The Civil Rights Movement:
I’m sure we all know the basic background to the Civil Rights Movement. First we had slavery, then we had the Civil War, then we had Reconstruction, then we had sharecropping and segregation, then we had the desegregation of schools, the bus boycott, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, Dr. King and Malcolm X’s assassinations, and then a whole bunch of people trying to following Dr. King and Malcolm X’s footsteps, but none able to fill their shoes. Now we have Jesse Jackson.
Now here are some details that most people haven’t heard about…
The Abolition of White Democracy by Professor Joel Olson is a good book on the history of race relations in America since the end of the Civil War. It’s basically a real-life version of my story of Rex and his toy empire, and it shows a lot of patterns that apply to the relations between any two groups when one is a majority and the other a minority.
First of all, slavery was an 8,000-year old tradition by the time the Europeans came to the Americas. Slavery in the Americas began with indentured servitude, under which materially wealthy Americans would pay for the ocean passage for Irish peasants. Then the Irish would have to work for the Americans for three years to pay them back. Naturally, these materially wealthy Americans were doing this to make a profit, so the amount of work they were getting out of their indentured servants was way the hell more than their passage aboard the ship had cost.
There was just one problem. The Irish looked just like all the other White settlers, so it was really easy for them to run away. So those materially wealthy Americans looked for another way to get a lot of work out of people as cheaply as they could.
These materially wealthy Americans tried enslaving Native Americans. They were conquering the people’s lands after all, so they needed something to do with all the Native Americans. But that didn’t work because the Native Americans were never very cooperative. I’m guessing maybe they hated the White conquerors too much to be willing to work for them, or maybe they had too much of a problem being forced to work on the land they used to live on, or maybe they were too familiar with local geography so they could escape really easily, or maybe they had too much practice at fighting Whites already and were able to organize escapes too easily, or maybe all of the above. Whatever the case, enslaving Native Americans just didn’t work very well.
So the slave owners tried something else. They started buying their slaves from African slave traders. That gave them something no one had ever had before in European history. They racialized slavery. Now they made one race the slaves and another race the slave owners, so now you could tell who was supposed to be a slave and who wasn’t just by looking at them.
Racializing slavery also created something else new. Not all Whites owned slaves. Now that slavery had been racialized, the materially wealthy White slave owners had created something completely artificial that White workers could earn without the slave owners having to pay them for. Now the White workers could work for the sake of proving that they weren’t slaves. By creating a racial social tier of slaves, they also created a racial social tier of non-slaves. Membership in the White workers’ tier meant that no matter what, there would always be someone below you that you could look down upon, but there would also be people above you that you could look up to.
This created a sensory illusion that the slave-owners took advantage of. The White workers and the Black workers were all workers, which meant they had a lot in common. But the White slave-owners looked more like the White workers. Out of the three groups, two were mortal enemies. Karl Marx and Fredreich Engles published The Communist Manifesto just 13 years before the American Civil War started. If the White workers had banded together with the Black workers, the workers could’ve won.
Instead, the White workers fell for the sensory illusion. The easiest way for them to identify with people from another group was the same way it’s been easiest for anyone to identify with anyone for all of human evolution—by who looked like them. That solidified the Whites as one group and the Blacks as another group. That made it really easy to tell who was crossing over to collaborate with the other group. And that made it really easy to expose that person as a traitor to their side. So that discouraged anyone from collaborating with the other side in a big way.
Despite what they teach you in history class, the 13th Amendment didn’t free a single slave. It specified that all the slaves in states that were in open rebellion against the United States were freed. But at the time the 13th Amendment was written, those states all belonged to a different country, so the U.S. Constitution didn’t apply to them, and neither did Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Maryland and Delaware were also slave states, but they stayed with the Union. So Abraham Lincoln didn’t free their slaves with the 13th Amendment, for fear he’d drive them over to the Confederates’ side. Washington D.C. is bordered by Virginia to the south and Maryland to the north, and General Lee had been trying to capture Washington ever since the war began. If Maryland had joined the Confederates, Washington D.C. would’ve been surrounded by the Confederates automatically.
