It Turns On Power: A Schematic Distinguishing the Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle from Futurological Anti-Politics

The Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle, Peer to Peer

A. Power Construed As Experience of Possibility

B. Political Rationality --> Yields emphasis on Open Futurity ineradicably inhering in present/presence, peer to peer --> history as ongoing, interminable social struggle

(prone to emphasize political dimensions of scientific research and technological application and to embed developmental claims in social and historical specificities)

C. Characterized by Dissensus, Dependent on Consent

(collaboration and contestation are matters of improvisation within enabling constraints)

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The Anti-Politics of Futurological "Enhancement" and Post-Human Ascension

A. Power Construed As Amplification of Capacities

B. Instrumental Rationality --> Yields emphasis on "The Future" as destination/destiny --> history as causal playing out of material forces, usually superhuman ones

(prone to technological determinisms and "natural progressivisms" recasting difference from parochial norms as atavisms)

C. Characterized by Consensus, Dependent on Dissent

(prediction and control enabled by warranted scientific beliefs which attract consensus after being put to test)

This is a schema and not an essay, so I'll keep the comments brief. You'll notice that the error of the futurological vantage in my view is its misapplication to political and historical domains of technoscientific assumptions and aspirations that are perfectly valid, indeed indispensable, in their proper domain. I daresay the futurologists will dismiss this schema as a hatchet job since I am the one coming up with it, but I really am striving to be fair here, to get at key differences between my perspective and theirs to help account for the many other points of contention that play out in my critiques and lampoons. After all, I would expect many of the futurologists I endlessly decry and critique here would actually dismiss my affirmed position as "postmodern relativism" outright and decry what they see as my own misapplication to history of what I am calling a Political Rationality while they would affirm precisely the sorts of structural/material accounts I am attributing to them. No doubt they would be less cheerful about the distinction of (my) open futurity from (their) "The Future." But this would mostly be because "openness" is a buzzword signaling subcultural membership for many of them (this buzzword has an interesting history, by the way, originating in especially Hayek's refiguration of market processes as "natural," whatever their enabling legal ritual artifice, "nonviolent," whatever the misinformation, exploitation, duress that characterize them, and "open," however constrained and constraining they are in fact, a rhetorical program that has been an incredible success to the distress of the world, and ramified into endless futurological discourses of "spontaneous order" and of disastrously deranging misapplications of evolutionary processes to every imaginable historical and cultural phenomenon). However, I honestly do not agree that many of these "advocates of openness" take on board the radical contingency, uncertainty, situatedness implied by my understanding of open futurity, while they almost inevitably do identify themselves with manifest destinies sweeping and transforming the world that assume anything but openness. Although, I suppose, from a tropological if not a logical standpoint perhaps even absolute predestination can come to seem open to its advocates once it gets big and sweeping enough in the imagination, one of the ways in which the Sublime functions is as a collapse of absolute openness with absolute closure after all. Theoryheads among my readership will notice how well the discussion of political power comports with Foucauldian accounts, they will recognize the phrase "improvisation within constraints" from Judith Butler, and they may even grasp that the provocative relations of consensus/dissent//dissensus/consent posited here are indebted to Hannah Arendt.

What Futurology Is Peddling Has Little To Do With Foresight

Foresight is a dimension of every proper form of expertise. Just as "The Future" does not exist, neither does the "foresight" claimed by the futurist as their unique expertise.

There is no "knowing The Future" that can yield useful knowledges otherwise. There is no-one "coming from The Future" to lead the way. To "know the future" is to admit to ignoring and disdaining the present and the open futurity arising out of the presence of the diversity of stakeholders to the making and meaning-making of the world, peer to peer. To "come from The Future" is to admit to a delusive inhabitation of a wish-fulfillment fantasy at the expense of the world, a derisive repudiation of one's peers for an imaginary species of angels or monsters elsewhere.

There can be no special futurological expertise that generates "foresight" as such, divorced from all the separate disciplines and knowledges out of which partial, contingent foresights emerge. The Hegelian understanding of philosophy as the project to hold the spirit of the age in thought comes closest to this kind of generality, if only in a superficial way, which may explain why so much futurology amounts to cheap pseudo-philosophizing (another point of contact explaining the family resemblance between superlative futurological sub(cult)ures like transhumanism and Singularitarianism and the very American enthusiasm for anti-intellectual pseudo-philosophical handwaving in the Randian Objectivist and L. Ron Hubbard Scientology vein).

The intuitive plausibility of futurological narratives derives in no small part from their activation of primary passions (the usual fears of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence that always freight the technoscientific imaginary of agency) but also deep discursive formations, whether the irreconcilable omni-predication of transcendent agency, omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence -- or dredging up an oceanic archive that has shaped so many of our intuitive understandings (from Eve to Icarus, from the golem to the Sorcerer's apprentice, from Frankenstein to the Philosopher's Stone, from the Fountain of Youth to Brave New World). What must be grasped is the extent to which futurology is not providing insights, but selling sensations and reassurances.

Further, it is crucial to grasp that not only does the futurological lack an expertise but it relies for its force on a repudiation of expertise, that not only does the futurological provide no real knowledge but it demands a repudiation of knowledge, that not only does the futurological provide no insights but requires the substitution of cheap thrills and easy consolations for insight and understanding, that not only does the futurological deceive when it claims to know of "The Future" but it relies for the plausibility of its deception on the repudiation of the present, emphatically including the open futurity arising indispensably out of the present. Futurology feeds on the substance of the present, peddling the profound deception that marketing and promotion is one and the same as knowledge-making and meaning-making, peer to peer, futurology feeds on the substance of freedom in the present, peddling the profound deception that the amplification of given force is one and the same as the elaboration of freedom, peer to peer.

Ten Reasons to Take Seriously the Transhumanists, Singularitarians, Techno-Immortalists, Nano-Cornucopiasts and Other Assorted Robot Cultists and White Guys of "The Future"

ONE -- Just because futurologists tend to be both foolish and wrong doesn't mean it is always foolish to point out in public places that they are, indeed, wrong.

