Israel and Palestine: two ways to resolve a conflict
This post is the transcript of a video available here. Sources are in the description.
Introduction
When you find yourself in conflict with someone else, what do you do? Do you find a way to resolve the conflict peacefully, in a way that attempts to meet both your interests? Maybe it depends who you’re arguing with and why. If the person seems reasonable and willing to listen, you probably treat them the same and try to meet them halfway. That’s because you respect others and value their autonomy. If the person doesn’t care what you want and attempts to impose their will on you over your objections, you might get the urge to fight them. That’s because they do not respect you or your autonomy.
This channel is all about freedom and oppression. I look at how power works, and how it destroys freedom. In our time, political power is concentrated in the state, represented by the government. States are our greatest source of death, destruction and chaos. This video is about why. Today, we’re going to learn how the state works, how it thinks, why we live in such extreme times, why Israel is currently invading Rafah, and how people propose to resolve the war on Palestine. We’re going to learn all that by learning about two opposing forces: escalation and decentralization.
What is authority?
Last week, I pointed out that being an authority, not the kind that knows things but the kind that is in charge, means you have the entire enforcement apparatus of the state behind you. Using that power is known as authoritarianism. States are authoritarian social systems that set up social hierarchy, so through school, media and other institutions, they foster in their subjects an authoritarian mindset. Authoritarians, whether agents of the state or civilians without institutional power behind them, might choose to escalate the conflict, maybe ramping up the rhetoric, raising their voices, getting rough. Escalating is an effect of wanting to impose one’s will on another. States are institutions designed for escalating conflicts.
States centralize social power, which means taking power away from people and concentrating it in institutions like the cabinet, the courts, the police, and the bureaucracy. People with access to the power of those institutions don’t like giving it up. You might have noticed people will commit any kind of violence they can get away with to take or cling to whatever power over others they can. Having power means killing the freedom of others for one’s personal benefit. Those of us who don’t strive for power care more about freedom from other people’s control, our ability to choose our life for ourselves, and the freedom of those around us to do the same. We resent losing our freedom and living forever at the mercy of a merciless system. So we resist.
Being under the constant threat of violence in the name of the law, we usually start the attempt to resist by asking nicely, which in a state society includes submitting petitions and participating in elections. But through the bitter experience of countless attempts to change things, we learn if powerful people could be swayed by politeness, they wouldn’t need power. We could just discuss your proposals in the marketplace of ideas, or the grocery store of imagination. But if the powerful have already made the decision, we need more than words to stop it. So people resist with force.
At this point, most people I know get queasy. I mean, I hope they find a way to free themselves, but by force? Isn’t it always wrong to use force? If so, you should be opposed to the existence of the state. Everything the state has, everything it does, is a product of force. The state imposes certain ways of thinking on its subjects in order to legitimize everything it does, and on most people for most of their lives, it works. One result of our indoctrination is we don’t see state violence as violence. We see it as the will of the people or what our leaders have decided is best for us. Only illegal violence is bad.
We’re all “terrorists”
Unsurprisingly, any form of resistance that has the remotest chance of being effective is not only widely frowned upon but illegal. If you don’t believe me, you might not be aware how long it was illegal to unionize and strike, and what happened to people who tried it. You might not be familiar with how police treat efforts by Indigenous people to defend their land. You might not realize how long environmental activism has been criminalized. It’s not that no one is interested in solving these problems. It’s that the people trying to solve them keep getting imprisoned and murdered. If you don’t know about any of those events, you might be equally unaware what has been happening to people protesting the bulldozing of the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta to build a police training center. You might be taken aback that they are being charged with terrorism for non-violent protest. The state wants to retain the power and legitimacy to do whatever it wants to you, including killing you for assembling peacefully, which after all is not allowed without a permit. The state does not debate, encourage, suggest, or submit proposals for your consideration. It demands, imposes and enforces. If you resist, or just don’t give up immediately, the state escalates. It will escalate to any level to subdue you.
Now, depending what kind of movies you watch, the word “resistance” might conjure up images of militant, reactionary, terrorist groups who want to take over the government and kill everyone. We have this supposed democracy and these evildoers want to kill people and impose a theocracy, so obviously we should overpower them. But what if the resisters just want to keep their land? What if they’re defending their homes, their communities and their freedom? Does the state make a distinction between the two types of groups? Or does it treat them all as terrorists?
When the state decides you’re a criminal, a terrorist, a radical, whatever other bad thing, it pursues you. The state does not negotiate unless it is forced to. And actually, that’s why we have multiple countries in the world: because states couldn’t expand any farther without prohibitively costly wars against other states, so they agreed to borders. Within those borders, states monopolize power, which means, among other things, there is only one form of justice allowed. If you do not agree with its justice, the state escalates. You don’t want to move along, police will arrest you. You don’t want to be arrested, police will attack you. You fight back, police will keep escalating, inviting more police to come, like in Rambo, until their target is neutralized. Because the state only knows how to escalate.
It makes sense if you think about it. The state styles itself as this omnipotent force whose rule cannot be disobeyed or it will ruin your life. If it ever gave in, admitted weakness or ignorance, treated people as sovereign and able to make decisions for themselves, the illusion would shatter and people would realize they don’t need the state.
Growth
But instead, power escalates, and the propaganda goes with it. You can see the logic of escalation play out in any aspect of life subjected to institutional power, because people with the most power want more and will never compromise unless they are absolutely forced to, and would much rather escalate the violence their rule is predicated on. That’s why we live in such extreme times compared to any other time in history. States purport to rule every inch of the Earth. Huge corporations span the globe and markets dictate the policy of nearly every government. Ecosystems are collapsing. Poverty is rising. More people rely on state welfare but funds from those programs are progressively funnelled toward police, military, surveillance and other enforcers. We should expect more extreme behavior from more people.
One form of escalation is “growth”. Capitalist states prioritize economic growth and tell us that’s what we want too. The capitalist system compels corporations to grow by any means necessary, and the state is happy to clear the path for them. Growth tears down forests and kills its inhabitants. Growth crushes unions, suppresses wages and cancels insurance, and we get subjected to news about how “greedy unions are destroying this country” and “no one wants to work anymore”. Growth strengthens the rule of those who take home the surplus.
If you watch the news you might hear about how these poor retail oligopolies suffer from shoplifting. Why do you think that might be? It’s partly because prices keep rising. And what if you’re not one of the lucky few with a juicy salary that keeps up with inflation? You might have to steal. So what should retailers do? Lower their prices? But how would that look on a quarterly report? If you only know how to escalate, the only answer that makes sense is to put locks and chains over the stuff people steal.
Oppressive state, authoritarian culture
The need for growth at any cost to life has had devastating effects. But if we don’t know how to question what’s going on, maybe because we only know the official side to the story, we don’t see our problems as a result of the demand for growth, which, after all, is supposed to be a good thing. Look at borders and how they have escalated and why. Only a few generations ago, it was a piece of cake to go most places around the world. Now, you have to fill out forms and pay fees and go through interviews and wait for months or years or forever, then get a full-body scan, before you’re allowed to go to the place in the world you want. From having a porous border, the US has escalated to machines designed to kill migrants so they can’t cross, cages to indefinitely detain anyone who does cross, and a large subculture that delights in hearing someone died trying to cross. In the US and EU, borders and their enforcement cause thousands of deaths a year. And it’s all so some rich people can hire cheap labor.
Things escalate when the people making money off the issue want more money. When someone makes money building prisons or from prison labor, we shouldn’t be surprised there are more laws, more cops, more prisoners, and stronger borders, because they mean more money for a few business owners.
Since those targeted by police and border patrol are usually Black and Brown people, keeping prison numbers up requires racism. Things escalate when power-hungry people make promises to target the enemies they invented. The rhetoric might have started moderate but it’s never enough, so each time you need to say something worse, even if it’s all a lie, and you have to do something more violent, even if it serves no goal other than to get you re-elected. Now, thanks to escalating rhetoric, something like 11m people in the US alone admitted to surveyors in 2016 they were white nationalists and neo-Nazis, and “the number of terrorist attacks by far-right perpetrators quadrupled in the U.S. between 2016 and 2017, and far-right attacks in Europe rose 43 percent over the same period.” (source) Nazism represents the ultimate escalation, the greatest concentration of power, the most extreme violence with the fewest pangs of conscience, commitment to the extermination of everyone deemed unworthy of life.
State or other violence is justified, sometimes years in advance, by propaganda preparing the ground. The mainstreaming of fascism in our time has been fuelled by racism but also misogyny and transphobia, as we have seen in the recent passing of laws criminalizing abortion and gender transition. Stronger rhetoric justifies more cruelty, more oppressive laws, more egregious behavior toward migrants and criminals and poor people.
But if you grow up in this time, it’s not extreme but normal. It’s normal for us to see, for instance, people living and doing drugs in the street, because all other space has been denied them. Isn’t that extreme, that these people have had all their possessions taken away and aren’t even allowed a place to suffer alone? It doesn’t seem extreme that we can send missiles around the world because we are scared people just minding their own business will try to kill us? What about having millions of people spend years of their lives in cages for taking things, or selling drugs someone wanted to buy? It’s only obvious they should lose all their freedom if we hold the extreme beliefs taught to us by the propaganda.
We learn to trust the state, even to depend on it for truth and guidance, so whatever it does is justified. We get taught that whatever reasons the state gives for its existence in this time and place are the reasons why we need it. We used to need rulers to get in good with God; now, we need them to maintain order against people who just can’t be trusted to be free. Either way, states escalate until they reach the amount of control they want, always retaining the threat to use extreme violence if anyone rocks the boat, while many of the rest of us want to decentralize, to live independent of someone else’s rule. But decentralization usually leads to re-centralization. How do we avoid that? Does history hold any lessons?
All states are the result of conquest or some other violent process of establishing a social hierarchy. Repression is the state’s core function. During the Golden Age of Imperialism and Colonialism, the entire world was carved into states and colonies that would become states. In virtually every place conquered by an empire there has been an independence movement. So on the one hand, we have an empire trying to centralize ever more power, but it is blocked by people who want independence. Many groups won their independence for a while, because they kicked out the colonizers. But the successful movements became legitimate political parties, and once they had a taste of power they forgot all about decentralization and independence. Decentralizing a postcolonial state should have been easy in theory: when you kick out the empire, you could also dismantle and demolish the systems they installed and just let people secede and figure things out for themselves. But the people who took over the postcolonial states quickly realized it was in their interest to keep the colonial structures and live off their subjects. So while it would have been a relatively simple thing to let regions like Biafra, Katanga, East Timor, Kashmir and Bangladesh secede from the central state, the state’s response was escalation to civil war.
Israel and Palestine
The history of Israel is decades of tit-for-tat violence followed by escalation. We are now at the point where there are millions of people squeezed into a tiny plot of land where they can be easily bombed and starved whenever the prime minister’s poll ratings drop, a set of bantustans in the West Bank that keep shrinking as people’s homes and land are stolen from under their feet, and sadistic soldiers and civilians who mock their victims on social media. 80 years after its creation in response to a genocide, Israel is now committing one. Yet any violent reaction to this escalation gets labelled terrorism, because it always does, and any objection to the brutality of Israel or the US or Russia or whichever military is waging war on a civilian population gets called support for terrorism. In fact, you can get arrested for it now. Everyone who opposes your rampage is a terrorist, because anyone who poses a threat to the march of power is a terrorist, and now, they’re officially antisemites too. If you side with the powerful, you might choose to ignore or downplay the oppressive situation that made “the terrorists” mad, because that was our side and we’re the Good Guys, so our violence isn’t so bad, certainly nothing to get violent about.
The same logic of escalation and decentralization is playing out in the occupations of university campuses in solidarity with the victims of Israel’s latest bout of mass murder. A decentralized student movement has formed and made demands of its universities. While some universities have made concessions, possibly recognizing it’s the right thing to do, others have sent in the police, using tear gas and rubber bullets…on students. After arresting them, the police denied some of them food and water, which is all part of terrorizing them into never questioning authority again.
It’s instructive to observe when and how police choose to intervene. In 2017, a mob of neo-Nazis marched around Charlottesville, North Carolina, attacking people they encountered, and the police did nothing. In 2024, Charlottesville police attacked and arrested students at a quiet anti-war protest. Sure, all the students want is the university to divest from a state committing genocide, but letting people without institutional power make the decisions would weaken the authority of the institution. Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.
There have also been so-called counter-protests, ie. civilians attacking students and faculty. Despite their claims, they are clearly not interested in stopping antisemitism. If they were, they would join the encampments, because when you stand in solidarity with the oppressed in one place, you stand with oppressed people everywhere. Instead, they choose to ally themselves with power, to serve as its unpaid lapdogs, acting when and how people with power tell them to, for whatever minor benefit they imagine it brings them.
As rhetoric escalates, so does violence.
This sitting City Councilperson says it would be “worth it” to kill? or maybe just beat and cage? it’s not clear–students and faculty, and “raze”? or maybe just fill with right-wing ideologues?–the universities themselves. Moreover, consonant with the logic of escalating rhetoric, she claims “they’re leaving us with no choice”. We have to declare war on students protesting genocide, because authority needs to assert legal control over every inch of soil under its jurisdiction. This rhetoric isn’t new. Police attacking protesters and calling them “terrorists” has plenty of precedent.
I don’t want to go deep into the history of colonization, but I think this woman’s thinking is very much in line with centuries of settlers before her. The European colonization of the Americas introduced millions of white people to an ecosystem they weren’t familiar with. When they found out about something hurting their crops, they called it a pest and tried to exterminate it. Soon, they started seeing people as pests, and tried to exterminate them too. Over and over in US history, white people declared their intention to wipe out an entire tribe of people and take their land, and often they were successful. Instead of coexisting, they declared the natives “savages” and the only good one was a dead one. This ideology is still very much alive in the US and Israel.
How to decentralize
On this channel I mostly talk about the nature of social problems, so quite reasonably, people ask for solutions. I think solutions should flow logically from the nature of the problem they are solving, which is why understanding the problem is my priority. Our thinking about everything is imperfect, partly because no matter how much we know we’ll never know everything, but mostly because our knowledge is clouded by a lifetime of indoctrination. We need to unlearn our dependence on approval from authority, or we’ll never be able to learn from the things authority disapproves of. Nothing is ever going to be “realistic” except what the people in power happen to be proposing.
