040 A - Blue Flowers

I got carried away this week remixing “Blue Flowers” by Dr. Octagon. Unbelievably vital lyrics for our time of neo-liberal abandonment. For copyright reasons, I’m not publishing this anywhere, but you can you can download download the MP3 and a 24 bit WAV.

I suspect I’m going to indulge in digressions wherever inspiration strikes. As fun as the various series I come up with are, if another project wants to cut the line, then I’m going to let it for the time being. One must endulge while searching for vitality.

The Edging the Aftertimes spin-off, Sofa Flower Moon is publishing twice a week, giving us all an hour of peaceful focus soundscapes every week. Subscribe or just keep it in mind.

Lastly, this newsletter is a bit extreme, and I know we all enjoy it, but this makes it difficult to share especially if you’re a PMC surrounded by pecker-heads or have commitments in any kind of culturally conservative milieu. If you have any ideas of communities I should share my work with or know anyway to spread the good news send me email, comments etc. I appreciate you all. Have a great week.

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COVID ravages the land. White grievance politics prevent voluntary mask wearing. Thus, if a mask mandate is made, it must be enforced. The police side with white grievance both morally and tactically (by design). So now what? 

They issue the mandate, pay off the cops, and mandates are enforced, but at what secret universe-destroying cost?

Or they issue the mandate, the cops are not paid, the mandates are not enforced but now we know the rulers have no power. 

The second case seems impossible as both the rulers and the cops know that this is the worst-case. Sure the cops "win" but they're not rulers, they know there's nothing to see from the top of the heap. Besides the mandates the rulers provide give cover. It's a lot of work to be in charge. 

The process of how state repression becomes capital exploitation becomes white identity nationalism, is a wild ride but we already know it happened — white dudes love cops, and in turn the cops are very focused on not alienating white grievance, even as their deference causes mass death.

While both sides of this want to cooperate, only the rulers are actually responsive (by design) to the population, so only the rulers face consequences for the mass death the police enabling creates. 

Whatever lives behind the conspiracies is driving a wedge between natural allies by weaponizing white grievance, causing them to stand firmly against the tides of reason and feast on each other’s scat, til they feltch the whole “baked” mass back on the shore of our dying world.

Not surprisingly, historians of the police have made little use of the Marxist theory of capitalist development and class struggle in their analyses. Yet Marx's argument that the police serve “to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labor” is a compelling synthesis of the actual function of the police (Marx, 1974:742). In breaking strikes and impeding working-class organization, the police increase the degree of exploitation by forcing workers to work for low wages. In enforcing public order laws, the police functioned to socialize “new” workers, either immigrants or young people. Marxist theory accurately locates the police institution in it's political context as an integral part of the repressive apparatus of the state. The order which it helps maintain is that of class exploitation and oppression (Lenin, 1970:5-17). Although they may render other services as well, this central economic and political role accounts in large part for the solution of the American place institution. 

“The Development of the Police Institution in the United States” by Sidney Harring, Crime and Social Justice, No. 5 (spring-summer 1976), pp. 54-59 (6 pages)

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