Socialist Humanism with a human face

God as First Cause

2011-11-22T23:04:00.001-08:00

The “first-cause” argument for God may be one of the mostblatantly fallacious arguments ever devised.

The argument, to compress it into a categorical syllogism,begins by proposing that “everything has a cause.” It then submits that the universe itself musthave a cause and concludes that this cause must be God.

The argument is ridiculous on several grounds and, in fact,is rendered untenable by its own internal reasoning. Following the logic of the premise thateverything must have a cause, God too must have a cause and the cause of Godmust have a cause and so on to infinity. If God does not require a cause then the first premise, everything has acause, is false.

The above is the most popular form of the argument, known inphilosophy as the “cosmological argument”; however, there are more sophisticatedversions (to loosely use the term).

Some have refined the first premise to state, instead ofeverything has a cause, that everything contingent, or everything caused, has acause (nothing more than an observation of the trivially true). This qualified first premise places itselfbeyond criticism and requires a closer analyzing of the second premise and theconclusion.

The second premise, refined, states that the universe iscontingent and must have a cause. However, there has never been a serious argument to sustain thispremise. Bertrand Russell rhetoricallyasks “[j]ust because everything in the universe is contingent, must theuniverse itself be contingent?”

The best argument considers time. It is argued that were the universe to havealways existed the very fact would require an infinite amount of time to havealready passed and that this would be contradictory and thus impossible becausean infinite amount of time would never pass (the passing of an infinite cycleof time would never, by definition, be completed).

The problem with the argument predicated upon time has beenknown since at least the work on General and Special Relativity by AlbertEinstein. Einstein calculated that timeitself is relative and can be warped. The Big Bang hypothesis, proposed due to the Doppler Effect, suggeststhat the observable universe was produced by the explosion of a dense, hotinitial state of gravitational singularity and has been offered by many atheologian as support for the cosmological argument’s second premise. While current work on this is purespeculation, the best guesses by the most acclaimed physicists in the fieldpoint out that time is the relative fourth dimension of the universe created bythe Big Bang and that time more or less dissolves the closer it gets to thegravitational singularity. Discussion oftime with regards to the origins of the universe and the Big Bang may very wellbe nonsensical.

The second premise cannot currently be verified one way orthe other and cannot therefore sustain conclusions. While work is still being conducted on thenature and origins of the cosmos it is beyond rash to draw any definitivestatements and arguments about it, which is why the conclusion only furtherexacerbates current work. While itremains unknown why there is something rather than nothing it only confoundsthis question to introduce the further problem of why and how there is also God.

The conclusion now looms. The first obvious problem with the conclusion is that a sufficientreason is not given as to why God must be the cause. It would be as logical to argue that extra-dimensionalspace aliens were the first cause or that the universe is the product of thefunctioning of a super-computer.

Furthermore, the argument only establishes a first-cause inthe past; it does not demonstrate the continued existence of thisfirst-cause. The argument thateverything contingent must be caused does not demonstrate that the first-causecontinues to exist presently or eternally and it does not elaborate anyqualities of the first-cause (such as life, consciousness and so on) whichundermines the very purpose of the argument. The argument against an eternal universe being contradictory because ofthe paradox of an infinite cycle of time concluding equally applies to aneternal God.

The essential points about this argument are relativelyelementary and the fallacies readily identifiable to anyone who takes time toconsider them rationally. This is whythere are only ever illiterate charlatans who invoke the argument and never anyserious philosophers, at least since St. Thomas Aquinas, and when viewing hisphilosophical work against the great works of philosophy, it seems to pale incomparison.

Karl Marx and the State

2011-09-25T01:58:00.001-07:00

Karl Marx is among the most cited of intellectuals. He is, in fact, the most cited intellectualin the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. Most people would at least recognize the name. It is therefore quite odd, given suchwidespread recognition, that there could be such incredible misunderstandingand confusion regarding Karl Marx and his work.

In the general sense of the Left it is more than predictablethat there should be not only misunderstanding but also an intentionalmisinformation campaign waged against an individual so greatly associated withrevolutionary movements. Within ahierarchically class structured society where there exists a ruling class withspecial privileges and power (among them, near absolute domination of the meansof communication) it follows almost axiomatically that there should be waged adisinformation campaign against all that which threatens the current relationsof power.

The most common myth regarding Karl Marx involvesassociating him with Soviet Russia’s Bolshevism and state totalitarianism ingeneral. Exacerbating this confusion arethe various self-described Marxists who are nothing more than the descendentsof the Bolsheviks. A great manyso-called Marxists are Leninists, Trotskyites and Maoists of one form or anotherwho, in concert with bourgeois propaganda, hold up Karl Marx and his work asthe foundation for their positions and actions regarding the seizing of thestate by a party dictatorship.

With the self-described Marxists who follow in the footstepsof Lenin and company there is a great sense of anachronism. It may have been quite forgivable forsocialists living after Marx and before the dissemination of his unpublishedworks to assume that Lenin’s work and actions paralleled the work of Marx dueto much of it remaining unpublished and unknown as well as suppressed by theSoviets. Modern Bolshevik sympathizershave no such excuse. Long has Marx’sunpublished works been rediscovered and distributed by people of a wide varietyof political persuasions, largely beginning with the Marxist Humanists such asRaya Dunayevskaya, Erich Fromm and Maximilien Rubel, among many others, whopopularized Marx’s Economic andPhilosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Dunayevskaya was the first to translatethe manuscripts), among other lostand obscure texts.

People can no longer pretend as though the Communist Manifesto contains the finalword by Marx on the matters of state and revolution. It is no doubt true that in the ManifestoMarx lays out the revolutionary transition in stages with the first stageseeing to, “little by little,” the means of production, the means oftransportation and credit all being centralized into the state. However, even were the Manifesto to be thelast word on the matter it must be observed that Marx does not end socialisttransition with centralized state power, as many bourgeois reactionaries oftenincorrectly shriek, but rather with the eventual dissolution of classes and thestate into the association of individuals. No matter familiarity or lack thereof with the entirety of Marx’s oeuvure,the end goal remains a stateless free association. It remains libertarian socialism.

With this established it is quite obvious that the bourgeoismisinformation confuses the end whereas the so-called “Marxists” who follow thelikes of Lenin, Mao and others confuse the means as well. For the Manifesto does not contain the finalword and was, in fact, itself revised with a forward (dated June, 24 1872), asdescribed in Daniel Geurin’s No Gods NoMasters. Marx and Engels explain inthe forward that “in many respects” they would now “rephrase” the Manifesto’scontent regarding the state. Geurinpoints out that “they cited in support of such redrafting ‘the practicalexperiences, first of the February [1848] revolution, then, to a much greaterextent, of the Paris Commune, when, for the first time, the proletariat heldpolitical power in its hands over a two month period.’” Marx and Engels conclude the forward bystating that all of this “means that, in places, this program is no longer upto the minute. The Commune in particularhas supplied proof that the working class cannot rest content with takingpossession of the existing machinery of the State in order to place it in theservice of its own aims.”

The Paris Commune discussed in the forward is discussed atmuch greater length in perhaps Marx’s most underappreciated and ignored work:the three addresses drafted by Marx for the General Council of the Workers’International on the situation in Paris,better known under the pamphlet name TheCivil War in France. The ParisCommune saw to the implementation in Parisof the federation of communes, the basis of libertarian socialism, and at oncethe negation of state power.

Arthur Lehning writes that Marx’s addresses involve not a“’withering away’, but rather” the “utter extirpation of the state.” This could not possibly be any clearer when inthe third part of the third address given by Karl Marx he writes that “theworking class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, andwield it for its own purposes.”

Following the unequivocal comment about state power, Marxthen further analyzes the role of the state within developing industrialsociety. He writes that “[a]t the samepace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensifiedthe class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed moreand more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a publicforce organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.” He continues the analysis several paragraphslater when he writes that “[i]mperialism is, at the same time, the mostprostitute and the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle classsociety had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation fromfeudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed intoa means for the enslavement of labor by capital.”

Marx’s analysis of the state is in this sense virtually indistinguishablefrom the analyses of many anarchists. RudolfRocker is in a sense paraphrasing Marx’s analysis when he writes that “[a]slong as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beingsface one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable to the possessingminority for the protection of its privileges.”

Marx’s analysis, in fact, anticipated the role of the statewithin Soviet Russia and the form of state capitalism ruled by a single-partydictatorship centralized within the state as manifested in Soviet Russia and inChina. It must not be overlooked that socialismnever existed within Russiaand has never existed in China(the two nations most readily misidentified as socialist or communist). Many anarchists, libertarian socialists and,in this sense, true Marxists (such as Gorter, Ruhle, Pannekoek, Luxemburg andso on) predicted that the policy of the Bolsheviks was going to lead to thestate despotism that sunk the Russian people into the Soviet dungeon. They argued that rather than replacingcapitalist relations with socialist relations the Bolsheviks were merelycondensing many capitalists into the single capitalist of the state. The political economy of Soviet Russiaremained capitalist. It was the ultimateform of state capitalism, where the state is sole capitalist.

Nothing could be more counterrevolutionary and nothing couldbe more contrary to the totality of Marx’s work than turning the state into thesingle capitalist and centralizing all power therein. Doing justice to Marx’s work and doingjustice in the real world period means dismantling the state altogether. Not piece by piece or with the hope, afterseizing it, that it will simply disappear on its own accord with thedissolution of the antagonism of classes. Instead, the state must be rendered superfluous and powerless throughthe instituting of the power of the federation of communes (the workers’councils, community cooperatives and so on), in the face of which the state canonly dissolve into irrelevance and out of existence and history altogether.

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn and Censorship

2011-01-20T11:12:00.000-08:00

Shame on all those who are currently advocating the censorship of Mark Twain’s masterful The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn and disgraced are they who support such malfeasant censorship. However, one must not be overly worried by the transgression, for America has quite an inspiring tradition of respect and defense for freedom of expression thanks to countless activists, organizations and the right kind of lawyers and judges. Furthermore, in a positive sense, as is often observed, bad publicity is good publicity and when the publicity is for the American treasure Mark Twain and one of the greatest works of American literature it is all the better.

Mark Twain is rightly regarded by many as one of the greatest American writers and as the originator of American literature (influencing later writers of such scope and achievement as T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway) who first developed characters who spoke in the unique and authentic American languages and dialects found in the regions and cultures he wrote about. Ernest Hemmingway claimed that “[a]ll American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” T.S. Eliot compared Twain’s character, Huck, to other “permanent symbolic figures of fiction” such as “Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and other great discoveries…” The book is perhaps the best example of Twain’s invention using, as he prefaces the book himself with, “a number of dialects.”

Mark Twain is also known, unfortunately to a lesser extent, for his radical views grounded in a strong and independent moral vision of right and wrong. He was involved with the Anti-Imperialist League with its links to civil rights activism. He was an opponent to slavery and to racism (he was acquainted with Frederick Douglass and married into the abolitionist Langdon family, being the son-in-law to a leading conductor of the New York Underground Railroad) and Huck Finn is an ingenious expression of this.

The current movement by the publishing establishment advocating censorship is due to the fact that the word “nigger” is used commonly throughout the book, as the word was for sure used by such characters at the time, in accordance with reality (the commonplace usage of the word, I also must insist, is by no means yet a pastime).

Through Huck Finn Twain exposed the ugly everyday realities of racist ideology (such as the common use of the word “nigger”) and developed a main character, Huck Finn, who was immersed in such racist ideology, indoctrinated into believing that it was not only right, but God’s Will.

In the story Huck Finn lives with an abusive and alcoholic father and decides to escape by faking his own death and floating down the Mississippi. In the process of so doing he runs into a slave, Jim, who has escaped because he fears being sold and sent to New Orleans and they set off down the river together.

