The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

by Chapo Trap House

Perhaps once you got a job, you realized that the pay—or, if you were really lucky, the benefits package—was vastly outweighed by what work took out of your soul, as you spent your days white-knuckling it from check to check, feeling like the same idiot failure you were before you had a job.

So brace yourself for a lot more talk about a showdown between democratic Western values and mammoth, red, Communist China, and remember that it’s all total horseshit. It’s just cover for a desperate scramble for resources on our wheezing, dying planet, as every country’s elites pile up last bits of obscene wealth to better withstand the inevitable collapse.

People talk about the “coming apocalypse.” Take a closer look. The apocalypse is Puerto Rico annihilated by a hurricane. It’s villages in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal tortured by lethal flooding. The apocalypse is already here; you just don’t live there yet.

Incidentally, the authentic journalism of Woodward and Bernstein unleashed a brain bug into the skulls of American liberals, convincing them that all journalists were brave heroes and that one merely had to ask those in power, “Sir, how dare you, sir?” until they stepped down.

what happened? Fact-checked, focus-grouped, data-driven Clinton lost to the most deranged presidential candidate ever: a clown, a fraud, a sexual predator, an inveterate liar who has faked every single thing he’s ever done—a giant cube of flesh who embodies all our vilest instincts and our ludicrous celebrity culture. She lost—the Democrats lost, the liberals lost—to him.

the wisdom of No Country For Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, delivered in his final moments with a cornered, deluded victim: “You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it.”

America’s liberals are the good cops. They appear in viral videos in which they play basketball with diverse teens, participate in charity bike races, and look the other way only on evidence-planting and extrajudicial murder. Conservatives are the bad cops, right down to their Oakley shades, strained to the breaking point as they wrap around their fat, pink heads.

Much ink has since been dedicated to the question: Why? Here’s a couple of drops: Because Trump does to liberals and minorities exactly what they thought Obama did to conservatives. Politics has become a realm of purely spiteful grievance.

our main takeaway is that George Eliot was a really great writer and probably didn’t get the recognition he deserved while he was alive.

Another uniquely American lie meant to cover all this up is the idea that “the rich work hardest of all.” The premise that the wealthy got that way from working harder than you do—or, at the very least, that they’re justly compensated—is a central myth of a country that let a hundred assholes on Wall Street get away with deleting $10 trillion in 2008 and (after brutally suppressing a grassroots “Occupy” movement) immediately pretended it never happened.

The ugly truth is that no employer hires anyone unless they can extract more value from them than they have to pay out in wages and benefits.

Even if the boss is a nice person (it can happen), they still deny their employees an equal share in the profits of the business and continue to prop up the completely arbitrary social order that lifts up people with access to a bank loan and makes everyone else dependent on their personal generosity.

The expectation that the office should also be the center of your social life, that one need never leave to enjoy activities usually associated with “free time,” is perhaps the most insidious idea about work yet devised. This is the final frontier, the newest batshit notion the ruling class wants to normalize the way it normalized privatized health care, extraction of surplus labor, and thanking your boss for not letting you die in the street.

we don’t know much. But we know this: as the liberal opposition to Trump (and whatever nightmare comes after Trump) reveals itself to be feckless and incompetent, more and more people are going to realize that there is no reforming a system built on exploitation and nonstop, infinite economic growth. Socialism will emerge as the only genuine alternative to the savage, hopeless, gangster system of capitalism—an alternative that offers an actual future, one in which there are enough resources to take care of everybody and to take on humanity’s challenges with a dab of dignity.