My point is, the 13th Amendment illustrates all too clearly that President Lincoln faced the same basic problem that General Lee faced. General Lee was smart enough to figure out what an advantage rifles gave to defenders, but he knew that most of his men weren’t, so in order to keep his army functioning, he had to try winning with the old battlefield tactics. If he’d told them to fight defensively only, the Confederate soldiers would’ve felt like he was a coward. They wouldn’t’ve felt like cowards, and they wouldn’t’ve wanted to fight like cowards, so morale would’ve suffered, there would’ve been a lot of conflict within the ranks, people would’ve disobeyed orders, and sooner or later someone would try to replace him or get him replaced. So General Lee had to fight in a way that his men felt would succeed.
President Lincoln’s version of this problem was that no matter how kind-hearted he was, he obviously had good reason to believe that the slave owners in Delaware and Maryland cared more about owning slaves, and therefore owning cheap labor, than they cared about the Union. This makes it pretty clear that it was President Lincoln, and not the Northerners as a whole, who cared so much about freeing the slaves. The Capitalist aristocrats cared about what Capitalists have always cared about—the control of Capital. Even when it’s human capital, and even when it means joining an armed rebellion against their own country. How else can it be that President Lincoln, who we all remember so well for having freed the slaves, in his historical act of freeing all the slaves, didn’t actually dare to free a single one of them?
(And that raises the further question: Why don’t they teach anyone about this in public school? Maybe because our politicians don’t want our kids to learn about this historical proof that Capitalists are a threat to national security?)
Even after the Civil War, slavery was only nominally ended. Now the Blacks had to rent their farmland from White landowners and pay for it out of their crops—hence the term sharecropping. They weren’t slaves anymore, now they were serfs with a few more token rights than serfs had in Medieval Europe. They could go to school and learn how to read now, but thanks to segregation they couldn’t go to as good of schools as the Whites did. And of course, the Whites did all they could to prevent them from voting, like trying to reserve the right to vote for property owners, giving people literacy tests, and making them pay voting fees. (When things like that happen to Black voters in the old Confederacy today, it’s called “voter disenfranchisement”.)
So Blacks were legally free now but they still lived in forced poverty. You saw what happened in the African village when it took all the work energy the people had just to survive from one day to the next. Now the Whites were forcing the Blacks to expend all the work energy they had just to stay alive from one day to the next. If the Whites could keep the Blacks underrepresented in elections, they could keep them politically powerless, or close to it. If they could prevent them from getting good educations they could keep most of them from ever learning how to do anything but farm. Then they would never be a match for the Whites politically or economically, so they could never threaten their cultural and societal dominance.
The cultural tradition of Whites hating Blacks wasn’t something that could be outlawed. Sociologically it was the Whites’ cultural background by now, and as individuals it was their personal belief. So now our political system said that Blacks were equal to Whites, but the Whites themselves still said Blacks were inferior.
Before the Civil War, White workers were separated from the Black workers by that line of slavery. The White workers could identify themselves as non-slaves, and therefore had two things in common with the Capitalists just by virtue of their membership in the White race: their skin color and their free status. That guaranteed them that no matter what, there would always be another group below them in the social hierarchy. So given the choice, which other group did they want to make the best impression on? The one below them? Or the one above them?
The emancipation of the slaves did nothing to change that. There were still the same three groups in the south: the White land owners, the White workers, and the Black workers. They still had the same social hierarchy. The White landowners still thought themselves superior and thought the Blacks a threat, and the White workers were still trying to make the best impression on the White landowners. Depending on how you want to look at it—and I’m sure it affected some people one way and some the other—being a White worker gave you one of two things. Either it gave you the chance to work for the sake of earning the completely artificial, imaginary currency of proving you weren’t an untrustworthy Black worker, or it gave you the chance to prove your loyalty to the White land owners. But in order to prove your loyalty to the White land owners, you had to work extra hard, and you had to help oppress the Blacks. After the war, White slave-owners racializing slavery so long ago still created an artificial motivation for the White workers to work harder, not for the sake of earning more money, but for the sake of earning the artificial currency of membership in the non-slave—now non-Black-worker—group.
