Revolution?
2015 February 11
I don’t agree with all of this, but I find it hard to disagree with much of it.
Enjoy:
h/t: Vinay Gupta
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30 Responses
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a youtube video is just so much more by the word. wake me when it’s by the deed.
People are too invested in things as they are now. They post things on Facebook and sometimes go to protests because it somehow assuages their guilt for benefiting from the system.
Noël Coward, ” Why Must the Show Go On?”
“Because you’re not giving us much fun.
This laugh, clown, laugh routine’s been overdone.”
A naive belief in the salvific power of violence never did anyone any good; it’s especially dangerous when coupled with a folksy appeal to unity and pretty pictures of trees and an abstract centrist decoupling from real interests. I can agree with the first premise– by all means do something, stop complaining! –but not with anything that follows. It’s a limited imagination that conceives of violence as the alternative to political impotence.
This is evil stuff. I fear we will see a lot more of it.
I like it too, Ian.
Not sure what there is to disagree with here, but calling for revolution is not the problem,
I see where publicly calling for these corporate and business leaders to be brought to justice could be seen as a problem, but the police now kill so many innocent people that my care factor is becoming zero.
Cheers to all
I agree with Stuart. This is a disturbing call.
There are things you can do other than violent things. In this regard I agree with the permaculture community: don’t waste time pulling down the old system, rather start building the new.
We don’t need violence to end this system, it is unsustainable on a number of counts, and it is only a matter of time before it collapses without anyone having to do anything. A violent end, even if it shortens the natural term of the system, is likely to be just as destructive, if not more. Also, the leaders of violent revolutions are violent people, and perhaps a worse regime would come in. The current system, certainly borne out of violence has at least evolved to one that no longer depends on it in a raw form for its own perpetuation, any new system born out of violence would depend on raw violence to maintain itself, at least initially. Whereas a system that emerges through co-operative endevours that seeks to create an alternative would be far more pleasant (if successful).
Look to the words of Bill Mollison in this regard (father of permaculture) “the most revolutionary thing you can do is to grow food” (or something to that effect). Growing food locally frees you from the corporate system, by providing your most basic essential needs.
That is my suggestion for any aspiring revolutionaries. Grow food where-ever you can, or just gain the skills on a small scale (home or community garden) or run a seed bank, or teach preserving techniques – do anything you can to contribute to this ‘new’economy. But do not waste time, and perhaps your life, fighting the old system. It is already a ‘walking dead’ entity. Your energies can be better directed.
The people who the revolution are the right.
A Walt with a great radio voice is still a Walt.
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then we’ll begin.
Once upon a time there was a cruel but clever king. He was cruel, he was clever, he was wise, he was wary and he was very very rapacious. The people groaned under the weight of the taxes he imposed and to make matters worse all the things they needed to live – such as food or salt, could only be bought from merchants who had paid the king huge amounts of money for a monopoly on the supply of that particular product. He was a very wealthy man in fact he was wealthier than everybody else on the planet – including all the other kings. Every year he spent vast amounts of money on weapons, on soldiers, on informers, on police, on instruments for torture, on portable mass gallows, and because he was a forward looking and progressive monarch he paid scholars and engineers and inventors vast sums of money every years to encourage them to devise ever more ingenious ways of killing other people.
It came about one day that he was sitting in his chamber teaching his son and heir how to read the exchequer’s accounts. The prince was flabberghasted at how much money the king had and even more flabberghasted that despite being the wealthiest man on the planet and notwithstanding his vast revenues that the cost of all that security and all that ingenuity meant that his father never had any money to spare. “Surely father” he said “surely if you spent just a little less on defense and security and weapons research you could afford all these other things that you say the kingdom needs”.
The King gazed at his son in horror, “idiot boy”, he growled “there’s a revolution coming, and when it comes I’m going to be ready.
mfi
The call to revolution deserves it’s own response, maybe. Actually it’s hard to know just what part of this you actually do agree with Ian. The aesthetic is simply bizarre paired with the message whatever you think of the text. “Neo-modern” architecture and cool nature calling up the passions to revolution in a blase tone of voice? I think not. “The revolution will not be televised” is a tone I can take much more seriously than this artsy-fartsy nonsense.
