, please do, if not, no worries. Take care of yourself and be well.

The Piece Proper:

As a child, when I first went to school and thus first encountered bullying and deliberate meanness, I remember feeling a sort of pure bewilderment, why would anyone hurt others?

I’ve been working thru this problem for most of the rest of the my life. Last year I read a book by the late David Graeber, “Bullshit Jobs.” Graeber was concerned with why people hate meaningless jobs and his theory was based on the human need to affect the world.

Babies, when they realize they can affect the world, even by something as simple pushing something are delighted. They get pure joy from the feeling of efficacy, or, if you wish, power.

Knowing we can change things, that we can affect the world, makes us happy. It makes us feel safe. It is pure, primal pleasure.

Humans are the most important thing to be able to affect. Humans have almost everything we want, especially in a society like ours, where most of us are very removed from nature and primal activities like hunting, gathering, farming and building things.

The easiest way to affect someone is to upset them. Make them angry, or sad, or hurt them. They react, the person doing it feels powerful, and feeling powerful feels good. No matter how shit your life is, if you can make someone else react to you, you don’t feel helpless and you get that little rush of primal pleasure.

(When I’ve pointed out similar things in the past, there’s always someone who writes a comment about how this makes me evil and a bad person and they, of course, never feel such emotions.)

Being mean is a way of proving you still have the ability affect the world and people in it. Bullying them, forcing them to do what you want though they wouldn’t without your threat or violence, is an even purer form of this. Imposing long term fear, so they do it even when you’re around feels even better. (Bullies in the mil-ind-police complex call this “tuning people up.”)

Being mean or a bully has a payoff. You just need to be careful not to try and bully the wrong person.

The problem with bullying is the same as most bad behaviour (long term readers know where I am going and can groan now.) You create bad feelings, and you have to live with unhappy people. Maintaining dominance is stressful, because one of your victims may strike back and you may mistake how powerful or vengeful someone is.

So you become a lord of Hell. You’re able to impose your will, but you make the world you live in hellzone.

There is another route to getting what you want. You can make people feel good and happy, or get them to like you. You can create positive emotions. You can be charming and kind. (I am aware that I don’t always do this, I’m not holding myself up as a paragon of good behaviour, would that it were so. I’m learning and sharing what I learn with my readers.)

If you predominantly act this way and keep would-be hell lords out, you will create a heaven around you: an oasis of positive emotions and happy people. You’ll get most of what you want, without most of the risk.

None of this means that even a heavenly person many never have to use threats or even violence. But that isn’t their go-to: it isn’t their default strategy.

When dealing with a would be hell-lord the strategy is to disarm them; to stop their strategy from getting what they want, and then only rewarding them for using heaven strategies. Like all such re-conditioning it takes time. First you remove their power to do harm; the rewards from being scum. Then you set it up so they can only win by being charming and kind.

This isn’t always possible, we’ve all been in settings where the leadership was so ensconced in their hellish ways that the only way to end hell was to leave. In some other places (one corp I worked for comes to mind) it is possible to create an island of heaven inside hell, carefully choosing who one lets on the island.

All of this scales. The mean we use daily to get what we want create the feeling of the world around us; the means are the end. Heaven is a place where people are kind and good, and hell is a place where people are mean and bullying  and don’t care what happens to other people.

Being selfish and mean is a strategy that works only if not too many people are doing it. If too many people do it, you hit a tipping point where the group or society as a whole turns toxic, and everyone loses. We can see this at the world level today in climate change and ecosphere collapse. When I worked in the US for a month, I saw it in the way people treated each other: scared and defensive and unwilling to trust, because they knew any trust would be abused.

Heaven and Hell are created by nothing more or less than how we treat each other, and how we treat the world around us.

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Abundance Mindset, Scarcity Economies and the Great Game Of Musical Chairs

Like a lot of older Gen-X I remember the good times without having every participated in them. By the time I was an adult stagflation, the Federal Reserve, Reagan and Thatcher had done their work and the decline had begun. Everything kept getting shittier for most people in the western world and it has kept doing so for about 40 years now. Depending on what group you’re in, it might be fifty.

This has given rise to a whole body of how to get rich works. They rival those of the gilded age: Napoleon Hill’s “How To Think and Get Rich” is a good example. (The best of them is still “How To Make Friends and Influence People,” its advice will work as long as humans are human.)

The catchphrase these days is “abundance thinking”. There’s a ton of good stuff in the world, and you just have to figure out how to get some. The world isn’t full of scarcity, it’s full of too much.

