Are we really allowed our little pseudo-revolunionary idiosyncracies in industrial-capitalist society under the Google regime?  As long as we work and consume, albeit in a quasi-counter-cultural form?  Hot Topic is a hot topic.  Let us find out.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Barry Goldwater 

4. Universal arming of the people. In future armies shall at the same time be workers’ armies so that the armed forces will not only consume, as in the past, but produce even more than it costs to maintain them.

In addition, these shall be a means of organising work

Marx and Engles - Demands of the Communist Party in Germany

Tolerance as an Ideology Category - Slavoj Zizek

S.C.U.M. Manifesto - Valerie Solanas 

 Industrial Society and Its Future - Ted Kaczynski

Situationist International Journal 

Manifesto of the Communist Party - Marx and Engles

Socialist Gun Review

They don't need to burn the books, they just remove them.
- RATM

The Hegemony of Freedom: Power as a Finite Resource

This story begins with the Law and Disorder Conference in Portland, Oregon and the chaos that descended upon it.  It should be seen as somewhat of an embarrassment for today's left.  However, not necessarily for the reasons one might imagine.  It was not a matter of anarchy gone awry, necessarily.  It was more a cognitive dissonance within anarchism between individualist libertarianism and collective democracy.

The melee ensued as a result of Kristian Williams' status as a panelist in a forum about the role of agent provocateurs in the anarchist movement.  However, his stated purpose for being there was not the bone of contention that caused the feud.  The disruption arose from his insistence that issues of sexual assault have become off limits to anyone other than abuse survivors.  These sentiments were stated in an essay entitled "The Politics of Denunciation."  The most controversial of the statements made in the essay are as follows:

Under this theory, the survivor, and the survivor alone, has the right to make demands … one obvious implication is that all allegations are treated as fact. And often, specific allegations are not even necessary.... It may be enough to characterize someone’s behavior … as ‘sexist,’ ‘misogynist,’ ‘patriarchal, ‘silencing,’ ‘triggering,’ unsafe,’ or ‘abusive. (additional source)

Earlier this year a blog post entitled "The Rise of the Post-New Left Political Vocabulary" by Stephen D’Arcy was published, which analyses more precisely "calling out" culture in today's left circles.  D'Arcy's article approaches the problematic more sensitively and is a more rounded critique, centered on historicity.

One major concern is that I and others have expressed is that this "calling out" culture uses humiliation as a tactic. It is a strategy of the defeated.  If we are to win in the broader struggle for liberation, we cannot shoot ourselves in the foot this way.  We are embarrassing and thus alienating our allies.  The problem arises when privilege is unconscious. Suddenly individuals new to today's leftism are being called out for things they don't understand. The cry then becomes:  My privilege has been checked. I'm still not liberated. What next?

Many of these current left tendencies arose at a point where damage control was necessary after a particularly reactionary period (Regan, Bush, Bush Jr.).  Perhaps the way to proceed is to be liberation oriented as opposed to doing constant damage control. I understand this means different things to different demographics, but I would advocate a return to the orthodox Marxist critique of political economy, whereby these particular oppressions can be linked though economic imperatives of the ruling class. I'm not suggesting, however, that all dialectical struggle arises from class antagonism. Certainly sexism was around much longer than capitalism or feudalism. I'm saying the reason these oppressions continue to be very real today is because they benefit the ruling class.

However, the embarrassment at the Law and Disorder Conference, was not necessarily an overly self-reflexive left. Perhaps the precise critique lies not in defending the correctness of Kimberly William's statements regarding the hegemony of abuse survivors, but in the failure to reconcile dissent from those statements within a "libertarian" framework. "Libertarian" socialism fails in its marriage to individualist freedom as a fundamental precept. In this arena "anarchism" is rendered impotent in its ability to appropriately respond to theoretical questions of privilege.

Recently, Mark Bray wrote a critique of what he deemed "liberal tendencies that plagued Occupy."  The first he discusses is what he deems "liberal libertarianism."  However, why does he necessarily adhere to "left libertarianism" while denouncing "liberal libertarianism?"  Much of what he criticizes in "liberal libertarianism" in inherent to libertarianism/anti-authoritarianism itself, particularly, the aspect of idiosyncratic individualism.  This liberal tendency arises from multiculturalism, which states that all points of view are valid, and so censorship, on whatever basis, is reproachable.  The "mic check" phenomenon at occupy exemplified this.  The collective voice of the movement could become whatever idiosyncratic rant whomever had the moxy to yell out "mic check" determined it to be.

Bray defines the "liberal libertarian" thusly:

The Liberal Libertarian is the person who has learned enough about the potentially heinous repercussions of coercion and exclusion to renounce authoritarian organizing structures, but takes this in such an individualistic direction that they also often dismiss even directly democratic structures and reject collective attempts to prevent boisterous individuals from completely disrupting assemblies, meetings, actions or any other collective endeavor.

So why define the prevailing tendency in today's left as "libertarian socialism?"  I understand that this has a historical significance in the history of the IWW and other proposed libertarian socialist movements in America, but why not, instead, demand direct democratic socialism?  Here is an example of how the tolerant libertarianism of Occupy could go wrong when a reactionary throws a monkey wrench in the gears:



The incident(s) this wing-nut is referring to occurred because of OWS's reluctance to have any safety measures in place, what so ever, such as a kind of "people's security" like they did in Tarhir Square.  Why give these individuals fodder to attack our movement?  Self-conscious leaderlessness gives individuals whose will is opposite from the leftist values we espouse not only a platform for their idiotic rantings (and why give them one of ours when they have so many already?), but also creates an opportunity whereby oppressors can exploit the weaknesses of our movement, including, but not limited to physical and even sexual violence.

A discussion of the film The Act of Killing is relevant here.   It's international title was "Free Men" because the Indonesian word for gangster sounds like the English term "free men." As is a plague for foreign films, the title was changed to the more moralistic "Act of Killing" for ideological reasons. This concept of freedom is something that we should respect as a myth but beware of as a reality. Mussolini said "Every anarchist is a baffled dictator." There is perhaps some truth in that. Are not the stars of this postmodern film personifications of freedom gone wrong? Were they not free to live out their darkest fantasies with no consequences?  

Passolini's sado-masochistic film Salo also comes to mind, where at one point the sadists say, "The true anarchist is the fascist, because true freedom comes only from power."

An intriguing current in cyber-politics has arisen from these lines of thinking.  Moldbuggian neoreachtionarism has arisen from counter-intuitive roots: voluntarism, anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism.  Neoreactionism is a high-tech, Silicon-Valley based brand of techno-fascism pushed by nerd-blogger Mencious Moldbug and Google engineer Justine Tunney.  Tunney touts herself as an Occupy Wall Street activist, but her recent endorsement of Moldbug makes one wonder if she really "gets" OWS or how sincere her motives are for being involved with OWS in the first place.

