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Episode Summary:
In this episode of Revolution Now!, Peter Joseph discusses the urgent need for systemic change, focusing on the intertwined crises of socioeconomic inequality and ecological decline. He critiques traditional political activism and argues that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Peter also delves into the history of racism in the United States, explaining its economic origins and systemic perpetuation. Throughout the episode, he emphasizes the need for a deeper systems analysis to address these critical issues and outlines his vision for transformative societal change.

Transcript:
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now! This is a 30-minute weekly program every Tuesday. It will be an audio-only program for now, but we’ll expand into video, I think in the future. It will also be more or less a lecture series for the first few weeks, but will eventually expand into interviews and other kinds of interactions.

It’s also worth noting that this program will be somewhat paired with Medium articles through the platform of Medium, articles written about the subjects in more detail with sourcing and so on. In fact, the subject of the podcast today will be better expressed probably in the article that will be published soon on Medium in regard to American racism and its history, which I’m going to be talking about today after some introductory comments. As the inaugural podcast, let’s answer a few questions, “Why revolution now? Is it just a little parody on democracy now?” Well, first, I’ve been very frustrated that even though you have a litany of political and social shows dealing with news, dealing with analysis about what’s happening with current events and so on, along with some theoretically-minded shows that are debating the ins and outs of this or that, the capitalist versus communist, duality and other things of such, which I don’t really care for, there hasn’t been a show that first really embraces the urgency of what we face as a species right now, given the confluence of negative trajectories from the ravages of socioeconomic inequality, something I’ve written about at great length in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, to the relentless and ongoing destruction of the environment, through pollution, resource overshoot, loss of biodiversity.

Every life support system on earth is in decline. Under the umbrella of those two issues, socioeconomic inequality and ecological decline, is really where my analysis and my interest lies because those two top-tier categories embrace a cascade of other systemic problems. That’s kind of the limitation of thinking out there and why this program also, aside from promoting this urgency, promotes a particular worldview and how to analyze these problems, and how to solve them. I’m sorry to say, and this is what has kept me a pariah out there, because I am completely unapologetic at this point, the traditionally-minded activist avenues, whether protests in the street, whether creating petitions, whether some kind of general lobbying … lobbying, of course, the term lobbying really just means public appeal to government. Obviously, it’s redefined today because lobbying is the arm of business to basically own government, but you get my point.

All of this stuff that people routinely do in this political dance, it’s not going to work for the problems that have emerged at this time. They will be marginal progress. I’m not saying that those out there engaging in traditional activism are not contributing to positive change, but the kinds of problems that are at hand today, particularly under the category of ecological decline and socioeconomic inequality, are not going to be solved by common policy shifts and the fundamental democratic process as we know it. Why? Because the forces of other system processes are interfering with the idea of democracy and limiting its capability.

Imagine a boat on an ocean. The boat is a system, right? It has been created to hold things and to propel and be safe across water. That system is strong in certain environments. If you put a boat on a lake, it’s going to hold its integrity, but what happens if you plop it in the ocean during a giant storm, and as the waves get larger and larger, the integrity of that boat to control itself, or to even stay afloat becomes suspect?

Why? Because there are two different systems, and one is stronger than the other. Likewise, and I’ll use a real-life example this time, look at our system of energy, or at least the predominant system of energy employed by humanity over the 20th century, hydrocarbons. While hydrocarbons have worked positively to propel humanity forward, fueling industry and productivity, unfortunately the negative externality related to hydrocarbons, the creation of pollution through burning this stuff, is incompatible with nature’s system because nature can’t absorb the level of pollution putting out there, therefore, it’s destabilizing the ecosystem. We’re all aware of this, but the framework here is to look at it from a systems analysis, so you have two systems, and one is more powerful than the other in the sense that it can affect negatively the whole of humanity and the variability to produce hydrocarbons themselves over time as the ecological pollution-based destruction continues. I hope this is beginning to make sense, so in this analogy, the ecosystem is the ocean, and our hydrocarbon system of energy production is the boat, and the boat is not going to survive the ocean if the ocean becomes turbulent enough.

Now, with that kind of introduction, let’s now go back to the political argument as to why the political tradition and the activist tradition are systems that are no longer strong enough to compete with other systems that have different intentions. The existing system that is of the gravest threat to democracy is known as capitalism. Before you get your hair standing on the back of your neck in horror that Peter Joseph is going to go into some pro-socialist diatribe, let me reiterate the fact that I don’t see any of this through the lens of political ideology. In fact, I don’t see any of this through the lens of morality. Systems work, or they don’t work, defined by their goals.