The book is about the adventures of Huck and Jim on the river and contains quite a breathtaking moral statement about racism and slavery. Huck Finn has been indoctrinated into believing that slavery is sanctioned by God and that to help a slave escape is theft (immoral and illegal) because a slave is actually a piece of property the Master rightfully owns and to help in such an escape would earn one an eternity in hell’s burning furnace.

Huck Finn several times faces this moral dilemma. When Huck and Jim first run into each other Huck promises not to tell on Jim: “But mind, you said you wouldn’t tell – you know you said you wouldn’t tell, Huck.”
“Well, I did. I said I wouldn’t and I’ll stick to it. Honest injun I will. People would call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum – but that don’t make no difference. I ain’t a-going to tell.”

In one instant Huck lies to some people passing them, telling them that his family has smallpox so the men make sure to stay away, saving Jim from being found, caught and sent back. Huck then feels regret for not doing what he was taught he should do, report a runaway slave, but he feels good that Jim was not caught: “They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a boy that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show…Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; - s’pose you’d ‘a’ done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad – I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that.”

Later on Huck begins to think about helping Jim escape and the possible consequences and becomes torn: “The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence…letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time…I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared.”

He recalls that had he gone to Sunday school they would have taught him that the way he was acting now would send him “to everlasting fire.” The thought makes him shiver and he decides to pray but cannot and he realizes he cannot pray of giving up the sin of harboring a runaway slave because it was a lie, he wasn’t going to and he knew it. He decides that he should write a letter to Jim’s owner and then pray.

He writes the letter and feels washed of sin but then begins to think of Jim and their trip down the river, he recalls “a-floating along, talking, singing and laughing” and finds that he is unable “to strike no places to harden” him against Jim, “but only the other kind.” He remembers how Jim would stand Huck’s watch on top of his own so that he could “go on sleeping,” how Jim called Huck “honey” and “do everything he could think of” for him and how “grateful” Jim was when Huck told the lie about smallpox, preventing Jim from being caught and how Jim said that Huck “was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now.”

Huck then sees the letter he just wrote: “I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ – and tore it up.”

Such a profound situation and moral statement provides the proper context for Twain’s use of the word “nigger” throughout the rest of the book and, after all, it is the context that is most important in matters such as these. The word is most assuredly an ugly, horrible word that conjures images of lynching, slavery, murder and the darkness of America’s past and present or, as Chester Stevens put it, the word “rings out like the sound of rifle fire,” and that is precisely Mark Twain’s point. Twain uses the word almost as a bludgeon by which he beats the heads of the complacent and the unconcerned. He is showing a little bit of the reality in all its ugliness and forcing one to confront it honestly and forthrightly.

It was in this sense that Booker T. Washington wrote that he could “not believe any one can read this story closely without becoming aware of the deep sympathy of the author in ‘Jim’…[O]ne cannot fail to observe that in some way or other the author without making any comment and without going out of his way, has somehow succeeded in making his readers feel a genuine respect for ‘Jim,’ in spite of the ignorance he displays. I cannot help feeling that in this character Mark Twain has, perhaps, exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the negro people.”

Mark Twain has always been controversial and there have always been attempts to censure and ban several of his books, notably Huck Finn. In fact, Huck Finn was first banned just a few weeks after publication in 1885 in Concord Massachusetts due to the dialects used; deemed too course and vulgar and only fit for the slums by the well-to-do bourgeoisie of Concord. As recently as 2000 there was a move in Enid Oklahoma to have the book removed from the local high school’s required reading curriculum. The debate was heated.

Michelle M. Houle writes that “the school district contacted Jocelyn Chadwick” who was a leading Mark Twain scholar and an assistant professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education “to ease some tension.” Houle notes that Chadwick is “an African American whose ancestors were slaves on both sides of her family. Her parents were active in the civil rights movement when she was young, and she says that they gave her Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when she was just a child.”

Chadwick believes that “[t]hrough the controversy surrounding this book alone, Twain brings into schools what all of us in this country desperately need, yet fear, most: discussions – frank discussions – about race, race relations, interracial relations, race language, racial stereotypes and profiling, and, ultimately, true and unadulterated racial equality.”

Eventually the Enid school board voted to keep the book in the curriculum after Chadwick had visited, spoken with people and held a workshop (the workshop “included discussions about the book’s place in history, teaching strategies, and useful resources”).

The move to censor Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essentially the move to efface the stark and dreadful realities of slavery and racism from history and to evade the difficult issues Twain illustrated in Huck Finn to which Chadwick refers to above.

NewSouth publishers has already censored their 2011 editions of the book, replacing "nigger" with "slave" (a change that makes little sense considering Jim, on the escape, is no longer a slave) and erasing the word "injun" altogether. NewSouth holds up Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama English Professor Alan Gribben as justifying their censorship.

Gribben argues that the censoring places Twain's "ideas" and novel in the 21st century and prevents the book from possibly being banned. The latter argument is an affront to any notion of freedom of expression - you do not prevent a wrong, a book being banned, by committing a perceived lesser wrong, censoring - and should be discarded as nothing more than unprincipled confusion. The former argument is perhaps an even greater affront.

The argument that the censoring brings the book into the 21st century is hopelessly unknowing and misguided. The characters in the book are not 21st century characters driving down the highway in an SUV, they are characters who emerge from and exist within the Antebellum South and float down the Mississippi on a raft (the book is an obvious period piece, documenting a specific region in time).

If Twain’s Huck Finn is to be censored of the word shall then Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative” of his life be so censored as well? The book, being as it is Douglass’ autobiography, obviously contains the offensive word. Oddly enough, Douglass edits such vulgarity as “dumb bitch,” writing instead “d-b b-h,” while leaving “nigger” wholly intact.

The usage and context of the word in Douglass’ work is on a whole far more offensive than in any place in Huck Finn, having been derived from actual events rather than Twain’s sympathetic imagination. For just two such examples one should consult the last paragraph on page 35 and the last paragraph on page 40 that continues onto page 41 (cited in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition).

The examples quoted and recounted by Douglass consist of the true realities of racism and slavery and it is intellectually and morally acceptable to include these realities in a work of fiction that deals honestly with these realities. It is morally misguided and intellectually lost to suggest otherwise.

As observed earlier the word "nigger" is an incredibly offensive racial slur, but so too was the culture of racism and the structure of slavery and Jim Crow within which the word commonly existed. It is to sanitize and diminish the ugliness and terror of these realities to begin erasing the very details that constructed the horrific racist edifice in its totality.

First the ugly language of racism and slavery are erased, then what? Shall depictions of the whipping of slaves be banned or censored? For, certainly, the whipping of a slave, the chaining of slaves together, the selling off of slave children, the hanging of slaves and the whole of violence, murder and terrorism, all integral aspects of the evils of racism and slavery, are all an order of magnitude more offensive than the word "nigger."

The evils of racism and slavery must never be sanitized. Not in any detail. NewSouth must be boycotted and their products never purchased again.

The only thing more disgusting and repulsive than the everyday, commonplace realities of slavery and its aftermath is to compound these horrors by pretending that they did not happen and attempting to efface them from history.

Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave

Houle, Michelle M., Mark Twain: Banned, Challenged, and Censored

Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Williams, Tenley, Mark Twain: “The Lincoln of our Literature,” Bloom’s BioCritiques Mark Twain

The Democratic Debacle

2010-11-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

The Republican Party picked up a swath of seats within the House of Representatives and several seats in the senate, although the Democrats retained their Senate dominance, riding a wave of enthusiasm among Republican supporters and taking advantage of the receding crest that is the demoralized and disgusted Democratic party’s progressive base and that is, speaking truthfully, the majority of American citizens.

The corporate press will no doubt spin elaborate and not so elaborate lies about how the Obama Democratic Party was for the most part dismissed in the midterms because the United States is actually a right leaning country and President Obama took the country too far to the left. Nothing could be more ridiculous.

The American citizenry holds social democratic positions on most issues. For example, an overwhelming majority of U.S. voters when polled have supported a universal healthcare system for decades[1] and viewed the lame, pro-corporate “healthcare reform” bill that did little more than mandate people to buy into the outrageously high-cost, dismally low-coverage, privatized, for-profit healthcare industry as a betrayal of trust and a selling out to precisely the same-old Wall Street friendly politics-as-usual apparatchiks that Obama’s campaign opportunistically and deceitfully ran against. The “financial reform” bill tells the same story, as does most of Obama’s policies, that is, when they are not significantly worse.[2]

Perhaps one of the single most painful losses is that of principled and independent liberal Russ Feingold in Wisconsin to Tea Party supported Republican businessman Ron Johnson. Feingold essentially lost by being associated with the status quo Democratic Party and the pro-corporate health care reform bill, an association so unfortunate it is difficult to formulate with concision.

Feingold was party to some of the best legislation and attempted legislation that has appeared in the last several decades. He struggled and achieved the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, along with pre-2004 John McCain, that took seven years to pass in opposition to the overwhelming might of corporate interests. Feingold was opposed to NAFTA and the spate of “free trade” agreements that serve as the foundation for the flood of jobs being outsourced to other countries. He was one of the sole principled opponents to the heinously illegal, anti-democratic, unconstitutional USA Patriot Act and, despite his support for President Obama’s healthcare bill, which he was repeatedly castigated for by Ron Johnson, he has long supported universal healthcare. In 2006 he authored the State-Based Health Care Reform Act that was to act as a “pilot program” for universal health care.

Katharine Seelye quotes Ken Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin at Madison political scientist, for the New York Times observing that “Independents deserted Democrats, period. This was not about Feingold’s record or the money or the advertising. It was about the anger of independents at the status quo.” Seelye observes that “the loss came…despite Mr. Feingold’s record of one maverick vote after another” and despite his independence and principled opposition to the status quo.

This is a distilled expression of John Judis’ observation that while “Obama deserved to lose…the country doesn’t deserve the consequences.” Nothing could illustrate this better than the situation in Wisconsin where one of the rare and unique liberal independents led by principle alone in opposition to moneyed, corporate interests was thrown overboard in favor of a Tea Party supported Republican businessman (sure to be as status quo and reactionary as anyone). The consequences of this alone are already quite unfortunate (although it is not too soon to predict a successful Feingold campaign in 2012).

The bourgeois press, certainly the outrageously partisan Fox News and its minions, are already beginning to churn out nonsense about the American people rejecting President Obama’s liberal agenda and that he must therefore turn to the right in order to regain confidence. However, the reality is that there is always a low turnout for midterm elections, those getting out to vote typically being of the right, there was enthusiasm within the Republican base which manifested itself in high voter turnout in Republican strongholds and there was a significant lack of enthusiasm within the Democratic base, manifested in low voter turnout in Democratic strongholds.

Patricia Elizondo, the Milwaukee International Association of Machinists local president discussed this lack of enthusiasm when interviewed by the New York Times. Elizondo observed that the union was not able to mobilize its members to vote in the same way they had been able to in 2008: “People have been unemployed for two years, and they’re unhappy that the health care bill was not as good as they expected…Two years ago, I had many members going door-to-door to campaign. Now they’re saying, ‘Why should I? We supported that candidate, but he didn’t follow through.’”

The only way for President Obama to regain the confidence of a majority of Americans is to keep to his campaign pledges, to stop being a business-as-usual functionary and to stop caving into some of the most extreme elements and compromising with them on far too important issues, but as any analysis of American political economy reveals, such a departure from within is practically impossible.

Therefore, let the establishment burn. Let this serve as a lesson to those politically coming of age that the left hand of the business party is no more to be trusted than the right hand and that the only way forward is to build an organized socialist movement guided democratically by the participants involved and beholden only to the people united.