This is, of course, true. There are money spigots, like various central banks, early entry to crypto, being attached to important resource economies like oil (though that’s ending) and so on. There are people who have way more money than they need, for whom money is a trivial concern, a way of keeping score, and those who just have too little.

You want to move to a position of abundance. You want to find a spigot. On the right this selling is courses on how to get fit or slim or rich or whatever. Sometimes the courses are bogus, sometimes they’re pretty good stuff, but they price them high and find desperate people to buy them.

So it is, so it always has been. Sell the dream to desperate people and you’ll get rich. Attach to a money spigot and you’ll be fine. It’s why the fights are so savage these days. Corbyn in Britain threatened the money-spigot attachment of Labour elites and they hate him for it and will do anything they can to destroy him. Nothing was too low to do to stop Sanders, because he would have brought in his own administrative class into the Democratic party. Democrats used many of the same vote suppression tactics against Greens and Sanders as they squealed about Republicans using against them.

It’s all about position. This is why the standard advice in prosperity circles is to ditch your loser friends and hang out with successful people. They’re attached to some spigot, or have found some vein of insecurity to mine and they can cut you in or show you how to get in.


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But this is the larger issue: it’s all about position.

It’s a giant game of musical chairs. Some people are in abundance economies, other people are in scarcity economies (these have little to do with national economies, though it’s easier to get into an abundance economy in some places, obviously.)

But there are only so many money spigots and only so many people who can mine veins of insecurity. There aren’t enough good seats.

So the abundance stuff focuses on how you can become one of the winners, one of the people in an abundance economy. If you do it ethically, you help others get inside. If  you do it unethically, you’re just a parasite and you reduce the number of prosperity chairs. (Jamie Dimon, for example.)

The issue with all this, even when done ethically, is that even the “good” guys are rarely increasing the number of seats in the abundance economy. They’re just redistributing who gets them.

In econo or math-speak that’s a zero sum game. But because most of the people attached to money spigots like the Federal Reserve are actually reducing the number of good seats, it’s actually a negative sum game. Every dollar someone like Dimon earns hurts other people.

Abundance thinking could be a good thing: there’s no reason the world can’t be abundant. I am perfectly aware of limits to growth, but  every human could have a good life if we wanted them to. But right now it’s all about winners and losers. It’s about each of us, perhaps on team with the other “winners.”

You can win such games, of course, but they produce a world that is hell, and worse a world that keeps heading towards worse hells. This is how downward spirals happen: when we’re concerned only with a few people’s well-being, rather than the well-being of all.

Eventually the hell becomes so bad that practically everyone is in hell, with perhaps a few lords of hell still enjoying life (almost every post-apocalyptic story still has some people doing fine.)

This is the treadmill we’re on, as we seek to save ourselves from the horrible fates we see around us.

So we resort to “I see what it takes to be successful and I’m going to do it and I have those characteristics or can get them. I’m not a loser. I’m a winner!”

The worse things get, the more we focus on what it takes for individuals to grab onto a money spigot.

We grab a prosperity chair (or we don’t, I haven’t!) And that’s great, but the number of chairs relative to the number of people keeps going down, the carbon goes up, and every day more species go extinct.

And hell looms.

A solution that just works for a few is a solution: but it’s only a partial solution unless you don’t care about others, about the future, or about non-human life.

Not everyone, as we’ve designed the modern world, can live in an abundance economy.

Perhaps we should try for a world where people don’t have to do everything just right, or be born to wealth, to live well?

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Know Your Enemies

An enemy is someone who means you harm and has the means to inflict it.

A friend is someone who has wants to do good for you, and has the means to bestow it.

I once wrote primarily to predict and to change the world.

I now write to help a few people, those who listen.

So, listen, because other than understanding climate change is written in, won’t be stopped (can’t at this point, minus geo-engineering), this is the most important message I have for you.

You must know who wants to harm you and has the means.

Let’s start here:

“If America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the 3 decades following the second world war… A low-income American earning $35K this year would be earning $61K. A college-educated worker now earning $72K would be earning $120K.

Everyone responsible for this is your enemy, unless you’re in somewhere between the top 4% to top 10%.

How much money, how much good, has the end of the post-war economic order inflicted on you? Adding in interest (because you wouldn’t be in debt, but have investments) it’s over a million dollar for almost everyone. You’d have a home and probably have the mortgage paid off if you don’t. You wouldn’t be drowning in student debt if young (especially since that order kept college costs down.)


