The Last Slavemasters

Ever watch  the modern “horror” genre?  I don’t, but many storylines have been described to me.  It seems in the non-ending end of these storylines, the good  guys”win” by becoming bad guys.  The heroine has to choose between the vampire and the werewolf.  The hero becomes the zombie.  

Well maybe that’s not a great description, but that is my take-away from how they are being described to me.  Similarly, music that has great appeal  to working class youth, what I tend to think of as “barf” music because it often has singers who sound like they are vomiting words rather than singing them, but what might be more properly termed black metal, dark metal,or formerly thrash or speed metal from which they developed often are framed around the defeat of society and a lordship of satanism.

What these “arts” that are appealing to the masses illustrate is that the society no longer believes that goodness wins out in the end.  Ministers are making calls from the pulpit to begin the armageddon through violence and politicians are gaining appeal who attempt to enforce “goodness”.

There has, throughout the historical advent of structured society, first through kingships, then through corporate dominance supported by the first democratic governing communities and later implanted into authoritarian regimes that maintained their structure through enforcement of work on the majority.  Well direct ownership of persons more or less ended but “contract” or “wage” ownership persisted by the limitations of resource  ownership by the corporations.  Today, people, not just in the United States, are seeking an alternative to those corporate sponsored democratic societies.  And in the autocratic sponsored corporateships they are also seeking a  “democratic” alternative.  In other words, people around the globe, whether in “democratic” or in “autocratic” governorship, are seeking a new form of governance, and the more “working class”, and less include farmers, or food producers into this equation, even they often don’t see themselves as equivalent—but, let’s face it, they suffer equally with the laboring class in all economic downturns, and in, at least the American community, have finally to a great extent joined together in what is seen as a “maga” movement.

Now I want to briefly thumbnail what I feel has occurred, having experienced working class life for most of my adult life.  In the early 20th century there was an extreme autocrat who hit on a manner to subdue the masses through granting them privileges that were formerly only available to those at the top, either autocratic or commercial authorities—and that was the right to possession.  The man was named Henry (of course, because first stage “democracy” began with Henry FitzEmpress) Ford. This Henry came up with the assembly line production that allowed the workers to produce so much that he could offer them a wage high enough to actually buy, or possess, some of what they owned.  We then entered second stage democracy, the democratic society that concentrated even more control of the resources of nature and labor, into the hands of the business elite by pretending to “gift” them the right to self-own their homes, their means of transport, and a certain amount of leisure or entertainment.

Of course this “right” to possess did not end the battle of the workers of either the goods producing laborers or the food producing laborers to have a “fair” share.  In fact, it probably encouraged the struggle to have more “rights” and more “possessions.” There seemed to be a workable balance between ownership and industrial laborers (but few other laborers) that created a stability that allowed for a long period of economic stability, at least among industrial labor and industrial capital. This led to the greatest era in questioning the commonly accepted values being imposed upon them.  Now wait, wait—weren’t the 50’s the great era of conservatism?  Not at all.  Again, if we ignore the new medium of television, and look at the supposed “conservatism” through the lens of the arts–if we look at the values being examined by the most popular movies, by the shift in literature and the “beat” writers like Kersey and Kerouac and the new experimental “value” questioning writers like Hersey, Roth, Bellow, Brautigan, et. al,  and especially in the music that made mainstream the old folk and blues protests into the new genre of rock and roll and the rise of bop jazz there is no way to claim it was an era of “conservatism”.  The only thing wanting to be conserved were the economic gains being made by the industrial laborers.  This  opened the door for the first time in questioning the long-held prejudices against Jews, Native-Americans, and other minority ethnicities, as well as support for greater participation of women and black Americans becoming more a part of the new stability.  If I’m all right, then I am more readily unopposed to others being all right. So economic security actually led to a greater acceptance of social stability.

By the mid 60’s some of the economic stability was beginning to erode.  Businesses began to move into formerly non industrialized and non unionized sectors resulting once again in economic instability, prices began to rise, and then the new class of “students” began to protest about Viet Nam, radicalism developed likewise amongst this new educated class towards advancing all of these “rights” equalities. 

Of course the new students began to enter into the production era of their lives and now, satisfied with their own rights, became opposed to others' rights and began to want more and more of the possessions of the fruits of the productions.  

Now the old political divide between goods producers and farm producers began to have more and more commonality and a new divide began to occur between those wanting more “rights”, generally seen as the new educated “liberals” and those who were the producers of the food and the goods who began to unite towards “conservatism” in their economic despair that continued to worsen, but seemingly improve with higher wages and more possessions but at an ever-increasing servitude to debt due to increased concentration of ownership of the resources that spread into multinational corporations.  This, once again, split people into ethnic divides, blaming each other for their own economic woes, and susceptibility to “political” rhetoric that thrived on disunity amongst those being dominated by the increasing world-wide oligarchy of corporate resource concentration.

Fast forward to 2008.  The big bail-out of corporations as millions lost their possessions.  You can’t take away what you have given.  This is stealing.  I am very illiberally inclined towards feeling a need to own more than I need.  At one point I had only one sandwich to eat and began to unwrap it to eat and someone asked “Could you give me part of your sandwich?’ and I gave them the whole sandwich.  But damned if they had tried to take my sandwich away from me.  I would immediately demand it back, disassociate myself from them, and perhaps attempt to call the law to have them disassociated from everyone.  

The immediate aftermath of the 2008 theft of possessions to give to the “too big to fail” was seen as government theft and the end of a lot of confidence in the government.  The first result was the tea party which morphed into the radicals of what is now called the “maga right”.  Those benefitters of the bail-out, recognizing the anger of their theft of people’s possession, used that anger to direct their anger (once again) away from them. Those who had benefited misdirected the anger towards those who had given them the benefit—the government.  

It is time now to recognize the era of “democratic” is about to end and people (a great percentage, albeit a non-majority) see the existing system as unreliably democratic to their concerns.  So what is called the “maga-right” is really a longing to be considered full participants in a democracy that has marginalized them,and a corporate autocracy that is using that despair as a last-ditch effort to cling to their own corporate autocratic enslavement of both the resources and the laborers who give them their own wealth and power.  

I do not blame the people in their despair. I have long had that despair, and so forty years ago I chose to not have possessions over being owned by those who control the ownership of those possessions and the persons who labor those possessions into existence.  

If democracy is to survive, then we must now enter the third stage of democracy and end the last enslavers who concentrate the resources of both nature and the people who produce the resources.  This is the still existing enslavement that defeats democracy.  No one should need “work”, i.e. be owned, for someone else.  People can join in partnerships, community co-operatives, or work solo—but unless democracy totally eliminates all enslavement of human owners who require others to produce wealth for them, democracy fails, the world descends into chaos and the result is uncertain.  For those who support “democracy” and maintain the preservation of the system of the ownership of the few over the majority are being perceived more and more as an undemocratic and autocratic system in itself.  If you really want democracy to survive, then all vestiges of ownership must end.