Episode 14
TRANSCRIPT
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Revolution Now! Episode 14, December 30th, 2020. My name is Peter Joseph, and the main subject today is going to be termed The Structural Limits of In-System Activism. This has been quickly touched upon before, but today I hope to provide a more rounded explanation, as it really gets to the heart of the structuralist reasoning that defines the worldview and train of thought this podcast is about.
The resounding conclusion of this reasoning from a sociological and systems and science perspective, is that the kind of focus and consequential means common today to the activist community are simply too myopic to be effective in any real way in the long term. What may have worked well in the past does not necessarily mean it will work in the future, because social conditions change.
But before we jump into that, as a quick aside, this kind of subject matter is going to be part of a live event I'm planning in March called On the Future of Civilization. It will be held in Los Angeles. I'm talking to some venues right now, but it's all very vague, given the COVID-19 crisis and the legal limitations. At a minimum, I plan to do a theatrical presentation anyway, and if people can attend, that's great. And if not, it will just end up as a live stream, which is fine.
I'll make more announcements on this podcast and through social media, and of course, on my website, peterjoseph.info. In fact, if you want to join that mailing list, that would be an easy way to do it. The event will be free in whatever regard, whether it's streaming or live, and supported by my Patreon program, if anyone wishes to donate to these efforts.
Now, before I jump into this, I want to get a quick overview of the evolution of activism, as I think there's some interesting information in the trajectory that many people don't seem to pick up on, especially those that are ideologically opposed to anything other than market economics or capitalism, for whatever reason, which, as I hope to make clear in this, I find completely inconsistent and in total contradiction with the entire evolution of activism on almost every level, meaning what the focus is.
We jump back to the neolithic revolution, the dawn of agriculture, which created what I've refer to in my writings as the root socioeconomic orientation of the very society we have today, based around property, labor specialization, consequential economic hierarchy, and all the geographical and procedural determinism, that unfolded as a predictable chain reaction when we transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies, roaming and foraging existing in a fundamentally egalitarian condition, to settled agrarian societies.
The world we experience today is still in that paradigm, starting 12,000 years ago. We might have lots of fancy technology today, the advancements of science, we certainly have seen vast social change in many ways too, but the way our society operates is still based around root socioeconomic orientation. Again, this is detailed greatly in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, and I've talked about it before in other podcasts.
People today are still trading with each other. People are still specialized and they're focused, necessarily so, because of the competitive labor system. And obviously, we have great inequality and socioeconomic hierarchy and the ravages that come along with all of that.
Many people still have a very confused sense of history, especially regarding things like poverty. Poverty is a modern concept. You might think that people before the neolithic revolution existed in some kind of extreme poverty, but that's actually not the case. Poverty is a relationship. Obviously, if you don't get your needs met, and you're not meeting basic nutrition, and you're getting diseased and sick, you have no water and so on, that's a very particular kind of deficiency. That is a subsection of poverty. The poverty itself is really a relationship within the bounds of inequality.
More succinctly, you have absolute poverty, basic nutrition not being met, and then you have relative poverty, which is the majority. And relative poverty did not exist before the neolithic revolution. I know that's very foreign for people to think about because of the lack of technology and the sustenance-based lifestyle. But, actually, that was a form of affluence as recorded by hunter-gatherer researchers in the 20th century, people's needs are met and they engage family and social life for fun. If anyone wants to learn more about that, you can read The Original Affluent Society by Marshall Sahlins. And as an aside, it's something that people really should take to heart.
The way we live is not sustainable on multiple levels, and getting back to the root of simplicity and appreciating the social life and things that have true meaning, not a materialistic property in society, is going to be the dominant value system of the future if we expect to have one. Now please understand, I'm not trying to glamorize the period before the neolithic revolution. Change is always going to happen one way or another, it's just to show the fact that things were actually quite different. And it wasn't until the dawn of agriculture and the evolution of market economics from that, moving through all of these complex phases that are all overlapped and interrelated, that we got to where we are today.
Feudalism for example, feudalism to many might be antithetical to capitalism based on people's non-structural myopic definitions, but when you look at the characteristics, they're actually quite consistent from an economic perspective. You have an ownership class of monarchs, down to a merchant kind of middle-class, to a working peasantry. Capitalism today doesn't have some strict cast system per se, as was the case in feudalism, and you use profit, it generates a little bit more freedom by comparison. Labor exploitation isn't as overt, now it's more systemic. People can choose their slave owners, as opposed to being bonded by them, and so on and so on. I'm not going to belabor that comparison.