Sometimes solutions should be clear; we’re just conditioned not to see them. As I explain in this video, the simplest and most obvious solution is to not do the thing. What’s the solution to dropping bombs on innocent people? To not drop bombs on them, and failing that, to stop the people doing it. Afraid of homeless people breaking into places and stealing stuff? Which do you think would be more effective at stopping them–more police and prisons, or giving people homes and basic incomes? You’re paying for it either way. But you’re less likely to be a victim yourself if others are taken care of. The solution to escalating is decentralizing, letting people be free to decide for themselves. So how would that work? If the state only centralizes and doesn’t decentralize, and if so many civilians have an authoritarian mindset, how do we establish a free society?
There are a lot of possible paths. Last week I recommended reading Mariame Kaba, and this is me repeating myself, because she and her contemporaries present some of those paths. Kaba’s priority is reducing with an eye to eliminating the power of police and the so-called justice system and returning that power to the community. This paragraph from her book No More Police is a window into how that might start:
We can begin, as many communities have, by focusing on removing police from specific tasks, arenas, and spaces, such as mental health crisis response, traffic enforcement, and schools. We can eliminate the police units, weaponry, and individual cops who are doing the most harm, including “street crime” units, homeless “outreach” units, vice squads, antiprotest units, “party patrols,” canine and mounted units, militarized equipment, and surveillance tools. We can prioritize termination of cops with violent track records as we shrink the size, reach, and power of police departments—while simultaneously recognizing that the problem extends beyond individuals. We can divest from police departments and invest in meeting individual and community needs like housing, health care, education, and youth programs, in community-based nonpolice violence prevention, interruption, and transformative justice programs…. Our ultimate goal must be abolition of all forms of surveillance, policing, and punishment and the systems that require them if we are to achieve true public safety.
I like the focus on the police, but there are plenty of other things that can be done. There are a lot of people talking about using technology to aid in our liberation, maybe by developing decentralized systems that anyone can use and access, maybe a bit like Wikipedia or the fediverse. There is so much potential for decentralized mutual-aid systems on the internet. We have the infrastructure for a website to get anything to anyone (Amazon). But it’s owned for profit, so control over it is centralized in the hands of a few managers and directors. If we had a website for getting resources from people who have them to people who don’t without the need for money to change hands, we would have a mutual-aid system. (Learn more here.)
Unlearning our belief in social hierarchy means unlearning patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism and other authoritarian ideologies buried in our minds. As we become self-sufficient and self-governing, as we learn to treat each other better, we won’t depend on states and corporations anymore and can live as free people. Yes, societies with no state, no slavery, no poverty, where people respect each other’s autonomy, they still exist, even in such extreme times as these. You can learn about some examples of them in this video or wait until my next video, when I’ll be going into more detail. Here’s one example to keep you busy.
The Rojava region of northern Syria went independent in the wake of the Syrian revolt of 2011. Rojava is organized as a confederated system of communes, with emphasis on women’s rights and ecology. People sign up for committees for things like health and dispute resolution. Since everyone makes and enforces them, the rules do not reflect the exercise of power but the political equality of everyone. There is no police force. Everyone learns community defense. Those charged with security are elected by the community they serve, and the delegates rotate, so everyone is involved and accountable to each other.
There is no doubt the self-organized society would have its hands full defending itself from states and empires. Rojava has been doing it for years now, and they’re still going strong. If you need more examples of decentralized forces defending themselves against a centralized one to know it’s possible, I refer you to centuries of stateless German tribes defending themselves from the Roman Empire, centuries of successful Apache resistance to European colonization, and decades so far of Zapatista autonomy in Chiapas. Decentralization has been integral to their success, because it is impossible to hijack a decentralized movement. To this day there are millions of people living in free societies. It’s possible to stay free indefinitely. If you think it’s worth it, let’s make it happen.
There are no-state solutions
So how could we apply the principles of decentralization to the question of Palestine? There are currently three basic ideas circulating on how to approach resolving the conflict and ending Israel’s colonization of Palestine. They are, in order of popularity, the two-state solution, the one-state solution and the no-state solution. Two states would mean both Israel and Palestine were their own nation states, presumably along the lines proposed in UN Resolution 242. Hamas and Fatah more or less agree on a form of two-state solution, as do many peace activists around the world. I have a number of problems with this model. One mistake many well-meaning people make is in their beliefs about the state, that it protects and represents them, so if Palestinians had a state of their own, they would no longer be considered “terrorists” but legitimately defending themselves, and they could have a military that could match that of Israel’s. The thing is, the most democratic of states could be taken over by people who do not serve the people’s interest. A decentralized system is robust, while hierarchical systems like states get taken over by the people with the most money. Sure, they would be Palestinian, but they would get bought out by foreign diplomats and businesspeople, or, if they didn’t play ball, they might get assassinated. A new state might just spell the newest reason Palestinians can’t be free.
A one-state solution might be slightly more realistic. After all, there is one state right now: Israel. If it accepted all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as legal citizens and gave them the same theoretical rights as Israelis, the conflict would de-escalate, at least at first. However, many Israelis are afraid of what might happen if Jews lose their majority in Israel, not even necessarily of revenge but just losing relative power over political affairs and having to give back land.
Finally, we come to the no-state solution, which means no Palestinian state but liberation from all states. Feel free to protest that’s not what most Palestinians want–I’m not here to tell anyone how to think. It’s just another idea floating around. It’s not “on the table”, because no solution is on the table. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth even considering. No state in Palestine might look something like in Rojava: people empowered to defend, educate and take care of each other, and to make decisions together in a confederation of communes. But no one can create stable systems of governance if they are under constant bombardment, if their homes are being blown up and friends are being killed or arrested every day. Our most immediate concern is ending the war on Palestine, letting people eat and breathe.
Conclusion
The violence in Palestine is not unique or unprecedented or unpredictable. It is a result of wanting power over others. The violence in postcolonial states is not incomprehensible. It’s what happens when you fear losing power. But there is nothing inevitable about any of this. We don’t need to be ruled by other people who don’t care about us. We don’t need money and property and police to have a society; in fact, those things mark the substitution of society for hierarchy. We can create self-governing communities and join those around the world living free.
Good cops, good landlords, good bosses and unicorns (why there aren’t any)
This post is the transcript of a video available here.
Do you believe in the Loch Ness Monster? Probably not nowadays. But back in the 20th century, practically everybody did. We never had evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, just a blurry photograph that turned out to be a cheap hoax. The myth didn’t die. Since the 1970s, people have scanned and dredged the lake with expensive equipment to look for a monster they had no reason to believe in. They had so much hope, so much faith, wasted a whole bunch of resources and probably didn’t do the fish any favors, either. And yet, the myth is still alive. We know the photo was faked; we know there was no monster in the Loch; yet some people still believe. Beliefs die hard.
We should have treated the Loch Ness Monster like we treat unicorns. We don’t have any evidence unicorns ever existed, either. We think of it as a cute, enduring myth, but only a myth, not something that probably once existed, just something we made up. Children believe in unicorns, because they are presented with the idea of unicorns in fiction and don’t really have a reason to doubt it. The idea isn’t ridiculous in theory. Horses could have evolved horns. Until we get older and someone disabuses us of the idea, unicorns are just part of our world, like dinosaurs. You don’t have to have seen dinosaurs in person to believe in them. You just need to have been reliably informed they once existed. That brings us to the rest of the phenomena in the title of this video.
If you can measure, by any criteria, how good or bad someone is, it would make sense to assume that in theory there should be good cops, landlords, bureaucrats, politicians and people of any group. However, to think of good cops and bad cops, or good landlords and bad landlords, is to ignore that the nature of these jobs puts them in an antagonistic relationship with most of us.
Take the landlord. Landlords own your home. They own your home because they have more money than you. If someone already has more money than you, you have to pay them for a place to stay. Now, I could see the fairness in that if you were paying the people who built your place, but there is a one hundred percent chance that wasn’t your landlord. Your landlord owns your place because they have so much money they can afford to own their own and someone else’s home, and you can’t even afford your own. They will kick you out of the small space you occupy if you don’t pay the tribute they demand.
So what would it mean to be a good landlord? If they gave up being a landlord. If they gave you the home you’ve been living in, eliminating the incentives they had to screw you over, making you equals. The only good landlord is no landlord.
A good person should not be someone you fear. It shouldn’t be someone who can kick you out of your house because you don’t have enough money, or fire you and snatch your income away. A boss is someone who makes more money than you, tells you what to do, monitors your behavior and threatens you with poverty if you don’t do everything as expected. Sure, they might be nice, friendly, have a beer with you, but to a boss you are a means to an end. You are entirely disposable, interchangeable with the other job seekers. If you are pregnant, injured, sick or grieving, the boss only wants to know when you’ll be ready to work again.
We learn from a young age to fear punishment from an authority. What makes them an authority? Their job, the seat they occupy, puts the entire enforcement apparatus of the state behind them. If the landlord evicts you, if the boss fires you, if you’re not a paying customer, either you leave immediately or the police will be called to remove you. Property rights are the only rights that matter, and you don’t have them.
The police like to indoctrinate children into thinking they are the Good Guys, your friendly neighborhood officer who keeps you safe from the Bad Guys. Then, we grow up and realize cops don’t have to keep you safe, that their job is to impose the will of the ruling class on us and keep the money flowing upwards. If you dig deeper, you might blame the police for most of our social problems, because they defend our rulers from us as they kill, plunder, enslave and destroy nature. The police are the single greatest obstacle to freedom. And “defunding” them would not change that because their core purpose and functions would remain the same. Abolishing the police would make it possible for people to resist the exercise of power over others.
But if we want to abolish cops, landlords, bosses and unicorns, what do we replace them with? Short answer: nothing. After all, having a landlord just means paying someone else so you can live in your place. You can call a plumber yourself. Let’s cut out the middleman. Some people squat and refuse to leave, or engage in rent strikes. Many people live in cooperative housing, or some form of communal home. These strategies will become necessary for more and more people as home ownership becomes more concentrated and out of reach for more people.
What about the boss? Aren’t they essential? Well, do you need someone else making all the decisions about your work? Do you need someone monitoring you all the time? Do you need the carrot of promotions and raises dangled in front of you, and the stick of someone threatening to take your livelihood away if you don’t follow all the rules or work fast enough? Corporations are structured for control. The job of the boss is to maintain the discipline the owners of the corporation demand. If employees had control over their workplaces, they might structure them horizontally, so if you contribute something you get a say in the decisions. If they have teams, it might make sense to have team leaders, but as ad-hoc positions, not for everything forever. We need organization to get complicated things done, but we don’t need bosses.
And the police? Is it possible to abolish police and avoid plunging into chaos? You could ask millions of people around the world who don’t live under the thumb of police. Many communities have no need of formal organization because people take care of each other as a matter of course. In larger societies, however, people form community-based organizations, accountable to people who live there. They can provide rapid response, maybe one group to stop violence and another for mental-health crises. Some organizations build homes and distribute food and other goods so that people aren’t cold, hungry, addicted, homeless or in an abusive home, and forced to resort to theft and violence. They might counsel and check up on people, provide spaces and host events for everyone, so we’re less isolated and more like a community, and thus less likely to hurt each other. There are probably people around you doing all this already, preparing for a community that does not depend on police. If you want to learn more, I recommend the work of Mariame Kaba.
But until we abolish the relationships that give rise to cops, landlords and bosses, some people will continue to insist there are good ones. How about this? As skeptical people, we won’t close our minds to the possibility such people exist. We’ll keep searching for the good cops, landlords and bosses with the same effort we’ve been searching for the unicorn. But until we find one, we should spend our time creating a world without them.
Human intelligence is collective
This post is the transcript of this video.
We often hear that humans are a social species. But what does it mean in practice? Among other things, it means we need to be loved early in life to develop properly. It means relationships and group activities can be some of the most fulfilling experiences. And it means when we put our heads together, we are much greater than the sum of our parts.
No matter how smart a person appears, working or consulting with others who have the same goals will take them farther. Because we are all different in so many ways, the best way to harness our intelligence is in groups. We’ll start today with examples of how we do that already. Next, we’ll look at the effects of thinking some people are smarter than others, then at the ways our culture makes us think intelligence is a hierarchy.
In my last video, I looked at the movie Brazil, and how one of the features of the world of Brazil was people separated from each other, not able to see each other as fully human, and incapable of working together outside hierarchical social systems. Fortunately for us, that’s probably the biggest difference between our world and that of Brazil. In our world, some people in some places still have enough freedom that we can gather, discuss and act together without being told to by someone higher up.
Collective intelligence
In a group, we can trade ideas and perspectives, lending the benefit of our experience. As long as everyone in the group is encouraged to participate and not fear embarrassment or punishment, everyone young and old can teach and contribute something. Provided no one is afraid to dissent, you can avoid groupthink. As individuals we are particularly ignorant, but if we recognize that ignorance, we can work with people who know different things, who can tell us we are wrong, or at least who know where to look it up. Everyone has their own knowledge, which when combined either in group decisions or just in spontaneous order empower us to discover new galaxies, build cities, coordinate global supply chains, and practically anything else.
Even just communicating the problem to another person helps us clarify it and prompts us to think what objections the other might raise while we’re still talking. I usually find the best way to “advise” someone is to let them talk and figure things out for themselves. They probably have the answers–they are the ones involved in the situation, not me; they just needed to talk to someone else to realize what the answers were.
Another major part of our intelligence that stands out among animals is a collective memory that enables us to learn from others, even if we haven’t met them. Hunter-gatherers learn how to identify every plant and animal in their environment, not because the chief figured it all out for themself but because many people before them figured it out, and passed on the benefit of their efforts. One person tested one plant. Another person tested another. They shared their knowledge with the group. In humans, knowledge is created and transmitted collectively. Now that we can write things down, our collective memory has no limits, well, besides paywalls, which the right browser extension can bypass.
That’s how science works. Though they’re not perfect, we can use the physical sciences to find or approximate the truth over time. That’s not because there’s one genius making all the discoveries but because there are thousands of people around the world working on this and related topics. They consider each other’s work, try to replicate it, report their results, and slowly but surely advance our knowledge of the field. However smart you think you are, you can’t just enter a field and expect to advance it if you have no idea what a million people before you have said. What you can do, however, is read the people who know about this field, learn from them and then enter the field with the same knowledge as them. If there are jobs available. Scientists make use of collective intelligence by writing, reading each other’s papers, discussing, exchanging, holding conferences, collaborating across space and time. We can do that for almost any goal. Think about the potential for organizing direct action around some of the things I talk about in other videos on this channel.
Are some just smarter than others?
If we treated a few scientists as individual geniuses, we would miss that they are standing on the shoulders of millions of people. So why do we pay so much attention to a few CEOs? Why do we treat and pay them like they did all the work themselves, or the only work that matters? Do we really believe the recent success of a business is entirely due to their uncommon intelligence? Certainly, many businesses are structured to empower one or a few people to make huge decisions that everyone else in the firm just has to accept, because that’s how the powerful choose to structure wealth-creating organizations for maximum control. But it begs the question to say some committee at the top should make the decisions on their own, without having to answer to employees or customers, that they are better at making decisions than the people doing the work.
