Common governance awards all members of a given community equal rights — power is equally distributed. There is no coercive body delegating policy. Common governance is rooted in liberty, not enclosed by a monopoly of force and violence.

For the libertarian this approach to governance is ideal. We do not view freedom in the abstract — we hold it is critical to unleash the creative, innovative potential of human society. Consistent libertarians seek a stateless society. Beltway political circles dismiss the proposal as utopian and incompatible with modern civilization. These objections are easily refuted, however. We are inclined to decentralize. The emergence of democracy, for example, exhibits this societal trait.

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The research finds that people evaluate issues based on the desirability of policy implications. If said implications are undesirable people tend to deny a problem even exists. The study uses the subject of climate change as a specific example. Most discourse regarding climate simply asks after the role of the nation, or state, in addressing global change — to carbon tax, or not to carbon tax is the question. The Washington Post‘s Chris Mooney connects the dots and notes: “Conservatives don’t hate climate science. They hate the left’s climate solutions.”

This is interesting fodder for the libertarian. Beyond the subject of climate change, this study holds large implications for the entire state apparatus.

The scholarly definition of the state is: “A human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” State officials, ideology intact, make sweeping policy decisions for entire nations. After each election, parties gain or lose majority influence, but the problem of centralized governance always remains. It is impossible for a few elected officials to form desirable policy representing the whole public, even if they want to. Successful governance and state are ever at odds.

This cannot be more evident today. The United States Congress enjoys a miserable 14% approval rating and after recent mid-term elections the same miserable party affiliates are crafting policy to govern each and every one of us. It is time for polycentric, common governance.

Common governance awards all members of a given community equal rights — power is equally distributed. There is no coercive body delegating policy. Common governance is rooted in liberty, not enclosed by a monopoly of force and violence.

For the libertarian this approach to governance is ideal. We do not view freedom in the abstract — we hold it is critical to unleash the creative, innovative potential of human society. Consistent libertarians seek a stateless society. Beltway political circles dismiss the proposal as utopian and incompatible with modern civilization. These objections are easily refuted, however. We are inclined to decentralize. The emergence of democracy, for example, exhibits this societal trait.

Today it is of increasing importance to dismantle illegitimate forms of authority and spread power to as many individuals as possible. Systems of power and domination contribute to apathy and quiescence. This hinders the populace and denies us the ability to craft our own unique existence. We are too busy denying problems exist to fully engage and participate in democratic decision-making.

The beauty of common governance is its decentralized nature. The commons are built and sustained by individuals — empowering the commons, by default, empowers all individuals. A society operating under the principles of liberty necessarily rejects the concentration of authority and coercive claims to power. Such an order thus champions individual labor, place connections and civic participation in the political economy. Individual achievement exists not despite of, but due to liberty.

Decentralization is a requirement of successful governance. Concentrated power is unnatural. It holds a monopoly over decision-making. Concentrated power lacks competition, innovation and progress — it is static. Common governance, on the other hand, is dynamic. The commons allow all stakeholders to craft and emulate policy, creating desirable options for all participants. Thus, the commons can overcome barriers to meaningful social change as discussed in the Duke study.

Let us end the state monopoly on governance and reclaim the public.

As I left home here in Pernambuco’s capital, Recife, the prevailing sensation was that nothing had changed. Pernambuco is one of the most violent states in the country, and Recife is the 39th most dangerous city in the world, with 36.82 homicides per 100,000 people. When the police function normally, we are in constant peril. Without them, was it actually more dangerous or had little changed?

What actually changed was people’s perceptions. They thought no one could be punished for crimes anymore. People took the streets and plundered. Big retail stores moved their merchandise and were able to protect themselves, but many small businesses lost everything. The situation seemed to have gotten out of control, but government decided to exercise its monopoly of violence radically and put army tanks on the streets. I imagine they hoped to blast some people who were getting away with stolen TV sets — the World Cup is less than a month away, TVs are valuable right now.

