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To decommodify survival is the first blow against capital. The second must fall upon the political architecture that protects it.

Capital does not merely dominate through markets; it governs through institutions designed — whether by design or by decay — to dilute popular power and amplify concentrated interests. Reform must therefore target not only wealth, but the mechanisms through which wealth translates itself into rule.

Lobbying, in its present form, is the clearest expression of this conversion. It is legalized bribery — a permanent corridor through which corporate power drafts legislation in its own favor. When policy is written by those who stand to profit from it, democracy becomes an illusion of choice within preselected boundaries. To ban lobbying is not symbolic moralism; it is the severing of the financial umbilical cord between private capital and public law.

Yet even absent lobbying, a permanent political class entrenches itself. Career legislators accumulate influence, donor networks, and strategic alliances that render them effectively irremovable. Politics becomes a profession insulated from consequence. Universal term limits disrupt this consolidation. Rotation in office prevents the formation of a governing caste and reasserts the principle that political authority is a temporary delegation — not a lifetime entitlement.

But structural distortion runs deeper still.

The Electoral College stands as a relic of compromise that now functions as a stabilizer of minority rule. By filtering the popular will through an intermediary mechanism, it insulates executive power from direct democratic accountability. It allows disproportionate influence to smaller blocs while diffusing the collective agency of the population as a whole. In practice, it creates conditions in which national leadership may diverge from majority consent, reinforcing alienation and entrenchment.

A system that devalues one person’s vote relative to another’s based on geography perpetuates uneven political leverage. When combined with capital influence, it compounds the insulation of power from the populace. To abolish the Electoral College and institute direct popular election of the executive is not mere procedural reform — it is the reassertion of equal political weight for each citizen.

And yet even these corrections remain insufficient if financial sovereignty persists elsewhere.

Entities such as BlackRock represent not mere corporations, but centralized command nodes of financial capitalism. Through asset aggregation, they exert quiet dominion over housing markets, infrastructure, agriculture, defense contractors, and technological enterprises. They shape economic reality without ever appearing on a ballot. Such concentration is incompatible with meaningful democracy.

To nationalize systemically dominant financial institutions is to reclaim structural leverage. It is to prevent the privatized coordination of society’s material base. Without this step, political reform remains perpetually vulnerable to economic coercion — capital strikes, investment withdrawal, manufactured crises.

Thus the trajectory clarifies:

Ban lobbying to end the direct purchase of legislation.

Impose universal term limits to dismantle political entrenchment.

Abolish the Electoral College to restore equal democratic weight.

Nationalize systemically dominant financial institutions to dissolve private command over the material base.

Guarantee universal basic assets to remove survival from market coercion entirely.

Each measure strikes at a different layer of concentrated power: economic, political, procedural, and structural.

The aim is not to perfect representation within a fundamentally coercive order. It is to progressively eliminate the mechanisms by which wealth entrenches itself and minority power perpetuates itself against the majority.

Only when survival is secure, political influence equalized, and financial command decentralized can hierarchy begin to wither. Only then can creative and intellectual life exist without subordination to market viability or political patronage.

The revolution worthy of the name does not rage blindly — it dismantles deliberately.

And it begins by identifying the machinery.

If the disease is systemic, then the cure cannot be sentimental. One does not abolish exploitation by pleading for mercy within it; one abolishes it by dismantling the conditions that make exploitation possible. The central crime of capitalism is not merely inequality, nor even greed — it is the commodification of survival itself. It forces the human being to sell their life in fragments in order to continue living. Shelter, food, water, warmth — these are not rights but products. Existence itself is auctioned.

Therefore, the revolutionary demand must begin not with niche grievances nor with the defense of particular professions, but with the unconditional guarantee of material existence. Housing, food, clean water, energy, and basic utilities must be decommodified and secured as universal material foundations. Not charity. Not means-tested humiliation. Not bureaucratic paternalism. Universal provision as a matter of social organization.