But I understand this thinking, the idea that intelligence is a hierarchy. We get it drilled into us right from the first day of school, when we’re told to start striving to be better than those around us so that we get higher marks than everyone else to make our parents happy. Higher marks are taken as official proof of a person’s superior intelligence, as if the abilities school exams, or for that matter, IQ tests, test for were the correct measures of overall intelligence. Everyone soon finds out who is smart and who is not smart. If you are not naturally talented in school subjects or aided by your parents, you must have low cognitive ability and are not capable of achieving anything noteworthy in life.
If you were a victim of being told how smart you are, you have been limited. The kids told they are not smart are the most limited, because unless they are defiant and know how to question authority–and where would they have learned to?–then they’ll probably assume there’s no point in trying because others will always be better, so they might as well settle for a life of hard work and financial struggle. The kids who were told they were smart have also been impeded in several ways, because they learn they’re better and don’t need other people, and if they don’t do it all on their own, they’re failures and they’re letting themselves and their parents down.
Whichever of those categories you’ve been scarred by, school teaches you to work alone and rely on your own brain, whatever its strengths and weaknesses. Working with others is called cheating. So instead of learning we can do anything through cooperation, we learn we can only do some things, or if we do poorly on all the tests, nothing. These are just a couple of the ways school ruins our brains, so I go deeper into school in this series.
People who don’t seem like geniuses might just not have had much opportunity to develop their skills and knowledge how they want. If you don’t have the time, or no one taught you something exists, you can’t spend the time necessary to understand it properly. You might even think of yourself or others as lazy, but that could just mean you haven’t found work that motivates you or a topic that interests you. We think of a bunch of dead white guys as geniuses when any of their servants and slaves could have made the same discoveries if they had had all day to do as they liked. History ignores the people whose labor made it possible for someone else’s genius to come out. Today, billions of people around the world labor so that a few rich people can get called geniuses.
People given the chance to develop as individuals gain a variety of skills and experiences, which don’t have any more inherent value than any others. A lot of attention is paid to geniuses, but as I explain in my video on the topic, the idea of genius isn’t a defined concept but just a celebration of whatever cognitive skills people who’ve been called a genius appear to exhibit.
Really, no one is smarter than anyone else, or to put it another way, everyone is smarter than everyone else. I know stuff you don’t know and vice versa. I can give you perspective on your thoughts and vice versa. I’m better at some things, you’re better at some things, and we need someone else to help us with all the other things. What if we were in a bigger group? What if there were 20 of us, each one smarter than the other? We might have enough skills to do almost anything, as long as we take advantage of our collective brain. That might mean dividing up tasks based on skill. The most knowledgeable should be teachers, empowering the less knowledgeable. The more experienced can take roles like project manager, making them leaders for specific functions, and when they do other things they don’t know as well, they can be followers.
Why do we believe some are smarter than others?
We are indoctrinated to see everything as hierarchy. We rank children according to test results, for no purpose other than to embarrass them. It seems normal to us there are people with more power and people with less power. There are the countries that are the good countries I want to go to one day and the bad countries we don’t want immigrants from. That’s because the people in those countries are lower down the hierarchies of race and nationality, not like us, the better countries with superior cultures and civilized people. The same is true of intelligence. We are taught to believe some people are smart and some people are not; some people are capable of creativity or logic or critical thinking or whatever we say it means to be smart, but not everyone. Some people will even use their imagined hierarchy of intelligence to justify their imagined hierarchy of race, saying those people just aren’t as smart as we are, and that’s why we don’t want them around us.
But none of these beliefs are based on facts. There is no superior country, culture or race except by arbitrary criteria, and there is no one is smarter at everything than you. They might do better on an IQ test, but an IQ test is not a test of intelligence. It tests for like two or three cognitive skills. Some people have read more books than you, but maybe they just have more time to read books, or more interest in books, and you’re more into practical skills. I might think faster than you but you might think deeper than me. We could spend all day naming ways that one person can be smarter than another, and everyone has one of them.
We’re not superior and inferior to each other. We’re diverse. We complement each other, and that’s why we’re smarter in groups. White supremacy abhors the idea of diversity, because it demands conformity, viciously oppressing everyone who does not have the right skin color and demanding strict adherence to the law from everyone else. White supremacy imagines hierarchies not just of race but gender, nationality, physiology, psychology and other made-up reasons.
Many of the people who come to believe in white supremacy are relatively wealthy, not just the super rich but small-business owners, middle managers, and so on, because they feel they could benefit from the enforcement of imaginary hierarchies. Hierarchical thinking makes their power seem normal, and makes people think someone has to have power so my group should have power so that the system favors me. But why do you want symbolic power in an imaginary hierarchy when we could have freedom? We should see through this propaganda to the reality of our equality, our diversity and our capacity to do anything if we work together.
The rusty law of oligarchy
This post is a transcript of this video.
Intro to oligarchy
We live under the rule of oligarchy, but do we have to? In my last video, I introduced egalitarianism and looked at the writings of a couple of people who disagreed with it. But it turns out that video didn’t change the world. Those couple of people were just the tip of the iceberg. There is still plenty of propaganda out there to smite. We are still getting told some people deserve more wealth and power than others. We’re still being told to look down on people for not having the opportunity to become millionaires. And we’re still getting told social hierarchy is an unavoidable fact of human nature, so we should shut up and learn to live with it.
If you watched that video, you might recall hearing the term “the Iron Law of Oligarchy”. In his essay, Murray Rothbard invoked this “law” to support his claim that hierarchy and inequality are inevitable, that some will inevitably dominate others because they’re just better. You might not know the term he used comes from the book Political Parties by Robert Michels. Michels is famous for coining “the Iron Law of Oligarchy”, his conclusion that all organizing, or at least organizing to achieve political goals, will inevitably lead to a few people at the top controlling the organization, and a mass of followers whose role is mostly just to perform basic tasks and pay dues. As such, there was no way to challenge social hierarchy–try to stop it and you’ll just end up recreating it.
But what if it wasn’t so inevitable? What if oligarchy wasn’t so much an iron law as a product of a certain time and place? What if you realized it’s possible and desirable to avoid it? Would you want to learn how?
When I started reading the Italian School of Elitism years ago, I was impressed with their willingness to analyse the world as it is, in sharp contrast to people who assume a democracy is democratic, you know, “for the people” and all that. We are schooled to believe in democratic government, that other people can represent us by making laws over us, and any deviations from what “the people” want must be anomalies. The elitists said that’s nonsense: any political system, whether or not nominally democratic, would end up being presided over by a small group of rulers for their own benefit. Some, like Mosca, said this arrangement was morally good; others avoided moral judgments to say this is just how things are. Fortunately, at that time, I was also reading about anarchist theory and practice, so I knew better.
Mosca
First, we’ll look at what I think the elitists get right, then at the limits of their theories and the possibility for something more. Elite theory describes power in a society as largely held in the hands of a small minority of the population. The disorganized majority, the ruled, can be coerced and indoctrinated by the minority, the rulers. Seems indisputable so far. Gaetano Mosca says we spend too much time labelling states and types of government—monarchy, democracy, republic, etc.—making regimes seem different on the surface while hiding crucial similarities. They perform more or less the same functions, and they all answer to the local ruling class.
The ruling class consists of people in control of political parties, high-ranking government officials, business executives, directors and active shareholders, plus everyone else who translates their wealth into influence through lobbying. Not all rich people have lobbyists, but they still get the state to protect their property, which makes it possible for a tiny percentage of the people in any country to own, well, pretty much everything. From the Ruling Class: “[S]uch individuals possess the most varied resources…for threatening and corrupting public officials, ministries, legislative bodies, newspapers.” Meanwhile, the wealth of the ruled majority is scattered around so widely in so many hands that, even though it is almost as large, it “has no power whatsoever to react.” The tiny measure of upward mobility afforded US citizens “helps to foster in the people of that country the illusion that democracy is a fact.” Elections, protests and recall campaigns are how the majority attempts to “exercise over [the elite] … a spasmodic, limited and often ineffective control.”
Michels
So there’s your intro to Mosca and the Italian School of Elite Theory. In the classroom next door, Robert Michels wastes no time in destroying popular belief in democracy. In his time, so just before World War One, democracy was contrasted with its supposed opposite, absolute monarchy, which was dying out. However, actual democracy, with everyone or even just everyone in a party getting a voice, getting a say in how things were run, was impossible. His study looks at why even the most ostensibly revolutionary of political parties end up being run by a small clique.
For one thing, says Michels in so many words, look at who is running the parties and why. Some of it is the old aristocracy with the same goals but new messaging. Michels points out that, despite appearing meritocratic, political power is still basically hereditary, because property is, and access to property is access to political power. Other parties are liberal parties, but the liberal parties don’t really care about “the people” either: From Political Parties: “For the liberals also, the masses pure and simple are no more than a necessary evil, whose only use is to help others to the attainment of ends to which they themselves are strangers..” Any party aims at using the masses to attain power.
But the intentions of the leaders aren’t a complete explanation of the tendency for organization to lead to oligarchy. It’s also because the political system pretty much requires it. Parties that want to win elections need spokespeople, strategists, people who write policy, people familiar with campaign-finance laws, and rich donors. It’s expensive to start a party, so most people can’t do it, so they join an existing one at the bottom, where their voices won’t be heard. Being a mass organization, a party requires technical specialization, which ends up taking decision-making power out of the hands of the party rank and file and concentrating it in the hands of the leaders. “The more extended and the more ramified the official apparatus of the organization, the greater the number of its members, the fuller its treasury, and the more widely circulated its press, the less efficient becomes the direct control exercised by the rank and file, and the more is this control replaced by, the increasing power of committees.” You know, like PACs and SuperPACs.
Moreover, “[c]entralization guarantee[s] the rapid formation of resolutions.” Political parties require mobilization, which is much easier with a dictatorship. Ferdinand Lassalle, who started one of the first socialist parties, apparently said “[t]he rank and file must follow their chief blindly, and the whole organization must be like a hammer in the hands of its president.” Without this hierarchy, Michels suggests, a party would not be able to respond quickly enough to crises, opportunities, or crisituinities.
Michels concludes “[f]or technical and administrative reasons, no less than for tactical reasons, a strong organization needs an equally strong leadership.”
The limits of elite theory
But there are limits to how far you can take this theory. Michels mostly just studies the functioning of the German Social Democratic Party of his time, but he infers that all political organizing will have to lead to oligarchy to be effective. “[T]he appearance of oligarchical phenomena in the very bosom of the revolutionary parties is a conclusive proof of the existence of immanent oligarchical tendencies in every kind of human organization which strives for the attainment of definite ends.” Except it isn’t proof of that. What about when we organize and make decisions when we organize and relate to each other horizontally, as equals? Far from being an iron law, the tendency to oligarchy is historically contingent and can be overcome by self-governing in small units, consensus building, and empowering the most vulnerable among us.
One way people avoid and challenge hierarchy is through mobilizing for mass protest. It’s political action undertaken by a large group, and there is basic consensus, but only on the purpose of the protest and the one way it has been agreed the participants will protest. There is no consensus on the hows, the how longs or even the whys of more sustained, strategic action. While they might have positive effects like showing others you are speaking out against injustice, mass protests do not scare the ruling class when they follow the law and shake hands with the police but when accompanied by threats, like strikes, riots or otherwise liberating space from the grasp of the state. (Card to public space) You can march all day through the streets but if you are not inconveniencing decision makers and disrupting the flow of capital, you might be wasting your time. A march or rally is a temporary affair not capable of making lasting change. I think a smaller, more permanent organization, properly organized, can have a much greater impact. And actually, a great video just dropped last week all about mutual aid and how to organize. I’ll talk about organizing here but check out that video because it goes much deeper. You might also like the books Deciding for Ourselves by Cindy Milstein and Mutual Aid by Dean Spade.
Organizing without hierarchy
Organizations that want to get things done without asking permission learn to organize without hierarchy. They could be called leaderless organizations, because there is no single leader or committee that makes the decisions, but they could also be considered “leaderful” organizations, because everyone in them is empowered to be a leader. So members come up with cool ideas and then take the initiative to implement them, as long as what they are doing is within the ambit of the organization. You can be a leader on one thing and a follower on another thing. You might need to get consensus from the other members, which might require you to explain the merits of the project, but if everyone agrees on the mission of the organization and it’s clear enough how your idea fits in, the rest will probably approve.
In my experience, it’s not nearly as difficult to get things done by consensus as people assume it is. You probably do it with your friends all the time when you say “So, where are we going next?” People give their ideas, you talk a bit, then you go. You might even have spontaneously self-selected roles like the moderator who makes sure to respect the views of the shier members of the group, the mediator who helps resolve conflicts, or the timekeeper who tells you if we want to get there on time we need to leave now. Horizontal decision making is kind of like that.
There are probably already various groups not too far away near you doing mutual aid, anti-racist and abolitionist work, etc. If you don’t have any experience with non-hierarchical organizing, you can learn from them. I suggest joining a smaller organization, because then you can really make a difference. But even in larger organizations, there are plenty of examples of empowering everyone and deciding by consensus. Here is one that seems relevant in light of events of the past week. From here:
In late 2001, a spontaneous rebellion erupted in Argentina when the government decided to freeze bank accounts to forestall a mounting financial crisis precipitated by the IMF-mandated privatization and austerity measures of the 1990s. In under two weeks, popular mobilizations ousted four governments. Against the hierarchical machinations of the political elite, social movements organized democratic neighborhood assemblies and workplace occupations around principles that were increasingly encapsulated in the concept of horizontalism. Occupied workplaces forged networks of mutual aid and assemblies formed locally before establishing inter-neighborhood organisms of direct democracy guided by both the sentiment and the practice of consensus decision-making. This uprising was eminently prefigurative as it sought to embody the society it desired in its everyday practices. As Marina Sitrin (2006, 4) argues in her influential Horizontalism: Voices of Power in Argentina, horizontalism “is desired and is a goal, but it is also the means – the tool – for achieving this end.” For many, it was “more than an organizational form”; it was “a culture” that promoted new affective relationships and communal solidarity.
With all that said, “horizontalist movements have at times struggled to counteract the encroachment of patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, white supremacist, and ableist tendencies that inevitably come when broad swaths of society are suddenly brought together.” It’s okay for an organization to give more voice and authority to marginalized and oppressed people. We live in a world brimming with bigotry and propaganda, so it’s still hard for white guys like me to understand, it’s okay for white guys like me to defer to people who experience the most oppression. Either way, different organizations have different purposes and each one evolves as circumstances change and people come and go. You can find what feels like a good fit for you, or you can start something new.