TWO -- In an era of urgent technodevelopmental quandaries it is actually crucial to understand technoscience questions and their developmental and distributional effects, and every second displaced onto hyperbolic futurological wish-fulfillment fantasizing and disasterbation is a second lost to that deliberation, every techo-transcendentalizing framing of the issues deranges that deliberation from sense into nonsense.

THREE -- Futurological rhetoric and fandoms represent the extreme amplification and reductio ad absurdum of the body-loathing, narcissistic death-denialism, crass materialism, complacent consumerism, technocratic elitism, market triumphalism, fraudulent profit-taking, hyperbolic deception and self-promotion that now utterly suffuses our public life through the prevalence of advertizing and marketing norms and forms and of neoliberal global developmentalist narratives and rationalizations. To grasp the ugliness and absurdity of these extreme forms is to gain insights into the pathology of many mainstream values and the deception of official elite-incumbent justifications. Where we have grown accustomed and complacent to these pathologies and deceptions looking at ourselves from the alienating margins of our own discourse can help us see ourselves and the urgency of the need to change all the more clearly.

FOUR -- Hyperbolic and deceptive futurological narratives will usually be far more attractive to superficial and sensationalist Establishment Media figures and outlets than the difficult, ambivalent, qualified, dynamic, complex realities of actual science and ongoing technodevelopmental struggles, and so the futurologists will often provide the larger rhetorical frames within the terms of which the stakes and significance of these developments are taken up by public and policy deliberation. It matters less that this is disastrous than that it is true and must be dealt with as such.

FIVE -- America is not only an incredibly rich and powerful nation that will probably remain for generations a key, and often the key, player in global technodevelopmental social struggle, it is also a profoundly anti-intellectual nation full of people who are, in consequence, especially vulnerable to the fraudulent sale-pitches of pseudo-intellectuals like futurologists, who tend either to be providing PR for corporate-military elite-incumbents or guru wannabes hoping to attract a flock to fleece.

SIX -- As Margaret Mead famously insisted, "Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world." The example of the neoliberals of the Mont Pelerin Society reminds us that a small band of ideologues committed to discredited notions that happen to benefit and compliment the rich can sweep the world to the brink of ruin and the example of the neoconservatives reminds us that a small band of even ridiculous committed people can prevail even when they are peddling not only discredited but frankly ridiculous and ugly notions. Futurologists pretend that hypberbolic marketing projections are the same thing as serious technoscience policy deliberation, which is a gesture enormously familiar to the investor class and the technology sector's customary membership, and the futurologists inevitably cast rich entrepreneurs as the protagonists of history, which is a gesture enormously attractive to the skimmers and scammers and celebrity CEOs of the technology sector's essentially narcissistic culture. Although their various predictions are rarely more accurate than those of chimpanzees at typewriters, although their various transcendental glossy-mag editorials and tee-vee ready techno-rapture narratives are rarely more scientific in their actual substance than those of evangelical preachers, although their dog and pony show sounds almost exactly the same now as it did five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, twenty-five years ago as they still drag out the same old tired litany (super-parental robot gods! genetic fountains of youth! cheap nanobotic superabundance! better than real immersive VR treasure caves! soul-uploading into shiny robot bodies!), and all with the same fervent True Belief, the same breathless insistence that this is all New! the same static repetition that change is accelerating up! up! up! it is not really surprising to discover that the various organizations associated with superlative futurology are attracting more and more money and support and attention from the rich narcissistic CEOs of the technology sector whose language they have been speaking and whose egos they have been stroking so assiduously for years and for whom they provide such convenient rationalizations for elite-incumbent rule. You better believe that, ridiculous and crazy though they may be, the Robot Cultists with well funded organizations (like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, Global Business Network, Long Now Foundation, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, Singularity Summit to name a few) to disseminate their pet wish-fulfillment fantasies and authoritarian rationalizations can do incredible damage in the real world.

SEVEN -- So long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "AI" let alone "Friendly Superintelligent AI" seriously we are all taking real global network security and surveillance and media misinformation issues less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "Drexlerian nanotechnology" seriously we are all taking real environmental problems and promising materials science breakthroughs at the nanoscale level less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios like "general assemblers," "nanofactories," and "utility fog" seriously (like so many took seriously the futurological techno-cornocopiasts before them flogging nuclear energy too cheap to meter, cheap superabudance via ubiquitous toxic plastic, universal leisure via ubiquitous robots, the high energy-input fraud of the petrochemical bio-engineered industrial-monocultural "Green Revolution," and immersive virtual reality treasure caves before them, not to mention fraudsters peddling on-the-cheap global developmental leapfrogging via boutique Green consumption or helicopter-dropped laptops, cellphones, 3-D printers right up to the present) we are all taking the crisis of global poverty, precarization, exploitation, and human trafficking less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "uploading" and "SENS" and "longevity-medicine" and "enhancement-medicine" seriously we are all taking the global maldistribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of both already-existing and actually in-development medical research and treatment less seriously than we should be, we are all taking actual medicine and the struggle to ensure its access to all less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "crypto-anarchy" "Brinian transparency" "the participatory panopticon" "online participatory democracy" seriously we are all taking the corporate-military enclosures of commons, the facilitation of global financial fraud via digital networks, the intensification of police surveillance, intrusive target marketing, punitive credit profiling via so-called "social media" together with the evacuation of the very ethos of "participation" via an internet actually defined for the majority of its users by endless posts with zero comments, drift-surfing user-generated content of deceptive dating profiles and vapid pet videos, "friending" strangers and consumer products, and scrolling insubstantial decontextualized "tweets" less seriously than we should be -- And so long as people are taking futurological scenarios about "geo-engineering" seriously we are all taking education, agitation, organization, regulation, and public investment to ameliorate anthropogenic climate change, resource descent, pollution and waste and the promotion of real-world sustainable polyculture less seriously than we should be. All of this actually matters.

EIGHT -- It is never wrong to expose a dangerous fraud as a fraud.

NINE -- It is always good to defend science against pseudo-science and promote critical thinking against True Belief.

TEN -- Even when it is not necessary, ridiculing the ridiculous is often a pleasure.

All Humans Are Mortal. Socrates Is Human. Therefore, Socrates Is Mortal.