The forced poverty and political marginalization of the Blacks reinforced this, in spite of what the Constitution said. The Whites perceived the Blacks as a threat and acted accordingly, so the Blacks perceived the Whites as a threat. That only made the Whites continue to perceive the Blacks as a threat, and the cycle continued. The Blacks were uneducated, that that made them seem dumber and less cultured than the Whites—also known as “less human”.
This is yet another example of Capitalists using divide and conquer tactics against Labor to eliminate Labor as competition before they even get the chance to compete. To paraphrase Professor Olson: Black is a culture. White is an economic system.
This racialized economic system still exists today. It’s particularly noticeable in the old Confederacy, but you can find it all over America. And Capitalists are still profiting from it. If Whites still see Blacks as dumb, uncultured criminals, and the people who own media outlets help to propagate that stereotype, then Whites are going to continue to feel threatened by Blacks, and are going to continue to keep themselves safe from them. In so doing, they’re going to act just the same way the White slave owners of centuries past wanted them to act, to oppress the Blacks. And if the Whites continue to oppress Blacks with their actions, even if they don’t mean to and don’t realize they’re doing it, then the Blacks will still perceive the Whites as a threat and will act accordingly.
Here in the desert, this is exactly what’s happening now between Whites and Mexicans.
This racialized three-tier socio-economic hierarchy is a lot more than skin deep now. Now Blackness has become not just a race but a culture. Now everyone is free (but some more than others) to try to move up in the socio-economic hierarchy. All over America now, the White landowner, White worker, and Black worker tiers are pretty much synonymous with upper class, middle class, and lower class. If you act Black, everyone in America is pretty well guaranteed to see you as lower class. And if you act Black, it’s a pretty safe bet that there’s a reason you’re trying to fit in with what everyone perceives to be the lower class. There are any number of ways that people can act upon their perceptions of someone else as lower class, and there are any number of reasons people can want to identify with what everyone else perceives to be the lower class. But I think Tom Friedman put it best in The World Is Flat. He said something along the lines of: “Class isn’t an economic level, but a state of mind. The biggest difference between lower class and middle class is not their income. The biggest difference is that middle class people have hope for the future and lower class people don’t.”
I think there’s something to be said for that, although not quite in the way he meant it. A lot of lower class people are lower class because they’ve given up. That would explain why a lot of people act Black because they want to identify with what everyone else perceives to be the lower class. But in the town I grew up in, most people were lower class according to the IRS, but none of them acted Black. Granted, we didn’t have MTV back then, so nobody had any exposure to Black culture. But that’s not the point. The point is, they acted like White workers who were trying to make the best impressions on White landowners. Some were trying harder than other, and some weren’t trying very hard at all. But the crucial part was: Maintaining their cultural identity did not depend on maintaining hostility toward the White landowner culture.
In other places people define cultural boundaries in other ways. In England they use accents: Queen’s English versus Cockney. Which group do you try to sound more like?
Anyway, here in America, everyone is free (more or less) to try to climb up the socio-economic hierarchy. But if you want to do it, you have to act White. If you act Black, a lot of people are going to think a whole lot less of you and not offer you jobs and call the police when they see you walking down their street, or whatever. That’s even true for White people who act Black now, but it’s even more true for Black people who act Black. Also for non-White and non-Black people who act Black. White skin still helps you act White without your doing anything; Black skin helps keep you Black without your doing anything. Of course, the clothing style and hairstyle you pick out for yourself contributes to other people’s perception of your cultural group also. And if you’re dark-skinned but not Black, then you’re somewhere in between White and Black. You’re not automatically White or automatically Black, but you’re somewhere on the continuum between the two. You can act like a White worker or you can act like a Black worker or you can act like a White landowner. Here in America those are your choices.
Whichever one you act most like will determine the information package you pull out of the subconsciousness of the people you meet. That will determine what they expect you to act like, and what they’ll notice most about you. If you confirm their expectations about you, they’ll remember that strongly, and if you don’t confirm their expectations, they won’t remember that as strongly. Of course, these cultural traits aren’t determined by skin color anymore; now skin color is just one trait among many—but a very important trait for some people.
Finally we get to the life of Dr. King. There are two important things that few people ever learn about him because they aren’t taught in public school and the mainstream media never mentions them.