[1] Noam Chomsky observes within Failed States that “[a] large majority of the population supports extensive government intervention…An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that ‘over 2/3 of all Americans thought the government should guarantee ‘everyone’ the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply’; a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 80 percent regard universal health care as ‘more important than holding down taxes’; polls reported in Business Week found that ‘67% of Americans think it’s a good idea to guarantee health care for all U.S. citizens, as Canada and Britain do, with just 27% dissenting’; the Pew Research Center found that 64 percent of Americans favor the ‘U.S. government guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means raising taxes’ (30 percent opposed). By the late 1980’s, more than 70 percent of Americans ‘thought health care should be a constitutional guarantee,’ while 40 percent ‘thought it already was.’”

[2]Such as, for instance, his alleged opposition to kidnapping, torture and special rendition that consists in reality of Obama’s Justice Department claiming that prisoners being detained indefinitely without charge or trial at a U.S. prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan have no right to challenge these illegal transgressions through American courts. According to a UN report “ex-Bagram detainees reported being subjected to repeated interrogation involving torture or abuse.(James Cogan)”

Discussing Anarchism and Marxism

2010-08-14T12:47:00.000-07:00

With Eric Kerl’s recent article entitled “Contemporary Anarchism” in issue 72 of the International Socialist Review we at long last have an example of the ISR putting forth some effort to take anarchism a bit more seriously than in the past. While there is much to be desired and quite a bit lacking from the article, there is acknowledgement of the growing international anarchist movement, the significant influence of anarchism within the global movements and the outstanding call for “Marxists and…anarchists” to “stand shoulder-to-shoulder in every aspect of struggle…” That is a call not seen from the ISR in the past and it is a very welcome one indeed.

There are a few central points Kerl proposes with regards to what he calls “contemporary anarchism.” Principle among them is the claim that contemporary anarchism has drifted from classical opposition to state power and now merely “attempts to resolve the problem of state power by going around it. It claims to do this by creating space independent of authoritarian control by establishing autonomous zones.” Kerl then cites as evidence an excerpt from Hakim Bey’s The Temporary Autonomous Zone wherein Bey essentially calls for the passive retreat into one’s self, what he conceives to be the real revolutionary arena, where one must not only, as Kerl observes, cease waiting for revolutionary transition, but cease wanting it.

While it is true that Bey has become very popular and even, during the 90’s, became something of a Priest of anarchy among certain segments, it is quite open to debate how much influence this tract of lifestylism has had upon the activist anarchist movement. It is certainly without dispute that various anarchists and anarchist groups have roundly critiqued Bey and the TAZ, one of the more notorious critiques, to be sure, being Murray Bookchin’s critique in his polemic Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism that Kerl is certainly aware of considering he cites it within another context.

Rudolf Rocker provides one of the best distillations of the anarchist conception of state power in his Anarcho-Syndicalism wherein he writes that “[a]s long as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges.”

Kerl proclaims that anarchists “wish away the demands of history, as if the state will either simply evaporate or become somehow irrelevant – with no alternative prepared to fill the needs of reconstructing society.” Such a statement indicates a severe absence of knowledge of anarchist history and, in particular, Spanish anarchist history.

Rocker writes that “the problem that is set for our time is that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement” and Noam Chomsky, discussing this in his famous Notes on Anarchism, explains that “the method is not the conquest and exercise of state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather ‘to reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build it up in the spirit of Socialism.’”

Continuing on the subjects of anarchism with regards to state power and the way in which to dismantle it Chomsky writes that “prior to the outbreak of the [Spanish] revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de Santillan had written: ‘…in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the organization of producers. We have followed this norm and we find no need for the hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in order to establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to point out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an economic organization, where private property has been abolished and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has been a lie and the State would continue. Our federal council of economy is not a political power but an economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its orientation from below and operates in accordance with the resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a liaison corps and nothing else.’”

During the course of the Spanish Revolution, the so-called Civil War, Gaston Leval documented collectivization and appropriation of land and industry by the revolutionary CNT (Confederacion National del Trabajo) in his Collectives in the Spanish Civil War. In Catalonia three-fourths of the land had been collectivized and workers’ syndicates appropriated the administration of industry. While collectivization existed during the Revolution, essentially while libertarian socialism existed, the state had been rendered superfluous. It was the federal council of economy, manifested through the CNT that became the “economic and administrative regulating power” as Santillan had written.

Kerl commits absolute violence against this history by dismissing the incredible heroism, diversity, nuance and achievement (however temporary) of the Spanish experiment with a few dismissive sentences. Kerl’s only source on this expansive subject appears to be the self-referential, he offers that for more on “the role anarchists played in the Spanish Civil War” we should look up Geoff Bailey’s “Anarchists in the Civil War’ in issue 24 of the ISR. Not a very promising prospect considering the ISR’s previous treatment, or mistreatment, of anarchism and anarchists. One would do much better by reading Murray Bookchin’s The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 and, in particular, the masterful Durruti in the Spanish Revolution by Abel Paz which offers one of the most in-depth accounts available.

Anarchism, in the libertarian socialist tradition, has quite definitive views about State power and how to dismantle it and they go well beyond theory and have in history entered into the realm of action and practice. It is ironically Marxism that never definitively deals with the dismantling of State power, leaving the problem, as with most socialist transformation and social organization within Marxism, to the dim, hazy future. Kerl illustrates this himself when he writes that “Marx once wrote, ‘All socialists see anarchy as the following program: Once the aim of the proletarian movement – i.e., abolition of classes – is attained, the power of the state, which serves to keep the great majority of producers in bondage to a very small exploiter minority, disappears, and the functions of government become simple administrative functions.’”

Marx only ever claims that the State will simply disappear, apparently by itself, with the abolition of classes. He does not explain how or why this is, he merely assumes it. However, the assumption, as Bakunin and others pointed out, was flawed. Bakunin wrote that “[n]o state, however democratic, not even the reddest republic – can ever give the people what they really want, i.e. the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People’s State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves.(quoted in Chomsky’s Notes on Anarchism)”

The left-Marxist Anton Pannekoek (head of education for the international Marxist movement) agreed, writing in his Five Theses on the Class Struggle that “[t]he goal of the working class is liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Chomsky quotes one of the better expressions of this view by William Paul (member of the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party) writing in The State: its Origins and Function that “[t]he revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism…Industry can only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees.”

Anarchists contend that the State exists as Rocker wrote, to serve and secure the interests of those wielding State power and that whether they be the bourgeoisie or the vanguard of the radical intelligentsia they will perpetuate it for their own interests, for, as Bakunin observed, even workers entering into the bureaucracy of the state cease being members of the proletariat.

Preceding Kerl’s claim that anarchists have no alternative to seizing State power is a quote from Leon Trotsky on “dual power” and a quote from Engels asking whether the Paris Commune would have lasted “a single day” if not for the use of authority by the armed people. Kerl here goes awry. Firstly he conflates Bey’s TAZ with an anarchist failure to grasp Trotsky’s insightful analysis and, secondly, he conflates the authority of the collective people of the Paris Commune, presumably, with the State.

Having previously written a flawed review of Staughton Lynd’s and Andrej Grubacic’s Wobblies and Zapatistas and having here cited it Kerl should at least be aware of the notions of counter/dual power that exists within anarchism, that is what the Zapatista program is partially based upon: expanding the floor of the cage (to borrow a concept from Buenos Aires anarchists) while also creating autonomous sociopolitical space and Bey’s amorphous individualist TAZ does not constitute the latter, rather collective villages, municipalities, organizations and so on do. It is something of an irony that Kerl quotes Engels in this capacity for Engels also wrote, due to the fact that the Paris Commune demonstrated the fact that the Marxist notion that the State must first be seized was fallacious (which is what prompted Marx to write, in his pamphlet The Civil War in France, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes”, among other things), that anarchists have “the thing upside down.” He observes that anarchists “declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state” and that this “must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.” It should be here noted that it was Marx who altered the Communist Manifesto’s position on the State in his The Civil War in France pamphlet, about which Engels later, after Marx’s death, reversed back to the original premise.

Kerl writes that “the fundamentals of Marxism are about full and complete human liberation – not so different from anarchist aspirations…However, political differences do exist, particularly over the means to achieve human liberation, and what social forces or classes can accomplish it.” It is true that the fundamentals of Marxism, conspicuously the writing of Marx himself and the left-Marxist tradition (Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, Ruhle, Korsch, Mattick, etcetera) consist of complete human liberation and it should further be argued that not only are they “not so different from anarchist aspirations,” they are the same aspirations and actually parallel remarkably (as I have written about with the specific examples of Rudolf Rocker, Anton Pannekoek, Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Mattick). The means to achieve liberation may differ in various ways, conspicuously with regards to seizing state power, although considering Marx’s writing on the Paris Commune, Marx himself came to agree more with the anarchists than many later self-professed “Marxists,” but the differences within the libertarian left (Marxist and anarchist) is more or less superficial and virtually negligible.

The single most significant difference between anarchism and Marxism would be that anarchism derives great strength from being a tradition or tendency that continually evolves, led by specific principles, and views revolutionary struggle as a ceaseless process rather than a doctrine and practice sealed by ideological and tactical limits and commandments. Past anarchist theorists and tacticians are understood to be flawed human beings working within the specific context of their historical and social reality who have offered great insight but who may have been wrong in various ways about a multitude of issues or whose insights may no longer apply to the constant flowing currents of history.

Marxism is similar to anarchism in having various tendencies and strains but is unlike anarchism in that it is defined by a single person, Karl Marx, who was merely a person rather than an omniscient god. In an interview entitled “The Manufacture of Consent” Noam Chomsky explains that “Marx was a major intellectual figure and it would be foolish not to learn from him or to value his contributions properly. He was, like anyone, limited in his perceptions and understanding.” He certainly wrote some of the most revolutionary analysis of capitalist production and relations, but it must be kept in mind that he did so in the 19th century and while much of it remains relevant, some of it is no longer. Treating everything Marx wrote and said as though it were the Gospel of the Lord quite simply has nothing to do with a rational scientific endeavor (Marxism self-proclaims to “scientific socialism”). For a rational science is not built upon a concrete theory set in stone that is not to be deviated from, science is actually predicated upon the attempt to falsify itself and established theory, it proceeds from various principles and axioms and is guided by theory and experimentation, discarding that which is found to be incorrect and misleading and accepting that which is found to be valid and of some pragmatic value.

As John Moore illustrates, instead of “being determined by a set of fixed theoretical and organizational concepts, anarchism develops within an ideological framework susceptible to dynamic and extensive transformations. Hence, while certain conceptual tendencies and continuities are perceptible, these are rarely permitted to ossify into dogmatic or static definition…” Anarchism here bears more resemblance to a scientific endeavor.

Perhaps an equally significant difference is that anarchism places hierarchy and domination at the center. All socially produced hierarchical relations are, unless justified in some fashion, critiqued and found to be in need of dismantling. Indeed, as Graham Purchase observes in his critique of post-modern anarchism, “anti-hierarchical ideology differentiates anarchism from All other major alternative political philosophies and practices.”

In what is perhaps Murray Bookchin’s enduring masterpiece, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, he demonstrates how anti-hierarchical ideology in anarchism differentiates it from Marxism by tracing the socially constructed origins of hierarchy back through patriarchic social constructions and gerontocracy, among other forms. Bookchin defines hierarchy as “the cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command, not merely the economic and political systems to which the terms class and State most appropriately refer. Accordingly, hierarchy and domination could easily continue to exist in a ‘classless’ or ‘Stateless’ society. I refer to the domination of the young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of ‘masses’ by bureaucrats who profess to speak in their ‘higher social interests,’ of countryside by town, and in a more subtle psychological sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality, and of nature by society and technology.” To be sure, for the sake of clarity for those unfamiliar, Bookchin was a conscious descendent of the secular Enlightenment and by sprit he meant a deep, conscious-feeling and awareness and contrasted reason with instrumental rationality, the former imparting “meaning and coherence to reality at all levels of existence” while the latter “reduced reason to rationalization…to a mere technique for achieving practical ends.” As the founder of social ecology he was also strongly opposed to anarcho-primitivism and its anti-technics, he insisted upon a rational, humane balance between natural ecology and human social technology.