Students have been learning the basics of logic through the re-iteration of this syllogism for centuries.

Everybody who has ever lived has died. Everybody dies. You're going to die. That you are going to die is part of what it has always meant to be human. If you didn't die, you wouldn't be living a legibly human life. But of course you are going to die so there is no reason to belabor the point, and to do so is probably just to indulge in pathetic panic-stricken distraction or denialism about it anyway.

And, sure, you really can go into denial about it if you don't want to face facts, you can stick your fingers in your ears screaming la!la!la!la! whenever you contemplate your curtain call, you can dwell on death so much that you manage to die in life even before you die if you really want to be pathetic about it, you can behave recklessly on cliff faces and in sports cars to show how invulnerable you are, you can pray to Baby Jeebus to give you a cozy cloud perch from which to observe the bad people burning in Hell, you can build a gold-plated poop pyramid a mile high with your name on it. Heck, you can get your brain frozen by sociopathic scam artists in the desert who promise you won't thaw for the centuries it takes for magic nanobots to "fix" you with the help of the Super Dad Robot God they are coding.

Many readers may think I am writing parodies when I speak of superlative futurological discourses and subcultures as a Robot Cult. Mike Treder, Managing Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (long-time readers may recall that I tend to call it "stealth Robot Cult outfit, IEET" and tend to call its high level muckety mucks as "Very Serious Futurologists" or, alternatively, "White Guys of 'The Future'"), asked the question in a post yesterday, Will You Die? (The answer, for you kids keeping score at home, is: "Yes, Mike, yes, you will die, as will every single person who reads these words.") Here's Mike:

The hope for transhumanists in 2011 is that the science of biogerontology—potentially combined with rapid progress in techniques for using smart ‘nanobots’ to clean out our arteries or fix our degraded cells—will soon lead to a new era of widely available radical life extension. IEET Fellow Aubrey de Grey, a leading expert in the field, has predicted that the first person to live to be 1000 years old will be born in the next twenty years. If that doesn’t happen quickly enough for you or me, then maybe we can have our bodies (or just our heads) cryonically “preserved” and possibly reanimated at some point in the future. Another hypothesized route to immortality is the idea of having your personality “uploaded” to a computer before you die, so that the essence of you will live on for centuries or for eons. You might, theoretically, be able to have your mind implanted into an advanced robot, giving you a superior body that can be upgraded and made to last for a very long time indeed.

It doesn't seem right to make fun of people this desperate and deluded and dumb, but, well, I say, go ahead. Especially rich for regular readers will be the robotic predictability with which Aubrey de Grey has apparently chosen the inevitable "twenty years from now" as the arrival date for the goods in "the field" in which he is "a leading expert," a futurological gesture also beloved -- and for far more than twenty years, let me tell you -- of experts heralding the arrival of Artificial Intelligence, Drexlerian Nanotech, Designer Babies, Clone Armies, Immersive VR, the Paperless Office, Energy Too Cheap to Meter, Orbital Space Hotels, the Cure for [insert disease], and the history-shattering Singularity when the Robot God inaugurates Tech-Heaven or eats the world for lunch (you decide). No less enjoyable is the accompanying illustration for the piece of drawing-board nanobots on graph paper backgrounds just like real engineers use and with orange arrows indicating the immortalization action, and also, too, the reference to cyber-immortalization via "uploading" presumably involving something called your "essence." Science!

No doubt about it. Socrates is dead.

Every Jock Is A Puke -- And Why This Matters

In 1968, Bill Stowe explained to me that there were only two kinds of men on campus, perhaps in the world -- Jocks and Pukes. He explained that Jocks were brave, manly, ambitious, focused, patriotic and goaldriven, while Pukes were woolly, distractible, girlish and handicapped by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning.

There was all too much in Robert Lipsyte's recent piece on the values of American athletics culture in The Nation that was disturbingly familiar to me from memories of high school and so on. And I appreciated, of course, his muddying of Bill Stowe's stark demarcations and denunciations and welcomed his insistence on the fine qualities to be discerned in folks on the Puke end of Stowe's stick. But the truth is that is frankly a pretty low bar, and when all is said and done I still found Lipsyte's perspective more worrying than I presumably am supposed to. I recommend you follow the link for the whole piece and decide for yourself. I leave to the side the rather sticky schticky feel-good rapprochement between liberal lefty Lipsyte and reactionary right Stowe that frames his tale, and from which he draws his blandly hopeful and likely misguided conclusion. Although it is clear enough that Lipsyte disapproves the work of Jock Culture separating us into Jocks and Pukes and erecting authoritarian hierarchies onto that scaffolding, as well as the deeper work of Jock Culture in deranging those in its thrall into robots programmed for destruction (and self-destruction, I would add), the fact is I think Lipsyte retains too rosy a vantage on the world of competitive team sports.

While I don't doubt the correctness of his earlier assessment of Bill Stowe as a "dumb jock" my worry, to put it bluntly, is that Lipsyte may be too much of one himself. Given the competitive jock Thunderdome of Village journalism one wonders if he owes his success as a sports writer in some measure to his own socialization in Jock Culture or whether his socialization into success in those savage precincts renders him now more sympathetic than he would otherwise be to Jock Culture? I must say that there seemed to me to be something defensive about his little genuflections to sense, reassuring though they are meant to be: eg, "I am for de-emphasizing early competition and redistributing athletic resources so that everyone, throughout their lives, has access to sports. But then, I am also for world peace."

Anyway, far more to the point, when I read in his piece that competitive sports were "[a] once safe place to learn about bravery, cooperation and respect" that has become "a cockpit of bullying, violence and the commitment to a win-at-all-costs attitude that can kill a soul. Or a brain" I find myself wondering if this edenic space of safety and solidarity really ever existed anywhere for long enough to manage the wholesome work he attributes to it. I find myself wondering if he is describing as essential what are at best occasional or even accidental properties of competitive sports.

