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Episode Summary:
In this episode of Revolution Now!, Peter Joseph discusses the systemic issues related to climate change, the economic system, and societal responses to crises like COVID-19. He critiques the inherent flaws in market economics, which prioritize growth over sustainability, and examines how this dynamic perpetuates environmental degradation. Peter also revisits the topic of racism in America, emphasizing its economic roots and systemic nature. He concludes by exploring new forms of activism and how a fundamental shift in society’s structure is necessary for meaningful change.

Transcript:
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to the second episode of Revolution Now!, September 8th 2020. I’m coming to you from my apartment in Los Angeles, California, sweating quite a bit due to the massive heat wave that’s currently hitting us while record breaking fires are ravaging, I believe, around two million acres of forest at this time. And while statistical evidence of phenomenon related to climate destabilization as a result of the emissions of greenhouse gases coming from hydrocarbons and animal agriculture have been talked about for probably almost a hundred years, particularly with respect to hydrocarbons, the ignorance, skepticism and disbelief out there on the part of more conservative minded people, coupled with the complete and utter failure on the part of the global establishment, however you want to define that, goes to show that the social psychology that has manifested from the structure of our society, from an economy that simply has no vocabulary to conserve, from an economy that simply has no idea what true efficiency means in a technical sense, it goes to show that whatever we think we’re doing in terms of problem solving is not working.

And the reason is highly sociological, which is why I speak of the social psychology emanating from the social structure. We have experienced generations and generations of this market driven psychology, a culture that’s based on propertied value and ownership, a culture that is competitive and acquisitive and seeks to gain more and more hence expand, hence economic growth, which of course is associated to the cyclical consumption required to keep labor for income going. If you’re not familiar with that basis of our economy, it’s very simple. You have consumers, you have producers and you have laborers. In the modern day there’s far more overlap between these three things, but the system is still the same. The producer needs to demand to hire people, to pay them a wage, to give them purchasing power so they can become consumers to spend back into the system perpetuating or increasing demand so the company can keep gaining income to keep the cycle going.

That is the positive feedback loop of the entire market system, that is the foundation. And it’s like the gas pedal on a car. The more people buy and consume, the faster the car goes, “Yay, everyone’s employed. Everyone has woo…” And the more people stop buying, the gas slows and the brake is put on and you have depression, recession and so on. So what does that mean in terms of system function? It means there’s no incentive to slow this car down. It’s just going to want to go faster and faster until it flies right off the cliff, which is exactly what we’re doing. So back to my point about culture, we have been living generationally in this system and we’ve watched our behave in it. And we’ve basically molded ourselves around these system requirements to keep our economy going.

So it should be no surprise out there, folks, that between all the pacts, and protocols, and treaties and accords, very little progress has been made. Because in order to achieve balance or homeostasis between humanity and its habitat, you have to look for the structures and system relationships that perpetuate the detrimental behaviors of industry. And unfortunately, the market system of economics incentivizes all forms of labor and resource exploitation, coupled with a fundamental growth ethic, coupled with the labor for income system, once again. And when you put this entire system together, you see it has zero capacity to deal with something that requires degrowth, that requires a conservative ethic. Sustainability, efficiency and conservation are the enemies of market economics. And since, once again, the social psychology develops a culture that’s loyal to how it is fed, people become agents of the system and they’re just not willing to reconcile what’s really required to the detriment of what will end up being many tens of millions of deaths as a result, as the future unfolds in the short term.

And to conclude this tangent, I’m not just speaking about the barriers of the prescriptions that have been put forward by these accords and pacts and the well-meaning people that think they can talk their way into a sustainable economy without structural change, I’m also talking about the activist community. Show me an activist, an author, someone involved in economics, progressive economics, environmental economics, show me somebody that gets to the heart of the structural flaw of this because it’s so few and far between. And what you’ll find is enormous cognitive dissonance that reveals itself in staggering contradictions throughout their writings, literature, lectures, and so on. Why? Because they have the same problem. They are locked into a social psychology coming from this system based on reward.

