Archie Bunker Wasn't Really Funny

The popular sitcom All In The Family tried to portray Archie Bunker as a lovable conservative, a working-class curmudgeon who had a good heart and just valued tradition. But in fact he was a stupid bigoted asshole and the beginning of the end for any kind of principled conservatism. The shows producers were trying to be progressive and understanding of the changes Reaganism was bringing, but mistook tolerance for politics. We can now see the results of this desire for unity. Instead of being another prejudiced dumb bastard, he was "politically incorrect". Aggrieved and full of resentful self pity, the audience was supposed to sympathize with a "regular Joe" in a changing America. We knew he wasn't a "real" racist because he had such a sweet, dumb (but loaded with "common sense") wife who liked her role of wife and mother but wanted to cautiously test the role's feminist boundaries. In this sense I see Archie as a precursor to Tea Party Trumpism with all it's defiant, boastful incoherence.When they say Make America Great Again they mean bring back Archie, exalt Archie as the anti-woke, crass, working stiff. The worker who blamed Outsiders instead of the Boss. Who wanted to fight a culture war instead of class war. Who just wanted to kick back in his easy chair and watch tv and have his wife bring him beers. Democrats blamed Hillary for alienating the Archies by calling them deplorable. But they are deplorable whiners and they were alienated long before Hillary's campaign.Now they have abandoned all pretence of political philosophy and in favor of the blood thirsty howl of the self-righteous mob.

Sleepwalking Over the Cliff

The Right-wing has made "wokeness" the thing that must be avoided at all costs. And along with concern for social justice and the rights of minorities they have now included concern about climate change as a symptom of woke. It is more awesome, more American to be asleep. More manly. States that produce fossil fuels are now protesting that attempts to pull investment from polluting industries is to buy into wokeness culture and since wokeness is a program pushed by liberal, effete intellectuals, it is to succumb to fragility and weakness. In other words, the opposite of hyper-phallic Trumpism. Large investors such as Blackrock who wanted to be responsible, conscious, green capitalists are being told in no uncertain terms that their fiduciary duty is to make money, period. In other words, even the fake simulation of green capitalism was too much wokeness for the conservative "base". We should not kid ourselves. Neither the State nor Capital gives a rats ass if there are no insects, no coral reefs, laborers dying of heat stroke. As long as there are profits and tax revenues on the short-term horizon they are prepared to see forests go up in smoke and bodies pile up. The global head of responsible investment at HSBC lifted the veil when he gave a presentation at the Financial Times Conference titled : "why investors need not worry about climate risk". Of course he was hustled off the stage amidst apologies but he delivered the unvarnished truth; there are immense profits in misery. How strange to live in a time when it is bad to be awake. We are supposed to slumber through the American Dream, which might be what Timothy Morton was getting at with "hyper-reality". When things get too real, we can retreat into fantasy and disavowal. On the "social cost of carbon" battlefront, the Highest and Most Sacred Supreme Court ruled that the Federal government can continue assigning a "cost" to emmissions or “estimates of the monetized damages associated with incremental increases in greenhouse gas emissions.” In the next breath we get: “An accurate social cost is essential for agencies to accurately determine the social benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions when conducting cost-benefit analyses of regulatory and other actions,” the order said. The question I've been asking is are we talking "estimates" or "accurate" accounting? It matters if you insist on using markets to regulate behavior.

Revolutionary Subject

In a review of Andreas Malm's Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, (Open Democracy Oct.2020) Cihan Tugal asks who Malm is referring to when he uses "we". Who is the subject that will foment radical change, or what Malm calls "war communism"? Tugal criticizes Malm for not including "one mention of organizing or mobilizing the workers of these (fossil fuel) companies to carry out the necessary nationalizations." Those in the climate justice movement are constantly being called on to identify the revolutionary agent or subject that will form a base. It is orthodox socialist/Marxist theory to point to "the working class" and then move on but do these "workers" Tugal and others point to actually interpellate as workers? Are they in any sense a class for themselves, sharing a common understanding or "class belonging"? Does the climate movement wait for this class to rise up and lead and if yes, for how long? Tugal is willing to entertain the possibility "that workers are so complicit in pollutant capitalism that they can't be counted on." But then he asks Malm to name an "effective social replacement...or whatever the social equivalent of workers might be." I would ask: why is it deemed so necessary to name this agent? Any suggestion the reified "working class" won't lead is labelled "petty-borgeoise substitutionism". Hense the dead-lock. Waiting for Godot. Waiting for the "rational" abandoment of fossil fuels and a "Just Transition" led by Capital and it's clients in government. Good luck with that plan. This is the critique of "spontaneity". I would argue the existential nature of the current crises changes the calculus, that you can indeed initiate a rupture using whatever available social agents and the struggle will radicalize them. The process creates the subject when the future is on the line. Tugal goes on to blame "disorganization of the working class" but I would suggest a re-organization does not fit into the timeframe we face for salvaging the biosphere. Lots and lots of workers would join an energized mass movement once things got going. But if Leninism is proletarian leadership of "the people" I would say that in our time, in the current conjuncture, this formula needs to be reversed. If that is substitutionism, so be it.

Voting Our Way To Power?