OWS's triumph was its distinction between the "99%" and the "1%."  On Tunney's Twitter page she has a picture of her holding a sign that says "Give Class War @ Chance."  Which class does she want to win the war, one must wonder?  I like the slogan "we are the 99%" precisely because it creates an "us vs. them." Because we are not the 1%! Some sentimental people have perverted it to be "we are 100%" but I feel this deludes the power of the message. 

Power is a finite resource and it must be meted out equally for liberation to be possible. That means some must lose some power/freedom. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with losing my white-male-hetero privilege if it means a more complete liberation in the end. I'm just interested in actually achieving emancipation, and not simply sitting at the cool kid table in the lefty club.

It is incredibly baffling to those less theoretically inclined to decipher the link between vonluntaryism/anarcho-capitalism and neoreactionary techno-fascism.  It appears that fascism hegemonically becomes its opposite, unrestrained freedom. Of course this is not new. See the trajectory of Georges Sorel from syndicalist to fascist, or even Mussolini (prominent in the Italian Socialist Party early in his political career) for that matter. What is clear is that radicalism for radicalism's sake is not enough. 

Seeing power and freedom as interrelated and from there seeing power as a finite resource that must be distributed with an interest to egalitarianism is a necessary step.  A revival of Gramsci is incredibly important in these times. The concepts of praxis and hegemony have taken on renewed relevance. How creepily appropriate that Gramsci was executed by the ultimate left wing traitor, Mussolini.

For all our hope that things will continually get better and better, it is an unfortunate fact that in politics (as in physics) for every action (in the pursuit of emancipatory progress), there is an equal and opposite reaction.  The rise of the Nouvelle Droite in France, the participation of Svoboda in the recent Ukrainian revolution and the fascist character of their current regime, the current democratically elected regime in India, and the anti-Bolivarian protests in Venezuela make it clear that those of us on the left have a continuing responsibility to be ever vigilant against all forms of reactionarism and fascism that threaten to undue the progress already done.

Liberation is necessary before any kind of liberty can be pronounced.  One can declare a space a Beyian "Temporary Autonomous Zone," but until we have a society where the autonomy of all is respected, it is premature to declare universal freedom.

Dare to struggle!  Dare to win!

Commodity mysticism

Commodity fetishism is perhaps one of the most insightful and groundbreaking concepts from Karl Marx's tour de force of economic philosophy Kapital, first published in 1886. For those not familiar with commodity fetishism it is somewhat of a magical mystique around a particular physical thing (commodity) that determines its social value, expressed by Marx as exchange-value. An example of this in the current state of capitalism would be branding. Slavoj Zizek uses Coke vs. generic cola beverage as an example in his 2011 book Living in the End Times. A consumer may be willing to pay more for the Coca-Cola brand soda than the generic simply because of the magical gravitas of the Coke name/logo and all other psycho-social associations that go along with.  According to Zizek, this marks a departure by Marx from Marxism.  He thus deems Marx's writings from after 1850 to be the post-Marxist Marx.

Of course, there are other ways to determine the value of a commodity apart from fetishism. The labor theory of value posits that a commodity is worth the amount of labor (labor = time spent working + rigorousness of work (this is perhaps an over-simplification, but let's use this rudimentary definition for the sake of argument)) it takes to make something. Adam Smith also subscribed to this idea. This is the first element of a materialist conception of capital.

The second factor is use-value. Since labor is required to fashion a commodity that suits human wants or needs, the value of a commodity also reflects its usefulness. This is a bit more of a complex formula than labor-value as the determination of use-value is often a combination of social relations and material concerns.

Commodity fetishism comes in at the level of exchange-value. Exchange-value under capitalism involves profit. Zizek eloquently defines profit as "the price of the 'nothing' we pay for when we buy something from a capitalist. The capitalist economy counts with the price of nothing, with reference to a virtual Zero which has a precise price (2011: 210)."  It has perhaps become almost a cliche when a communist insists that wage labor under capitalism is always robbery because if the boss were to pay the worker what her/his labor was really worth the boss would make no profit. However, it is precisely the mystical element of the fetish that the boss provides. In this sense the bourgeois capitalist (boss) acts as a kind of priest; a gatekeeper to the heavenly realm of the transcendal commodity fetish.

So how then does the concept of commodity fetishism inform us that Marx has disavowed Marxism in Kapital? The philosophical writings of the young Karl Marx were primarily based on Hegelian dialectics. However, Marx differentiated his dialectical materialism from Hegel's dialectical idealism.

In Marx's materialism, ideology, society, civilization, our species' entire symbolic culture arises from material conditions that are clearly discernible by science. Those conditions are most often those which Charles Darwin had identified as being traits of a species "fit" for survival in On the Origin of the Species. Primary among those would be subsistence and reproduction. One also may note that in nature, a species' evolutionary trajectory is often determined by these factors. For example, opposable thumbs in the great apes may have been a mutation that stuck around because those who could pick things up with one hand were more likely to be able to feed themselves. Another extreme example from the other side is the flamboyant plumage of a male peacock. Even though these bright colors may make them more susceptible to predators, they also make the most brightly colored males more likely to be noticed by potential mates and thus more likely to have offspring.

Certainly this materialist theory is sound when we look at things zoologically (although we do now know that some of the great-apes such as chimpanzees do display ritualistic behavior, which one could argue is in some ways symbolic). And it is even consistent when one considers those human cultures that had or have hunter-gatherer type subsistence (again, the existence of animism in these societies also displays a kind of symbolic culture).

Where this theory of materialism breaks down, however, is when it comes to those human societies that have a complex symbolic culture. Ethnologically speaking, symbolic culture (i.e.: not only language, but abstract meanings (signifiers) given, at times seemingly arbitrarily, to certain symbols (signified)) tends to arise with consolidation of political authority (from loose egalitarian bands into tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, states, empires) and also a change in the mode of production (from kinship to tributary, mercantile, capitalist, industrial capitalist, monopoly capitalist). Interestingly enough, a change in religiously seems to coincide with these apparent phases in political-economy. The trajectory seems to go from animism (spirits in all things) to polytheism (many gods), to monotheism (single God) and then perhaps even to atheism (no god) or nihilism (nothing at all). There is a corresponding localist versus universalist approach to religiosity as well here: animism and polytheism being more localist, and monotheism, atheism and nihilism more universalist.

Zizek points out an interesting paradox in Marx's Katpital.  It is expressed by Marx himself in the following passage, "... the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things...."  I would even make a more bold paraphrase, saying that persons are treated like things, and things are treated like persons under capitalism.

Another paradox can thus be extrapolated.  Capitalism takes on the character of a sort of universalist animism, whereby commodities are possessed with a spirit, akin to Hegel's geist, but involving things rather than persons.  If we were to compare capitalism to vodou, the capitalist then takes on the status of a bokor: a black-magic priest involved in the business of creating zombies.  A zombie would here be a person who becomes a thing; un-dead: the Hegelian negation-of-the-negation.  Additionally, a thing (here a commodity) then is given a spiritual dimension, a soul.  Also, like vodou, capitalism allows interchanges between the spiritual realm of the fetish and the physical world through liaisons: bokor (hougan or mambo) in vodou, marketeer in capitalism.  These liaisons must become possessed by the spirit in order to communicate its message.  They must fully identify with the myth in order to propagate the myth.