A bestselling author that’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year off of this system, promoting an environmentalist and degrowth and sustainability and resulting climate change and so on, has a massive cognitive dissonance inherent, and it comes through pathologically, and they pathologically go out and they claim they’re going to fix this system and fix the woes of the world with some kind of revision of capitalism, some revision of market economics, without actually addressing the structural problems, the incentives, and so on that ultimately negate everything they hope to achieve.

Now that said, let me just quickly state, this is not a dogmatic perspective. I’m not sitting here telling you this is the conclusion and that’s that. What I’m saying is that I can’t find any argument against what I’m trying to say. And I will bring people that will have different perspectives in the future, hopefully, if they want to talk to me, and this can be fleshed out even more. Make no mistake, I’m not sitting here because I think it’s cool to argue about changing the system or declaring everything is wrong and I’m some know it all, or some group knows better than some other group and so on. I don’t want to be here. Frankly, I have lots of other interests in life that I would find much more enjoyable than this kind of mission.

But to date, after a decade of all this research of reading prolifically, especially reading people that are very notable, I’m left with a very disappointed and disheartened feeling about the future, because the people that are your activist leaders in this department, and many others are just as compromised on average as the selfishly minded common business person.

Now, that was a far more extensive introductory tangent than I intended. I will revisit these subjects in the future more specifically. Let’s talk about what this program is going to be today. First, I’d like to revisit the racism in America subject that I started in the last podcast, talking about systemic racism, cultural racism, and psychological racism.

By the way, there is an article that is going to embrace the content of these two podcasts on this subject coming out on Medium. I have promised this article before, and it will happen a few days from now. Then I’m going to talk about the most topical issue of the time COVID-19 and what it says, what it relays, what it reveals, I should say, about our economy. And I want to pose the hypothetical of, what if we had COVID-19 in a non-market, a non-capitalist society, that was formed very differently? What would that look like? Would it be as bad? So we’ll talk about that. And finally, I want to address new forms of activism and why, which is going to be a continual theme in this podcast series.

And on an unfortunate note, I’m sad to hear of the death of David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and On Bullshit Jobs. These are great works, anthropological, economic, very well researched and grounded works. David was a big proponent of Occupy and was instrumental to it in many ways. So it’s unfortunate, and he’ll be missed and I recommend his books to everyone.

Okay, so let’s jump back into racism in the United States: origins and perpetuations. As talked about in the prior podcast, racism was not the motivation for Americans slavery. It was a social construct legally created that worked to justify the existence of slavery after the fact. Contrary to dominant mythology, the true motivations for slavery in America was economic and not prejudice. This is very important history that people need to understand because it links this kind of economy with human exploitation on the worst possible level. The revelation being, if you have an economy as we still do today, based upon human and labor exploitation, the moral lines of how abuse occurs is as subjective as can be.

We also talked about how the post slavery period pitted poor black people against poor white people, basically creating the dynamic that carries to this day of xenophobia and foreign fear, something you see replete in the Trump administration, even in the 21st century in America. This goes to show just how powerful and how ingrained this kind of group versus group mentality is and how accentuated and amplified it is by our current economic system. And as long as you have a system based on scarcity oriented competitive economics, pitting worker versus worker, group versus group, manifesting a mathematical inevitability of large range socioeconomic inequality, with great concentrations of wealth on one side and highly in debt oppressed workers on the other, you’re never going to see racism resolve on the systemic level, on the cultural level or the psychological level. In fact, all signs point to all of those factors getting worse as time moves forward, given current economic trajectories.

Now let’s step back a bit, since the dawn of Black Lives Matter, which is a continuation of the American civil rights movement, a movement, by the way, that has been dealing with police brutality and a ridiculously punitive American justice system slanted to harm blacks and minorities disproportionately. This term, systemic racism, has finally made it into the public conversation, even though the misunderstanding of it is quite grand, especially with the fact that you have lots of people that simply don’t even believe it exists. Why? Because they don’t understand it. And as an aside, I’d like to point out that we do have cognitive inhibitions when it comes to thinking about things systemically, our brains are not wired to do that. We are wired to be reductionist, to be categorical. We can’t see the systemic relationships hence the point of science and the method of science and basically a scientific worldview, in fact, which leads to system science because all nature is systems. And hence you have to have an understanding of systems science in order to understand systemic racism and pretty much any other kind of integrative synergistic phenomenon, which is everything.