Whereas Marxism is entirely predicated upon the economic realm of exploitation and oppression, anarchism is an open opposition to all forms of unjustified hierarchy and domination wherever the roots may lie.

Rudolf Rocker summarizes this well when he writes that anarchism “recognizes only the relative significance of ideas, institutions and social forms. It is, therefore, not a fixed, self-enclosed social system, but rather a definite trend in historical development of [human]kind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways. For the Anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him[/her], and turn them to social account.”

The preceding representing differences and disagreements there is actually much of Kerl’s critique of contemporary anarchism that many anarchists would not only agree with but critique just as forcefully.

Coincidentally, while Kerl critiqued the trend in “contemporary anarchism” to espouse post-modern ideas and, in particular, the view that “the working class” is “just another socially constructed identity” with little to no revolutionary agency and potential. Graham Purchase made much the same critique in issue 54 of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review within his “Post-anarchism and other blind spots.”

Kerl critiques the anarchist “black bloc” tactics of protest wherein a group of more or less lifestyle anarchists attempt to reach Bey’s TAZ by forming tight, militant groups for the engagement of property destruction (the smashing of corporate lobby windows, the burning of cars and so on) and street fights with the riot police in order to illustrate to the general public the hegemony of the State. While these tactics may be exciting for the lifestyle anarchists involved and make for good cannon fodder for the bourgeois press, they are wholly disengaged with the goal of attracting sympathy and good-will, raising consciousness and winning over more and more of the public.

Civil disobedience and protests are an integral aspect to any social transition and, in particular, American history. The purpose and utility behind protests is to raise the consciousness of the public, to awaken the mass slumber that is sleeping on various issues and to stir the public to mass action. Property destruction and violence prove to be the worst enemies of such a goal. The Civil Rights movement was incredibly effective because people have a general sympathy and inclination towards the nonviolent when confronted with violence. It is difficult for even a segregation sympathizer to witness the unleashing of police dogs, batons and harsh blasts of fire-hose water upon innocent, nonviolent black children. Conversely, even many of the radical left look upon adolescents throwing bricks through windows, burning cars and openly and aggressively challenging the police with disgust and regret.

While Kerl is correct when he writes that “[s]ometimes, confronting the police is necessary to win, or to defend our movement” and while there is no doubt that if there is ever to be socialist transformation there will come a point in time when the Movement will necessarily have to meet and defeat the reactionary violent retribution of the State, it remains true that unnecessary provocation that alienates and turns off the public and wonton, senseless destruction are nothing more than the self-defeating stuff of the oppositions wildest dreams.

Even the nonviolent, more passive elements of the global movement in many ways pose no real challenge or threat. Purchase writes that “[w]hile carnivals [against capital] may be fun, and certainly contain important elements of self-organization, many have become major tourist attractions that disrupt the normal flow of events (and sometimes assert diversity), but pose no real challenge to capital or the state. If the global capitalist offensive is to be contained and defeated, strategies that strike at its economic heart will have to be developed.”

Therefore many anarchists are in accord with Kerl when he writes that “[r]ather than emboldening and empowering the mass forces whose self-activity are at the heart of any successful struggle, these elitist, provocative tactics accomplish little more than offering an excuse for the state to justify its violence against social movements.”

There are, as Kerl writes, differences and disagreements between Marxists and anarchists on various issues, such as those described here, yet there are also similarities and agreements, far more than many realize. There needs to be a free, open and fair exchange of ideas and a fraternal discussion about differences (Kerl’s article is a worthy effort) and, above all, there needs to be solidarity in the struggle. For as one of the slogans of the Movement goes, “the people united will never be defeated.”

The Indian State and the Maoists

2010-05-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

To set aside for the moment opposition to Maoism itself – an opposition significant enough in principle alone – and to look for now only at practice, specifically, the recent Maoist militia actions, such as the killing “of nearly 40 civilians and trainee special police officers…[a]fter exploding a civilian bus carrying 50-60 persons, they opened fire on those who survived the blast(Nirmalangshu Mukherji),” it is without difficulty to identify the current Maoist strategy as having not only nothing to do with a revolutionary program, but, ominously, with a counterrevolutionary campaign of desperate terrorism.

Revolutionary campaigns consist of, by principle and definition, raising the consciousness of the people, rallying and organizing the masses, educating and preparing them for the responsibilities that form the very foundation for the initiation of a people’s governance. It need not be stressed in detail that bombing civilian buses, killing innocent civilians and waging a campaign of terrorism against the public is intrinsically diametrically opposed to any such effort. One cannot hope to educate, organize and raise the consciousness of those one is inexplicably and indiscriminately killing.

The Indian situation is among the horrors of the world, the tribal situation even more so and it is therefore a shame and a crime that the Maoists have exploited the tribals’ impoverished destitution for their own military centered strategy over and against any serious material improvement in the tribal situation. Mukherji observes that “[i]n an act of palpable cowardice, the defeated maoist leadership from Andhra and Bihar abandoned the struggling people there, and entered the safe havens of Dandakaranya forests. Taking advantage of the historical neglect and exploitation of the tribals by the state - the ‘root cause’ - the maoist leadership ensured the support of hapless tribals with token welfare measures while directing most of the attention secretly to construct guerrilla bases. In the process, they lured a large number of tribal children with assurances of food and clothing. These children have now grown into formidable militia and guerrilla forces. After committing atrocious crimes in the name of ‘revolutionary violence’, these youth brigades are now facing the wrath of the mighty Indian state. It is reasonable to infer that millions of tribals continue to side with the maoists largely because their children are with them.”

The Indian state’s “Operation Green Hunt,” a ruthless and violent campaign initiated by the state consisting of forming paramilitary forces and sending them into the forests in order to murder Maoists, tribals and anyone who will not submit and even many who will - a campaign described as genocidal by some and which will, in effect, include the killing of many children (considering that many of the Maoists’ “guerrilla forces” are young and impressionable tribal children who were offered no alternative) – is nothing short of a crime against humanity and must be identified as such, Maoist terrorism not being a rational justification for such heinous murder (especially when considering that Indian state sanctioned murder predates recent Maoist terrorist actions).

The Vietnam inspired program of Operation Green Hunt has historical roots and parallels. Arundhati Roy writes that “the Salwa Judum was a ground-clearing operation, meant to move people out of their villages into roadside camps, where they could be policed and controlled. In military terms, it’s called Strategic Hamleting. It was devised by General Sir Harold Briggs in 1950 when the British were at war against the communists in Malaya. The Briggs Plan became very popular with the Indian army, which has used it in Nagaland, Mizoram and in Telangana. The BJP chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, announced that as far as his government was concerned, villagers who did not move into the camps would be considered Maoists. So, in Bastar, for an ordinary villager, just staying at home became the equivalent of indulging in dangerous terrorist activity.” This was the program of the U.S. in Vietnam: roll through the country burning down village by village and imprisoning the inhabitants in concentration camps where they could be controlled and restrained from supporting the indigenous political movement that was opposed by U.S. foreign policy when they were not massacred outright or when they had not already been decimated either by aerial fire bombing or chemical warfare. This is the policy taken by the Indian state and now heightened to new levels of violence and murder.

In light of the situation: violence, death and destruction from both sides, a ceasefire need immediately be called, peaceful negotiations taken up and grievances aired and addressed, predominately and centrally those of the tribals who have suffered unspeakable oppression, exploitation and domination for far too long. Here the burden lies upon the back of the treasonous Indian state which at every opportunity has refused such offers from the Maoists (such as in late Februrary when Kishenji challenged the Indian government to declare a 72 day cease-fire, among other immediately important and reasonable demands, such as the ending of “encounter killings” which target not only any Maoists but even “suspected supporters”), stamped upon every chance of ceasefire and negotiation and has spurned on to exponentially greater degree the circular internecine violence that disproportionately injures and maims Indian tribals and civilians.

Terrorism is for the most part and almost axiomatically acts of the desperate, the last resort of those who feel suffocated and left with no alternative and the Maoists, constituted by the most oppressed and neglected in India, the tribals, are just such a demographic. The resolution of any conflict that involves them must be predicated upon improving their horrific plight, acknowledging and including them in the social and political arena in India and rectifying the history of wonton disregard, exploitation and destruction of their lives. They must be offered real, substantive alternatives in order that they are no longer left in disparate villages in the forest hiding from the next paramilitary assault targeting any and everyone in the area, while simultaneously being subject to some of the most naked forms of oppression by the mining and other corporations in India and living every moment of their lives, men, women and children, with targets on their backs.

When the Maoists bomb a civilian bus they are not engaged in revolution, but are instead perpetrating terrorism, however, when the Indian state wages war within its own borders against some of the most impoverished and oppressed human beings on the planet one cannot but expect them to resist and to retaliate by any means necessary. The Maoists have proposed cease-fires, unless the Indian state is determined to exterminate the tribals, to cleanse the Indian forests of their long established inhabitants only in order to strip the forests barren by mining corporations and other business interests, and to show to the world how little life is worth in India, what “free-market capitalism” really consists of at its most naked and unregulated, they shall and must accept such offers. Only then can the ugly history of India be placed within the proper trajectory and only then can light begin to rejuvenate the unspeakably violent darkness of India.

The Immediate Situation

2010-04-26T11:20:00.001-07:00

As congressional elections loom President Obama has launched the Democrats’ 2010 campaign. The fear within Washington is that the Democrats and President Obama have been so milquetoast, so compromising, so middle-of-the-road, so pro-corporate and have represented so little progressive change that the unprecedented, massive base that swept Obama into the presidency is going to, as they did in Massachusetts, sit the vote out in dejected apathy. This is to be feared and it is to be placed within a more serious context than all of the white-noise being broadcast by the bourgeois, corporate media.

The corporate media have for some time now been parading the tea party movement as though it were of some real significance relating to a “populist uprising” of the disenfranchised working class and that a much broader segment of society either agreed with the movement or identified in some ways with it. However, as recent research derived from national data illustrates, the tea partiers are overwhelmingly rich, white males. 76 percent of them have incomes above $50,000, 59% are males, 75% are 45 or older, 54% are Republican supporters, 66% usually or always vote Republican, 57% have a favorable view of George W. Bush, 66% have a favorable view of Sarah Palin, 92% believe Obama is moving the country towards socialism and, taking the specific example of the Chicago protest, 99% of them are white(Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio).

The “populist uprising” of the tea party represents nothing even remotely similar to a populist movement, rather, it represents the last, drowning fragments of what remains of the GOP’s base for which was issued the “southern strategy”: predominately rich, white constituents who opposed everything progressive about the sixties and who wished to dismantle “the left hand of the state.”

As Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio observe: “The Tea Partyers are mainly people of overlapping racial and socioeconomic privilege. They are intent on maintaining that privilege at the expense of disproportionately poor minorities. The ugly message at Tea Party rallies is clear: ‘keep your hands off my money; social welfare is fine, as long as I’m the beneficiary, but if my taxes go to the poor and needy, I’ll scream in the street until they’re cut off.’

This is a toxic brew. It reflects a culture of greed, narcissism, nationalism, white supremacy, and self indulgence. The Tea Party at its heart is a tool of the neoliberal corporate-imperial state, singing praises of ‘small government’ and ‘free markets,’ while quietly demanding massive state welfare subsidies for oneself, and demanding ‘market discipline,’ ‘personal responsibility,’ and ‘rugged individualism’ for the less fortunate. On the global stage, it is worth adding that, as Ford notes, ‘all but a sliver of the Tea Party crowd are belligerent hawks, as racist in their global worldview as in their domestic outlook.’”

