Category: society

Class Consciousness Is Dead – And It Was Murdered

Class consciousness was once widely understood to be the vehicle that the workers would use to liberate themselves from the divide-and-conquer tactics of the rulers. For that reason, the rulers sought to oppose the flourishing of class consciousness wherever they could. Today, class consciousness is dead – and we can tell you how it was killed.

From the point of view of the ruling class, watching class consciousness take root is like being a feudal lord and watching the peasantry assemble outside your manor with pitchforks and burning torches. You know that you’re going to have to do something about it sooner or later, or risk losing your position.

For the rulers of our society, it’s an imperative to destroy class consciousness wherever they can.

For a long time, the go-to tactic for destroying class consciousness was virulent nationalism. The ruling class had learned that they could take the hate and anger ordinary people had as a result of their suffering, and channel it towards rival neighbours. All they had to do was subject their working classes to several years of propaganda about how the neighbouring nation was evil, and then those working classes could safely be marched off to kill each other, at no threat to the rulers.

The ruling class eventually overplayed their hand. After the Hemoclysm of World Wars I and II, class consciousness made a resurgence. Although fraternisation between opposing troops was rare, it was common enough that the average soldier was able to figure out who their real enemy was – their real enemy was behind them all along.

Returning to the West, these soldiers brought with them an immensely strong class solidarity and a dogged refusal to allow the ruling class to divide and conquer them. This powerful class consciousness set the stage for the economic boom times of the 1950s and 60s. Because class consciousness was so strong, wages were high and working conditions were favourable. One worker could easily buy a house and raise a family on one wage.

The extreme unfashionability of nationalism meant that workers were no longer willing to kill another man simply because he wore a different uniform. The ruling class needed a new way to divide and conquer the workers. The ongoing Civil Rights Movement would provide the inspiration for their next strategic advance.

The masterstroke was to divide and conquer the workers in the exact opposite way to how they were divided and conquered before 1945. Thus, the workers never saw it coming. Whereas they were once united along ethnic lines, now they would be divided along them. Since the advent of neoliberalism, which was when the ruling class started to win back the territory they had lost over the previous 40 years, the working class has been divided among racial lines.

The secret to this has been manipulating a rise in the level of racial consciousness. The logic was that, if racial consciousness could be increased beyond a certain point, both working-class and middle-class people of the same race would come to see each other as being on the same team, and start to see people of the same class but a different race as being on a different team. With this achieved, working-class people of any race would stop fighting for their class interests.

To that end, the ruling class directed their lackeys in the mainstream media to overemphasise racial issues and underemphasise class issues. Any incident of racial conflict was magnified out of proportion and made to appear a terrible evil, while measures that damaged the working class were trivialised or made to appear inevitable (and therefore not objectionable).

Thanks to all of this, the number of people who identify with their race first and foremost has increased sharply, while the number of people who identify with their class first and foremost has decreased. People now say “If Maoris do well, then New Zealand does well,” but no-one ever says “If the working class does well, then New Zealand does well.” They used to – back in the days when class consciousness existed.

Wages were much higher back in the days when class consciousness was stronger than race consciousness, as was housing affordability, which ought to provide a couple of clues as to why it’s important. Sadly, not enough people get it.

Today, the ruling class knows that it can divide the working class neatly in two, simply by appearing to exclusively help the non-white half. They don’t have to actually help them – the Government gives with one hand and takes away with the other – they just have to give the impression that they do, and that they’re ignoring the white proportion of the working class.

As they do this, they tell the non-whites that this advantageous treatment is the result of past white racism. When the whites complain about being demonised, they’re told to suck it up because of the crimes of their ancestors. The outrage and resentment that naturally arises from this inevitably causes the working class to disintegrate from bickering. Then the ruling class laugh and go back to their gated communities.

The reality is that class consciousness is by far the greater threat to the ruling class’s stranglehold on our society than race consciousness ever could be. It allows the working class to present a united front to their rulers, which makes their negotiating position much stronger, and consequently their wages much higher.

