The US public consistently expresses majority support for policies like Medicare for All, higher taxes on the rich, free university education, debt erasure, rent control, legal abortion, and statehood for DC.

The US lacks these because the US political system does not exist to implement the public’s preferences. 

 This story about a Texas town slowly destroyed by the climate crisis reads like cautionary sci-fi from a decade ago but it’s quite literally their present and possibly your near-future.

Roads washed out until the only escape from the town is on foot. Public services slowly eroded and then abandoned entirely. Collapse slowly, a little bit at a time, and then suddenly all at once.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/29/texas-climate-managed-retreat-buyouts-liberty-county-flood/ 

 I think about the Roman Empire a lot because most of our worst social institutions can be traced directly back via direct chain of transmission or self-conscious aping of it. 

 The story is, unfortunately, sickeningly familiar to anyone who pays attention to capitalist malfeasance. The story usually goes: 

A firm makes a decision to alter a product to be more competitive. (In this case, Philips was racing with competitors to create a quieter CPAP machine.) The decision turns out to be bad and harm customers. The firm, rather than protecting customers at its own cost, forges ahead and hides the harm, lies about it, denies it, until the weight of evidence is insurmountable and the firm belatedly takes steps to remedy the problem while fighting torts against it.

We could be talking about Philips or the Ford Pinto; we could be talking about cigarettes or fossil fuels. They all know; they know virtually from the first moment that they’re harming customers; they do it anyway.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/

2/ 

 ProPublica just came out with another amazing piece of journalism, this one on the efforts by the capitalist firm Philips Respironics to hide the harms caused by its products.

Philips makes CPAP ventilator machines designed to be worn while asleep, creating positive air pressure to help people with sleep apnea. Back in 2010, Philips added a foam to its CPAP machines to reduce rattling that kept users awake at night. The foam Philips chose degrades, releasing toxic carcinogens directly into the mouths, throats, and lungs of users.

Philips knew about this *right away.* It spent years hiding reports that it was legally obligated to share with US governmental regulators. It waited over a *decade* to issue a recall. Thousands of people are sick; hundreds have died.

Go ahead and read the whole thing, if you have the stomach for it. It’s a typically excellent piece of investigative reporting by ProPublica:

https://www.propublica.org/article/philips-kept-warnings-about-dangerous-cpaps-secret-profits-soared

1/ #thread 

 My correspondent below makes the argument that any effort by an exploited class to end its exploitation will necessarily be violent. 

People will want revenge. It will be bloody. The poor will rise up against the rich and murder them; all we have to do is look at an historical example like, say, the Romanovs of Russia to see that this is true.

But is it?

https://phpc.social/@chrastecky/111136122961496278

1/ #thread 

 I try to keep the number of people I follow at *no more than* 250 because otherwise I get totally overwhelmed. I think it’s the ADHD. I recognize most of you by your avi pictures so if you change them I might lose track of who I’m talking to. 

 I’m not a big fan of the rhetorical framing of “seizing the means of production” or redistributing wealth from capitalists, both because that’s not how these systems actually function and because it provides capitalists with an ideological boogeyman. “They’re going to steal your PlayStation!”

No. We don’t have to seize a single thing. Nothing has to be stolen or taken. If you stopped paying your landlord rent, if the cops stopped enforcing the landlord’s claim, the landlord will have lost nothing but a rentier claim to your labor. You don’t “seize” your own home; your landlord has not lost something they weren’t even using in the first place. 

 In the US, heat and drought have reduced the flow of the Mississippi River so much that New Orleans, at the mouth of the river, is facing salt water intrusions into the city’s water supply.

The Army Corps of Engineers is building an underwater barrier and planning to barge in 36 million gallons of freshwater *per day.*

At this point, it’s a race to see if New Orleans or Miami is the first major American city to become uninhabitable.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/09/23/us/freshwater-new-orleans-saltwater-mississippi-river/index.html 

 About 4,000 years ago, at a site called Pingliangtai in eastern China, Neolithic people had to deal with frequent and unpredictable flooding, driven by summer monsoon rains. These stone age people responded very resourcefully: they built a wall around their community, surrounded by a moat to capture rain water; they dug ditches around their homes; and, most impressive, they built an elaborate system of ceramic drainage pipes, made of interconnected clay segments.

And they did it all without any indication of state authority.

1/ #thread

https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/111/079/318/833/603/457/original/5c10062d09521de8.jpeg 

 It’s really quite incredible that I go about my daily life unarmed and never find myself in a situation where I have to shoot someone, but lots of folks who carry guns seem to find themselves in those situations all the time. What an incredible coincidence, they just happen to have guns AND have to shoot someone. Just wow. 

