there are many striking formulations of the fact that extreme inequality is devouring our species, but this is a good one: the richest 85 people in the world have as much as the bottom 3 billion. we spend a lot of time admiring, loving, and rewarding those 85: think of how people treat gates or buffett or that fuckwad whatshisname who ran apple. but there is only one possible solution: all forms of hierarchy must be simultaneously dismantled. you can't use the political hierarchy to ameliorate the economic hierarchy, because the two are completely intertwined. understand that the political state and international multi-state organizations are what has made this degree of inequality - which is a completely absurd moral disaster - possible. beefing up the state sector to redress the injustices of global capitalism is exactly as plausible as beefing up the governments of spain, portugal, france, and england in 1670 to redress the injustices of colonialism.
release elizabeth warren on this and you just reinforce the sorts of mechanisms that made it possible in the first place. try equalizing on a state-control-of-the-economy basis and one thing you get is this: chinese princelings stashing their nation's wealth in caribbean havens. that is how marxism-leninism-maoism-etcism has turned out in the real world. seriously, this thing where we're going to use political power to equalize wealth is an article of faith: it is empirically absurd. look at the actual intertwined histories of capitalism and the state. nothing has ever been more obvious. 'davos' is a good name now for this identity. it is the place where all hookers gather to fellate the corporate state, which is really the hobby of all of us, essentially our whole lives. communism is just a slight permutation of this, and historical communism is yet another demonstration that political and economic hierarchies are mutually reinforcing.
people appear to be mystified that inequality increases under both democratic and republican administrations. oh my god! you've got to stop listening to what these people say about themselves. right? they both have entirely hierarchical orientations. they are both up inside wall street like tapeworms in your intestines. dems and reps, right and left: they have different adjustments in mind for your pension. and that appears to be enough to make y'all absorb your whole lives screaming at each other. they have massively the same political and economic orientation. surely you see that. america at the historical crossroads: hillary clinton or jeb bush? oh for heaven's sake.
the only coherent position, and the only position that is responsive even vaguely to reality has to be: oppose all coercive hierarchies. otherwise i'm telling you this just gets worse and worse. it gets worse under neocons. it gets worse under leftists: they all have the same position, really, and it is underlain by the desire to subordinate and to be subordinated. i don't actually see the distinction between the positions of paul wolfowitz and mao. or rather i hear their opposed rhetoric and i see their identical reality. i think that paul ryan and elizabeth warren have the same position, stated in slightly different ways for slightly different audiences. they do not know this about themselves, but they are perfectly complementary: we can oscillate between reinforcing the state hierarchy and reinforcing the corporate hierarchy, but these are the very same hierarchy. but also the tea party and occupy don't know this about themselves either, but they are on the same side too: the only other side.
