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Latest essay from JMGreer. On socialism. Insightful as usual -

Readers here may be familiar with my enthusiasm for JM’s insightful - and extensively polymathic - clear-seeing. This despite the fact that he describes himself as a Burkean conservative, not really a friend of socialism, whilst I stand steadfastly under the banner of socialism, and pretty radically at that.

Here, in a revealing - and entertaining as usual - analysis of Charles Fourier’s early 19th century ideas, John charts the origins of socialism, and its many failures to make effective socio-political systems that endure; a bit like that other theoretically-impeccable but pragmatically unworkable (in mass societies) doctrine of anarchism, really… :slight_smile:

Though, honest realist that he is, John does acknowledge the several flavours of practical socialism that have been shown to work well, and the further refinements such as democracy in the workplace which Richard Wolff and I - and many others - like rather well; Euskadi’s wonderfully-successful and well-liked Mondragon cooperatives being the glorious veteran example, stitching together the coherence of an entire small, time-battered nation in Iberia with an anarcho-syndicalist socialist economics which has held its own effectively right through this current vile era of criminal-gangster corporate capitalism, even during the overtly-fascistic Franco era in neighbouring Espania:

very interesting article, Rhis. I’d never heard of this particular Fourier, but I’d def be up for 4 more moons and the rest. :slight_smile:

The worry that I have about things like the Great Reset, etc. is summed up in this paragraph from the end of JMGs essay:

At least for the moment, despite the Stalinist rhetoric that surrounds the Great Reset, there’s no sign that the World Economic Forum and its pet pundits are thinking of taking up Stalin’s way of dealing with the internal contradictions of their theories via mass graves and labor camps. They’re among the intellectual heirs of the Fabian movement, convinced that they can use their own wealth, influence, and position in the collective conversation of our time to get the populace in general to accept social changes that will preserve the dominance of the privileged classes, while giving the masses what the privileged classes think they ought to want

Yes, at some level that seems true. However you don’t have to look far to see that an agenda of techno-fascism is pretty well advanced in the developed world (including China).

When currency is purely digital, (no cash, gold or silver) and doled out through state controlled programs (UBI). When facial recognition is everywhere, and 24 hour surveillance is the norm (thanks 5G). When every interaction on and off-line is logged and poured over by bots. When you are judged publicly according to a sliding “social credit” system (alongside the debt-credit score), and your ability to work, travel, etc. is helped or hindered by how good your score is. When getting a passport is conditional upon receiving the vaccine-du-jour

…Well…

One may ask whether we would actually need forced labour camps (or what the difference would be!) in such circumstances.

Coercion has many forms these days, over and above the somewhat crude efforts of various authoritarian regimes down the years. And it takes but a moment’s perusal to see that in every single category I mentioned, we are far advanced down that techno-fascist road. We have never been more surveilled, controlled, lied to by a compliant media, or otherwise coerced. And most people would fight to the death rather than have themselves removed from facebook and twitter and other such means of coercion. And who would voluntarily remove themselves from a regular handout of digital “cash” via a government run UBI?

On top of all that, the people who control those levers, who are busy developing more sophisticated tech, and are currently setting the agenda for a significant handful of governments around the world, are the very same people who are pushing the great reset as the only way forward.

JMG is right that these ideas are not new. It may even be the case that we ultimately do need a great reset if we are to survive as a species on this planet. But whatever it is that is being planned by our GIC overlords in no way has our best interests at heart…

Cheers
PP

I’ve been meaning to post this here, and this seems like a perfect place to put it. We are being overtaken by techno-fascist systems of control. In almost every aspect of our lives. This is just a single example to give a lo-fi flavour of what is to come.

And the Australian government is pushing ahead with cashless cards for welfare recipients that controls what you can spend your “money” on…

Put your faith, P, in two saving factors to set against the nightmare which you - and many other alarmed people - see hoving up so clearly now:

First, the sheer bloody awkwardness of the common humans - we plebs - who will push back, and screw up this monstrous system of control, as always happens. The BellenderGatesoids and their fascistic Reset haven’t a hope in hell, really, you know. Just as nuclear-fusion materials always escape any containment-bottle in which researchers try to enclose them, ultimately-uncageable humankind will invent ways round, behind, and beneath the control systems. The instinct to create a black market never dies! :slight_smile:

And second - and even more potent - is… tara!! - the Long Descent! There are two narratives competing for human attention just now, one hopelessly unrealistic but still very popular for a shortish while longer, the other absolutely real, and coming to get us steadily, ignore and pretend about it as we will.

The horror which you outline, P, is the dark-underside sump of the main article of faith of the currently-world-dominating scientism religion: its all-dazzling techno-narcissist dream of a startrekky future. This is still widely held as a basic, limpidly-trusted myth-faith by a lot of Western and wannabeWestern people around the world. But the other future - the real, absolutely non-gainsayable one - is the Long Descent; the slow, steady fading of hitech industrialism into history; the Single Giant Pulse Event in the life of the Earth, which has already begun its irreversible and non-negotiable ebb-tide. We’re already just about over the cusp of global peak energy right now. (Never forget that the key idea is not how many barrels of oil, etc., are produced each year, but how much energy they actually contain; hint: not as much as previously; and then there’s the absolutely intractable reality of EROEI…). And that’s only the most vital sine-qua-non element in the peak-everything reality which is also now on us. (Without adequate energy from somewhere nothing happens; nothing at all.)