I for one believe that one learns about bravery in standing up for a loser (whether a person or an idea) in a way in which one risks becoming a loser oneself -- not from the experience of being on a winning team. I for one believe that one learns about co-operation in discovering through the exacting experience of patience and consideration and sometimes even mild humiliation that one often actually benefits from the abilities and knowledge of others one did not initially value at all -- not from the experience of getting ahead through unquestioning obedience to a given authority. I believe that one learns about respect when one is treated with respect by someone who disagrees with us and so realize that we can still respect ourselves even when we are mistaken or wrong and others when they are mistaken and wrong so long as we are honest and open in the struggle to be and do better -- not from the ready respect we garner from those with whom we have explicit affiliations or easy affinities. I do not believe that it is in being on a winning team that we find the paradigmatic experience of "belonging," but among friends and peers and others who continue to identify with us even when we are losing (and who we often find only through losing).

It will come as no surprise that I myself was always a Puke and not a Jock, that I was a theater geek, that I never went outside without a book, that my friends were all girls and my enemies were Jocks they foolishly pined over, that I was tormented in gym class, that I was an object in the public ritual humiliation through which my peers enacted their crisis of masculinity, relentlessly punished as the class faggot (which was true, but since I hadn't even come out to myself at that point my "faggotry" then was far more a matter of being an intellectual among anti-intellectuals than anything else). I have no warm and fuzzy thoughts about Jock Culture against which to measure the endlessly many countervailing pathologies I witnessed up close and personal and struggled to understand.

What seems to me the heart of Lipsyte's argument is crucially wrongheaded. He writes:

Sports is good. It is the best way to pleasure your body in public. Sports is entertaining, healthful, filled with honest, sustaining sentiment for warm times and the beloved people you shared them with. At its simplest, think of playing catch at the lake with friends. Jock Culture is a distortion of sports.

As somebody who has danced on a dance-floor with a diverse crowd of joyful strangers, as somebody who has marched with marginalized losers in a show of solidarity for justice, as somebody who has indulged the exhilarating adventure of public sex with a revolving cast of anonymous partners I really must protest that his assignment to "sports" of all things "the best way to pleasure your body in public" testifies to a rather impoverished and conventional imagination of the possibilities open to bodies in this world. I am far from denying there are pleasures to be had in playing catch at the lake with friends, any more than I would deny the pleasures of dangling a string in front of a kitten, but I really have to protest both the implication that his Ralph Lauren ad with Buffy and Scooter tossing a ball at the Lake House is really so universal after all or that it takes us to the heart of what can be "entertaining, healthful… honest" and all the rest (can he not hear how creepily sanctimonious and fascistic all this spit-spot playing field hygiene sounds even in his thoroughly domesticated for Nation readers variation?) in bodily exertion, peer to peer.

While Lipsyte rightly worries about the aggressiveness promoted by competition and the uncritical authoritarianism of team cohesion, I daresay his romantic attachment to sport restrains him from going deeper, and grasping the poisonous adrenaline heart and hard-on of the Jock Cult. Since human beings are deeply inter-dependent on one another our whole lives through, since we arrive into a world which precedes us and exceeds us and makes us even as we collaborate in the making of it, the "autonomy" and "responsibility" we aspire to and value, while real and important, are also profoundly ambivalent. To believe any of our accomplishments are entirely our own, that they owe nothing to the multicultural archive into which we are born and nothing as well to the efforts of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world, to fancy instead our endowments derive entirely from our own solitary efforts or singular superiority to others who lack them (or to attribute these achievements to a homogeneous and superior "we" against alien and inferior "theys") is always to indulge in a profound self-deception. And to the extent that our self-esteem is bound up in maintaining that deception, it demands an incredibly costly expenditure of effort wasted in a pointless spectacle of self-aggrandizement that manages mostly to be pathetic while it works and is almost always destined eventually to a failure that will be all the more devastating the longer it has been staved off in the first place.

I believe that competitive sports is an engine feeding this wasteful and deranging form of delusive self-indulgence. Jocks are in the throes of a compulsion to "winning" that provides a delusive hit of a "goodness" that is profoundly inhuman in its presumed "godlikeness," tinged with the destructive and self-destructive delirium of self-denial and megalomania. I believe that the momentary superiority of Jocks is written on the broken bodies of the Pukes they terrorize… but as well it is written on the inevitably failing, ageing, finite bodies of the Jocks themselves.

While Lipsyte speaks of competitive team sport in terms of the "pleasure [of] your body in public" it would be better to speak of competitive team sport as the ritual humiliation of bodies, the denunciation of bodies, the reduction of the body to Puke through the assertion in Winning of the Jock-Body as an imperishable, invulnerable, angelic spirit-body. The Jock-Body is a body at the ready for human civilization's many bloody-minded body-minded rituals of dehumanization, enslaving bodies to pile up loot, killing bodies to pile up skulls, bodying forth the Babel bodypile that would reach up to heaven and leave the earth behind and the body behind and the people behind and, hence, death itself behind.

It's a stupid wasteful destructive madness and there's nothing good in it, even if sports have an incidental yield of harmless pleasures to recommend them. Lipsyte is right to be worried, but he has scarcely begun to tear the lid off the hell of Jock Culture and the hell it makes on earth.

Jock Culture more essentially and perniciously consists of the ceremonial substance through which we are educated and incited into that self-denying madness of self-assertive victimizing victory-mongering to the ruin of the world. Contrary to Lipsyte's assertion that "Jock Culture is inescapable" it is more deeply true that the failure of Jock Culture is inevitable. Since it is the eventual exposure of the Jock as Puke that is really inescapable, it would seem to me that the education or circumvention of the wasteful delusive self-destructive tendencies exacerbated by Jock Culture is indispensable to the well-being of the individuals vulnerable to its siren song and to the flourishing of societies dedicated to equity-in-diversity.

"The Rich Are Different From You and Me"

Brian Alexander:

Psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner says the rich really are different, and not in a good way: Their life experience makes them less empathetic, less altruistic, and generally more selfish…. “We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behavior in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,” he said. “Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.” … There is one interesting piece of evidence showing that many rich people may not be selfish as much as willfully clueless, and therefore unable to make the cognitive link between need and resources. Last year, research at Duke and Harvard universities showed that regardless of political affiliation or income, Americans tended to think wealth distribution ought to be more equal. The problem? Rich people wrongly believed it already was.

