POLITICAL ASTROLOGY 

THE YEAR OF THE YANG FIRE MONKEY

I have written about Political Astrology before and in particular about the impact of unexpected change created in the Year of the Monkey.      

It has been twelve years since the last one, and at that time I used it to predict the minority government of Paul Martin and his and the Liberals fall from power. That was 2004, I also used it as the basis of predication of the coming Obama campaign for POTUS and the auspicious birth it would have in the year of the Monkey.

With the topsy turvy politics that began a year ago with the totally unexpected win by the NDP in Alberta and later the Trudeau Liberals federally in Canada and the Trump and Sanders campaigns in the US change of the trickster kind, the unexpected is the norm, it flows right into the year of the Monkey. As I said back in 2004;

And why should we put such credence into the Year of the Monkey? Well it occurs on a twelve-year cycle, and in Canadian politics the year of the Monkey has seen the fall of many PMs and their parties.In the monkey year1992, Brian Mulroney stepped down as PM and was replaced by Kim Campbell, who went down to defeat in the 1993 election.In 1980 Pierre Elliot Trudeau came out of retirement to defeat PC Prime Minister Joe Clark, who had held his office for only a year. Of course PET had the year of the Monkey on his side having become PM in 1968, a crucial and revolutionary year of the Monkey.1968 is a quintessential year of the Monkey, with the Paris uprising of students and workers, the Tet offensive effectively defeating the Americans in Vietnam, the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention which led to the election of two time loser Richard Nixon. The assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the Russian invasion of Chezslovakia.The Year of the monkey in 1956 saw John Diefendbaker elected Leader of the Progressive Conservatives who win the 1957 election with a Minority Government, the first minority government in Canadian history, which lasted only one year.

The Unexpected Should Be Expected should be the motto of this year of the Monkey as it is the norm.

Today we are seeing a much broader range of change occurring as this is the year of the Male Fire Monkey a much more active trickster. With a Jupiter nature, the Monkey Trickster spirit is sure to impact on mundane politics which Jupiter rules. The rise of both Trump and Sanders are reflective of this spirit. And so is the win by Leicester in the Premier League of Football, their first such win in 132 years, at 5000-1 Odds !!!

Hoary astrology is the practice of Political Astrology; it uses a base style of chart first developed in England by the father of modern political astrology William Lily who predicted the Great London Fire of 1666. I do not have those abilities nor do I use the standard astrological tools. I use an intuitive method looking at events that would fit in the spirit of this year of the Monkey.

Hanuman which is the Monkey God in Asia is the spiritual nature of Man the Trickster, which we find in other cultures with their tricksters; Set of the Egyptians, Loki of the Norse, Coyote and Raven of North American first peoples, the Fox in Aesop’s Tales and in Japan, and Mercury for the Greeks.  All of them turn the world on its head, spin the magician or shaman around the leave folks guessing. They do it with a laugh, either on you or on them. While the tricks can teach a lesson that lesson may not be benevolent nor without some pain or other form of unexpected event.

In this the campaigns of Trump and Sanders actually reflect that Fire Yang of this year’s Monkey Tai Sui the Grand Duke of Jupiter. Jupiter rules politics, the Twentieth card in the Tarot; XX The World or Aeon

.

Both candidates for POTUS came from behind, with nothing but negative expectations and media prognostications the magick of the media appointing or anointing their winner and their loser, as though they were Thoth himself.

But here the truth of Ptah did not come from the lips of the media but rather from the people, change was in the air, as the saying goes. In the spirit of the Monkey King, the people decided to support these two politicians because they were not the usual kind of politician. One was a seventies anti war activist a self avowed Socialist, the other a racist bigoted businessman who was both a Democrat and a Republican.  Such Janus like archetypes now fill the imagination of the mass of the American public.