I believe that we should live in a society that is sustainable, that takes care of people, not because it’s the right thing to do. That’s obviously part of my value system, but that’s not the reasoning, technically. We have to take care of each other because if we do not, we destabilize and everyone becomes more at risk. We have to take care of the environment because if we destabilize it, everyone becomes a risk to each other. It is a fundamental law of human behavior that deprivation and stress will lead people to actions and behaviors that are not rational, particularly in groups, as we saw with all the riots across the United States and beyond.

We know that riots and violence, for example, really don’t do anything. They don’t do anything at all when it comes to social progress, I’m sorry to say, but this is the kind of emotional reactivity, and I can assure you, if current trajectories continue, the increase of socioeconomic inequality, the rise of poverty, all now very much accentuated by COVID-19, coupled with ecological decline that will push the walls of humanity closer and closer towards the middle, you are going to have climate change refugees, which you already more or less have, but it’s going to become far more epidemic, all moving towards the West. Once again, current future trajectories are all negative. In fact, the only positive trajectory that humanity has at this point in time is its innovative capacity to try and create new technology and mechanisms tangibly to solve these problems faster than we’re actually creating them. That is ultimately the race we see now, particularly on the ecological level.

Peter Joseph:
We have to scramble to try and solve these serious problems with our atmosphere, and land, and lakes, and oceans, the plastic epidemic, and people are devising technology to try and do then, but it has to happen faster than the problems arise, and that race is not one we are going to win if everything stays the same. That tangent aside, let’s return to my point about the incompatibility of our economy, the monetary market system, capitalism, and how it is incompatible with democracy. What is the system of market behavior? We can talk for a long period of time about different perspectives of the institution of capitalism and the way it is, the way it’s supposed to be and so on. It’s exhausting because the argument on the side of proponents of this kind of system say that we haven’t been able to perfect it properly, therefore, all the inequities, and power abuses, and the litany of problems associated to market behavior are just sort of a anomalous thing and we have to blame the politicians or something, to blame state regulation as is probably the most common cliche, the idea that the free market should just be free.

Well, let’s take a different view of this concept of the free market. By the way, I say free market because at the core root of this system is that concept. While we have always lived in a mixed economy, there is no pure capitalist economy. It would be technically impossible due to the externalities that would be created that markets have no vocabulary to control or resolve. The ethic of capitalism still is the concept of open and competitive trade.

Here is my point when it comes to the incompatibility of this kind of economic and social system when associated to democracy. If the ethic is to buy and sell freely, if that is the mechanism of society, where do you draw the line as to what can be bought and sold? You see, I don’t look at the compromised nature of government as some anomalous thing where people are spending money to influence or people that are CEOs or in a revolving door with political institutions. I don’t see any of this as anomalous because the system is simply expressing itself. The system of economy we have says buy and sell everything, and we are nothing but naive to say that we should draw lines about what can be bought and sold, so yes, it is a free market to the extent that you are free to buy your politicians if you can afford it.

Since the entire hierarchy is built through the capitalist order, with all of the class relationships, moving from the poor to the middle, to the upper, to the billionaires, the super upper, what you also have in return is a system where people that have lots of money are more likely to have power and influence, therefore, you’re always going to have a sort of top-tier group of regulators, or managers, or governors of sorts, and I’m using system language here, that are going to be biased towards the various system that as will be continually argued, desperately needs to change or more accurately needs to be replaced, so there is your system analysis. You have this system of democracy as we know it, based on voting, based on basic lobbying and grassroots activism, you have your activist integration of this fundamental political avenue, electing representatives and hoping for the best. That system is not strong enough to counter the system of economy, which dominates everything. It’s an issue of consistency. One final thing I’ll add on the subject that just dawned on me is the system of business is in fact dictatorial.

I hope everyone understands that. Private dictatorships are what businesses are. Very few exceptions. People might feign some kind of democratic community approach to their businesses, but ultimately, it is a clear hierarchy with the boss and the agents and so on. If business and markets are the guiding energy of society, it’s what makes things move, which is the case today, and we also, at the same time expect democracy, which means community-balanced involvement, not power systems that ignore the will of other people in society, then obviously, the contradiction should be even more clear. How can you expect a system based on business dictatorship to somehow translate into an open democracy on the tier of government?