This is what is meant by universal basic assets: the direct social allocation of the means necessary for survival and dignified participation in society. Land for housing. Infrastructure for water and energy. Agricultural capacity oriented toward nourishment, not speculation. The redirection of wealth — accumulated through centuries of extraction — back into the commons from which it was taken.

A modest wealth tax — even as small as 2.5% on those above subsistence — represents not confiscation but correction. The reallocation of a mere fraction of military expenditure — one percent of an empire’s war chest — could eradicate homelessness within a decade. The numbers are not utopian; the refusal is political. The resources exist. What does not exist is the will to subordinate capital to humanity.

To guarantee the material basis of life is to undermine wage slavery at its root. When survival is no longer contingent upon obedience to capital, labor ceases to be coerced in its most brutal form. The worker who cannot be starved into submission is already half liberated. The landlord without leverage is merely a property holder. The employer without desperation is forced to negotiate.

From this foundation, the abolition of capitalist domination ceases to be rhetorical and becomes structurally inevitable. Once housing is guaranteed, speculation loses power. Once food is secured, the threat of hunger evaporates. Once utilities are public and universal, private monopolies weaken. Each guarantee removes a pillar from the edifice of coercion.

In such a society, art would not need special protection, because survival would not hinge upon its profitability. Creativity would flourish precisely because it would no longer be forced to justify itself in the marketplace. The same is true of intellectual inquiry, craftsmanship, and invention. Tools such as artificial intelligence would cease to be existential threats and would instead become collective instruments — augmentations of human capacity rather than competitors in a scarcity economy.

The general trajectory, then, is clear:
1. Decommodify survival
2. Neutralize coercive leverage
3. Dissolve the structural power of capital
4. Expand democratic control over production.
5. Gradually render hierarchy obsolete through abundance.

This is not a call for vengeance. It is not sadism dressed as justice. It is structural transformation. The revolution worth pursuing is not one that selects new elites, nor one that preserves artisanal privilege, nor one that centers cultural anxieties while prison labor persists. It is one that eliminates the condition in which any human must beg, starve, or submit in order to exist.

Only when survival is guaranteed can solidarity become sincere rather than transactional. Only then can movements stop competing for urgency and begin building a society in which urgency itself is no longer manufactured by deprivation.

The task is not to defend positions within capitalism, but to make capitalism itself structurally impossible.

That is the trajectory.

I. The Postwar Settlement: Concession Under Duress (1945–1960)

After the mechanized slaughter of global war, the industrial democracies confronted a dangerous truth: unrestrained capital had produced collapse, fascism, and catastrophe. In the United States, a compromise emerged. Labor unions retained strength. Marginal tax rates on the wealthy remained high. Public infrastructure expanded. The GI Bill broadened access to education and homeownership—though unevenly applied along racial lines. The state appeared almost benevolent.

But this settlement was not generosity. It was containment. Workers were powerful, socialist movements were global, and the memory of depression still raw. Concessions were granted because elites feared instability. The architecture of surveillance, security agencies, and centralized executive power built during wartime did not disappear. It waited.

Even before the war’s embers cooled, geopolitical calculations exposed the fragility of moral posturing. In 1945, Britain developed Operation Unthinkable—contingency plans for potential conflict with the Soviet Union, including scenarios contemplating rearming German forces. In the United States, Operation Paperclip relocated German scientists, some tied to the Nazi regime, into American military and aerospace programs. Anti-fascism, so loudly proclaimed, yielded swiftly to anti-communism as the organizing doctrine of power.

II. The Red Scare: Manufacturing Obedience (late 1940s–1950s)

The Truman Doctrine framed global politics as a binary struggle. NSC‑68 formalized massive military buildup. Loyalty oaths proliferated. The House Un‑American Activities Committee staged public spectacles. The Hollywood Ten were imprisoned. The Taft‑Hartley Act weakened labor’s militancy by restricting strikes and permitting "right‑to‑work" laws.

McCarthyism did more than persecute individuals; it disciplined imagination. Union leadership purged left elements to survive. Universities avoided controversial scholarship. The press amplified panic. The message seeped into civic culture: structural critique was foreign contamination.