But the perception that there weren’t any police was much stronger than reality: The truth is that Pernambuco never actually has a police force. When it does, it’s seen as a threat, not as protection, by 80% of the population. In our everyday lives, we hardly ever feel protected by the police and nothing had changed in that regard on Thursday. If, on any given day, people decided to do the same they did then, they would be able to and would go unpunished. They just haven’t realized their power yet, but the police are nothing but a small group of people, incapable of dealing with a much larger number of people who are not willing to obey them.

The fact that the police stopped working and everything came crashing down so quickly was supposed to show us how essential the police really are, but the message seems to be the very opposite. In Recife, 1,416 people died in 2013 — almost 4 each day. On the 15th, when anomy and anormality supposedly reigned, there were 7 deaths. The police strike should make stop and think for a moment that, ultimately, the Military Police are an exercise in futility, an institution that survives on stated purpose rather than results.

Order only survives when people believe it will survive; if people believe that it is government’s enforcement branch that keeps order, this order will only subsist while government does. Thus, order is not sustained by force, but by culture — and the same goes for rulers. If people, collectively, stop thinking that the police are needed, there will be order and freedom without looting, depredation or deaths. Power is just a public fiction, something that does exist, but which can disappear with a simple change in public opinion.

Ayn Rand would say that power only exists by the sanction of the victim. La Boétie asks us which power our rulers have, if not those we give them. David Hume concludes that power is sustained by little more than opinion; while Gramsci knows that any order is created and maintained by a cultural system that legitimizes it. And, as Lord Varys puts it, on Game of Thrones, “Power resides where men believe it resides.”

On Thursday, people took the power they always had and used it for evil. And, by the end of the day, they decided to hand it over to the police, that announced the end of their strike — but if the people didn’t want to hand power back over, what could the police do? When cops announce their next strike, maybe the people will realize they don’t really need them and will keep on living normally. Because order exists where people believe it exists.

Those in power regularly reveal themselves to be oblivious to conditions in the real world, and to material constraints on transforming their commands into reality. There’s good reason for this: Their power insulates them from direct experience of the material world, and from direct experience of the constraints offered by material reality.

For example, earlier this month the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that a judge could rightly weigh a police officer’s memory of events, as recalled in testimony, more heavily than video evidence. That’s right: When a video recording of events contradicts the subjective recollection of a police officer, so much the worse for what actually happened. A cop’s “experience” and “superior observational skills” should carry more weight even when what the cop observed didn’t happen.

As ridiculous as this sounds, it’s really not that unusual. Back in the 1960s systems theorist Kenneth Boulding observed that “the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.” The system of information flow in a hierarchy is designed to filter out messages from below that contradict the carefully constructed images of the world in the minds of those at the top. Advancement in a hierarchy is predicated on being a “team player,” which means reinforcing the image of reality held by those at the top and protecting them from exposure to any, you know, actual reality that might contradict it. So naturally when those in authority inadvertently come into contact with real-world information that undermines their official worldview, they dispose of it as quickly as possible using all available Hazardous Materials protocols.

At the same time, those at the tops of hierarchies make decisions, and issue endless decrees to those below them, in utter disregard of the actual resources required to carry them out effectively or possible material constraints on their implementation. The Pharaoh of Egypt anticipated the very best practices of today’s corporate CEOs in the age of downsizing when he said “Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore:  let them go and gather straw for themselves. And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish ought thereof.”

When the implementation of the Studer Group’s idiotic management gimmicks was at its peak frenzy a few years ago, we all got (as “gifts” for “Employee Appreciation Day”) little inspirational booklets full of all kinds of sayings from Gandhi and Mother Theresa about giving endlessly without expecting anything in return, out of the sheer fulfilling joy of doing good for others. “Take no care for thy paycheck or staffing ratios. Behold the lilies of the field: Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” They also reassured us in a newsletter that we could provide “extraordinary patient care” despite our “abundance or lack of resources.”

Oddly enough though our management, despite their seeming belief that we lived in a world of pure light and spirit beyond the concerns of the physical world, were not similarly immune from the requirements of the material realm. Our corporate CEO made an $18 million salary that same year, plus a $3.6 million bonus. And management constantly poor-mouths us about the need to economize on staffing because “nursing staff is our biggest cost” (even though the salaries in our hospital’s C-Suite are probably the same general order of magnitude as hourly wages for all nursing staff). I had to wonder why management couldn’t just miraculously multiply its funds to hire enough staff, like Jesus did with the loaves and fishes. That’s apparently what they expected us to do when it came to providing adequate care with the dangerous and criminally negligent staffing levels they provided us with.