But the root socioeconomic orientation still prevails. If I remember correctly, Marx did a very cogent analysis of the two systems finding great overlap, which to me just shows the evolution. As with anything, everything comes from something, right? Just like mainstream religion, as I've talked about in the past. On the surface, it could appear novel, and yet under the surface, you see that all religions have a linear history and going back to paganism and beyond, and they all share similar events, and overlaps, and concepts, and names and on, and on, and on. The same for capitalism, which unfortunately many people today myopically think somehow just evolved after mercantilism, codified by the writings of Adam Smith.
In truth once again, the starting point is the neolithic revolution. You can't understand the features of capitalism without going back to that point. Obviously to split hairs here, the agricultural revolution did not come out of nowhere either, but it marked a definitive shift in the way society organized itself economically.
Now moving on, and likewise, in this development we see very consistent characteristics socially, such as the advent of slave labor, hence human exploitation. By whatever excuse, whether you're dealing with conquered peoples used as slaves in ancient Egypt, the African slave trade centuries ago, or today's modern human trafficking and debt bonded slaves, as an aside please remember, it's shocking to realize that even though our population has clearly grown, there are still more slaves in the world today, by definition, than any time in human history. We see this pattern very clearly of human exploitation. And in parallel to that, you then have the characteristic of group dominance, dominance which comes in many flavors, for example, patriarchy, which can be observed of course going back thousands of years.
Group dominance is extremely consistent due to the hierarchical nature of the root socioeconomic orientation once again. It embraces all of the sexist, xenophobic, racist ,group versus group phenomenon, where one set of people, whether based on skin color, or gender, or nationality, or religion, feel afraid of or superior to another group. They might want to have no association with them, they might think they shouldn't even exist. Or, perhaps they want to maintain a power over them and keep them subordinated as inferiors and so on. And in this interplay between human exploitation and group dominance, we see class war as a connection point, so to speak. While someone may not be racist or sexist or xenophobic, they may feel some level of superiority because of their wealth and social status as a consequence. I know that term class war's a bit arcane, but I still think it embraces the idea quite well.
If you have a society based on competitive economic warfare, as has been the case, since the neolithic revolution, you are naturally going to have power division that eventually molds into bigotries, as I'm also going to talk about a little later in the podcast when it comes to systemic racism, in the context of this in-system out-system activist framework.
Overall, generally speaking, classism should be seen this economic foundation of division and antagonism as the mother, the parent of racism, xenophobia, and sexism, to a large degree. That stated, if you really think about it historically, what has been the most conflict riddled environment so to speak, that we have seen on this planet? It's been around labor, the ownership class versus the working class. The battle over labor is likely the most notable sociological arena of conflict there has ever been. Now, I'm not going to bother extending this into global warfare, but that also is a class war problem. Generally speaking, when you dig deep, all wars are basically class wars, and there is a micro and macro relationship.
But we're not going to concern ourselves with the class hierarchy on the global level, let's think about it in domestic micro terms. If you are aware of the history of unions and what life was like before unions with non-existent child labor laws, people working 20 hour-a-day shifts, such as with the longshoreman, pre-industrial and early industrial capitalism was an extremely brutal environment. Some of the most tense stories in history have been around this classwork conflict between owners and workers, propagandized of course as well, in the United States. The red scare, this fear of communism in the mid 20th century, was used against union workers, people trying to organize in order to shut them down in favor of the ownership class, in favor of the elitist power class, people simply wanting to get more decent wages, and conditions, and have time for their families and so on. And needless to say, we still contend with this to this day.
It always blows my mind even to this day, when I look at rich societies and you still have an underclass of people that are horribly underpaid, treated like garbage, they can't support themselves all because of this incentive structure. You can't have a system where human labor becomes a commodity to be exploited on the part of another for profit, and expect those exploiters, those profit seeking organizations, corporations, to appreciate or want any kind of balance, it's antithetical to the incentive, obviously. But, returning to my point here, things have improved, and this has been the general trend. Class war as the intersecting link between human exploitation and group dominance, has had an evolution, and that evolution has been this constant attempt to erode to create more equal circumstances. More equal circumstances for women eventually given the right to vote, which didn't actually happen that long ago, de-stigmatization where women can now work and do the same acts as men can do, which was not always the case.
