By Caitlin Johnstone
Facts:
- There are Chinese people with real
grievances against their government.
- The US empire’s propaganda machine will
spin current protests in China to advance
imperial agendas.
- Western intelligence agencies will
become more and more involved in these
protests the longer they go on.
❖
It still amazes me how many people who fancy
themselves anti-establishment critical thinkers
will spend all day mindlessly regurgitating
mainstream media lines about China.
I cannot emphasize enough how little respect
I have for anyone who parrots US empire
narratives about China and how completely
dismissive I am of all their attempts to explain
to me that it’s actually right and good to do
this. Literally all of our major problems are
because of the people who rule over us; if
you’re buying into the narrative that who we
should really be mad at right now is a
government on the other side of the planet with
no power over us, you’re a fucking loser. You’re
a bootlicking empire simp. You’re worthless,
bleating human livestock.
❖
Why does China keep aggressively surrounding
itself with US military bases?
❖
Everyone knows the US has invaded countries
completely unprovoked very recently and will
definitely do so again, but we still have to
pretend that Putin is the worst thing since
Hitler.
❖
It’s disturbing how many people I encounter
who claim Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worse
than America’s invasion of Iraq because Ukraine
is a “democracy”. How fucked up do you have to
be inside to believe human lives are worth less
because of their nation’s political system?
Leaving aside the fact that a nation which
bans political parties, shuts down opposition
media, imprisons opposition leaders, and is
vastly more accountable to Washington than to
its own people is in no way a “democracy”,
that’s just a profoundly disturbed way of
looking at life. A mother holding the remains of
a child whose body has been ripped apart by
military explosives does not care whether her
country is considered a “democracy” by the
western governments who are invested in that
country’s military outcomes.
❖
Rightists correctly believe that liberals
subscribe to an artificially constructed
worldview designed by the powerful in the
service of the powerful, but incorrectly believe
that they themselves do not.
❖
Common debates:
- Which status quo party is best
- Which side of the culture war is correct
- How the western empire should act
- What capitalism should look like
Uncommon debates:
- Should status quo politics exist
- Should the western empire exist
- Should capitalism exist
- Should class war replace culture war
And it is of course entirely by design that
the former are common and the latter are
uncommon. Keeping everyone debating
how establishment power structures
should exist, rather than if
they should, ensures the survival of those power
structures.
❖
It’s actually a really big problem that the
most visible “left” in the US is completely
worthless on war and militarism. When Americans
who are critical of those things look right and
see people like Rand Paul and Tucker Carlson
doing something then look left and see AOC and
Bernie doing nothing, which side do you think
they’ll choose?
And of course this is because the so-called
progressive Democrats are not “left” in any
meaningful way, but your average mainstream
American doesn’t know that, and perception is
reality. The US is the nation where antiwar
sentiment is most important and the most
urgently needed, and it’s been buried on the
left. Americans are trained that Clintonites are
“center-left” and AOC/Bernie are “far left”, and
anyone further to the left than them on foreign
policy is demonized by these progressives as a
Russian agent. This creates the very
understandable impression that the entire left
is pro-war.
When you’ve got
Ilhan Omar and
AOC calling people who protest US proxy
warfare at their rallies Russian operatives and
antiwar leftists like Jill Stein branded as
Kremlin agents, the message mainstream Americans
come away with is that antiwar sentiment is only
welcome on the right.
Again, I get this isn’t true and there’s lots
of antiwar sentiment on the true left in the US,
but nobody sees that left. It’s denied any media
presence or political validity; mainstream
Americans don’t know the difference between an
anti-imperialist socialist and a Berner. This
causes antiwar Americans to drift to the right;
I’ve watched it happen in real time with some of
my US followers. I do my best to make the case
for the left, but I’m just one voice amid a
surging deluge of messaging they’re getting that
the real opposition is on the right.
❖
Naming your war machinery after the
Indigenous tribes your government genocided is
the modern-day equivalent of wearing the skulls
of your enemies on your war horse.
❖
A lot of acceptance of the status quo
worldview boils down to a failure of
imagination. People literally can’t imagine the
possibility that reality is as different as it
is from what they’ve been told by their
teachers, parents, pundits and politicians. It’s
actually unfathomable to them, and that is
because it’s so different. The world we’re
trained to see by establishment perception
managers is as different from the real world as
any fictional world is.
❖
❖
The claim that capitalism is the best system
for generating profits is basically correct;
it’s hard to beat greed and starvation as a
carrot and stick to get the gears of industry
whirring. The issue here is that merely
generating profits won’t solve most of the
world’s problems, and in fact many of our
problems come from the fact that capitalism is
too effective at
turning the gears of industry. Our biosphere is
dying largely because capitalism values making
lots of things but not un-making things; we’re
choking our ecosystem to death because it’s
profitable.
Capitalism has no real answers for problems
like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and
caring for the needful. Yes “let the markets
decide” will generate lots of profits for those
set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking
cannot address those very serious problems. The
“invisible hand of the market” gets treated as
an actual deity that actually exists, with all
the wisdom necessary to solve the world’s
problems, but in reality the pursuit of money
lacks any wisdom. It can’t solve our major
problems, it can only make more stuff and
generate more profit.
Find me a capitalist business plan for
leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist
business plan for keeping someone free of
illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing
gets what they need, for giving resources to a
struggling parent. You can’t. Capitalism can’t
do this. These are the most important things in
the world, and no possible iteration of
capitalism has any solutions for any of them
whatsoever, apart from “Well hopefully rich
people will feel very charitable and fix those
problems.” And how is that solution working out?
It’s a joke.
The “Maybe the very rich will feel charitable
and fix our problems for us” solution assumes
that the very same people who are wired to do
whatever it takes to claw their way to the top
of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply
about everyone they stepped on to get
there. Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because
profit-seeking competition-based systems reward
those who are willing to do whatever it takes to
get ahead. That’s why we are ruled by
sociopaths, and it’s why looking to
“philanthropy” as a solution to our problems is
a ridiculous joke.
When capitalism proponents tell socialists
and communists “You don’t understand economics,”
what they really mean is “You don’t understand
that capitalism is the best system for
generating profits.” But socialists and
communists do understand this; it’s
just that generating profits, in and of itself,
is not sufficient.
If lack of wealth is your major problem, then
capitalism can be a tool to address it; that’s
what China is temporarily doing to keep up
economically with the western forces who wish to
enslave it. But such measures won’t solve
ecocide, inequality, exploitation, and caring
for the needful. For that other measures are
needed.
If you want to make more of something (money,
material goods), then capitalism can be a good
way to do that. But if you need to make less of
something (pollution, inequality, exploitation,
sickness, homelessness, etc) it’s worthless, and
other systems must be looked to.
You can say “But communist regimes are
authoritarian blah blah” all you want, but that
doesn’t change the fact that capitalism has zero
answers for the most important problems facing
our species. This still needs to be addressed,
and moaning about Mao and Stalin isn’t an
answer. Don’t like the iterations of socialism
we’ve seen so far? Okay. Then find another
answer, and remember we’ve already established
that capitalism is not an answer; it cannot
address the problems we’ve discussed here. So we
need to find an actual answer that does actually
work.
Dismantling capitalism, if we ever achieve
it, will be the most difficult thing that
humanity has ever accomplished. As hard as
everyone becoming a buddha, and essentially not
much different. But that doesn’t change the fact
that it is existentially necessary for us to do
so.
We’ll either move from competition-based
systems to collaboration-based ones, eliminating
all the obstacles necessary for us to do so, or
we will go extinct. We are at our adapt-or-die
juncture as a species.
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