Steve Kelsey“ Every epoch therefore develops a range of contradictory discourses and ideologies for the purpose of legitimising the inequality that already exists or that people believe should exist”
Thomas Piketty – Capital and Ideology
The Role of Ideology
Thomas Piketty, in his seminal work ‘Capital and Ideology’, presents evidence for the role of ideology as the means of maintaining inequality through history, from feudal societies, through the proprietary societies of the 19th century, to the hypercapitalist societies of today. Although the identities of the perpetrators, the techniques used, and their professed politics may differ, they can all be reduced to a simple formula. A small self appointed group seek to capture as much wealth for themselves as possible by overt or proxy violence. This simple formula has written all of human history to date.
Any successful ideology is always backed by extreme violence which, because it is understood to be a constantly present threat may not need to be enacted. The violence required to protect inequality since WW2 has become both more subtle and more aggressive, invading the minds of people in new and stealthier ways, .
Economic Violence.
Extreme forms of violence are by definition destructive, reducing human resources and capital, and so proxies have been developed that are economically more efficient.
The first level of proxy violence in opperation today lies within the economic system. This form of proxy violence may be very broad and targeted at entire societies – e.g. trade embargoes, national indebtedness to another power etc- or it may be inter-societal sanctions, e.g. austerity programs, non-progressive taxation regimes.
The sanctions may be directed at the individual by means of low pay, high indebtedness, reduction of labour opportunities. All of these forms of proxy violence are prescribed by and enforced by laws.
The Rule of Law
The law is simply violence one step removed, providing a means for ideologies to establish preferential change and protect the inequalities that have been achieved. History tells us that progressive change in a society is only achieved by violence, or effective proxies for violence. e.g. the removal of productive labour, organised protests, rioting etc.
However, the current neoliberal ideology, in power since the 1970’s, has sought to reduce the scope for effective proxy violence by legislation e.g. the removal of the right to withdraw labour, limitations on workers ability to cooperate and coordinate action, the removal of the right to protest or the restriction of those rights.
Currency Punishment
Money, its creation and control, is another form of violence by proxy. Although initially evolved from societies need to cooperate to create civilisational wealth, money has been coopted by ideologies to provide another controlling mechanism. Far from being a democratically unassailable, fundamentally neutral mechanism for the transmission of value, money has been cultivated into a myriad of forms, the complex rules surrounding its ownership and rights of use all intended to separate money from its single true function, the abstract representation of civilisational wealth. The invention of currency, debt, profit, interest, banking, and financial services all exist to enable the rationing of money by the self appointed elite desiring inequality.
Political Clout
Politics evolved from the need for a managerial class to observe, measure and anticipate the needs of a society. This need is inevitable in any modestly complex society, where the communication of need and the proposal of solutions could not happen around the camp fire. Ideologues coopted this function as it lies at the heart of resource, and therefore wealth, distribution.
Once ideology took root within this essentially practical function the control of who might be allowed to participate becomes subject to ideological control. i.e. the beneficiaries of inequality become the gatekeepers to the function of wealth distribution.
To be able to access the powers of distribution you are required to meet the conceptual and operational constraints the ideology applies. An individual must agree to a political belief system and be prepared to support this political mandate irrespective of personal views.
Media Rules
The complexity and richness of human activity is deliberately simplified to those attributes that support the inequality that has been achieved and the ideologues ensure that this artificial simplicity is consistently reinforced throughout time, irrespective of the true needs of society as a whole.
It is here that the violence is exposed.
A society has been led to accept propositions and constraints that damage the wealth generation and distribution capability of the people making up the society in preference for building wealth for the controlling ideology.
A New Violence
The first two decades of the 21st century have seen the evolution of a new form of proxy violence, one that targets the mind of the individual directly. Massive data collation and analysis has enabled new forms of manipulation of the individual via social media.
Although in its infancy it has already achieved significant results for the neoconservative ideology, and the continued use of military grade psyops software in the service of the prevailing ideology is inevitable.
Programming of a society, or a subsection of a society, is an old technique. Propaganda has been with us since at least World War 1 and was developed to become a highly effective method by the National Socialist Party in Germany during the 1930’s and 40’s. Social media programming is just a more efficient and cost effective extension of that method with its notable successes being the deep profiling of individuals and the intimate personalisation of messaging that can be achieved.
Social programming works well because it reinforces attitudes and motivations that are already present in the individual in ways that the individual believe are a natural extension of their own thoughts and beliefs. This is still a form of violence no matter how abstract it may seem, because the objective of social programming is to persuade the individual to act in ways that support the inequality that the ideology desires, irrespective of whether this is beneficial for the individual, and especially so if it is not.
This new form of violence is especially harmful in that it commandeers the natural desire of everyone for a peaceful and profitable existence and associates that desire with the ideologists goals. This is why we see a working class in both the USA and the UK voting for parties and leaders who have objectives that are not just demonstrably different to the objectives of the voter but inimitable to them, and yet the voter believes they have made a sensible choice.