We know pay scales, obviously for women are still bigoted, but the improvement is there. And obviously across the world and theocratic societies, such as Saudi Arabia, they're very much in a primitive place when it comes to progressive rights for women. But the same goes for race relations. A world once saturated in group versus group antagonism, has alleviated to a strong degree with changes to legal statutes that no longer support any kind of caste structure and so on. So we see the trajectory of these kinds of changes. And today, of course, you have a robust gesture in the activist community that wants to see what is best described as an egalitarian ethos. No one is subservient to anyone else, people have equal political rights, and to a certain degree people have equal economic rights. We all know the phrase equal opportunity employer, I've even heard the phrase equal opportunity economics as some strange perversion that ignores the fundamental structure of capitalism, which I'll talk about in a second.
We also see a general democratization of access because of the fruits of technology. This is more of a side effect, but it still has a sociological bearing, which is positive. And while it serves as more or less lip service, organizations that are influential, like the United Nations, put forward a bill of rights for all of humankind, an attempt in gesture to project any level of exclusion and bigotry, and even giving credence to certain things like fundamentals of existence, like having access to clean water, stuff like that.
And to frame this point finally, we see a general evolution of democracy, of people having the right to not be controlled by somebody else, ideally. And yet, in stark contradiction to all of these values and principles, everyone stops short when we talk about economic equality, about economic democracy, about not tolerating totalitarian business systems, which is precisely what they are, top-down control subservience from the bottom up. People stop short when trying to figure out how to counter the vast harmful inequities and structural violence. Why? Because they can't conceive of anything that isn't capitalism or the market economy, and it's taboo to enter into that territory, as we all know.
From an activist perspective, we have hit a brick wall. You are not going to see broad social justice improvement in this kind of social structure, failing to continue the idealized march towards a more socially just and humane society. The structure will not allow it, because the basis of market economics is abstracted scarcity and systemic human exploitation, which leads to elitism, and hence, group dominance on many levels, entrenched in class war - the evolution of social justice is going to stop. And as the systemic crises that affect our environment particularly, continue to grow, that social justice progress will in fact reverse in time.
This is where we are today. And rather than see this trend and think about it from a system science perspective, we live in this terrible ideological culture war, and people have been conditioned to think that because of human nature, or some unfounded view of environmental scarcity, or some historically propagandized fear of oppression associated with anything that isn't capitalism or markets, we can't possibly provide people with the necessity of life and the things that they need, instead, they have to battle it out. Oh, there would be no innovation if we didn't have this grand strata of people that are struggling to survive, forcing them to try and sell anything they can, including themselves, to others in order to make money and survive.
Truth is, every element of our social evolution points to breaking this wall down and destroying the structure of the market economy, and getting people the necessities of life directly without needing to battle it out in the market structure. The structure simply refuses to allow a greater evolution of human equality and social justice. And it is today the focal system source of the vast majority of the accelerating problems in the world. If it remains, I have no doubt, it will be at the root of the destruction of civilization as we know it, if we haven't already passed that point of no return. I am available for children's parties by the way.
Okay, we're moving on now. So for the second half of this podcast, we're going to get into this in-system out-system framework.
What is in-system activism? In short, in-system activism is most everything we commonly see today. This mainstream established, political, legal and to a degree, economic focused, small degree - incorporated devices such as voting, writing to your congress person, litigation and lobbying by NGOs, grass roots movements like Black Lives Matter, folks just protesting, starting non-profits. You have anti-war activism, you have policy proposals that float around like the green new deal, you also have personal behavioral changes like voting with your dollar, or joining zero waste movements.
You have boycotting of companies that you don't like for whatever reason. You also have financial activism, so to speak, with people, say, demanding we return to a gold standard to replace fiat, or perhaps use cryptocurrency instead in order to combat power issues or inflation. You have broad human rights activism, such as people trying to stop the modern slavery epidemic that I talked about earlier. And then you have inequality activism, which tends to demand more wealth redistribution through taxation, or perhaps the incorporation of UBI. You also of course have activism against abstractions, such as racism, individual, institutional or systemic.