Democracy has always been a lie, a way of letting people attain power and convincing the masses that’s what they wanted, letting a few people wield power and saying it’s the will of all the people, a way of legitimizing everything the government does, because they won a vote, so it must be right. Now, fascist parties in the US and Europe are on the brink of winning power because the road to power is paved for them. Everything they do, people will grumble but most people will not fight them because there was an election, and if there is an election, the government must be legitimate, and it’s illegitimate to fight them. Is that what you think? I sure hope not. But that’s what the word ‘democracy’ does to the brain. We should either reject it or redefine it to mean people empowered to organize as equals, to bring down social hierarchy and take their freedom back.
The conspiracy of capital
The following is a transcript of this video.
What if I told you the world wasn’t controlled by a few people? What if I told you the real conspiracy has been in front of your eyes your whole life, and everyone’s in on it, including you? The world is a complicated place, and no one video or person could explain it. But it’s especially confusing because so much of what we’re taught about it is misleading, simplistic and outright wrong, which leaves us susceptible to conspiracy theories and the rabbit holes they lead down. The theories, if you can call them that, claim to explain how things work, but without a lot of evidence. If you actually look at what happens and why, rather than what some guy told you is probably happening, you can learn how power works. If you get some idea how power works, where it is located, how people get it, what they do with it, what incentives it creates, you realize conspiracy theories can’t explain things, and you were getting played.
I’m not going to try to explain and debunk all the conspiracy theories. In the age of computer-generated deepfakes that look and sound exactly like real life, you could get anyone to say anything, and the fake news is wilder than ever. Like all my videos, all I’m doing here is scratching the surface so you can see things in a new light, and then figure out more for yourself. I can recommend lots of books on these subjects, so let me know in the comments and I’ll hook you up.
Intro to antisemitic conspiracy theories
The most dangerous and pervasive of conspiracy theories is about how Jews “control the world”. They tap into the feeling everyone with any awareness has that we don’t really have a democracy but are ruled by other people who lie to us about what they do. Most antisemitic conspiracy stuff takes the form of dogwhistles that don’t use the word “Jews” but absolutely mean Jews, like globalists and cultural Marxists, the Great Replacement and the New World Order, international elites and Hollywood elites and New-York intellectuals, the Rothschilds, George Soros, even lizard people and space lasers. If people believe there might be something to the conspiracy, they look more into it, and they come across websites and videos that teach them the dogwhistle words really meant Jews the whole time. These sites use words like “Jewish plot”, which sounds sinister, and show pictures of powerful people who are Jewish and say “see? Some powerful people are Jewish!”, as if that weren’t statistically inevitable. Yeah, and most powerful people are NOT Jewish. So it tells us nothing. But to the conspiracy theorist, there is always someone else secretly directing things. Everyone is a puppet of the secret group we’re not allowed to talk about. This is antisemitism: well packaged lies about Jews for rulers to distract people and for fascists to recruit people. Wait. Elites. Globalists. Lizard people. Does this mean Alex Jones is antisemitic? I’m just asking questions. Just wondering aloud if Alex Jones’s program was one long antisemitic rant set to dogwhistles.
One result of a couple thousand years of antisemitism is we think there could be some secret, global cabal making all the important decisions and undermining everything we hold dear, yet leaving no trace of their involvement. It’s a kind of central conspiracy theory all the others can bud off from. Any time there is a conspiracy that we don’t have any evidence of but someone assures you it’s probably definitely happening, the Jewish-cabal hypothesis is likely below the surface. For instance, whenever the right wing’s enemies, like racialized people, queer people, poor people and so on, organize to resist their oppression, or even just show awareness of it, the right blames the same group of people. From here:
Any time a minority group which white supremacy has been insisting is incompetent, stupid, lazy, irrelevant, child-like, unsympathetic, etc is successful at organizing and agitating for its collective well-being in exactly the way that white supremacism insists they couldn’t, white supremacy has a convenient explanation: the Jews must have put them up to it. Rich Jews must have funded it, intellectual Jews must have plotted it, powerful Jews must have used their political power to facilitate it.
That would certainly explain the right-wing response to the widespread acceptance of trans people. Trans people are coming out of the closet? Must be a plot to undermine masculinity, or femininity, or the family, or something I’ve been told I value, anyway. People who jump to the conspiracy theory don’t know what being trans is and don’t want to know. They want to blame a shadowy clique controlling things behind the scenes to provide a convenient explanation for everything they don’t like. Sure, there’s no evidence, but since when did people require evidence for their beliefs? Trans people? More than two genders? It’s a conspiracy to corrupt our children! Must be the doctors conspiring to trick children into harming themselves, possibly in league with woke teachers. Harming children is an evergreen antisemitic argument that dates back about 900 years, and the charge of “corrupting the youth” has been a way to shut people up since Socrates. People like Marjorie Taylor-Greene use antisemitic dogwhistles to rise to power: she will defend our country from the globalist elites tricking dogs into pooping on your lawn.
Bigotry corrupts minds into believing nonsense and distracts from real problems. It spawns violence and helps people take power. Like all people labelled a race, Jews are an amorphous group of people held together by frayed threads of identity. Groups are rarely the problem. When you start looking at how systems as a whole work, you start to see things as more complicated than this or that identifiable group of people.
It’s the system, not the people
Think about it this way. If you got rid of all the supposedly corrupt politicians and bureaucrats and everyone else from all the institutions and made sure they never came back, then replaced them with different people, unsullied by politics, after a few months we would be right back where we started, with all the same problems not getting solved. The new people would quickly realize how power actually works, that power works for powerful people to oppress everyone else, that social problems are a source of power, so the incentive is to initiate and prolong them. Anyone who disagreed with this new old way of doing things would get relieved of office. The new rulers would consolidate power among themselves and then wouldn’t have to do any of the things they promised. No one who has power ever wants their subjects to have that power back in the form of freedom to make their own decisions. No, people with power want to know how they can take more power.
So the problem is not the wrong asses in the seats of power, and least of all what color they are. The problem is the existence of the seats. Seats come with incentives. If you are, say, an aspiring politician, you need money so you can campaign. So you go to the people with all the money, solicit donations and ask what they want in return. When you take your seat, you use it to help out your campaign contributors. It’s not necessarily that every bill you pass was written by your sponsors, but that you are highly unlikely to do anything against what they want you to do. We might think of politicians as powerful, but like the rest of us, if they make more powerful people angry, they’re out of a job. If you lose your seat, you are back to having no power.
Politicians play a big role in determining what the bureaucracy does, so in that way civil servants’ incentives are influenced by the same money, but they are also sometimes more directly bought off by the offer of lucrative careers after they’re done civilly serving. No one group of people runs or rules the world. They administer the demands of capital.
What is capital?
So what is capital? Capital isn’t just money but money used to buy something in order to sell it again at a profit. (In mainstream economics it means something else but that’s not what I’m talking about.) Capital is privately owned, usually by a small minority of the population. Since capitalists own the land, the factories, the stores and have all the money, they create a whole class of people without capital, or the proletariat, who are forced to accept work from the owners of capital to survive. One law of capital is it has to keep expanding, so some portion of the surplus created gets reinvested. The effects of that law lead to other laws, like the compulsion for companies to show a profit, and increase the efficiency and productivity of labor.
The world is organized around capital
Decisions are carried out in institutions, and today, most social institutions exist to facilitate the formation of capital. Government is where power is exercised, but not necessarily where it is located. Decisions get enacted in government, but they are often made in corporate boardrooms. Capital is always trying to expand, which is always carried out by force, because no one wants to give up their land and start working all day in someone else’s mines and plantations. As such, capital’s demands might include dispossessing people and forcing them to accept wage labor, beating up striking workers, taking money from them to subsidize and bail out large corporations, inducing or pressuring other governments to lower barriers to foreign trade and investment, imposing sanctions on non-compliant governments and even invading, occupying and constructing a new state.
Due to all those processes and more, virtually every government in the world today is designed to serve capital. That’s why governments have mostly the same functions and priorities everywhere. It’s why voting seems to make no difference: all the parties are parties of capital. If you want to run for office, you need to get millions of dollars from somewhere, and “somewhere” expects returns on their investment. It’s not one kind of person running things or benefiting from this system but anyone with the money and the connections.
But judges are independent, right? Well, you decide. The day before I recorded this, the DC Court of Appeals ruled that enslaving children and working them to death is just fine if it’s big corporations doing it.
It’s not that government can’t act independently of the orders it takes from capitalists. Government is the concentration of force. If it wanted to, it could lock up every billionaire and seize their assets. But there is no incentive to. The incentives are to use that force to serve the capitalist class generally and your closest benefactors in particular.
People seem to think schools and especially universities are somehow less a part of the capitalist system, possibly even an unchecked hotbed of leftist subversion! But they aren’t. They are the basic medium for capitalist indoctrination. I’ve made a whole series on the school, but to confine this part to the topic at hand, I think of the school as a factory for turning the raw material of people into obedient, incurious, hard-working patriots who instinctively wince when they draw outside the lines. You go into school bright eyed and full of questions, and you leave believing some people should rule you and others are your enemies. There is no better way to prepare children for the endless, unrewarding drudgery of work than getting them to sit down, shut up and obey authority for nine hours a day.
Another thing about school is it claims to teach us how the world works, but it actually covers it up. I’ve been saying conspiracy theories distract us from the real problem. In our time and place, the problem is capitalism. We never learn how capitalism works in school, its violent history or present, how it creates or takes over social institutions, how it unites powerful people across national and religious divides in the goal of exploiting the rest of us. So we leave school thinking we know something about the world, when really we have been trained to believe stuff, rather than observe for ourselves.
But maybe you knew about government and school already, certainly if you’ve been on this channel long enough. Have you ever considered the family as a tool of capital? The family as a closed unit is not universal but historically specific. The family has taken innumerable forms over the millions of years. You could learn a little about it here. Nuclear families are designed as hierarchies, with the patriarch on top. The man works for money; the woman works to make it possible for the man to work and have kids. Property is transmitted down the male line. Wealth would stay private that way. Some of that has changed recently, of course. The patriarch could be two parents of any gender, because now we recognize any adult can dominate and abuse a child.
A hierarchy transmits values like discipline, so kids learn to fear and obey the parent, then the teacher, the boss and the cop, to accept hierarchy as normal, to internalize other people’s rules, to prepare for a life of doing what they’re told. In the family, they learn to consume, and to base their identity and worth on what they consume. Advertisers target children for the power they have to manipulate their parents into buying things. Because if you love your children, or just want them to stop screaming, you’ll buy them the latest thing kids are into.
Capitalism is the conspiracy
Even if these are new revelations, they should make sense to you. The thing the most powerful people care most about is capital, so they mold society to serve it. If you wanted a society organized for, say, compassion, joy, pleasure, fun, freedom, you would need to end capitalism, like the Zapatistas, or at least carve out a defensible territory for yourself somewhere. Because in a world of capital, most people’s job is to reproduce capital, and you’re only allowed happiness in that tiny gap between work and sleep.
So there is a conspiracy, but it’s mostly out in the open, a matter of public record. Remember I said even you’re in on it? When we work for capitalist corporations or other institutions, our job is to reproduce capital for the capitalist class to accumulate. When we shop from corporations, we are giving them money they will use to expand their power over us. Every law passed, every budget approved is the result of conspiring among powerful people to continue the systems of oppression they benefit from. Sure, we don’t know exactly what was said at which meeting, but we can see the results in front of our eyes. We live in a world of war, poverty, prison, mass surveillance and sophisticated propaganda to make it all normal. You don’t need conspiracy theories to see that. Of course the wealthy are lying to us: they own the corporate media and the public relations firms. The rich and powerful are not one ethnic or religious group, because there are wealthy people in every country, cooperating and competing to carve up the world among them. Two thousand years on, antisemitism is still helping them draw attention away from their own actions.
Fighting back
Now, I’m against capitalism mostly because of the social hierarchy it creates and strengthens. Capitalism means slavery, wage labor, police, prisons and poverty, not to mention the constant destruction of the environment. I’m against all those things. So when critical thinkers with creative ideas suggest moving to North Korea, they might not realize I don’t want that either. I want a world without social hierarchy and the oppression and violence that come with it. You can imagine such a world, and find people around you who are building it. We exist. We’re doing mutual aid in your community. We’re confronting the state and the right wing in the streets. You just gotta look for us. Anything we do to disrupt the processes of capitalism has an effect, whether it’s smashing windows at a bank or blocking arms shipments. And the more of us there are, the better our chances of succeeding. See you out there.
Why is there poverty in “the richest country in the world”?
This post is a transcript of this video.
Youtube keeps asking me how poverty can be so widespread in the richest country in the world. It’s a great question. No one ever taught me where wealth or poverty come from in school. The other videos make great points, but I wonder if they are bogged down in details and don’t clearly display the big picture. That’s why I’m here. The thing about wealth and poverty is they are two sides of the same coin, each indispensable to the other. Where there is wealth, there is poverty nearby.
I made a video a couple of years ago about how calling the US or anywhere “the richest country in the world” doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I don’t like to repeat myself, so I’m going to make different points here. If you want more detail or some books you can read on the topic, check the links in the description, or ask me in the comments. First thing to understand is a country isn’t a family where everyone shares in whatever the patriarch brings home. If it were, GDP might mean something for you personally, but it doesn’t. A country is a state with millions of people under its rule. A country is the property of the class that rules that part of the world. Once you understand that, things should get clearer. It should explain why no one besides the rich have any power to affect the decisions made and imposed on everyone by law, because that’s who “my country” works for.
Second thing to understand is how wealth is created. To hear the wealthy talk, you would think you just come up with a good idea, then do some work, and it just becomes a million dollars. If that were true, everyone would be able to get rich. But wealth is created collectively, by millions of workers, alive and long dead. Now, why did they work? Why did they create that wealth, just to have it stolen from them by the people at the top of the hierarchy who claimed to own it? Because they were forced to.
I’m not just talking about slavery. Slavery in fields, factories and prisons has always been integral to capitalism and certainly is today, but a less well known but equally significant phenomenon is original expropriation (aka primitive accumulation). I’ve talked about it in the links in the description, but it basically means taking shit away from people so they are forced to work for you. So let’s say you have a bit of land around your home, not much but enough to support you and your family. Then, one day, the local lord just takes it from you. He says you can have food from the land, but from now on, you have to pay money. What do you do? A lot of people fight back and a lot of people die. But if you don’t want to risk your life, the only thing you can do to survive is work for the people who have all the money. This is original expropriation. It has happened in every part of the world you can name, maybe several times, and as a result, today the world is one big propertyless labor market that conforms to the demands of capital.
