We can do this through strikes, blockades, and occupations, which disrupt the system that the oligarchy rests on. Or through “monkey wrench” protests which also upset order in this way, like the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have involved shutting down traffic. As we separate ourselves from the products, media, food, energy systems, and ideas of the corporate establishment, we’ll become free to create our own versions of these things within our lives. Gardens, independent media, and self-generated electricity are how we can function outside the power structure.
Beyond this we can construct entirely new societal infrastructures: the use of bartering and cryptocurrencies take away from the power of the banks and the Federal Reserve; walkable communities make fossil fuels largely obsolete; alternative elections, the idea of electing officials apart from the authority of the established government, could negate the power of the elites.
Especially for the poor, who have to work outrageous shifts just to have basic resources, these actions might seem undoable. But they’re being incrementally accomplished, as people around the country and the globe work to transform their communities, organize against injustice, and spread the truth. Are these actions happening fast enough to save us from catastrophe? With climate crisis being inevitable and in its early stages, we may have to redefine what we think of as an acceptable outcome.
But we’ve done enough already to make the ruling class deeply afraid. People aren’t as compliant as they were just a few years ago. The will to mobilize against the corporatocracy on a mass scale is here, and the recent volatility in the stock market might mean the economic disruptions needed to provoke that revolt are very close. Organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Green Party, and Redneck Revolt are doing all they can to make an impact, and their success could explode when the new economic bubble and the fraud of Trump’s populism are revealed.
In an age of AI, mass surveillance and atomic weapons, the backlash from the establishment is unique and chilling. “Just when you thought the corporatocracy couldn’t possibly get more creepily Orwellian,” writes CJ Hopkins in his report last month The War on Dissent, “the Twitter Corporation starts sending out emails advising that they ‘have reason to believe” we have ‘followed, retweeted,’ or ‘liked the content of” an account ‘connected to a propaganda effort by a Russia government-linked organization known as the Internet Research Agency.’ While it’s not as dramatic as the Thought Police watching you on your telescreen, or posters reminding you ‘Big Brother Is Watching,’ the effect is more or less the same.”
The products of more than a century of government propaganda research are being forced onto us right now. In addition to those actions from Twitter, Facebook has created a massive team of “counterspeech” operatives to “disrupt ideologies underlying extremism.” Google is systematically suppressing search terms that take users to dissenting websites, and material from RT and Sputnik has been blatantly de-ranked. Fearmongering about Russia and other media sensations bombard us constantly.
Nuclear drills, based in fear of a North Korea first strike that all actual evidence sayswon’t happen, are spreading dread throughout communities across the country. There’s good reason to think the false nuclear alerts in Japan and Hawaii were made with a similar motive. Something big is being planned, and we can get a sense of what that will be as the U.S. now prepares for an imaginary “preemptive strike” from Russia.
“The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect,” went the motto of the notorious CIA torturer Dan Mitrione, whose agency is at the center of many of these operations to crush dissent. Cruelty has always been part of totalitarianism, but not until now has a power establishment had today’s tools to wage war against a population. If we don’t dismantle oligarchy soon, we’ll be subjected to the vision of current CIA director Mike Pompeo, who promised in October that “We are going to become a much more vicious agency.”
“I wish I had some rallying cry to end this depressing assessment with,” concludes Hopkins, “but I have no interest in being one of these Twitter-based guerrilla leaders who tell you we can beat the corporatocracy by tweeting and donating to them on Patreon, and then going about our lives as ‘normal.’ It’s probably going to take a little more than that, and the obvious truth is, the odds are against us.”
If you’re discomforted by seeing this indictment of the lifestyle many activists are in right now, discomfort is how we become motivated to taking the right actions in life. The actions of the oligarchy will show us which kinds of changes we’ll need to make.
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