In the United States there's a great deal of activism against police brutality in a similar context. And then of course, you have environmental activism, animal rights activism, fighting corporations and seeking more regulation to stop whatever abuse. It goes on, and on, and on, and on. Within this, you also have education-based activism as a medium of all kinds. People writing books about the way the world should be. Obviously, education is important on all levels, but it also culminates in what I've called before, the activist industrial complex. People that regardless of their intent, make a career out of complaining and suggesting in-system solutions through their media productions. The outcome being basically profiting off of the very problems they profess to want to change, using the very economic system that is the problem unknowingly.
And my point in this mild tangent is, there is nothing more psychologically powerful than being materially rewarded for your actions, through income or profit, as the brain experiences the reward, and by natural force wants to believe that the system that created that personal reward, has to be a positive thing. After all, being successful at the economic game is not easy, so those that do generate disproportional financial success, are obviously going to be less inclined on average to question the validity of that success. They blinker out the structural problems of the system, because they're being supported by it.
If an activist creates a best-selling book on say, the ecological crisis, makes a million dollars, there's a good chance that writer would be far less inclined to see the entire economic system as the root of the ecological crisis itself, and will move towards other policy-based things that are in-system, because that is the association that has a positive cognitive effect. In fact, it is one of the most fundamental psychological and sociological problems we face as we endure the market system. Successful people, influential people in the activist industrial complex, become rewarded and will by nature in most cases, there are exceptions, be willing to support the system that rewards them, contradicting the root logic of many of their arguments through truncation. Truncation meaning, the train of thought stops. They're not willing to go to the next stage of the train of thought to understand the root of the problem.
In fact, when you think about it, everyone that is rewarded by this system, that gains financial success which often relates to status success and fame and influence, is going to most likely uphold this system. And that is a terribly toxic circumstance, considering that the people you see on television, the most influential people, are the ones that most people listen to and have their biased confirmed by, which makes it that much harder. You show me a wealthy person that is opposed to the capitalist system, and I'll show you a grand anomaly.
Now, coming back to this haphazard list I cobbled together about in-system activism, you'll note that I didn't say anything about pro-life or pro-choice activism, or moral activism say, against the death penalty. I didn't list anything related to LGBTQ struggles, or gender equality struggles, even though female oppression has a deep economic component, albeit rather abstractly. The need to times up movement phenomenon dealing with powerful men like Harvey Weinstein, embrace a range of sickness, but think about the methods that were used in these cases. They used the environment of business to generate non-disclosure agreements while young women trying to get a job and make it, are manipulated in their vulnerability by their economic and fame ambitions.
Another one that's similar, has to do with men as the breadwinner historically in history, and women being viewed of course as property. Men could be horribly abusive to women, because long ago women had no other means to survive, and they had no rights of course, but economic dependency was huge. But all that kind of stuff exists in a middle ground when it comes to the structuralist oriented activism I speak about. However, I do have little doubt that you would see great improvement in LGBTQ and gender equality, if we saw more economic equalization, because there have been numerous studies done that relate hate crimes and such violence to uncertain economic conditions. Insecurity. It's a more distant part of the general instability created by socioeconomic inequality.
But coming back to my framework here, this kind of stuff is diffused, deeply entrenched in culture simultaneously, which means it isn't the kind of thing I put forward when I talk about a structuralist in-system versus out-system argument. And let's use the example of racism to compare these two perspectives.
Most people when they think of racism, tend not to associate it with economics. But when you take an empirical examination of the phenomenon, and then start tracing history, you discover that there's a profound economic foundation. Racism in most people's mind, is perceived as a cultural issue, and sometimes a biological issue in some arguments. But when you realize that racism has its roots empirically in economic fear, and not just immediate fear but historical fear that has a sociological effect, coupled with economic utility such as in the United States and the use of slavery centuries ago, along with some other systemic outcomes such as the legal decree of race as a response, an artificial construct to continue oppression of African Americans during the slavery and post slavery periods, working to divide poor whites from poor blacks and so on, I wrote an article about all of this if anyone wants to read it, you realize that racism is actually a system level problem rooted in the history of market economics and its dynamics.
Of course, no-one would think that running into a typical racist on the street, because the cultural development from these historical and sociological factors, have taken on a life of their own, which is what makes it so insidious.