Thus the political spectrum narrowed. Radical egalitarian traditions that once animated American labor movements receded from legitimacy.

III. Civil Rights, Vietnam, and Strategic Realignment (1960s–1970s)

The Civil Rights Movement exposed the contradiction between democratic rhetoric and racial apartheid. Federal legislation dismantled legal segregation, yet economic disparities persisted. Simultaneously, the Vietnam War revealed the machinery of permanent intervention abroad.

As urban uprisings and antiwar protests intensified, political elites recalibrated. Richard Nixon’s "Southern Strategy" capitalized on white backlash. "Law and order" rhetoric translated racial anxiety into electoral strength. The War on Drugs began its expansion.

Economic restructuring compounded the shift. Deindustrialization hollowed out manufacturing regions. Stagflation eroded postwar stability. Rather than revive labor power, policymakers increasingly embraced monetarism and deregulation.

IV. The Neoliberal Counter‑Revolution (1980s)

The Reagan administration institutionalized a philosophy already forming: supply‑side tax cuts, aggressive deregulation, and hostility toward organized labor. The breaking of the PATCO strike signaled that federal power would no longer mediate between labor and capital—it would side openly with capital.

Financialization accelerated. The savings and loan crisis foreshadowed systemic risk. Meanwhile, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 altered media incentives. Talk radio flourished. Ideological broadcasting expanded without balance requirements. Corporate consolidation intensified.

The state shrank rhetorically while expanding in carceral and military dimensions. The prison population rose dramatically. Defense spending remained robust. Government was denounced as inefficient except where it enforced hierarchy.

V. Bipartisan Convergence and the Politics of Management (1990s)

The end of the Cold War did not produce demilitarization; it produced triumphalism. Globalization accelerated through NAFTA and the establishment of the World Trade Organization. Capital mobility increased; labor leverage declined.

The Clinton administration embraced welfare reform, financial deregulation (including repeal of Glass‑Steagall provisions), and expanded policing policies. The ideological message was subtle but persistent: markets were inevitable, redistribution suspect, structural change unrealistic.

Politics narrowed to technocratic adjustment within market boundaries. Class language faded from mainstream discourse.

VI. Permanent Security State (2001–200 cool

The attacks of September 11th catalyzed the USA PATRIOT Act and sweeping surveillance authorities. The Department of Homeland Security was created. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq extended military commitments indefinitely.

Legal rationales for enhanced interrogation, warrantless wiretapping, and expanded executive authority were constructed with bipartisan acquiescence. Fear legitimized expansion. Emergency normalized permanence.

The architecture of digital surveillance matured quietly alongside consumer technology.

VII. Financial Crisis and Institutional Immunity (2008–2010)

The collapse of Lehman Brothers and cascading financial failures revealed systemic fragility rooted in deregulated speculation. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and Federal Reserve interventions stabilized major institutions.

While some reforms followed, few high‑level prosecutions occurred. Foreclosures devastated communities. Public anger surged across ideological lines. Occupy Wall Street named wealth concentration explicitly. Simultaneously, the Tea Party mobilized resentment toward government itself rather than corporate structure.

Distrust deepened. Structural reform remained partial.

VIII. Platform Capitalism and Polarization (2010s)

Social media platforms expanded rapidly, funded by targeted advertising models that rewarded engagement above accuracy. Algorithmic amplification favored emotionally charged content. Political campaigns integrated data analytics to micro‑target persuasion.

Misinformation ecosystems flourished. Conspiracy movements gained traction. Traditional journalism faced economic decline as advertising shifted online. The shared informational baseline weakened further.

The boundaries between entertainment, politics, and spectacle blurred.

IX. Institutional Stress and Norm Erosion (2016–2020)

Populist rhetoric entered executive office. Immigration restrictions intensified. Judicial appointments reshaped federal courts. Political discourse grew openly hostile and personal.

Simultaneously, wealth concentration continued. Corporate lobbying remained robust. Executive authority—expanded across prior administrations—remained intact. The structural foundations laid decades earlier proved resilient regardless of partisan control.