This requires the ideologies to maintain deep and persistent acts of dishonesty. Again history provides ample evidence of deception employed freely and regularly as a tool to achieve the ideologues aims. We need only reflect on tools such as the political mandate used by political parties to present their manifesto for action should they be elected. It is common practice for manifesto’s to present a mix of universally desirable goals and, often with lesser prominence, the objectives of the ideologue. The desirable goals attract the votes and yet history shows that out of the mix of actionable objectives it is the ideologues objectives that receive focus once the party is in power.
The key consideration for now is that while honesty is regarded by most of us as a fundamental underpinning for a cooperative and healthy civilisation, it is regarded by the ideologue as a tool to be manipulated or an obstruction to be overcome.
The Defeat of Civilisation
The defeat of honesty is the most damaging acts of violence against society possible. Even a superficial review of your immediate surroundings reveals that our civilisation is the accumulated wealth of generations of cooperative effort. Cooperative effort is a survival trait that precedes humanity by millions of years. Biologically based, the evolution of the cooperative group provided far better chances of survival. As humans, we have perfected social cooperation to an advanced degree and understand its simple codex well. It is embodied in and has allowed the emergence of our sophisticated societies and civilisation and it is expressed simply as…
Honesty begets trust, trust begets cooperation, cooperation begets civilisation.
Without the cooperation of millions of people food would not be harvested and distributed, cities would not be built, specialised functions like science and education could not develop.
Cooperation is built on trust, trust that you will be paid for the work you do, that the doctor you need is well trained and capable, that the plane you fly in is engineered well and its pilot is competent. Trust underpins our civilisation, and the core of trust is honesty. To lie is to commit violence not just against individuals or societies, but civilisation itself.
But the dominant ideologies of today care nothing for our civilisation. Our civilisation is an externality to be efficiently exploited. The ideologues role is entirely predatory.
(1) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2018.00017/full
Countermeasures
If you understand that the purpose of an ideology is to achieve and then maintain inequality and that you are not the beneficiary of that ideology your task becomes very simple. You need to identify the actors who benefit from the ideology and target any countermeasures against them directly.
As the ultimate sanction supporting any ideology is violence it follows that in opposition effective violence must be used. This is not an exceptional statement, it is merely the logical conclusion to a study of ideology in action.
What is effective violence? As with the violence used against you, it must be legal and efficient. Efficiency and legality argues against physical violence but leaves all other forms available. In essence the violence used against you can be used against the ideologues and exploiters without fear of criminality or ethical outrage. It is not possible for exploiters to argue against or ban the techniques they rely on to maintain their inequalities
To be effective the violence needs to be targeted and personal. An impersonal generalised violence against a class or group is inefficient producing only secondary or tertiary levels of concern. Generalised violence dilutes energy and blunts the impact. Specific acts of virtualised violence against a specific individual for a specific reason has great force and if sustained will be irresistible. This is the objective, to change the minds of exploiters by sustained virtual violence.
It will be argued that targeted violence to gain a specific reversal of policy is antidemocratic. This argument assumes that we live in a democracy, and much time and resources has been devoted to convincing us that we do indeed live in a democracy. At best we live in a highly managed democracy heavily biased towards maintaining inequality, but this will seem counter intuitive to most and antithetical to some. I explore the artificial nature of our democracy in more detail in this article Real Politic but for now let us assume that we do live in a perfectly functioning democracy.
In this perfect world it is still possible for ideologies to be deployed to secure inequality of the same level as that existing in France at the time of the French Revolution. Democracy allows eight citizens to own 50% of the worlds wealth . The democratically elected US Senate consistently passes legislation that favours corporations over the people who voted them into power and has done so for decades due to the growing power of the lobby industry. In the UK democracy has given a Conservative government the power to ignore Parliament, give extreme powers to ministers and override budget and procurement constraints to enrich personal contacts and Conservative party donors with contracts worth tens of billions of pounds.
Even if we accept the democracy we are offered is fit for purpose, it allows us the same scope for direct action as it allows the ideologues and the exploiters. If this form of democracy is sufficient to protect the exploiters of virtual violence against you, it offers you exactly the same scope for action and protections against them.
Targeting Violence
Who should you target and why? Today the target is clear. A class of self appointed elite are systematically restructuring society to create and maintain inequalities on a completely new scale. Oligarchs maintain their power and influence by their great wealth. They have resources far beyond the reach of ordinary people and if they are ‘old money’ they have generations of experience to guide them. But they are far from untouchable. They are dependent on actors that extend their personal agency politicians, lawyers, financiers all of whom act in the defence of the Oligarchs position.
Like modern day monarchs, each Oligarch has a court, and each court has its intrigues and conspiracies. If you understand who is in the court and who is influential you have your first targets for virtual violence.
