"The hard turn for austerity will do damage for years to come. A decade is modestly optimistic" (Ian Welsh)

Modern-day social conditions and tools will naturally produce a more modern approach to ruthless state repression -- but the basic strategy is the same.

"[T]here will be a renewed, and successful push towards what might be called the biometric surveillance state. You will carry ID, your biometric data will be centrally located as well as stored on ID, and this data will be used to control what privileges you have access to. (You have no rights.)"

"What is clear is that the developed world has made a hard turn for austerity, one which will do damage for years to come. A decade is modestly optimistic."

-- Ian Welsh, in the blogpost "Socially how
the next 20 odd years will play out"

by Ken

Since just last night I was noting, in connection with BART's shutting down of cell-phone service to stymy Bay Area demonstrators, that our powers-that-be have been strenuously cracking down on the notion that American citizens have any rights (except the made-up one to own guns), Bill of Rights or no Bill of Rights, so naturally the latest post from our friend Ian Welsh, "Socially how the next 20 odd years will play out," grabbed my attention. I noted that Ian has been doing some sensational writing on the uprising in the U.K. and also interpolating from it. In this latest post he offers his "baseline, loose model for the next generation" with a familiar proviso:

As with most of my predictions, folks will scoff at this one, think I’m hysterical, and doom-monger, and so on. But this is just social mechanics played out over time. This is the glide path; it can be stopped, but it is unlikely to be.

Ian too notes the connection between the BART cell-phone cutoff and the repressive response of the U.K.'s government to the rising wave of protests there, and also harks back to the course set by the powers-that-be in the matter of WikiLeaks.

The decision has been made by [British PM David] Cameron and society in general that the way to respond to the riots is to crack down, hard. They are sentencing people to long sentences for minor crimes (a year for stealing a bottle of water) and they are extending the punishment to families, kicking people out of housing if a member of their family was arrested. They are discussing cutting people off from social networks, and in California today the powers that be cut off cell phone service during an entirely non-violent protest.

The decision has been made to double down on repression. To extend repression to families, a logical extension of our socieity’s obsession with family as above all else, and a very aristocratic thing to do, which reeks of the 17th century. In terms of social media, Wikileaks was the bleeding edge of this, when Paypal, VISA and Mastercard cut off Wikileaks, despite them having been convicted of no crimes, it was clear that access to the modern economy would be held hostage for those who didn’t play the way the oligarchs wanted them to play.

Repression of this sort always spirals. Cut-offs from the internet, from cell phone use, from specific sites, will continue to spread. Sometimes they will be temporary and blanket. Sometimes they will hit individuals. Sometimes they will hit specific sites in specific areas. Access to the modern credit economy will continue to be used as a weapon. There will also be continued removal of the right to travel, with no-fly lists moving to trains, and later to bus stations and eventually there will be a ramp up of stops of automobiles.

"Meanwhile," he says, "the ranks of the permanently unemployed will swell."

At this point companies simply don’t want to hire anyone who has been unemployed for longer than about 3 months, and have a strong preference for the currently employed. If you don’t find a new job in 3 months, you are probably never going to have a good job again. The data is clear on this; what is also clear is that the developed world has made a hard turn for austerity, one which will do damage for years to come. A decade is modestly optimistic.

This will increase social disorder, of course, and our lords and masters and the remnants of the middle and working class who scream “they’re criminals, pure and simple”, will double down on repression, again and again.

ON THE OTHER HAND . . .

Nobody has accused the oligarchs now tightening the screws of being outstandingly smart. And Ian sees them making serious mistakes in their doubling down.

For one thing, he says, "throwing youngsters into prison for very minor crimes is a mistake."

It will harden them, and connect them. This is especially true in British prisons, because British prisoners are a hardened bunch of criminals. But it is a mistake no matter where, because in America and Britain, having ever be thrown in jail means your life is over. Every decent job does a criminal record check, and if you have a criminal record, you will never ever have a good job again. At that point you might as well become a criminal, and why not a revolutionary?

"Which leads to the crackdown on hackers."

Throwing young, bright, technically savvy young adults in with the criminal element is, again, a mistake. The rise of the surveillance state means that tech savvy is going to become very important to anyone who doesn’t want to live by what might be called “Society’s new rules”. And the young hackers have a revolutionary mindset. The combination of men with nothing to lose, with men who have tech skills and believe society is corrupt and needs to be brought down, will be explosive. And since the biometric security state will be done on the cheap, by the sort of incompetents who run the current wars and the current security apparatus, there will be plenty of cracks in the system to exploit.

"Likewise the increase in punitive sentences is a mistake, pure and simple,"

because it means people have less to lose. If a relatively minor crime gets you in for years, and destroys your life, many will make the calculation that they might as well fight, might as well use violent force, rather than be taken.

And in general, Ian says, the plan to deal with increasing social disorder by progressively doubling down on repression "is, of course, a big mistake."

It may turn into a relatively stable solution set in some countries, but they won’t be places you want to live unless you have the morals of totalitarian, and in others it will lead to revolutions, while in others it will lead to outright failed states. We can hope that a few will turn aside from this path. So far in Europe only one country has, Iceland. As with most of my predictions, folks will scoff at this one, think I’m hysterical, and doom-monger, and so on. But this is just social mechanics played out over time. This is the glide path; it can be stopped, but it is unlikely to be.

I've been noting in my series on the atmosphere of "seething revolutionary rage" captured by Umberto Giordano in Andrea Chénier (the third and final part of the series is penciled in for next weekend) that it's beginning to feel familiar. Just think of the exchange in Act I when the mention of Louis XVI's finance minister, Jacques Necker, who was urging political reforms on the king, by the aristocratic swells at the Countess of Coigny's party produces the response that the king "was badly advised" -- as if Necker's desperate attempt to forestall the looming cataclysm was the problem rather than the last hope of preventing it. The king paid dearly for that mistake, but then, so did the country.

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