“Consciousness is…from the very beginning a social product”
Karl Marx
Given the degree of consciousness control suffered by people
under the domain of privately owned political media and its stress on
individual consumption, the very notion of social behavior, let alone
socialism, can provoke outbursts of fear and loathing as the current idiocy
over the term clearly shows. Fear that wealth will be taken away from people
who don’t have any and given to some unworthies who have even less can reduce
intellects and morality to a point at which president Trump begins to look like
a humanitarian scholar with funny hair.
Social: having to do with human beings living together as a
group in which their dealings with one another affect their common welfare.
This definition does not come from the Communist Manifesto
but from a left wing tract called the New World Dictionary of the American
Language. It defines what most of us are led to believe only in times of war or
other threats to our well being which we must face, bravely, proudly as a
nation of souls striving to work together to kill whoever the proposed enemy
is. Otherwise, it’s the hell with everyone else, what’s in it for me, how can I
trust any of these fools and why don’t they all acknowledge me and my identity
group or my pets instead of themselves. Welcome to the commodity consuming
humanity denying market forces of a malevolent social disease at the root of
what should be called our climate catastrophe: private profit obsessed capitalist individuality.
While it is in our nature to be social, it has been forced
into our heads to be anything but and our schools, advertisements and
government see to it that we remain mostly obsessed with self. We only join
with others under great stress, which is then used to keep us in small separate
groupings that offer no threat to the minority rule of the rich. There are
exceptions, but they are mostly of the cosmetic form, like shopping, which
guarantees the system prevails, but with privileges offered and provided for
those who serve it, and only rarely, perish the thought, society.
Members of the comfortable class able to see the value of
social democratic capitalism as preservation and possibly even improvement of
their status while also bringing in some of the less comfortable are often
unaware that their status depends on the continued existence of less and under
privileged “uncomfortables”. They are hardly reducible to white supremacists
but an ever more diverse economically privileged caste certainly akin to the
more comfortable house negroes created when classes were introduced to slaves
that made life among the future black bourgeois – the house Negros - far
superior to life among the field Negros. While some working the fields would
occasionally remind them that they were still slaves but only with some
material privileges, and some few from the house even led rebellions against
their owners, most acted as “upper” classes are educated, taught and trained to
act. Eat your better food, wear your better clothes, put something in the poor
box at church or write out a tax deductible check during the holidays, and
otherwise keep your mind clear of critical thought and above all keep your
mouth shut. This division of class background realities among people of all
skin tones, religions, ethnicities, genders, political and other market choices
- maintains age old minority power by keeping the multitudes-masses divided in
every psycho - identity way but the most obvious: the economically disabled
results of market place private profit-private property rules not only taking
precedence over any public good but dominating such out of the realm of thought
let alone action on the part of truly disabled populations reduced to rising up
as minorities and mostly taking issue with those below or beside them and
showing little regard for those above except near worship, until recently when
things have become so blatantly unjust that the previously near comatose are waking
to the stench, sight and sound of massive injustice and inequality.
While anti-social media tropes of tripe get attention from
major sources, as when reporting crimes among the working class majority rather
than the bigger crimes of the leisure class minority, we get a steady diet of
indigestible mental fare that makes fast food seem like gourmet dining. As in;
which identity group suffers an outrage of hate from which other identity
group, while the outrageous hate crime of inflicting war, waste and trillions
of dollars in debt on people powerless to stop it while distracted by economic
arguments based on a form of market fanaticism to make religious fundamentalists
seem thoughtfully critical by comparison.
A degenerate value system based on an alleged democracy
owned and controlled by a minority reduces humans to “the homeless” and pets to
revered status while slaughtering millions in foreign countries with hundreds
of billions spent for alleged defense that leaves millions here defenseless
against poverty, crime, traffic and mental illness while inducing impoverished
foreigners to come here in search of job security, which profit makers supply
them in return for their cheaper-than-American labor. Welcome to the joys of a
free market, where nothing is free and if you can’t afford food, clothing and
shelter, you can drop fucking dead.
This economy sees to it that hookers get paid to make fake
love to profit the pimp, reporters get paid to report fake news to profit
corporate media, and politicians get paid to legislate fake democracy to profit the
1% and their professional servants.