DavidW – the system is already walking dead? No way, except for if it does indeed bring about cataclysmic climate change on a scale large enough to seriously damage the human species, enough to cause chaos heavy enough to collapse state control.
As for “the revolution”, the state serves the .01 percent *very* well, thank you, and the masses seem to be farther from clueful than ever. Does anybody believe any part of Marx’s theories of revolution now? If not Marxism, then what is your (anybody, please) theory of how we could possibly get from here to revolution? The real endpoint of Yippieism was proven in Chicago in 1968 if not again in the USA starting in Seattle, on up to Occupy almost everywhere. The cops have heavy weapons now, the DAs own the courts and the judges aren’t opposed to total lockdown style discipline if it comes to that, and the corrections industry is quite up to the task of housing another few percent of the population on demand.
Nobody is going to crush the modern state from within. It can and will get much much repressive if it needs to (think “1984”), but it doesn’t even have to in the least. It’s already got the 99% by the hearts and minds and balls. IMHO and I sure don’t like it, but there is zero ideological base on the left for any serious ‘state-denting’ level action anywhere I look in US/UK/Oz/Asia and almost nothing in Europe.
At the age of 60 I’m old enough to see Iraq or Afghanistan when I think of what a revolution significant enough to succeed in smashes the modern state would like. I sure hate the wholly owned modern state of the .01% but revolution does not seem to be the answer. Actually I can’t conceive of any process whereby we get from here to there anyway so IMO it’s totally moot.
As for the message of ‘get off your ass and DO something’, the narrator himself says, ‘I’m sick of your pissing and moaning so I’m just going to chill out. Call me when you get the revolution together.’ That more of less does in the supposed call to action, doesn’t it?
I’m as opposed to the corporate state of by and for the .01% as anybody but as far as I can tell the possible forces to oppose this are historically weaker than ever since the start of the industrial revolution. “Labor”? It’s gone. Where else is the anti-capitalism supposed to come from?
Guys, by way of explanation of the stark contrast between the “script” and the production, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say this is satire, along the lines of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxrWuE5qC5c
Making fun of someone’s “Goodbye Cruel World” post on some message board, somewhere.
You had me waste 3 minutes to watch THAT? April 1 is 6 weeks off
The last minute or so was pretty good, IMO.
Fear; understand it. It’s not a definition; it’s a state of mind. It’s a life style.
Fear is a thief; don’t let it steal from you…
It does amuse me to watch the top quintile muse about revolution, safe in the blasé assumption that they would of course be part of the over-turners, not the over-turned…
That said, fear not, this is not actually a call to revolution. This is simply a packaged piece of media fluff with good production qualities aimed at capturing eyeball share. If it is a call to anything, it is a call to more ass sitting – the message being that change is worth coming out from in front of the keyboard and screen for only if it is revolutionary and only if the other folks are sufficiently blood thirsty to be “worth the producer’s while”. Said producer is a voice actor who vaguely claims a background with SADF special forces – my view, this is just another example of the “some guy on the Internet big talking about what a hard, hard man he is” genre.
I got bored halfway through and turned it off. “They’re pinpointing who’s causing it.” The corporations are…” And we are buying the products sold by those corporations, and buying those products in ever increasing quantity, while blaming the corporations for filthy profits that we give them out of our pockets, and tax breaks created by legislators for whom we vote, and pollution created in the manufacture of peoducts which we buy. Crap.
Does a pretty good job of elaborating on Burke’s quote: “Bad things happen when good people do nothing.”
At 6:16 we hear:
Is that the part you jag off to?
Whether a revolution happens really isn’t up to the hoi polloi. Whenever talk of it comes up, I am reminded of the words of somebody (Glen Tomkins) who articulated the point better than myself, in some other blog’s comment section.
This came out of a discussion about the debt ceiling madness back in 2011.
I appreciate it’s guilt by association, but the original source of the language in that video is a massively anti-Semitic blog. I mean “Jews did 9/11” on the sidebar anti-Semitic.