In 1967, a book was published called Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Charles V. Hamilton and Stokely Carmichael. Some may be familiar with the name Stokely Carmichael, he’s a very notable figure in the American civil rights movement. And in this text, a very important concept was introduced, that of “institutional racism”. The book states and I quote, “Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two closely related forms, individual whites acting against individual blacks and in the operation of established and respected forces in the society that receives far less condemnation than the first. This is not to say that every single American consciously oppresses black people, he does not need to, institutional racism has been maintained deliberately by the power structure and through indifference inertia and the lack of courage on the part of white masses, as well as petty officials,” unquote.

Carmichael continues, open quote, “When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. While in the same city, Birmingham, Alabama, 500 black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community. That is a function of institutional racism.” Unquote.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, institutional racism pretty much is systemic racism. Carmichael’s definition employs a vague combination of intent versus lack of intent, where outcomes can occur because of long range systemic phenomenons, which is poverty, or institutions that are fundamentally bigoted and consciously so such as, say, banks, someone goes in for a loan, they get denied. The process of denial won’t look overtly racist, but behind the scenes the decisions were racist, hence institutional racism, it’s a facade. But the more profound realization here, and which is what I’m getting at, is systemic racism is ultimately about racist ends without racist intents. It’s about a confluence of factors that have been set in motion, that continually systemically oppress a group of people without any agents out there that happen to be associated to this outcome having actual racist intent, I hope that makes sense. Racist outcomes without racist intent.

And with that in mind, I’d like to now go through four factors that I talk about in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, that I think most contribute to this web of systemic racism we see today. Those factors are one, historical; two, economic; three, legal and four, cultural, with the most important of course being an economic. So let’s quickly address each one of these, but keep in mind this is a synergy. Economic, historical, cultural legal, all of this is a synergy bundled up into one nasty culminated system of oppression.

As far as the historical, we’ve already talked about this for the most part. You have the economic motivation for slavery, seeing black people as a better investment than the white indentured servants. So they are conscripted as capitalist tools to then be justified later through legal decrees saying race existed, there was white people now and black people now and white people are hence superior and in charge. And by the way, if you didn’t figure this out, and I remember reading this from the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, there was a two pronged goal here when it came to classism, which by the way, classism is the mother of racism because racism was born from economic conditions, economic incentives.

So the classism, those that are rich versus those that are poor, it was very convenient and very useful to now create this white versus black bigotry amongst the poor population, divide and conquer. What better way to keep stability in the society by making the poor folks at that stage fight amongst themselves for jobs and so on, as opposed to looking to the true culprits, which are the owners of the country, which is the business establishment and the structure they perpetuate, of course. It also subdued the poor white community, keeping them distracted from the power system. So they had someone to pick on the field superior to. They blamed all the problems of the world in their society on the black community. And you know what? That’s interesting that there seems to be a presidential figure today that kinda does the same thing, am I right? But that’s for another conversation.

So I hope this is becoming more clear, we’ve talked about this. Within this historical context, within the economic foundation of this historical context, we then see the legal and cultural phenomenons emerge. So now let’s hone in on the legal specifically. One historical tidbit a lot of people aren’t familiar with I find, is the phenomenon of convict leasing. After slavery was abolished, white legal systems in the South decided they were going to create bogus laws and they were going to arrest former slaves and put them back to work through prison labor.

Basically, convicts were leased out to capitalist institutions once again to be abused for their labor for free. Many of even speculated that this was worse for the health of the slave, because at least if you were an abject slave – property of an owner, they had to take care of you. Leased convicts on the other hand, had no value, they were not an investment. They were just these tools taken from the prison and they could be literally worked to death, as they were, in mines and so on and the owners would just throw them in a shallow grave and go back to the Sheriff’s office and to the prison and get yet more to be worked to death.