So people in authority are completely out of touch with reality. What does that mean for us? The good news is voluntary self-organization, like horizontal networks, is running circles around the old government and corporate hierarchies and eating them alive, like piranha skeletonizing a cow. Over twenty years ago John Gilmore said “The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.” Self-organized networks and other voluntary associations, similarly, treat the intrusions of irrational authority as damage and route around them. We’re building a world in which the irrational interference of those in authority is becoming less and less relevant to our lives and their stupid commands are becoming unenforceable. Maybe you’d like to join us?

Let us quote from Solomon’s piece:

As the largest Web retailer in the world, Amazon has built its business model on the secure accumulation and analysis of massive personal data. The firm’s Amazon Web Services division gained the CIA contract amid fervent hopes that the collaboration will open up vast new vistas for the further melding of surveillance and warfare.

We can see that corporations can suck up our data in a manner analogous to the government. It’s no surprise that the CIA has found an affinity with Amazon. There is clearly an interwining of state and corporate power here. One that needs to be opposed for the sake of liberty. It isn’t a choice between corporate or state domination. We can and should reject them both.

To quote Solomon again:

A free and independent press is crucial for confronting such dire trends. But structural factors of corporate power continue to undermine the potential of journalism. The Washington Post is a grim case in point.

Six months ago, Jeff Bezos — the CEO and main stakeholder of Amazon — bought the Post. But the newspaper’s ongoing CIA-related coverage does not inform readers that the CIA’s big contract with Amazon is adding to the personal wealth of the Post’s sole owner.

This refusal to make such conflict-of-interest disclosures is much more than journalistic evasion for the sake of appearances. It’s a marker for more consolidation of corporate mega-media power with government power. The leverage from such convergence is becoming ever-less acknowledged or conspicuous as it becomes ever-more routine and dominant.

A free society is harmed by this convergence of state and corporate power. If people are not free to publish damaging things about either institution, both are left off the hook for bad behavior. The punitive potential of both of these institutions is vast and needs to be opposed. People should be free of the power of either. This is a necessary aspect of total freedom. Let us work at making it a reality.

Quasi mai il coraggio fisico è la virtù suprema. Non è neanche particolarmente legato ad un qualunque altro valore morale. Ma è ugualmente una virtù, e una virtù che purtroppo oggi scarseggia tra gli individui dei dipartimenti di polizia, che si nascondono dietro una buffa schiera di macchine da guerra e fanno fuori chiunque, di qualunque specie o età, provochi il più flebile fremito di paura nei loro deboli cuori. Animali domestici, malati di mente, vecchi: apparentemente, tutto quello che si muove è in grado di terrorizzare l’ardito poliziotto; lo colma di abietta paura, presumibilmente se la fa addosso, è spaventato al punto che tira fuori la sua arma e fa fuoco, volente o nolente, su tutto quello che batte i denti per il terrore.

A luglio a Hawthorne, in California, un agente di polizia alla vista di un cagnolino meno di un quarto le sue dimensioni è stato sopraffatto dalla paura al punto che non gli è rimasta altra scelta che sparargli cinque colpi davanti al suo padrone. Ovviamente, nessuno può biasimare il poliziotto in questione. Con lui c’erano soltanto tre suoi colleghi. Non avrebbero mai potuto nulla contro quella bestia feroce, che sulle zampe posteriori arrivava quasi all’altezza della sua cintola. Lasciare che il padrone lo calmasse era chiaramente fuori discussione, visto che quest’ultimo era un pericoloso malfattore colpevole di un crimine orrendo: offesa alla polizia in stato di negrezza.