That’s probably even more naive frankly, in the idea of stopping all of the lobbying and financial influence that is replete in all nations. One more thing I’ll add since, again, this is the subject of systems. I’m not trying to go into too much depth with respect to the problem of democracy and the current economic environment. I am going farther than I intended to, but I’m trying to give examples of system relationships. Some may be familiar with studies out of UC Berkeley that were looking at how behavioral patterns change when people get wealth, and it’s quite striking how people become more apathetic, they become more prone to break certain kinds of laws to feel superior, they become more entitled. These studies have been written about …

I put a lot of in my book, and that’s another issue to take into account, if it’s true that across populations, those exposed to increased wealth, and then ultimately power, become spoiled and different jerks, and doesn’t mean everybody of course, but if it is a statistically relevant psychological shift for whatever reason, that’s a confluence of reasons, there’s no singular causality when it comes to stuff like this, but if it’s true, then that’s even worse for this argument of democracy, because the people that are going to achieve power because of their financial and business success are also most likely going to be the most indifferent to the plight of mankind, due to this psychological modulation. That is another system interface. I’m going to stop there, and I hope this has served as a kind of introduction to the way this podcast approaches things. I am part of the Structuralist movement. I think that is probably the most apt phrase to describe this way of thinking.

We are a group of people that don’t outright reject the avenues, political change as we see it, voting, but we recognize the marginal effect it has at this point in time in our social evolution. Instead, focusing on the root of these problems, the root of democratic failure, the root of ecological decline, the root of ravenous socioeconomic inequality that’s harming people disproportionately in and structural violence, a term I use quite frequently. We want to see things change from the ground up, and stop playing this game, and this delusion frankly, that this protest-oriented political lobbying tradition is going to be effective anymore. I don’t put people down for it, I just create the qualification that it’s not going to be enough. Now, there is a temporal exception to this rule, and that is when people rise to power that are of exceptional causticness and neurosis, such as Donald J. Trump, when it came to the prior neoliberal establishment, Trump is indeed an outlier, but he’s an outlier in the worst possible way.

First, it’s completely cliche that a billionaire becomes president with absolutely no experience because we have a whole culture of spectacle, where they take the appreciation of a reality TV star, and they superimpose it. The public does, or at least some of the public, on this figure, and his rise was a result, make no mistake, of the constant deficiencies of the Bush, Clinton, Obama dynasties. They are all basically the same kind of political institution, and the inherent disgust of a slowly-awakening population, not knowing what to do, but just knowing they hated what was happening, impulsively elected Trump. I’m sorry to say, he’s got to go. It doesn’t matter what you do, doesn’t matter how much you hate opponents, this guy has to be voted out for the sake of the future of this country and the world, and it’s as simple as that. Point being in the broader scheme here, there are anomalous figures that will come along that should have no relationship to any form of social power, and Trump is that exception, so he’ll be booted hopefully, and then you return to your basic neoliberal establishment, which is bad enough, but not even remotely as caustic as the Trump regime.

All of that said, let’s now move forward with the actual focus of this podcast, episode one, Racism in the United States. It must be interesting to look at the United States and all the social unrests that’s occurring right now from the outside in countries that haven’t gone through the experience that the United States condition has. By the way, I try my best not to refer to America, referring to the United States because it’s not really fair to all the other Americas, so in the hope to be exact in my language, I’m going to be correcting myself if I slip. The United States is a very unique case study on group relationships because of what has happened since the slavery period. If you want to understand systemic racism, truly, you have to understand this unfolding.

Let’s step back and look at the history. It’s interesting that race-based slavery, as we think about American slavery, really wasn’t race-based slavery when it began, and what I mean by that is it took time to come up with the construct of race to justify slavery as opposed to the other way around, where I think the myth has been that Europeans felt superior to Africans, and therefore felt they were natural slaves, and really, all that scientific racism that in fact came later. The actual history as recorded is not like that. The truth is slavery in the United States was simply a market-based economic decision to secure cheap labor and profitable investments. I’m going to quote a sociologist, Robin M. Williams Jr. on this issue:

“In a very basic sense, race relations are the direct outgrowth of the long wave of European expansion, beginning with the discovery of America.The resulting so-called race relations had very little to do with race. Initially, it was an historical accident that the peoples encountered in the European expansion differed in shared physical characteristics of an obvious kind, but once the racial ideologies had been formed and widely disseminated, they constituted a powerful means of justifying political hegemony and economic control.”

