The musical bucks game

Raw, genuine humans

OK, so you are born and, biologically, you are a big headed ape with a evolutionary history of hunter-gatherer 99.99% or more. Sure, you are somewhat smart but elephants and some dolphins are too: Neanderthals were too and they went extinct anyhow. I mean not that smart that you can normally outsmart the game itself, just a two or three times smarter than chimps and that's about it. 

But that would be all right if you lived a plentiful natural life, as happened in about 95% of the history of humankind (understood as H. sapiens). In those times most people had almost full control of their rustic lives while at the same time living in supportive communities. Of course, life always has issues but otherwise it was fine: it was as it was meant to be. 

I'll skip the transition(s). Today we are born the same but we are asked a lot more. Sure, some stuff is easier because of technology (notably plumbing, heating and washing machines), but there is a big caveat: you are not anymore in control, someone else is. 

Someone who controls the distribution of a code: money. Money can be (more or less) golden coins as in old times, can be printed paper as it was dominant till recently or it can be just encrypted numbers in a computer network. I have described money as a chaotic and terribly unfair rationing card. It is nothing else... in essence. 

But in consequence it is much more: it is a bait that you are trained to follow. 

Once Monopoly had a more honest name (source)

Since early childhood you are directed by parents and all society to follow the trail of money, to desire it, to make what you can to get it. And for good reason (in a sense) because, in this society, with money you survive and without money you have many problems or even die.

This is absolutely not in the hunter-gatherer's handbook to life, in our genes. But we are intelligent animals, with flexible, plastic brains that can learn. So we do learn, better or worse. 

Intelligence as such does not help because it is intelligent people who see easier through the fallacy of the value of money, as they do with any other social referential belief (religion, etc.) On the other hand, if you manage to conciliate your intelligence with the social fetish of money, then you can really thrive because you have the best of both worlds. But it's easier to accept things just because "everybody believes it" if you are not too smart, that's clear (and in fact there is a negative correlation between IQ and religious faith, for instance). 

I personally suspect that's the reason why our brains are on average smaller than in the Upper Paleolithic: because living in large societies like those created by civilization is not the best environment to boost brains but rather to boost credulity and conformity. 

In any case, for most people at least, by means of this "magical" fetish known as money, control of their own lives is lost. (True, I know that in early civilizations this may have happened without money as well, but I said I'd skip the transitions). 

You are born and trained better or worse to a game for lab-rats known as "follow the buck, gather the buck, spend the buck".  In the end we are here just rats (or apes or whatever animal you wish to compare with) trained by more or less perfected Pavlovian methods into playing a complex and dramatic game that could well be known as Gladiator Monopoly. 

A game in which we are forced to bet our lives and a game that is not anymore even the old good martial stuff of kill each other with swords and spears but a sublimation (Freud would say) of such bloody game into one of musical chairs. 

But who loses his/her chair dies as well.

Not for being civilized (hypocritical, sophisticated, indirect, twisted) the game is less bloody: it is similarly deadly. 

But not even a honorable death is allowed anymore. Since Christians and such abolished the legitimacy of suicide, it has become a dirty affair. But maybe worse than the Christian damnation imposed on this exit to the troubles of life, it is the stigma of being a death of losers. 

And this issue of losers and winners is clearly a Capitalist thing. You are supposed to play the musical bucks game, you have little choice but to bet your life in it... but you are not even acknowledged the right to lose graciously. 

Why?

Because it is your life and not your death what the game and the (always temporary) winners of the game want. They do not want your ritual sacrifice, they want your whole life (with emphasis in the productive and reproductive aspects of it, leisure and joy are not in their interest) and, once they get it or at least while they believe they can get it, you are not allowed to exit. 

Not fair and not sportsmanly. But while you are thrown into the cage-labyrinth, forced to fight your way in the musical buck game, impeded generally from a honorable exit in form of dignified suicide and forced to work as slave in the real life equivalent of a hamster wheel... you are still able to rebel. 

You, possibly in coalition with many others, can indeed decide that, as you know what the game is about (conscience of exploitation and alienation), you do not want to play it anymore. Because the whole Earth has been appropriated as "board" for this sadistic game involving also minors (disciplinary and propagandistic training, and even direct exploitation, begins in early childhood: total child abuse, sexual or of other kinds) you may need to concede while you organize and plan ahead how to tear down the system and how to organize a new and better system (realistically returning to Paleolithic conditions is not possible)... but you are trapped: you have no dignified exit other than rebellion. 

Because submission is not dignified at all. It is admittedly an option (the main option you are being trained for since the beginning) but neither an exit nor much less dignified.

It depends on you, you choose. It is a vital kind of choice and it is a choice that may decide the future of the wholes species and planet. I already made mine long ago. 

But first one needs to become aware, that's why I write this kind of stuff: to make you think, to make myself think as well - because if we stop thinking we lose, not the game (the game cannot be won) but our dignity as free and intelligent animals.

Democracy strikes back: PayPal, MasterCard and other financiers that bowed to inquisition against Wikleaks suffer hacker-rage

As more and more companies bow to the pressure by the USA and lackeys to destroy Wikileaks (what does not seem really possible, specially now that has become a cause célèbre) hacktivists around the world have reacted with cyberattacks against such sites. At the moment of writing this Mastercard services are at best unstable. 

The list of attacked sites include PayPal, Mastercard and the Swiss Bank Post Finance. 