Parallels come to mind with the fictional House of Fetish cult from Albert Camus' short story "The Renegade", of his collection entitled Exile and the Kingdom, published in 1957.  An unnamed missionary renounces his Christian faith and follows the deity known as "the Fetish," after a period of being tortured, culminating in the cutting out of his tongue.  The House of Fetish follows a sado-masochistic philosophy of spirituality.  Pain, suffering, destruction, hate and unchecked power are celebrated as sacraments of this religion.  Isn't this akin to the masochism of the proletariat class under capitalism?

Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, argued against the masochistic nature of the proletarian work ethic in his critique of capitalist conceptualization of efficiency entitled The Right to be Lazy, from 1883. He there explains that the drive to over-produce, a result of the profit motive, has lead to a puritanical work ethic where efficiency is a virtue and sloth a vice. Is not this crisis of over-production what has lead to the imminent ecological and financial crises we face today?

For Lafargue the crucified Christ is the ultimate symbol of this masochism. He makes note that in pre-Christian societies work was the duty of lowly slaves, whereas the philosophers of ancient Spain and Greece praised laziness.

At the end of Camus' "The Renegade", the apostate missionary again renounces his faith, this time the faith of the House of the Fetish. As he lay dying next to the high priest of the fetish from a wound inflicted by the Christian colonialists who came to exterminate the House of the Fetish he expresses a Hegelian negation-of-the-negation, put forth by the following passage:


Who is speaking, no one, the sky is not opening up, no, no, God does not speak in the desert, yet whence comes that voice saying: 'If you consent to die for hate and power, who will forgive us?' 
Is it another tongue in me or still that other fellow refusing to die, at my feet, and repeating: 'Courage! courage! courage!'? Ah! supposing I were wrong again! Once fraternal men, sole recourse, O solitude, forsake me not! Here, here who are you, torn, with bleeding mouth, it is you my beloved master! Cast off that hate-ridden face, be good now, we were mistaken, we'll begin all over again, we'll rebuild the city of mercy, I want to go back home. Yes, help me, that's right, give me your hand...."

A handfull of salt fills the mouth of the garrulous slave.

(1957: 60-1)

At first glance, it appears as though Camus' unnamed protagongist may have reverted back to Christianity here, but I would posit that he is merely expressing his religious status as a Hegelian negation-of-a-negation. To Hegel this double negative does not make a positive as it does in grammar. Rather it puts the individual (here Camus' "renegade" protagonist) in a third, liminal category. Just as the undead zombie is neither living, nor dead, the "renegade" here is neither Christian, nor zealot for the Fetish. He has renounced both faiths.

Implicit in the above passage is that the "renegade" protagonist has come to understand that the cruelty of the Fetish has been defeated by the cruelty of the Christians. He has come to understand that the perceived dialectic between Christian mercy and the cruel sadism of the Fetish is not necessarily so black-and-white as he had assumed all along.

In the religion of capital, money is the transubstantiated sacrament with which we create meaning out of nothing.  Capital's dualistic nature can thus be described in Christian terms.  The commodity is the person - of a dualistic nature itself, possessed of both flesh (thing) and soul (fetish). Money is the Holy Spirit, the vehicle through which commodities are transubstantiated from soul (fetish) to "fleshly" object. One cannot buy the fetish directly. It is physically nothing.  The fetish must come as part of a package: physical thing (shoes, food, electronics etc.) plus fetish (symbolized by the "brand" - Nike (athleticism), McDonalds (fun), Apple (innovation) etc.).

Finally, I would insist that commodity fetishism must be ethnographically and ethnologically studied as a form of religiosity.  Michael Taussig's book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism approaches this category, specifically in relation to the connection between capitalism and Satanism in South America.  Historian Patrick Geary's paper entitled "Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics" published in Arjun Appadurai's (ed) The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective from 1986 is another.  However, these studies primarily explore capital and the commodity's relationship with preexisting religiosity.  To get to the heart of the matter, economic anthropologists must also approach capitalism as a religion in-and-of-itself: a black-magic, universalist animism that has dominated the entire world.

Kevin Rose: Parasite

From [kevinroseisaterribleperson.wordpress.com]