As an example of what I mean, consider veteran oil-geologist Art Berman’s forecast that the output from US fracking wells will plummet this year to less than half of their peak output - putting the whole US into an even more parlous collapse crisis than it’s in already. This - the US fracking slump - is clearly scheduled to happen this year. (I pray in aid here - to quote one of George Galloway’s favourite verbal habits! - Richard Heinberg, Dmitry Orlov, and JM himself, plus several other canny clear-seers, who also accept Art’s estimate as pretty certain.)

The upshot of these upheavals seems likely to be a retreat of current global techno-narcissism into survival-oases in a few regions of the world that happen to be still ‘favoured’ with the last largish pools of actually-getatable fossil-hydrocarbon deposits within their national territories, together with viable reserves of the other absolutely vital commodities which underpin the weirdly-aberrant industrial-civ. model of human society; with Russia leading the field, and China hanging on to the same status for as long as it can (not long, with their demographic nightmare completely unsolved); and with a shrinking tally of satellite states in thrall to those two strongholds. (Oz/Aotearoa as grovellingly-dependent satellites of Russia/China, anyone? :smile:) Elsewhere, I expect to observe in my next few incarnations - :slight_smile: - a steady ebbing away of all the junky consumerist gear and the abundant energy which creates and maintains the modern hitechie life-ways - temporarily, and only ever for the Pampered Twenty Percent.

And speaking of life, I expect the current human-population overshoot episode - already several centuries long - to have resolved itself in the usual grim Gaian way, without any useful input from we feckless hom-saps, by the time this century turns into the 22nd, or maybe by a bit after; just as Malthus predicted, but on a slightly longer timescale than he expected. That’s likely to be pretty chaotic too, and not at all conducive to the sort of hyper-controlling tyranny which so many frightened people are dreading right now. Maybe such hell-holes will hang on in a few awful enclaves, a scatter of declining Efrafas here and there, to pinch on idea from ‘Watership Down’, but with plenty of wild humans still around outside, doing life as they prefer, as far as the harsh conditions of the time allow.

As you can see, P, my counter-vision of where we’re going isn’t pretty. But it has the benefit of being realistic; plus the other inestimable benefit of being Gaia-managed, and therefore ultimately creative and life-affirming (if coloured by her usual ruthlessness). We just have a few little local difficulties to get through first…! :slight_smile: Bloody hell, bro, we live in unsettling times. Cling to the Consolations of Philosophy!

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BTW, P, Daisy Luthor (Lex’s daughter?) over at Off-G has another set of horrid nightmares to upset us - if we swallow them too quickly: about how so many ‘crazy cospithirries’ have proven true in this year of the covid-scam workup. Let me hasten to add in reassurance that I think all these psychotic dreams too will go the way of all hitech, as outlined in my post above. :slight_smile:

Hard to disagree with you on any of this bwana. Which, strangely, gives me hope and trepidation in equal measure.

I think you’re right in that, even in the most totalitarianism of societies, a thriving black market in essential items will survive. We do have a tendency to subvert even the most powerful systems of authoritarian control… However. The powers that be can certainly cause a great deal of harm in their determined pursuit of dystopia.

But then again. Given our current starting point, there is no road forward that doesn’t rain down pain and a good deal of despair in the medium term…

Eyes on the horizon, I guess. Ultimately we have no choice but to reorganize ourselves to live within the hard boundaries set by planet earth. It’s non negotiable so it’ll happen eventually.

It’s hard to live with such profound loss, though. Human caused mass-extinction weighs heavily…

As first-aid comforters, hold these thoughts about the Sixth Extinction, anguishing though it is to watch it happening:

First, remember the Tibetan monks’ intricate and gloriously-beautiful sand-paintings, which they promptly destroy the minute they’re finished, to underline the inevitable transience of all things corporeal, no matter how achingly-beautiful they may be (oh god! that tigers should go extinct! Oh no!).

Next, remember the Akashic Records: Once anything has existed at all, it remains stitched into the great tapestry of being for ever. Nothing is ever lost entirely. And patterns in the Record can be resurrected at any time.

Next: I - this immortal soul, this individuated unit of the great consciousness that is the ultimate foundational stuff of all reality - I can keep going round on the wheel of rebirth for as long as I choose, until the buddhist option of ultimate escape from its perennial pains persuades me more: Thousands of incarnations, amounting to millions of years, if I want. The choice remains open indefinitely.

Next: On that time-scale, watching Mam Gaia re-fill the recently-vacated life-niches with new species, as she has been doing incessantly ever since she first ignited life on this planet, is all part of the passing - virtual - show, and to be relished as the comfort and healing that it will be: the great re-wilding. All this being part of our reason for being alive at all: service to the great purpose of Big Mind, which is: lowering the overall entropy of the whole system, and growing everything towards harmony and love…

To ease the angst, think ‘all we need is luuuurve’ (as the psilocybin-spirit whispers constantly!), and think on the Palaeontological timescale! :slight_smile:

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