Unlearning To Not Think*  

 

Recent American elections involving a relatively small segment of those already small numbers who actually vote has revealed, according to major consciousness controllers, a tremendous turn around from what is called progressive left to reactionary right. This is actually the all to ordinary voters move from what the Rolling Stones once called an electoral ” choice of cancer or polio. ‘ Meanwhile, good health still awaits the total transformation of the American and global political economy and a political party to help bring it about in a truly democratic form before it is forced on us by something approaching a massive global collapse with particular disasters here in America.

 

An already miniscule economic program proposed by President Biden which would have still offered the biggest social democratic change since the pre world war two days of the FDR “new” deal has been sliced, diced and reduced to what so-called moderates call reasonable. This means it does absolutely nothing to alter, let alone transform a system that spends trillions on warfare and billions on pet care while reducing growing numbers of humans to homelessness and denying millions of citizens healthcare. It’s more positive form, before being mercilessly hacked by supposed moderates, has been dubbed a “green” new deal in view of the near cataclysmic results of a systemic attack on humanity’s life support system – nature – created by the market forces of private profit which reshaped the world and brought incredible wealth to some, a relatively good life for much of the former peasant classes, and dreadful pain and misery for the greatest number of human beings on earth.

 

The present explosion of munitions, toys, pet comfort, disease, video games, fast food, slow thinking and wondering if, when and where it will all subside is the modern state of a system first warned against most vividly and authoritatively by Karl Marx back at its beginning in the 19^th century. A brief quote from him from the system’s earliest days:

 

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins, are all the things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder, flowed back to the mother country and were turned into capital there.”

 

Capital, 1:915, 918

 

If he was witness to the present material state of the world and it’s nearly 8 billion people, he might be reduced to a state of shock.

 

Almost all solutions proposed by governments and citizens labeled progressives, moderates or conservatives involve perpetuation of the very system responsible for creation of the growing problems for humanity. As long as we leave capitalism out as the substance of our problem, the chances of solving it are like those of an ice cube in an oven. The pursuit of private profit at a market involving the purchase of everything needed to keep humanity alive is proving, with every second, to be the worst possible economic form for everyone but an ever shrinking minority which reduces life support for billions of human beings. A profit on one side of a transaction must involve a loss at the other and those profits are more enormous than ever for a tiny minority while the absorption of the loss is suffered by an expanding majority.

 

Real as opposed to the fictional democracy some of us think exists, as though being able to vote defined the term even if the greatest majority have absolutely nothing to do with selecting the representatives of capital offered to voters, doesn’t simply involve rubber stamping the governing servant class of capital. And it should be remembered, or possibly understood for the first time by those of us denied the capacity if not ability to think critically, that, true or fictional, the supposed evil of all evils Nazi state came to power via the vote. The Nazis didn’t march to power in a blaze of gunfire; German people chose them at the polls. Voting in itself does not define democracy, peace, equality or any social good. We need to create real democracy, the voice of a majority of the people and not simply the representatives of tiny minorities of great wealth, and do it on a global scale rather than simply in small communities, job sites or towns where it may exist now. While that may seem a titanic task it is actually far more possible than ever before, given the possibilities for communication among billions and not just elites/leaders that goes beyond twittering and creeping brain death. Here is a simple thought easily understood by people without degrees in economics, who are frequently those most responsible for the creeping brain death. They can explain how rape is a cost effective form of dating but only if they have graduate degrees from the London school of economics…try this:

 

If petroleum, weapons, pet food, garbage and supposed education which teaches us not to think are costing us far more than what is being paid to the workers responsible for doing that dirty work in order to pay their rent, mortgages and health care expenses, they make collective millions but it costs us collective billions to clean up the physical and mental waste they create just to make a living. It is to our economic advantage to have them all stay home and not go to work while we pay them the millions in order to survive, thereby saving ourselves the billions previously spent on cleaning up the mess they create only to survive. Anyone with a doctorate in marketing or economics will have little or no capacity to understand that but most humans will have little if any problem seeing the logic.

 

Until the capitalist pandemic of the corona virus a gallon of milk cost more than a gallon of gas. Only a person with a multi-degree education can explain why something that comes from a cow which can be milked by a child costs more than something that has to be dug from the earth, refined and carried over sometimes thousands of miles and yet is cheaper.

 

The overwhelming majority of high school graduates, if that, can see that hungry people need food, sick people need health care and neither need market forces of private profits governing their ability to get them.

 

Unlearning to not think makes it clear that our primitive communist ancestors had it morally right. When the men’s hunt was successful they all ate meat, when not they ate what the women had gathered. That had nothing to do with patriarchy but an eminently sensible division of labor that found pregnant and/or nursing women ill equipped to chase and kill animals but able to put together a meal of vegetation when the hunt, as most often, failed. That was cooperative and brilliant by comparison with the savagery of economics that reward a few while crippling almost everyone else.

 

The time has come for a moral, political and economic reawakening of humanity to save ourselves and by necessity the planet. We need to get in touch with our original sensibilities and create global democratic communism.

 

 

*Thanks to Marge Piercy