Cops

I had this funny feeling for a couple of days, and it took me that long to figure out what it was.  It had been quite a while since I'd experienced twinges of optimism.

That horrifying snuff film starring Derek Chauvin and George Floyd had set off what was beginning to look like a genuine mass movement.  Our President's psychopathy was becoming so evident that even a few Republicans were looking uncomfortable, and voices from the military offered some reassurance that our armed forces might not support a Tr*mpian coup d'etat.  I suppose that's cause for "hope," but the "change" part will be harder to come by.

Structural racism is just one component of a larger structure: a social system that allows a small number of individuals to amass great wealth and power at the expense of everybody else.  For a sizable chunk of the white working class, white privilege is the only privilege available, and they are loathe to give it up.  Also, consigning people of color to an underclass makes it so much easier for the agents of our overlords – the police – to recognize just whom they're supposed to repress.  Restrictions that keep minorities geographically separate make the task of repression even simpler, and the show of force is far more important than the "control of crime."

Cop culture is macho, authoritarian, and insular.  I suspect it is held together primarily by shared privilege: everything from never getting traffic tickets to  "qualified immunity" for murder.    Maintaining that privilege demands intense loyalty to each other: hence, the "blue wall of silence."  Compounding that opacity, municipalities save money by conceding "free" items in negotiations with police unions, like periodic deletion of public complaint records, or contract language that keeps them secret.

I'm not encouraged by any of the "reform" or "defund" ideas making the rounds now.  None of them addresses the real problem: somebody has to be repressing the underclass to keep the elite in its very comfortable place.  Somebody has to ensure that the working class remains divided and at odds with itself.

Just the same, I keep getting this funny feeling . . .

Where is the Class War?

We hear people on the right yelling "class war" with a boring regularity. Those of us who have been paying attention are inclined to believe the class war is over, and that the working and middle classes have lost.

There still are plenty of warriors out there, though, often quite well armed. There are hunters, rifle clubs, militias, street gangs, and no shortage of individual angry paranoids — many with combat experience. They could stir up some extremely severe civil unrest if they got it into their heads to just start shooting in a concerted way, but except for the drug gangs shooting each other and some of the paranoids shooting their families, co-workers, and the occasional abortion provider, things are unnaturally quiet.

To a large extent, the liberals have to take the blame. They have perpetuated the ridiculous belief that we can get what we want and need by voting, and that shooting our corporatist oppressors and their toadies is just not done. The ones most likely to shoot anyone for political and economic reasons don't even have a clue whom they should be shooting, and dream about taking potshots at immigrants and Democrats.

Okay, some Democrats might deserve it, but not for the reasons their assassins would have in mind.

The main thing that keeps a perfectly justifiable class war from happening is that there's nobody left to tell the people with the guns who they ought to be shooting. They won't get it from their corporatist media, their corporatist drug cartels, nor their supremely corporatist NRA. Organized labor — what remains of it — has been co-opted. "Progressive" campus groups were suckered into working for corporatist Obama, and now they've gone back to their keggers.

The so-called "left" has fragmented into feminists, environmentalists, "free speech" advocates, gay rights activists, anti-war activists, immigration reformers, and scores of other single-issue ax-grinders, incapable of recognizing that their common enemy is world corporatism — and that fascism, over six decades after World War II, has triumphed. The other problem with the "left" is that they're liberals, and "don't believe in violence." Where are the goddamned Communists when you need them? Is everybody who owns a gun and understands that "the man" is not his friend in prison on drug charges?

Oddly enough, I think the best chance for class warfare might be in China. New to capitalism, their elites haven't learned to hide their corruption as well as ours do.