You might know the history of original expropriation in the US, the so-called richest country in the world. Natives had their land taken from them. African people were taken from their land. Indentured servants came from Europe and Asia. This is how all that wealth was created: taking away people’s land and freedom and telling them to work. That wealth was invested and passed down through a small capitalist class, who reinvested it. Everyone else worked, most of them all day, every day, creating more wealth for people who already had enough to live for two hundred years.
Today, the US no longer has legal slavery. But the wealth created by stolen people on stolen land created corporations, landlords, banks and governments who demand you work. If you don’t work, you don’t eat, and hungry people don’t need to be whipped. What’s that? You don’t have to get a job? What else could you do? There’s all this land you could cultivate or forage on, but it’s all privately owned. There’s all this food just there in the supermarket, but it’s owned by the corporation, so you can’t have it unless you push papers around, or make some equally valuable contribution, for most of your waking time. So you work.
But your work might not be enough. Hierarchical societies are designed to take from the many and give to the few. We’ve looked at original expropriation, but there are other ways we get robbed. What about inflation? The price of goods keeps rising, so we can buy fewer goods, which at some point means less food and medicine. The price of rent keeps increasing, which is terrifying, because it makes it ever more likely we will end up living on the street. We might have to get two jobs just to avoid that fate, which might be super stressful. Stress is really bad for your health, and you need your health to work.
But take solace! Your work is creating wealth. For someone. Not for you. For your landlord, your bosses, their shareholders and those of the corporations you have to buy from. You are making them wealthy. Not only will they be able to do whatever they want with their own lives; they’ll be able to buy politicians, judges, police chiefs and PR firms so you won’t fight back. All they require is your time, energy, physical and mental health.
So the reason there are all these rich people is there is so much poverty. So much has been taken from so many people and concentrated in the hands of so few that we now have this huge wealth gap. Of course there are so many homeless people: there are so many rich landlords. Of course there is so much hunger and malnutrition: all the food is owned by huge corporations. Of course so many people are in so much debt, when governments and businesses keep borrowing and then passing the costs on to you. You can explain more social phenomena this way. Prisons are the effects of poverty and wealth, so of course there are such high incarceration rates: First, so many people get imprisoned for doing what they can to survive, like stealing or selling drugs; second, (prison) thanks to the multi-billion-dollar prison-labor industry and its lobbyists. Of course there is so much xenophobia: if most migration is criminalized, people in the country illegally can be hired with no protections at really low wages, as I explain here. The more poor people there are, the more people are desperate to work for any wage on offer. The more wealth they create for the least pay, the more the owners of their labor can take. How could the richest country in the world create such poverty? How could it not?
All right, that’s the problem, now what are we gonna do about it? Giving more money to people sounds like it could work until you consider when the landlord and the corporation and the state see people have more money, they raise their prices and take it. The most peaceful and legal solution to a widening wealth gap that I can think of is if the government started taking from the rich and giving to the poor. If the state were to implement wide-ranging measures designed to revitalize communities, shelter people, provide healthcare and social safety nets for everyone, including people in the country illegally, plus it decriminalized drugs and stopped building prisons, then poverty would drop and the relative power of the rich would drop. That’s why I don’t think it’s about to happen any time soon. Not unless we organize.
Historically, agitating for revolution was the way to wheedle concessions out of the ruling class. You go on strike and you get a raise, maybe two more whole dollars an hour. You threaten to overthrow capitalism, like anarchists and trade unionists and others in the early 20th century, and you get the New Deal, and an end to child labor. If there are enough of you, anyway. If some of us cause disruption and destruction, we can at least slow down the endless accumulation of wealth. If some of us steal back corporate property, we at least redistribute a little wealth. And the more we do, the more we inspire others.
But alongside direct action, we need to take care of each other. Poverty is going to increase and so will the budgets of the police to enforce it. We should recognize that most of us are in the same boat, so we can create arrangements of mutual aid. If you think mutual aid means sending people money online, it mostly doesn’t. It means treating others as equals, taking care of each other as equals, pooling skills and resources so we don’t have to go it alone. You might have people doing these things where you live. If you don’t, you might be able to contribute something online. You can still help out. You can still be part of a group making things better.
This new meritocracy is a nightmare
This post is the transcript of a video available here.
The outcry over college-admissions scandals and the whole conversation around so-called nepo babies shows people still believe the systems they live under are basically fair and meritocratic, or that they should be. I think you should be careful what you wish for.
There are many ways you could approach the topic of meritocracy. On the one hand, it seems easy to argue there is no meritocracy. How could people like Jeff Beebos and Elon the Monkey Slayer possibly deserve millions of times more wealth and influence than the rest of us? But for a couple of reasons I’ll get into, I’m not certain there is no meritocracy. Maybe there is. You’ll be able to decide that for yourself. I’m going to argue meritocracy is undesirable, even for the meritocrats at the top.
You know what they say: it’s not who you know, it’s WHOM you know. No, wait. What do they say? Whatever they say, that’s the last time I’m ever going to say “whom”. Whoever “they” are, I’m just glad they recognize that what you know and how good you are aren’t the only factors that determine how far you go in life.
Remember last week when I said the idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps has been twisted from being obviously impossible to just another slogan that serves the wealthy? Turns out the same is true of meritocracy. A meritocracy is a society or organization where influence and power are apportioned based on merit, like talent and effort. And it was originally portrayed as a dystopia.
I think the meaning started to shift in the 1970s or 80s, with the rise of Reagan, Thatcher and neoliberal economics. Powerful people looked at the dystopia and saw an ideal. Margaret Thatcher said in an interview “I don’t care two hoots what your background is. What I am concerned with is whatever your background, you have a chance to climb to the top.” Presumably because once you get to the top, the government begins to represent you. Stuff like the ladder-climbing metaphor set the propaganda ball rolling, and now politicians everywhere talk of equality of opportunity and levelling the playing field. Millions have followed in the Iron Zombie Lady’s footsteps by respecting the rich and assuming they deserve their wealth and power, while looking down on the poor and assuming they’re just lazy.
Who deserves what?
We need to talk about “deserve”. I don’t like this word. Who decides who deserves what and for what? You? Plato? Your boss? The government? IQ tests? I think for most people the answer is money. If you assumed we had a meritocracy, money would decide what we deserve. You can be a wonderful person, but if you run out of money, you no longer deserve food, shelter, or to live. Some places are kind enough to offer you a jail cell but others just let you freeze to death outside.
People say you get paid based on what you can provide the market, but it depends. Who is “the market”? Management? Because that’s who sets wages, other than the law, and I’ve never seen employee pay rates that vary according to the precise amount of value the employee provides. Sure, hard work and talent might be what they’re promoting, or they might prefer people they get along with, or people who kiss their asses, or maybe the promotion was just going to go to the boss’s nephew all along, and your work was for nothing. But hey, maybe the real meritocracy was the friends we made along the way.
I don’t aspire to “equality of opportunity”, because it implies you have the opportunity to have things, but only if the people with all the money say you deserve it. To hear politicians describe it, equality of opportunity seems to mean everyone still works hard and falls into poverty in the same proportions, but there’s no more racial discrimination in the workplace. Discrimination is just against the poor now. What an inspiring vision to work toward.
Moreover, we’re limited by assuming we should pursue opportunities as individuals, competing against one another, instead of pursuing collective goals as groups. The ladder is an apt symbol of the meritocratic ideal. From Against Meritocracy: While a ladder
undoubtedly offers the opportunity to climb, ‘it is a device that can only be used individually; you go up the ladder alone’… [Meritocracy] legitimises inequality and damages community ‘by requiring people to be in a permanent state of competition with each other’… [I]t ‘sweetens the poison of hierarchy’ by offering advancement through merit rather than money or birth, whilst retaining a commitment to the very notion of hierarchy itself…it promises opportunity whilst producing social division. In the contemporary era, the promises of meritocracy have become increasingly loud and competitive participation has come to be presented as a moral obligation at the same time as the ladders have grown longer.
If somebody deserves the wealth they have, presumably the poorest people deserve their misery. Extremes of wealth can only exist when there is extreme poverty to prop them up, as I explain here, so the poor are saddled with “the triumvirate of deprivation, segregation and stigma” (Against Meritocracy). But I don’t understand how anyone could deserve those things. It’s like saying they deserve a nasty illness. Why would we deserve to be deprived of the basics of life? People relatively higher in the social hierarchy might laugh contemptuously at people for being jealous and wanting something they don’t deserve, but they might just want the freedom denied to them by the shitty system they live under. You can call them losers, and you’d be right, but in a system where only a few can win and everyone else has to trudge along in poverty, most of us are losers. Does that mean we deserve nothing, and the winners deserve to own everything and make our decisions for us, because they beat you in a race you never wanted to run?
I’ve said before we tend to assume things are legitimate the way they are, without regard to how things came to be this way. When people have something, unless they stole it illegally, we assume they deserve it. Which is fine if it’s, say, your own home, but when you can own billions of dollars in assets you have a lot of influence over people’s lives. Conversely, if someone doesn’t have something, we discuss them and form opinions on whether or not they deserve it, and you might have noticed the poor don’t deserve much. It’s been decided for them.
There are other groups of people who are perceived as inherently not deserving. Hiring and promoting often exclude people for their race, gender, religion, disabilities and criminal record. And if they do get hired, people in marginalized groups face harassment, so they’re less likely to stick around and compete with others for the next promotion, which is the goal of the harassment.
Plenty of studies find that I, a white, male, cishet, English-speaking, legal citizen, am more likely to get hired and make more money than someone who isn’t one of those things, let alone all of them. These biases aren’t always conscious. They’re cultural and systemic, so they creep into your brain at various points in your life. So maybe the hiring person doesn’t realize they never hire the Black person or the Arab person who’s applying, just that for some reason, I didn’t think they would be a good fit. If people don’t get hired in the first place, or are quickly chased out, they don’t get the chance to demonstrate their merit.
And what about just discrimination by looks? We don’t hear about it that much but we know in the interview and in the workplace short people have it harder than tall people, fat people have it way worse than thin people, older people are less likely to be hired than young people, and in general, more conventionally attractive people get more perks and others get the shaft. We don’t take these unavoidable biases in hiring and promoting into account when we think why people are in their positions. It’s much easier to use the word “deserve”.
Nor do we ever consider genetic and environmental factors that might have led a person to develop skills and work harder. We don’t select our genes. We don’t select our parents or their incomes. We don’t select our environments. We don’t choose everything that happens to us. Why should providing for our basic needs depend on such factors?
Who believes in meritocracy?
So when people imply the system we live under is somehow meritocratic, that the distribution of wealth and power is somehow legitimate, I don’t know what they’re talking about. People seem to have a board-game understanding of how an economy works: there are some simple rules, and you compete as equal tokens on a level card table, so everyone has the same chance to win. So I guess rich people played the game and followed the rules, and poor people just kept landing on Community Chest. If you want a more accurate idea of how our system works, imagine a board game you’re forced to play using your own money, and whoever is in the lead gets to decide when to enforce the rules.
Who believes in meritocracy? It seems like the more money and power you have or plan to have, the more likely you are to tell yourself the system is based on merit. (The political editor of the Economist, for instance, wrote a whole book about how meritocracy is real and it’s great, because these awesome empires that killed and enslaved millions of people were meritocracies.) Meritocracy is used to justify the grind or hustle culture, and imply your hard work will pay off. Someone who ticks my boxes, the straight, white guy who didn’t grow up poor, might be inclined to believe racism, homophobia, misogyny and poverty aren’t really such a big deal. Sure, they’re an inconvenience but if you really worked hard, I’m sure you’d make it to the top. Systemic forces? What systemic forces? Point to these systemic forces or I win and it’s a meritocracy.
Because if it’s systemic, you might have to read and think about it to understand. Well, who has time for that when you’re judging other people? So we ignore the complicated stuff and take a simplistic, individualist approach to success. When individuals tell their stories, they want to appear better, so they claim to have these virtues that make them unique. There’s a much better chance they got one lucky break after another, while others in the same position were denied one or all of them. The story of a person’s success is really the story of the capitalist system, how it limits some behaviors and incentivizes others, how it gives us ladders to climb, risks to take and competitions to win, and the winners that emerge are the ones we call successful, hard working, risk taking and all the other capitalist compliments.
The current right-wing argument regarding meritocracy is it does not exist because the system discriminates against…white men. The right’s fast-talking media darlings always bring up the advantages given to the handful of individuals who aren’t cishet white men who benefit from affirmative action as proof that we do not live in a meritocracy. I don’t know if they believe it, but they’re saying it. And there’s a reason. They claim to believe in meritocracy, and no doubt some do, while others know it is a great curtain to conceal discrimination. It’s like when they say they’re “color blind”. I’m color blind so I don’t discriminate because I don’t see color. Unless I see a Black guy in my neighborhood. More recently, the right has been militantly attacking DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities and corporations. While I see DEI roughly the same way I saw CSR, or corporate social responsibility, 20 years ago–just another way to legitimize corporations owning everything–there is the usual right-wing crusade behind their fake indignation. Ethan is online just made a whole video about it, so check that out, but if you already understand white supremacy and its propaganda as a system, you know where this anti-diversity outrage comes from. Any time it seems like people the right doesn’t like might be using their merit to rise in the world, it must be a conspiracy. To the right, a meritocracy is when things are run by straight, white men.
How could meritocracy work?
But let’s imagine we ended prejudice and opened things up to everyone. How could a meritocracy work? In any -ocracy, the people at the top decide who deserves what, not based on some objective criteria we’ve all agreed on but to serve their own interests. For sure, people will say when you hand decisions over to a machine they become objective, but intelligent machines are programmed with the biases of the people who ordered to have them built in the first place, so the same people who were making the decisions before. If machines are owned by corporations or states, they will be used to enslave us.
If you design a system so only one person or a tiny percentage of the people who want to can be on the top, you’re creating this artificial situation where people will fight with each other to be the one person who grabs the whole bag, rather than just sharing the money and other perks. There is no longer any way to determine who deserves what, because the people at the top of the hierarchy inevitably make decisions, allocate resources and appoint people according to their own idea of merit.
The vagueness of the idea of merit is to the advantage of anyone higher up in the hierarchy, because they can make their own stuff up. Our family worked really hard, and that’s why we have all this money today. So how do you explain people who have worked really hard for generations and still have nothing? Maybe hard work wasn’t the decisive factor. Our family took risks. But we only value risk taking when the person succeeds, while there are plenty of poor people who took risks who were never rewarded for them. Did you have some other virtues that no one else did? Kindness? Bravery? Authenticity? Obviously not generosity. Or did someone else create the wealth and your family owned it, like all great accumulations of wealth?