Results are in. The DSA Green New Deal Committee put up a slate of 11 candidates running for office around the country. So far they are all losing. Some races were close and yes, the campaigns helped build infrastructure and pushed a green message, but none of our people are in power. After lots of organizing effort and resources spent. What are known as "opportunity costs". Things that we could have been working on but weren't. Now DSA Political Committee wants to use abortion politics to mobilize the masses but I fear this means supporting Democrats. Tough to get super inspired. You try to develop a strategic plan and keep clear priorities to work on for the long haul but these Events inevitably pop up, what we call brushfires, and everyone drops what they were doing and rushes to put out the Crisis of the Moment. But women are outraged and leadership thinks that emotion can be mobilized toward some real gains. But how? Putting millions in the streets? A march, a rally, some speeches by Democrats? What crisis will pop up tomorrow? Maybe Capital will start a little war or some Black men will get shot by racist cops. Maybe they will ban books or raise prices. Something for sure. Whack a mole here, whack a mole there. Plenty of moles.

The Money Revolution

A lot of leftists believe the revolution to replace capitalism goes through the currency system. They believe money is at the heart of the contradiction of exchange value, and that eliminating money is the way to a more just and equitable social order. This is revolution without Marx. The cryptocurrency movement taps into this same sentiment and unease with capitalism, but thinks freedom is the thing that money threatens, something that can be rectified through a de-centralized currency system,(no banks or middlemen). Liberation/emancipation is an ethereal economic system based on cyber technology. Unfortunately for many small-investor "revolutionaries", this latest crypto bubble burst gives a great window into how wrong-headed the focus on money is and how a "revolutionary" movement just gets sucked back into the maw of surplus and profit accumulation. In an article (NYTimes 5/18) on the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna we see the all-too-familiar confluence of personality cult, gambling fever, and Capital in search of profit masquerading as revolution. Audre Lorde nailed it when she said "the Master's tools will never tear down the Master's house." Investment and markets will never tear down capitalism no matter how complex the technology or de-centralized the accounting. Marx's simple truth, "M-C-M" is a force that annihilates all your radical intention. It can't be tweaked by libertarians into a force for good. Here is a list of all the abstract value that comprises late capitalism, gleaned just from this one article.Litterally trillions floating around out there in geek world, searching for profit. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Galaxy Digital,Pantera Capital, Tezos (a crypto platform),Scalar Capital, Paxos (blockchain company), Arrington Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Hack VC, GMCC Global, Binance (crypto exchange) Citadel, Trrra Hacker House. Geek world meets Las Vegas. Lots of X and Z. Lots of small investors ruined, committing suicide. No revolution for you, so sorry.

Overshoot Creep

When the climate scientists describe goals such as limiting warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, which is to be accomplished by "dropping (emissions) 45% below 2010 levels by 2030", we should understand that they are building in a certain amount of what is called "overshoot". This means they know they can't actually hit the 1.5 target but will go beyond it and then hope to bring temperature back down. By normalizing this term "overshoot", they hope to reassure the public that as we approach 1.8 or 2 degrees, all is not lost, that we can flatten the curve and then bend it down through lowered emissions and sequestration. Should we though, be reassured? Given the record, I would suggest not. It is all too easy to imagine governments and capitalists normalizing the term to obfuscate and delay, after all, if we can overshoot and then return, why not overshoot by 2 or 3 or 4 degrees? Sure it dooms millions to misery and death, but that threat has never slowed capital accumulation or inspired mitigation in the past. They can die and eventually we can bring the temperature down. The important thing is that in the meantime, growth can continue apace. After all, overshoot victims will mostly be poor black and brown people in distant lands. The other thing to remember is that these predictions are based on modeling which produces multiple scenarios with varying outcomes. In this instance there are 53 scenarios and 44 of them involve a certain amount of overshoot. And they all incorporate percentages of likelihood, in other words, if we do such and such we have a 65% chance of achieving such and such outcome. A 35% chance of not. Ready to roll the dice? Reassured yet? To my way of thinking, the precautionary principle dictates that rather than overshoot we should be striving for undershoot. When climate scientist Vaclav Smil inists on setting "realistic" goals he is in essence saying we should learn to accept the fact of all this death and misery. Get real people. The ship is simply too big to turn in time. Given current power relations, that is. And it is much easier to accept the consequences of overshoot than to imagine a change in those relations. We also notice that as capitalism demonstrates its inability to slow emissions, there is geoengineering creep. More and more "serious" talk about the inevitability of aerosols being deployed. Slowly get used to it.

Aging Out

Diane Feinstein is symbolic of a system well past its prime and sliding into oblivion. Along with Old Joe Biden and the rest of the senile, sclerotic "leadership" of the world's late great superpower, these oldsters lack the basic life-animating spark to even pretend they are in control of events. Or even aware they are happening. And Liberal "Democratic" Capitalism in its death-throes is not a beast you want octogenarians taking care of. "Caressing the sharks teeth" is one thing, playing with a fatally wounded shark quite another. It should be pretty clear by now that these ancient managers are comfortable with leaving a planet on which millions of mostly poor, brown skinned people are doomed to a terrible death. Doomed thanks to the efforts of these very same managers. They will shake their bald, wrinkly heads in resigned sadness. But their plans just don't include all these surplus humans. And these ancients can rest comfortably in the knowlege that when they pass there will be magnificent state funerals and glowing eulogies praising their selfless works. It won't be easy to ignore the shit show just beyond the palace gates, but if you get the camera angle right you can avoid the stinking, bloated corpses or burning hills or flooded streets. And if you vote for the hillbilly you too can at least rest comfortably with the knowlege you fought back against "the machine", whatever that is. You resisted by following orders. You are a gallant, noble, patriot gravedigger, digging your own grave.