In Answer to Zeitgeist

[William Prest]

Technocracy has not been, nor is, nor will be the panacea for the betterment of humanity. Although the concern for the equitable distribution of resources is paramount in the solving of human problems, there remains an encumbrance to the effecting that necessity. That encumbrance is the conservative, hide-bound power elite and their military structures entrenched around the world in the form of monarchies, theocracies, so called democracies and oligarchies. They are entrenched with the might weapons of mass destruction. All of this has been put in place by those who toil and not their usually self appointed masters. We have the means to make sure that the people of the world are taken care of in all their needs, but it is not being done. This is as much of a historical problem as it is one of human nature and politics of the current period. There are numerous examples that can be drawn from ancient to near contemporary history to demonstrate the tenacity of the problems hereinafter described and the necessary actions required to correct them.

 

The experience of the average worker over history is to dread the next advancement in technology, because this usually translates to being uprooted again, suffering another round of poverty, retrained again, watched more intensely, tortured more acutely and murdered in numbers almost beyond comprehension. Instead of liberating him/her, the machine ups the ante of exploitation, where he/she now has the means to do far more in the same time, but with less return for his/her efforts.

 

Machines are not by any means new. In ancient times, there were machines; some of which were extremely sophisticated and verged on becoming mobile such as a basis for a steam engine, but they were kept out of the public domain and used to mystify and terrify the masses. They were employed mainly in religious practice, drawing of water, entertainment and warfare. These economies were slave driven, so they never thought to use machine to do laborious tasks. We have the remnants of this attitude today.

 

Money; it's meaning, use and substitute.

 

Money is an old idea, which has served groups and societies for as long as there has been historical records. Whether we talk about notches on sticks, wampum, gold, jewels, cattle, slaves, script or e-commerce it is not likely that its use as a universal commodity will be abandoned in the foreseeable future. The key concept behind money is its universality of exchange for any other value, use value or real commodity. It has even been used in areas of the economy that cannot be regarded as a commodity such as land and time. It is an idea that will not go away like an electric light that is switched off. As an universal commodity, it is subject to the manipulations of whoever is in control of it in part or in whole. The tendency of money evolution in history has been from the real and solid item of trade to something more ephemeral such as e-commerce. Though the real item, such as a surplus value/commodity was not readily subject to devaluation, the abstracted form of this, such as script or e-commerce is readily subject to all forms of manipulation and corruption. One of the more contemporary forms of this was the removal of the US dollar from the gold standard in 1971 and converting the dollar into a floating currency of fluctuating value. The fact that money itself going through evolution is telling us that we are moving away from the solid real commodity to something less substantial as a means to affect exchange.

 

Living as we are in a world that is diverse in ways where there are regions awash in use values (resources) and others that are almost totally barren of any such resources, does a few things. People tend to gravitate to regions of plenty and avoid the “wastelands”. The resource rich regions as a result end up being highly valued as a type of unworked commodity and the wastelands tend to be regarded as useless. As resources are not equally distributed by nature, we end up with combined and unequal development as a natural outcome. The solution of history and human societies was the invention of trade and the universal agreed upon value; money. It is easy to see why then, that some areas would wind up impoverished and others rich.

 

Mechanization and the multiplication of productive power began early in the context of the industrial revolution. This has put the labourer on a continuous learning curve, just to remain in the employ by selling the only commodity they have. From the first power loom to the modern robotic assembly line, this has been the norm where labour power has been amplified thousands of times over so that a handful of workers can now produce the same amount of surplus value as an army of labourers did in the past. The people squeezed out with each advance had to retrain, fall into the army of the unemployed or become criminals. This is but one path of making profits by increasing productivity. This creates the problem of so much over production that the unit commodity becomes almost worthless.

 

The crisis of overproduction results in such an abundance that the glut sits idle, even though the army of the unemployed could use the surplus. Even though it is next to worthless in relative value due to its super abundance, the market is often manipulated to keep prices artificially high. In some circumstances, overproduction is destroyed, such as food that "has no market" in order to keep prices up. Sometimes commodities are passed on through a line of investment with each round of investment increasing prices without adding any real value. What is added is fictitious value. There are many market manipulations that take the freedom out of the market. This trend developed with the advent of stock market speculation and tended to restrict the free market that was the hallmark of laisse faire capitalism. But as more and more business concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the freedom of the market became more and more controlled by banks and the government.

 

Any new business needs requires money to get started and this usually is done on loans from a financial institute that lends on interest against collateral actual or potential. The collateral thus becomes the virtual property of the lending institute by law until the loan is paid off in full including interest, which adds fictitious value. Anyone acquiring commodities from such a company is paying for added fictitious value. The free market in such a circumstance is not so free being controlled by bankers and speculators.