So returning to our vocabulary, in this framework of in-system versus out-system activism, given this example of racism, we can then consider the limitations of in-system activism in this regard. The in-system perspective of course involves people protesting, getting into conflicts and berating racist people like white supremacists, as we saw recently with the confrontation between the Proud Boys and Black Lives Matter a number of months ago. One can deal with legislation to force more equality in certain areas of the society, such as equal opportunity housing, or affirmative action. The NAACP can engage lawsuits to try and help people, perhaps victims of mass incarceration, or other side effects of what has been a deeply bigoted socioeconomic outcome.
Systemic racism is the reason you have a disproportional number of blacks versus whites in the prison system in America, not to mention the disproportional punitiveness. I recommend the book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander if any of this is new to you. And these are just a few examples that people are familiar with when dealing with the ongoing existence of hate groups, hate crime and systemic, institutional; individual racism. In-system activism here.
Now, what is the perspective of out-system activism? Again, out-system activism is defined by recognizing that the social structure is the fundamental problem of our social system, and our social system of course, is defined by the economic system. Out-system activism recognizes that the systemic unfolding related to the economy, is so severe, is so powerful and overwhelming, that in-system activism can't compete. You can't use the traditional forms if you expect to see relevant change, and hence, you need to take an out-system approach, which means you need to change the social structure, or facets of it, in order to allow for some alleviation of a given problem.
So in the context of racism once again, from a system's science view, as per much sociological research, the only thing that's going to really stop racism or slow it significantly in the world, is the generation of economic equality. Something market capitalism has an extremely difficult time with, if you haven't noticed. You remove the economic tension of society, and you will see the group versus group bigotry subside, if not disappear in many cases. It would take likely a few generations for the remaining bigotry to subside, but it would be the most effective longterm approach. The more unequal a society, the more racial tension you can expect. The more countries compete with each other for economic resources, the more xenophobia and bigotry will prevail.
I grew up in the south of the U.S., and I remember someone telling me about how in West Virginia where they lived, there was deep bigotry between the north and south in West Virginia. Very odd if you think about it. And all that changed of course, when NAFTA came along, and suddenly this interrelational hatred between people because of job opportunities, because of economic opportunities, was transformed to hatred against Latinos and people from the global south, that were coming to West Virginia to take jobs. You see the same historical interplay in Italy between the north and the south, if you studied that history, all economically rooted. It's certainly hard for people to see this, because we only tend to see the superficial effects of racism. People don't realize that you have generations of snowballing, that starts in the economics sphere and then merges into whole new levels of neurotic hatred over time, where people don't even understand why they don't like one group of people.
So I hope this is making sense. Rest assured as with many negative consequences on the horizon, if we increase economic insecurity in society as we're doing now, we are going to see an increase in racism and bigotry of all kinds over time.
Now, before I close this episode out, let me say generally that activism has three basic layers, the interest, the focus, and the tools. You first have the interest to see something change, then you have a focus, meaning, narrowing down of what will assist that interest, and then you have the tools of that focus, the actually actions. Let's consider now an in-system approach to environmentalism. The interest may be to reduce pollution, the focus may be working to stop the oil industry, while the tools may include a PR campaign, protests, political and legal actions, or perhaps fundraising for investment in renewables.
Now, from an out-system view, the interest of course remains the same, however the focus would not be on a corporation or a sector, it would be on the mechanisms that allow that corporation or sector to exist and operate. And the tools, would be activist actions that work to erode those mechanisms, building entirely new mechanisms. If we truly wish to achieve habitat sustainability, we have to focus on the fact that our economy is based on cyclical consumption to power jobs through demand in order to get purchasing power into people's wallets, so that they can spend back into the system infinitely, and the more the better as we all know, in the growth ethic.
So how do you move against that? What do you replace it with? And by the way, given this example of the oil industry, remember, power consolidation and the interest not to change, not to lose market share, is also an output of this kind of mechanism, one of the more dangerous features of capitalism, because it's deeply inhibiting. Nobody wants to make themselves obsolete. So out-system activism in effect, is anything that directly contradicts the most fundamental structural nature of the economic system, the fundamental mechanisms. It contradicts aspects of the system that if those aspects were changed or removed, that system ceases to exist by its own definition in totality. And the key word here as I've said before, is de-marketization coupled with tangible development that substitutes the market mechanisms with something that does not have the structural flaw, needless to say.
So I'm going to leave it at that for now, leave you hanging, but I will talk to everyone soon. And I hope people can ponder this. I'm not an island here, and that's why the Reddit is there. And I've enjoyed reading the comments as well, and I'll talk to everyone soon. Be safe out there.