This can hardly be more a surprise than the results of the Milgram Experiment, revealing most human beings are conformist even when it makes them cruel, or Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, revealing the proneness of human beings to abusive and authoritarian behavior should institutional conditions conduce to it.

That human beings in the main are parochial, hierarchical, and prone to rationalize their errors and bad behavior has been well attested since at least Aristotle's Rhetoric recommended ways these frailties might be exploited and circumvented by politicians. Indeed, the whole of politics from an ethical vantage is the creation of a space of conviction and consent -- identified with the state -- the aspiration toward which ameliorates these tendencies, just as the whole of ethics from a political vantage is the creation of space of liberty and open futurity -- enabled by the state -- the experience of which makes sociality a blessing rather than a curse despite these tendencies.

Riot, Try It: A Pragmatics of Urban Disruption in a Planet of Slums

A political scientist at Drexel University, George Ciccariello-Maher, provides an insightful preliminary analytic sketch of recent rioting (hereafter, usually scare-quoted) as a pragmatic political tactic and ethos as well as of the prevailing media narratives through which such disruptions tend to be pathologized here and now in the service of incumbent-elite interests and hence profoundly misconstrued. (Although I will not pursue the point in this essay, I do want to mention at the outset that the Stonewall Riots in 1969 in New York City offer an interesting counter-example, in which an unambiguous insurrection inassimilable to compulsory non-violence narratives about efficacious historical change seems nonetheless to be canonized in liberal progressive discourse. Sure, there's also that whole pesky American Revolution against British Occupation to consider too, but Stonewall still seems to me an especially surprising and encouraging resistance to be getting the liberal postage stamp treatment.)

Ciccariello-Maher emphasizes the emerging pragmatics of rebellious "rioters" in urban settings stratified by economic and police violence. This pragmatism has a number of dimensions. For one thing, it puts a kind of pressure on otherwise unresponsive authorities to address real problems. A case in point, Ciccariello-Maher recalls that in 2009 here in Oakland (where I live) "it was riots and only riots that led to the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the death of Oscar Grant." The emphasis that it was "only riots" that compelled a response is his, but I certainly agree with it.

In his now canonized -- and hence largely domesticated -- Letter from the Birmingham City Jail, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writes that

law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and... when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress…. [T]he present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

I am not exactly proposing that King would approve contemporary "riots in the streets" but I may be proposing views that seem tantalizingly or scandalizingly close to that. If the very idea seems scandalous I would remind you that just weeks before his assassination King explicitly refused blanket condemnations of riots, insisting on more contextually sensitive critiques:

It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

More than that, it bears remembering that although King did not "endorse" "rioting" (whatever saying that is supposed to good for), he was quite happy to raise the specter of "blood in the streets" should the powerful choose to ignore the terms of non-violent struggle. The force of this contrast actually depends on the lived experience of violent insurrection and protest, and hence assumes a curious and substantiating role within non-violent rhetoric. But I would propose a deeper continuity still between the provocation of tension in nonviolent social struggle and some of the unrest that will tend to be condemned as rioting from the perspective of beneficiaries of an unjust status quo.

It is important to see the ways in which King's radicalism complicates the proper location of violence in analyses both of it and responses to it. King is insisting that the exposure of violence is never properly identified as the commission of that violence (which is not to justify violence when it occurs but to attribute responsibility for violence more realistically). King subversively proposes both that when disruption leads to negotiation (or, say, to the proper conviction of a wrongdoer) that would not have taken place otherwise the end of negotiation to which that disruption has contributed should articulate our sense of the substance of that disruption itself, just as when an unjust and exploitative status quo leads to a disruptive response among those who suffer in silence and without recourse in the midst of its superficial peaceableness the resulting disruption should articulate our sense of the substance of that peaceableness. A superficial peace that yields a disruptive reaction may not be the peace it seems but can be an insidious enactment of violence, while an apparent tension that yields a negotiated settlement may not be the violence it seems but can be a promising enactment of reconciliation.

Again, this is not the facile insinuation that King would have approved what are being called "riots" in London or in Athens or in Oakland, but I very deliberately do indeed mean to annoy those whose smug identification with a thoroughly domesticated and nonthreatening fantasy of King would fancy his rebukes would address only the "rioters" while championing the authors of violation and injustice against whom these "rioters" are so conspicuously responding. King properly assigns blame and locates irrationality and recognizes the source of violence not with the suffering but with the failure of constituted authorities when he reacts to his comfortable establishment critics, saying that while they

deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham… your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

There are real questions whether King would still have proposed in our present circumstances the same alternatives he championed in the face of the segregated South (any more than he would have confined himself to the alternatives Gandhi championed in colonial India). Ciccariello-Maher quotes one young rebel who puts the point succinctly:

You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?... Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.

A failure of what might be deemed conventional Kingian nonviolence forms an inextricable part of the story of "no alternative" to which many so-called "rioters" are responding in London.Part of the reason this is an especially complicated assessment to make is that so many of the tactics we have come to identify with non-violence were once regarded unambiguously as violent. The violence notoriously advocated by Sorel turns out to be the General Strike -- no longer regarded as violent at all. The occupation of privately owned lunch counters was once regarded as violent, rather than as iconic non-violence. What clearly emerges is that the politics of non-violence is never only, or even primarily, a matter of applying already-established tactics of non-violence to political struggle, but a political struggle to establish-anew the matter of non-violence.

[Added! Wow, the recent Occupations of both public and "private"/owned open spaces but also transport passages, bridges, streets and docks (sometimes rendering them inoperable to expose the complicity of everyday people in the smooth function of systems of oppression) would seem to be pressuring our intuitions about the non-violent still more. Especially provocative are contemporary critiques of policing in which acts of vandalism "provoke" disproportionate tactics of racial profiling, harassment, brutality, and murder by police in the communities they are meant to serve -- suggesting an intriguing (and I would say promising) elaboration and insistence that property crimes are comparatively non-violent in contexts of systemic police violence may also be consolidating.]

