chris hayes and francisco goldman talking about the situation in mexico
goldman argues that the government and the drug cartels have merged, fully, and are dumping children's corpses into rivers. it is funny watching statists suddenly completely bewildered by the howling contradictions, infinite regresses, and so on that have always obviously been inherent at the essence of their position. oh my god! says hayes, if the government is the drug cartels, what can be done? there must be a force sufficient to hold the government to account, says hayes, as he looks completely flummoxed: the only thing this smart person can envisage is creating a new, more powerful state to control the old corrupt state. so then when all those segments in turn merge, you will be facing an even more impossible-to-constrain force. and then who will constrain it? you really do need god. after that, you're gonna need mega-god. this may well be the origin of monotheism, which never helped anything.
the usually extremely thoughtful goldman, too, is completely at a loss as to what even conceptually could possibly be done: someone, something, must impose the rule of law! he asserts, in answer to the question of what practically might improve the situation: he seems literally to be invoking athena, or deciding to believe in some force or other by a sheer kierkegaardian leap of faith. something, someone, somewhere help me. this, intellectually and practically, is where your own commitments led you: you have advocated the force that creates this monstrous oppression; suddenly you realize you can't even face the rudimentary entailments of your position: you started on this road by constituting a power capable of controlling the powers that existed already. that was the most general solution, and yet it entails an infinite repress.
the conceptual and the practical problem, remakably, are exactly the same in this case. you wouldn't think someone could miss both simultaneously, but there it is.
the merging of a government and a drug cartel is a pretty typical scenario, and is just one version of squishy totalitarianism. you are not going to keep economic and political power apart, you dorks! it's quite as though the us government were not distinguishable from the oil companies, or j.p. morgan/chase, or blackwater. fortunatley, those aren't vicious or violent, unlike a drug cartel. they'd never kill you to preserve their territory or market share, or just because, would they?
seriously, a state-leftist solution - the only one envisionable in that structure of thought - would be to nationalize the drug cartels or make them public utilities: just straight-up to endorse the merger you find intolerable and are trying to solve. it is already a socialist system on the ground: that is, a merger of state and economy. that is supposed to be an egalitarian formula.
