It's easier to remove a king because a king is a single person, easily identifiable, tangible and living.
An establishment is none of those things, it's murky and unclear, it's lots of different people and nobody all at once.
I think she was talking about removing the system of monarchy, not removing a king. The former is much harder.
Much harder. Which is why the Commonwealth of England only lasted 11 years...and we still have a freaking monarchy ruling by divine rights now...
we still have a freaking monarchy ruling by divine rights
Technically, sure. But, when was the last time the monarch flexed his/her muscles and used his/her power? There are rumours that in 2010 Elizabeth refused to allow another election. But, that barely counts. She didn't pick a winner, she didn't influence the election, she just said that she was just going to withhold her rubber stamp, to call another election. Then there's Australia in 1975 when the governor general (acting on behalf of the queen) fixed a deadlocked parliament by removing the PM, appointing his opponent, and requiring that an election be called immediately. Before that, you have to go back to Churchill being appointed as PM despite not being the leader of his party. But, again, that wasn't some task the monarch took on alone, he was advised by the whip, the PM, and various other people in top government spots.
IMO the current constitutional monarchies are basically republics with a safety valve. If the monarchs ever abuse their power, they know that the countries would happily switch over to a full republic. But, they can be tolerated, maybe even loved, if their only roles are ceremonial plus the occasional nudge to unstick the gears when they get jammed.
I just don't agree that having a monarch that is the head of a church can ever be accepted. Plus, the royals do vet many, many bills from the government and change them.. The monarchy also receives the inheritance from anyone that dies on "their" land without a will. And to top it all off, the Queen gained many, many exemptions to racial equality laws.
They have a lot more power than is often let on. And even if they didn't, what is the argument for having a useless bunch, including known paedos, get money from the tax payer just because they were born into a certain family? I can't make it make any kind of moral sense.
king has never been a single person that was easily identifiable. it is was a huge extended family, distant relatives, lords with no blood relation, central army of the king and multiple armies of many lords, huge institutions that manage every aspect of life on behalf of the king. it was never about getting rid of a single, individual king. there were literally hundreds of people in line at any given time. it was just like today, and it seemed just as impossible.
This is more about removing the system than the individual. People believed that the right of kings was divine, and when you believe that, it’s hard to argue for anything else.
Let's replace the king in this example with religion then. It's pretty much removed or at least had lost the power it had just 100 years ago
You can remove a king, but can you remove the concept of a single person ruling over a territory?
Kim Jong Un isn't a king, but he is a single individual ruling over North Korea. Putin isn't a king, but he has the powers of one. Then there are examples from history like the Roman Republic, and the Weimar Republic.
IMO governments are basically a hierarchy where if things become "stable" enough, you can replace one with another one higher up the hierarchy. But, without work, they'll eventually collapse into something lower down the hierarchy.
At the bottom of the hierarchy you have violent anarchy, where nobody is in charge and various groups are all vying for power. If things become stable enough, one powerful person (or small group (often headed by one person)) can take charge, and you get an autocratic / dictatorship type system. If the dictator is removed, you will often descend back into violent anarchy. But, if things get stable enough, sometimes you can replace that dictator with a kind of republic, either something like a constitutional monarchy, or a democratic republic. The former dictator might become a figurehead while power is held by a medium sized group who is elected by the public. If you don't take care, that kind of system can devolve into an autocratic one, where one person holds absolute power. You might still have elections, but they don't really change anything.
So, even though the "divine right of kings" is mostly gone, that was just window dressing on an autocratic system. And, we can easily get back to that kind of a system now. In fact, many supposedly democratic places are backsliding towards that right now.
P.S. I think there's probably other forms of government higher up the hierarchy than democratic republics / constitutional monarchies. We should be trying to get there, instead of assuming that a democratic republic is the best possible system in the world. But, at the same time, we need to guard against allowing a democratic system to backslide into becoming an autocracy.
Kim Jong Un is definitely a king, whatever he calls himself.