This all plays out in the foreground of the looming elections, rather than the background where it so certainly should be. As the reactionary results of the election in Massachusett’s indicates there is serious trouble ahead for everyone if those who voted in 2008 stay at home on election day, as they did in Massachusett’s, ensuring the election of the reactionary and clearly incompetent Scott Brown. Undoubtedly the Democrats are spineless, pro-corporate shills, however, they differ from the other variant of the business faction, the Republicans, and, it should also be noted, it is not simply the standard Republican candidates and party that would be winning in the upcoming elections, it would be the crazed, proto-fascist, reactionary fringe represented by the Tea Party and their mouth-pieces and representatives, unless, of course, the Republican party is so thoroughly broken and splintered by the extremists, as they are now, that they are unable to cobble together enough unity to beat the Democrats. The latter result is a for sure one so long as people take the time to merely go mark a piece of paper and go back to what they were doing, so long as they don’t stay at home stewing in dejection and apathy.

What progressives and activists should be doing and should be preparing to do is, as always, educating and organizing. They should be organizing autonomously from either faction of the business party and building an independent movement that will hopefully eventually forcefully move the Democrats to substantively progressive and rational policy. A popular slogan now heard is “don’t vote, organize.” There is value within the slogan, but there is also, as with any slogan, a simplicity that obfuscates the nuances and complexities of our sociopolitical reality. The value is that one should be organizing, always and regardless, the obfuscation is the call for voter abstention, which, within our current situation, is an implicit endorsement of the opposition, in this case, potentially the reactionary elements manifested through the tea party. Such self-masticating is the content of the opposition’s wildest dreams and is inconsistent with even some of the most thoroughly revolutionary movements in history.

The Spanish Anarchists were certainly some of the most thoroughly principled revolutionary actors in human history, yet even they departed from their doctrine of complete voter abstention in order to secure the death of Spanish dictatorship and the initiation of the Spanish Republic (which they rightly viewed as similarly their antagonist, yet, righty, as one which afforded them more breathing room). Noam Chomsky, the greatest polymath since Denis Diderot, and the greatest revolutionary intellectual, perhaps ever, observes that when the difference is little yet existent nonetheless, a difference as between two factions of the business party when one is boiling over with elements that cannot but recall elements of late Weimar Germany, it is not inconsistent to be educating, agitating and organizing and to also go into a voting booth for a few moments and help to ensure that the more reactionary of the ruling parties does not succeed in securing a position with which to even further severely beat down the efforts one is making autonomously as well as the minor gains that have been won and then return without a moments pause to the very same work. The CNTistas did it in Spain and they did so within a trajectory that directly preceded the fascist revolt and the Spanish Revolution (nothing the least bit counterrevolutionary about that).

The stakes are becoming rather serious. It is not for nothing that serious, sober commentators, many of whom are not in the least given to hyperbole, are discussing analogies of the current condition to late Weimar Germany, analogies of what the Tea Party represents, it’s constituents, it’s mouth-pieces and it’s representatives to that situation and movement that saw to the end of Weimar Germany. Bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of the Tea Party is made up of rich, while males and recalling, as Street and Dimaggio rightly suggest that we do, Trotsky’s diagnosis of fascism as a reaction of the petty bourgeois, voter abstention is a grave threat that could well ensure the victory of what is now only the swirling detritus of proto-fascism. Everyone who is at all concerned about these things and more should make absolutely certain that they condemn the opposition to its proper place at the fringe of society and make sure that they convince everyone they know to do the same as well. Then, of course, we should all continue to pressure the Democrats to pursue a sane, progressive policy through organizing an autonomous movement beholden only to the communities, workers and people directly involved.

Anarchism and Marxism

2009-09-14T11:24:00.000-07:00

The statement which concluded Eric Kerl’s review of Wobblies and Zappatistas – a conversation on anarchism and Marxism, synthesizing the two – in issue 67 of the International Socialist Review, that a synthesis of “Marxism and anarchism, ideas which have repeatedly waged combat with one another, can only offer more confusion and hesitation in the midst of these turning points of human history,” cannot but come off as useless and unthoughtful sectarianism; a recurrent theme, I have found, of the ISR’s distasteful Leninism.

For as I have written in some detail[1], the two tendencies have all throughout history converged and in many instances are virtually indistinguishable: Anton Pannekoek’s council communism and Rudolf Rocker’s anarcho-syndicalism is a vivid instance.

Kerl points out that many anarchists embraced Marx’s analysis of the political economy of capitalism and wants to make this seen as hypocritical or inconsistent in some sense, writing that anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin “appropriated” Marx’s analysis “wholesale for their own program.” Bakunin certainly did champion Marx’s analysis, translating Capital into Russian, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Bakunin’s now almost prophetic criticism of portions of Marx’s tactics, especially with regards to the state as a transitory mechanism (a tactic altered after the Paris Commune and Marx’s address The Civil War in France). Undoubtedly one can accept Marx’s breathtaking analysis of political economy while simultaneously rejecting some of his tactical decisions and premises, there is simply no contradiction there.

Kerl, while making this trifling charge, ignores the fact that Marx was greatly influenced by the anarchism of Proudhon (to later pen a full length polemic against his one time comrade, a recurrent theme of Marx and Engels: viciously and publically castigating former comrades), for, as Rudolf Rocker observes, it was Proudhon’s What is Property? that led Marx to embrace socialism in the first instance. As Rudolf Rocker writes in Marx and Anarchism: “As editor in chief of the Rheinische Zeitung, one of the leading newspapers of the German democracy, Marx came to make the acquaintance of France’s most important socialist writers, even though he himself had not yet espoused the socialist cause. We have already mentioned a quote from him in which he refers to Victor Considerant, Pierre Leroux and Proudhon and there can be no doubt that Considerant and Proudhon were the mentors who attracted him to socialism. Without any doubt, What is Property? was a major influence over Marx’s development as a socialist; thus, in the periodical mentioned, he calls the inspired Proudhon ‘the most consistent and wisest of socialist writers’” (Rheinische Zeitung, 7 January 1843).

It is here that one actually has a case of inconsistency, the early Marx who embraced Proudhon and the later Marx who castigated him, whereas with anarchists such as Bakunin their embrace of Marx’s analysis of political economy and rejection of portions of Marx’s tactical premises are entirely consistent.

Rather than attempting to wedge a superficial divide between the two tendencies one would do much better by working towards just the kind of synthesis that indisputably exists (i.e., Pannekoek and Rocker); considering that one of the most severely debilitating aspects of the left as well as a cause for much failure is the crippling sectarianism that Kerl has decided to become the latest proponent of.

[1] Anarchist-Marxist Convergence: Part 1

Anarcho-Syndicalist Council Communism

Towards Socialism

2009-08-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

For those of us who advocate the striving towards a just socialist society free of exploitation, oppression, hierarchy and domination and instead founded upon rational ethical principles such as equality, mutual aid, solidarity, cooperation, freedom and democracy, we certainly do not expect to see such a radical transformation occur overnight. Any rational person looking at existing society could not possibly believe that it is anything like ripe for substantive, foundational socialist change; that would be a ludicrous conclusion. These are for sure long-term goals, although anything can happen at anytime, most unexpectedly.

This being the case, the question arises: what to do? Noam Chomsky stresses that what should drive people working “for change are certain principles you’d like to see achieved,” such as the ones I have cited; people must advance these principles. Chomsky observes that many people refer to such tactics as “reformism,” and that this is more of a baseless “put-down” because “reforms can be quite revolutionary if they lead in a certain direction,” and they can certainly help better lay the foundation and create the material conditions for a more thorough transformation.

The question then arises as to what reforms should be advocated and implemented, what reforms would be likely to help work towards a more just socialist society. In my view some of the immediate tasks should be the reestablishment and reorganization of the unions that have been absolutely decimated from, conspicuously, the Reagan administration throughout every following administration (both Republican and Democratic). Historically unions act as centers furthering democracy, freedom, solidarity, welfare and so on. Noam Chomsky elaborates upon this point in his lecture “Class War: The Attack on Working People”:

“Effective democratizing forces has always been the labor movement, labor unions; history on that is completely clear. In countries that have a strong labor movement there is also a very strong tendency or a strong correlation with a real, live, functioning social contract that includes not only rights for working people, but for people who need help and protection: for the defenseless, for children, for women, for families, for people in need of assistance generally, for the general public in fact. And there’s also a culture that goes along with it: a culture of solidarity and sympathy and mutual aid and support.”

For these reasons it is surely of critical importance to reorganize the unions and to reinvigorate and empower the labor movement. The labor movement is a strong countervailing force for democracy promotion, social justice and the like and must become again a leading social force.

It would also seem practical to form a viable labor party that actually represents working class and regular, ordinary people – rather than being forced with simply two divergent factions of the single business party – seeing as the United States is one of the only, if not the only, “first-world” industrialized nations without such a labor party.

Taking into consideration the effects of corporate globalization – for example, the fact that a multinational corporation, such as a car manufacturing company, can, when labor demands become “too costly” for the company, simply, because it is cheaper, transfer manufacturing somewhere else, from the United States to Mexico or Indonesia, from Germany to Alabama, etcetera, where workers rights have either not been achieved or have been decimated – the reconstitution of the labor movement must truly be international, as they have always made a pretense of. This project can take as a guide the Industrial Workers’ of the World Union’s international unionization of Starbucks baristas where labor actions have taken place in various countries, following the fact that the company is international, so too must be the unionization of it.

Following the subject of internationalism, the Humanist Manifesto 2000, drafted by Paul Kurtz, presents some pragmatic international reforms. A Planetary Bill of Rights and Responsibilities is proposed. “It incorporates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but goes beyond it by offering some new provisions” and goes into detail describing these new provisions, such as economic security, protection from unnecessary injury, danger and death (the inadmissibility of capital punishment), protection from discrimination based upon race, ethnic origin, nationality, culture, caste, class, creed, gender, or sexual orientation, the necessity of the principles of equality (equality before the law, equality of consideration, satisfaction of basic needs, equality of opportunity) and so on.

Discussing “The Need For New Planetary Institutions” it is observed that “[t]o solve problems on the transnational level and to contribute to planetwide development, we need gradually but drastically to transform the United Nations…The most fundamental change would be to enhance the effectiveness of the UN by converting it from an assembly of sovereign states to an assembly of peoples as well.”

The Manifesto cites as some more reforms that “the world needs…to establish an effective World Parliament – and elections to it based on populations – which will represent the people, not their governments.”

The Security Council veto must be abolished due to its having the effect of allowing any permanent Security Council member, such as the United States (the most egregious abuser), to halt any action or policy it wishes, even over and against overwhelming international consensus. As the manifesto states “[t]he basic principle of world security is that no single state or alliance of states has the right to undermine the political and territorial integrity of other states by aggression; nor should any nation or group of nations be allowed to police the world or unilaterally bomb others without the concurrence of the Security Council.”

There must be developed “an effective World Court and an International Judiciary with sufficient power to enforce its rulings.” There needs to be “a planetary environmental monitoring agency on the transnational level” and “the development of global institutions should include some procedure for the regulation of multinational corporations and state monopolies.”

Outside of these broad, international reforms, tactics must vary, being contingent upon specific circumstances, geographic regions and so forth. In this sense local community centers, cooperatives and activist groups should be created in order to address local issues as well as partake in the broader, larger issues; such a reorganization should begin from the ground up.

Elaborating upon these themes Chomsky suggests that “in your local community you want to have sources of alternative action; people with parallel concerns, maybe differently focused, but, at the core, sort of similar values and similar interests in helping people learn how to defend themselves against external power, taking control of their lives, reaching out your hand to people in need, that’s a common array of concerns. You can learn about your values, you can figure out how to defend yourself and so on in conjunction with others.”

