Politics, amirite? Hooboy. This will be the last article in my attempt to top all categories of FtB articles, unless some sneaky fucker edges me out of one of the categories I already topped. Get it, I’m a top. I kid, you know I switch. OK I’m probably a pillow princess but you know I got a bad back. LL Cool J would rap about banging my girlfriend if I had one. Remember that line?
OK, so politics, I know I’ve been thinking something about this lately, what was it? Hm… Oh yeah. Last night while I was non-sleeping, I was trying to explain myself to the mute audience in my head, and felt the need to preface my arguments with who I am, politically. I haven’t felt the need to put that into words much, so here it is.
I’m a personal anarchist. I think society should have laws but that all people should be willing to break them, as needed, to suit our personal ethos. Be willing to do the time for your crimes, but be willing to do the crimes you feel are most necessary.
I’m a socialist, maybe even a communist, at the end of the day. No allegiance to the ghost of the USSR, no worries in that Charly. I just know that in a world where every inch is owned by either the government or billionaires, there is no room for any person to truly meet all their own needs.
In the USA we live by that myth. All our laws are constructed around an idea grown more absurd every day, that every person can work, and that the fruit of that labor can be sufficient to care for us through our whole lives. If we, the poor, can’t have one fucking thing that isn’t fragile as hell, can’t have any social safety net to pick us up when getting worked at this rate inevitably breaks us, then the government needs to step up with cradle-to-grave social services, given generously and without stipulation. And as far as the commune goes, that isn’t just breaking your back with a hoe. I think all Hollywood movie-making and corporate art should ultimately be destroyed and replaced with artists working communally to make art for its own sake, profit as incidental rather than the sole motivating factor to make or do anything. And tech and science and education and child-rearing. There are many things that can be done communally.
The rich bore me as much as they oppress me. Their idea of the good life, of what is worthwhile at all, it’s a cosmically bad joke. I’d be OK with them existing, with their cheek implants and lambos, if they could just leave it at that and not suck us dry at every opportunity. They can’t be trusted with what they have. Class war now, babes.
I keed, I keed. Or do I? I do. Unless..? Ahaha, I had you going. Or maybe…
–
EDIT – I DID IT!!!! I’M NUMBER ONE!!!! for as long as it lasts.
Speaking of politics, I am pretty sure it was Jesus Christ who is reported as saying in all the gospels:
To each according to their needs; from each according to their abilities.
All I know is that Karl Marx wrote fan letters to Republican President Abraham Lincoln.
So maybe “party of Lincoln” is just code for Marxist?
Good ones. Thanks for keeping me company this morning, Bruce. I have, since then, gotten about two hours of sleep. Hopefully I can get this back on track tonight.
I’d probably describe it in different words but in terms of the class warfare and socialism points I’m pretty much there.
But I think it’s far, far too late to start a class war. We’ve been in one since before the US was founded. It was part of the why and how of the country being founded and it wasn’t ended then. It just got new players. In the last 100 years or so it’s not even very hard to follow. And it seems like the root cause for every single culture war issue is some rich asshole that sees something to gain in having other people fight each other for scraps rather than think about where all the money is really going.
I’m not sure about communal living and artist colonies yet. To be perfectly honest, I started to type that I don’t think those are a good idea as a structure for the whole society because there are a lot of people who aren’t willing to work with anyone else. And there are issues with the efficiency you can get from such things. I quickly realized that the efficiency issues are about scale, though. I’ve simply never seen anything cooperative operating at the scale of a large corporation.
The bit with people not being cooperative though, that’s an actual problem. I’ve been helped when I was in a bad way and I’ve tried to help many other people. I don’t know that it’s turned out that well. I have a very small sample size but of the people I’ve helped the most I would say about half have conveniently lied to themselves and think I’m taking advantage of them, even if I’m asking for little or nothing in return. I know I’ve gotten help at times when I wasn’t in the right mental state to use the opportunity presented to improve my life. I don’t know a fix for that outside of transitioning to a post-scarcity culture. I feel like dealing with this would be one of the stumbling blocks in transitioning to such a culture though.
I have, in moments of relative prosperity, offered to help an internet associate with a few hundred bucks for a desperate circumstance. One time they declined and we continued to associate fine, the other time they left the discord entirely, never to be seen again. Sometimes I think people are complaining just to express themselves and actively doing something toward a solution is too much hassle, or very frightening.
As this related to communal activity, I think we could do much better than we do now. Communal child rearing was, I think, the norm in pre-agricultural civilization. Part of the reason we evolved to have very long lives (compared to our closest relatives in the apes), so old people can help nurture the new. Capitalism has separated us to create redundant need for products, sold to us as “independence.” That’s a lot of damage that has to be undone and the repair has hardly begun.
But I’m not saying we need forced interdependence. Lone wolves should be able to lone wolf. That does cause some problems. Those lone wolves turn into old people with nobody to support them, crying while they’re dying. Our individualized society has very grim endpoints in store for individualized lives.
–