A smart person will ask themselves, the next time they see a racial issue being blown out of all reasonable proportion in the mainstream media: what important issues is this hysteria intended to distract me from? In most cases, a small amount of investigation will reveal a class issue that our rulers would rather sweep under the rug. Racial issues were always a distraction from class issues, and the focus on them has made the working class much poorer.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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How To Get Rid Of The 5% Threshold Without Empowering Extremists

New Zealand runs elections under a Mixed Member Proportional system, meaning that parties contesting the election win a number of seats in Parliament proportional to how many votes they receive. This system has advantages and disadvantages, one of the latter being that it facilitates extremists coming to Parliament. Various methods have been adopted to counter this, such as a 5% threshold – this essay suggests a more elegant solution.

As John F Kennedy warned us, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” Although it’s never admitted, the purpose of the democratic system is to pre-empt the violence that inevitably follows when people are not given a say in their own destiny. The problem with totalitarianism is that people resent it, and if they resent it enough they end up killing their rulers.

Democracy is a charade in which the ruling class pretends to take the opinion of the working classes seriously, in exchange for a dampening of revolutionary sentiments among those working classes. If the ruling class can successfully placate the workers, then they can continue to do as they please. If they cannot, then resentment will arise, and this will eventually lead to radical extremism.

Kennedy might have warned us that a 5% threshold to get into the New Zealand Parliament creates a number of problems.

It is set so high that no new party has ever crossed it. In 24 years of MMP elections, the only parties to achieve representation apart from National and Labour were parties that broke away from them (New Zealand First and United Future from National, ACT from Labour, the Greens from the Alliance that itself broke from Labour).

The ruling class considers this a win, but the people consider it a great loss. It has meant that no opinion, other than the mainstream ones, can find expression in Parliament. Only those opinions that have been so thoroughly vetted and curated by the Establishment that they pose no threat are allowed into the House of Representatives. This does little to soothe the people’s feelings of frustration.

It could be argued that having a 5% threshold leads directly to outcomes like the Christchurch mosque shootings. The mass immigration of the last half a century has caused immense resentment among the many who have lost out from it, but their voices are silenced by a system that profits heavily from the cheap labour. Sentiments like these are liable to boil over into xenophobic violence on occasion – a pattern that has been seen all around the world.

There is a possible solution to these tensions – one that has never previously been tried. This is to firstly scrap the 5% threshold, and secondly for each voter to have three votes instead of one. Two of the votes can be cast for any candidate or party, much like the current system, but one vote can only be cast against a candidate or party. This anti-vote cancels out one of someone else’s votes for that candidate or party.

Having two positive votes, one negative vote and no threshold means that (in theory) small parties who do not engender hatred can still achieve representation in Parliament, while the extremists who do engender hatred get eliminated by the negative votes.

Parties like the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party, Social Credit, or The Opportunities Party, who have unfashionable ideas but who are not malevolent or extremist, ought to be able to take some seats in Parliament. The ideas that these parties represent are long overdue for serious consideration, but the 5% threshold has prevented them from ever being represented.

Other parties like the New Conservatives, who combine popular ideas like ending mass immigration with horrendous human rights abuses like increasing penalties for cannabis use, are the reason for the 5% threshold in the first place. It was precisely to keep aggressive, narcissistic, Bible-thumping morons like them away from power that it was invented.

In practice, we could expect that parties like the New Conservatives would attract a high number of negative votes. If the total number of negative votes for a given party was greater than the total number of positive votes, they would receive no seats in Parliament. Therefore, the ability to cast a negative vote would mean that human rights abusers could be kept out of Parliament, but not at the expense of other small parties who have ideas the country needs to hear.

Then again, Germany has a 5% threshold (our version of MMP was modelled on theirs) and they have six parties currently polling well over that. So it could be argued that the New Zealand political class severely lacks imagination, which is the reason why no party other than Labour, National, Greens or New Zealand First has ever presented a compelling enough case to get over the threshold.

The positive/negative vote model would allow our electoral system to not only measure and weigh the sympathy of the public for the various political platforms, but also to measure and weigh their antipathy for those platforms. The biggest advantage with this suggestion is that platforms that inspired disgust, hatred and contempt would now find themselves judged for that, instead of getting away with it.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Would Andrew Yang’s Universal Basic Income Scheme Work In New Zealand?