Anonymous

According to BBC a notorious hacktivist group by the name Anonymous are the main ringleaders. A member said that the attacks are meant to be just a wake-up call to the companies. There has been no judicial action against Wikileaks as such and, as has happened in previous less notorious cases, the closures have been triggered by mere assessment notices from the executive branch (the White House, as most of these companies are based in the USA). It is a clear case of "guilty till declared otherwise"

The actions also mean loss of credibility for US and Switzerland based companies, which are showing to the World that they are anything but safe hubs for trade. Naturally I'd be doubly wary of doing transactions with PayPal now that I know that a mere executive branch commentary can render my account null without notice and without trial of any sort.

(see BBC for instance, if you need a source)

Cyberwars ahead?

Will the USA use this matter to prompt the application of Internet emergency procedures? The USA has been planning towards cyberwars and Internet control and it has become a matter of speculation if they will launch a self-attack (much more severe than this "soft warn" by what seem genuine hacktivists with best intentions - even if also rude manners). 

The plans do exist and are considered central to the (doomed) US empire-building strategy. This hackstivism will probably not be enough pretext for their implementation in full but may bring the USA (and many satellites) to decide that parts of it be implemented as soon and as widely as possible. 

It is very possible that, in order to gain a better pretext they may orchestrate a self-attack. It was a possibility already but I suspect that now the imperial rulers may think such plans as more urgent than ever before. 

But can the Internet be controlled? I doubt it very much. 

Class War in the Net

In spite of Assange, who at least once showed himself hostile to the very concept of Communism, the rising tension around the Wikileaks affair (not anymore just the leaks but every day more for the repression that is going on), has a Class War dimension to it. 

Even if highly specialized, hackers are workers who possess, as all qualified workers, a precious know-how. Knowledge that is more and more a central component of Capital (and hence the attempts to copyright/patent everything). By using this know-how to sabotage the system, they remind the oligarchs where the

power lays. 

Essentially this is not different than striking workers seizing refineries, slowing traffic, blocking trucks from entering distribution lounges...

But today knowledge, know-how and also more or less raw science, is one of the main battlefields of the Class War. Now a major apportion of Capital exists in intellectual form, part of which is patented/copyrighted/secret but piracy, Wikileaks, alternative online media, etc. all show that capitalization (appropriation) of knowledge is very feeble. 

Another key element here is money, electronic money in all variants, which has been shown to be highly vulnerable and which is central to the very functioning of the system as most rewards and punishments are administered with this tool of monetary virtuality. We are talking of the very financial system at its very core potentially. What would happen if millions of accounts were erased or blocked in a cyberattack. I doubt that there is any way of totally preventing such thing other than shutting the Internet down altogether, what is a clear case of cure worse than the illness or trying to kill mosquitoes with a cannon. 

How far will this conflict, described by some Anonymous as a clash of "the people versus the government", will go? Will the Empire try to classify these kind of actions as "terrorism"? Will they succeed in imposing this ideological tag? How? What means will it use? Will it make a fake attack against itself? 

I'd say that we are at the eve of some such attempt of regain control of the virtual zone, of intellectual property by means of censorship and inquisition, which will try to improve their moral stand by presenting all opposing them as terrorists. However 2011 is not 2001, now the economic and social situation is bad and only seems to deteriorate even further, including too many obvious cases of abuse of power in favor of the oligarchies (from the BP catastrophe to the mortgagegate in the USA to the debt-related blackmailing of the popular classes in Europe). People today is much less likely to believe the official lies and accept as necessary increased institutional repression. 

The USA and the late capitalist oligarchies that rule the World are hysterical and behaving like the proverbial elephant in the china shop. They are scaring everybody, getting nearly everyone against them... 

They are completely failing in their role as leading elites of society. If Capitalism managed in the past to generate large consensus it was because the elites dedicated at least some effort to keep large swathes of population more or less content. However now they seem to have decided that, as the Cold War is over and it is therefore less likely that established powers such as the former USSR could capitalize the discontent, they can afford now to get people unhappy and even angry. 

That is why it is so important to react and draw red lines as this group of hacktivists is doing, because each action that shows how workers wield real power on the system, not only helps to contain the offensive of the masters of Capital but also builds strength for an eventual revolutionary solution to this dead end. 

Everyone or no one, everything or nothing,

one alone cannot save himself.

Everyone or no one, everything or nothing,

either the guns or the chains. 

Bertolt Brecht

It has been a long transgenerational struggle but the scenario we are in is very much suggestive of that of a final struggle. All elements converge: an advanced working class with possession of key power over the whole Capitalist system and that is becoming more and more conscious and daring, a global communication network that allows for real time transfer of information (the real nature of power is connection and knowledge, nothing else except maybe consciousness and willpower), a system in clear accelerated decadence and degenerated up to the point of losing all credibility in a matter of months or years at most, a determined but aimless offensive of the Capitalist oligarchy against the working and middle classes (yes, small companies are also set to be plundered), an excessive dependence on delicate systems such as the Internet or the more generic social knowledge (two sides of the same coin) and totally unreal pillars such as the degenerated monetary system in all its aspects.

So it looks to me like we are already in the final class struggle, which can only have one final outcome (other than catastrophic failure as species) but too many uncertain ways to arrive there.

Of course, all finals are new beginnings and that's precisely what we want, right?