Dream Dreamers Dreaming And The Bloody Trail
Part One Dream Dreamers Dreaming
I spent the other evening with the Dream dreamers and we were dreaming. I called them policy wonks but in reality they are dreamers, would be policy wonks perhaps. Call them communists, or ultra leftists, what have you. They are interesting dreamers, dreaming of revolution and I am always concerned about the aftermath, doing the dishes as it were. I see the abyss of the everyday waiting to trip up the fancy thoughts and fabrications of these weavers of gossamer film.
Most radicals are obsessed with the revolutionary process itself, or the theoretical basis that makes the revolution inevitable. But the cleaning up and the dealing with the day to day after the fact. That is what I see. I see the fact that when the flash, bam, boom is over, then there are still the roads to be maintained and the utilities to keep running and the fuel needed for the vehicles and food for everyone left after the excitement is over and the pigs have been offed. Somebody has to cook the bacon.
Revolutionaries always end up saying new forms will develop after the revolution. They talk as if the world will take a new shape, as if there will be sugar plum trees and soda water fountains, well there are soda water dispensers and sugar plum trees, but the dispensers have to be built and the trees planted and pruned. The point being that there needs to be some sort of plan on how to run things after it is all over. I guess its because I spent the last 20 years figuring out how to get things done as my job. I would get an idea of what someone wanted, then figure out the most cost effective way to do it and then figure out a price and tell them what it would be. Usually it would be too expensive and they would want a less expensive option. Not always.
After the revolution I wonder will I be doing that again? Only there won't be money. There will be some accounting chits or tabulation taken with a data entry system. There will still be materials tracking and logistics will not go away. Automobiles will probably be restricted to emergency use and carpooling. Why because we will be running out of oil and since we will have disbanded the army we will have no means of forcing people to give us their oil except with our peoples militia. We will have to trade, and how we do that will depend a lot on whether the revolution is worldwide or just local. No matter what it is if there is no longer an enforcer out there then there will be a problem with piracy and locals wanting to keep their resources for their own consumption. This means the militia will have to have a navy and a marines. At least until the rest of the world decides to play fair.
What do we have to trade, mostly knowledge about how to do things and agricultural products. We grow dynamite pot here in the United Peoples Of America, the UPA. There may not even be nations anymore, just localities and networks of communication and trade, the Federated Peoples of the Earth, or FPE with local entities based on regional affinity. People who used to be in the USA might want to federate, but then there are plenty of people who might prefer a Greater Mexican Federation or multiple Federates. You might really be an Afro-American federating in both continents. There are multiple hubs of interconnectivity and this gets hard to visualize the problem is getting from here to there.
A revolutionary coup in the USA is going to involve perhaps half the population at best. It will either be a fascist takeover in which case thinks will look a lot like they do already, imagine Fox News all the time with Rush Limbaugh on every channel gloating. Or we have a social revolution. The problem is the nation is so polarized our only hope is a massive infusion of immigrants if we are to have a democratic revolution. Vote a socialist into office and then tell the capitalists the game is over. Hardly likely. Things would have to be really bad before they would roll over. It would take a depression of ultimate severity. Fifty percent unemployment. Stock market closed. Debtors demanding repayment. No money to even support the military. An enforced reduction of forces.
So we have this revolution and the people decide to take things in hand and occupy closed businesses and decide to restructure society with things done for the benefit of all instead of for profit. There are some leftover capitalists. They have to be pacified and retired. Mostly there will be a lot of figuring out what is worth keeping and what to get rid of such as lots of luxury goods. There will be a question of how to resolve the debt with the collectives that have inherited the now worthless American Treasury Notes.
No more commercials? Full medical care? Doctors compensated by collectivity? Now what do we do when we need specialists and they insist on being paid like before? Since we no longer have money, will we have to have special luxury shops just for specialists? This problem occurred in the Soviet Union in the early days of the revolution and they decided to give the specialists higher wages. Oh yeah they had money in the Soviet Union. So we are blackmailed by the Doctors, or the local plumber? Perhaps can we convince them to do their revolutionary duty and accept what we all accept, a world where we live with our integrity intact.