The most public of the oligarch’s agents are politicians. They are subject to the pressures of public opinion and are dependent on their position on their popularity. They are also important agents for the Oligarchs’s mission, able to influence the creation of legislation that favour the Oligarchs interests, able to argue for the removal of legal obstructions to the Oligarch’s plans, able to divert attention and and deflect criticism in private and in public. The identification and targeting of politicians working for oligarchic interests rather that their constituents and society’s interests are principle targets for virtual violence.
In addition to politicians there are the policy influencers, the lobbyists and manipulators who are rarely known publicly but work behind the scenes to drive government manifestos, the formation of policy and the forging of legislation. Think tanks, political ‘charities’, lobby companies, political PR agencies are all agents of oligarchs intent on controlling the direction of society to meet their needs. They are well funded and well networked acting internationally to influence policy and politics. All of these organisations are dependent on secrecy in order to have an effect. Like politicians in the orbit of an oligarch, they are particularly threatened by exposure.
In a society where physical violence is subsumed by virtual forms inevitable that some members of the legal profession provide an important service for the oligarch. The law is both shield and sword for the oligarch providing both defence and attack. The law is designed to be expensive and inaccessible to society at large, its high costs limiting who can afford to take legal action. It is the primary weapon of the Oligarch, employed to shut down dissent, force through favourable decisions and remove competition. As it is the Oligarch’s primary weapon, it is important that any action against an Oligarch’s court remains strictly within the law. This is not an ethical or moral judgement, in this environment the law has nothing to do with ethics, it is to ensure that the Oligarch or its agent can never employ its primary weapon rendering it useless. This does not mean that lawyers as individuals cannot be targeted. Like lobbyists and policy influencers lawyers are vulnerable to exposure and personal challenges.
Oligarchs own capital- companies, properties, investments. Oligarchs derive their wealth from these assets. If we look at how these assets create money for the oligarch, in a large percentage of cases, we end up looking at ourselves. Consumers create much of an Oligarchs wealth. Without consumption, this source of wealth stops. One of the great successes of the Oligarchs neoliberal political transformation of society was removing a workers right to strike. Without the ability to halt the production of wealth the worker has little power. What the Oligarch has missed is that workers are also consumers and consumers can also go on strike. But there is something remarkable about consumer boycotts, they can never be defeated. No Oligarch is going to sponsor legislation that bans consumption, no oligarch can propose legislation that forces consumption. There is no legal remedy to consumers choosing not to consume. This hints at the qualities a successful weapon of resistance needs. It is direct, acting on the Oligarchs income, it is legally undefeatable, and it is simple requiring no expertise or expenditure beyond the reach of anyone. To be successful it needs to be an action taken on mass and consistent, which requires communication and organisation. The specific design of successful action is a topic I will return to in another post.
Oligarchs depend on and act within systems, and systems can be disrupted. In their description of oligarchies as social networks, Ansell, Bichir and Zhou define oligarchy as a social network that exhibits three structural properties: tight interconnections among a small group of prominent actors who form an “inner circle”; the organization of other actors in the network through the intermediation of this inner circle; and weak direct connections among the actors outside the inner circle. This practical description points us at the second layer of the three layer network as being the most significant. The oligarchs themselves are well defended from action, the third layer is large and dispersed with little if any direct associations with the Oligarchs themselves. This intermediate layer is linked to the Oligarchs and sufficiently important to the Oligarch’s strategy that disrupting the actions of the intermediate layer will have a significant effect.
The systems Oligarchs and their servants employ and the networks that they form are fragile and need to be protected. This is one of the reasons they operate in secret, they are vulnerable. The Oligarchs depend on you not knowing off their existence, not being able to understand how their networks function, not being able to identify the nodal points that are essential to the smooth functioning of the Oligarchs system. The more efficient a network is, the more fragile it is. Oligarchs cannot tolerate an inefficient system, an inefficient network gives their competitors the competitive advantage and in the hyper competitive world of the Oligarch this is deadly. So Oligarchic systems are designed to be ruthlessly efficient and as a result they are fragile. If they are fragile they are easy to disrupt by targeted action.
In a follow on post I will review the practical application of virtual violence, but let me close this post with a summary how to identify who to target. It is a question of network research and it will take time. Your conceptual target are the nodes in the Oligarchs network, the people, companies and organisations used by the Oligarchy to enact its strategy. The nodes are the key agents, the ones who are relied on my the Oligarchy on a regular basis, the agents closest to the centre of power entrusted with a greater part of the strategy in play.
Once the key nodes in the network are identified the next step is a deep profiling of these individuals and organisations to develop a complete picture of how they are supported, who and what they would consider indispensable, their motivations and weaknesses. If this seems personal, it is. If this seems intrusive, it is. It is important to remember that we are simply using the tools they deploy themselves against them.
Once you have a deep profile of each the nodes in the network, the politicians, lawyers, advisors, companies and agencies that the Oligarchy depends on, you can plan how they can be attacked, in a lawful and efficient manner. More on that another day.
American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it’s pumped by the oligarchs who run the country
Eric Zeuss https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/15/the-contradictions-of-the-american-electorate/