It is about the cost of food and petrol, of basic alimentation and transport. It is about not being able to pay bills, rent, mortgage, housing costs, the costs of habitation, shelter. It is about not being able to afford to pay for education, whether for children or oneself. It is about not being able to afford to support those who depend on us, aging parents, sick relations, friends in need. It is about having no money. It is also about high prices, about taxes set punitively high. And it is about the contrast visible everywhere around between people with enough to pay high prices, usually the people who impose high prices, and the people with less, less to the degree that they are victims.
A line has been crossed: the spectacle of wealth is no longer sufficient reason to keep our seats. We are at war with those on the stage, on the other side of the line, across the carefully regulated, policed and legislated for wealth divide. A line has been crossed in so far as we have been betrayed: we no longer believe in enjoying ourselves to death; we are no longer complacent about watching since we have discovered we can no longer attain to the sort of lives or gain access to the sort of world we see represented before us, everywhere around. Life in the real world has become too expensive. The line is real cost, actual price.
The war is about a threshold we have not crossed but been forced over and now life is insupportable; it is beyond our means. We wage war neither on the images of lives we cannot possess, nor with needs fed on these illusions, but on the injustice concentrating wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The compensation for this decrease is found in the multiplication of images of excess, to excess. Here also a threshold: forced to consume advertising, we declare ourselves at war with the authority who gives us to be force-fed, the power that regulates for, not against, the advertiser.
Here again a divide: between greed and fear. We overcome our fear of information, of the fetishes advertising holds up to mesmerise us; we overthrow this combination of the greedy using fear, this combine. We don’t assert a right to what we need, we take it. The war is about the overthrow of every government that allows injustice to be perpetuated as good business.
With entry to deregulated markets (that is markets in whose favour states regulate), with access to docile populations strangled, sociopathic corporations turn to autism, the affliction symptomatic of their affect on individuals in victim societies.
The power of the state lies both in an advertising jingle, a matter of representation, and the permission it gives for us to be made victims, a matter of authority. The war is about rejecting the illusion and claiming the right of authority. It is about representing our wishes to the greedy. It is for an open and egalitarian society.
It is happening everywhere because conditions are similar everywhere, even where histories differ. It is happening in the Middle East. It is happening in Europe and in England. Why isn’t it happening yet in the US?
The war is about rejecting both economics and politics as reasons for victimisation. It is about claiming adequate representation in the overthrow of authority.