The seventies, which is when I became a young radical activist, have returned, to remind the yuppies, nerds and geeks that they are the baby boomers who lived in the seventies, making it a time of both mass anti war protest and organizing for a political revolution, a music and cultural upheaval and finally a spirit of change, that society as well as the individual could change, it was Yippie culture and Hippie culture combined, it was protest and self help/inward awareness, paganism and Buddhism began to expand in North America. All of the counter culture, freak culture of the Woodstock generation is wrapped in an old guy who was a hero of mine when I was a teenager and he was an anti war socialist elected mayor in Vermont.

This particular historical moment in time, on the way to the second decade of the 21^st. Century with its millennial generation is exactly where we were at fifty years ago, ironically. All the Occult and Revolutionary revival of the seventies is coming to be the norm in this new age. The concept of an alternative consciousness, a worldwide ascendant consciousness of humanity and the idea of a revolutionary consciousness baptized the new century in Seattle and Chiapas in 1999. And five years ago its zeitgeist became apparent to all of us with the Weltanschauung of the Arab spring.

Both Trump and Sanders reflect this zeitgeist in the year of the Monkey, the anti free trade movement has a left and right base and both these candidates reflect these bases, while their parties the Democrats and GOP do not.

They are the Left and Right of the same coin, a libertarian urge to social change for the good of the individual and for society. Unfortunately as we have learned from history this left right deviation occurred in the thirties and created fascism, which has returned as the zeitgeist of the Trump movement. White America is being swept up in final campaign, before it becomes a minority in the United States. 

Both Sanders and Trump reflect this, both are appealing to predominately white voters, and in both cases they are appealing to the working class, there is no middle class that was a socioeconomic myth of  sixties sociologists to confuse producers with consumers, creating new classes such as blue collar and white collar, to separate them into economic categories. Everyone wants to be white collar, middle class, a consumer, who may or may not be a direct producer, like auto workers, or secretaries, both jobs created for post WWII North America.

Trump appeals to the older white working class, while Sanders appeals to the new generation their children and grandchildren who now live in a pre socialist world of postmodern capitalism. Like Star Trek that my generation grew up with the advanced communications, social media, internet world which is very much the creation of the 21^st Century, is real change occurring instantly give or take a couple of months or years of development.

Apps reflect this change, this shift from consumer based capitalism, to active ameliorating capitalism on its way to becoming socialism, not just the conditions for socialism but actually shifting productive relations into socialist relations of production.

Everyone under advanced capitalism is becoming a producer user, even this blog is reflective of that change, by its very nature the blog allows me to create more than just an article but an actual autonomous media form, that can be spread everywhere on the internet, no different than the New York Times.

The modern technology being used by millennial’s attests to this sense of coming socialism, socialism of the association of free producers, artisans not wage slave labourers,  using apps they create and share. We have a sharing economy bursting through a capitalist economy, whether you and I like it or not. Revolutions are radical change whether people like it or not and we are in a period of revolutionary change unseen since after WWI.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Uber is one of these kinds of disruptive technologies it confronts the old taxi culture that grew out of the forties to sixties when a small group of capitalists dominated and created an industry based on ownership of state sanctioned cab licenses. 

The ultimate purpose of Uber and other such apps, is to eventually be used by us to call autonomous vehicles to our home, workplace or shopping mall, we will no longer own cars, but use a new form of public transit, privatized as it is now. It will change because we are now actually talking about socialism in North America. 

Currently Uber is destroying the taxi industry, and transferring that ability to drive people, to people themselves, taking it out of its specialized role in society, in much the same way the car itself replace the horse drawn carriage or the street trolley.

But eventually once Big Auto starts producing autonomous vehicles, there will be an app used to call up a vehicle, but there will be no need for Uber.

Cars would be leased and once they outlived their lives they would be returned for recycling and reuse, this idea has been in circulation for twenty years now.

Socialism is the natural result of the contradictions of capitalism, which is a failed economic model, based on continuous growth of at least 3% annually, as Prof DavidHarvey has pointed out. Socialism occurs when capitalism reaches the point of restricting the growth of technology, robotics, automation, which can free us from the drudgery of wage slavery. We move from an economy based on production and waste, to one that is that is green, that uses natural resources in a way that considers their finiteness, that then relies on reusing and recycling these products.