The first is that Dr. King was the good cop of the Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm X was the bad cop. The Civil Rights Movement as we’ve known it owes a lot to Malcolm X, because he offered Blacks a choice. If Dr. King had been in it on his own, the Civil Rights Movement wouldn’t be what we remember it as. By himself he would’ve just been some guy who had a lot of opinions that a lot of people agreed with. In strictly Capitalistic terms, he was creating a demand for something, so the sensible Capitalist thing to do would’ve been to cash in on it and offer people what they wanted. But if that was all the Civil Rights Movement had behind it, it would still be owned by the Capitalists, because its success still would’ve depended on Capitalists offering everyone else what they were demanding. If their demands became more than the Capitalists were willing to part with, the Capitalists could still defeat them by refusing to supply for their demands. Meanwhile, the Capitalists could also undercut the Civil Rights Movement by offering people the superficial appearance of supplying for their demands, even though they had divorced that appearance from its original content. Go to any mall in America now and you’ll see what I mean. Capitalists buy and sell Blackness now, along with every other symbol of rebelliousness that’s ever been invented.
Now enter Malcolm X. Malcolm X, to a large extent, took the decision of whether or not to cooperate with Dr. King out of the Whites’ hands. Between Dr. King and Malcolm X, the Whites were now trapped between a rock and a hard place. Malcolm X gave the Blacks another choice in how to empower themselves to get what they wanted, and forced the Whites to realize the Blacks had another choice—just like the No Borders movement is giving Mexicans an alternative to the die-in-the-desert economy and the Arizona Counter Recruitment Coalition offers kids alternatives to joining the military. Now that Blacks had the choice between Dr. King’s version of Civil Rights and Malcolm X’s version, the Whites no longer had the choice of whether to help Dr. King or not to help him. Now their choice had been reduced to giving Dr. King what he wanted, or take their chances on Malcolm X taking what he wanted. Once again, by giving everyone a choice, and everyone then making a choice, Malcolm X created a political system that was truly of the people. Everyone involved was attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them. When Malcolm X joined the Civil Rights Movement in his own way, he made the Blacks perceive a backup plan for preserving the survival of their DNA, and he made the Whites perceive that the Blacks perceived that they now had a back-up plan. By giving the Blacks more choices in ways to preserve the survival of their DNA, he gave their oppressors fewer choices. When the Blacks acted within their new range of possibilities and the Whites acted within their new range of possibilities, the Blacks won more than they would’ve if both sides had acted within their previous ranges of possibilities.
The other important thing that few people know about the life of Dr. King was that toward the end he was becoming a Socialist. Everyone in America has heard his I Have a Dream speech, and considers that the high point of his life. Then James Earl Ray shot him. But that wasn’t until five years later.
Before he died, Dr. King started drafting what he called the Economic Bill of Rights. He intended that to be a step taken by the government to guarantee an acceptable minimum standard of living for Americans. And as we all know, our government is the embodiment of the agreement made among the people to work together to provide for their common interests and to work together to protect themselves from those who would harm them. That makes a government of, by, and for the people the foundation of any socialist society.
There are two important lessons that can be learned from the history of the Civil Rights Movement before I move on to the Civil Rights Movement of today.
The first is that Blacks won the right to vote before women did. When women were struggling for the right to vote, a big argument they made was that letting women vote would give White voters a big advantage over Black voters. If the women really wanted to challenge White male dominance, they could’ve joined forces with the Blacks instead. But instead they broke their potential big revolution into a bunch of small revolutions competing with each other. Naturally, the people of the Globalization 4.0 movement have learned from this mistake—or at least, are trying to—and develop a political ideology that’s universally inclusive so they can work together, or at the very least, keep from working against each other.
The second is: Watch how conservatives talk about Dr. King today, and it’s a perfect lesson in how childhood development and cultural background shape information and anti-information packages. On Dr. King Day of 2007, I remember hearing or reading something about how much President Bush was praising Dr. King’s contributions to America. President Bush, as you will recall, is a conservative. That means he prefers hanging onto old ideas over adapting to new ideas. 40 years ago, conservatives, especially ones from southern states like Texas, thought all them damn niggers marching down their streets must be a sign of the end of the world. So what did they do? They fought tooth and nail to make them stop, so they could make their society continue to function the way they were used to it functioning. They called out the riot police and brought out their attack dogs and turned on their fire hoses.
