American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) comes down the moment that Patrick Bateman confronts his lawyer in person after leaving him an emotional confession over voicemail the night before. The lawyer is at first joking, then serious, then offended... he doesn't believe Bateman's experiences, in fact, he doesn't even think he is talking to Patrick Bateman. It's this complete dispossession of his identity, his great experiences that leads Bateman to insist "Don't you know who I am?" over and over to his lawyer, existentially insistent that he is, that his deeds have been.

Many first world communist parties have attached themselves to the "1% vs 99%" analysis of capitalist society. However, they have done so uncritically. A 99% v 1% analysis is fundamentally too vague to be useful as an analytical tool when looking at how policy is formulated and carried out in any political system. This is reflected by occupy's focus on campaign financing and relatively inconsequential legal fictions like corporate personhood.

We have arrived, as a species, at a peculiar juncture in the development of our shared world-system. An interdigitating set of political-economic and ecological crises looms large, threatening centuries of deprivation for our descendants, if not outright extinction. An absurdly unjust system of global capitalism, benefitting a tiny minority of kleptocrats and criminals, staggers mindlessly toward oblivion. As unrest grows and these crises intensify, it has become painfully obvious that no reform of this revolutionary state-capitalist machine is possible. It will destroy itself, and us with it, plunging us into debt-serf neofeudalism or worse, if we do not stop it.

In a neoliberal framework, choice is paramount. Contemporary notions of human rights stress the importance of a person living free from state coercion and this has filtered through our culture to mean that no one should be able to tell you what to do over your own wishes - so long as you hurt no one else. Cajoling and manipulation are evidently okay, but someone cutting to the chase and telling you you "can't" or "shouldn't" do something chafes our sensibilities. Politics becomes something that is negative-rights based.

Notions of broad American populism are popular on the white “left”, but nearly all the gains from broad American populism go to a privileged strata of white people. When radicals divorce the 99% rhetoric from the history of American populism, they are ignoring how that broad rhetoric has been used to exclude the needs of the disenfranchised. Without a POC-centered strategy, nothing is stopping the ruling class from using the same tools to reduce class tensions.

For advocates of social justice the problem of postmodernity is generally seen in terms of political impotence, specifically a subjective, individual impotence. The conditions of postmodernity are allegedly such that the pre-emptive co-option of social action into the reproduction of capital is assured. Capital, despite creating first and foremost its own gravediggers, has somehow 1. achieved hegemonic dominance, 2. circumvented the creation of alternative productive modes, and 3. completely subjugated the site of resistance, the working class, into its reproductive program.

In "Is The Red Flag Flying" (1979), Al Szymanski examined empirical research on the Soviet Union and came to the conclusion that the USSR was socialist, but that technical and professional intelligentsia (those "who develop and disseminate knowledge and skills and who provide professional services") had disproportionate influence over policy. However, "the managerial stratum appears to be significantly closer to the manual working class than is the scientific-technical intelligentsia". "Socialism Betrayed" by Keeran and Kennan noticed that this intelligentsia was dominated by right-opportunists who wanted to introduce capitalist "reforms".

In this way, one could see great potential in Cybersyn, at least on the surface, in that the aim of regulating value is essentially an exercise of trying to bias the system, i.e. society, towards some goal by the system controller, and that could theoretically be done by a true democratic vote. We could have our cake and eat it too... In contrast, the market is an autonomous entity, a beast prone to roam wild until it is attacked and consumed by some other beast, more vicious and powerful. However, it is also precisely because of that potential for control that Cybersyn suffers a fatal flaw: it will never be able to maintain itself in balance while maintaining an accurate representation of the underlying economy it seeks to model.

For the most part, the directors (“interventors”) of the new state industries were competent, however, some were not, and it was difficult to determine the difference with the few existing channels of communication between industry and state. In August of that month, Fernando Flores, the young intellectual who had been named General Manager of the CORFO, the state institution that regulated the recently nationalized factories, flew to England to meet with a very peculiar man. Bearded and eccentric, lacking any formal degree in cybernetics or computer sciences, Stafford Beer was a visionary in the mold of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, with one key difference – he was a socialist, even a techno-communist. He spoke no Spanish. However, he communicated to Flores – in broken Latin – that he very much desired to offer his expertise to the Chilean project.

the working class is under attack worldwide and will not gather around one flag because the one flag concept is what is attacking them. leftist protesters in the united states have the wherewithal to wave flags. they don't mind. they understand the forces at work against them are flagless, and we count on footage of pigs trampling the flag while they beat your ass to stir that kernal of patriotism still embedded deep in every american thanks to years of pledging the damn thing in grade school. it's a smart move and very practical at this juncture. globalization depends on a fake front of dissolution of nation states to get by.