Working towards socialist change must be variegated and diverse, manifesting the specificities of the regions, organizations, cultures, issues and peoples working toward such change and such work should begin immediately, where it has not begun already.

Substance Abuse and the 12 Steps

2009-07-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

In the letters section of the June/July 2009 edition of Free Inquiry two people wrote in reaction to Seven Mohr’s “Exposing the Myth of Alcoholics Anonymous," both with unjustified criticism.

I would like to now respond to these letters.

As someone who, as an adolescent, suffered through and eventually fully overcame extreme, nihilistic and, near the end, suicidal substance abuse, I have direct experience with AA. I was therefore beyond pleased to find a rational secular critique of this dismal religious organization that, like Scientology’s Narconon, sustains itself upon those at their most desperate.

In both letters the writers falsely proclaim that alcoholism, and by extension drug abuse generally, is a “disease.” An absurd notion that many rational people as well as experts on the subject reject, such as the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz who, incidentally, is a contributing editor to Free Inquiry, and who goes through the entire relevant and inglorious social history in his brilliant and incredibly well-informed exposition of “the ritual persecution of drugs, addicts, and pushers,” and all of that which is necessarily related in his Ceremonial Chemistry.

Substance abuse is a behavioral problem/abnormality, it is not a disease. As Lance M. Dodes, M.D. states: “Addiction has long been deeply misunderstood in both our culture and clinical practice. Rather than of being a reflection of impulsivity or self-destructiveness, or a result of genetic or physical factors, addiction can be shown to be a psychological mechanism that is a subset of psychological compulsions in general.”

In response to the proposition that “addiction is a physical disease caused by being addicted to drugs,” Dodes writes: “Physical addiction is often confused with the problem of addiction in general. Actually, it plays a very minor role. Physical addiction is important mainly as a medical problem when people try to withdraw from certain drugs. Sudden withdrawal from drugs like alcohol or certain tranquilizers (benzodiazepines like Valium or Xanax) can be life-threatening. But in terms of why people perform addictive behavior, physical addiction is not important. For one thing, physical addiction is easy to treat. People can be safely detoxified (withdrawn) from drugs usually in a matter of days. But as we all know, even months or years later they may return to addictive use of the same substances…Another illustration of this is that many drugs are incapable of producing physical addiction, yet they can be used addictively (compulsively) and even substituted for addictive drugs. Marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, and others can all be used addictively though they do not produce physical addiction in the way that sedative drugs (alcohol, heroin, barbiturates) can. Non-substance addictions like gambling or sexual addictions illustrate the same point. Since it is well-known that people can switch back and forth from drug to non-drug addictions like gambling or even other compulsive behaviors like shopping, it is clear that the physical component in some drugs is irrelevant to the nature of addiction. For a full discussion of the role of physical addiction see chapter six of ‘The Heart of Addiction’.”

The preposterous notion that it is a disease stems from, as Szasz points out, metaphorizing “disagreeable conduct and forbidden desire as disease – thus creating more and more mental diseases…they [the neuropsychiatrists of the nineteenth century] literalized this metaphor, insisting that disapproved behavior was not merely like a disease, but that it was a disease – thus confounding others, and perhaps themselves as well, regarding the differences between bodily and behavioral ‘abnormalities.’”

A devastating point against AA is its abysmal success rates, a point conceded by the letters. However, the authors wish to credit this general failure with the “disease” instead of the AA program. Galten claims “that without AA the natural course of the disease will almost certainly return after detox” unless the individual continues going to AA. However, for many people, such as me personally, it was the program itself that was a major obstacle to recovery.

One of the greatest factors in the program being an abysmal failure is the stunning revelation that the program actually makes little attempt to reform or cure the addiction and treat the underlying motivation compelling the addictions continuation. A tacit assumption within the program is that one is an addict for life and that one can only survive day by day, humbling one’s self before a gracious god.

The program claims that the individual is “not responsible for his/her disease.” This is an unfortunate, if logical, extrapolation of the false notion of addiction being a disease. The individual that is suffering from the severe consequences – that are the direct product of their decisions – of addiction are culpable for their own behavior, they are themselves responsible and attempting to lay blame on some external force, petty as it would be, is extravagantly malevolent in its undermining of recovery.

In fact, the first step of the program insists that we admit “we were powerless over our addiction.” A proposition that I saw, in times of great crises, severe cravings and so on, as justifying the fact that I simply didn’t have the power to stop myself from further engaging in substance abuse.

This leads to the second step which insists that we believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. This is obviously a problematic step for those who, like me, don’t believe in the supernatural. When anyone within the program attempts to reconcile this second step with secularism, arguing that it need not rely upon god, they necessarily illustrate the irrationality inherent within the program itself. They will tell people that “the power doesn’t have to be god, it could be a rock,” at once insulting the individual with outrageous condescension and making a mockery of their own program simultaneously. Step three only furthers this dilemma by stating that must “turn our will and our lives over to the care of god as we understood him.” Could this too also be only a rock?

Moving along, for purposes of space, to step eleven, we are supposed to seek “through prayer and meditation” the improvement “our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” This would make as much sense to a Buddhist or a Hindu, for example, as it did to me. Speaking of god in such terms proves what the idea of “God as we understand him” is supposed to be.

Step twelve calls for blatant proselytizing: “Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” The Christianity of this program is not even subtle, it’s blatant and transparent. The last step tells the addict that after having a “spiritual awaking” – hopefully through Jesus, as the Christian chaplains at 12-step treatment centers push for – we must now go out and proselytize to the poor and suffering, the desperate and the susceptible.

Why the program is a dismal failure is as transparent as is its Christian dogma. To indoctrinate people with the belief that their behavioral problems and habits are not their responsibility, but are rather the symptoms of some disease, is to emasculate them of any personal responsibility over their problems and, with the further claim that they are powerless without the interference of a divine force and, even further when the program teaches that one can only survive as an addict for life day by day – that’s one of the chief dogmas of the program, that once an addict, always an addict - a desperate notion if ever there was one, can in many, if not most cases, induce paralyzing hopeless despair.

The reality is that addiction is a psychobehavioral problem and the underlying psychological problem/s must be addressed and treated. If people are able to become sober through the program that’s good, although it’s indisputably rare and it’s also not treating the problems that motivated the substance abuse in the first place - as is obvious in many cases by those in the programs, those who still clearly have festering issues that have yet to be resolved – and those who do resolve the underlying problems are not getting their treatment from the twelve steps, but rather are likely getting professional psychotherapy or something of that nature while simultaneously attending the organization. As the dismal statistics of success illustrates, the program simply does not help most are even a significant number of people in recovery, in fact, as in my case and as in so many others, it simply further spurned the downward spiral into desperate darkness and despair.

Socialist Organization

2009-07-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

One of the most critical issues for the left is the question of organization. For the purposes of this duscussion I would like to focus upon two general tendencies, the decentralized, democratic libertarian left and the centralized, authoritarian vanguard that stems from Bolshevism (a contrast between the libertarian and authoritarian left, if the latter can be considered left at all), although various alternatives presented by others are welcomed.

By way of introduction I would like to present a quote by one Otto Ruhle about social revolution in general, that social revolution, by definition, “is not a party affair; politically and economically it is the affair of the whole working class.” Social revolution is either carried out by society, by the people, the workers and so on, or it is not a social revolution (this is simply a matter of elementary definition).

In the footnotes to Noam Chomsky’s famous “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” he emphasizes that it must be noted “…the ways in which exercise of control over steps of the [early] revolutionary process [in China] was a factor in developing the consciousness and insight of those who took part in the revolution, not only from a political and social point of view, but also with respect to the human relationships that were created.”

Importantly, as Chomsky here emphasizes, integral and direct participation in the revolutionary process is central to the raising of revolutionary consciousness and the further unfolding and expansion of the revolution, leading to its likelier success. Rather than forcing processes upon the people – although, actually, the Bolshevik program constituted the destruction of revolutionary processes, such as the immediate dissolution of workers’ soviets and councils and so on – the people must be in control of the processes themselves. Instead of leading a vanguard party of mostly bourgeois intellectuals, the masses must be the central agent in revolutionary change.

The left-Marxist Anton Pannekoek explained that “belief in the party constitutes the most powerful check on the working class' capacity for action. That is why we are not trying to create a new party. This is so, not because our numbers are small -- a party of any kind begins with a few people -- but because, in our day, a party cannot be other than an organization aimed at directing and dominating the proletariat. To this type of organization we oppose the principle that the working class can effectively come into its own and prevail only by taking its destiny into its own hands.”

Rudolf Rocker, one of the leading proponents of anarcho-syndicalism, concurs writing that “[p]articipation in the politics of the bourgeois states has not brought the labour movement a hairs' breadth closer to Socialism, but, thanks to this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned to insignificance. The ancient proverb: 'Who eats of the pope, dies of him,' has held true in this content also; who eats of the state is ruined by it. Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labour movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.”

It is critical that people realize progress must be made by the whole of the people involved, from the bottom up, democratically, and do not wish for and rely upon a Christ-like savior, someone like Lenin, who is allegedly going to initiate, progress and defend socialist revolution alone with their vanguard party of intellectual and revolutionary betters, for history has clearly shown to us the consequences of such an elitist, authoritarian program: it’s known as the counterrevolution.

Abortion

2009-06-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don’t know, the time of violent male dominance, the Victorian era, the “cult of domesticity,” the notion that a man’s wife is his, such as property, and that others shouldn’t interfere or bother if they may notice signs of abuse – now, thanks to the raising of consciousness brought about by the feminist and social movements, there are domestic abuse call centers for help – that women are inferior to men intellectually and emotionally and so on: all of this is no longer tolerable to socially conscious human beings.

When a woman becomes pregnant after suffering through a violent rape, she is to be in control of her own body and her body’s biological processes. No male authority, no authority period, has the justification for deciding for women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies and biological processes. Even setting aside the all too frequent nightmare cases such as pregnancy through rape and incest, a woman has the right to her own body and control over her own biological processes, regardless.

The hysterical and extremist anti-choice movement (such as the crazed organization “Operation Rescue,” formerly headed by the charlatan Randall Terry) that recently saw to the murder in cold blood of Dr. George Tiller (a brave giant of a man who placed his own life on the line in defense of women’s health and the rights of women everywhere), the fourth victim of the blood-thirsty, death-cult since 1993, has, especially since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, grown in momentum.

The Bush Presidency saw to the appointing of social conservative, radical Catholic judges to the Supreme Court – John Roberts and Samuel Alito – an aggressively undemocratic political institution that the religious extremists have been attempting to control since at least Reagan’s presidency in recent times; which is one of the reasons Obama’s election came as such a relief, in opposition to the wildly reactionary McCain-Palin horror-show of a ticket.

This reactionary, extremist and murderous cult of death, hatred and oppression must be broken. It is well beyond time for people who believe in women’s health and rights to stand and hold firm to the elementary principles involved in allowing legalized abortion methods.

The claim made by those who act as megaphones for extremists, reactionaries and killers – such as the O’Reilly Factor bully-pulpit that helped foment hysteria about Tiller (“O’Reilly repeatedly attacked Tiller on air, referring to him as a ‘so-called baby killer’” and the clinic he worked in “as a ‘death-mill,’ in segments he called ‘Tiller the Baby Killer,’ O’Reilly hurled wild accusations” such as that “George Tiller…will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed. And there are rapists impregnating 10-year-olds who are being protected by abortion clinics.” As Nicole Colson observed in the Socialist Worker) – that abortion represents a holocaust of babies is nothing but vulgar propaganda.