So merit clearly isn’t about hard work or risk taking, and if I’m wrong that it’s about money, what else could determine an individual’s merit, and how would you measure it? Would you observe everyone all the time to see how kind and honest they were being, how hard they were working, again, maybe according to some objective measure? Maybe we could have a central database to record every time we see someone helping an old person cross the street. How would you measure anyone’s merit without raking over their life and eviscerating their privacy?
I know you thought that was a rhetorical question, but China has answered it. China has long been assumed to be a meritocracy because you take this test to see who gets to be in the government. Who makes the test? Who decides what qualities to test for? Do those qualities make us better or worse people? Because the government says so? But the Chinese imperial examination dates back like 1400 years. More recently, China’s innovative totalitarianism is designing the ultimate tool for creating meritocracy: the social-credit system. It’s like FICO, the financial credit score in the US that ruins lives, but for everything and everyone. Everyone is tracked, ranked, shamed and blacklisted according to government criteria. Don’t worry: If you behave, you’ll have all the rights the government of China grants its citizens, like um…., plus the occasional pat on the head, and if you don’t behave, by say, getting fines and owing money, you will be socially isolated and economically destitute. China has found a way to translate meritocracy into a system of imposed morality.
Silly China. We have it slightly better than that. Sure, the state gathers information on us from birth, we are constantly monitored and judged at school, then all our time at work under surveillance and fear of getting fired, we’re increasingly getting filmed outdoors and get spied on by our phones. Sure, we’re limited by credit scores and no-fly lists and bad-tenant lists. Where was I going with this? Ah, right, meritocracy. It sucks for everyone, in China and everywhere else. We’ve talked enough about how hard it is on the majority. How does meritocracy affect the so-called elite?
Meritocracy means the rich work too
In the literature on meritocracy and inequality, at least regarding the US, there is a lot of emphasis on schooling, that schools are a driver of inequality because if you go to the right schools, you have a significantly better chance of getting ahead. Before reading, I was under the impression the relationship between supposedly better schools and financial success in the future is not because the schools themselves were better, but for three other reasons you might have figured out too. First, if you are going to more expensive schools, your parents have money, so there’s a much better chance you’ll have money in the future, regardless of which school you go to. Second, we are swayed by our biases, so if we see someone comes from a quote-unquote good school, they have the permanent glow of merit, so we are more likely to recommend and hire and promote them. Finally, at those schools you meet the children of other people with lots of money, which is excellent networking, as the parents are well aware.
For sure a kid will get more out of a well-funded school because there are more teachers and other resources, and no overflowing classrooms or police. But most of what a child learns in any school will be of no use in the working world, least of all in an interview or while networking or doing whatever it takes to get that first job. What are they teaching at the rich schools that makes them so good? Are kids getting MBAs? What are they teaching at the poor schools that makes them so bad? That the sun revolves around the moon?
But there are more recent developments that I hadn’t taken into account in my assessment. Have you ever noticed how rich guys like to brag about how much they work nowadays? In a meritocracy, the people with the money and power have to at least pretend to have earned it. From the Meritocracy Trap: If you know anything about inequality in the US you might be aware “[t]he top 1 percent of households now captures about a fifth of total income and the top one-tenth of 1 percent captures about a tenth of total income…. Compared to the period between 1950 and 1970, this roughly doubles the share owned by the top 1 percent and triples the share owned by the top one-tenth of 1 percent. [So the rich are taking a bigger share of the pie than ever. But it’s not just from owning more stuff, like it used to be.] [B]etween two-thirds and three-quarters of these increases” come from income. Even the richest people are working harder than they ever have.
This book explains the history of the shift from the idle rich to, as the author calls it, the superordinate working class. I’m just going to highlight a key point.
Elite jobs of all sorts nowadays demand hours—routinely, as a matter of course—that would have been thought unimaginable, because degrading, by an earlier, more genteel American elite. For centuries, the old order imposed a social taint on those who worked not from passion—for honor and exploit, or as a calling—but industriously, for wages. But that stigma, which remained at midcentury, has today been entirely erased and even reversed. Elite workers across all fields now valorize long hours and conspicuously and almost compulsively publicize their immense industry—including through their habits of speech—as a way of asserting their status. Meritocracy makes effortful and industrious work—busyness—into a sign of being valued and needed, the badge of honor.
The economic returns to schooling have consequently skyrocketed in recent decades, and—especially at elite schools and colleges—double or even triple the returns to investments in stocks or bonds. This produces an astonishing segmentation of income by education.
So yeah, they’re rich, but if they want to stay that way, they might have to invest a lot more in themselves than ever. But once they have, they are ready.
From the Meritocracy Trap: “For nearly three decades…graduates of every top college and professional school, in every field, have studied, worked, practiced, and drilled. They have been continually inspected. And finally, they have been selected. This is what it means to join the meritocratic elite.”
So maybe now it’s somewhat less about who you know and more where you’ve been. For most of us, the effect is the same as ever: wealth gets concentrated in the hands of a shrinking ruling class, and everyone else has to work for them. However, now, even the wealthy are working their asses off. What a waste of money. They don’t even coast through school anymore. If wealth can’t buy freedom from work and school, what’s the point? There’s only one thing left to buy.
In a meritocracy, once you have the nice house and car and stuff, you need to look like you deserve to be where you are, or else deserve more than you have. That look, the appearance of deserving, is prestige. The wealthy buy prestige.
Remember the college-admissions scandals? Rich people, ashamed their children might not be meritocrats, paid to get their kids into elite universities like Harvard and Stanford. You might think they’re rich: their kids don’t even have to work if they don’t want to. But then the child would have the stigma of only having inherited their wealth, you know, trust-fund kids, and therefore not really deserving it. That’s why I say meritocracy is even bad for the wealthy, who are under more pressure to achieve and thus maintain their position at the top. They have to work as much as the rest of us now.
The alternative to meritocracy
So the system we live under may or may not be meritocratic, depending who you ask. Either way, having looked at several visions of meritocracy, one thing we know is, it’s shit. We shouldn’t want a meritocracy.
Still dreaming of equality of opportunity? Can I interest you in equality of access? It means everyone has access to everything. You know, everything that isn’t your private stuff. There’s no way to work out exactly whose contribution is worth what, and no one deserves to go hungry, so everyone should have access to everything produced. That also means everyone should have a say in what is produced and how, so the consideration is no longer what is profitable for the few, but what is right for everyone.
Some people scoff at the idea and say no one would ever do any work if we weren’t forced, but we’re still forced by nature, so it’s not like we’re going to stop making food and building homes, just that we wouldn’t be forced to do whatever work the people with all the money want doing, so we’d have more time to do stuff as free people. If you say the only way certain things would get done is if we’re compelled to do them, maybe we shouldn’t be doing them. But if it’s something necessary or enjoyable or rewarding, people will do it. We don’t need to be duped into following some huge carrot on the end of a stick our whole lives because there is a tiny chance we’ll deserve to catch it one day.
What if your bootstraps are on fire?
This post is the transcript of a video available here.
Have you ever got the feeling you weren’t sufficiently rewarded for working hard? Why do you think that is? The economic system we live under demands hard work, but it doesn’t always compensate it. Instead, it promises you the opportunity to get rich. Even the poorest people, they say, can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, leave poverty on the ground below them and soar into the heavens of wealth and the freedom that comes with it. Where does this argument come from? We have seen it used over and over, in any situation where people want to blame the poor and oppressed for their problems instead of the system they live under. If you don’t know what is wrong with telling the poor to stop being poor, don’t worry: you’re in the right place, because I’m going to explain.
It doesn’t mean what you think it means
Let’s start by looking at how everyone uses the boot expression incorrectly and why. When people today, especially people who want you to work, and we’ll come back to them, use the idiom pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, they mean to imply anyone can get out of poverty, and presumably any other oppressive situation, by their own hard work, as opposed to needing help. It assumes the economic system is full of opportunities waiting for any and all hard workers to take, and your big break is pretty much inevitable if you really want it. But that’s not what it means.
It is ironic that this metaphor is so widely used to represent the American dream of social and economic mobility through self-reliance, since the action required [pulling yourself up by pulling your shoes up, film me trying to do it and failing] is physically impossible. When it was first used in the 19th century, the saying made more sense – it described an absurd, impossible feat. [So people who use the phrase to suggest you can succeed without help are using a phrase that reveals the suggestion is ridiculous. But b]y the mid-20th century, bootstrapping had become part of our national narrative, seen not as a miracle but as the almost inevitable result of hard work.
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/In-a-Word/2021/1004/How-the-bootstrap-idiom-became-a-cultural-ideal
I guess it’s not surprising the phrase has lost its meaning: anything can get twisted to serve power. I’ve talked a lot about the origins of wealth and poverty on this channel, so check the links in the description for more context. Today, we’re going to look at how easy it is to fall into poverty and how difficult it is to get out. Because to listen to the bootstrappers, you might think nothing has any effect on you or anything you do, other than your own work. And your mind–you think for yourself, right? You’re not affected by the nonsense you learned in school or in the media or from the government or the people around you. The fact is, all those forces have huge effects on you, most of which are invisible. They linger in your mind and whisper in your ear, telling you to apportion respect based on net worth, discriminate against people you don’t know anything about, and approve of harsh punishments for people you’ll never meet. Fortunately, you can identify those voices and the values they try to inculcate, assess them for yourself and unlearn.
Propelled into poverty
But what we learn to believe and take for granted obscures the observable truth. The first thing to unlearn is the assumption that poverty is a character flaw, a mere lack of effort, and everyone could get out of poverty if they really wanted to. Only someone who has never experienced poverty would think that. Let’s look at what we know from easily accessible data. In Canada, the rich are getting richer, but the poor are getting poorer. Hm. Wonder if there’s any causal relation between those two developments that I explain in this video. The wealth gap is widening faster than ever. For most of us, that means you have farther to go to get to where you want to be.
But I’m sure whatever country you live in is…different. Let’s see how Americans are doing. (since 2007, wealth has declined) Oh. The same. “Since 2007, wealth has declined for all but the top 20%”… “[A] historic increase in negative net worth”… That doesn’t sound good. We get told to diversify our assets, but only the upper 20% can do that. Surely it doesn’t matter what color you are though, right? Racism is over, I heard. Hm, guess not: “Median white household wealth far exceeds other races”. Is there a history we could look at, possibly told by a respected figure, in about 60 seconds, that might explain the racial wealth gap? (See here.) Martin (Luther King Jr) probably heard the bootstraps argument used against Black Americans all the time. Black people have had several generations since slavery to free themselves and for some reason that only the most basic knowledge of history could explain, Black people still experience poverty and oppression. So thanks to the weight of history on racist institutions, “Black, Latino and ‘other'” people are still less likely to own their own homes. Must be tough to put that million-dollar idea into practice if you’re still trying to make rent every month. In fact, you might have to take on debt just to have a home. Certainly, that would help explain why homelessness is at record highs. Can you pull yourself up when you had to sell the straps for food?
But what if you have a job and a place to stay? Surely, you shouldn’t be poor anymore. Unless you’re making minimum or low wages, which in many places does not even cover the costs of rent and food. And yet, the work is often long, hard and unfulfilling, so it sucks up too much of your time and energy for you to be able to get another job. To compound it all, in the US and other places, unless you have a union, you might not have health insurance, so one trip to the hospital could wipe you out and throw you into debt, like these millions of people. How do you get out of that? At a low wage, you won’t.
And there are other kinds of debt that will weigh you down for years, like student-loan debt, remember, the loans you took out when you were 18 because you were assured you would get a good job thanks to your degree that all employers are clamoring for. Remember how you were lied into debt? It’s the same thing they tell post-colonial states: take out these loans, use them to invest, and before you know it, you’ll be swimming in money. Trust me, bro. It’s taking a huge bet on your future and the people selling it to you assure you the odds are in your favor, not theirs. While researching this topic, I realized I had been imagining everyone with student-loan debt as young, but I found out how wrong I was when I saw the graphs divided by age. Figures keep changing, but what struck me was the fact that people over 60 owe billions in student-loan debt. Turns out your education doesn’t help you pay off the loans. It just traps you in debt your whole life.
Poverty is expensive
But you don’t need health problems or outstanding loans to get poorer. It’s actually really expensive just being poor. They hit you while you’re down. You might live in a food desert where the stores can charge huge markups. If you have enough money and a place to put it, you can buy in bulk, which saves you money, but if you can’t afford to buy in bulk, you have to spend more over time for the same stuff. Likewise, the cheaper clothes, shoes, furniture and so on, wear out faster, so you pay through the nose in the long term. Negative bank balance? Pay a fee. Late on your bills? Pay a fee. If you get fined and you can’t pay, what do they do? They fine you. If you don’t have insurance, any accident or health problem costs you an arm and a leg, so maybe you don’t go to the doctor, so you have problems that go untreated that, you guessed it, cost you more in the long run. Even taxes cost you more when you’re poor. Do you have any other examples of the exorbitant costs of being poor?
What’s more, the price of just being alive keeps rising. Inflation is not just in food or gas. It’s rent. It’s utilities. It’s clothing. It’s electronics. Everything we rely on gets more expensive, and wages do not keep up. Even if you get a raise, when there’s inflation in everything, a raise is a slightly larger life preserver to replace the one shrinking around you. How will most people afford to live?
-If your answer includes the word “welfare”, you might not realize how inadequate most welfare programs are. First, you might not qualify. There are plenty of exceptions. If you think you can just stroll into an office and get welfare, then you are probably thinking of universal basic income or UBI. Means-tested welfare programs don’t work that way. But even if you qualify, welfare tends not be enough. Some parts of Europe are the exception but in most of the world, welfare is a paltry sum. And when was the last time you heard the government announce it was raising welfare allowances, even just to keep up with inflation? 1945? And yet, when have you heard them announce they were cutting welfare? Does it seem like it’s every time you turn on the news?
You might have heard people say “welfare shouldn’t be a job; it should help you pick yourself up by your bootstraps,” and I think those people should learn to care about people with less money than them, too. Welfare might be necessary for more than a couple of months for people with disabilities or addictions, physical or mental illness, people too old to work, unemployed people, people in debt. Or maybe they can’t work because they’ve been working, so they have a bad back or bad knees or burns or anxiety or depression or something else that reduces the number of jobs available to a person, sometimes to zero. But I don’t take very seriously the tears of people who despair that welfare exists and people are on welfare and they should work for it and they don’t deserve it and they’re getting too much money, and the reason there is no reason to take them seriously is they say so little about the vastly greater sums of money being taken from them to pay for war, prisons, surveillance and corporate welfare. You care that poor people have your money, but not that rich people do? Curious!