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So the people who are responsible have robbed you of a million or more dollars, and a good, prosperous life. These people had names. It started with with intellectuals like Milton Friedman and the oligarchs who funded economics departments to overturn the economic orthodoxy the old order ran on. It moved onto politicians, executive and CEOs. Margaret Thatcher, and Reagan; then Blair and Clinton, who made their victory complete. Thatcher understood that it was Blair who made her victorious, until Labour accepted “There Is No Alternative” they could have simply undone almost everything she did. Clinton, cutting welfare and smashing blacks and poor people in the face with punitive jail sentences, was Reagan’s heir more than George Bush Sr. ever was.(Biden, of course, was there for all of it and supported almost every shitty piece of it. Enemy. If you can’t manage “enemy, but perhaps not as bad an enemy as Trump, you can’t think.”)

This piece isn’t primarily about ideas and the influence of intellectuals and academics, but I do want to give another nod to Milton Friedman. Please remember, always, that in politics and economics ideas do usually come before action, despite everyone telling you otherwise.

1970, Baby! The sound you hear, to paraphrase Ross Perot, is your jobs going down the drain to every low wage countries around the world.

Now, here’s another fact: wage theft is almost equal to ALL other theft combined, except (get this) it isn’t considered a crime. That’s right, when your boss steals from you, it’s a civil/regulatory matter! 

Who’s the enemy?

Now, when it comes to dying, if you live in America or Britain or most of Europe, who is most likely to get you killed?

That dastardly Putin, twirling his metaphorical mustache and cackling about how much he hates the West, “muahahahahahaha, I hate democracy,” he cackles, or your own elites?  Did Putin send you or your children to war in Iraq or Afghanistan? Did he bungle your Covid response.

Did Putin do this?

It is very rare, unless you are an Iraqi, say, that the leadership of any country save your own is more dangerous to you than your own. On those rare occasions when they are, it’s because a great power is fucking you up (yes, sometimes that’s Putin, but not if you’re American or a member of the EU.)

Your enemies are you own elites. They are the people who price drugs so high you can’t afford them, fuck up a pandemic response so your parents and grandparents die, or send you to war. They are the ones who create economic policies which funnel money to the rich and impoverish you, and if you don’t think being poor isn’t bad for you, you ain’t ever been poor, that’s for certain.

So, when you prioritize the people to be wary of, to be scared of, and to hurt or harm if you ever can, remember, a wise person knows who their enemies are.

Be a wise person.

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Seven Rules for Running a Real Left-wing Government

(With the Bolivian coup overthrown, back to the top.  I’ve noticed this is the article of mine front-line activists refer to most.  Originally published May 16, 2016.)

So, we have had a right-wing coup in Brazil. In Venezuela, the left still controls the Presidency, but has lost control of parliament. In Argentina, the right has won the election.

I have been asked how to stop right-wing reversals.

First, it’s worth noting that these three cases are somewhat different. Brazil is a coup in all but name. Venezuela saw massive, deliberate economic sabotage by internal right-wing forces. The situation in Argentina was the closest to fair; a reversal of electoral fortunes.

Still, there are lessons to be learned from their experiences:

It’s Not You, It’s China (or, the World System)

All three left-wing movements in Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina were associated with rising commodity prices. When those commodity prices collapsed, it was only natural for their fortunes to reverse. They are in power when the economy goes bad, now people want them out. The populace is willing to be complicit in actions that get them out, which are dubious.

Don’t Run Your Economy on Resources

Yes, okay, this is easier said than done. It is hard to bootstrap into something else if you’re a non-core economy. Heck, even many core economies are losing their manufacturing bases and while finance can “work,” it’s a shit way to run your economy. So are “services.” We’ll discuss this in more depth below. But the bottom line is this: You have to develop (or have plans to develop) your economy into a mixed economy, so that it can survive during the inevitable downturns, and, thus, so that your movement can survive them.

People expect you to be able to maintain prosperity. Given the world order as it stands, that may be like asking you to swim with a hundred pound weight strapped to your back, but you still have to do it.

Your First Act Must Be a Media Law

Break them up. Take them over. Whichever. Ignore the screams about media freedom from the usual suspects in the West, this is a case of “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” In all three countries, the media conglomerates remained in the control of oligarchs (update: to be clear, Venezuela did eventually expropriate them, but only after many years), and in all three cases, the majority of the media remained relentlessly hostile to the left.

This is just as true in countries like Britain, Canada, or the US as it is in Argentina, Venezuela, or Brazil, by the way. There is a reason why the post-war liberal regimes put strict media controls in place–including size limits–and there is a reason why those limits were removed by the neoliberal regimes that replaced them.