It is impossible to deny the force of the London rebel's intelligent assessment of the scene. And once it is grasped that something like "the riot" has often functioned historically both as an effective threat pressuring otherwise unresponsive authorities to solve real problems and also as an effective way to attract otherwise unresponsive media to attend to real problems, and effective where other strategies fail, it becomes necessary to deny the prevailing proposal that "the rioter" is (always-only) unreasoning, ill-considered, self-destructive.

When Ciccariello-Maher goes on to document some of the ways in which contemporary "rioters" more easily evade the sophisticated measures developed in recent years by police to marginalize resistance, arrest demonstrators, and control crowds one realizes that "activists" may have easily as much to learn from "rioters" in this historical moment as "rioters" might learn from "activists" trained in non-violent civil disobedience (that would-be rebels do still have something to learn from civil resistance is one of the lessons of the Egyptian Revolution, as I have discussed already here).

As it happens, there is a profound symmetry to discern in the phenomena of "rioting" and "looting" in the face of the neoliberal mode of profit-taking in an epoch of planetary precarity, financial fraud, skimming schemes, and taxpayer-funded bailouts: gang warfare against gangsters and looting looters has about it a ring of justice that is unquestionably on to something. And, again, Ciccariello-Maher provides quite a lot of evidence that this symmetry is one of which the "rioters" themselves are absolutely aware:

One onlooker to the London riots puts it precisely: "This is about youth not having a future… a lot of these people are unemployed, a lot of these people have their youth center closed down for years, and they’re basically seeing the normal things: the bankers getting away with what they’re getting away with… this is the youth actually saying to themselves, guess what? These people can get away with that, then how come we can’t tell people what we feel?" As one young female looter told The Sun, “We’re getting our taxes back,” and as another told The Guardian, “The politicians say that we loot and rob, they are the original gangsters.”

One inevitably hears an echo of Fanon here, and the argument in Concerning Violence in which he describes the "manichean world" of colonial administration, an absolute opposition of colonist/colonized constructed by means of the making and policing of parallel (and inter-dependent) conceptual boundaries and geographical boundaries. Fanon focuses on the "irrational rationality" of race which rationalized colonial exploitation and violence, but one could speak just as well of the demarcation of the so-called "investor class" or "creative class" from illegal, informal, or precarious labor, an "irrational rationality" still resonating with pseudo-scientific racial stratifications as often as not.

Fanon also directs our attention to physical boundaries, borders, walls, infrastructure, the vivid contrast of the separate quarters and settlements of colonizer and colonized, and while Fanon points himself to the example of the conceptual and architectural circumscription of race via norms as well as papers as well as walls in Apartheid South Africa, one could speak just as well of contemporary Palestine, one could point to the recent and still ongoing history of zoning practices and highway construction through which "white flight" of capital from cities to suburbs was facilitated through the destruction of traditionally thriving neighborhoods of color, one could take a hard look at "gated communities" filled with McMansions subsidized by fraudulent finance and maintained by illegal and informal labor.

For Fanon the characteristic violence of anti-colonial struggle is perfectly symmetrical to the violence of colonial administration, the "argument" of civilization under colonialism is relentless violation, exploitation, humiliation, and the violence of de-colonization is in fact the proper "answer" to it, the answer precisely proper to and determined by the context.

The question raised by Ciccariello-Maher's initial sketching of a political economy of "rioting" and "looting" in the context of neoliberal corporate "developmentalism" and neoconservative military "democratization" is whether or not the planetary precarization of structural over-urbanization and over-exploitation produces the kind of "manichean opposition" to which Fanon so ruefully but righteously speaks in The Wretched of the Earth.

I have read Ciccariello-Maher's piece as a sort of preliminary critique of contemporary disruptive "dis-organized" social protest in urban settings under conditions defined by neoliberal-neoconservative ideology, institutions, and public practices. But he described his own aims much more modestly:

I want to address directly the idea that the riots are fundamentally irrational, as the smear of “the mob” would symbolically insist. Let’s listen closely, let’s block out the torrent of media denunciation and hear what the rebels are saying themselves.

When prevailing explanatory narratives and frames in the media and elsewhere infantilize, bestialize, and pathologize these disruptive "dis-organized" urban protestors as "rioting" and "looting" they are re-activating the reassuring platitudes of incumbent-elites confronting what they take to be utterly and essentially irrational "mobs" and one fears they are preparing the way for the usual exterminism in response. To "listen" to the ones who have the guns pointed at them at a time like this is immediately to hear a voice rather than an infantile wail, a bestial cry, a pathological shriek, to confront reason and reasons rather than an unreasonable unreasoning force. To propose to hear anything at all is inevitably to embark on a more ambitious project of analysis it seems to me.

It is not only because I find relevance in both King and Fanon to the social disruption about which Ciccariello-Maher is writing that I found myself turning to them the moment I started reading his piece, but also because I find in the tendency to canonize King while demonizing Fanon the same discursive forces that would insist we see in Oakland, in Athens, in London nothing but a kind of madness rather than a predictable and explicable and even pragmatic response to madness. The conditions of colonization in French North Africa differed from those of colonial India and again from those of Jim Crow, and I would argue that these normative and institutional differences better account for the differences in Gandhi's, King's, and Fanon's radicalisms than does some Fanonian ethos of celebration of violence as an end in itself (about which I begin to say a little more here).

Ciccariello-Maher proposes we understand these disruptions (which isn't the same thing as justifying them in any blanket sense, so I hope I don't get too much of that line of anti-intellectual bullshit in the Moot) and also that we learn something of their actual organization and from their actual practice as they play out. This seems to me an indispensable intervention on its own, but it also seems to me to be an intervention that provokes so much more in the way of analysis and elaboration. These off-the-cuff reactions of mine certainly don't offer the kind of analysis and elaboration I'm talking about, but they do attest to the provocation and I'd like to think they might even amplify it a bit.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk Are the Koch Brothers of Reactionary Futurology

That last post was rather long and covered lots of topical ground, but I do want to make sure this late link-rich paragraph doesn't get overlooked:

Anyone who knows the history of Movement Republicanism and the role of a handful of impassioned ideologues backed by a handful of super-rich donors in the creation of an institutional archipelago that disseminated a deranging anti-governmental discourse and organized a legislative program that turned the tide of New Deal to Great Society civilization into Reagan era through Bush and Teavangelical anti-civilizationism (about which I've said more here), should pay close attention to PayPal billionaires Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and their coziness with transhumanoid and singularitarian and futurological would-be gurus, from Kurzweil to Brand to Brockman, their support of the rhetoric of "spontaneous order" and hence the practice of privatization of public investment and culture (for example, of public education, security, infrastructure, the space program), their inevitable hypocritical reliance on government coupled with anti-government rhetoric, their peddling of reactionary geo-engineering and Web 2.0 superficialization schemes as though these are in some way "green" or progressive (aided and abetted by many progressive-identified folks whose fetishization of "technology" renders them, as so often happens, particularly susceptible to reactionary authoritarian politics).

