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

Tuesday, August 11, 2020

Posts that I especially recommend today: Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020

Although Street gives an accurate description of the largely colored underclass (but not exclusively so) of capitalist America, he ignores the indispensable part that fascism plays in capitalism to deal with the problem of surplus workers that is an integral part of capitalist rule. This I think largely comes from a misunderstanding of fascism which confuses many people in the USA. (This is not an accident: capitalist ideological agents carefully craft propaganda to confuse people on this subject and many others.)
Fascism is basically an attitude that encourages coercion in one form or another. The fundamental source of this attitude is from the capitalist morality as described by Margaret Thatcher: looking only to the welfare of the individual and of one's family:
 ...you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.
Therefore fascist methods are employed to deal with capitalist's main antagonists (the unemployed, poverty stricken, etc, (and let us not forget other competitive capitalists), and they can range from the threat of violence to indirect forms by controlling jobs and careers (traditionally favored by capitalists) to controlling the narratives (including censorship) that shape people's understanding of issues. (Caitlin Johnstone writes extensively about the latter subject.) Nowadays the three are combined in various combinations.