One final note on this terrible phenomenon is the former slave owners were very much a part of this project, so to speak, and they would offer bonds to some of these newly arrested former slaves, to pay their bonds in exchange for labor once again. So these poor ex slaves would sign contracts to get out of their jail sentence, yet to be put back on the plantation with dubious terms to basically be abject slaves yet again. This happened, this is called cost efficiency, this is called market incentive, this is called capitalism.

Now that aside, what you have when you combine the legal and the historical is a longterm trajectory, where after years and years of legal oppression, segregation, red lining, and so on, pushed the black community into poor regions with no investment, low socioeconomic status, poverty and basically a subculture with very limited means. And as has been clinically proven through sociological study, empirically so, if you are limited in your means and you have to feed yourself and your family, you will resort to crime. And that creates cultures and then eventually by the eighties, you have gang lands and these inner cities in the black community and so on. When I was growing up in the eighties, I remember watching the show cops, it was just full of brown and black people in prisons, and being arrested and thrown to the ground. My image as a child in fact, was the black male being the enemy of society.

And this now leads us to the cultural aspect. We’re surprised given everything that we’ve just talked about, historically, the concentration of black people with no jobs deviating into whatever they can do to survive, prostitution, robbery, drugs. And we’re surprised when a white cop, who probably has a bunch of black friends, gets involved in a tense situation and just can’t help but impulsively kill somebody. Or we’re surprised that racial profiling occurs on a daily basis so cops can meet their quotas. It’s not because they consciously think, “I’m going to go after black people.” It’s because it’s been so ingrained that the black community is a hub of crime and violence because of the deprivation for so long, that they don’t know how to think otherwise. It’s what they’ve experienced, that’s what they’ve learned and they act upon that pathologically so.

So in many ways what’s happened is you have a legal system that’s morphed from direct racial oppression to indirect, by targeting the outcomes of historical and present socioeconomic inequality and deprivation rather than a group directly, in the sense of direct racism. And then you add in the news media, compounding this image of the criminal and black community, especially in the ’80s and ’90s with the crack epidemic and the war on drugs. And suddenly families watching TV in their home get this repeated image of the evil black male, particularly, but also disparaging views of the entire black society. So I hope this is beginning to sink in.

Today if you want to conquer this problem, there’s three things that need to be done. First, you definitely have to have cops and people at large educated on this history. If they become conscious of the phenomenon, they can start to unravel their own bias, pathological bias, in most cases subconscious bias. Two, as mentioned before but it’s important to reiterate, low socioeconomic status is what keeps all of this alive. If you can alleviate poverty and close the gap of socioeconomic inequality. Forget about the myth of equal opportunity, there’s no such thing as equal opportunity. You have to have equality built into the system and stop playing this nonsensical game that some people just deserve more than others, it’s amoral and it’s illogical, and it’s destructive. And three, building upon that, if you end poverty and socioeconomic inequality and you provide people what they need to survive, giving them a foundation to not worry about their livelihood, which we could absolutely do, you’re not even going to see crime as much.

White collar crime aside, which is a different animal, deprivation based crime is actually quite predictable. It’s been studied sociologically for years as linked to deprivation and the cultures generated from deprivation, keep that in mind. Gangs are not just gangs because they have no morals and they just want to shoot each other, they are groups that have evolved because of lack of means. For example, here in Los Angeles, there’s an old gang called the Crips and it stands for community resources for independent people. And it was born out of the Black Panther Party years ago, and originally was about internal security amongst the group because there was such a lack of security and lack of means. So back to my point, if you would like to see structurally the end to police brutality disproportionately affecting the black community, and the country or world at large, eliminate socioeconomic inequality and poverty and you’re going to see the vast majority of crime disappear, blue collar crime mind you, disappear almost overnight.

Now, as you can tell, this is a vast subject. I cover a lot of this in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, and as I said, you can expect a Medium article soon.

So let’s move on, COVID-19. I think I got a thousand emails the first few weeks when this started to really come to the surface. Most of which were asking about the economic ramifications, what to learn from this, how it can be used as a stepping stone to transition out of this kind of economy. And I’m not particularly sure what the answer is to that question, other than the fact that this kind of phenomenon has pulled back the veil of the mechanics of market economics, showing just how dysfunctional and incompatible it really is. Market economics is a system, a dynamic network, and all systems have certain properties that will give them quality to decide whether they are viable to some degree or not viable to some degree, with viability measured by how well the system adapts to new circumstances.

