We Eat For You, We Fool You, We Rule You

Every so often, when a coven of preening billionaires credit themselves with their own irreplaceable genius, I am more inclined to indulge myself in a little anarcho-syndicalism.

It is the economic analysis of a hundred years ago, but it almost the opposite of the ego-driven pseudo-Marxist dictatorships of the 20th century -and many of the essential values are a little hard to argue with...

Rudolph Rocker (!) quote in the wikipedia entry:

Political rights do not originate in parliaments, they are, rather, forced upon them from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers try to nullify every concession they had made to labour as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers' organizations, so governments are always inclined to restrict or to abbrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance. . . . Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace.

We can argue about "violent." It all depends on the context, I suppose. The American revolution was one. French, for a while. Russian, in a way, but without an ingrown habit of liberty what chance did they have before a megalomaniac gobbled up all the revolutionary power to serve his own ego? And by that I also mean Putin.

With the Republicans accusing everyone who suggests that maybe we should help poor children with some medical insurance of waging class war, (see this Ben Stein, yes that Ben Stein, column for a half-conscious reflection on the nature and existence of social class), I am inclined to believe in the radical hypothesis that capitalism itself will never deliver social justice unless forced to do so with equally concentrated national power or new market realities, like powerful, socialistic unions, highly active democratically accountable state governments, or the instinct of self-preservation that might blossom from the reality of the dying earth.