A gennaio in Maryland un ragazzo di ventisei anni con la sindrome di Down e un quoziente intellettivo pari a 40 è stato assassinato non da uno, non da due, ma da tre poliziotti fuori servizio perché osava cercare di vedere un film due volte senza pagare un secondo biglietto. La possibilità che una tale trasgressione non valesse la vita di un uomo non è passata per la testa dei nostri impavidi agenti. Quando gli hanno chiesto di andarsene, la sua reazione irata fu tale che gli agenti si presero una paura tremenda per la propria vita, e furono costretti a immobilizzarlo e “tenerlo sotto controllo” finché non morì asfissiato. L’aspetto tipico di una persona affetta da sindrome di Down è così facile da riconoscere che anche un profano riesce a diagnosticarla sui neonati. Ma apparentemente i nostri eroici agenti non hanno mai visto “Johnny Stecchino”. Chi può biasimarli per aver avuto paura? La loro vittima era alta un metro e sessantatré e pesava 130 chili. Di muscoli, immagino.

Di nuovo in California, a giugno, alcuni agenti del dipartimento di polizia di Los Angeles, credendo di sentire l’odore inconfondibile di qualcuno che si fa un prodotto chimico illegale, hanno sfondato la porta di casa di un ottantenne che, spaventato dall’intrusione notturna di sconosciuti, ha tirato fuori un fucile ed è stato immediatamente ucciso da una scarica di piombo dei nostri eroici agenti, che coraggiosamente hanno giustiziato un vecchio sul suo letto. Si ignorano le ragioni per cui i nostri agenti non siano riusciti a farsi identificare. Non si sa neanche come abbiano fatto a schivare il fuoco del vecchio. Ma una cosa è certa: ora che un ottantenne non può più brandire la pistola contro sconosciuti che irrompono nella sua camera da letto nel bel mezzo della notte siamo tutti più sicuri.

Quando si parla di abusi della polizia, si finisce solitamente per discutere di politiche e procedure da cambiare e della necessità di una maggiore responsabilità. Cose importanti, ma è importante anche discutere dell’incredibile livello di codardia che tolleriamo negli agenti di polizia. Se il pericolo ti spaventa al punto che sei un pericolo per gli altri, non ci fai nulla in un lavoro pericoloso. Dovresti prendere in considerazione un altro lavoro da qualche altra parte in un bell’ufficio confortevole. Il coraggio fisico non è la più grande virtù, ma è pur sempre una virtù.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

If there is a single general theme to Glenn Greenwald’s career as a journalist, it is that he constantly confronts and challenges power and those who exercise power, primarily in the political sphere. Greenwald himself has often proclaimed this to be his major concern, and he repeated this conviction in a recent interview: “I came to believe if you’re smart, skilled, and have the resources, you should use those things to fuck with the powerful.”

So challenging power and those individuals who exercise power is a positive good, one of critical significance. Indeed, if you are able to do so, you should “fuck with the powerful.”

Pierre Omidyar is a multibillionaire. On Fortune magazine’s list of “The World’s Billionaires,” Omidyar appears as number 123. Fortune describes that article as follows: “The names, numbers and stories behind the 1,426 people who control the world economy.” At 123, Omidyar is very high on the list of people who control the world economy.

By any measure, Omidyar is a very powerful man, one of the most powerful in the world.

You may choose to believe Omidyar’s own proclamations about his work and goals:

Pierre and Pam Omidyar are active philanthropists engaged in numerous efforts to make the world a better place. Through their work, Pierre and Pam seek to provide opportunities for people to improve their lives, and ignite change across a variety of sectors and geographies. Guided by their belief that people are inherently capable and basically good, Pierre and Pam have committed more than $1 billion to causes ranging from entrepreneurship to human rights to chronic illness in children.

You may view this as noble and admirable. Or, perhaps, you may be struck by its insufferable pomposity and condescension. (I admit that I tend toward the latter view and paraphrased that remarkable paragraph to a friend as follows: “A multibillionaire who pats the rest of humanity on the head, and says: ‘There, there, now. I realize you’re poor, and sick, and have a shitty life — but you’re good too! I sincerely believe that! You’re good! And you can do … well, something. Cheer up you poor, sick person with a shitty life! I’m here to help you!'”)