An answer came to me while taking the bus home from my dialysis clinic. We offer special credits for everyone who performs above the norm. Specialty stores for performance above and beyond the call of duty. I suppose we could end up with a new elite of high performers. But then merit is the only fair reward and the criteria should be based on individual abilities not on some mass average. That way even low intelligence persons if they perform well within their capacities would be rewarded. So what is the difference between this and wages? Well it is based on the premise that if there is a scarcity and there may be at first, then we want to make sure people are encouraged to do their best. Some will do so simply because that is the stuff they are made of, in fact most people will as long as they are treated fairly and they have input into the decision making process. That is the crux, people have to participate in determining what they do, how much, for how long and if it is needed. That is democracy in action on the economic level, real workers control.
There will be some who will try to game the system. People who had poor upbringings among greedy capitalists or spoiled children who expect to be served, or those who were mistreated and assume the deck is stacked against them, all these may be socially retrograde and need to be allowed space to learn that the new society is for them not against them.
This makes me wonder if in our brave new village we wouldn't have a new set of bureaucrats who understand these things in principal but are wondering if the comrades next door aren't gaming the system, so they institute a policing authority with the right to spy on people to make sure no body cheats. That leads pretty soon to a society where everyone is looking over their shoulders and is likely to cheat if they think they can get away with it. Pretty soon you have a Soviet style police state. Stalin made damn sure everyone had their nose to the grindstone. He was the great leader. A paranoid drunk too. No that is not the way to go. This collectivity has to work because we want it too. We have to keep the power in the collective body of the people.
Part Two The Bloody Trail
Do we go back to the old division of powers? The three way cluster of knives in the back. The USA worked pretty well for a couple of centuries burning out the resources of a conquered land. It was gamed to benefit the wealthy farmers, lawyers, and merchants who founded the republic. Only later and gradually was the franchise enlarged to include non propertied white males, males of other races and eventually females in the 20th century. By the 21st century people realized things were in precarious shape. The dream of prosperity was cracked open when low tech terrorists armed with box cuttters were able to destroy a symbol of the arrogance of capital the World Trade Center towers and they damaged the headquarters of the military machine, the Pentagon. This all had kabbalistic significance. The mystical order of the universe had been overturned and a new order was rising.
The people of America instinctively knew that something was up and by the end of the first decade of the century when the power of the greatest nation on the earth was clearly waning, they began to cry out to their gods for mercy. They had spent the decade attempting to gain retribution sending massive armies into small nations with primitive infrastructures attempting to capture the elusive mastermind of their defamation. This evil force, this genii of the dark powers was clearly the devil himself incarnate and that was why some religious leaders decided to burn the book they took to be the source of his alchemical powers, the Koran.
This naturally did nothing but enrage those who saw this as a symbolic attempt to destroy their understanding of the holy invisible power that is. The challenge to the Christ bloodied cross by the moon shadowed crescent was on again as it had been for 1500 years. How was the revolution with the masses arising to take their place in the culmination of history to take place if there were these rabid dogs tearing at the feet of this mighty giant?
Here we were at the end of history and the gates of heaven about to be stormed and what happens? From the left were the forces of the massed people arrayed in their iron armor and to the right was the hulking beast of the capitalist monster breathing fire from its mouth and shiny in its bronze scales. The capitalist dragon had just slain one head of the many headed hydra of the masses. Another had put on a dragons head and breathed fire better from its Iron stove than the beast itself. When out from seemingly the most obscure land of Aladdin and the magik lamp came this genii Osama who struck down the mighty towers and stabbed the beast in her belly so that she bled and sent the blind children of the damned out into the desert to be melted and decapitated by the bombs of Eden.
The defeated and bloodied home of the masses turned to the beast and begged dead fish like a circus bear. The forces of the genii were wisps in the willow striking at the fallen bear, the beast herself and the iron behemoth Dragon which was striking at the willow wisps with their talk of paradise for the mad bombers of Eden by strict regimes of capitalist discipline, the like of which had not been seen in the heart of the beast for a long time. They are all three at one another to the throat. Who then stealthily walks behind them in the shadows?
The fuel for the fires of this world conflagration are at their peak production and will soon be on the wane, when that fact has settled into the hearts of even the most happy go lucky guzzler and they are paying through the nose with blood money to keep on moving, then will they realize that time has come for some prioritization. Hopefully by then the beasts will have all spent themselves and we the people will be able to walk out from beneath their hulking ruins and create the world anew in our own eyes. Lets hope they don't take us all down with them. Let us hope the global south, the dark shadow, the peoples of the worlds who have long lived without, will simply be able to walk on. This drama is to be continued.
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