But it didn’t work. So now something new was happening in society, despite the best efforts of the conservatives to prevent it.
That was then. This is now. If President Bush had been governor of Texas 40 years ago, what do you think he would’ve done if Dr. King came to Austin and given a speech in front of the state capitol building? Called out the National Guard?
But if you asked President Bush about it now, what would he say? Well first of all he’d never admit to the possibility that he, as a conservative, would’ve been a racist back when the south was still segregated and the majority of voters were White racists. But would he even realize the contradiction in what he was saying? Of course not, because he believes that evolution is bullsh*t, which includes evolutionary mechanisms of childhood development, and for that matter, the anti-information package he would be using right then and there while he was talking to you. He would assure you that his god would’ve guided him to do the right thing then as now.
Even if he was willing to admit that he would’ve been a racist, and even if he could imagine the possibility that he could be a racist if he had been born in another time, his biggest blind spot of all would be his not noticing that conservativism itself is a gigantic anti-information package. Forty years ago, President Bush would’ve fought Dr. King tooth and nail because he was trying to preserve the conservative values Dr. King was threatening. Now he’s conserving cultural values today by praising Dr. King because Dr. King created the cultural values we have now.
So my question is: Why the f*ck did anyone ever elect President Bush to be the leader of our country when he’s nothing but a f*cking follower?
And of course, the same goes for all conservatives. If it didn’t apply to them, they wouldn’t be conservatives, would they?
And by the way, do you think President Bush ever praised Dr. King’s Socialist values, or said anything about his Economic Bill of Rights? Of course not.
Today, the Civil Rights Movement has split into two main branches.
The first is what looks at first glance to be the direct descendant of Dr. King’s movement. And the reason it looks that way is because it’s made up of conservative followers of Dr. King, still trying to follow where he had led them as of 40 years ago, and making a few minor improvements of their own. I must say, it’s sad to see.
In 2006, before the elections, I was walking out of a grocery story one day when a Black guy who was standing outside asked me if I would like to sign some petitions he had. He had about a dozen, for all kinds of different things, from smokers’ rights to the environment. I signed them all… until I got to the last one. That one was for a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I just about threw that one back in his face.
So there he was, a Black man trying to prevent other people’s civil rights from being recognized.
The conservative side of the modern Civil Rights Movement isn’t going to get much further. I can say that because they’re trying to act like Whites so they can get ahead in a civilization that isn’t going to get much further.
Blacks as a culture aren’t so much “progressive” as they are “a different culture from the Whites, who are trying to get ahead in the world”. They’re conservatives for the same reason any group of materially poor people is more conservative than people who have more material wealth: because as individuals or as groups, the less economic safety net you have, the fewer chances you can afford to take. With all their Black soul I’m sure they can win a lot of popular support by making people feel like they’re right. But no matter how far they get this way, they’re still opposing fundamental laws of the universe. A suicidal economic system is still a suicidal economic system, no matter what group of people are using it.
It doesn’t help that the Civil Rights Movement began in Black churches. The conservative followers of Dr. King still depend on religion to give them their sense of how the world works. That means they’re still trying to pit religious faith against religious faith. They can win simple emotional aikido duels that way, and they can even attract enough followers to win victories by plain old might-makes-right. But they still aren’t fighting in a way that’s ever going to let them win, because victory through might-makes-right can only be maintained through a constant input of energy from the victors. As long as your enemies believe they’re right, they’ll never stop looking for a way to fight back. So even if the conservative Civil Rights activists were using an economic system that could survive the laws of physics, they still couldn’t get very far, because the further they push, the harder their opponents will push back.
That brings me to the Globalization 4.0 side of the Civil Rights Movement…
Anarchism is the embodiment of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the highest priorities of the Anarchist movement is to systematically seek and destroy all forms of authoritarianism.
Anarchism had been around for a century before Dr. King got his start. So if he’d lived, there were a lot more ideas he could’ve found out about and put to use, or at the very least, a lot more ideas he could’ve rediscovered on his own.
