The antistatist think tank C4SS has an explanation for the betrayal inflicted on the Greek people in their government's recent surrender to European (and US) financial power.
According to an open letter from C4SS social theorist Kevin Carson, the fault for the betrayal of the Greek people rests not with any person but with a misguided plan by left-wing politicians to achieve state power and revise government and corporate policies in order to accommodate the wishes of the people. History has proven that these actions lead to betrayal of the people, as the state's will can be bent by powerful institutions such as banks and corporations, as well as supranational oligarchy and foreign powers. Ultimately, any people who attempt to vote their way to a more humane and compassionate future using the dead end of the capitalist state will end up betrayed.
Syriza's failure to defy the European Union as intended by the Greek people who voted them into power is the triumph of institutions over people: a result that invariably results when one tries to play by the institution's rulebook. The C4SS think tank has an alternative view: Greeks should turn away from the state and focus instead on the development of their own alternative economy, stimulated by a climate of changing technology and increasing individual power. This result is inevitable, but foresight and proactive futurist approaches to Greece's economic oppression could prove to create a real exit for the Greek people from their collective economic misery.
As Carson writes, "hierarchical institutions like states and corporations are becoming obsolete", with piracy, encrypted currencies and the growth of micromanufacturing being the strongest evidence of this trend. Rather than seeing the state, courts, corporations and other monolithic institutions as possible allies, the body politic should instead focus more on circumventing them and ultimately destroying them. The institutions ruling Greece today are thoroughly corrupt, as is any politician who attempts to reform or even negotiate with them. Rather than being respected as authorities, these institutions directing Greece's economy should be regarded as backward or even obscene, and one should invest all effort into eliminating them rather than legitimizing them by trying to co-opt such institutions by starting at the ballot box.
In the conclusion of the C4SS open letter to the Greek people, an alternative economy for the Greek people and for the whole oppressed world is advocated in the following provocative, futurist-inspired paragraphs authored by Kevin Carson:
New, open-source production technologies like micromanufacturing are making high-tech craft tools affordable for individual workers and small cooperative groups — essentially a reversal of the technological shift from individually affordable craft tools to expensive large-scale machinery that led to the factory system. Raised bed, intensive horticulture can produce many times the ouput per hectare of corporate agribusiness. P2P networks with desktop technology can run circles around the old corporate information industries.
The old corporate dinosaurs and the rentier classes’ large piles of investment capital rely entirely on state-enforced monopolies to stay relevant, attempting to enclose the new technologies of freedom and empowerment within their obsolete corporate framework. Fortunately, the same production technologies that render their capital and institutions superfluous — like file-sharing and encryption — are also rendering their monopolies unenforceable.
These weapons for building a new society beyond capitalist control are freely available to you right now. And the Central Banks, the IMF and Angela Merkel are powerless to stop you because, unlike the government in Athens, you are not embodied in an official institution over which they can exert leverage. They are fighting a ghost.
Wallerstein: Lat America creeps right: The BlogThe Latin American left may be in a state of self-destruction, ... http://t.co/2vt4hjLngp— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) July 7, 2015
