Why do we obey?

When I think back on my long life, and consider the prosperity once available to the workers of the USA, I feel saddened and frustrated.

Decades ago, reactionary conspiracists, evil rich men in the orbit of Barry Goldwater and later Ronald Reagan, decided that​ American workers were getting too much money. (And I should add that in that frame, around 1964, they were ​only ​talking about ​cis White men.) Unions had successfully leveraged the mobilization for the World War, and the tensions of the Cold War, into a far more equitable distribution of wealth than had been seen in a capitalist society. The plutocrats looked at the desperation of workers that they remembered from the Gilded Age, that they could plainly see in places like Guatemala and New Delhi at the time, and they wanted that misery for the American laborer.

They were motivated by greed, to be sure, but to a much greater degree, they were motivated by the foulest spite. That money was theirs, they were certain. And so they mobilized, using their titanic reserves of wealth, attacking the hearts and minds of workers via their holdings in the press. They paid Senators and Congresscritters, to be sure, and their meddling went deep and far.

Funding for education, which had briefly expanded in the years after the Sputnik launch, was dialed back with efforts like Proposition Thirteen in California, which broke ground on the successful use of resentment politics, to get workers to vote against their own interests. Roger Ailes came along eventually and started Fox News, openly admitting that the intent was to destroy the working class. Even bankruptcy was destroyed for the worker.

Decades later, we Americans find ourselves in a dystopia, a workers’ hell, in which one may only access higher education via gigantic and usurious loans​, and once that education is gained, sky-high housing costs, inaccessible mortgages​, and low wages force the unlucky worker into a life of precarity. One illness, one injury, one angry and unjust action by an employer can result in a computer-tracked blackballing — and that can easily lead to desperation and houselessness. Meanwhile even adequate medicine is out of reach for many, as health-denial organizations find devious dodges to prevent the dispensation of effective care.

Seeing this, I have to ask, why are we collectively unable to see this, and why do we obey and even praise a system that is so cruel that it leads to widespread despair, madness, and violence?

But I ask only rhetorically. Because it is manifestly clear to me, it is painfully obvious, that we are cruelly brainwashed, and so deprived of truth and hope that we accept the hopeless.

Yes, it makes me very angry. But ​anger isn’t entirely a bad thing. To be sure, it is a survival trait that should be reserved for dire emergencies. But I can’t think of a worse emergency than our pitiful clanking fetters to a corporate system that is hellbent on worsening human misery, unto the destruction of the entire living globe.​

​I need to be honest about another reason we obey: we have been intimidated by armed force.​ I don’t mean just the police, which demonstrated, as they crushed the anguished cries of justice for Black Americans, that they can weather any degree of protest and come out with more power and funding than before. I mean the COINTELPRO-inspired destruction of all​ effective protest and reform movements from the Sixties to the Nineties.

I mean the assassination of Fred Hampton and Malcolm X and President Kennedy, and the bombing of Judi Bari, and the unreported retaliation-killings via car fires of the BLM organizers just a couple of years ago. We have a deep and abiding problem with secret police death squads in the United States today.

​So while I am calling for an immediate ​​​resurgence, on an emergency basis, of all climate, justice, and liberation movements, I am also calling for an educated, dynamic, ​and cautious praxis. Organizers and fundraisers for this new Left of the Twenties must understand that they do not have freedom of association, freedom of speech, nor freedom of the press.

I can only afford to say this much because I am to some minor degree a public figure in the Greater Portland Metropolitan Area, and because even so, my influence is so miniscule as to be perceived, probably correctly, as not worth bothering with. The New Left must organize swiftly under intense and disciplined secrecy. We all carry electronic snitches in our pockets, and even for those of us who do not, surveillance is everywhere and — this is the important distinction — artificial intelligence-fueled analysis, detection, and countermeasures are afoot.

This new America is in fact an intense and unprecedented police state. We must act in that frame, and in no other.