Anarchism is different from the conservative Civil Rights Movement in two main ways. First of all, it’s the Civil Rights Movement applied to everyone in the entire world. Second, it doesn’t depend on any governmental apparatus at all for its success.
Anyone’s lack of civil rights is caused by someone else wielding the power, in one way or another, to prevent that person from exercising their civil rights. So if you eliminate the source of that person’s power, what will remain are the other person’s civil rights.
The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement doesn’t depend on governmental apparatus for its success for the simple reason that any people’s movement that depends on governmental apparatus for its success is not a people’s movement. If your civil rights depend on the government to protect them, what you have are not civil rights, they’re governmental rights, or something like that. Or you could say that you don’t have civil rights, the government has your civil rights. And that’s still a form of authoritarianism, because you’re giving government officials the choice in whether or not to protect your civil rights.
The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement is waged in two main directions. First of all, education of both the oppressors and the oppressed. As Prof. Olson points out in his book, democracy all by itself is not an end to oppression; it’s just the concealment of oppression. If a majority of voters believes themselves to be superior to the minority and votes accordingly, all you’ve done is to democratize your oppression. Now you can say that the government isn’t oppressing the minority people anymore, because they’ve given them the right to vote. And if their problems still aren’t getting solved, it must be the people’s fault—because they really are inferior just like the majority said all along.
Solving that problem depends on educating everyone about the situation and how it affects them. Things like human equality and why the two groups seem so different from each other. I’ve written almost a million words on the topic of human equality by now, so let’s just pretend I’ve got this one covered.
Second, the empowerment of the oppressed. I’ve given you three examples of that in this chapter so far. That means giving the people choices, or helping them find choices, or whatever, as long as they end up with a choice of actions they can pursue to benefit themselves in the end. A lot of times oppressed people need help getting started, but once you show them one way out of their situation, they’ll start thinking of lots more. Oppressed people aren’t stupid, but it’s really easy for people who are stuck in a seemingly hopeless situation to get so focused on doing what they have to do to survive that they miss out on opportunities to break out of their ruts.
Empowering oppressed people says nothing what so ever about empowering them in a way their oppressors will approve of. If you are empowering the oppressed people in any meaningful way at all, their oppressors are guaranteed not to approve of it. If their oppressors do approve of it, you’re not empowering the oppressed people; you’re only giving them the feeling of empowerment, while obviously leaving the oppressors in control of the situation. If you don’t threaten the oppressors, you aren’t truly empowering the oppressed.
Hence my reason for saying earlier in this chapter that solving problems facing the world is almost guaranteed to require breaking a lot of laws. The laws are written by the oppressors, after all, so you can assume they’re written to help propagate their oppression.
The Globalization 4.0 Civil Rights Movement is a movement for racial equality, gender equality, sexuality equality, economic equality, religious equality, and political equality. Anything that makes people unequal is a valid target.
Well guess what. Capitalism depends on inequality. Capitalism is inherently authoritarian. I’ve already told you this part. Once you define a certain thing as your “own”, you give yourself control over how the thing can and can’t be used, and you prevent anyone else from deciding how the thing will or won’t be used. You can then use your control of the thing to control the actions of the people who need it.
Maintaining an economic system built on inequality depends on supporting a lot of non-food producing people who can devote all their labor to enforcing that inequality. Namely, police. I’ve already told you that part too.
In a world with an increasing population, diminishing material resources, and a suicidal economic system, which is what we have now, anyone who controls material resources that other people need to live can be expected to use the material resources for their own benefit. Likewise, they can be expected to use the control those material resources give them over other people for their own benefit. And if you control other people, you eliminate their civil rights.
So consider this alternative: If you teach everyone how to be economically self sufficient, which I talked about in the last book, you solve the problem of people being able to control other people through their control of material resources. If you make everyone economically independent, then you make everyone an economic system of one. You then empower everyone to join in whatever larger economic group they perceive best benefits them. I laid out that basic idea with my consumer-driven serfdom economy of my mythical town of the Empire of Niesen in the first book. This isn’t perfect, because farmers depend on their land for their economic security, so they can’t move anywhere that suits them, and labor learns certain job skills and not other job skills, so they can’t just choose to do any job. But to the extent that it is possible to make everyone economically independent, that’s the basic idea. If everyone is economically independent, you can’t have an oppressive economic system, because people aren’t going to choose to oppress themselves.