Of all the candidates for the Democratic nomination for the American Presidential Election later this year, none have the intellectual pedigree of Andrew Yang. From the demented Joe Biden to the snotty Elizabeth Warren to the weakling Bernie Sanders, the Democratic field seems mediocre in comparison. This article discusses one of Yang’s most popular ideas – the Universal Basic Income – and whether it’s applicable to New Zealand.

The maths is hard to escape.

Let’s assume we directly adopt Yang’s proposal of $1,000 per month, no questions asked, for every qualifying adult, with no adjustment made for the exchange rate. This equals $12,000 per year per person over 18. As there are at least 3,667,000 such adults in New Zealand, a UBI would require an expenditure of around $44,000,000,000 per year. This a hefty sum of money – but it’s a good deal for New Zealand if the costs of not having a UBI would be greater.

Yang suggests that he would pay for a UBI mostly by consolidating welfare programs and by introducing a 10% VAT on all goods and services.

Something that many UBI opponents fail to consider is that the introduction of a UBI would obviate the need for almost all benefits, which could then be scrapped. The unemployment benefit, the sickness benefit, the invalid’s benefit, the student allowance and the pension could all be shitcanned in one go. This means all the bureaucracy and expense associated with them would also go.

The Government spent $34,000,000,000 on welfare last year, a figure that includes the cost of running the welfare bureaucracy. The Ministry of Social Development, in a manner of speaking, is the welfare bureaucracy – it employs public servants in over 200 different locations around New Zealand. It’s a titanic institution.

With a UBI, all of those public servants would be made redundant, the bureaucracies that employ them would be wound down, and the 200 locations that currently house them sold off. As the Ministry of Social Development costs $27,000,000,000 a year to run – and that’s only the core expenses – getting rid of all this would provide 70-75% of the required funding for a UBI.

The Government brought in around $22,000,000,000 last year from the Goods and Services Tax, currently set at 15%. The GST is a tax beloved of modern Governments because it’s hard to avoid – pretty much every legitimate business has to account for it. Also, being a consumption tax, it’s all but unavoidable even for the most miserly person. Even if you only spend $200 a week to keep yourself alive, you will pay $30 in GST that week.

America doesn’t have a federal GST, so the introduction of one at 10% would be the equivalent of New Zealand raising ours from 15% to 25%. Most European countries have GST rates of between 20% and 25%, so this would be nothing extraordinary.

It’s not guaranteed that increasing GST to 25% (i.e. a relative increase of 67% compared to the 15% it is now at) would necessarily increase GST take by a proportionate amount. Higher taxes may lead to increasing rates of tax evasion (although, as mentioned above, GST is difficult to avoid).

If it did, however, then 67% of $22,000,000,000 would mean a further $14,700,000,000.

Add this to the sum of $27-34,000,000,000 for obsoleting the Ministry of Social Development, and we have somewhere around $42-48,000,000,000. This is enough to cover the cost of a UBI mentioned above. Once Yang’s other revenue-gathering measures (such as a transaction tax) are accounted for, there might even be enough to grant slightly more than $1,000 per month (which would otherwise only be about as much as the current unemployment benefit).

All of this is before we try to estimate the economic benefits of what would, in practice, amount to a powerful stimulus. The economic benefits of empowering individuals to turn down shitty working conditions, coupled with the physical and mental health savings accrued from sharply reducing the financial stress among the population, could be worth several billions in their own right.

In the end, Andrew Yang’s proposal to get rid of the American welfare bureaucracy could be applied in New Zealand wholesale. We also have the problem that we spend billions of dollars on office staff merely to determine who’s worthy of being allowed to eat and who isn’t. Scrapping the Ministry of Social Development, along with increasing GST by 10%, would allow us to fund a Universal Basic Income for all adult Kiwis.

New Zealand has already embarrassed itself by having less enlightened cannabis laws than 70 other nations. Hopefully we won’t have to wait for 70 other nations to introduce a UBI before the merits of such are understood in New Zealand.

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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The Four Main Opponents Of Cannabis Law Reform

With the date for the cannabis law reform referendum now set, the battlelines have been drawn. The opposing forces have taken up their positions: the pro-cannabis forces on the side of God, and the anti-cannabis forces on the side of suffering, misery, ignorance and hate. This essay describes the four major groupings of opponents to cannabis law reform.

