What is to be done?
For decades I have been thinking about a truly representative version of democracy and how to grow it organically within our political system. (NOTE.) In a recent discussion about such ideas, it was pointed out to me that all this political theorizing is utterly irrelevant because, in the West, the formal political and governmental systems are completely corrupt. They do not accept any input contrary to Deep State plans to destroy the middle class, to heavily depopulate the world, and (delusionally) to takeover the planet. The bottom line is that peaceful change is unlikely, as JFK said in 1962:
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
The question, then, is not what is a good governmental system, but rather how do we get the current system's hands off our throats. This is a painful reframing for me. It caused my brain to throw up a reference from the 1970s
a screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is "Remove side cover plate"...you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you’ve had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.
Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn’t just irritating and minor.
you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out.
- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Page 131
Of course, getting rid of a corrupt political system is much tougher than getting a stripped screw out of a metal cover. It is the idea of solving the problem at hand that is key.
A second jolt to my worldview was the belated recollection of how modern Chinese government works. This report - from 2021, the heart of the lockdown era - explained what the Chinese call "Whole Process Democracy". (China, a Democracy that Works ). It is a system that functions in the real world, not some airy concept like I have been ineffectually fiddling with. It begins at the local level and rises through a hierarchy of legislators. It relies on massive surveys and data gathering.
China's...democracy resembles Proctor & Gamble more than Pericles of Athens...
...policy development is managed like double-blind, randomized clinical trials, called Trial Spots, and Congress is primarily responsible for publicly evaluating data gathered on them. Europe has started universal income trial spots but China has been doing them for thirty years and has a mature system to support it and manage it.
- Godfree Roberts, Sitrep: How Democratic is China?
In short, China is already using something better than I have been dreaming about. China also allows vigorous local protests that are responded to by the immediate official to whom the complaints are addressed. In this way, genuine, widespread grievances are aired and dealt with quickly.
Rowdy protests–usually triggered by local officials’ unfairness, dishonesty or incompetence–are cheap, exciting and safe since police are unarmed. Indignant[14] citizens paint signs, alert NGOs and the media, recruit neighbors, bang drums, shout slogans and livestream their parade. Responses which once took months now take hours. Targeted officials–usually after a phone call from an angry superior–speed to the scene, bow deeply, apologize profusely, kiss babies, explain that they had no idea that such things were going on and promise brighter tomorrows.
- Godfree Roberts
The contrast with America makes me sad. Here, protests began to be hamstrung with the Bush-era "first amendment zones" and the police kettling operations. And, of course, our police are massively and militarily armed. Reporters and photographers are beaten up. Then there are the massive agent provocatuer squads. Like Antifa, a phony left-wing group that is conveniently ignored by police. The January 6th protests were clearly aided and abetted by police agent provocatuers. Internet censorship is blatant, the Hunter Biden laptop story says it all. It is obvious that the government is surveilling, censoring, and blacklisting its opponents.
All in all, protest and dissent from the party line seems freer in China, as long as one stays within social conventions of how to protest and petition.
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The perennial question is, as Lenin said, Что делать? - what is to be done? This question must be considered all over again, in light of the internet. Not only is the internet heavily surveilled (to find dissidents) and censored (to silence dissent), but its anarchic nature has atomized organization and paralyzed thinking. For every topic there are thousands of individuals and organizations posting information. Some are smart people, some are cranks, some of them are psyops. But most of these people are either unknowns or hide behind pseudonyms (like I do) out of fear of retaliation. The end result is that it is very hard to build trust; and if you do that, the censorship is going to get you or some agents are going to hijack your platform.
IMHO, you first have to have a reputation in the physical world before your internet presence will get any traction. In the first days of the internet, unknown bloggers could get traction. Sites like Media Whores Online, or the Smirking Chimp could be heard. But this demographic was rapidly rolled up by psyops like Daily Kos - run by Markos Moulitsas, whose liberal bona fides have been extensively criticized, although so many of the links providing facts have been deleted that it is impossible to verify the criticism.
And, unfortunately, as I recounted in my first essay, the only organized resistance in the physical world to the Blackrock-driven cultural revolution is the Republican party. They are actually doing good work in exposing the weaponization of government. Elon Musk, hardly a leftie, is doing good work breaking some of the censorship, although others claim this is another tactical limited hangout that will soon be reversed. RFK, Jr., an unwoke Democrat is also doing good work on several fronts. First he is living proof of censorship in action. Second he tells the truth about our foreign and domestic policies. And the truth is poison to the gangsters running our country.
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So, Что делать? I ask my dozen or so readers. (And I do appreciate each and every one of you!)
Should I support Republicans and people like RFK, Jr. as the only viable opposition in the physical world? Or is the whole political process so completely captured that no one should waste any energy on its kabuki theater?
Another question: can anyone confirm or deny the narrative I gave about democracy in China?
NOTE: The link to my old work from 2009 does not embed. It contains a double-layered URL. Let me spell that URL out here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090802184436/
immediately followed (no space) by
http://www.poly-ticker.org:80/index.php?title=Poly-Ticker_Home_Page