Kevin Rose: Leech
We are here to tell you about Kevin Rose, an employee of Google. At a glance, he might appear to be any other hipster techie walking down the street, but there is something deeper and far more sinister at play below his well-manicured hair. But first, we have to give you some background.
Behind every gentrifying hipster techie there is a tech company. In the beginning, each of the tech giants was nothing more than a startup, and behind every startup there is always a venture capitalist. Ram Shriram once invested in a startup called Google, the love-child of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two Stanford students with a search algorithm for the internet. This venture capitalist gambled on the Google startup in 1999 and now he is on the board of a company currently worth around 400 billion dollars. Without venture capitalists like Shriram, there would never have been a Google.
As a way of honoring the system that brought them their wealth, Brin and Page created Google Ventures, the venture capital wing of the corporation. The employees of Google Ventures select startups and existing companies to either fund or acquire. Many of these investments are located in the Bay Area and the employees of these newly funded or acquired startups have moved to San Francisco and parts of Oakland.
It has now come to the point where even Diet Coke advertisements are referencing the influx of techies and their startups. With venture capital in their pockets, these wealthy professionals with few attachments are able to pay hyper inflated rents and property prices, displacing long time residents and increasing the cost of living. Tech-workers on average earn four times the wages of a normal service worker.
Venture capitalists enable these tech-workers by funding their startups. With the success of each startup, more and more ambitious tech-workers flock to the city and displace underemployed service workers to the cities at the far reaches of the BART line. These workers must then commute back to San Francisco or Oakland every morning, in most cases to perform menial tasks for the entitled scum who drove them out in the first place.
Which brings us back to Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com and current venture partner at Google Ventures. He has already helped Google acquire Nextdoor.com and invested his own money in Foursquare, hoping to cash out when a giant buys it. We are here today because a few of the thousands low-paid, underemployed service workers got fed up with Kevin Rose treating them like the shit one scrapes from their boot, not even worthy of eye contact or the basic pleasantries generally taken for granted in our culture.
Recognizing that Kevin Rose is not just another techie asshole, but rather a meta-leech funding and profiting off the gentrification of San Francisco, we chose to bring the class war to his doorstep on our own terms. Rather than be subservient and do his bidding in exchange for the currency we need to commute home and back, we are here today in uncompromising solidarity with every person forced out of the city by the insane hyper-gentrification created through the tireless efforts of people like Kevin Rose.
Kevin Rose: Serial Entrepreneur
Kevin lives in an expensive duplex atop Potrero Hill. His address is 2004 19th Street in San Fracisco.
Kevin calls himself a ‘serial entrepreneur’ and is very proud of his business accomplishments. In 2004 he helped establish Digg.com, a website that ranked news stories according to number of reader “diggs”. From this, he created a spinoff video podcast called Diggnation, a show he hosted for six years that is widely considered to be the first clear articulation of the current tech-bro culture.
For example, in 2008, Kevin and his cohost began sermonizing on when it would be appropriate for a man to hit a woman. It was determined that if a woman kicked a man in the balls, it was okay to punch her “tit.” Kevin took it all a step further when he connected the expression tit-for-tat to their discussion and then announced, while making a cutting motion, “it hurts them, it does too – or take a scissors to the tit.” His comment was met with widespread criticism and Kevin became the poster boy for tech-misogyny, even after he apologized by saying, “obviously, violence against women is serious and something we don’t advocate in any way.”
Eventually the world forgot all about Kevin Rose and Digg and Diggnation. Around that time, Kevin and some of his bros started a company called Milk. This company in turn created an app called Oink. This app allowed anyone to take out their smart-phone and see a map of every nearby restaurant, café, and bar with ratings of specific items at each establishment. In essence, Oink allowed people to consume more according to their own specific tastes and needs, allowing them to browse prices and rank establishments.
Oink meant to capitalize on the way people tend to listen to the recommendations of friends by convincing them to use an ad-laden platform, rather than go out together or discuss favorite restaurants in conversation. Through mechanisms like Oink, Yelp, and Foursquare, people can now drive down business in establishments that no longer serve their luxurious needs by mobbing them with unfavorable reviews and rankings.
And then one day in March 2012, it was announced that Kevin and half of the Milk team were to become Google employees. The Oink app was terminated and Kevin briefly worked at Google+ before moving on to Google Ventures. Based on the various startups that he has funded through Google Ventures or on his own, we can see more disturbing evidence of Kevin’s technological derangement.
Nextdoor.com is a website that helps alienated urban and suburban home-dwellers learn about their neighbors and network their private surveillance feeds together. Like some of Kevin’s other investments, Nextdoor allows residents who use the website to gang up on anyone they do not like (or who does not have a Nextdoor account) and hound them into compliance or eviction. It allows the alienated to connect with others like them who would rather electronically complain than speak to an offline neighbor in real life. Nextdoor.com is a major new platform for the snitch-world, a bubble machine for people who never learned social skills. And it is something Kevin Rose and Google think is a really good idea.
But let’s take another one of Kevin’s investments, the popular app Foursquare. A previous manifestation of it, Dodgeball, was bought by Google in 2005 but then terminated in 2009. That year, the creators of Dodgeball started their new Foursquare app and by 2012 they had collected over 45 millions users. The app allows disconnected and alienated smartphone users to check-in to restaurants, hotels, and bars and in the process alert other Foursquare users of their location. In the world of this app, people can become the “mayor” of an establishment based on how often they check-in and how many “badges” they earn.
After performing fellatio on Foursquare for ten ridiculous pages in his book Smart Cities, Anthony M. Townsend writes, “the city of Foursquare might look like a lattice, but is it becoming an elaborate tree traced by hidden algorithms? Instead of urging us to explore on our own, will it guide us down a predetermined path based on what we might buy?” The answers to his questions are an undeniable yes. Foursquare gathers isolated and unimaginative people and gives them a way to connect without having to think beyond a glance at the food rankings on their smartphones. The system through which Foursquare enables people to connect is called the capitalist system and thus Foursquare will always connect people as consumers, customers, and tippers. It was designed to do this and nothing else.
Kevin Rose: OK Glass, Now Take Over The World!
Unfortunate people like Kevin Rose have never known a world without capitalism and in their ignorance they only know how to fortify it. Everything they do helps to extend the suicidal reign of this world system that renders all life into a commodity and replaces real life with digital distractions that lead people into narcosis, gluttony, and sociopathic greed. Kevin Rose and his employers at Google represent one part of a larger structure that keeps people enslaved to this single economic system that is literally killing the planet and decreasing the chances of continued life.
Tech entrepreneurship is not a harmless or benevolent force. The industry is built directly on the exploitation of millions of faceless people in the global south who are driven off their land and forced to do the dangerous and thankless work of extracting (at great ecological cost) the precious metals and other raw materials that enable the tech world to exist. Once the technology has been shoved down our throats through merciless advertising campaigns, mandatory cell phone upgrades, and jobs requiring instant connectivity of smartphones, we find ourselves tied to their world.
Unlike us, this beast has a head that can be targeted. Kevin Rose and other venture capitalists like him literally design and implement this entire exploitive system. They do it because they are drunk on their own power, caught up in a sense of importance bestowed upon them by the type of wealth most of us will never interact with. Kevin Rose will rise and fall with the elites of the dominant order. While we struggle to be included in the trickle-down of wealth through dehumanizing menial labor, these techies, entrepreneurs, and capitalists take over the world. Knowing that at the vanguard of this tech invasion are people like Kevin Rose only increases our desire to completely stop the current insanity.
Taken as a whole, Kevin Rose invests in startups that perpetuate the process of alienation under the guise of social technology. It is, admittedly, genius: create the technological conditions of alienation that drive people to desperately consume technological products that claim to combat the alienation produced by contemporary technological society. Tech is now about creating and selling the new indispensable commodity that everyone must have in order to be less bored, less lost, less ridden with anxiety. We want no part of this disgusting and creepy game being played by a bunch power deranged man-children.
To this end, we now make our first clear demand of Google. We demand that Google give three billion dollars to an anarchist organization of our choosing. This money will then be used to create autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California. In these communities, whether in San Francisco or in the woods, no one will ever have to pay rent and housing will be free. With this three billion from Google, we will solve the housing crisis in the Bay Area and prove to the world that an anarchist world is not only possible but in fact irrepressible. If given the chance, most humans will pursue a course towards increased freedom and greater liberty. As it stands, only people like Kevin Rose are given the opportunity to reshape their world, and look at what they do with those opportunities.
We know that your security advisors are taking our analysis seriously, so if you are confident that your system is the best, it would be wise to give us three billion to see if we fail. Our wager is that you are scared of the viable alternative we would create. If you are not scared, contact us at our WordPress website. Send us a message and we can go from there. Otherwise, get ready for a revolution neither you nor we can control, a revolution that will spread to all of the poor, exploited, and degraded members of this new tech-society and be directed towards you for your bad decisions and irresponsible activities. We advise you to take us seriously.
For a world without bosses, rulers, or cops! Down with the Empire, up with the Spring!
-The Counterforce
PS: The following devices and programs were used in this action: Microsoft Word (for Mac) MacBook Samsung Nexus (powered by Google) Gmail Youtube Electrical Socket

The Korea Conundrum

North Korea is a conundrum for apologists of "actually existing socialism" regimes.  There aren't a whole lot of Communist countries left.  China is too capitalist, Venezuela is too pink (read: not revolutionary/radical), it's too soon to judge the Maoist movement in Nepal, CCCP fell, FARC is a bunch of gangster drug lords.  Cuba seems to be doing alright, but years of sanctions have inhibited their ability to progress as a nation.  North Korea, supported mainly by the new economic boogy-man - China, stands out as a big middle finger to Western imperialism.  They have nukes, which forces superpowers like the US to take them seriously, but also to leave them alone.  Saddam Hussein never had WMD's so it was safe enough for the US to invade his country and lynch him.  Kim Jong-Il made it clear that they had a nuclear program and his son, Kim Jong-Un, has threatened to use them.

