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In a society like the United States, where to all appearances we have been terminally individuated by market relations, where in the words of the greatest of all Americans “history is bunk” and where few of us have any lived experience of bare-knuckle collective direct action in defense of our lives and living conditions, it might be understandable to assume that a condition of abject sheepishness and passivity is embedded in our genes, that this will continue indefinitely, and that the reigning predators and criminals psychopaths of this failing social order will get an endless free ride at the expense of the rest of us and at the expense of the continued inhabitability of the planet. But even in a place like the United States human consciousness is fluid, not static. And against those who believe that things can only get endlessly worse, it’s also possible that the vast majority of us who must sell our labor power for wages and have nothing to lose but our pains are waking up to the fact that market society has no future. As far as the owners and rulers of a precipitiously declining capitalist America are concerned, they clearly have no interest in history — but history is very interested in them.

My understanding is that Marx and Engels felt that the most optimal place for the world’s first successful anti-capitalist social revolution would be in a nightmare region called the United States. As in so many other things Marx and Engels were right; their schedule was off by a couple of centuries. It’s probably that no one in France in 1788 or Russia in 1916 imagined what was about to happen in their near future; we are living in times akin to that now. The capitalist mode of production is well on its way to rendering the planet uninhabitable. Capitalism has also created the material preconditions for an immediate leap to a free, egalitarain, ecological sane, post-market society, where we can replace this malignant social order with a society worthy of the human beings who live in it, a society where we immediately abolish wage labor, unnecessary toil and the use of money.

The sadly unpleasant downside of this will be that not all of this will be pretty: the most malignant malefactors of the fallen social order will suddenly find themselves on the receiving end of the merciless judgement of history. You gotta be cruel to be kind, and as someone else once said, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Be happy be optimistic, be energetic: great events are on their way.