Politics is Violence

how to make it into a sport

I am reading Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. The point seems to be that, come the revolution, the Proletarian Strike by working-class trades-unionists is OK. But the Political General Strike by middle-class socialists is not OK. Maybe I will understand why when I get to the end of the book.

Of course, Sorel was writing in 1906 at the last moment before experts agreed that capitalism wasn’t all dark satanic mills and black lung disease. And that Marx’s prediction of the “immiseration” of the working class due to price and wage competition was not the game-changer he thought.

Obviously there is a vein of instinct that goes very deep in male humans that feels that violence can solve the world’s problems. Or at least his problems and his clan’s / tribe’s / race’s problems.

I like to make the point that boundary wars make a lot of sense for animals that live off the food growing in their territory, including humans.

Back in the day, the price of grain doubled when it was transported by cart for a day. But now it costs $0.10 per bushel per mile to transport grain by semi. Today the ocean transport cost for grain from the Pacific Northwest to Japan is about $1.00 per bushel ($30 per metric ton at 35 bushels per ton).

Remember, at the start of all this in 1492, ocean transport was all about shipping high-priced spices from India to Europe in sailing vessels. We price spices in $/oz; grain in $/ton.

So my point is that it is way, way cheaper to manufacture goods with the division of labor and distribute them around the world by trading than by the old method of conquest and loot and plunder.

But this was not really obvious until well into the 20th century. And not blindingly obvious to educated intellectuals — and everyone else except Bernie Sanders and AOC — until the utter failure of Communism in Russia and China.

Meanwhile, male humans are programmed to fight for access to food. In the Arabian desert, where survival depends on finding the grass that grew up after the last rainstorm, it was considered OK to steal another tribe’s animals to avoid starvation. But it was not OK to plunder the women.

Now we read about an “assassination culture” in Democratic circles. Not to mention the support for Luigi Mangione, accused killer of a health-care exec.

In other words, politics is violence by other means, and violence goes way back.

Here is the story of progress. In the old days they used to talk about riots. Then it was demonstrations. Then it was protests. Then it was peaceful protests. No violence: just mostly peaceful protests. Do you see the point? Any gathering of people in a public space is a show of force, and we have tried to damp that down in recent decades.

You can see that in the good old days, border wars or stealing sheep really was a life or death question. And that is what many male mammals, including apes and humans, are programmed for.

But now humans specialize in the division of labor. Now humans organize production and distribution using the price system and the market economy.

And the intriguing thing is that as this all came together in the 19th century, unleashing unimaginable prosperity, that is exactly when Marx and others decided that the whole thing was a scam, that it propagated monstrous injustice because the capitalists made fortunes while the ordinary worker was paid peanuts. What is going on?

I think that the “fight to survive” instinct is still alive and well in humans, as we should expect, given the slow pace of genetic adaptation. In many ways we have adapted to the lowered risks of our modern era, with the development of male sports and the “deadly” competition between the sports teams of cities and nations where everyone acts as though everything is at stake.

The question is how to adapt the political instinct into harmless channels. Maybe modern “protests” are a peaceful version of the old-fashioned “riot.” The only problem is that the product of modern politics — modern taxation and government spending — are not exactly as harmless as yelling for your team at the big-screen TV. Western nations appropriate about half of their peoples’ income to be directed by politics.

I say that if you believe in Peace, you should have come up with a solution to the big government problem.