For some of us this morbid prospect is intriguing.  Of course no one wants nuclear war.  There's a slim chance that Un is just reckless enough that it might seem like a good idea to him, but I think the reality is much different.  Nuclear weapons are an ace in the hole.  The threat of using them is a powerful bargaining tool, and his wild card has been effective.  In exchange for promises to decrease the scope the N. Korean nuclear program Un has been able to secure foreign aid for his country.

However, Un is hardly a benevolent dictator.   A recent Frontline episode has exposed the hypocrisy in N. Korean pseudo-Marxism where classless socialism is the official line, while orphan children are forced to live on the streets and starve.  The episode makes the argument that a black-market of foreign cinema and television has made the people aware that there is another way.  However, they seem to argue that the emergence of a limited free market in N. Korea is a sign of hope.  As any good socialist knows, capitalism and democracy are not necessarily married.  Zizek has made clear that China is a prime example of the estrangement of capitalism and democracy (See Zizek on "Capitalism with Asian Values").

What is clear is that the N. Korean experiment has become a veritable Jonestown: a dystopian project headed towards destruction.  The buffoonery of the Kim dynasty reveals the last three "great-and-powerful-leaders'" ineptitude and has rendered them as caricatures to the outside world (See "customer reviews" on Amazon's On the Art of the Opera page).  Unfortunately, for the people of N. Korea the situation is all too real.

Film review:

The Comedy - Entitlement Tragedy

Rick Alverson's 2012 film The Comedy is a lyrical critique of the so-called "entitlement generation."  Starring Tim Heidecker as Swanson, the anti-hero protagonist, the film proves itself far superior to the other Tim and Eric film, Billion Dollar Movie, which came out the same year.  However, The Comedy is more of a tragedy than the title suggests.  It is a character study primarily, but also a poignant critique of so-called "hipsters" who have too much money and time to know what to do with.  There are a few remarks made by Swanson and his friends that are worthy of a laugh, but the awkwardness and uneasiness that Tim and Eric's comedic efforts are known for takes a dark turn in this film.  For example, he makes references to slavery and rape in his jokes that are pointedly unfunny.  These offensive themes that shows like Family Guy and South Park make light of are exposed for what they are in this film: not funny.  Actually, one of the things I have always liked about Tim and Eric's tv-shows is that they never crossed the line in this sense, particularly on racial issues and violence against women.  The edginess of their comedy owes more to scatological humor and absurdism than pushing the boundaries of political correctness.

Alverson uses alienation as a trope throughout.  The scene where the protagonist is wandering around a hospital combing the hair of random patients speaks to his longing for a human connection.  There is an uneasiness as the viewer wonders, "What will Swanson do next?"  Although he never actually does anything violent necessarily, there is a feeling that this individual is indeed dangerous.  The underlying danger of the character's behavior is exacerbated by his boredom and lack of need for resources.

The scene where he goes into a bar populated exclusively by African-American men and proceeds to mock and stereotype them reveals a duality in the character.  On the one hand, there is an interest in diversifying his community and "getting out of his comfort zone," but also a profound disconnect from reality and an inability to transcend his prejudices or even to understand others.  Another example of this disconnect in the film is when he is talking politics with a woman at a party.  When asked if he is sympathetic to socialism he says, "I think we gave up on feudalism too soon," and then proceeds to defend Hitler.

This film is incredibly relevant as there are in fact individuals in this country who find themselves in a similar position as Swanson and his friends.  I wonder if the so-called "hipsters" who have seen this film have taken it as an opportunity for self-reflection or if they have just passed it off as a boring indie film worthy of forgetting.  Perhaps people looking for scatological, absurdist humor were disappointed and eager to dismiss the film.

My Breakfast with Zizek

by Mitch Jones
with contributions from Joshua Strauss

PART I: The Narrative

We spent the night in preparation at Josh's house the previous evening.  Neither of us got much sleep.  Despite the insomniatic energy, we didn't get much done.  We had absolutely no idea what was about to happen the next day.

We woke up early, at like 6am, and made the forty minute trip out to Brockport, my alma mater.  It was a Saturday, however, and none of the professors I knew would be there.  When we arrived we told them our credentials and they offered us the grad student rate for admission.  Well, we didn't have any money.  They let us in for $5 between the both of us!  Power to the people!  Then we were treated to a breakfast of bagels with cream cheese, muffins (not as healthy as you might think), donuts (piggy's favorite) and the most beautiful thing in the world at that moment... COFFEE.

We saw our friends Ian and Mary there.  Ian was presenting that day.  He wrote a paper called "In Praise of Irresponsibility," which was about (partially) how around WWII time there was a shift in the left to the partial, the incomplete.  He also makes many pop culture references including GI Joe, fascists who dehumanize their enemies by making them wear masks, and the liquefaction party in William Burrough's Interzone which insists that the majesty of autonomy needs to be questioned.  His conclusion is that Philosophy is irresponsible - can be read and read and reinterpreted over and over, but there is never any response that is sufficient to that text.  Philosophy is that which has no response.

I took tons of notes.  Recorded some audio on my computer.

We got lunch at a diner on Main St.  They gave us BOGO lunch tix at the conference.  I got a bacon cheeseburger and plugged in my computer behind a dart board.  It kept running out of batteries.  Probably because I was using it so much.  Josh got a salad.  I think I ordered another coffee.

When the conference was over for the day I was dying for a cigarette.  I was all out.  Had been the whole day.  We went to another resturaunt where a Zizek Conference party was going on and hobnobbed.  I bummed a cigarette from some dude who told me he just got engaged outside a bar on main street.  For some reason I didn't see it lasting for them.

Inside the resturant we were talking to all the professors and grad students and by this time our minds were completely burnt out, blown and getting to the verge of twisted.   I ended up calling a woman I used to know who still lived in Brockport.  We slept on her couch.

I got no sleep.

We left at six the next morning and went to Wall Mart.  Today was the day.  We were going to interview Zizek in just a few short hours.  We realized that we had no video equiptment.  Wall Mart was a necessary evil.  We bought a little, cheap, digital video camera.  Josh has been using it ever since.  I saw people I used to know most of the places we went.  Then we went to McDonalds to use their WiFi and get some breakfast and more coffee.

We met Antonio Garcia at the conference site at 9.  He escorted us to the dormitory where Zizek was staying.  He met us at the door.  Then we proceeded into a classroom within another dormitory.  This was to be our warroom.  We were unprepared for this.  An intimite moment with Slavoj Zizek.  Just me, Josh and him for forty minutes with everyone watching like it was a television show.  Well, it was on cable access and it's available on YouTube so I guess it is a television show now.

I was initially disappointed in my choice of questions but as time went on I began to feel grateful for the privilege of getting to interview a rockstar intellectual and even a little proud.  We stayed for a few more talks, but I was so tired that we went home shortly after lunch.  They ran out of free coffee fairly early in the day and I couldn't hold my head up anymore.