If an abortion is performed, it is by definition not the termination of a baby, but rather, even late into the pregnancy, the termination of a fetus. This of course is irrelevant to religious extremists and their anti-legal abortion movement – comprised of the Christian equivalent of al-Qaida organizations, organizations that inspire fire-bombing, the throwing of acid upon human flesh and murder in cold blood – who consider the moment of conception and the tiny cluster of cells that will later develop into a fetus to mark not the beginning, but the full realization of a human person endowed with a “soul” (overtly illustrating that their sociopolitical views are dictated by their religious dogmas, which, observing the separation of church and state, means that they cannot enter into the realm of political and legal discourse on the matter in a society where not everyone is a Christian extremist).
Peter Singer points out that “some opponents of abortion respond that the fetus…is made in the image of God, or has an immortal soul. They thereby acknowledge religion is the driving force behind their opposition. But there is no evidence for these religious claims, and in a society in which we keep the state and religion separate, we should not use them as a basis for the criminal law, which applies to people with different religious beliefs, or to those with none at all.”

Such beliefs are so much white noise and ignorance, the product of religious indoctrination and tyranny (religious institutions being historically patriarchal, women-hating and oppressing and extremely violent and authoritarian). Peter Singer points out in his Practical Ethics (pp. 150-1) that “[t]he weakness of the first premise [it is wrong to kill an innocent human being] of the conservative argument is that it relies on our accepting the special status of human life. We have seen that ‘human’ is a term that straddles two distinct notions, being a member of the species Homo sapiens, and being a person. Once the term is dissected in this way, the weakness of the conservative’s first premise becomes apparent. If ‘human’ is taken as equivalent of ‘person’ the second premise of the argument, which asserts that the fetus is a human being, is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a fetus is either rational or self-conscious...For on any fair comparison of morally relevant characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure and pain, and so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy – while if we make the comparison of a fetus of less than three months, a fish would show more signs of consciousness.”

Singer suggests “that we accord the life of a fetus no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc. Since no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. We have yet to consider at what point the fetus is likely to become capable of feeling pain. For now it will be enough to say that until that capacity exists, an abortion terminates an existence that is of no ‘intrinsic’ value at all. Afterwards, when the fetus may be conscious, though not self-conscious, abortion should not be taken lightly (if a woman ever does take an abortion lightly). But a woman’s serious interests would normally override the rudimentary interests even of a conscious fetus. Indeed, even an abortion late in pregnancy for the most trivial reasons is hard to condemn unless we also condemn the slaughter of far more developed forms of life for the taste of their flesh.”

The argument centered upon the fetus as “potential life” may be more compelling to some, but is as fallacious as any and the refutation of this argument can also be found in full detail in Singer’s Practical Ethics (pp. 152-6).

There is then also the social consequences of making abortion illegal. As A. Faundes and E. Hardy state: “Illegal abortion is responsible for up to half of maternal deaths and consumes a large proportion of health resources in many developing countries, particularly in Africa and Latin America. The legal situation of abortion in a country does not influence the abortion rate, but illegality is associated with a much greater risk of complications and death. To make abortion legal is not enough. Access to safe abortion strongly depends on the capacity and willingness of physicians and the health system to provide safe services, which sometimes are made available in spite of restrictive laws. The abortion rate will drop and the safety of the procedure will improve, parallel to the position women occupy in a given society, and to the level of recognition of their sexual and reproductive rights.”

It is well beyond time for those of us who are concerned for women’s health and rights, for elementary human rights and social justice, to be loud and clear, to hold firm that these rights will not be abrogated by a reactionary movement of religious frauds, hucksters, extremists and killers – the movement must be broken, left without any credibility or illusory moral standing - and that no one will be frightened away by threats of violence and terrorism from supporting what they know to be right and just.

President Obama: Reflections Upon the First 100 Days

2009-05-04T13:07:00.001-07:00

The victory of Obama’s campaign over the hysterical, reactionary, rabid and racist elements of the McCain-Palin campaign came with an indescribable sense of joy, relief and validation to innumerable people (myself included) and celebration was justifiable. However, with the election also came a sort of intoxication and as with any intoxicant there were blinding effects (such as that Obama represented real, substantive change rather than mere cosmetic alterations and improvements). I along with everyone on the left worthy of mention knew and predicted ahead of time that real substantive change was not going to be freely offered by Obama over and above the will and power of the corporate business world (with the backing of the federal state system) without serious, organized and sustained grass-roots mobilization.

Any self-delusion that Obama was going to introduce sweeping and substantive change immediately dissipated when he began to assemble his administration. His economic team almost down the line are all former Clinton personnel, the very same people who helped to orchestrate the gross deregulation of the financial system that sunk the world economy. “Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, Furman, Rattner…what are they, if not the long-caricatured ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie’?” Mike Davis rhetorically asks. Obama has pledged billions and trillions of dollars to help bailout and rescue the private banking system, continuing a central policy of Washington: socialism for the rich and free-market discipline for the poor.

In a society that values social justice a failed banking system run by corruption, well connected insiders, avarice and deceit wouldn’t be rewarded by their gross failure – which has resulted in millions of people being thrown out of their homes and into the streets by the very same hucksters who fished them into shyster deals, while those hucksters are now being rescued and even given bonuses by the very public they swindled – with public subsidy (the public paying trillions of dollars in order to save the shadowy banking system and those who helped to destroy it).
Instead, everyone who was in a position of private and managerial power within the banking industry, within the failed banks, would be rightfully fired, replaced by those whose capital was rescuing the system (the public). The public has paid, they should now own. The banking industry in any sane and fair society would be fully nationalized (rather than forcing the public to pay for the banks losses while keeping those who were responsible for the losses in their positions of management and power, those responsible for the losses should be either fired or indicted or both and managerial power should be in the hands of those who came to the rescue). However, Obama and his team of free-market fundamentalist Clinton carry-overs are doing nothing of the like, quite the opposite. They are doing precisely what you would expect those who are part of the failed system and responsible for its failure to do: saving their own interests and the interests of their connections and associates (simply review Paulson’s Goldman Sachs connections and the way in which he decided who was to be bailed out and rescued: read, who were his friends and accomplices? The same holds for Geithner as well as the rest of the usual suspects).

While Obama’s horrific position within the economic realm may be the most blatant, it certainly isn’t unique among his positions. Militarily Obama has committed the country to possibly even more war than McCain. Obama has certainly crossed over, very quickly and without hesitation, to the imperial ambitions of state: in Afghanistan and Pakistan, most conspicuously, as elsewhere. With his decision to keep at the helm Robert Gates, Obama has signaled that he doesn’t intend to substantively alter Washington’s imperial and hegemonic foreign policy; it may now have a more diplomatic and gentler quality about it – changes may be made, progress may occur – but it remains militant and ruthless nonetheless and holds onto the general ideology that begins from the absurd and violent premise that the United States owns the world. Obama represents and has assumed the “realist” tradition within the government, the very same tradition that is responsible for an almost infinite index of invasions, occupations and international terrorist actions. No one should be surprised when Afghanistan and Pakistan turn into an even worse nightmare of atrocities. Obama has adopted the Bush Doctrine that the United States can and should wantonly bomb Pakistan (there have been a slew of such bombings). As Noam Chomsky observed on Democracy Now!: “There has been for example a great deal of chaos and fighting in Bajaur province, which is adjacent to Afghanistan and tribal leaders – others there – have traced it to the bombing of a madrassa school which killed 80 to 95 people, which I don’t think was even reported in the United States, it was reported in the Pakistani press of course.”

Obama’s silence on Israel’s terrorism in Gaza – as well as his appointing for Chief of staff, Rham Emmanuel (who, among many other horrors, helped set a record for supporting Tel Aviv’s political assassinations of Palestinians) – outside of being a moral disgrace also serves as yet more evidence of heinous continuity. His treatment of the Middle East generally is yet to prove much different from any of his predecessors as well as his treatment of Latin America. While the left in the South remain open to normalizing relations with the United States – Chavez, Morales, etcetera – Morales points out that “[i]n Bolivia… one doesn’t feel any change. The policy of conspiracy continues,” and he says this within the context of a brutal opposition in Bolivia (an opposition of corrupt, dangerous, ultra-right, protofascist party leaders and wealthy corporate CEOs and so on over and against the populace, many supported by the CIA) that has recently even plotted to assassinate Morales and secede from the state.

While thankfully repudiating the criminal and internationally illegal use of torture methods used in the Inquisitions and as prosecuted by the United States when used by the Khmer Rouge and others, Obama has left open whether or not any Bush administration officials (such as the moral slug of a former attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, who referred to the content of the Geneva Conventions in relation to torture as “quaint,” as I pointed out in my post about humanism and the occupation of Iraq) will even ever be prosecuted; once again proving that the “rule of law” is in reality the rule of concentrated capital and power and it is a real shame (although it was predicted by everyone on the left worthy of mention) that Obama has assumed the leading role in such rule.
While repudiating the use of torture, Obama plans to continue the system of military commission trials for some Guantanamo prisoners. As Tom Eley reports: “The articles, which are based on anonymous White House sources, and statements by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder appear designed to prepare public opinion for a revival of the trials, which were temporarily suspended in an order issued by Obama on the day of his inauguration. The suspension is due to end May 20.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday, Gates was asked whether the Guantánamo military commission system would be shut down, to which he responded, ‘not at all,’ and added that ‘the commissions are very much still on the table.’
At a news conference last week, Holder said that ‘it may be difficult for some of those high-value detainees to be tried in a normal federal court.’”
As for the big ado about Obama’s war budget and the significant cuts called for, there is little substance behind the smoke screen. As Jeff Leys writes: “At first glance, it is easy to conclude that the proposed 22 percent reduction in war spending from 2008 to 2009 represents a significant shift in war strategy and is indicative of a drawing down of the twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sadly, such a conclusion would be wrong…In October 2006, England [Deputy Secretary of Defense] directed the military to submit spending requests to not only cover the incremental costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also to include any new costs attributed to the so-called “long war on terror”.
Procurement appropriations exploded, jumping from $22.9 billion in 2006 (the fiscal year immediately prior to England’s directive) to $45.4 billion in 2007 (the first fiscal year under the new directive), and then to $64.9 billion in 2008.
Thus, it is likely that the reduction in Procurement monies to be appropriated in 2009 simply reflects a reversal of England’s directive, with a shift back to a more normative budgetary process which seeks to limit new “emergency” procurement requests to those incremental costs directly related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than being reflective of significant shifts in the direction of the overall war strategy.”

There are also the myriad of issues upon which Obama has staked out a triangulatory opportunist, compromised and intolerable position: gay marriage rights, single-payer nationalized healthcare, possibly even EFCA and so on. As Patrick Martin writes: "The wage cuts imposed on auto workers at Chrysler and General Motors at the insistence of the Obama administration demonstrate the class strategy that American big business as a whole is carrying out: to impose a reduction in the living standards of American workers on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression."

It is now the task of everyone concerned for social justice, freedom and equality to oppose such unjust policy, to offer, demand and work towards more just alternatives where people are not lorded over and huckstered by elite, well connected insiders and highly concentrated capital, where promises of change do not amount to mere cosmetic redecorating and general continuity and where the interests that dominate are not those of the rich and well connected few (corporations, conglomerates, corporate paid and supported political lackeys and corrupt and failed banks and all those subservient to said power), but rather by the many through direct forms of democracy creating in embryo what is to be the future just society while at the same time putting pressure on President Obama, the Congress, the Courts and so on to support real, effective, substantive change.

The Left and the LGBT Movement: Past, Present and Future

2009-04-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

The current grass-roots mobilization and politicization of the LGBT rights movement has been emboldened rather than set back by the recent spate of anti-gay ballot initiatives (dating from virtually time immemorial through the Clinton era DOMA, Defense of Marriage Act, legislation to the recent passage of Proposition 8 in California).
With victories in Iowa, Vermont and so on and accounting for certain future set backs the mounting successes continue to come and will only further lay the foundation for and help ensure ultimate victory.

