The problem of resistance to the oligarchy

is how to hurt their interests at an acceptable cost to those doing the harm.

The traditional answer to this was solidarity and martyrdom. It is impossible to overstate how dangerous being a union activist right up to the middle of the 20th century was. You had to accept that you would be beaten, jailed and possibly killed. Violent confrontations with police and private cops were routine. Outright battles were not unknown, as when miners squared off against the military in a multi-day battle with over ten thousand casualties.

Nor did the early unions wring their hands about violence, even “criminal” violence. Clarence Darrow was a union lawyer for years. One of his most prominent cases was defending union members who set off explosives in a newspaper office, killing people in that office. The unions did not abandon those workers, who had clearly committed what we would call terrorism: they hired a star lawyer, one of the best in the country, to defend them.

The general strike, even more than the strike, was another answer: just shut the entire economy down. It was used because it inflicted real costs on employers: they still needed some workers. But a strike requires social solidarity: bringing in scabs must be socially unacceptable, either due to mores or because the scabs know they’ll have their kneecaps broken. A general strike requires enough workers to be willing to do it to shut down an entire city, region, or country.

The Gandhian resistance method is very similar to general strikes: it requires hundreds of thousands to millions of people to be willing to shut down the economy and dare the police or army to kill or imprison them all. When you have only a few hundred or thousand people, the police can deal with that easily enough: worst case they call in the national guard. Hundreds of thousands: not so much.

What all of these actions had in common is that they genuinely hurt the interests of the rich where it mattered, in the pocketbook.

You can also get change through making the lives of the rich unpleasant, or making them fear for their very lives. Social peace has often been bought by treating ordinary people better, when the rich genuinely feared the army and police couldn’t protect them.

But if the elites think that their security forces can protect them, and especially if they live in a bubble where they never have to face people whose lives they have made miserable, as is the case for most of our rich, who fly by private jet, travel about the city in helicopters or chauffered limos and live in gated enclaves; and if you can’t cost them any real money, why should they let you have any of the surplus of society beyond the bare minimum you need to remain useful to them? (Not to survive: as the cutting of food stamps in the US indicates, that’s not a priority for the oligarchy.)

Be clear that distribution of goods and money in an economy is almost entirely unrelated to any ethical idea of merit or deservedness. The bankers, amongst the best paid people in the world economy, destroyed far more money than they earned in the 00s, and yet are still paid billions of dollars in bonuses every year. They receive the money they do because they had the power to make the government make them whole after they lost everything, then the power to make the government make them even richer than before. They control a bundle of valuable rights from the state: the right to borrow at prime, the right to value assets to model (fantasy); the right to huge leverage; and the right lend, which is how money is actually created in our economy (aka. they can print money.)

This is why they’re rich: not because they produce net value: they destroy value; but because they have the power to make the government do what they want it to do and to make it not prosecute them when they break the laws, and even to change the laws so they can take even more money.

Distribution in an economy is based, virtually entirely, on power. A group receives goods and money because it can force others to give it to them. The libertarian fantasy of free markets and free choice is exactly that. They don’t exist today, they have rarely existed in the past, and to the extent they have existed they owe their existence entirely to government making sure they exist. As soon as any group gains enough power to take over government, they do, and free markets cease to exist because they make the government give them special rights,whether those are rights to print money, borrow low and lend high, or so-called intellectual property rights that let them continue to profit from ideas created 80 years ago.

Power, power is all that matters. Even distribution, or something close to it, happens only when there is relatively equality between groups in society or there is an existential threat to society which requires the willing participation of all parts of society.

If you ever want to see raises for ordinary people again, you must figure out how they will become powerful: and power means “what can they do to hurt people who cross them, hurt them really, really badly.”

Peace is the result of everyone knowing and believing in their hearts that if they break the conditions of the peace, others will react with overwhelming force. When it becomes clear that there is no cost for taking more of the pie, people will do so, and yes, did do so.

So: how do we punish the rich for what they have done? How do we force them (not convince, force) to give up more of the surplus crated by society?

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