We took the sleepy drive home buzzing and jazzed from the fallout of the excitement.

When I got home I still didn't sleep for several hours, but I couldn't think.  I had exercised my mental muscle to exhaustion.

PART II: Useless Academia

"Pure, useless academia... is as subversive and necessary as ever."
"All good things come as collateral damage of useless thinking."
- Slavoj Zizek

The function of ruling class ideology is to make us not think too much.  Thought may lead to action and action to revolution.  However, action without thought can be just as dangerous.  No clearer of a recent example of this can be seen but in the Kony 2012 movement.  A YouTube video posted by Rhianna on her Twitter page caused a stir over the leader of a rebel army in Sierra Leon (?) who happens to use child soldiers.  The bloggers and facebookers sprung into a clicktivistic fury over this viral infotainment.  However, few got the whole picture... one that painted the government as hardy innocent in this quagmire.  In addition, the blind cyber-Praxis of clicktivists ignored all sorts of other atrocities going on in the world of equal import and reprehensibility.

PART IIA: Theory and Praxis

The thing that arose over and over in my mind was one of Praxis... i.e.: WHAT THE FUCK CAN WE DO ABOUT IT!!!!!
We've identified the problems, so what's the solution.  The only person that had an answer to that question was Jodi Dean of course.  I'm becoming more pragmatic, realistic and practical as I get a few more years on me.  I've read the Revolution Betrayed.  I'm a Trotskyite.  So we have here a formula for a pragmatic revolution.  As Castro said after taking Havana, "We've won the war, now the revolution begins."  He also said "Homeland or death!"

Jodi Dean, in her eloquent speech on Occupy Wall Street and the Communist Party form, stated that clicktivism and use of capitalist social media by the activist vanguard does have liberating potential.  However, she warns about turning the movement into a physical manifestation of the internet.  It mustn't be solely a public forum for expressing disparate concerns.  We already have the internet for that.  Her suggestion, from my understanding, is that an enlightened party vanguard, with a measure of theoretical sophistication, steer the 99% in the direction of liberation.  Here Dean employs anarchist anthropologist David Graeber's distinction between anarchists and communists - anarchist groups operate on the assumption that no one can convert anyone, whereas communism emphasizes conversion.  This dialectic can be boiled down to vangaurdism vs. insurrectionary alternatives.  Anarchists lead by example, forging their own autonomous communities within the "shell of the old."  Communists seek to transform the old system rather than creating what Hakim Bey calls "Temporary Autonomous Zones."  Zizek's problem with anarchism is that most anarchists do not have a clear, pragmatic vision for what anarchist society would look like.  I must admit, however, that the science-fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin put together a fairly clear outline for an anarcho-syndicalist society in her novel The Dispossessed.

PART III: Individualism

Zizek says that his vision for a communist society would be something like the television show Heros whereby a collection of mavericks ("freaks and outcasts") comes together with their own strengths to bring to the table.  This allows one to understand the compatability of communism with individualism.  If we collaborate then each one of us will bring their own valueable and idiosyncratic experise to each situation.  The difference between this vision and anarchist "consensus" models is that there would have to be some sort of authority that has the final say.  This could be democratic authority, sometimes called the dictatorship of the majority, whereby a one-person, one-vote plebicite is formed.  The reason anarchists oppose the majoritarian democratic model is because ultimately someone's opinions will be marginalized.  The anarchist wants every individual to be empowered and for there to be no winners or losers.  That sounds great and should be strived for at the local level.  The problem is that when you start to deal with a large population it gets increasingly difficult to convince absolutely everyone that one direction or another is the right way to go.

In some ways I disagree with Zizek's analysis of individualism.  But this is only a recent event.  When I was younger I was extremely individualistic, to the point of becomming anti-social.  Individualism was one of the things that lead me away from religion.  However, at this my 27th year on the planet, I am starting to understand the need to conform to your environment somewhat.  Sometimes it involves doing things that you don't want to do.  Freud said that repression of desire is essential so that we don't go around acting out all our most perverse fantasies all day.  This is how humans get along together.

We decide to repress our desire for something it usually fits into some sort of collective decision, like standards of lawfulness or politeness.  Often these standards are organic and driven by culture, but collectively agreed upon nonetheless.

Capitalism too is a collective decision. We need to begin seeing capitalism as imaginary and not just the natural way of being.  This is made aparently clear when we look at the institution of money.  Money is an abstract concept, but it drives our lives despite its surrealistic nature.  That is because we as a society have collectively agreed to place value upon money.

I think homo sapiens is an essentially social species.  We actually mostly go through life doing no willul harm to others.  We all have our moments of anti-social rage, but for the most part we don't want any trouble.

Standing in line is a perfect example.  For the most part people wait patiently in line until their turn arives.  When you're a kid there are "cuts" or "budges" where someone strong arms a more strategic position in line.  However adults rarely do this.  If they do it's only out of desperation.  Politeness and mutual respect are virtues in our society that need to be cultivated more.

Violent criminals are only a very small portion of the overall population.  However, our media is fascinated with violent crime.  As a result of a combination of that and our racist justice system that punishes the powerless more than the powerful, we have locked up more people in America than in any other country in the world.

PART IV: Unilinear evolution

Zizek is a traditionalist Marxist when it comes to "Third World Socialism."  He describes the indigenous movements in Latin America and the Bolivarian revolution as what Marx describes as "primitive communism."  "Capitalism is a condition of liberation," according to Zizek.  He here shows his adherence to the unilinear model of cultural evolution.  According to Marxian unilinear-evolutionism as explained by Eric Wolf, the history of the world can be through modes of production: from the kinship mode (primitive communism, tribes and bands, forraging and horticulture/pastoralism), to the tributary mode (feudalism, cheifdoms and kingdoms, agriculture), to the capitalist mode (empires, industrialism), and then through socialism (mixed economy, more efficient industrialism) to "true" communism (decentralized industrialism and a "withering away of the state").  The people mustn't skip a step.  You can't go immediately from agrarian feudalism to industrial communism.  This is what Mao tried to do and with disasterous results in the short term.  In the long term China would become a superpower, but only because of it's embrace of private enterprise creating what has been described as "state-capitalism."

PART V: The Fetish

When you look at the man he's got a larger than life character.  He's foreign.  He ran for Prime Minister of his country, Yugoslavia... and almost won because his opponent admitted that he was smarter than all the other candidates.  His accent reminds me that he is in fact from the other side of the iron curtain.  They experienced communism and some of them kinda liked it.  He's been described as a rock star intellectual.  He's a little overweight.  He has greasy hair and a shaggy beard.  He wears nice shoes.  He has nervous ticks where he pinches his nose.  He swears, tells dirty jokes.  He likes cinema.  He is growing bored of politics.

His most recent book was a 2000 page work on Hegel.  Pure philosophy.  Hardcore thinking.  He is the envy of other philosophers.  There is also a journal devoted to him.

