It's time to do our part now
We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nations to the changed conditions. - James Madison
The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to affect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion. - Thomas Jefferson
The time that our revolutionary founders predicted has arrived. As explained in an earlier post, the current system of financier capitalism will collapse under its own weight within the lifetimes of today’s high school students. We are already seeing the early death throes in our politics, in our media and in our foreign policy. The next generation of automation will accelerate it. Bank tellers, call center employees, low-level software coders, paralegals, grocery checkers, low-level accountants, graphic artists, and so on are all going the way of the secretary. Soon we will have the robot salesperson who can be relied upon to follow the script, who is never annoyed by a cranky customer or embarrassed to respond to a complaint by trying to push 6 new “services”. Professionals in the top 10% will continue to gain in value for now, but as for everyone else, good luck. Hope that they don’t automate that Amazon warehouse. Maybe you can get a job as drone fodder in the wars the financiers are desperate to have with Iran and China.
In the meantime, expect your children’s lives to become increasingly soulless on the consumerist treadmill. Getting and spending, they will have no time or energy left over for other things. And what other things will there be, anyway? Watching TV shows written by AI to be exactly like all the other shows Amazon’s data says people click on, or listening to AI music that has perfected the 4-chord pop song with lyrics subtly getting you to buy things? Going out into an increasingly devastated environment? Walking around dystopian cities? Going to the megadollar megachurch with the biggest, flashiest show where the Voice heard in stillness is drowned out entirely? As financier capitalism goes into its death throes, the efforts to force 24/7 consumption and to distract us with conflict and sex and addiction will ramp up more and more, and the technolords will be increasingly good at using all that data to get us to go along with it.
They will also become increasingly good at crushing anyone who speaks up in dissent. Big Brother sees and hears all. He traces the threads of influence back to the people who threaten him. By calling them names that the technolords have taught us signify evil, he can get the rest of society to shun them. Now if you annoy the Powers That Be they can lean on universities to expel you, lean on employers to reject you, lean on media companies to deplatform you. With AI they will be able to adopt the tactics of the East German Stasi, filling dissenters’ lives with difficulties so that they have no time or energy left for dissent. They will teach us to all give in and love Big Brother. As the multi-billionaires become trillionaires in a system where infinite money and media can be devoted to campaigns and where the Uniparty no longer feels it is strictly necessary to even pretend to have a primary, and where judges now are selected solely based on their political reliability and the bureaucracy are all being taught to salute the President unquestioningly, what will make us change course?
Do you think you will have an armed revolution? When Big Brother knows your every move and has millions of drones ready to shoot you down? Where the President, based on his sole say-so, can activate the entire military to do what he wants, and can drone American citizens that he says are threats, and Congress and the courts say “yeah, sure, why not?”
We still have the power to change that, but we need to use it now. By simply talking to each other and organizing ourselves in the ways described above we can take control of the existing political structure just as the Nonpartisan League did in North Dakota a century ago. We don’t need a lot of money to do that. We don’t need permission from the parties or the media or the billionaires. We can just take some time and effort and do it. But we need to stop being stupid. We need to stop fighting for the amusement of our financier overlords. We need to focus squarely on what is important – shutting down parasitic profits and speculation, letting workers keep the profits they generate, shutting down the Military Industrial Complex and our foreign adventures, focusing heavily on giving every American child the resources he or she needs to reach full potential, restoring our family farms and family businesses and the independence of American working people, throwing off the destructive influence of The Machine that poisons our souls. If we do this, then we can be worthy of the vision of our revolutionary founders. We can be the America that we are supposed to be, the country that was supposed to be a shining light to the world by its example, a country of tolerance and friendship and freedom. Our we can sit on our couches and watch reality TV as the world caves in. Your choice.
This is the last in my initial series that presents my book Laborism: A Bloodless Revolution in serial form. The first post in the series has links to free versions of the book, or you can get a hard copy version from Amazon. After a pause, I intend to initiate a newsletter in a modernized version of the style of the Nonpartisan League and the affiliated Farmer-Labor organization, hopefully with guest posts on a number of the issues that I touched on in this series and on related matters. To free our minds, we must learn to question authority habitually and, when doing so, to ask the right questions. The parasitic financiers win largely by managing to control the questions that the media and academics choose to discuss. We will instead ask the questions that are actually important for working Americans.
To defeat the power of compound interest, we must use compound effort. Please subscribe (it’s free, and I won’t send you spam, just posts) and pledge to recruit at least 5 other people who each pledge to recruit at least 5 others. Recruit family, friends, co-workers, church members, union members, lodge members, people in your organizations, strangers. We can do this, but we each need to put in the effort.