 

 

The interventionist attitude regarding innovation.

 

The foundation and establishment of a method of doing things becomes intrenched and serves as a focus and the lynchpin of power. When anyone establishes a way that will make life easier, they will struggle to preserve that way of life in the face of competition real or perceived. A classic historical case serves as an example, concerning the interaction of J. P. Morgan and Nikola Tesla. J. P. Morgan was a tycoon with vast wealth. One of his ways of deriving wealth was through the distribution of electrical power. In his day and to the modern era, this was effected through wires and meters that regulated and calculated power usage for a fee. Tesla's innovative idea was to distribute power wirelessly and he proved that it could be done. At first Morgan funded Tesla's projects in New York, but when he discovered what wireless power could do to his electric power empire and one of his sources of wealth, he cancelled the project, tore it down and sequestered Tesla until he died. The FBI raided and seized all of Tesla's research notes after he died and hid them in the Smithsonian vaults. Today, some of Tesla's brain children live on in the remote control and the cell phone. However, we do not have electrical power transmitted wirelessly into our homes as there would be problems over collecting fees from unregulated electrical power. There are many more innovations that can be commented on here, but the end of the stories follow similar patterns. The innovator is prevented from completing research. The innovator is bought out and silenced. The innovator is disappeared. The invention is kept secret or destroyed so that the established ways are allowed to continue.

 

There are many ways to generate power or run transport without using fossil fuels, but why is this not going ahead? The answer is simple. There is intervention occurring to block new ideas as this will overturn the old way of doing things and end the flow of cash and the rich life style that comes from keeping people tied into the consumerist way of doing things. Innovation is directed instead to keeping this essential ingredient of the economy running Consumerism is one of the few things that keeps the current economy going as most business have run out of growth room and markets. To keep consumers spending, many devices are used, such as credit, fashion and planned obsolescence. Another way to generate more consumerism, is to destroy old markets in war. Further, with the death of established ways of running the economy, such as fossil fuels, many jobs will be lost to change, though new ones may be created. A movie of this sort of thing was made in Britain called “The Man in the White Suit”, concerning an innovator who made indestructible clothing. The immediate results was the destruction of the economy and massive joblessness in the textile industry. What was once loved became reviled and hated as peoples' lives got more and more miserable.

 

Property

 

The "owners of the means of production", title holders of the crown and all other property as defined by law and protected by an armed state are in competition to increase their holdings at the loss of the other holders. They have managed to convince the masses of their inherent right to own from whom they originally took by force or deceit from the ancestors of the masses. This is what is behind property in the capitalist sphere of influence. Title comes in the form of some type of certified paperwork, proving that a certain identifiable person owns lands, housing, factories, ships and the means of production. Originally, this was the domain of kings and popes, but now it’s the domain or the bourgeoisie. The poor who form the overwhelming majority though using land and producing things cannot prove that they own anything and thus can be legally expropriated due to lack of identity and title. Many means are used to keep this going, much of which has been discussed.

 

Think about this for a moment. In the US, banks own all you have by law until you have paid for it in total and can keep up annual taxes in any state that is a republic. To a large degree, Canada emulates this, but there are the additional interests of the crown. In the case of title granted by the crown, the crown is the owner no matter what and any property, including the banks, can be taken at a whim. In the republic form, failure to pay the taxes and the ownership reverts to the government. The government itself is in deep debt to the banks, so the bank can claim ownership at any time by calling the debt when the holder of the debt can't pay the sum of it. Many governments have a hard time just servicing the interest of debts. If you have a mortgage, a loan on a car or credit debt of any kind, the bank is the legal owner of all property until it is paid in full. The property in question is what is called collateral against the full extent of the loan and that must be paid in full to finally own the property in question. Fail to make a payment or to pay off a called loan means that you lose all past payments and the property held by the loan or credit. Though this type of thing appears to be true in the case of tike under the crown, the crown retains all property under the "commonwealth" even if it is paid in full and it can be expropriated at any time at he will of the crown. The crown learned early from capitalist ways and got heavily involved. The crown of England today is as capitalist as any large American private corporation that exists for the purpose of making a profit and accruing property. Thus there in effect, two types of corporations, the crown corporation and the private corporation. The crown and independent capitalists were at loggerheads early on, competing and plundering one another’s wealth and holdings.

