Master-Slave Dialectic

Scrolling through the morning news what jumps out at a reader are all the smartphone videos of police brutality, an issue that Caitlin Johnstone addresses in "Smartphone Cameras Are The Windows Into Society’s Soul."

If you have had a conflict on the street with an officer of the peace, you know that this is how things usually go. The police are trained to use overwhelming force if their authority is challenged.

Recalling my university days and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, this is the dynamic that guides lordship and bondage, a.k.a., the master-slave dialectic. And, FYI, it doesn't work out for the master. Overwhelming force as a solution freezes the master's consciousness, while the overwhelmed slave has to use her noggin to figure a way out of her dominated state. Off she goes to a higher stage in the dialectic.

That's where we are at now. The neoliberal state -- absent all its bells and whistles -- is reduced to gross displays of brute force to maintain fealty.

It's hard to see how it survives, even if somehow jobs were added in May.

UPDATE: The latest from Caitlin Johnstone:

A police force which cannot respond to protests about police brutality without the internet being flooded with a steady stream of police brutality footage is a police force in sore need of drastic overhaul. It has already been proven that that is in fact the case. There’s no taking it back. There’s no fixing it. It’s done. The debate is officially over. Huge, sweeping changes must immediately be made, and there’s no valid reason for the protests to stop until that has occurred.