The first talk we saw on Saturday morning was Russell Sbriglia - The Symptoms of Ideology Critique.  It spoke of fetishistic disavowal whereby the fetish enables to us sustain the unbearable truth.  Fetishists are realists.  Where Marx described ideology as "They do no know it but they are doing it," Zizek updates it by saying "They know what they are doing, but continue to do it."  This pacifies the people.  Like shopping.

This is a result of alienation.  I think about alienation when I'm at work.  Gorky described workers under capitalism as human machines.  I therefore become alienated from myself when I wear a fake smile.

PART VI: Reiterations

"Lauage is art, communication is the real form of activity"
-Joshua Strauss

"The more you consume, the less you live."
-Paris '68

"Become the media."
-Jello Biafra

Zizek makes use of reiteration excessively.  He beats the proverbial dead horse.  He is almost condescending.  He not only uses the works of other intellectuals, but he also makes pop culture references.  He extapolates from Kung Fu Panda the concept that he wants to get across, but there is not really anything inherently ideological about Kung Fu Panda necessarily.  Is there?  Zizek finds ideology in everything.  Everything is an argument for him.  All the memes in the ether are making some sort of ideological point.

The recognition of what is relevant appears to be missing here.  He goes on a lot of tangents.  He is long winded, scatter-brained even.  He is the Nutty Professor.  He is the mad scientist with a big Hg, the periodic table symbol for mercury, on his tshirt.  Mercury is a poisonous, liquid metal.  In the East it was once thought to be a youth-restoring tonic.  Many died as a result of Mercury poisoning.  Mercury has also traditionally been used in thermomethers.  You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows... or how hot it is.

He is also excessively self-aware.  He embraces the subjectivity of human experience.  He see things through a Lacanian/Marxist/Hegelian framework.  Lacan for psychoanalysis, Marx for politics, and Hegel for the metaphysics.  His psychoanalytic approach differentiates his framework from the anthropological or sociological approaches.

If nature is media Zizek uses it well.  Why has Zizek become the new rockstar?  Why are there no more Rage Against the Machines or Public Enemies?  The intellectual has killed the radio star with video.

PART VII:  Zizekian Anthropology

Is there a lesson that anthropologists can discover from reading Zizek?  Zizek puts himself firmly in the psychological court.  He is constantly reiterating Freud and his student Lacan and their students.

The difference between the psychological paradigm and the anthropological paradigm is that psychology is primarily concerned with the individual whereas anthropologists emphasize a collective called culture.  Psychology attempts to diagnose whereas anthropology attempts to understand.  Psychologists describe culture as something external to the individual whereas anthropologists see a constant interplay between the individual and culture whereby one affects and is also affected by culture.  Sometimes we anthropologists make sweeping generalizations, but aren't psychologists guilty of the same when they attempt to pathologize behavior?  We may be guilty of reifying culture, as though it is this organic, amalgamous blob somewhere in the ether.

Isn't culture in fact a collective decision, however?  Culture is pathological.  It also relies heavily on ideology.  Perhaps most useful for anthropologists is Zizek's critique of ideology and fetishistic disavowal.  Post-modernism reflects this disavowal.  As I quoted earlier, Zizek's modification of Marx; "They know what they are doing, and they continue to do it," helps us understand the current state of culture.

Indigenous cultures are being replaced by consumer culture in nearly every corner of the globe.  The title of the conference was "Neoliberal Perversions."  This monoculturization is a product of neoliberalism.  One would be hard pressed to find a major city where there is not a McDonalds.  And while we're being doped by binary choices, i.e.: Coke or Pepsi, the real choices in life are made for us.  Human autonomy is disappearing under neoliberalism, to be replaced with the empty promise of individualism through consumer power.  However, it is the bourgeoisie that makes the choice of how much to pay the rest of us (the 99%), thus regulating how much consumer power we can exercise.

Through ideology the myth of freedom is perpetuated.  We engage in warfare with so-called "freedom" as a justification.  Make no mistake, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan was started by the Soviets.  Stalin (?) was the first to offer so-called "freedom" to the Middle East.  The Afghanistan invasion was a disaster for the Soviets.  Despite that fact that the Obama government finally found and killed Osama bin Laden, the United States has not fared much better in that region.  Many innocent and military lives continue to be lost.  Some anthropologists have even worked within the "human terrain system" to help the troops better understand the culture of the peoples they are conquering, despite a denunciation of this practice by the American Anthropological Association.

OVERINTELLECTUALIZATION AND ACADEMIC ALIENATION a report back from the Zizek Studies Conference - 2012 - day I - Saturday 4/28 by Joshua Strauss and Mitchell Jones. "I'm growing tired of this political bullshit that I used to write." - Slavoj Zizek Representation: should we consider? The overall lasting impact of the Communist conception of the revolutionary state as exemplified by the 1917 revolution in Russia is that revolutions are in fact possible. Not only are they possible, but inevitable according to Marx. They develop through our individual understandings of autonomy as a form of creation. However, the American/individualist conceptualization of autonomy has created a zeitgeist, via Occupy, whereby the "new New Left" is rendered impotent through its anarchistic insistence on leaderlessness. Such was the arguement put forth by Jodi Dean. This was her identification of the problem with the "new New Left" aka: Occupy. However she offered an alternative, something which none of the other critical theorists offered. Be one with the altruistic exchange. Her suggestion was to form a Communist party that would transcend routine involvement and enter the realm of true political empowerment. She articulated what I could only conceptualize. Contrast that to Slavoj Zizek's purely theoretical talk on Hegel. Perhaps he was playing to his audience; mostly philosphers. Others who are concerned with the issues Zizek addresses were apparently marginalized. I should preface my explanation of the previous statement by saying that I respect Zizek and his work and feel that what he has to say is incredibly relevant, as we percieve reality manifest. Those to whom Zizek's examination of contemporary culture and his critique of neoliberal ambition are most relevant, ie: the proletariat, are alienated by the duality of the so-called "radical acadademic" vs. the "radical activist." This duality can be explained thusly; the academic provides the theoretical basis whereas the activist does the work of making the revolution happen. Thus a distinction is made between radical thought and radical PRAXIS. As Ryan O'Neill remarked over dinner, academics can hardly even be considered radical as their livelihood depends on mad attachment to the structures of power that exist already and which reinforce Ivory Tower institutions aka: a social circumstance whereby an elite intellectual class is allowed to exist. Contrast this to Mao's Cultural Revolution where academics were "reeducated" and sent to experience reality as collective farmers see it. I do not share Mao's disdain for intellectuals. Mao himself was a bit of a hypocrite as he was an educated man. However, Zizek writes for an exclusive audience of elite intellectuals while simultaneously preaching liberation of the proletariat. It is a shame because the very societal element (ie: people) for whom his theories are not only relevant, but important, cannot access the wealth of knowlege he has to offer due to his incomprehensible use of jargon and constant flickering, tangential digressions. Zizek's masturbatory 2000-some-odd-page book on Hegel is a departure from his previous political work. His discussion of Hegel is purely theoretical and for someone who speaks a lot about the so-called "Real" he seems ungrounded in reality. Cries of "WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO!?!" could be heard in the audience during the Q&A sessions. The only person who had a pragmatic answer was Jodi Dean who put forth the establishment of a unified Communist party as a way to assert class autonomy. This would also do the work of fulfilling the proletariat's desire for collectivity. This has been a failure of the Occupy movement, according to Dean, as they are still caught up in American anarchist notions of individuality. Opposition to vangaurdism by the revolutionary vanguard itself (ie: the occupiers) have resulted in an attempt to reconcile the diverse, and sometimes contradictory, concerns of the 99%. This has made movement appear apolitical to its detractors since many of the occupiers have made few specific demands. These, among other tactical errors, have lead to the failure of Occupy to become a sustainable, lasting movement. However, Dean praised Occupy for their efforts in a few main areas. First of all, the Occupation has offered a more tangible community of activists who share the same concerns than the internet, exemplified by the MoveOn.org's "clicktivism" model. However, she warned against Occupy becomming simply another internet-like public forum. We already have the internet, we don't need another one. Second, through the slogan "We are the 99%" Occupy engages in class warfare, making a distinction between the "us" (99% of us) and the "them" (the wealthy 1% who control 80% of the wealth). Thus, Occupy identifies the other through statistical means. That brings me to Dean's third praise of Occupy: that the occupiers utilize facts to their advantage, thus providing a solid basis in reality. These elements, she says, are keys to a successful political party, which to Dean is the next step. I will conclude by saying that although the academics seem to be doing a lot of complaining and little pragmatic problem-solving, they do have something to offer the activist side of the duality. Instead of seeing the academy and the streets as opposing sides of the radical coin, activists and academics must reach something approaching symbiosis whereby activists can gain the theoretical sophistication of academe and the academics can benefit from the legitimacy of the revolutionary PRAXIS of the activists.

