To live without dead time, to live without restraints.
The fascists are coming, those undersexed lowlifes.
Ideology can only shatter to pieces when confronted w/radical subjectivity.
/endless rupture & priceless ecstasy
How will workers survive if there’s no work? How do workers survive now when the work that’s available isn’t enough to survive? They only want us for our ability to work, to generate their wealth. They will take us for suckers as long as we let them.
What incentive do we have to do anything? A raise is impossible. A living wage is impossible. They feast on our sweat and keep all the profits for themselves. We are all exploited, overworked & underpaid. It’s been going on so long we can’t see how it works even though the signs are all around us. We are all of us waiting for something.
The only reasonable path to liberty & justice for all lies in UBI—Universal Basic Income.
UBI asks the question How much money do you need to meet your basic living needs? and answers it with Cool, here you go. Once our basic needs are met—and living under a capitalist system where even if we work our basic needs go unmet, how can one not see a problem that needs to be solved—we will be free to pursue our dreams, all of us entrepreneurs engaged in a system of play instead of exploitation.
The less we are exploited, the less we will seek to exploit others.
Even a free-enterprise champion like 20th century economist F.A. Hayek, a man who loathed government spending and influenced the Chicago school of economics, who basically laid the economic template for 20th century conservatism, even Hayek fervently believed in UBI. Here’s the money quote:
“There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained that security against severe physical privation, the certainty of a given minimum of sustenance for all; or more briefly, the security of a minimum income should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom. There are difficult questions about the precise standard which should thus be assured… but there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. Indeed, for a considerable part of the population of England this sort of security has long been achieved.”
This is what the future should look like. It’s a future that, sitting in a grocery store parking lot early on a Friday night, is impossible to believe in. It’s a future that makes you gag slightly as you watch the circling police cars, the staggering homeless, and the swaggering college students lugging suitcases of beer under their tanned forearms. The capitalists drive their oversized cars and struggle through the tarmac maze like servile mice unaware that they are trapped in a strange social experiment and the conclusions being drawn are that the mice are at once both interchangeable & doomed. And yet they still keep torturing us as they dream of one day owning all the cheese.
Their tails should be sliced off and fed to them through their nostrils.
It’s time to hang the landlords and smash every church to the ground. The community is not dead. Their asses may sleep in warm blankets, but their ideas are corpses that haunt our waking moments. There are more of us than there is of them. Revolt in daily life. In every revolutionary organization, assume there’s at least one undercover cop.
Our tactics must be founded on the goal of individual realization, of each person realizing their potential. In order to survive each day we tramp down the best parts of ourselves—our humor, our creativity, our wicked spirit. And yet, and yet, we all have so much more to contribute.
UBI is the only solution, the only tenable future.
Thought this isn’t a prediction. it’s an epitaph. For what could have been.
The bastards will shoot us in the streets before they allow us to live in such comfort. If we ever start dreaming, they will criminalize our dreams.
Trout Fisting In America appears here every Tuesday (lately on Friday too!). We’re going to keep going until we reach #55, or until the Trout begs for mercy. You can check out previous installments HERE.
Scott Creney 