You can win “against the media” for a time, but if you leave it in the hands of your enemies, they will eventually use it to bury you.

Take Control of the Banking Sector

The banking sector creates money. Money determines what people can and cannot do. This is the control mechanism for the economy in any state which runs on markets. You must control it. If you control it, you can use it to strangle your domestic enemies. If you do not, your enemies will use it to strangle you.

This is a great problem. The world economy has been designed so that countries need to trade, and they need foreign money. So, you can take control of your banking sector, but you can’t control England’s, or America’s, or the payment system (this is what killed Argentina), and thus you cannot tell creditors to go fuck themselves. You need foreign money for necessities.

It is also problematic because the people who know how to run the market economy are not your people. You have get rid of the people who ran it before, so who is going to run it now?

Who Is Your Administrative Class?

You must have a class of people available to run the state and those chunks of the economy over which you are taking control (whether formally or informally). You must know who those people are. FDR reached into academia for many of his people; he also pulled from the social gospel folks (who were used to administering large organizations), and he found a lot of fellow class traitors (for example, JFK’s father, whom he used to run the SEC–Kennedy knew all the tricks and was able to tamp down Wall Street’s BS).

Post-FDR, one of the reasons why factory line supervisors were made ineligible for union membership was so that union members couldn’t be used as easily to take over organizations–even the lowest level supervisors were no longer union members.

There are always people who know the business and believe the way it is being run is bullshit. But you have to know who they are, both as a class and individually. There are certainly people who can run TV stations and newspapers who are left-wing, but you’ve got to know who they are. There are heterodox economists and people who have worked in the finance industry who are class traitors and just itching for a chance to put the boots to the assholes they worked for. Again, you must know who they are.

Take Control of Distribution and Utilities

Yeah, sorry, but no one said this would be easy. In Venezuela, you had the economic elite deliberately exacerbating shortages. Huge stocks of consumer goods buried and hidden.

These people have power. They are your enemies. They will use their power against you. They will not “play fair.”

In Egypt, under the Brotherhood, the deep state did things like cause electricity outages and blame it on the Brotherhood. Of course, the same bureaucrats as always were running the electrical system.

Again, this comes back to control: You have to take control and you have to have competent people you can trust who can help you. Do you know who they are?

Reduce Your Vulnerability to the World Trade System

The world system as it stands now is designed so that no nation can stand alone: No one can make and grow everything they need. This was not always the case. In the past, many nations went out of their way to be self-sufficient. It was Keynes’ position, by the way, that nations should produce all their day-to-day necessities themselves, wherever possible, and import only what they could not produce and luxuries–but to strive not to need anything they couldn’t make.

This has been economic and political orthodoxy at various points.

But it isn’t now. You’re in hock to various foreigners for a lot of money, denominated in their currency. You probably can’t feed your own nation. You can’t make what you need (toilet paper, famously, in Venezuela’s case) and you can’t buy it without foreign currency. But the foreign financial system is not friendly to you if you’re genuinely left-wing, and the world trade system is set up to make it illegal to do what is required to produce goods domestically.

You’ll need subsidies or tariffs to make new domestic industries viable, and that’s illegal thanks to a web of trade deals meant to make you unable to control your own economy.

Venezuela tried to increase farming, but failed, precisely because the price of oil went through the roof, and foreign food was cheaper than domestic. The classic response would be tariffs, but the kinds of tariffs sufficient to work would not be tolerated by the world trade system.

It’s hard to overstate how huge a problem this is. It goes back to the commodity issue. Maybe you have enough foreign cash for now, but you won’t always, and you must have it. This vulnerability must be reduced, generally.

No one has managed this in the neoliberal era, not completely, and huge amounts of geopolitics are run based on this. Russia has its oil prices drop, so it moves to selling military goods to make up the difference, for example, and its Syrian intervention is, in large part, a venue to show off how well its weapons work.

Workarounds have been tried: Cooperation with other left-wing nations is the standard one. Venezuela with Cuba, and so on. But this is the “south” trading with the “south.” The stuff they really need, generally, none of them actually produce. If they do, they either don’t produce enough, or they don’t really, i.e. it’s produced by some multinational with no loyalty.

So then you try to appropriate the multinational, but that runs you into all sorts of problems from getting replacement parts for the machines, to the experts to run what you’ve expropriated, to effective embargoes (even if not declared as such).