As long as news (?) is what we get from MSNB-FOX, the New
York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Post and the Washington Times,
the above will remain true. Thus, “hate crimes” become individual acts against
individual people and what they really are: poverty, war, invasions, injustice
and more are hate crimes of a social nature which are treated, if at all, as
due to evil individuals and nasty identity groups, never the acts of a
political economy that demands homelessness, bloodshed, drug addiction and
dishonesty in personal relations in order to keep profits flowing up to the top
minority while the bottom majority is taught to fight one another in order to
advance self, or their identity group safely kept a minority by individual acceptance of the social lie.
All too often, the mere mention of socialism is greeted by a
frenzy from consciousness control and its mind management staff implying that
this means mass murder, poverty, theft and all the other stuff capitalism has
been profiting from for generations while a relative handful control its
apparatus of propaganda taught as supposed common sense. The time has come for
people to look behind the plastic curtain and learn what is fiction and what is
reality. The economic class system is composed of a shrinking number of people
of more incredible wealth than any tyrant deity of ancient times, when there
might have been some excuse for people being taken in by fables, myths and
legends. In the present we find our selves facing a dilemma for the human race
that can only be met and overcome by ending the system of private profits first
and beginning one that puts the public good in its place. In whatever language
we speak or culture we are taught, that means something previously non-existent
anywhere but among very small groups: democracy. In finally achieving it for
the greatest number of people and for the greatest good, thus a salvation for
humanity, we need to understand the majority class almost all of us belong to,
no matter what minority division our rulers have reduced us to, even teaching
us to be proud of un-scientific differences. We are the human race, we are
overwhelmingly members of its working class, and we need to unite as ourselves
before their imposed separatism destroys us all.
2 comments:
Good article, as are the other ones I've read of yours.
But I think "pets revered status" is a straw man (or straw animal?) argument, and shames the very people socialism needs to reach. For example, homeless humans often live with their animals--and wouldn't part with them. I've known quite a few who don't want to go into the pathetic programs the city offers for fear of losing their animals. The working class neighborhoods I've lived in are full of "pets"--dogs, cats, racing pigeons, snakes, way more so than their upper middle class counterparts. Humans evolved along with, and to be around, other animals. It's in our blood--and it's actually the bourgeois who began to separate themselves from anything having to do with land, dirt, non-humans.
Socialists and Marxists need to take this aspect of humanity into consideration instead of dismissing it as "sentimental" or bourgeois. Otherwise it's just more shaming of the very people who could benefit from class consciousness--like the environmentalists who shame working class people for driving gas guzzlers. It doesn't help.
I had a neighbor who, during hurricane Sandy, clung to his roof with his dog and wouldn't get on the rescue boats until one came by that would take his dog too. Imagine telling him he can't buy a toy or something for the dog who stayed all night on the roof with him, trembling and crying like he did, because it's anti-class consciousness and sentimental to buy that toy.
Moreover--it's not "pets" who are revered, nor even particularly protected in this society. It's consumption. "Pets" are products, and useful for creating more consumption in the form of pet products--but they can be offed at your local shelter for peeing on a carpet. They are absolutely not revered in any real sense of that word.
So don't blame non-humans and the people who love them for the shit we're in. We're just trying to have some love in our lives.
well said, thoughtful and appreciated but you missed the point, which was not simply reverence for pets...and that is very real in that we spent more than 70 billion on them last year while increasing our population of homeless citizens, murdered foreigners, etc...humans have almost always had pets and you are right in that profits are the problem not the pets - which was the point, not animal ownership - and of course some humans might die or waste away without the companionship of animals, which is also a sign of a rather crippled alleged society of humans which needs to reduce animals to psycho-neurotic playthings, therapists, "family"members ( breast fed?) and other things that deny them a fairly natural life, including being neutered as a responsibility of ownership...and still, tens of millions of dogs and cats are produced in relative factories, because they are more profitable than providing housing, healthcare, etc for those who can't afford them..that's the point...dogs, cats and others did quite well being able to survive in nature before they became brands, commodities, and other forms of market forces.loving my dog or cat is no excuse for allowing the horrendous treatment of the natural and social environment by capital.there is no "blame" for non-humans..they don't buy/sell alpo, purina, pet hotels, etc while humans go hungry and homeless...we do!
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