Green economics is one aspect of socialism it involves current research in areas like green manufacturing, green chemistry, etc. These are actual fields of research and development. The idea is to take responsibility for your product from cradle to grave and when we go to bury it we find ways of breaking it down and reusing it.

Autonomous production; the freedom to choose, that supposed gift of capitalism is actually central to socialism, the concept of the free association of producers comes with the change in technology, like 3D Printing. This allows for manufacturing at home, a return of home based work, an end of the factory.
The Internet of Things, IoT allows us to administer things, not people, Engels ideal of the socialist state.

Millennial’s understand this, they grok the potential in the social media they use, they live in and live with. They used this to create the Arab Spring, the first world wide revolutionary struggle since the Bolshevik and Spanish revolutionary  struggles in the twentieth century . This consciousness of change was not lost on them.

It is this spirit of hope and change of that revolutionary potential that makes them embrace Sanders call to political revolution and Socialism.

It is the fear of job loss, of destruction of the norm, of the end of power of the white race that drives their parents and grandparents to Trump.

Like the turn of last Century which saw a horrifying war of Capitalist expansion that cut short the lives of an entire generation in Europe, and the creation of Modernism as a result, we are in a period of change, where consciousness, our social and personal self awareness is aware that we and the times we live in are full of potential for change and are changing.

Unlike the lost generation of WWI our Millennial’s as well as members of Gen X, Y, Z are all here. And like the generation of revolutionaries, modernists, they are the voice of the future, of a socialism that is not 19^th or even 20^th century, but a new model of an advanced technology shared for free in open source. 

Where work is what we all do because it is something we want to do, not because we are selling our time to someone else. Technology is on the edge of history, like Marx predicted in his work the Grundrisse, we can transform capitalism into socialism, by using technology to free us from wage slavery.

The followers of Trump are the heirs of the post WWI reactionaries and traditionalists who also appear at this time with the futurist and modernists movements, they are the founders of Fascism. 

They are not quite conservative or aristocratic, though these values and images of power appeal to them, they are actually as much a part of the revolutionary change in consciousness that is occurring, their spokespeople on the right talk about dialectics, gnosis, Hegelianism, all the left topics that while they dispute them consider them important enough as an ideology to continuously confront despite their protestations that Socialism has failed, and is a failed ideology.

It is more than an ideology; it is a historical zeitgeist originating in capitalism once capitalism develops industry and technology to a level of autonomous use it transforms into the potential for a socialist political economy.

It is here that the conspiratorial ideologues of the right, like Eugene Volokh, influence the readers of both the National Review and the National Enquirer. 

This movement of radical traditionalism of Evola and Volokh appeals to the American conspiracy theory imagination which Trump uses very effectively.

 However the white working class, like the coalminers in Appalachia who have abandoned Clinton for Trump, do not see that their jobs, their lives, their very existence being sacrificed by their bosses but because of Free Trade deals.

 With a reactionary consciousness they look to the very same boss who sold them out to save them, the left and the Democratic party has failed them. But they too embrace Sanders political revolution from the right, and support Trump because he will end trade deals. He will save their jobs. Even if the Republican Party is the party of free trade the very reason they have lost their jobs, they do not care, they are not republicans they are Trumpites.

Sanders and Trump’s political revolution also calls into question the whole two party system and Trump more than even Sanders has exposed what a rigged game it is.

In a sense Trump as post modern aristocrat has stepped down from his lofty heights to save the people. His politics are not of reform or revolution but of the great man in history no different from Mussolini or Bismarck who created state socialism in order to unify Germany.

Sanders political revolution harkens back to the seventies, to the ideals of the anti war movement which was the first post WWII movement to seriously threaten the establishment, even more so than the very successful CND anti nuke movement that it originated from.

He has not announced its structure, because as a transitional program it is made up of demands like #Fightfor15, ending Big Money in politics, etc. are all tactics for change, they are not a real program for socialist change. He is using this campaign like a big anti-war teach-in.

America’s political system is broken, this election has proven it.

 

And the Monkey King knows it and is only too glad to show it.