 

Most people who work for a living to produce value, don't own what they produce by law. It has become the property of the owner of the means of production. As we have seen from the above, a few own everything and the masses actually own nothing except their ability to work. Property is the self proclaimed historically justified right of the few who finance what we think we own by right of law and might of force. In the final analysis, private property for most is a farce; and so is the declaration of those who claim to own the means of production, lands, mines and all use values. Property is the result of accumulated theft over the eons. To restore the original situation of collective rights to the use value of nature will require a total revolution in thought and in the financial/political realm.

 

The class divide and struggle.

 

The ruling bourgeoisie are heartless and monstrous, willing to do anything against their fellow beings, willing to destroy the very planet, our only living resource for personal aggrandizement so they can luxuriate in indolence as virtual gods while everyone else wallows in their excrement of planned obsolescence. There is no appeal unless you are the wealthy, who alone reserve the right to criticize their own actions, which of course they will not, reserving their tirades for their victims. Sometimes, they will be critical, but this usually public relations and hand wringing apologetics designed as a distraction. They hire the unscrupulous to destroy us with poverty and neglect. Thus, the century old adage invented by the multimillionaire Rothschild, that "one half of the people can be hired to murder the other half" is proven to their satisfaction. This is why we have the war against the poor where each is in battle against the rest. This is the core philosophy of capitalist war of worker against worker divided by artificial boundaries and vilified one against the other as "the axis of evil." The real axis of evil is the bourgeoisie!

 

We enter a situation where the destitute serve as a deterrent to the working poor and middle classes and as a means to level everyone to their level of poverty. The destitute of one country are used to lower wages in another by various capitalist free trade agreements and immigration policies. Indeed, with contemporary politics, this is done between states and provinces in the search for the lowest possible denominator in wages, working conditions, manufacturing, health care, etc., so that the rich super-exploiters can maximize their profits universally. Free trade policies are designed to maximize profit, but this must be done by lowering all other standards, especially the lives of the masses everywhere. Marx identified the poor as the reserve army of the unemployed. When the appointed hirelings, whether NDP, Conservative, Socred, Liberal, Democrat, Republican, Labor, Green, deformed Communists or otherwise, do what they do, they serve the interest of their bosses and work against the rest of us. They do not, nor will not ever represent anyone but their own selfish interests and the interests of their bosses who seek to become gods, crushing the rest of us under their merciless feet as so many cockroaches. The only people who can represent a worker, is another worker by agreement. Daniel DeLeon originally opined that “the employees have nothing in common with the employers.”

 

Given the foregoing, we enter a situation where the masses will be homeless surrounded by empty buildings; hungry in the midst of a feast, because these items are controlled substances as surely as are illegal drugs like marijuana, heroin, crystal meth and cocaine are under the current bourgeois laws. The new millennial adage; “Pay up or get off the planet!” This is the end result of the chaos and anarchy of capitalism. This in essence is class division. It is also the cornerstone of class struggle that flares when the economy collapses and the bourgeoisie use draconian measures to exact even more value out of the toilers. This often evolves to armed struggle between the classes that sometime results in revolution.

 

 

The tenacity of the rulers.

 

The desire for great wealth, to be like a god is so great, that whole peoples are put to poverty and to the genocidal flame in order to achieve that end. Wealth is very addicting, as much so if not more than crystal meth or herion. Every kind of deception is used to throw a negative opinion onto the targeted people who may in some way threaten that wealth. With wealth comes power and that is what being a god is all about, although ultimately, they have no real power over the forces of nature such as gravity and planet making. Nevertheless, they achieve power over others and the more people they control, the more powerful they are in that context. Wars of conquest are about gathering more wealth and power. The history of the bourgeoisie is written like this as it was from ancient times under different types of economy. From the time of the conquest of the Americas, to the world wars complete with atomic weapons, to Adolph Hitler and Hermann Göring, to Vietnam, Africa and now the Middle East, the grab for wealth is the consistent pattern with a trail of destruction, pollution, genocide and grinding poverty left behind. The rulers have been consistent in one thing, that is, maintaining hell on earth for the majority of humanity.

 

Every tactic is used to keep the masses ignorant and subservient. Education is modelled in order to keep people in line as are prisons. The rule is maintained by an armed state, the soldiers of which are drawn out of the population that is under their rule. Laws are designed in order ti stress the nature of this relationship. Many laws on the book are ridiculous and vary from region to region, which is to say, what is legal in one region is illegal just across the border, an imaginary divide that in itself is fictitious. If anyone steps out of line in any way, the full weight of oppression is brought to bear of the offender and this uses many forms of pain compliance, also known as torture or in today's parlance, intensive interrogation. The powerful will not relinquish their wealth and power voluntarily. It can only be returned to common ownership through an armed class struggle beginning with dual power as a direct challenge until they relent.