But if we seek to analyze power, especially power on a vast scale, in a serious manner — as Greenwald the journalist would surely have us do — whether we believe in Omidyar’s (or anyone’s) nobility is entirely beside the point. The question is: Is it good for anyone at all to have this degree of power? There are additional questions: How does an individual acquire this much wealth and power? Even if his intentions are impossibly pure today, what happens if they change tomorrow? And there are many more related questions. I once remarked: “A government that has the power to save you also has the power to kill you.” The same is true of individuals.

This is the man with whom Greenwald has now formed an alliance. This is the man who says he wants to fund journalism which will systematically challenge the powerful. That challenge is Greenwald’s calling card as a journalist, and it is the trait that Greenwald and Omidyar tell us they seek to encourage and strengthen by means of their other hires. As the result of his alliance with Omidyar, Greenwald himself is rapidly becoming a man of notable wealth — and power.

If we apply Greenwald’s own methodology to his new venture — if, that is, we utilize the methodology which Greenwald tells us has brought him to the point where Omidyar finds it valuable and in his self-interestto go into business with him — aren’t we required to ask the questions Greenwald asks of all those who exercise power on a significant scale, but now ask those questions about Greenwald and Omidyar?

Shouldn’t we wonder if Omidyar has connections to companies that are directly implicated in the Snowden revelations — for example, Booz Allen? Shouldn’t we inquire as to whether such connections may affect future stories about surveillance? Isn’t it possible, perhaps even likely, that major conflicts of interest will arise? That companies to which Omidyar is connected in complex, non-obvious ways might not wish certain of their activities to be revealed? I would suggest these represent only the beginning of the questions that should occur to us.

If we wish to analyze the operations of power critically, we should adopt the approach that Greenwald repeatedly insists is the keystone to his work. Yet it appears that this is the one thing we must not do under any circumstances. Or, rather, we must not use Greenwald’s own methodology now, in these particular circumstances, since Greenwald himself would be subjected to the kind of questioning to which he subjects everyone else.

This is not a new story; it is the oldest story in the world. Beware the moralist — and Greenwald is, among other things, most certainly a moralist — who champions a standard for judging others, and who often applies that standard with merciless severity, but who exempts himself from that same standard. The same is true for many of Greenwald’s most fervent defenders: questions, and judgments, that they direct at many others are on permanent sabbatical as far as Greenwald and Omidyar are concerned.

I am not primarily concerned with particular conclusions we might consider justified at this early stage (although I have certainly indicated a few conclusions of my own, based on what I consider to be strong arguments). I’m most concerned with method — and the method at issue is the one forcefully advocated by Greenwald himself over the course of a number of years.

But with very rare exceptions, none of Greenwald’s admirers will entertain the indicated questions with even a modicum of seriousness. I see this in the reaction to my own posts on these matters: for the most part, my articles have been entirely ignored, even by those who often link and discuss my posts on other subjects. And I see the same reaction to others who cast a critical gaze on the Greenwald-Omidyar alliance. Is that what the pre-Omidyar Greenwald would counsel his current defenders to do? When confronted by a new venture which is the very embodiment of wealth and power, would pre-Omidyar Greenwald tell people to emulate the monkeys who decline to hear, see or speak of possibly discomfiting matters?

In discussing Greenwald’s ascension of the ladder of power and fame, I have remarked on the parade of awful ironies that now greet us daily. To the ironies I have already identified, we can add one more. Greenwald has written extensively about the endlessly destructive results of the doctrine of American exceptionalism. That doctrine instructs us that the United States government is entitled to pass judgment on the actions of every other nation in the world. When the U.S. ruling class is displeased, it is further entitled to mete out that punishment it deems appropriate in its sole discretion. There is no appeal from the court of the U.S. ruling class. Its judgment is final. (I have analyzed this noxious doctrine at length: “The Blood-Drenched Darkness of American Exceptionalism.”)

American exceptionalism imparts another “truth”: when the United States government acts in ways that our ruling class utterly condemns when pursued by others, that too is completely acceptable, and even admirable, for the U.S., but only for the U.S. The standards that the U.S. applies to everyone else are never to be applied to the U.S. itself, except on those extremely rare occasions when the United States charitably grants leave to do so (which is almost always when the exercise has ceased to have any meaning).