I’m uncomfortable with author Timster’s propagation of holocaust revisionism.
http://timster-howdarei.blogspot.com/2015/01/its-about-time.html
What Mr. Tomkins said.
The elite could rule indefinitely if they could restrain their appetites, at least until Mommie Dearest Nature decided (yes, I know Nature has no mind and can’t actually “decide” anything) to rid herself of the burden of her most demanding species.
However, if the elite could restrain their appetites and create, or just allow, an ecologically stable social order to come into existence, they might even dodge “the wrath of Gaia”.
They won’t do it, because they can’t help themselves–exactly like the addict who knows his addiction will kill him some day, but can’t stop himself.
Here lies Humanity–dead of the defect in its brain chemistry which makes addiction possible.
I don’t like addiction being used as a universal theory of human behaviour. It’s verging on a grand synthesis with the “war on terror”.
1. You have rights.
2. (Except, naturally, on a battlefield)
3. Every square inch of the Earth’s surface is a battlefield.
1. Everyone has rights.
2. (Except for addicts, naturally, who need to be protected from themselves)
3. Every single person on Earth is an addict.
Shrugs. 1830, 1848, 1871
Marxism starts at the end of this video, not with fuck y’all if you won’t burn it down, but with why ain’t it happening and how do we make it happen. All of Marxism/Marxianism, and there is a lot in argument with itself, are in those questions in that order. The answer to the first determines the second, but the moral imperative of the second conditions the first.
In case the above isn’t clear, “slaves and knaves, fuck ’em” is not just wicked, it is empirically wrong.
Theory must empower praxis, and the job is to find an analysis that makes revolution plausible, and an activism that simultaneously intellectualizes actual social being.
It is not optional just cause it’s really fucking hard.
I watched the video. It seems very will made, good voice, good production values (as if I know what those are my own amateur self , but still . . . ) When the good voice mentioned Anarchism, I lost all and any sympathy, but I kept watching. And I noticed something which several people upthread have beaten me to noting.
From 6:10 to 6:29 into the video, the voice says:
“What you call out in all your bitching has a logical conclusion. Revolution is revolution.
It isn’t watching Jew Tube videos about what we should be doing in the face of
annihilation of our species by a few. You string. them. up.”
“Jew Tube videos”? Was I sure? Did I hear that right? After several more listens I made sure that I was sure and that I did hear that right. So, the question arises . . . . what is this “Jew Tube” of which the Anarchist narrator speaks? And what are “Jew Tube videos”?
@ different clue February 12, 2015
Yes you heard it aright. If you check the link given by Kurt above:
http://timster-howdarei.blogspot.com/2015/01/its-about-time.html
You’ll find this:
Go here: http://timster-howdarei.blogspot.com/2014/12/why-are-you-telling-me.html
And you’ll find the text of the video in-toto including the “jew tube” comments.
Or there’s this: http://timster-howdarei.blogspot.dk/2014/07/horribly-wrong.html
(Have a vomit receptacle handy).
mfi
Yes, what Tomkin said indeed.
And yeah, this video sure does come from timster the Walt, wankster, Holocaust denier. I’ll guess IW was totally clueless as to the origin/intended meaning of this video, and I’m totally fine with that. My only question remains WTF was Ian Welsh thinking when he wrote:
“I don’t agree with all of this, but I find it hard to disagree with much of it”
I have not read that much of this blog, but I thought Ian was on the same wavelength as the Naked Capitalists. But again his comment on this begs the question of what part of subject video he agreed with besides the part where we are generally fvcked.
Does he actually think there is anything which “must be done”? I don’t generally get the sense that IW is naive enough to believe that any “progress” is likely possible except maybe in a purely theoretical anti-factual sense, or in the sense that it’s always worthwhile to try to mitigate suffering (and/or imagine its possible mitigation) any way one can, even if only for the sake of keeping some sanity.
Yes, I should have investigated the source more. Mea culpa.
Is this sort of jew-hating an exception to the norm within the Anarchist movement? Or is this normal and usual for Anarchists?
Hilarious!
Go ahead and try your little revolution. Pussies.
Leftards using any means to disarm the true liberal democrats (IE the Tea Party) all the while calling for bloodshed.
Absolutely hilarious.