 

It is known through research and investigation that the most formative years in the learning cycle of any individual, whether animal or human is the period between birth and the onset of adulthood. It is during this period that the young individual must learn to manoeuvre their own body, use the senses effectively and learn how to survive on its/their own. At this stage of development, the individual can be taught anything others of the community decide is worth teaching for a particular end. If that community is divided by class, then the decision on what is worth learning by various classes is made from on high. After the onset of adulthood, the individual should have learned these skills, because in the adult phase of life turns toward obtaining a suitable mate and to reproduction for the next generation. Human beings are no different than other animals in this regard and often have an extended learning cycle, as they don’t reach the age of reproductive capability until about the age of ten years give or take a year. Adult workers not only have to survive but must also look after raising and teaching the new generation of workers. For most people, the job, raising children and surviving in a mostly hostile class divided world is a huge task and a more than full time job. Many complain that they have two jobs, the one for the capitalist, the other raising the children.

 

In civilization, the reproductive urge is often curtailed until the late teens or early twenties. Learning under class division is extended into this period even though individual biological sexual forces are at their strongest. Needless to say, teens struggle to absorb the required education of the state while under the influence of such strong biological forces. If part of their upbringing in school has been religious, this adds to the pressure to conform to the “will of God.” Within the context of education is the bullying system of compliance enforced by propaganda of a terror deity. Civilization has gone far in subverting the natural learning process and bending it to the purposes of serving the powerful and wealthy elite.

 

Alienation from nature had its inception with the development of civilization and class division. This was a gradual process at first that occurred in discrete jumps with discoveries made from observing nature. In the end, with the development of intensive civilization, there came a complete alienation from nature on the part of its subjects that has important implications. In the course of nature are times of feast and famine. Like it or not, these cycles exist in small and in large all over the planet. During famine, the need to find water and food became paramount in importance. Some people solved this by living near the oceans and living off sea life. Others migrated, sometimes following wild herds alongside wild dogs and cats. I might well be that such people domesticated the first dogs and cats. Still others would raid other people and take what they had. In the course of human early development all this occurred. It still goes on today, but now it is over resources like oil, rare metals and cheap labour.

 

The role of religion, mysticism and obscurantism has had a profound impact upon humanity especially when the people so educated in their formative years have become alienated from all direct contact with nature. Religion itself was born from nature, from observing the sky and the uncontrollable forces of nature. Even today, under our high civilization, we are utterly helpless in the face of tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, big freezes, heat waves, droughts, floods and other forces. The original gods were all forces of nature, personified by the observers and writers. Solar and Lunar eclipses that could be predicted early in civilized history were used to inspire compliance when the “gods” showed signs. These gods were joined by other planetary deities, sea gods, wind gods, earth gods and such. This does not lessen the impact of raw forces. When these forces were personalized as deities, then the unscrupulous were able to bend the will of the toiling people to their desired end, even to the point of human sacrifice to appease the gods or in wars of conquest. Great calamities are terror inspiring when they occur. They induce psychic shock as observed in the victims of the Malaysian tsunami of Dec. 24th, 2004 and the victims of hurricane Katrina in Aug. 2005 in New Orleans. Unscrupulous people take advantage of this and can make people do what they command, even though the demands are counter to their survival or the survival of others. It can also be highly profitable to enrich ones self from the misery of others. A new form of capitalism has arisen called disaster capitalism. This form of control has a deep history and tenaciously remains in the modern psyche despite what some think otherwise. The great atheists of history could not wipe out faith in deities, gods and demons, which are still believed in today in the age of mega mechanization, materialism and science. It will take a lot more than mere denial to alter this mass thinking rooted deep in history and the collective psyche. The rulers know this and use it to supreme effect in all that they do. We have some major catching up to do.

 