Greenwald has repeatedly and heatedly condemned the nature and operations of this doctrine. But now a doctrine identical in its premises and meaning has arisen in a very different context. Call it the Doctrine of Greenwald Exceptionalism.

Forget everything you knew. Abandon all the principles you championed. Set aside all the questions and critiques that would occur to you in an instant if anyone other than Greenwald were involved. It’s always the first surrender that is the hardest. Get past that, and you’re on your way. Bask in the praise that will be yours. Perhaps you’ll even get a job offer. They are actively hiring, after all.

If you have ever wondered why power wins so easily, you have no excuse for wondering any longer. Everyone loves a winner. Power is safety, power is comfort, power is life.

You should remember, and I mean this only figuratively (for the moment): power is also death.

The entire spectacle is disgusting.

Physical courage is hardly the highest virtue, nor one linked particularly closely with any other measure of moral worth. But physical courage is a virtue all the same, and one sadly lacking today in our cowardly police departments, who hide behind a comical array of war machines and gun down anyone of any age or species who inspires the slightest tremor of fear in their faint hearts. Family pets, the mentally disabled, the elderly — seemingly anything that can move can terrify our brave police officers, so overwhelming them with abject, presumably pants-wetting fear that they draw their weapons and open fire willy-nilly on whatever has their teeth chattering in terror.

In July in Hawthorne, California, a police officer was so overcome by fear at the sight of a little doggy less than a quarter his size that he had no choice but to fire five shots into the animal in front of its owner. Of course one can hardly blame the officer in question, as he only had three of his colleagues there with him and could not possibly have prevailed against the ferocious animal, which reached nearly to the officer’s waist when on its back legs. Letting the owner calm the animal down was also plainly not an option, as the owner was a dangerous villain guilty of a heinous crime — annoying the police while black.

In January in Maryland, a 26-year-old with Down’s syndrome and a reported IQ of 40 was murdered by not one, not two, but three off-duty police officers because he dared try to see a movie twice without buying a second ticket. The possibility that such an offense might not be worth taking a man’s life over never occurred to our fearless officers, who were put in mortal fear of their lives by his anger at being asked to leave that they were forced to tackle him and “subdue” him until he asphyxiated. Down’s syndrome has such a classic, easy-to-spot presentation that even lay people can readily diagnose it in newborns, but it seems these heroic officers had never watched “Life Goes On.” And who can blame them for their fear? Their victim stood all of 5’6” and weighed nearly 300 pounds, presumably all muscle.

In June, back in California, police officers with the Los Angeles Police Department thought they smelled the trademark smell of someone enjoying an illegal chemical and burst into the home of an eighty-year-old man who, startled in the night by strangers in his home, drew a gun and was immediately killed by a fusillade fired by the heroic officers in question, who boldly executed an old man in his bed. Why these officers could not explain who they were or back out of the room to avoid the old man’s fire is unknown, but one thing is certain — we are all safer now that this eighty-year-old man cannot brandish a pistol at strangers who burst into his bedroom in the middle of the night.

Discussions of police abuses usually turn back to policies and procedures that should be changed and the need for increased accountability. These things are important, but also important is addressing the unbelievable degree of cowardice we tolerate in our police officers today. If you’re so afraid of danger that you’re a danger to those around you, you have no business in any kind of dangerous job and should consider going to work in some nice comfy office somewhere. Physical courage isn’t the greatest virtue, but it is a virtue all the same.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, I Migliori in Città: Armati, Brutali e Codardi.

A series of serendipitous events this week pointed me to this central truth. Two of my Twitter friends, Jakob Petterson and Natalie Reed (http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed), raised the question of when environmentalism and racial and gender justice started being propagandized as matters of purely individual consciousness. Today, coming out of my natural foods cooperative, I saw one of those “peace poles” designed to be mounted in your front yard as a moral statement.

The central identifying feature of a reformist effort is that it fails to strike at the root of oppression — power. All such efforts aim either at changing individual behavior without regard to the individual’s position in the overall system of power, or at creating an authoritarian institutional framework staffed by upper-middle class “helping professionals” to protect the individual from oppressive behavior.