While eons of slavery was common by way of war, conquest, debt and so on, justification through physical appearance was actually a little practiced until the time of the American colonies. Upon settlement, white European indentured servants, in fact, were mostly used. However, they had fairly short multi-year terms and became limited number as time went on, so as the business minds scoured for options to save money, African slaves were sought when it was obvious they were better business investments than the indentured servants, the indentured Europeans.

As explained by professor of sociology, William Julius Wilson, and by the way, these quotes are taken from my book, The New Human Rights Movement, “The conversion to slavery was not only prompted by the heightened concern over a cheap labor shortage in the face of the rapid development of tobacco farming as a commercial enterprise and the declining number of white indentured servants entering the colonies, but also by the fact that the slave had become a better investment than the servant. As life expectancy increased, resulting from the significant decline in mortality rates from disease, planters were willing to finance the extra cost of slaves. Indeed, during the first half of the 17th century, indentured labor was actually more advantageous than slave labor.” Even more interesting and in stark contrast to a traditional assumptions, during the initial stages of African slavery in the colonies, racial bias actually wasn’t much of an issue. Black slaves worked alongside white indentured servants, and they were treated as equals, and even intermarried and had common social distinctions, families.

This, of course was before the artificial construct of race was legally created. As an aside, it’s truly terrible, we still refer to racism with that root word race, when science has proven there’s only one race, the human race, all the ethnic differences in appearance and custom and so on that have emerged from people existing in different pockets of earth under different exposures, has proven to have absolutely no definitive, separatist distinction. There is no quantifiable, defendable difference between any ethnic group on earth enough to equate to some kind of superiority or inferiority assumption, and again, it’s truly tragic that we still have scientific racist modalities out there. You still have all of these bogus studies talking about IQs and so on. In the words of Civil Rights Professor, Carter A. Wilson:

“Color prejudice against Africans was rare in the first two-thirds of the 17th century. Legal distinctions between black slaves and white servants did not appear until the 1660’s. At first, the plantation owners relied more on European indentured servants than African slaves. Initially, attitudes and behaviors toward the African slave differed little from those toward the European servant, except that the servant served only a short-term, usually seven years, and the slave generally, but not always, served for life. Interracial marriages were common in the first half of the 17th century, and that at this time, they provoked little or no reaction. Christian status and Christian morals were important. Race was not.”

All of this is to say that the dawn of American racism, the racism in the United States, was not slavery itself, but how the framework of slavery was eventually supported and justified. The full transition from temporary white servants to lifetime bound black slaves started around the last half of the 17th century, and the emergence of the legal distinction of race became encoded in society. Now, think about this for a second. This is fascinating. What it means is that all of the racism we see in the modern day in America, that culture of bigotry comes from this initial step to make legal distinctions between two groups of people based on the color of their skin.

All of the white supremacists, the KKK, all the proud boys, and the boogaloo boys, and the Trumpian cult, pathologically racist people, these folks are perpetuating a fallacy that was used years and years ago to justify the enslavement of black people. Think about that for a second. Now, that isn’t to dismiss other related things that are associated cognitively and culturally when it comes to group antagonism, but it’s important to understand this origin. Martin Luther King was very notable in describing the transition phase after the abolition of slavery, where poor, black people now were in competition directly with white workers, and that economic strain in the competitive market climate is really when the racism became codified and perpetuated culturally. You see this kind of behavior in all nations. Groups of people that fear foreigners for the most important reason, their own survival is restricted by them coming into their countries or into their towns and communities.

Again, this is empirically obvious. If you go through the history of all the countries of the world and look at where their biases, and prejudices, and bigotry rest in terms of group versus group antagonism, you will ultimately find that it’s rooted in some kind of economic fear. Now, I’m not talking about gender relationships. That’s a far more complicated thing, I’m talking about country versus country, nationality versus nationality, ethnicity versus ethnicity and so on. To put this in the most concise way possible, you’ve developed a culture of bigotry in the United States that has become more and more diffused, but somewhat pathological, as generations have unfolded with this transference, these memes of bigotry and groupism and identity neurosis and so on.

Of course, as alluded to prior, it feeds into already cognitive problems of the human brain. This is for a more expansive subject, but we do think categorically, and we do have certain propensities in terms of group identity and relationships. It’s part of our evolutionary fitness, which I think has turned into evolutionary baggage. All of this is to say that from a cultural standpoint, systemic racism has been with the Zeitgeist, as it were for a long time, and you can’t just declare America being not racist when this kind of cultural baggage is clearly evident, and it does play into the decision-making process of white people when they have this baggage in their psychology, and subconsciously so. Now, there’s one thing I forgot to mention as we move forward with this history, particularly with the fact that Black Lives Matter has been a direct response to police brutality, which by the way, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the punitiveness and disproportional harm the American judicial system has caused to the black community for a long, long time, going all the way back to the origin of the United States police department, slave patrols.