1990s Danish Cinema

Denmark, with a mixed market capitalist economy and a large welfare state, ranks as having the world's highest level of income equality. Denmark has frequently ranked as the happiest and least corrupt country in the world. Here's how the happiness/economic equality numbers break down according to Forbes:



Denmark:



Ranking: #1

Percentage thriving: 82%

Percentage struggling: 17%

Percentage suffering: 1%

Daily experience: 7.9



US on the other hand:



Ranking: #14

Percentage thriving: 57%

Percentage struggling: 40%

Percentage suffering: 3%

Daily experience: 7.3



Mental illness numbers compare thusly:

United States: 12-month prevalence of any mental disorder: 26.2% of adult population, 5.8% of adult population are diagnosed with severe mental illness.

46.3% of adolescants and young adults age 13-18 years experience a lifetime prevalence of any mental disorder (that's almost half!!!)! 21.4% of the whole 13-18 year old population are diagnosed with a severe disorder!

(source: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/index.shtml)



Denmark:

It was very hard to find information in English on general mental health statistics in Denmark.

Here's what I did find: 16.5% of Danish youth 12-18 were diagnosed with a mental disorder. That's a difference of 29.8%! (source: Gosden N, Kramp P, Gabrielsen G, Sestoft D. Prevalence of mental disorders among 15–17-year-old male adolescent remand prisoners in Denmark. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica [serial online]. February 2003;107(2):102-110. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed July 24, 2011.).



The afformentioned study mainly focused on juvenile prisioners. Of the sample group only 2% were found to be psychotic. Of adult prisioners only 3.7% were found to be psychotic.



Compare this to US prisioner mental health numbers:

"Among inmates with a mental condition ever treated

with a psychiatric medication, only 25.5% (SE =7.5%) of federal, 29.6% (SE = 2.8%)

of state, and 38.5% (SE = 1.5%) of local jail inmates were taking a psychiatric

medication at the time of arrest, whereas 69.1% (SE = 4.8%), 68.6% (SE = 1.9%),

and 45.5% (SE = 1.6%) were on a psychiatric medication after admission"

(source: Wilper A, Woolhandler S, Himmelstein D, et al. The Health and Health Care of US Prisoners: Results of a Nationwide Survey. American Journal of Public Health [serial online]. April 2009;99(4):666-672. Available from: Academic Search Complete, Ipswich, MA. Accessed July 24, 2011.)



The same study found that there was a chronic incidence of untreated physical illness amongst US prisioners.



According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) 7,225,800 people at yearend 2009 were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole — about 3.1% of adults in the U.S. resident population. 2,292,133 were incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails at year end 2009.



Whereas Denmark has a low incarceration rate with a total of 3774 inmates in the country. Denmark has 59 people in prison for every 100,000 citizens or .00059%, a difference of 3.09941% from the US.



Crime rates for Denmark can be found here: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/da-denmark/cri-crime

For US go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States



What are we doing wrong that Denmark is doing so damn right?



In the United States the highest tax bracket is US $373,651+ at only 35%, whereas in Denmark the highest bracket is US $138,050 at as high as 57% or as low as 43% depending on the amount of interest you pay annually.



Denmark is a constitutional monarchy with democratic aspects. They have a strong welfare state. Denmark has 20 weeks of paid parental leave and 32 of unpaid compared to the US which has 24 weeks of unpaid leave for mothers only (source: http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/parental_2008_09.pdf). Denmark ensures that all Danes receive tax-funded health care and unemployment insurance. The United States is stingy with these benefits limiting them only to the very poor. The average worker in Denmark makes US $5,464, monthly gross and US $3,226 net according to a 2006 survey. Sales tax is 25% compared to 8% in the most of the United States (some places like Montana are 0%).



In 2009 trade union density was 6.66 in Denmark as oppsed to 11.8 in the US.



Finally, Denmark has a strong socialist movement. In the 2007 election, the Socialist People's Party (SF) went from 11 to 23 seats in the Folketing (National Parliament) out of 179 members. That is 6.1%.

There is currently one socialist representative in the United States, Bernie Sanders, I-VT of 435 House seats. That is .22%. There are 100 senators and no socialists occupy any of those seats.



What do Danes get out of their monarchistic nanny state with high taxes? Peace of mind, knowing that they don't have to face beggars on the street or rampant crime. Less depression. More satisfaction with their jobs and their lives.

rhythms rhythms
the rhythm of the soul
history is repeating itself
how will future generations remember us in history
in retrospect
the retrospective
retro fashions of the zeros
will we be remembered as servants
or will we be kings among kings
i remember when men were men
that was when i was a kid
now i'm a man
i was so much older then
i'm younger than that now
my beard and my eyes behold the coming of the lord
justice my brothers
swift and fair
nothing to lose but chains
underneath the spreading mushroom tree
the world revolves in apathy
growing marijuana for profit
the prophet is a beggar
god is dead
and capitalism replaced her
the almighty dollar
and amerika weeps
under the weeping willow tree

Shooting Range, 1979, V. Tarasov (1 of 2)

Power Pill Fist - Sagadraga

Yoko Ono - John Lennon - Two Virgins Parte 1/2

NEW AUDIO - Jim Jones & Jonestown Sing Soviet Anthem