Sins of the Transhumanoids: More on "Animal Uplift" and Reactionary Futurology More Generally

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot, regular reader Martin responded to my recent critiques of the so-called "animal uplift" arguments Robot Cultists have been making lately to cash in on the hype surrounding the latest Planet of the Apes movie, but his response raised some larger issues, too. He wrote:

You criticize them a lot, but within the transhumanist community, George [Dvorsky] (and Michael [Anissimov, presumably?]) are not your enemies. George put forward a moral argument for enhancing the lives of nonhuman animals. I personally think the technology is so distant, if it's ever possible at all, that it's not worth speculating about. More to the point, after reading George's article, I can't seem to make myself care about that issue. After all, there are human animals who are suffering right now, and who could use a little uplift. The same moral imperative applies to them…. I don't know if George would agree with me, but that's what I take away from it.

Dvorsky advocates the forcible re-writing of nonhuman animal cognition and morphology into forms more congenial and familiar to human animals. I explained at length in the response to Dvorsky I linked to why it is wrong to use "enhance" as though it were a neutral designation in such arguments.

It is one thing to work to eliminate the suffering of nonhuman animals at the hands of human ones in the present world, it is actually quite another thing -- and a far more profoundly questionable one at that -- to propose that nonhuman animals suffer simply in being different from human animals in their way of being in the world, let alone to propose that we can simply assume in advance that it is neutral to claim it is so much better to live and think in a human way (a construction that already fancifully and possibly perniciously presumes human beings themselves have only one way of living and thinking that is proper to them) that we can just pretend in advance that nonhuman animals would consent to their forcible policing into conformity with more human ways of living and thinking.

Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them, and I happen to believe that most nonhuman animals do have a voice already in which they communicate their dissatisfaction with violation and exploitation quite well -- I hardly regard it as democratic to treat nonhuman animals instead as ventriloquist dummies congratulating humanity for the inherent superiority of our manner of cognition to justify whatever parochial preferences we happen to hold at the moment for how we want to treat them as raw material for our megalomaniacal project of the day.

The outrageous episode of futurological immodesty represented by their "animal uplift" arguments is, by the way, just one of many symptoms of the same parochial hubris that plays out time after time in the neoliberal eugenicism of the transhumanoid bioethical stances.

To frame as neutrally desirable "enhancement" what always amount to actually parochially preferred values is to render sensible deliberation on matters of prosthetic intervention in an era of non-normativizing therapy considerably less clear. I have argued for years that non-normativing medicine brings quandaries of consent to the fore -- that the politics of prosthetic self-determination demand a scene of consent that is legibly informed and non-duressed in ways that demand considerably greater entitlements than most notionally democratic states are willing to contemplate at the moment.

Certainly, the vacuous pro forma consent that satisfies market ideologues is profoundly inadequate here, given how stratified such scenes of "consent" happen to be by the inherent threat of precarity and informality and by the misinformation and fraud of marketing norms and profit-taking scams.

I would say that most futurological discussion of "enhancement medicine" with their activation of wish-fulfillment fantasies of eternal youth, marketable attractiveness, invulnerability to dis-ease, comic book super-capacities, body loathing, and all the rest are really best regarded as simply the extreme end of the marketing and promotional culture that already hyperbolically and fraudulently suffuses medical development discourse in North Atlantic societies.

Martin may be right to say that "enemy" is a rather overdramatic word to describe my relation to these transhumanoids, but certainly, to say the least, our disagreements are very strong and very deep. Now, if the actual plausibility of the "tech" they talk about was a precondition for critiquing transhumanoids and singularitarians and nanocornucopiasts and techno-immortalists I daresay I wouldn't ever talk about those assorted nuts at all, "ape uplift" handwaving certainly not excepted.

Again, their futurological discourse strikes me as interesting these days almost entirely as a symptomatic matter -- in the "animal uplift" stuff, for example, replaying tropes and moves from colonialist discourse in clumsy labcoat drag. Usually futurology is little more than a kind of fun house mirror and clarifying amplification of the pathologies and deceptions of mainstream advertizing culture, neoliberal developmental discourse, and techno-hype, it seems to me.

In practical terms, here and now, I still think futurology deranges technoscientific deliberation with hyperbole and terror and fraud in profoundly pernicious ways, and I also do indeed think its organizational life bears watching in the way comparably nutty celebrity cults but also, say, neocon think-tanks do.

Anyone who knows the history of Movement Republicanism and the role of a handful of impassioned ideologues backed by a handful of super-rich donors in the creation of an institutional archipelago that disseminated a deranging anti-governmental discourse and organized a legislative program that turned the tide of New Deal to Great Society civilization into Reagan era through Bush and Teavangelical anti-civilizationism (about which I've said more here), should pay close attention to PayPal billionaires Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and their coziness with transhumanoid and singularitarian and futurological would-be gurus, from Kurzweil to Brand to Brockman, their support of the rhetoric of "spontaneous order" and hence the practice of privatization of public investment and culture (for example, of public education, security, infrastructure, the space program), their inevitable hypocritical reliance on government coupled with anti-government rhetoric, their peddling of reactionary geo-engineering and Web 2.0 superficialization schemes as though these are in some way "green" or progressive (aided and abetted by many progressive-identified folks whose fetishization of "technology" renders them, as so often happens, particularly susceptible to reactionary authoritarian politics).