And the key word here is called requisite variety, put forward by a man named Ross Ashby, a cybernetician systems engineer. All requisite variety really means is that the system can account for whatever’s thrown at it. It has enough variability to maintain its autonomy and functionality and efficiency under different circumstances. And as a general rule, the more viable a system is, the less regulation it needs. More regulation means more low quality. Truly viable systems regulate themselves. And it’s interesting because the laissez-faire libertarian free market view, the extreme view that you can just get rid of any kind of government and management and let the competitive market system flail away into the wind assumes that the system can operate independently and solve problems it creates as it goes, which of course it can not. The negative externalities that would be created by a pure free market would ravage the entire planet rapidly and you see the evidence of this simply right now. Even with all the attempts to regulate this system, the power of the incentive and the structure still has humanity on the edge of its own demise.

And when it comes to COVID-19, I don’t think you could have picked a better interference, even though it’s wholly predictable, even though humanity has known this is going to happen, states have been preparing for it. But this particular event destroys the idea that the market economy has enough requisite variety; that it is adaptable enough to be considered a viable or working or functional or high integrity system. It simply is not a high integrity system. So the states are hemorrhaging money out of thin air, struggling desperately to manage this terrible system, hoping that the infinite growth cyclical consumption paradigm will return. And within this conflict, I hope everyone’s paying attention because there’s a great deal to learn.

One particular aspect that I find very revealing is that even with a 30% drop in GDP in the United States, the functionality of society is still fine. The necessities of life are still there. The resources and industries are still there. We saw a dramatic reduction in pollution, which in the wake of runaway climate change should make us stop and pause. Maybe we can live differently. Maybe it’s more intelligent to live minimalistically, but of course, this kind of economic model won’t tolerate that, it can’t function that way. So this all begs the question, what kind of economy could adapt to this kind of problem? Or put it in technical terms, what kind of economy would have requisite variety to absorb and account for the new features of the social condition? Well, I think everyone knows what I’m going to say here. It wouldn’t be a market economy.

It would not be an economy where labor is linked to income. It would not be a growth economy, which of course is insane anyway, nothing in nature does that. Everything in an ecosystem, everything that achieves homeostatic balance is steady state and it wavers within that steady state. So I think you get the point here, all the suffering and chaos and imbalance, the unemployment, the crime that has risen in multiple cities because of this, the social unrest, which has been going on relentlessly here in the States specifically, but still all around the world, this is not the result of COVID-19. COVID-19 is a natural disaster that humanity should be smart enough to expect periodically. This is a result of an economic system that sucks.

And one final note on this subject. Some people are familiar with MMT and this idea that government can just go spend as much money as it wants and have no repercussions. This is a radical view, by the way, this is not traditional economic theory. I’m not really a fan of MMT. I plan to do a podcast on it to explain why, but there is an important realization in this observation, that’s behind the theory. And that is the fact that states, big power states, can produce infinite amounts of money. And you look at the trillions of dollars with not only the bailouts prior, but this crisis, and you have to step back and say, “If they could do that, then why is that guy over there sleeping on the street?”

The whole myth that there’s no money for school and education, there’s no money to help the poor and homeless, there’s no money for social programs, it’s all a lie, literally. There’s plenty of money because money is fake. And the only phrase you should learn with respect to that fact is class war. The rich know they’re rich and they don’t want the poor to be rich and whether conscious or not, or whether by virtue of terrible traditional ideas that are bogus, such as trickle down economics or the whole value system of working for a living or you get what you earn… MLK said it best, we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism free market for the poor, and that my friends should enrage you.

And so to conclude this podcast, let’s now talk about activism. I have made myself pretty clear, I think, over the years with respect to the delusion that the kind of traditional activism that’s been with us for so long is going to be able to measure up against what the system has become over these last few decades, since the Reagan neoliberal revolution, so to speak. Because what this did was magnify the already inherent characteristics of the capitalist economy and the capitalist society, ultimately. Whereby what used to work in the past in terms of public persuasion, no longer works because the power of money, the power of business, the corporate structure that owns governments around the world to various degrees is simply too strong now to care about the sign you’re waving in the street protest.