The first major group of opponents to cannabis law reform are simple cowards.

There’s a certain kind of person who is terrified of anything new, of any change at all – they can be called neophobic. In much the same way that a certain kind of person shit their pants at the sight of their town’s first Indian restaurant, there is a certain kind of person who shits their pants at any thought of a new psychoactive substance.

This teeming mass of sheep-like idiots comprise about half of the opponents to cannabis law reform. They also comprised a large proportion of the people who opposed homosexual and prostitution law reform, and they will comprise a large proportion of those who oppose the next change, no matter how obviously needed or overdue that change is.

The second major group of opponents are the sadists who oppose cannabis because of its healing and medicinal properties.

Hard as it may be to believe, there are many people out there who just want to create as much suffering and misery as possible, usually because it brings them a sense of gratification and power. In much the same way that sadism exists in many of Nature’s creatures, so too does it exist within the human animal. The human sadist recognises the medicinal properties of cannabis – which is why they seek to withhold it from those who would benefit.

Also in this group are the retards who will guzzle alcohol like there’s no tomorrow and belch smoke like a 19th-century factory from their cigarettes, but won’t touch cannabis on account of that it’s a “drug”. There are plenty of alcoholics out there who have boozed themselves into a state of permanent retardation, and some of these people, owing to this brain damage, support harsher sentences for cannabis users.

The third major group of opponents are the turboautists who can’t into anything as mysterious as cannabis use.

Cannabis use, like other spiritual enterprises, can be an extremely humbling experience. It can teach you that you really knew nothing about the world, and about life. The intellectually conceited sort of person, the one who has an egoic need to establish themselves as a recognised intellectual authority, has extreme difficulty with such revelations. They prefer ideological security and safety.

The intellectually arrogant are the same group of people who see all cannabis use as stupefying. They can’t get their heads around the truth of it because there are no recognised peer-reviewed journals on the subject. For these people, all talk of spirituality is mental illness, and so if smoking cannabis leads to a person talking about God, then smoking cannabis drives people crazy. They don’t want legal cannabis because it shows them up as the spoofers they are.

The final major group of opponents are the spiritual liars.

Cannabis is a spiritual sacrament, and has been used continuously for thousands of years for this purpose. Unfortunately, a great number of people in the West today are spiritually dead. Not only do they not believe in God, but they believe that death is the end on account of that the brain generates consciousness. This is not a natural state of affairs – it is because they have been lied to.

There are spiritual criminals out there who earn a living from withholding from people the truth about God and about consciousness, and then selling some watered-down, padded-out, corrupted version of it for a fee. These criminals have always tried to establish themselves as intermediaries between the people and God, and in order to make this profitable they have needed to destroy all true spiritual movements and methodologies.

These criminals recognise that cannabis makes their position untenable, on account of that it’s a spiritual sacrament that leads people to God directly. Consequently, they act to keep cannabis illegal, for the sake of holding people in a state of profitable ignorance.

These four groups cover the basic emotions that motivate people to oppose cannabis law reform: fear, cruelty and ignorance.

Some people fall into more than one of these groups. Many pretentious intellectuals are also cowards who don’t dare to step outside of well-travelled paths; many religious fundamentalists are also sadists. Someone like Bob McCoskrie might fall into all four: the pants-pissing, shit-talking, hippie-bashing religious bigot is almost the archetypal prohibitionist.

Changing the attitudes of anyone in one of these four groups is easier said than done.

There isn’t much that can be done to persuade the cruel and the evil, because the more information you give them, the more power they have to cause suffering. Those who are ignorant can be persuaded of the merits of cannabis law reform by appealing to the successful examples of reform overseas. Those who are cowards can be persuaded by showing them the rest of the herd changing their direction.

Ultimately, cannabis will continue to be used more by Maoris, by young people, by non-Christians and by freethinkers, and so anyone who hates one or more of those groups will tend towards opposing cannabis law reform out of spite. Anyone not motivated by hate, but rather by honest ignorance or naivety, can easily be persuaded to see how cannabis prohibition isn’t in their best interests.

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Vince McLeod is the author of The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, the comprehensive collection of arguments for liberalising New Zealand’s cannabis laws.

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