He's the hereditary ruler of a state that maintains its grip with the personal loyalty of the military.
Guy Debord captures the problem best in his The Society of the Spectacle (1967).
In theory, you could probably go against it. Problem is that the Spectacle (capitalist ideology visually manifested) is tautological and self-reinforcing. Even to critique it you have to make the critique a spectacle, which immediately undermines that very same critique (think of any YouTube video critiquing YouTube).
So no, it's no the same. The odds are insanely stacked up in favor of keeping the structure in place—unlike breaking away from said belief in the divinity of kings.
I love how LeGuin can take concepts and make them as real as capitalism (The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest). Is there any modern speculative authors doing this?
OK, how?
Refuse to buy things? Live in a cardboard box?
Supply and demand. Either reduce the demand or increase the supply and costs go down. Now target the things people need to survive and the cost to exist goes down.
Then they downsize workers and further erode merchantability while jacking up prices. Capitalism is a race to the bottom, and those at the top have made sure they will literally be the last to fall. You want to get a billionaire to sell their 4th yacht, it'll only cost us a million people going hungry.
There are ways out of capitalism, but the only fast ones are violent and worse than capitalism themselves. We should be working on moving towards incorruptable governance and social expansion. It happens in slow steps. The millionaire tax in MA managed one of those steps recently, despite some pretty dramatic opposition by the ultrawealthy.
Realistically? Only successful and subsequent revolutions will resolve anything.
Absolute monarchy and feudalism ended after the bourgeoisie revolutions of the 17th and 18th century. Only after then.
Organizing politically.
While private ownership of production is in place, there's no amount of boycott we could reasonably do too make changes. As you've noted, it would end up starving people and making them homeless.
On the lowest effort end. Using the power we currently have; we should vote for the least fascist of the two party members. This will not save us, but it will slow the decay and give time to others who are more actively working to solve the problem.
People with more time and effort, should organize. Push for getting rid of the first past the post voting systems and replacing them with less broken voting systems. Try to create leftist candidates and get them elected locally. Spread leftist ideology to public.
RIP. She wrote the best dragons
This is a nice idea. But, it’s an oversimplification. To replace capitalism, we’d need to replace it with something more powerful.
Kings were overpowered by the merchant. If we want to overcome capitalism, something new must overpower the merchant.
The people.
What does removing the king look like in our deeply ingrained, hyper capitalist society?
Get rid of billionaires first as they are the #1 problem. Then go step by step.
The French did it before, so we can do the same
I feel like we have a lot more obstacles in our way than the French did during their revolution. Most notably heavily armed militaries, inscrutable governmental ties with wealthy elites, and a large fraction of the population conditioned into thinking that our current system is infallible.
We all going to die eventually. Give my life meaning, I dare you.
It was the same when most of Europe's monarchies were dethroned. Heavily armed militaries were there, it was the time of the Great War after all. Inscrutable government ties? Half the monarchs were cousins, the ruling class was essentially one family. A large fraction of our population thinking that the system is infallible? Divine right of kings, everyone was religious as hell, and you literally had your church in your ID cards.
The system still rolled over when millions of armed men came home from the war, their friends brutally killed for four years, their country which they were taught to sacrifice for debased, themselves having lived in a trench for four years.
The thing is, systems where the few accumulate ever more resources by taking it from the many is not sustainable. Of course, it seems we'll give up democracy before giving up capitalism. The thing is, democratic traditions are the difference between what happened to the Windsors and the Romanovs when the inevitable change comes. It also is the difference between the experience of the common man living in England vs Russia.
Nothing makes me feel better about the hopelessness in America more than platitudes. (/s)
The fact here is that most people are paying triple for groceries, 30-50% more for their rent, and have to work multiple jobs to survive. They're not going to care that Trump or DeSantis are fascists. They're going to care that Trump or DeSantis aren't Biden.
Good may come of it, but not without a ton of carnage in the interim.
This isn't a platitude.
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
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