It’s time, a number of people are saying, to match the critique with positivity. With (they hope) the elevation of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to the roles of president and vice president respectively, and on an ill-defined platform of ‘joy,’ we must say what we will do.
To answer that, I have to tell you a little about myself. I fell on the wrong side of capitalism and—worse—neoliberalism when I burned out (though I didn’t understand this at this time) on computer programming (the career my father had chosen for me) in 1985.
With my romanticized (in popular media) image of the working class, I had no idea what I was in for. Though along the way, when it all fell apart again and again and again, I did pick up a Ph.D. (and a few shit tons of student loan debt), only to find at what was supposed to be retirement age that all of it is for naught.
But along that path, I learned a little bit about critical theory—critique—and yes, here, we really are talking about the same thing. I understand what happened to me, not ever how it even could have gone right.
So, when you ask of me for a ‘positive’ path, my answer would be to begin, yes, I mean, begin, by taxing oligarchy out of existence. These people have far too much power, in both political and economic terms (as if it were possible to properly distinguish between the two), over the rest of us. Capitalism cannot exist: It inherently exacerbates social inequality and cannot do otherwise as it, like any system of exchange, privileges whomever has the greater power to say no.[1]
That would be a positive path. And I cannot even begin to conceive of anything less.
Also along my path, I have had to shed more than a few romanticized views. I am no longer an anarchist because I do not see, any longer, the potential for self-governance among humans as a whole: This requires, as Jimi Hendrix memorably (but I had forgotten) put it, that “the power of love overcomes the love of power,”[2] or that humans, as a species, regain an absolute intolerance for deprivation among our fellows[3] that I simply have not seen in anything like preponderance in my entire life—how could I? Poverty and desperation are all around us, but we go about our daily lives grumbling about taxes—oh, and don’t forget ‘crime,’ nearly all of which can in one way or another be attributed to poverty and desperation.[4]
Then, as a species, as we revel in our anti-intellectual ignorance, we fail to put two and two together. This flabbergasts me. And then I am supposed to be surprised when our responses to pandemics, let alone the climate crisis, are so pathetic?
We, as a species, are blind. And we celebrate our blindness, drowning it all in football, alcohol, and anything at all other than looking around and seeing what needs to be done. We are to govern ourselves? Utter nonsense. We are hurtling towards extinction and certainly few of our fellow species on the planet we have ruined will miss us.
So, anarchism is out. But what we do now is scarcely better for we still have the problem that those who govern us are certainly no better—and arguably psychopathically worse[5]—than the rest of us and so-called ‘merit’ has become a cover for nepotism.[6] Evil as it is, it is self-reinforcing. I see no way to overturn it without violence, which requires, however temporarily, that power be in the hands of people with guns as they wrest it from those who now have it, and I am not reassured that the people with guns and power, however temporarily, will relinquish those guns and power once they have them. Rinse, repeat.
And now you ask me for a path forward? Drink that Kool-Aid.
[1] Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” in Social Theory, ed. Charles Lemert, 6th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2017), 94-101.
[2] Jimi Hendrix, quoted in GoodReads, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace,” n.d., https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2381-when-the-power-of-love-overcomes-the-love-of-power
[3] Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead, 1999); David Graeber and David Wengrow, Dawn of Everything (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
[4] Steven E. Barkan, Criminology: A Sociological Understanding, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006); Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 7th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2004).
[5] George Monbiot, “Outer Turmoil,” June 17, 2019, https://www.monbiot.com/2019/06/17/outer-turmoil/
[6] Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites (New York: Crown, 2012).