Nonetheless, this is a problem which must be solved. A full description of how to bootstrap an economy is beyond the scope of this article, and I’m not sure I have a full kit, but I will say this: There are a huge number of highly-skilled first world workers, from the Ph.D.-level down to machinists who are unemployed or underemployed. They want to work. They hate their own system. You can bring these people in, give them new lives, and at least have the necessary expertise.

I know many extremely qualified pharma professionals who would love a chance to set generic factories and create new drugs without the pressure for palliatives they receive from their drug company employers (or ex-employers), as just one example.

This bootstrapping is a challenge which appeals to a lot of the very best and brightest.

Be Satisfied with What You Can Grow and Make

If your elites or population insist on fresh summer vegetables in winter, you’re done. What you can produce, you must have a taste for. This is especially true for elites. If they must have the latest Mercedes, a vacation in Paris, and a home in London, you’re screwed because to have those things, they must have foreign currency.

When Korea was industrializing they had huge campaigns to not smoke foreign cigarettes: It was considered unpatriotic.

You need what foreign currency you have to stay earmarked for capital goods, and you need your elites to be local elites, not global elites. If your elites consider themselves global, you will never be able to create the necessary self-sufficiency to buck the world system.

Obey the Laws of Purges

Let’s not dance around. Your first step will be to break the power of the current economic and political elites who are not willing to convincingly join you–or, at least, let you rule without trying to sabotage you.

You must do this all at once. When it happens, it has to happen to everyone to whom it is going to happen. This is Machiavelli’s dictum, and he was right. After it has happened, those who weren’t broken know they’re safe as long as they don’t get in your way.

If the breaking keeps going on and on, everyone who still has something to lose (and still, thus, has power) lives in fear. They must destroy you before you destroy them.

Let’s give a concrete example. Assume Obama was really a left-winger. He gets into power in 2009, and he really wants to change things. He needs to take out the financial elite: Wall Street and the big banks.

They’ve handed him the opportunity. Here’s part of how he does it: He declares all the banks involved in the sub-prime fraud racket (all of the big ones and most of the small ones) conspiracies under RICO.

He then says that all the individual executives’ money are proceeds derived from crime and confiscates it. (This is 100 percent legal under laws as they exist). He charges them, and they are forced to use public defenders.

They are now powerless. This is the second law of purges: Anyone you damage, you must destroy utterly. If you take away half their power, and leave them half, they will hate you forever and use their remaining power to destroy you.

Leave them whole, or destroy them. The financial executives would have been destroyed, and win or lose in the courts, the next five to ten years of their lives would be consumed by personal legal nightmares.

Again, this is a Machiavellian dictum.

All of this will make many readers uneasy. It seems “mean.”

Get out of the game. You aren’t fit for it. This is all mean. Millions of people die every year and millions more are ruined by the current system. If you’re in this game to win it, rather than feel good about yourself, you will have to play real power politics by the actual rules of the game.

Too many left-wingers try to play by what they think the rules are. “We have a fair election every X years and the losers accept the result and don’t sabotage the winner (or start a coup).”

Those aren’t the real rules. If the right is really losing, they will cheat and cheat massively. They will think nothing of running death squads, making a deal with the US to support guerrillas, and so on.

You directly threaten their wealth and power, if you are a real left-winger. Even if all you want is a 50s style social democracy with racial and gender equality, that would destroy almost all of what they have. They remember what FDR did to them, even if you don’t. They remember all the lost power and fortunes.

It is not possible to have a fair, egalitarian, prosperous society, and have very rich and powerful elites. It cannot be done. Brandeis was exactly right when he said you can have democracy or great wealth in the hands of a few, but you can’t have both.

Either you’re willing to do what it takes, including the ugly bits, or you aren’t. There are sometimes local exceptions, places where a lot of the ugly isn’t needed, but there aren’t a lot of those places left in the world. This isn’t the post-war era and even then, in the South (as opposed to Scandinavia), actual egalitarian, developed economies mostly weren’t allowed. You can ask Central and South America about that.

Most left-wing movements get into power without having properly thought out what they’ll do once in power and without a realistic understanding of how deeply their right-wing opponents lack any belief in democratic norms.

Break your enemy’s power. If you’re any sort of left-winger worth your salt, you ethically do not believe in huge concentrations of power and money in the hands of a few people anyway. Act on your beliefs.

And if they’ve committed a pile of crimes (and they almost always have), use those crimes against them.

Then remember the world system is set up expressly to stop what you are doing.

You’re trying to tackle the dragon, and most people who do that get eaten. We tell the stories of the dragonslayers because they are so few.

So, know the odds are against you and be willing to do what is required to improve them. If you aren’t, stay home.


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