 In 1381, King Richard II said these words to the defeated leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt:

“You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: slaves you were, and slaves you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.”

I appreciate it when elites are honest and straightforward about their intent, their contempt, and the system of privilege they fight to preserve.

1/2 

 @58fbd252 

Could it be that these metrics are insufficient or inaccurate indicators of the deep structural problems facing American capitalism that are driving intense anxiety and precarity for most Americans? 

 I tend to vote, since it’s a minimal effort that can contribute to harm reduction around the margins, but I’m under no illusions about its importance or efficacy. 

The “just vote harder” crowd, though, needs to grapple with the fact that people do vote quite hard and still see few benefits, if any. Majorities of US voters have elected democrats to the presidency in 7 of the 8 past elections, but have only held the presidency for 5 of the last 8 terms. If things had gone a bit differently in late 2020 and early 2021, the republican might have successfully couped his way into turning that into 4 out of 8.

Even setting aside that both the democrats and republicans are parties of capital, securing a majority of the vote is still not a particularly efficacious way of electing your preferred candidate. Under these conditions—knowing that even if you do vote really hard and win the election but still lose the election—what do the “just vote harder” folks propose to motivate people? 

 Yesterday, predictably, someone popped into my mentions with sputtering objections to the idea that a human community—ANY community—could exist without a central, coercive authority to enforce rules. 

“Even social animals have a ruling hierarchy and structured defense against attackers.”

This is simply, empirically not true. People are perfectly capable of organizing themselves voluntarily to use violence cooperatively, both for defense and offense. The Haudenosaunee of what is now New York depopulated and conquered virtually the entire Ohio Valley without any semblance of a state.

1/several 

 In “Forms of brutality: Towards a historical sociology of violence,” Siniša Malešević observes that interpersonal violence varies from place to place and time to time, but in general has remained fairly low throughout human history. What *has* changed is the state’s ability to mobilize entire populations to conduct industrial warfare and murder; there is nothing like the Holocaust in the pre-modern historical record. 

Not every act of violence is committed by a state; not every non-state society is free of violence or hierarchy. But every state is violent, as violence is one of the key defining aspects of the state. States exist to use violence to extract resources to facilitate more violence to empower the state to collect more resources. That is, at their heart, what they are.

It’s in this way that we can distinguish the state from, say, a non-state tribal community. Even if that tribe has a leader—many don’t or didn’t—that leader (a chief or a king or whatever) might only be able to command through persuasion and exercise violence personally, if at all. The state, in contrast, institutionalizes violence; not only the king but also the courts and the police and the army and the bureaucrats and the jailers will all endorse and facilitate the state’s violence.

12/ 

 We can see this readily when we investigate the extent to which even ostensible “democracies” ignore the preferences of voters in favor of the preferences and goals of elites allied to the state. 

One study, published in 2014 by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, found exactly this:

“Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy.”

States do not enact the preferences of their voters, even when they bother with elections, because states are not “democratic” in any meaningful sense of bottom-up, consensual self-rule through cooperation. States enact the preferences of the elites who make up the state or, increasingly in the modern world, elites who stand apart from but have wholly captured the state as their agent.

11/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B 

 Elon Musk turning off Starlink to prevent an attack by Ukrainians defending themselves from Russian state aggression is as clear and devastating an indictment of the ancap dream of a stateless but fully-privatized world as I could have ever imagined. 

 Hardin’s concept of the Tragedy of the Commons should be as embarrassingly marginalized today as phrenology or any other racist pseudo-science. 

 I see a lot of depressed people say “oh I feel so bad, I’m such a burden on the people in my life.”

And, yeah, you are. You’re absolutely a burden on someone. I am a burden. We are all of us a burden. And that’s ok.

My kids are young and for a lot of my time with them they were helpless blobs. They have been so much work! They have made me tired, they have made me sick, they have made me worried, they have spent my money, they have punched me in the junk. Don’t let anyone sugarcoat how hard it is to be a parent.

And I would do anything for them. I would die for them. I love them more than anything and would do it all over again, gladly, a thousand times.

It’s ok to be a burden. Literally every human being is, at some point, a burden on someone else. All of us need help almost all of the time. 

Because we take care of each other.

David Graeber once noted that we’re fragile biological beings who die without each other. It’s ok to be a burden. Be a burden. And take care of someone else when they’re a burdens. It’s the only thing we can do, really: take care of each other.

It’s ok.