american politics, and even world politics, really is caught in a scylla-or-charybdis dilemma: state or capital? every word out of the republicans is antigov, pro-biz. and the dems are fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the state: 'i will not accept a solution without revenue increases.' both of these modes of organization are profoundly hierarchical and oppressive. the problem with the discourse is that it never quite cognizes their identity or at any rate symbiosis: beefing up either beefs up both, more or less. really, you're pissed at wall street. who you gonna call? tim geithner and larry summers? that's who citicorp called when they were in trouble. i think one of the strategies of squishy totalitarianism is to keep pretending that there are two forces, each of which could be used against the other. that way, no one turns against the whole thing, or against hierarchical modes of power distribution. that's why occupy shouldn't develop a program of regulatory change or something; they should - as they are, i think - trying to develop non-hierarchical forms of power and self-organization.
all that bail-out action simply consolidated the banking industry in even fewer hands, and one should look clearly at how 'regulation' is used to construct and consolidate monopolies (in media, for example). the unification of capital and state is breathtakingly evident all over u.s. history. and yet there's nothing to liberalism but more state, nothing to conservatism but more capital. it could not be more obvious that the conflict is basically only apparent, and that oscillating from one to the other just makes the oppressive forces we confront ever-more inexorable.