Why does the myth persist?
We learn to reason that hard work leads to deserving, so if people have money they or maybe their parents must have worked for it, so they deserve it. If that’s true, the current distribution of wealth in society must be correct and fair. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, right? Hey, it’s happened before. Just rarely. Social conditions, inheritance, racism and luck are all at least as important factors as hard work. From here: “[W]here you grow up, how much your parents earn, whether your parents were married — play a major role in determining where you will end up later in life.” That’s why hardly anyone who grows up in poverty makes it out.
When the Pew Economic Mobility Project conducted a survey in 2009—hardly a high point in the history of American capitalism—39 percent of respondents said they believed it was “common” for people born into poverty to become rich, and 71 percent said that personal attributes like hard work and drive, not the circumstances of a person’s birth, are the key determinants of success. Yet Pew’s own research has demonstrated that it is exceedingly rare for Americans to go from rags to riches, and that more modest movement from the bottom of the economic ladder isn’t common either. In fact, economic mobility is greater in Canada, Denmark, and France than it is in the United States[, which I’m guessing is partly due to not having to worry about how you’re going to pay medical bills].
…
The wave of [Benjamin] Franklin biographies that appeared in the rapidly expanding republic of the early 1800s emphasized the qualities that spoke to aspiring men of business and fudged the ones that didn’t. From the beginning, selling the self-made dream to those who hoped to live it was a lucrative business itself. In a country where everyone thinks he’s bound to be a millionaire, you can make a fortune selling the secret to making that fortune.
https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/09/the_self_made_man_history_of_a_myth_from_ben_franklin_to_andrew_carnegie.html
The way the wealthy tell their stories, they make it sound so easy. They just got a small loan and then worked hard and it became a billion dollars. They’re “self-made”, right? Except for all the employees. They only did the work. They didn’t do the owning, so they don’t deserve the money. Thanks to the self-made myth, 44% of Americans think they might become billionaires one day. Oh hey look, a different link on the same page says “nearly half of all Americans are falling deeper in debt”. I wonder how many are the same people. 66% of adults surveyed said they saw wealth inequality as a serious problem, but 60% also want to become part of the problem. Or do they think if they had all that money, they would be a different kind of billionaire? Well, how do you think you would get rich? By ethical means? Not by owning stuff other people need and squeezing every penny out of your workers or customers or nature? All the power to you, then. I just think if we want to invest in the future we should build our communities, so there are people around to care for you on the off chance you don’t strike oil in your backyard.
So why does the myth of the self-made man pulling himself up by his bootstraps persist? You’ve figured it out by now: The people who spread it own businesses that they want you to work for. When that does nothing to keep you out of poverty, they want to blame you for everything that happens to you. We get told we live under a fair system where we’re free to do whatever we like, and it’s clearly a lie, but if you believe it you won’t blame the people who own everything and make the decisions and just blame yourself. It’s genius. It’s like stop-hitting-yourself for adults. But we can question what we hear and unlearn what we’ve been taught. That’s the first step. The second step is finding others and working toward our collective liberation. If you want videos on that, I’ve got ‘em, so subscribe!
Bothsidesing the War on Palestine
This post is the transcript of a video available here.
A lot of people I talk to who aren’t especially politically or philosophically inclined try to stake out a position of neutrality. They take a cursory look at what gets called the left and what gets called the right, or the two sides of whatever issue, and conclude things like “both sides are wrong”, or “it’s too complicated to take sides”. It sounds wise, because you’re aloof from the real conflict, able to think more clearly than people on the ground. Often, however, people who talk like that don’t know much about either side, and aren’t aware of any other sides. It’s possible they’re being manipulated by false equivalences. This video is about the limits of talking about “both sides”, and where this thinking has brought us in the discourse on Palestine. I’m Chris and welcome back to the channel rated best Youtube channel to watch while playing golf.
How to BS
”Bothsidesing,” or BSing, is presenting two options, two sides to some issue, and implying they are of roughly equal magnitude when they are not. Talking about “both sides” of a conflict as if they were equally guilty in that conflict is of very limited use if we care about getting to the heart of the matter. We tend to want to pick sides, and if we are told how to think by one side, we probably join that side. But to understand the issue, we need to recognize there are various possible points of view on it. If I hear about a war from the one newspaper I read, or even if I read all the newspapers from this one country I live in, I only know one way of thinking about this war. I might think it’s good that we civilized people are using guns to show the uncivilized the correct way to live. If I want to read more about an issue, but I’m under the impression there is only one way of approaching the topic, or one way and the obviously wrong way, I’ll probably go in thinking I just have to read the right people, the people who write from the correct perspective, and be on the lookout for signs the author is on the wrong side.
But what if there are other sides? If we’re talking about philosophy and how to organize society, there are innumerable sides. Powerful people and their followers want you to think there is only one correct way, the way things are, or the way the leaders promise it’ll be, and that’s why they have to use force to implement it, and there are one or two alternatives that would clearly lead to everyone dying. The powerful control the state. I talked a bit about the state in my last video, but I didn’t mention among its various monopolies was one on speaking for people. The state says it represents the people in the territory it rules. Because there are other territorial monopolies claiming to represent the people they preside over, each one might be forced to negotiate with another. We get told the two sides are meeting to discuss something. Well, there could be countless other sides to the conflict, other perspectives on what should be done, but if you watch the news, you hear about one or possibly two. This way of thinking keeps the scope of our thoughts confined to whatever the one side we are supposed to support says is acceptable. If we didn’t think and do what they say, the other side, the bad guys, might take over. People who want power over you will present you with options in order to limit your action, when a critical thinker knows there is always another option.
A consequence of restricting our thinking this way that might be familiar to you is the with-us-or-against-us mindset. You can only be one of these two things, so which is it?? What if it’s neither? Do you support Israel? No? Then you must support Hamas and everything it does. You don’t like Hamas either? Then you have to support Israel. Actually, no, I don’t. I support people who want to live free. That’s most people, but not most people with power. I want Palestinians to be free, free from living under siege, free to have their own land and live how they want.
See, when you value solidarity, it’s easy to figure out who to support. It’s easy to see beyond the us-or-them rhetoric to the innocent people caught in the crossfire. They’re all other sides to this fight, but they don’t get a voice because we’re not allowed to know there are more than two sides. We get told their self-appointed spokespeople represent them, so if Hamas says something antisemitic, Palestinians are all a bunch of antisemites. Israel can now add to its list of demands that people “deradicalize”, to the extent that no Palestinian feels any animosity towards anyone else, before Israel will lift the siege.
Now, I’m not about to defend Hamas or the attack of October 7th, 2023. But if you don’t know the century or more of history behind this conflict, you might not realize the enormous difference between Hamas and the IDF, or why there might be more than two sides. If you don’t know how much two million people are suffering in Gaza and why, you might think each party has an equal grievance against the other.
–In fact, if you just listen to their words and inherently trust the gleaming, white officialness of the state press conference, you might favor Israel, or maybe criticize Israel as also wrong, but not so wrong that anything should change. Hamas talks like they want to terrorize people. If you just watch the news, with its fake attempt at “showing both sides”, you might think Hamas’s rhetoric can justify the things Israel does, especially when contrasted with Israel’s carefully crafted image as this free democracy where everyone is welcome (also known as pinkwashing). You can choose between the legitimate state, with uniforms and parliaments and fighter jets and everything, which says it believes in human rights and minimizing casualties, or the Brown men in masks speaking scary words who the news calls a terrorist group. You might conclude the IDF has to shower Gaza with bombs: Hamas is evil! Sure, killing ordinary people is bad, but if they didn’t, things might be even worse. Both sides are wrong; better not change anything or even get involved. And that’s how to arrive back at the status quo every time. That’s how we train ourselves to think and do what powerful people want us to: accepting, rather than resisting. Now, I just need a simplistic explanation that wraps up the whole issue so I don’t have to think about it anymore. How about “it’s complicated”? Perfect.
A BS war
But is this really a war between two sides? Let’s look at what we know. First, Hamas is not a state. It attempts to claim a monopoly on force and administration in Gaza but some other requirements of being a state Hamas doesn’t have include sovereignty, a military and being recognized by other states. And in case you had hopes for it, the way it’s currently being offered to Palestinians, the so-called two-state solution, the deal on offer since 1993, would not permit a Palestinian Authority to build a military, either. The deals offered to Palestinians–or more accurately, whatever representative the imperial powers choose to deal with–get weaker with every decade, as Palestinians’ bargaining power has dropped, and they’ve found themselves with fewer and fewer state allies. One of the main reasons for the attack on October 7th was probably to sabotage the rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
So, unlike states, Palestine or Hamas doesn’t have a military, so it doesn’t have tanks and ships and radars and missile-defense systems or any kind of munitions that could defend against the cascade of bombs that have been raining down on Gaza. This confusing CNN article says how “deadly” Hamas’s “arsenal” is in the headline, and yet the article starts with “Homemade rockets. Modified AK-47s. Decades-old Soviet machine guns.” How can they even defend a city block with that? To call it “the Israel-Palestine conflict” or war like supposedly neutral media do is to imply Hamas or some other Palestinian people could prevail through military means, to send in multiple divisions, then take and hold territory, occupy cities, install puppet governments, and other things the winning side does after a war. Hamas has no capacity to blockade another state, to deny it food, water and electricity, like Israel does to Gaza. It’s a war, but it’s not a war between Hamas and Israel. It’s Israel’s war on the Palestinian people.
If you think of Hamas and Israel as the two sides, it’s easy to say both sides are wrong. But let’s not end our thinking there. Are they the only two sides? Let’s come back to that. The two sides we’re presented with do plenty you can criticize, but they’re too unevenly matched to compare. It’s like comparing a dog with a crocodile: they can both bite but one side can bite way harder. As a result, neither the IDF nor Palestinian resistance attack each other on even ground. Hamas and Islamic Jihad and some others carried out a surprise offensive because that’s the only way you can hurt a vastly stronger force: by hitting its weak spots. Israel, meanwhile, faces no challenge when showering bombs on crowded civilian areas.
It feels like 9/11 all over again. Is that what war is now? Angry people commit one ostentatious terrorist attack, and the response is thousands of smaller terrorist attacks. Does anyone really think that’s how you end the cycle of violence? Or do they just feel the need to look tough all the time? I don’t understand why it’s so obvious to everyone that taking revenge on people who weren’t involved is a legitimate response to terrorism, or anything, really. How could it be okay to target schools, mosques, hospitals and ambulances? Why does Israel target journalists? Is it the same reason the US did in Iraq, and states at war around the world do? Why is it excusable to target a civilian convoy fleeing an area being bombed, after the IDF promised to try real hard not to? Because Hamas?
And this keeps happening. Every couple of years, Israel decides to punish everyone in Gaza collectively because some of them have been firing rockets into Israel. All their excuses rely on the assumption of collective guilt. The Palestinian people voted for Hamas, well, some Palestinians who were alive at the time did, anyway, and therefore Palestinians are a bunch of terrorists. Those people were near a member of Hamas, so we blew them all up. As such, it’s hard to buy the argument that Israel is defending itself. How is bombing civilians with no capacity to hurt you defending yourself? Only if you assume there are no civilians, and it’s just fine to kill indiscriminately. It’s true: Any of them could be the next terrorist, but where do you think these “terrorists” come from?
Obviously, Palestinians want to fight back, but you can’t do that on your own, so you cast around for groups who seem to be fighting back. I don’t know if I’ve said it yet but I don’t support Hamas or Islamic Jihad–I know how important it is to Zionists that I mention that–but how could you fail to see why people would join them? Can’t you put yourself in other people’s shoes just for a minute? If your friends and family, and their friends and family, and everyone you know is being punished for the crime of being Palestinian, would you just sit back and hope things got better?
When people claim rockets being fired into Israel are a good reason to kill tens of thousands of people, they are creating a false equivalence and putting the cart before the horse. The rockets are a result of living under occupation. People don’t like being squeezed every day of their lives. They don’t want to live under a blockade forever. So they fight back against their oppressors. I know, who does that? They must just teach their kids to hate.
Those rockets have also been called a war crime, for the same reason as some of Israel’s bombing raids: they are indiscriminate and inevitably hit civilians. But the rate that they land anywhere near anyone tends to be one tenth or one twentieth of Israel’s numbers, or in the case of Operation Cast Lead, one hundredth. That’s how disproportionate this violence is. That’s how deadly those “rockets” are.
I’ve been hearing for years how Israel has precision-guided munitions, and how it has these teams that review the targets and judge they’re the right ones, and no one points out these factors all but prove Israel targets civilians. They could change targets and redirect missiles, but they don’t. From here: “When a three-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed – that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target.” They’re not just trying to kill card-carrying members of Hamas. Israel wants to cause maximum damage and kill as many people as it can until it is forced to the negotiating table.
Or look at the disparity in incarceration. As of September 2023, before the current exchange of terror began, Israel held over 4000 prisoners on “security” grounds. At the start of the fighting, Maan News reported 5200 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and 1300 held indefinitely without trial. On October 7th, Hamas and whoever else was involved kidnapped something like 250 people. I know what you’re thinking: one side is a state and calls it “arrest” and “detention,” so it’s not kidnapping. See, Hamas is worse, or at least just as bad, because they kidnap. Kidnapping is illegal. Lawful detention, for however long, is lawful. Since 1967, Israel has arrested about a million Palestinians, or 40% of the male population. But Palestinians sometimes kidnap, so…both sides?
Is it the G-word?
The attack on October 7th involved some horrific and unforgivable violence. However, it does not follow that the correct response is to kill as many civilians as possible. That would only be the answer if the question was how to wipe out a group of people. People have been using the word “genocide” more this time around–so much so the government of South Africa is taking Israel to the Hague. Now South Africa is a side in this fight. They could have chosen to charge Israel with war crimes. They could easily prove Israel targets civilians. If you charge a state with genocide, you’ve got to have a lot of evidence and confidence that it will stick. This isn’t just an empty political gesture.
Not that Israel would be forced to abide by the court’s ruling, because the court has no enforcement mechanism. The law isn’t really for punishing states but empowering states to punish individuals. (card) A ruling that Israel is committing genocide could hurt the people who made the decision to commit it if a state threatens to arrest them, which has happened before. Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998, and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Israel’s own Tzipi Livni for war crimes in 2009 in connection with her role in Operation Cast Lead.
