Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Purge the CIA

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Purge the CIA

Click here to access article by Justin Raimondo from AntiWar.com.

I am posting this article to give an illustration of a reformist view (or liberal view) of a contemporary problem as opposed to a radical view. I have long held the latter position and have encountered problems in clarifying this view for my fellow Americans. Most regard our system of capitalism as a given much like fish which regard water as simply reality. Obviously most Americans have been thoroughly indoctrinated by all the ideological institutions of our capitalist ruling class, and no longer see the system as a construct but simply accept it as reality.

Raimondo expresses his outrage regarding the CIA as an agency of the government which has committed the sins of lying to Congress and is currently trying to undermine the legitimacy of Trump's election. That's it. He doesn't even include all sixteen of the so-called intelligence agencies. So his fix is to purge it, and he hopes Trump will do this.

In contrast to this extremely narrow view of an undesirable agency, a radical view holds that the CIA along with all the unaccountable secret agencies are used by the capitalist ruling class's Deep State to control the government and all the institutions of our nation much like a puppeteer controls his/her puppets. They do this to hide their fascist operations within the US and its imperialist activities throughout the world while preserving the ideological narrative that we live in a democracy.

The solution is not to abolish the agency or revamp it, which is merely one symptom of control by a ruling class of major capitalists, but to use a radical solution by removing the source of the problem--the rule by a tiny capitalist ruling class. Thus a radical solution of revolution is required--whether we like it or not--to rid ourselves of capitalism, a class based system based on private ownership of the economy, and to construct a new egalitarian social system in which there is bottom-up public control of the economy and the entire society. I don't like it, but I see no alternative.