Also, if you teach everyone why our current economic system can’t possibly survive—namely, because it defies the laws of physics—and you teach everyone how to build an economic system that can physically survive, you’ve solved the problem of our suicidal economic system. Or at least, you’ve taken the first step toward solving it. Because guess what: Nobody participates in a suicidal economic system that requires them to kill themselves! Think about it. The only reason anyone would want to participate in a suicidal economic system is because they have the power to make that economic system work in a way that will make other people die, not themselves. So when I compare Capitalism to Fascism, I hope you can see why I’m not exaggerating.
Solving the problem of our suicidal economy depends on everyone learning how to be economically self-sufficient. Until then, workers won’t wield enough power to solve it, and the Capitalists who do wield enough power to solve it won’t have any reason to solve it. They’ll just go right on doing what they’ve always done, and try to get ahead in their competitive economy by competing against the people who are easiest to beat.
It’s inconceivable that global environmental sustainability can be achieved literally Anarchistically, because making the chemical reaction of the global environment work in a way that can keep everyone alive will depend on a lot of worldwide coordination. That will depend on a decision-making body that can make the necessary decisions fast enough. But that decision-making body can never be built without everyone learning to be economically self-sufficient, and learning enough about how the physical world works to understand why this decision-making body is being created, after you’ve done so much to systematically seek and destroy authoritarian power structures. The Communists in the Soviet Union tried appointing a centralized decision-making body, and that failed for a lot of reasons. The decision-making body would have to understand how the physical world actually works, which the Communists didn’t. The people who made up the decision-making body would also have to know how to be Anarchists, so they would know how to wield the power they needed to be entrusted with without using it to oppress anyone. The Communists obviously didn’t do that. The people of the decision-making body would have to educate everyone about everything they were doing, if that hadn’t been done already. They would have to make all of their work available to the public, and they would have to teach everyone a working understanding of what they were doing and how they were doing it. The goal of this decision-making body would be to coordinate everyone’s cooperation. In all likelihood they would wield some amount of authoritarian power as a byproduct of their need to coordinate people’s cooperation as efficiently as it needed to be coordinated to prevent global environmental catastrophe. Once again, the Communists didn’t do this. Finally, the decision-making body would need to make accurate predictions in solving the problem. If the decision-making body can’t make accurate predictions, then there’s no point in having it. The Communists didn’t do this either. Neither did the Capitalists, for that matter. We already have a decision-making body that can’t make accurate predictions. It’s called the U.S. government.
As you can see, the Civil Rights Movement is inseparable from the environmental and peace movements. If you have a war, you violate people’s civil rights by definition. If you practice a suicidal economy, it’s inevitable that people’s civil rights are going to be violated.
All of this is elementary to the Globalization 4.0 movement.
Before I end this section, here’s an update on the Civil Rights Movement in South Africa—also known as the anti-apartheid movement. Courtesy of my South African friends.
The White apartheid was a racialized economic system, which worked pretty much the same as the racialized economic system of the old Confederacy during segregation. The Whites maintained their political power by enforcing poverty on the Blacks.
Now that apartheid has ended in South Africa, according to my friends, the only thing that’s changed is the color of the managers. Blacks have the same legal rights as Whites now, but the economic system as it existed under apartheid was left intact. That is, Blacks have the right to own businesses or whatever now, but there was no redistribution of resources. They kept their definition of “rightful ownership”, so the Whites still control the economy, and by extension, the political system—only unofficially now.
They’ve done this by putting a wall of Black people who are really good at PR between themselves and the rest of the Blacks—just like Capitalist pigs here in America hire phone operators who are really good at being polite to answer all your phone calls and make you feel like everything that’s gone wrong with your internet service is your fault. The end result is that they still have economic apartheid at least, but the Blacks can’t call it that anymore, because now it’s being enforced by other Blacks who work for the Whites, not by the Whites themselves.
So there’s yet another example of Capitalists who aren’t competing for the sake of encouraging innovation but for the sake of winning the competition and eliminating their competitors.