There are many sides
Like everything complicated, there are more than two sides. The IDF and Hamas are two sides, but many governments are involved, especially the US and Iran, along with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansar Allah, or the Houthis, in Yemen. They complicate things. Your both-sides theories don’t work anymore. Different actors in a conflict have different interests and incentives. The US is not Israel. Iran is not Hamas. Nor are Palestinians in general Hamas. Every unaffiliated Palestinian is another side with their own view of the situation. You can’t tell me “the Palestinians reject peace”, just because an organization claiming to represent them rejects peace.
I know how tempting it is to assume an intellectual, enlightened posture of “both sides are equally bad so we shouldn’t take sides”. That thinking tends to obscure the history of the problem and render everyone fighting for peace and freedom invisible. I don’t think we should support institutions of power, states like Israel or political parties like Hamas, but should join the ongoing fight against power and oppression. Right now, that means ending the siege of Gaza.
How capitalism creates monopolies
This post is a transcript of a video available here.
We think of capitalism as an economic system built on competition. Competition is good, in theory, because it forces firms to do what their customers want them to. Competition is held to be the opposite of monopoly. No one can control a market if there’s competition. Why, then, is our world characterized by monopolies and oligopolies? This video is about a few of the ways the capitalist system encourages and rewards monopoly.
Competition creates monopoly
So the bad news is, we live under capitalism. The good news is, you’ve found the right channel to help you come to grips with it. As I explained by quoting Ellen Meiksins-Wood three videos ago, capitalism is an economic system based on “the laws of competition, profit-maximization, and capital accumulation.” I spend half my time on this channel explaining what all that means in practice, so, you know, subscribe. I used to assume the biggest and most successful firms, the winners, win because they provide the best products and services or best value or innovate the best. Until I started studying political economy and the history of capitalism, I thought competition meant capitalism was the cure for monopolies, just like no political party could possibly turn tyrannical if there are other parties contesting elections. Well, we’re all naive until we learn, right? Today, markets are dominated by large firms that don’t have to make a better product or lower their prices. In fact, they do the opposite: deliberately design products so they’ll break (planned obsolescence) and raise prices whenever they think they can get away with it.
You might have seen this image or a similar one on the internet.
I don’t know if it’s up to date but it paints a picture of a market dominated by an oligopoly. Well, nowadays, that’s most markets. We just don’t have graphics for all of them. In fact, the internet, only 25 years ago a highly competitive marketplace, nowadays is mostly owned by three companies: Google or Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. Is this how capitalism is supposed to work?
There has never been perfect competition under capitalism. The idea is purely theoretical. If that’s what people mean by “free markets”, that everyone is competing on a more or less level playing field, then there have never been free markets under capitalism. Not in its early days, which I go into in this series and will touch on later in this video, not during the golden age of progressivism a century ago, which you can read about in these books (The Triumph of Conservatism: a Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 by Gabriel Kolko and The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 by James Weinstein), and least of all today.
That said, though you can identify monopoly or oligopoly in almost any industry, it is rare that firms have no competitors. They might just be local or catering to a niche. Like most things presented to us as the two choices, in the real world, competition and monopoly exist on a spectrum.
For example, is Amazon a monopoly? On the one hand, it’s pretty hard to own all of retail. Capitalists, people who own capital, they are in competition with one another. Not all of them own stock in Amazon. If they think there is a chance they can make money by taking business away from Amazon, they will. What’s more, Amazon’s strength, besides its brand recognition, is it’s online, which makes it easy to copy, which is why there is competition from small retailers.
–On the other hand, when I or someone whose opinion matters, like the US Federal Trade Commission, talk about monopoly, we don’t usually mean one firm’s complete control of the market to the exclusion of all other firms, but firms that control more than 50% of the market and attempt to squeeze out competition with, as the FTC puts it, “exclusionary or predatory acts”. Capitalists broadly agree on maintaining the status quo, but again, individually, they are in competition, and the ideal is to own a monopoly. In a capitalist system, the state or the government works for the capitalist class. If a firm seems to be monopolizing an industry and other capitalists lose out as a result, the state might do something. And it does.
In 2023, the FTC and 17 attorneys-generals answered my question by suing Amazon for being a monopoly. A 172-page report details how Amazon dominates the online retail market, alleging Amazon uses various tactics to prevent competitors from charging lower prices. It doesn’t say anything about Amazon working its employees to death, but I guess that’s not an FTC concern. So Amazon acts like a monopoly, but isn’t that the point of playing the capitalist game? If you win the game, you are rewarded with control of the market. Competition isn’t the cure for monopoly. Competition leads to monopoly.
In the world of some economists, there exists a kind of equilibrium of forces in a capitalist market that keeps prices low and makes firms constantly improve the quality of what they provide. And that’s because economics is largely about justifying the status quo with words and charts. If you look at how capitalism really works, you can see competition regularly churns out winners and losers. Actually, that’s true of all types of competition, if I’m not mistaken. Joseph Schumpeter (who was also an economist but let’s not hold that against him) popularized calling this process “creative destruction”, which has been praised as what’s so great about capitalism, because it produces innovation, when in practice it also means waste, bankruptcy, unemployment and more power in the hands of the winners.
When a firm “loses”, it goes out of business, which means one less competitor. In theory, that opens up space in the market where other firms can enter, but it might take them years to build up the customer base and brand recognition necessary just to break even, and most people can’t afford to work at a job they’re losing money on. So a firm loses and it’s out of the market, right? Not exactly, because often the losers are acquired by the winners, and at a cheaper rate than the losers paid. The firms being acquired don’t even have to have lost, as long as they provide the acquiring firm a greater share of a market. So as a result of creative destruction, successful firms keep getting bigger, squeezing out the competition and cementing their dominance of the market.
In a free society where there are no firms and states owning everything for themselves, there would still be creative destruction, because people would still research and create; in fact, if they were free, they could create whatever they wanted, as opposed to whatever the market will pay for. But the destruction part would just be of outdated ideas and technology, not people’s lives. But we don’t live in a free society. We live in a world ruled by states on behalf of corporations.
Laws create monopoly
Have you ever heard “what’s good for GM is good for America”? I looked it up. It comes from Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, during senate hearings on whether or not to confirm Wilson, president of GM, as secretary of defense. “[S]ome senators took issue with the large amount of GM stock Wilson still held–about $2.5-million worth–and whether that would pose a conflict of interest with the secretary of defense position, especially considering that GM was one of the largest single contractors to the Defense Department at the time.” He said he couldn’t imagine a conflict of interest arising because he “thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” Maybe it was just a clever response to a tough question. But it revealed the very close relationship between corporation and state. To understand monopoly, we need to understand the state.
The state is, in fact, a bunch of monopolies. It’s a monopoly on making and enforcing laws and administering punishment to the noncompliant. It’s a monopoly on the territory it claims, which means, at least on paper, the state imposes its laws on all the people under its rule. It claims a monopoly on the land and therefore the resources within its borders. Nowadays, the state leases out a lot of that land, granting the people who pay the most the exclusive right to tear up the earth for resources. Some land goes to landlords, some to big corporations, which these days are sometimes the same thing.
Now, I don’t know the history of every industry or…any industry, but can you think of any that aren’t monopolies or oligopolies, with a few large firms that dominate and get special protection from the state? Being so concentrated makes it easy for corporations to lobby the state to pass favorable laws.
That’s pretty much why we have standing legislatures. The state intervenes in the market every day. They pass various laws and regulations to serve the winners and discourage potential players from even joining the game in the first place. Why enter the market when the odds of success are stacked against you? I mean, would you want to join a game of soccer if you had to play against Brazil? (In this analogy, the Brazilian team is a big corporation with a well-funded lobby.) Open Secrets reported $4b spent on lobbying in the US in 2022. Our so-called representatives meet with lobbyists from every industry. What do you think they do together? Well, we know some billionaires gave some of the most powerful people in the government lavish vacations and property so they would block a tax on wealth, so that gives us a clue. You’ll know from having read the books I suggested above in the past five minutes the value of regulations passed at the behest of the firms supposedly being regulated. Why lobby? Because that’s how to get rich without having to improve.
For people who think this is some modern anomaly and there is a kind of state that can work for the people, I’m sorry but there isn’t. States, even the state you like, exist and operate for the most powerful people in society. Their interests are usually in conflict with the people they rule. It might not be in your interest to subsidize oil companies or prevent new doctors from entering the market, but the decision makers do not have to answer to you.
The state is also a monopoly on handing out patents, which grant monopolies. You patent something, so no one else is allowed to use it without your permission. It’s just yours for decades. If there is no substitute for what you sell, you can charge pretty much anything. I want to say how many millions of people around the world have died just because they couldn’t afford life-saving drugs, but I don’t know how to calculate it. But when even the World Economic Forum calls you out for monopolistic practices, you know you’ve gone too far.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say patents are necessary for innovation. If I’m Mr Pzifer and I patent a drug and call it IH2BS, which helps against potentially fatal hadtobitis, now I have a patent, I don’t have to innovate anymore, because now I have a monopoly on this drug. If you can come up with a better formula, go ahead, but you might need teams of researchers, in which case you’re probably another big corporation, or a smaller firm working for a big one, so when it hits the market your drug isn’t likely to cost much less than mine. We’re an oligopoly.
And I might just get a university to do the heavy lifting on the research and then patent what they come up with. I might have to give a bit back to the university in royalties but at least I didn’t have to pay the people who did the work. Then when I charge huge amounts for the new drug, I’ll insist we have to charge that much because of all the R and D we do. If you can’t afford the drug, sorry! Guess you’ll have to die.
When you die because the property says so, that’s called structural violence. Do you need insulin? You are being gouged by structural violence. Insulin used to be free. Then capitalism happened to it.
When inventor Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1923, he refused to put his name on the patent. He felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that would save lives. Banting’s co-inventors, James Collip and Charles Best, sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a mere $1. They wanted everyone who needed their medication to be able to afford it.
Today, Banting and his colleagues would be spinning in their graves: Their drug, which many of the 30 million Americans with diabetes rely on, has become the poster child for pharmaceutical price gouging…. [O]ne in four people with diabetes are now skimping on or skipping lifesaving doses.
https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18293950/why-is-insulin-so-expensive
People think the obvious solution to all this is for the state to regulate business, but it already does. There are thousands of regulations governing each industry. That regulatory regime is what led to this situation.
And we still haven’t talked about the pharmaceutical industry’s ace in the hole: the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is a protectionist measure. I won’t go into detail in this video because I explain it all in the one I’m pointing to, but to sum it up, drugs are criminalized and the trade is policed so heavily because imprisoning and killing your competition on the taxpayer’s dollar might be necessary to maintain your monopoly.
War creates monopoly
The state and its violence have always been an integral part of the capitalist system. When monopolies or oligopolies control industries they can amass huge amounts of wealth, and with it, influence over the state. The state has expanded the scope of its power in line with the wishes of the wealthy (though it also has a measure of autonomy from them and can expand for other purposes). The main drivers of the past 500 years of history have been slavery, colonialism, imperialism and war, usually carried out either by business interests or states acting on their behalf. Force is how capitalism spreads. People who want to continue owning their own resources resist the expansion of capitalist property relations, where whoever has the most money owns the resources. Once capitalists feel they’ve taken everything they can at home, they want to invest abroad. But they might need the help of the state. If you want your money to grow past a certain point, you need people working for you who can overpower and enslave people in other parts of the world. Let’s look for examples down memory lane.
There’s the British East India Company, formed in 1600, which colonized large territories and populations all over Asia. The Dutch East India Company was formed by a merger in 1602 and granted a monopoly on trade in Asia, and also had colonies all over Asia. That’s not to be confused with the Dutch West India Company, which had a monopoly on trade in the Dutch West Indies and the Dutch Atlantic slave trade, or of course the French East India Company, or the Swedish East India Company. Notice these companies were chartered as monopolies to compete with other monopolies, because competition and monopoly exist side by side.
Now, I don’t know Indian history so I’ll have to take Wikipedia’s word for it, but did you know tens of millions of people starved to death in British India? How cruel an empire was it that there is a Wikipedia page called “timeline of major famines in India during British rule?” There were famines before British rule and a little afterwards, but British policy seems to have regularly turned unfavorable weather into disaster. As I go through the article for each major famine, I find some similarities. Let’s see…monopolies on grain… areas under British East India Company rule…in 1866, the state exported 200m pounds of rice to Britain while a million Indian people were starving…same deal 30 years later…same deal in 1943. Again, India is not my field, but it seems to me like the reason people went hungry was someone else owned their food supply. That’s structural violence. Property is defended by force, so if people who have the means of force at their disposal decide something is their property and you can’t afford it, well, you just can’t have it anymore. But you can starve to death knowing at least someone is getting rich.
Now that most of the world’s governments have aligned themselves with the US or at least integrated into the global capitalist system, there is less great-power rivalry. Sure, there is some, but just like rivalry among capitalists, states agree on the broad terms of the system they benefit from. They’re trying to outrun each other but they’re playing the same game. As a result, we don’t have world wars. We have a few border-crossing wars like Ukraine and Armenia and a lot of small wars, like more powerful states sending trainers, bombers or a few thousand soldiers, maybe to prop up one government or help with a coup against another. We don’t colonize anymore; we just install obedient governments.
People today say war, colonialism and imperialism aren’t financially worth it, because the state doesn’t recoup the money it spends on going to war or defending colonies. But that was never the point. The state appropriates social wealth to spend it on private interests. War, coups, trade embargoes, “structural adjustment” and whatever else it takes to subdue resisters are just policies well connected people can select from to line their pockets.
The US military has been at the employ of business interests for more than 200 years. Why do you think the US expanded to the shape it is now? Mostly, it was slavers who wanted more land for plantations using their power to get the US military to annex more land for them. Long before it finished expanding across the continent, the US was engaged in imperial ventures abroad. Since at least 1846, it has used its power to force open markets around the world, letting the highest bidder monopolize resources. Firms extract more wealth from more places and turn more people into landless workers, criminals and terrorists. I can suggest dozens of books for you to read on this subject but you could just listen to Smedley Butler, a senior Marine Corps Officer whose job was to break down barriers to capital expansion.
In addition, there are many corporations that lobby for war because they make money off any war. They get state contracts to be sole providers at huge markups, because part of the point of taking your money as tax is to give it to friends and partners of the state. Naturally, getting million- or billion-dollar contracts vastly improves your position in the market. States go to war to create and serve monopolies.
To wrap up, I know many people think the answer to the problems caused by capitalism is for the government to do something about the corporations. I don’t think it works that way, and I think history makes that lesson clear. Due to the extremely comfortable relationship between corporation and state, I think it would be a mistake to try to use one to take down the other. Both institutions need to be criticized, attacked and uprooted. I can do the criticizing part and so can you, but we’ll need to work together to do the rest.
The Rule of Freedom 