If you think that the origin of an institution, the fraternity of the police in America, if you think that the echoes of this ongoing traditional institution doesn’t have elements, baggage going all the way back to the slave patrol period, you are not taking into account the cultural transference. Now, that aside, let’s move forward with this history. Upon the development of law that decided that separate but equal was going to be the new method during Jim Crow, segregation, what you see is the seed planting, the forging of economic deprivation of the black community moving into the future. What you see is a clear and present vulnerability of the black community at the hands of police and power. Separate but equal, of course, is nonsensical when one side owns pretty much everything.

What this did through the development of this, and then eventually the resolution of it, and then the red lining, and then all the economic games that have been played, white flight, lots of things that can be listed that kept the black community in pockets, in poor areas that lacked investment, you see the compounding of deprivation over generational time, which leads to what? It leads to aberrant behavior. It leads to people that don’t have other options, so then comes the war on drugs, started by Richard Nixon, and Richard Nixon is widely established and has been recorded as saying things that are so racist, and it’s very clear that the war on drugs in America, started in the ’70s, was really racially motivated. It was a method to take control over the black community and disproportionally oppressed them under this new policing project, and then the crack epidemic came, so you have people that do not have enough work. They can make more money selling crack, they suffer from depression, and anxiety, and general loss of public health in their low socioeconomic position, not to mention, still absorbing the stigma of society, as racism still prevailed and it’s quite dominant and all the riots and protests that we saw in the ’60s and ’70s, and suddenly, what do you have with the crack epidemic?

You have the young black male on all the TV screens pictured as the ultimate threat to society, symbolically speaking. People sat in their white households, and they watched this, and they begin to develop and reinforce that image of the evil black person that has been culturally generated for hundreds of years. This is all to say that this culture of systemic racism is very obvious to understand. I experienced it firsthand when I grew up, and I think most people that lived, especially in the ’80s and ’90s in America understand it, but it goes far deeper than that. In fact, I would compartmentalize different forms of systemic racism, with the most critical category, being those related to low socioeconomic status.

At the root of my argument in terms of changing society, is you have to remove poverty and you have to close the gap of economic inequality. Low socioeconomic status is probably the worst thing you can experience as a child, and it sets trajectories for the future. It also creates patterns of behavior that get interpreted culturally as aberrant, because poor people tend to not be able to function as well as people that are doing fine, needless to say. When you see congregations of black communities in poor areas, and then you discover that for whatever reason, there’s crime in those areas, there’s destitution in those areas, there’s a general pollution in those areas, not because they’re black, but because they live in poverty, and the illusion that’s created in all of this aberrancy is when people on the outside look at it, they don’t see the causality. They don’t understand why the black community is still largely impoverished and hurting on so many different levels.

They don’t understand the congregations of the projects or the red lining, all the shenanigans that happen. They don’t understand the history of lack of investment in the black community and white flight. This is the kind of systemic vocabulary that’s required to understand systemic racism. As I stated in the book, the thing that pushes this racism along, the thing that keeps it alive is socioeconomic inequality. If you eliminate socioeconomic inequality, you eliminate the features that compound the bigotry and the outcomes, and hence, you can begin to stabilize society.

Socioeconomic inequality is the systemic root of contemporary group versus group bigotry, sociologically speaking. How do you remove it? Well, you can create a patch, like universal basic income, and just get people out of poverty, above the poverty line through that method, which is something I actually say is fine, even though it’s not really a solution, because the problems associated with market behavior go way beyond group antagonism, even though that’s ultimately the end result. For example, if we destroy our environment, all we’re going to do is make each other more upset at each other, and it’s going to cause more conflict and war, or you can get to the root of it, as opposed to UBI and change the system, which is what I advocate, and we’ll be talking about a great deal in future episodes. I’m going to stop here for this inaugural podcast.

I didn’t quite get through everything I wanted to talk about, but there will be a Medium article posted as I mentioned on the subject of racism in the United States and the systemic nature of it that we’ll go into more detail soon, so stick to my social media if you can tolerate me. I do have a Patreon if you want to support this project and the other projects that I have in the works. October 6th is the release of InterReflections, and I will be coming back to you next Tuesday, and we will engage yet again. Thanks, everybody. I really appreciate it, and everyone, be safe out there.