In the late 1960s Charles Reich’s vision of social change in The Greening of America put a shift in consciousness ahead of changes in the power structure. What really mattered was not dismantling the power of the centralized state and giant corporations, but seeing that those institutions were run by people in beads and bell-bottoms who, like, had their heads in a good place, man.

In the utterly godawful Captain Planet cartoon, all the villains like Horrid Greedly were motivated, not by material incentives to externalize their costs on society, but by an irrational hatred of nature. And the proper response was to encourage kids to recycle and turn off lights in empty rooms — not to attack corporate capitalism’s basic structural imperatives to utilize production capacity through planned obsolescence and grow through extensive addition of subsidized inputs rather than increased efficiency. Which stands to reason, of course — the latter alternative doesn’t sound like something Ted Turner would much cotton to.

As for those ridiculous “peace poles,” I have nothing against consciousness-raising as one weapon in the arsenal of the peace and social justice movement. But if that change in consciousness consists of Coleman McCarthy teaching “peace studies” classes about “Martin Luther King and the Rabbi Christ,” it’s just as much an opiate as the consciousness it’s replacing. The only effective change in consciousness will be one that involves seeing through the Matrix — that is, understanding war in the context of the system of power it serves. We have war because the people running things have a material interest in fighting wars. War, like all other state policy, is an instrument of the ruling class’s interest. Like every other aspect of the power structure, it’s just another means of extracting surplus labor every waking moment of our lives; in Morpheus’s words: “When you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.”

The feminist concept of rape culture, although frequently misunderstood, describes a fundamental principle that’s more broadly applicable to all forms of oppression and exploitation. One effect of rape culture is to confer a form of male privilege even on the protectors of women. The ubiquity of the threat of rape, and women’s dependence on “good guys” for protection, directly empowers patriarchal institutions in a way that — whether or not they intend it — creates a power differential on behalf of men.

One example of hacking at the branches rather than striking the root of oppression, in the case of feminism, is the tendency to ignore the way patriarchy interlocks with other forms of structural oppression — particularly class oppression. So the internal structure of the Second and Third Wave feminist movements replicates the hegemony of the upper middle class in the larger society. The movement is disproportionately led by an establishment from the managerial-professional strata with a tendency to see themselves as managing the less privileged — sex workers, transgender women, working poor women, etc. — “for their own good.” And their policy agenda gravitates toward the needs of managerial-professional women: Cabinets and boardrooms that “look like America.” Of course this obscures the oppressive nature of the power of cabinets and boardrooms as such, and the mutually reinforcing relationship between patriarchy and hierarchical corporate/state power.

This same good cop/bad cop dynamic characterizes all power relationships. The liberal reformist fights oppression, not by attacking the fundamental sources of the bad guys’ power, but by creating a class of good guys to protect us against the bad guys. The “protectors” are empowered by the preexisting system of oppression; they see their primary role, not as dismantling it, but to make it more bearable — and hence, in objective terms, more sustainable. More often than not, liberal reform involves simply putting the oppressive power structure itself under the control of “progressive” or “enlightened” people who make the system seem a bit kindler and gentler but leave the fundamental processes of exploitation and oppression in place.

A good example is environmental policy in the form of a “Green New Deal,” which leaves the basic structural imperatives of mass-production capitalism in place — but converted to the production of bullet trains and wind generators. And of course the leading advocates of this model are uber-capitalists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who want to make green technology the basis of another Kondratiev long-wave or “engine of accumulation” by enclosing it (via “intellectual property” law) as a source of rents.

Even when our overlords are sincerely humane, the goal (as explained by the farmer in Tolstoy’s parable) is to treat the livestock as kindly as possible — consistent with the primary goal of keeping us inside the fence and continuing to milk us. So long as the alternative is between the phony Reagan/Thatcher model of “free markets” versus New Deal liberalism or Social Democracy, I have no quarrel with those who take advantage of the opportunities the latter afford to make oppression more bearable. After all, in its essence the neoliberal model of “free markets” is as statist as state socialism — and I’ll take the form of oppression that weighs less heavily on my own neck.

But sooner or later, we need to look up from the tasty oat mash that nice farmer gave us and start thinking about how to break out of this fence.

“The Root is Power” on C4SS Media.