Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
And so the Democratic Party has gone and hoisted the flag of “socialism” on the mizzenmast of its foundering hulk as it sets sail for the edge of the world. Bad call by a ship without a captain, and I’ll tell you why. Socialism was the response to a particular set of circumstances in time that drove the rise of industrial societies. Those circumstances are going, going, gone.
The suspicion of industry’s dreadful effects on the human condition first sparked in the public imagination with William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem” in 1804 and its reference to England’s newly-built “dark satanic mills.” Industry at the grand scale overturned everyday life in the Euro-American “West” by the mid-19th century, and introduced a new kind of squalor for the masses, arguably worse than their former status as peasants.
And thus it was to be, through Karl Marx, Vlad Lenin, and the rest of the gang, ever-strategizing to somehow mitigate all that suffering. Their Big Idea was that if government owned the industry (the means of production), then the riches would be distributed equally among the laboring masses and the squalor eliminated. You can’t blame them for trying, though you can blame them for killing scores of millions of people who somehow got in the way of their plans.
Nobody had ever seen anything like this industry before, or had to figure out some way to deal with it, and it was such an enormous force in everyday life thereafter that it shattered human relationships with nature and the planet nature rode in on. Of course, the history of everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and we’re closer to the end of the industrial story than we are to the middle.
Which opens the door to a great quandary. If industrial society is disintegrating (literally), then what takes its place? Many suppose that it is a robotic utopia powered by some as-yet-unharnessed cosmic juice, a nirvana of algorithms, culminating in orgasm-without-end (Ray Kurzweil’s transhumanism). Personally, I would check the “no” box on that outcome as a likely scenario.
The self-proclaimed socialists are actually seeing the world through a rear-view mirror. What they are really talking about is divvying up the previously-accumulated wealth, soon to be bygone. Entropy is having its wicked way with that wealth, first by transmogrifying it into ever more abstract forms, and then by dissipating it as waste all over the planet. In short, the next time socialism is enlisted as a tool for redistributing wealth, we will make the unhappy discovery that most of that wealth is gone.
The process will be uncomfortably sharp and disorientating. The West especially will not know what hit it as it emergently self-reorganizes back into something that resembles the old-time feudalism. We have a new kind of mass squalor in America: a great many people who have nothing to do, no means of support, and the flimsiest notions of purpose in life. The socialists have no answers for them. They will not be “retrained” in some imagined federal crusade to turn meth freaks into code-writers for Google.
Something the analysts are calling “recession” is ploughing across the landscape like one of those darkly majestic dust-storms of the 1930s, only this time we won’t be able to re-fight anything like World War Two to get all the machines running again in the aftermath. Nor, of course, will the Make America Great Again fantasy work out for those waiting in the squalid ruins of the post-industrial rust-belt or the strip-mall wastelands of the Sunbelt.
Most of the beliefs and attitudes of the present day will be overturned with the demise of the industrial orgy, like the idea that humanity follows an unerring arc of progress, that men and women are interchangeable and can do exactly the same work, that society should not be hierarchical, that technology will rescue us, and that we can organize some political work-arounds to avoid the pain of universal contraction.
There are no coherent ideas in the political arena just now. Our prospects are really too alarming. So, jump on-board the socialism ship and see if it makes you feel better to sail to the end of the earth. But mind the gap at the very edge. It’s a doozie.
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What if rap, country, and rock music was really garbage now and the only reason people like it is that the elites keep pushing it to keep the 99% brainwashed and distracted by bread and circuses?
Does anyone find the fact that every song is about sex instead of morals, war, debt, and tyranny to be a bit odd?
What if..? Are you fucking retarded? The only reason people, and I use that term very loosely, still listen to that corporatist acoustic abortion is because they are never exposed to decent music. Here’s a few to try out: Melody Gardot, Acoustic Alchemy, Thelonius Monk. Go forth and be released from artistic bondage forevermore.
Not odd at all. The more I read Miles W. Mathis the more I realize how utterly hijacked and controlled both Art and Science are. Forget about fake news for a minute, forget about fake CEOs and fake politicians for a minute, and ponder fake art and fake science.
For anyone who is still listening, I just finished reading his paper on Waco for the second time. Absolutely mind-bending, yet so simple and straightforward.
http://mileswmathis.com/waco.pdf
Submit it as an article with your own analysis please.
Love Miles Mathis!
Yep, 70s music was rife with lyrics about war and shit.
There are plenty of bands calling this shit out….