X. Pandemic, Consolidation, and Cultural Fracture (2020s)

The COVID‑19 pandemic exposed supply chain fragility, healthcare inequality, and political polarization. Emergency fiscal measures stabilized markets rapidly, while labor disruptions reshaped employment patterns.

Wealth accumulation among top tiers accelerated during crisis conditions. Cultural debates intensified over public health, speech, and governance. Empathy and expertise were frequently contested in public discourse.

Proposals common in peer democracies—expanded healthcare access, stronger labor protections, wealth taxation—are often described as radical within American debate. The horizon of acceptable reform appears narrower than mid‑century baselines.

Under the iron law of capitalism, all labor is exploited, yet not all labor bears the same weight in the machinery of society. The artisan, the artist, the small manufacturer—these individuals, historically, have occupied a liminal space between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. They enjoy, for a time, privileges denied to the masses whose labor sustains life itself: those who till the soil, construct the dwellings, operate the machines, and keep the wheels of civilization turning. To elevate the struggles of these comparatively protected workers above those of the materially oppressed is to misunderstand the class struggle itself.

Many artists and creators have not opposed capitalism until it began to threaten their comfortable illusions of autonomy. Flexible hours, indoor work, the ability to choose one’s projects—these are conditions that capitalism itself has provisionally granted. Yet now, perceiving precarity, these artisans call for a recentering of the revolutionary struggle around their interests, demanding that the movement prioritize their liberation above that of the already homeless, the chronically underpaid, the imprisoned, and the dispossessed. Such a demand betrays a failure to grasp material reality. Exploitation is universal under capitalism, but it is not uniform. To fight for one’s own fragile privilege while ignoring those whose survival itself is at stake is not revolutionary; it is self-preservation masquerading as radicalism.

The commodification of personal expression further illustrates the contradictions of this class position. Copyright, intellectual property, and the marketization of art constrain creativity, producing legally distinct yet soulless copies and crushing projects that fail to satisfy the market’s logic. The systemic obstacles faced by artists—cease-and-desist orders, profit-driven cancellations, and the race to monetize passion—are the symptoms of a capitalist system in which even creativity must bow to exchange value. And yet, these are not obstacles unique to artists: the very same system produces goods through prison labor, forces the masses into wage slavery, and denies essential needs to millions. The struggle for systemic justice cannot begin with the preservation of the already privileged.

As Marx observed, the lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the artisan, and the shopkeeper, in attempting to defend their fraction of privilege, act conservatively, and even reactionarily, in the grand sweep of history. If they do become revolutionary, it is not from loyalty to principle, but because they are being swept into the ranks of the proletariat, and their struggle is redirected from defending their present comfort to defending their future subjugation. To attempt to lead a revolution from the standpoint of artisan privilege is to desert the material standpoint of the oppressed and to leverage the movement for personal security.

The revolutionary imperative, therefore, is clear: liberation must be pursued in accordance with material reality. All humans deserve freedom from toil, access to sustenance, shelter, water, and energy—fundamental rights that capitalism commodifies and denies. To fight for these is not merely charity; it is the structural dismantling of the chains that bind humanity to labor and exploitation. Measures such as universal basic assets, modest but progressive wealth redistribution, and the reallocation of resources toward the elimination of want are not utopian fantasies—they are the materialist path to post-scarcity abundance.

Art, intellectual work, and creativity are not to be dismissed; they flourish most freely when the material conditions of survival are guaranteed for all. But to treat artists as a separate revolutionary class is to invert priorities, to misread the material foundations of society, and to risk reproducing inequality under the guise of liberation. The struggle must be total, systemic, and aligned first and foremost with those whose exploitation is most immediate and absolute. Only then can the full flowering of human expression—artistic, intellectual, and communal—truly be realized.

The revolution is not a gallery of privileged grievances; it is the uprooting of the material conditions that allow privilege, oppression, and precarity to exist. Those who wish to join it must do so not to preserve their craft or comfort, but to emancipate all laborers, and through that emancipation, to free humanity itself.

https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/