Be all that as it may, however, these days I really do think the various superlative futurologists are mostly worthy of attention for what they expose, clarify, and illustrate about more mainstream technoscientific hyperbole, reductionism, denialism, and anti-democracy. Also, of course, they are usually good for a few laughs.

Reagan, PATCO, and the Turning of the Tide (With a Prelude on Pelerin and the Rising of the Tide)

Michael Moore reminds us of the PATCO Strike thirty years ago today and the moment when Reagan turned the tide in the long-ongoing Republican War against Americans who work for a living. Follow the link to read the whole thing, from which I will be excerpting a few choice morsels in a moment. Before you do, though, I also think it is important to remember as well some of the pre-history that brought Reagan to that terrible moment and gave him the power to do the terrible things Moore documents in his piece.

As it happens, the organization and dissemination of the right-wing resistance to macroeconomic literacy, North Atlantic social democracy, and Roosevelt's New Deal, the moment when both Movement Republicanism and the Randroidal-Friedmanian libertopian pseudo-intellectual strain that fuels Movement Republicanism to this day was born can be dated just as confidently as Moore dates the turning of the tide. The date is April 8, 1947, and the signing by its members of the "Statement of Aims" of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Mont Pelerin was spearheaded by market fundamentalist icons Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises (members George Stigler, Karl Popper, Henry Hazlitt, Leonard Read all loom large in the reactionary-libertopian organizational and rhetorical universe), and members of the Society included countless figures who would be prominent in conservative administrations in Europe and the United States (a third of Reagan's economic advisors were members, as were some key figures in his cabinet) as well as in enormously influential right-wing publishing and media formations.

No less pernicious was Mont Pelerin's role as the fountainhead of the right-wing think-tank movement which sought, and has largely succeeded in, creating a fraudulent funhouse mirror of the world of the legitimate academy. So much of the anti-democratic and anti-governmental rhetoric yoking freedom with so-called free markets and championing "open societies" -- where "openness" designates the deregulatory clear-cutting of general welfare, the privatizing looting of public goods, the libertarian exposure of the vulnerable to limitless predation and violence -- arises out of Mont Pelerin.

Karl Polanyi saw the threat clearly even as it emerged, and wrote the still indispensable book The Great Transformation as a call to arms that was never heeded as it should, but inspired readers generation after generation to this day (it is always a big hit with my students). Both David Harvey's excellent A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan provide glimpses of this story of Mont Pelerin and post-war anti-civilizationism, which I think is even less well-known than the recent history Moore brings to the attention of a new generation in his piece. It is from Moore's piece, though, that I am quoting here:

From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated. Young people have heard of this mythical time -- but it was no myth, it was real. And when they ask, "When did this all end?", I say, "It ended on this day: August 5th, 1981." …

On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who'd defied his order to return to work and declared their union illegal. They had been on strike for just two days…. Reagan had been backed by Wall Street in his run for the White House and they, along with right-wing Christians, wanted to restructure America and turn back the tide that President Franklin D. Roosevelt started -- a tide that was intended to make life better for the average working person. The rich hated paying better wages and providing benefits. They hated paying taxes even more. And they despised unions. The right-wing Christians hated anything that sounded like socialism or holding out a helping hand to minorities or women.

Reagan promised to end all that. So when the air traffic controllers went on strike, he seized the moment. In getting rid of every single last one of them and outlawing their union, he sent a clear and strong message: The days of everyone having a comfortable middle class life were over. America, from now on, would be run this way: The super-rich will make more, much much more, and the rest of you will scramble for the crumbs that are left. -- Everyone must work! Mom, Dad, the teenagers in the house! Dad, you work a second job! Kids, here's your latch-key! Your parents might be home in time to put you to bed. -- 50 million of you must go without health insurance… -- Unions are evil! You will not belong to a union! You do not need an advocate! Shut up and get back to work! No, you can't leave now, we're not done. Your kids can make their own dinner. -- You want to go to college? No problem -- just sign here and be in hock to a bank for the next 20 years! -- What's "a raise"? Get back to work and shut up!

And so it went. But Reagan could not have pulled this off by himself in 1981. He had some big help: The AFL-CIO. The biggest organization of unions in America told its members to cross the picket lines of the air traffic controllers and go to work. And that's just what these union members did. Union pilots, flight attendants, delivery truck drivers, baggage handlers -- they all crossed the line and helped to break the strike. And union members of all stripes crossed the picket lines and continued to fly. Reagan and Wall Street could not believe their eyes! Hundreds of thousands of working people and union members endorsing the firing of fellow union members. It was Christmas in August for Corporate America. And that was the beginning of the end. Reagan and the Republicans knew they could get away with anything -- and they did. They slashed taxes on the rich. They made it harder for you to start a union at your workplace. They eliminated safety regulations on the job. They ignored the monopoly laws and allowed thousands of companies to merge or be bought out and closed down. Corporations froze wages and threatened to move overseas if the workers didn't accept lower pay and less benefits. And when the workers agreed to work for less, they moved the jobs overseas anyway.

And at every step along the way, the majority of Americans went along with this. There was little opposition or fight-back. The "masses" did not rise up and protect their jobs, their homes, their schools (which used to be the best in the world). They just accepted their fate and took the beating. I have often wondered what would have happened had we all just stopped flying, period, back in 1981. What if all the unions had said to Reagan, "Give those controllers their jobs back or we're shutting the country down!"? You know what would have happened. The corporate elite and their boy Reagan would have buckled. But we didn't do it. And so, bit by bit, piece by piece, in the ensuing 30 years, those in power have destroyed the middle class of our country and, in turn, have wrecked the future for our young people. Wages have remained stagnant for 30 years. Take a look at the statistics and you can see that every decline we're now suffering with had its beginning in 1981… It all began on this day, 30 years ago. One of the darkest days in American history. And we let it happen to us.

Follow the link for more, including organizations and movements Moore recommends you might want to connect with if you are concerned about the issues he is talking about and want to do something about them. And as I always say: more, and better, Democrats! Perhaps you should get more involved with your local Democratic party or think about running for office yourself?