I’ve not been to the USA for 20+ years, so my perspective on its condition is limited, but even so, it’s difficult for me to imagine that after a genuine financial crisis it would revert “back into something that resembles the old-time feudalism”. Easier for me to imagine is a situation in which basic industry would by default require rebuilding, a painful but possible process. The accumulated knowledge of the industrial process and all that it requires is not going to vanish into thin air like debt-based currency can.
The USA will not be invaded by another industrial power simply because those powers will be occupied by their own re-set difficulties. Computers and the internet will not disappear and national mobilization will be easier to effect than was the case earlier. Keeping food on the table, the lights on, a population living in a back-to-basics mindset will put paid to large central governments and ALL subjective political nonsense that is superfluous in a bare-bones situation.
Yes, the USA of today isn’t my grandpa’s, or my father’s or even my own USA, but I believe the human capital still exists there to make America if not “great” again, at the very least a semblance of what the USA was well beyond the beginnings of the industrial age. I certainly hope so!
If the reset is bad enough, there will be a lot of people die of starvation and war. A few like HSF will make it through. My parents and my in laws knew how to feed themselves during the 1930’s. Not to many of those around these days. The asphalt jungles will be terrible.
Somehow, I don’t think it will come to that, or at least I hope not! I live in Argentina, where a financial collapse took place in 2001-2002, and while the capital city was fairly chaotic, I’m told by my friends here in the rural area in which I live that things weren’t all that bad. I arrived here in Jan 2004 and even the capital was calm by then. Things were what pass for normal in this country and I felt perfectly safe walking in the city center at two in the morning. People are more resilient than we often credit ourselves for being, and I imagine that’s still especially true in the USA. I still believe folks will rise to meet a crisis, particularly if they’ve made preparations for a potential crisis. The ideal of total collapse just doesn’t seem convincing.
Slight quibble with JHK. “…the Democratic Party has gone and hoisted the flag of “socialism” on the mizzenmast”.
It looks much more like the mainmast to me.
“…a great many people who have nothing to do, no means of support, and the flimsiest notions of purpose in life. The socialists have no answers for them. They will not be “retrained” in some imagined federal crusade to turn meth freaks into code-writers for Google.” True dat.
No, it’s the mizzen. They’ve run up the Jolly Roger on the main’s halyard. Stupid commies though, they thought a flag works the same as a sail, which is why they’re going NOWHERE. It’s what happens when you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing but trying desperately to signal that you do. And where does this end them up? IN IRONS. As it should be.
Serious question here. What’s worse? Perhaps better stated, which is sillier?
The notion that true socialism in America is feasable, or the notion that restoring the Republic to say, some pollyanna vision of the late 1950s is possible?
The 1950’s are gonna return whether we want it to or not. If we are lucky, our regression only stops there and not, say, in 1850.
I would gladly settle for Chrome plated Automobiles and Chrome plated soda fountains.
Just imagine if a republican ran on an “anti-crony-capitalism” platform that included massive cuts in government power over the economy, money supply, freedom, etc. and the abolition of any and all means for government to pick winners and loser in the market. Yeah, like he/she would ever have a chance….
Jim: I think what replaces modern civilization is a new form of localism built from the ground up. It is already in full swing with thousands or perhaps tens of thousand intentional communities around the world that are experimenting with off the grid living, local self-reliance and living in harmony with nature. These are the seeds of a new civilization, they are the remnants who understand.
Maybe a tad OT but this is where we are at the moment with these clowns in congress who not even come close to qualify as adults; this mindless badgering would hardly be found on a 6-yr old playground.
http://wwwtheworldandeverythinginit.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-craziest-hearing-ever.html
The Democrats are running a presidential campaign fishing for issues that will sell. It is a repeat of the plan used in 2008. Lots of unknowns floating trial balloons from Medicare for all to free college to killing babies after the are born. Remember taxing people who made 250,000/yr just a little more from John Edwards? They will sort out the things that voters think are to radical and concentrate on the issues that will sell.
Most of those Demoncrats running for president know they don’t have a snoballs chance in hell. They are just an excuse for the media to cover while the unknown” Chosen One” gets a lot of free advertising. In 2 008 it happened to be a Kenyan transvestite.
In the meantime, the Republicans will continue to play their parts as the Globetrotters opponent the Washington Generals. They will be led by their stars Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.
“Most of the beliefs and attitudes of the present day will be overturned with the demise of the industrial orgy, like the idea that humanity follows an unerring arc of progress, that men and women are interchangeable and can do exactly the same work, that society should not be hierarchical, that technology will rescue us, and that we can organize some political work-arounds to avoid the pain of universal contraction.”
BOOM BOOM BOOM !
PREY!
Or PRAY!
Perhaps a new mantra for the continuing “reset”: “sucks to be young”.