Years ago, as a well-read but naive soul, I came into this world of social theory, economics and activism with the general view that you can educate people, logic will prevail and you can galvanize community, and you can have a peaceful democratic revolution on the local and ultimately global scale. Part of this theory is that the periodic crises inherent to this kind of social architecture, as we’ve just seen with COVID-19, will educate people, will motivate people, incentivize them to see the truth and hence realize the need for something new.

But there are two fundamental problems here. First, society will never fully collapse, it will just re-acclimate to the next level of degradation, this is what we’ve seen historically. We will continue to normalize more destruction and poverty, climate destabilization, and so on. It will become normal for the refugees on the outskirts of countries to sit in effectively camps waiting to be let in because their areas are too dry or too flooded due to climate change, just as it’s become normal for me to walk down the street in Los Angeles and see the sea of homeless encampments, what one arrogant radio host called ,euphemistically, “curbside communities.” That coupled with the fact that when it comes to mass mobilization, the kind of massive group galvanization required to really push the system over is fought by our most fundamental psychology.

As I state in my new film, InterReflections, we are social beings first and intellectual beings second. Because the structure of the current society is so reputation driven, career driven based in scarcity, hence fear-driven, people are far more prone to conform to their short term interests than they are longterm, while also more prone to conform to the local group identity. I really believe when you look at the nature and behavior of political parties, what they really exemplify is mass group hypnosis. They identify far more with their group than any logic behind the group or any broader rationalization. Polarization is killing us and it’s a fundamental psychological flaw as far as I’m concerned. Can you break out of it? Yeah. It would take a lot of introspection, a lot of education. I’m not saying anything is impossible, but it’s improbable that you’re going to see mass galvanization on this planet, given everything is moving in the wrong direction at this time.

So what does that leave us with? Well, first, humanity is going to have to accept the punishment for what it’s done to a fair degree. In other words, the climate destabilization and general pollution crisis, it’s going unbated. In fact, I’m sure you’ve noticed that under the COVID-19 hood, all environmental protections in the United States, virtually all, and many Western societies included, longing for the economic growth have been removed or reduced. And because that feature (economic growth) is so integral to this kind of economy, you can’t really expect this society to be overthrown fast enough to make a dent in the ecological crisis in this critical stage.

The only solution right now is the hope that engineers will come together and try to problem solve this with a direct technological solution. For example, as has already been talked about, building technology that can actually pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. As far as I’m concerned, as sad as it is, that’s the best you can hope for, because the kind of revolution required to overthrow the economic system in time before the really bad detriments unfold is just not in the cards and I think you can understand why.

Couple that patchwork technology with the hope that we finally make it over to some kind of renewable energy infrastructure, then you might get some balance resumed. All of this is to say that the kind of revolution required to tackle that structural issue is way distant. That stated, and coming back to the idea of a new activist framework. My conclusion at this point is you need to get people off the grid in a very deep way, where your participation in this society is not in the traditional commons, it’s not through the corporate establishment, it’s not utilizing the given system, rather a new society is created, a parallel internal society is created.

People have always talked about trying to go get land or influence a leader, but you know what? With the advancement of technology, we can do some pretty miraculous things within the current architecture. And the potential for this, to not only help people that are currently suffering, but also set a brand new example that people can see an action, to see the values and practices, to see the technological integration, to see the efficiency, I think it would be very effective if done properly.

So I apologize to be vague on the issue for now, but it’s a very detailed subject that you’re going to hear a whole lot more about. I appreciate everybody listening. And program note, there is a Reddit now connected to the main podcast site, which is revolutionnow.live. And I’m sure it’s going to be in the description of this podcast and then you can see the subreddit linked there in the menu. If you’d like to contribute, ask questions, if you want me to talk to somebody or address a certain issue, just put it up there. All right folks, really appreciate it. Everybody stay safe out there. Take care.