16 March 2009: "Gotta stop drinking bottled water // I feel guilty abt stuff"

This post is about Josef Stalin. Is our capacity to feel guilt what prevents us from succumbing to the ruthlessness of Stalin? Or does guilt become irrelevant when we become caught up in the fervor of a cause, like the social causes Carles itemizes in this post?

Sometimes I don’t ‘get’ why ppl care about ‘the environment’ so much… It’s like they think that we’re ‘going to be around 4ever’ and ‘we should care about ppl who live after we die.’ I think we should do everything we can 2 find pleasure in our lives’ while we can. We don’t have much time, and if we start worrying about 1 person can’t make a difference, so don’t make a ’sacrifice’ if not every1 else will.

Uncle Joe couldn't have said it better himself.

Stalin was a mediocre party functionary in the early days of the Bolshevik revolution, after which he demonstrated an uncanny power to shift blame and take credit, rising to the top of the bureaucracy by carefully pitting his rivals against each other. This is not unlike the competition between bottled waters that Carles notes. "I don’t rlly ‘get’ the Bottled Water Industry. It seems like every1 has ‘the same product’, but for different reasons, ppl tend to ‘like’ one type over the other. I feel confused." The Communist party in the Soviet Union bristled with differences of opinion, but Stalin was able to divide and conquer because he grasped the all-important bottom line, that beyond these differences all that matter was power for its own sake, exercised absolutely. His brand was undivided authority.

To extend its power, he routinely ignored science or had his minions recast it in his image. Carles offers this glimpse at what contemporary Stalinism might consist of: "but srsly… do yall know if some1 has scientifically proven that ‘recycling is bullshit’? If I were mayor of a city, I would give ppl recycling bins, but just take all of that trash 2 the landfill." Science is deployed to produce facts that an executive power can exploit to march the masses through meaningless acts of obedience.

Carles concludes with another classic theme from Soviet propaganda. After noting his contempt for propagandists -- "I feel guilty for being so privileged and having a world of opportunities at my finger tips. h8 when ad gurus create these design/advertising/marketing memes that challenge my reality just bc they are trying to ’sell something’" -- he illustrates the tried-and-true Soviet theme of the knee-jerk callousness of the privileged capitalist classes:

Leave me alone /
Let me ‘be wasteful’ /
Stop reminding me abt /
the 3rd world /
And other sad shit /
like mortality /
and global sustainability /

But cleverly, Carles inverts the propaganda: the isolationist tendencies were actually most pronounced under Stalin, who advocated "socialism in one country," and who then pursued a policy of third-world imperialism to counter the capitalist countries' efforts in that domain. And no one knew the cleansing power of mortality like Stalin, who killed millions to protect the "sustainability" of the Soviet regime.

With this ambiguous lyric, Carles forces us to consider whether Stalinism lurks behind individualistic efforts to protect the enivronment, whether these gestures are the building blocks for a return to authoritarianism, for "the good of the planet."