We work the land we can never own
Someday we’ll reap what we have sown

I don’t look east I don’t look west
I don’t understand their accent
If it’s not soldiers it’s foreign debt
But they haven’t won this one yet

Soon from the fields will come fire
To cleanse the lies from all sides
The flames of freedom grow higher
Until desire – is satisfied

http://www.lyricstime.com/little-steven-bitter-fruit-lyrics.html

I don’t understand people who think the global order is stable in the face of mass democratization of communications.

I don’t understand people who think that a family’s garden is the same kind of property as a 100,000 acre farm.

I don’t understand people who can’t see that industrialization reduces the amount of available work – of necessary work to maintain a given standard of living.

Somehow there’s a rigid lock on people’s perceptions, maybe it’s genetic, maybe it’s cultural. They can’t see what technology is really doing out there to the basic processes that make food, water, power. The ground we’re standing on is shifting out of all recognition, and everybody sits watching the terrain in front of them thinking the change is just in their life, that tomorrow will resemble yesterday.

I’m talking obliquely, of course, because when you say these things directly they sound trite. But who assumed that a population with immediate free access to the entire pool of human knowledge would choose to be governed in the same general framework as a population which regarded books as expensive luxuries of the landed classes?

While the future looks like it will be better than the past to most people, they will observe the current order and permit it to continue to exist by investing their time and energy in its maintenance. It’s at the point of inflection, where things start to get worse, that the decision is made: ride the downcycle of the global economy, or strain for a change to a new way of life.

What is not factored in is the economic democide (like genocide, but not of a specific race.) When the WHO says that 36 million people a year die of reasons related to malnutrition, do you not understand that the people who are living in 18,000 square foot penthouse apartments in NYC are partly responsible for this, responsible to the degree that they exercise indirect political coercion to maintain the status quo?

Libertarians seek to escape responsibility for their neighbors by dint of a simple expedience: this is mine, and not yours, and you may not take it. Yet this “mine” they lay claim to was largely created by two factors – the natural riches of the earth, and government fiat through the taxation which produced infrastructure and education in the first place. All land is stolen property made legitimate by the hand-waving of the state, exactly as legitimate as fiat currency. Strip this away, and what remains is the war of all against all, as the starving swarm the rich land to grow what they need, or die at the warehouse doors.

36 million a year. Let me put that into simple numbers: at $1000 per person per year, that would be $36 billion. It’s one day of US GDP, more or less. And I’m not saying the US should pay it, only that the money is there to buy these people the essential infrastructure to survive indefinitely. If this was only aid, it would cost a fraction of $36bn. $36bn would buy what they need to survive for keeps.

What I’m trying to say is that the poor are not idiots. The working class have been doing well enough in the developed world to cease to function as a proletariat in the Marxist sense, but the farmers of the developing world are not doing well enough to cease to function as a proletariat in the Maoist sense. I keep trying to explain this to people, look, we have active Maoist insurgencies all over the agricultural world but everybody thinks communism is dead.

Four billion poor people, online, talking about why we are rich and they are starving. This is the future, and we need to get oriented, face facts, and do something meaningful about social justice – before we are called to accounts for the enormous wealth we have generated, partly on their backs, and the hard eye we have turned to the living conditions of most of the human race.

With great power comes great responsibility, and the childish governments of the west have squandered their opportunities for greatness on petty wars, and declined to engage in the single fundamental story of our times: now there is enough for everyone to eat.

Today I am angry in the way that breaks worlds. I work on infrastructure, and soon on farming, but if you look me in the eye, you will see death.

That the nazis had camps, and the current system simple has slums and villages, does not change the numbers. That pol pot was fast, and poverty is slow, does not change the numbers. The economic genocide of the poor continues unchallenged, unconsidered, while every other cause is celebrated.

The people are hungry. It is time to get out of the way, or get to work. I do not think there is much time to resolve this crisis peacefully, and I sincerely hope that the current status quo cannot be maintained even one more decade.