Each and every one of us is born entirely dependant on parents, society and ultimately upon nature. We absorb everything around us, the earliest years being the most formative and impressionable. Knowing this, the rulers takes successive generations of working class children and educate them in the fundamental arts of compliance, that is, the respect of authority from parents to God, the regimentation of work life, competition within the education to the failure complex, individual limits and boundaries and a servile attitude. The bourgeoisie, who once fought against aristocracy and theocracy with the help of the lower classes, now employ a type of aristocracy and use theocracy to rule the masses. Once an educated working class was desirable but now it is not. So a great dumbing down is afoot, just as it was when First Nations Indian children were re-educated in parochial schools. The bourgeoisie and fundamentalist leaders are cultivating an attitude of faith in a system not worthy of trust by its multitude of scandals and massive thefts. They are cultivating intolerance against minorities in a divide and conquer strategy. After hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, several facts emerged. The bourgeois state did not assist in a timely manner prior to, during and after the event. The people who were victims were utterly helpless, as a babe in arms with no survival skills of any appreciable type. Many people died horribly and needlessly, some deliberately murdered for convenience. Many people relied on prayer as a means of help, which utterly failed during and after the event. Many believe even now that “God visited sinners with a disaster.” A colour divide became plain during and after the disaster, which is still in place and was in place prior to it. Assistance when it did come was not to the most religious, but to the wealthy and greediest. Religious intolerance was fanned, especially against gay people and other revellers. Nothing of course as said about the luxuriating and indolence of the bourgeoisie. This whole catastrophe could have been prevented if people were taught what they really need to know instead of fantasies and xenophobia as living skills. Perhaps the best summery of the modern education system was summed up in a song by Trinidadian Calypso King, song writer and performer, the Mighty Sparrow who stated “What they taught me in school made me a block headed mule.” The song goes on to state some of the nonsense taught that has no practical use other than enforcing command and obey. This has a parallel in religious upbringing that heavily influences education where people are taught to believe in the ridiculous and ignore the obvious. Obey the commands of God as interpreted by the pope or televangelist as “God’s representative and spokes person.” Dogmatism is preferred to genuine enquiry. Even many on the left fall prey to dogmatism. This is not to knock genuine religious spirit that builds community and seeks revolutionary solutions to social issues as in Liberation Theology, but this part is ignored in favour of blaming and the fantasy-land brand pushed by church, state and bourgeoisie.

 

Public and parochial education thus is about building and enforcing compliance to the exploiters in capitalist society today. It ignores the real needs of individual and real human society. It builds the idea of keeping timely schedules and to take the job home with you after work. Your time and by implication therefore, your life is not your own, but a commodity expropriated by the bourgeoisie in order for you to fulfil your responsibility to market, state, king/president, church and God. Bourgeois education teaches almost nothing about fundamental survival skills. Very little is taught regarding agricultural skills and animal husbandry. Most of it does not teach any trade unless you take construction shops and auto mechanics. One learns basic skills like reading (to follow the boss’s instructions), writing (to communicate to a potential employer by way of resume and cover letters) and arithmetic/modern math (to do your tax return, use a credit card, pay the rent and balance a cheque book). Most school graduates wind up on assembly lines, warehouses, fast food/burger flipping, as cashiers, security guards, the military or working in fishing, mines and timber. Even those who don’t complete basic school wind up in such work due to on the job training. One does not learn about the trickery of the capitalist system on all levels. Much of that is reserved for specialists trained in university, college and various trade schools to be completed after basic education. A person can spend easily a third of their life span in school and often accrue a debt that takes the rest of the life to pay off. Job training occurs after basic schooling is done for and prior to getting some jobs. Other job situations rely upon on the job training to bring the employee up to speed. Most important within the capitalist school, is to train the student to the consumerist life style. Consumerism after all is one of the most important generators of profit. Consumerism is even touted as a way to survive in preparation and during a disaster. However, if the supplier of consumer goods collapses and ceases to exist, the consumer is left stranded without skills to deal with a new reality. There are many avenues whereby a supplier can collapse, so it is not necessarily caused by a natural catastrophe. A war or a market collapse under capitalist market anarchy will do the same thing.

 

We have in the developed world, something of a misnomer; a huge throng of adults who are as developed as new born babes when it comes to basic survival as an individual in an environment devoid of civilized influence. When the lights go out, many don’t know how to start a fire. When the taps stop running, they don’t know where to get drinkable water. When refrigeration ceases, they don’t know how to jerk, dry and smoke meat. When the food runs out, they have nothing but their witlessness to help them survive. When nature encroaches, they are unprepared to live any life beyond the artificially taught one of consumerist capitalist civilization. How does doing the same weld on the same spot on an assembly line day in and out for decades put food on the table when one can no longer weld? What good is your car without gas? The unemployed, the homeless and beggars teach us every day the value of our education when civilization is no longer supportive whether by engineered design or catastrophe. They too were taught as all captives and wage slaves were and are taught. They end up begging for help from other still working wage slaves or from church and state. The church and state are reluctant to help and seek ways to not help. Little or no attempt is made to teach alternatives beyond begging, welfarism, dumpster diving, recycling and so forth. When the rulers are done with you, the best thing in their eyes is for you to disappear. Some in desperation turn to small crime. Big crime is left to the state in waiting; organized criminals. The chief criminals are the ones in power that are not recognized as criminal, yet they gun run, run casinos and drugs like the ones in waiting. Too bad the wage slaves are not so well organized. This is where the left has failed miserably of late. As Leon Trotsky once stated, "There has been a failure of leadership."

 

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