As a result, capitalism, the system that serves the ruling class, is shielded from scrutiny. In its place, political theatre takes centre stage, deceiving the masses into believing that whoever is in power will alter their material conditions, thereby legitimising electoralism. It thus creates the illusion that the working class chooses the very system that oppresses it and, as such, dilutes and redirects the revolutionary ethos of the masses by reintegrating it into the very political structure that serves the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Elina Xenophontos

 they bomb them in in their homes and then they bomb them in their tents and the rain comes and there's nowhere to go.

The difficulty of revolution in an illegitimate state is that improving living standards for the (demographically engineered) majority is probably at odds with justice. The democratic will of the majority in such states might be found to be a genocidal will.

Improving people’s lives, enacting the majority’s will - these were the basic demands of revolutionaries in the last century. But they need an update: where these clash with stopping genocide, where they clash with justice, justice has to prevail.

The Anti Empire Project

  American living standards are founded on stolen land and slavery, maintained by a continuous plunder of most of the world, funding and arming and organizing Israel’s genocides. Under such a world order, it could be that improving American living standards would make for a more unjust arrangement of things. When genocide is a tool to manipulate demographics to fulfill a racialist ideological vision, democracy isn’t automatically legitimate.

The Anti Empire Project

 

The racists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries planned for extermination and the replacement of the vanished races with superior ones. They never stopped. We are living a world shaped by their century-old racist fantasies; demographic engineering continues to this day. If, through genocide and displacement, a settler majority can be engineered, then a place can be made safe for “democracy” (famously, “Jacksonian” democracy, or Israel’s “only democracy in the middle east”). Questions about what to do with land, or what will be the fate of Indigenous peoples, can then be settled “democratically” within the borders of the engineered majority, and these electoral exercises can be lauded as democratic. 

The illegitimacy of settler states

Unique challenges of contemplating revolution

The Anti Empire Project

 We keep trying to translate the dead in these end times. They're all around us. In our dreams we're trying to rescue someone. The someone is ourself. We belong to the earth. We can't adapt to a toxic environment, just in order to make a living in the industrial death cult of techno-fascist neoliberal capitalism. It's genocide. We translate for the dead.

 

They're playing games with us, on a local and global scale, with their toxic lies and scorched earth and genocide, but as they rise they fall, and as Caitlin Johnstone said this morning, They know that as soon as enough of us stop believing their narratives, we are free. We can decide to re-write the made-up rules of society whenever we choose to, and change everything about states, authority, money and labor which have allowed the plutocrats to live like kings at the expense of everyone else. We can stop playing the capitalism game they’ve been winning at any time, because the rules are completely made up, and we can just make up a different game.