Many separate yet contingent factors have led to the politicization of young people and the further and deeper politicization of many others. A prominent, arguably the most prominent, among them is Obama’s election (the campaign through the inauguration) an historical event still worthy of celebration in and of itself. As Issue 63 of the International Socialist Review writes: “Many feel they played a part in Obama’s election; they were politicized by the experience, and are ready to take action to make sure they get the things they want.”
Very unfortunately for the LGBT movement, the event was bitter sweet for several reasons. To begin with, Obama, though coming out unambiguously for gay marriage rights – along with, presumably, all others – during his 1996 senate run, as reported by Windy City Times newspaper (President Obama’s answer to a 1996 Outlines newspaper question on marriage was: “’I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.’ There was no use of the phrase ‘civil unions’.”), has transparently because of his Presidential Campaign and real and/or perceived political dependencies and obligations reversed his position and now claims that he “disagrees” with gay marriage – the very same reactionary conservative bigotry euphemistically manifested in disingenuous arguments about the “definition of marriage” as related to religious extremism – because, as is the conventional wisdom in Washington, gay marriage is politically risky at best and possibly suicidal. So, ignoring the for the most part open depravity of the McCain-Palin position on such matters, among innumerable others, Obama’s position was a politically opportunist compromise (predictable and possibly understandable yet unethical as well as intolerable). Then there was the devastating passage of the heinously anti-gay Proposition 8 in California (which restricts the definition of marriage to opposite-sex couples and eliminated same-sex couples’ right to marry).

Setting aside for now the absolutely grotesque and evil involvement of the Mormon racket in the Prop 8 campaign and passage, which was also possibly illegal (as alternet.org reported “[a]ctivists claim that money from the Mormon Church was the deciding factor in passing Proposition 8 in California - banning gay marriage. The church claims to have only spent a few thousand dollars on the campaign, but ANP has uncovered evidence that may expose a gaping hole in that claim. Also, the IRS forbids religious organizations from "substantially" lobbying for political legislation. Did the Mormon Church violate this law?”) there is now considerable frustration and anger “at the corporate driven strategy of the No on 8 campaign that,” as Sherry Wolf writes in the ISR, “disastrously misled the Prop 8 battle.” Wolf agrees with Rolling Stone writing that the proposition “was down seventeen points only two months before the election. The reversal wasn’t inevitable, it was unwittingly orchestrated by corporate-driven, Democratic-Party beholden interests who ran a tepid and defensive campaign of euphemisms obscuring the stakes in the fight.” Alongside of this was the racist and class antagonistic atmosphere of local organizers – that led some to form independent organizations, such as Love Honor Cherish – that was also evidenced “[i]n Sand Diego and San Francisco…Upper-middle-class gays who led the local No on 8 ‘fight’ sequestered the movement inside trendy gay ghettos while the working-class neighborhoods and non-white ethnic groups were written off,” whereas the obscenely Mormon financed Yes on 8 campaign “was in evidence as every gridlocked crawl through LA’s notorious traffic revealed Spanish and English language ‘Yes on 8’ stickers adorning bumpers of pick-ups and Mercedes alike.”
Obama’s campaign wisely directly engaged the online community, a generally younger demographic, and it is these online networks, such as Facebook, that have helped to organize and politicize the protests against Prop 8 nationally. For instance, as Jason Farbman and Lonnie Lopez from Seattle write to Socialist Worker, “[t]wenty-one-year-old Kyler Powell – a gay Mormon – had never organized or even attended a protest before spearheading the anti-Prop 8 march in Seattle. Due largely to Facebook and word of mouth, it drew nearly 10,000. The turnout was a testament not just to the fierce opposition to the second-class citizenship of gays and lesbians, but to the willingness of many outside the gay community to take action.”

The nascent movement that is emerging from these spontaneous grass-roots protests (and the organizing necessarily involved), politically, is strikingly pro-labor and anti-corporate. Sherry Wolf writes that “…new movement activists, students and socialists organized a gay marriage forum in Chicago on December 11, one day after the historic victory of the Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation in that city. Fresh from winning nearly $2 million in severance and vacation pay for the multiracial group of factory workers, Raul Flores addressed the crowd brilliantly, saying that our struggles are united and we must be too. ‘Our victory is yours,’ he said, ‘Now we must join with you in your battle for rights and return the solidarity you showed us.’ The day before, hundreds of gay protesters rallying for equal marriage rights as part of the national Day Without a Gay initiative linked their march with the Republic Workers’ protest outside Bank of America. Trade Unionists, immigrant rights activists, and gays rallied together in the most eloquent display of genuine rainbow power Chicago has witnessed in decades. One Chilean immigrant described the day’s action as ‘a school for struggle.’”

It is for these reasons that Sherry Wolf writes that “[t]he release of Gus Van Sant’s brilliant biopic of gay activist elected San Francisco Supervisor in 1977, Milk, has arrived in theaters at a crucial teaching moment in the struggle. The film alludes to a key aspect of the successful gay-labor struggles against Coors beer and the 1978 Briggs Initiative that would have banned LGBT teachers and their allies from ‘advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting’ homosexuality in California’s classrooms.” The initiative would have banned anyone who was gay from teaching and fired all those who were already. “By uniting with Teamsters in the Coors battle and forging lasting alliances with blue and white-collar workers in the Briggs initiative, Harvey Milk along with tends of thousands of activists advanced both the fight for gay civil rights and for labor unity." Rob Epstein’s documentary The Life and Times of Harvey Milk goes into these areas more thoroughly which helps further illustrate all of this.

In the late sixties, when the gay rights movement began to really take off after the Stonewall riots and groups such as the Gay Liberation Front were formed, the radicalization of the movement was already clearly existent. The very name of the GLF was a tribute to the South Vietnamese Liberation Front, at the time fighting the United States military forces in Southeast Asia. Sherry Wolf observes that “[t]he influence of small radical groups in the GLF was evident in its statement to one underground newspaper the Rat: “We are a revolutionary homosexual group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature. We are stepping outside these roles and simplistic myths. We are going to be who we are. At the same time, we are creating new social forms and relations, that is, relations based upon brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality. Babylon has forced us to commit ourselves to one thing…revolution.”
The Chicago chapter of the GLF, writing in the Gay Flames pamphlet, as Wolf quotes, wrote that “because of the rampant oppression we see – of black, third world people, women, workers – in addition to our own; because of the corrupt values, because of the injustices, we no longer want to ‘make it’ in Amerika…Our particular struggle is for sexual self-determination, the abolition of sex-role stereotypes and the human right to the use of one’s body without interference from the legal and social institutions of the state. Many of us have understood that our struggle cannot succeed without a fundamental change in society which will put the source of power (means of production) in the hands of the people who at present have nothing…But as our struggle grows it will be made clear by the changing objective conditions that our liberation is inextricably bound to the liberation of all oppressed people.”
The last line about gay liberation being “inextricably bound to the liberation of all oppressed people” is a central tenet of socialist and anarchist thought – the great syndicalist unions dominant principle and slogan was and is that “an injustice one is an injustice to all” – and Martin Luther King Jr. – who associated with socialists and trade unionists, such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, who both helped organize the unions for the famous march on Washington – proclaimed that “an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.”

The current and immediate struggle for gay marriage rights should be variegated and diverse, certainly not wholly tied to and dependent upon larger anti-capitalist struggle, lest it be burdened with reactionary red-baiting and general, infantile anti-left hysteria and slowed down or defeated by such rabid ideological reactions. However, the general LGBT movement as such must emphasize the fundamental struggles interwoven and shared in common with all oppressed people, the power of social movements lies in the organizing, consolidating and solidarity of these movements. There must be forged and strengthened lasting alliances among the LGBT movement, the labor movement, the feminist movement, the immigrant rights movement, student movements and so on.
Real and effective change must be demanded immediately, going through every route available (the judiciary, the legislature, the executive and the streets). Opportunism and compromise must be adamantly opposed, for there is no opportunity in compromising with bigots, the ultra-right and religious extremists and there is simply nothing about freedom and equality that can ever be conceded; one either supports and works towards the fuller realization of freedom and equality or one does not and the movement can no longer afford any of the latter.
Anyone who believes in freedom, equality and civil rights must now take a stand and hold firm: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” that all are created equal, regardless of sexual orientation. The people united will never be defeated.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

2009-02-02T12:09:00.000-08:00

Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls is a great work of literature, an insightful journey into the minds and hearts of Spanish guerillas held out in the mountains fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. A story detailing the horrors of war, the effects of said horrors upon the minds and psyches of the victims and the aggressors. A story of the excesses of war and violence like no other I have read before.

Unfortunately, the book in many places repeats Stalinist propaganda. Unknown to those who have not studied the Spanish Civil War is the fact that Stalin’s “Popular Front” played a large role in the Spanish Republic, communists having joined the Republic in defense against the fascists and in offense against the Trotskyists, anarchists and workers and peasants who, in the face of the failure of the Republican government, organized cities and farm land under shop committees, collectives and community centers.

Ernest Hemingway unfortunately appears to defend in the book the murder in cold blood of such Trotskyists and anarchists – who were imprisoned, placed in labor camps, tortured and murdered (it was these murderous purges that motivated George Orwell to write Animal Farm ) – as well as providing the counterrevolutionary Stalinist caricature of them as wild, undisciplined, beasts of men who need to be murdered.
However, fortunately, these severe drawbacks of the book are few, there is positive mention of the great anarchist leader Durruti and the greatness of the other aspects of the book overwhelm the vulgarity of the Stalinist propaganda. Possibly and most likely Hemingway was simply mislead and honesty believed in these things.

The love story, between Robert Jordan and Maria, although at times very sexist in nature (surely an accurate representation of sex roles at the time) shows how the light of humanity can shine through even the most horrific events and the darkness of war. Hemingway’s romantic depiction of the “good” Spanish and of Spanish ways of talking, thinking and of their customs is insightful and brilliant and his depiction of their camaraderie, fraternity and solidarity is fantastic, as is his depiction of their ideals (as ill conceived as the unfortunate drawbacks were) and how they motivate a religious-like righteousness that is able to overcome the most difficult and horrific obstacles. It’s difficult to put into words the brilliance of these aspects.

All in all a great work of literature, a giant, that stands the test of time; worthy of being read by all, though surely with the qualifications cited in mind and in conjunction with, say, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

The Discovery Institute Fraud (Creationism)

2009-01-30T13:54:00.000-08:00

The Discovery Institute racket – the Christian extremist organization that rejects evolution and believes that the Earth was created spontaneously by a grand wizard in vacuous darkness in a matter of seven days and is only several thousand years old, laughably, placing creation 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Summerians developed techniques for brewing beer – has called for an “Academic Freedom Day” on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a day being celebrated by conscious and educated human beings with radio shows, documentaries and exhibitions.

The depth of deceit and hucksterism inherent in the very phrase “Academic Freedom Day” as espoused by the same sects of Christian extremists who many times spawn abortion doctor murderers is absolutely breathtaking. Academic freedom has nothing to do with the fact that first century religious barbarism isn’t to be taught in the science class room. If people want to wear prairie dresses and ride around in horse drawn buggies teaching their children that science is of the devil and that human beings were created from dirt by a fatherly wizard in the sky, that’s fine with me, the Amish seem like decent people. People should be able to live however they want so long as it doesn’t harm others. They can stay in their isolated, archaic villages out in the wilds, or the desert, if they’re with the Latter Day Saints, so long as they don’t rape minors (despite polygamous preaching that it’s alright by god), murder people, or try to force their religious hucksterism and idiocy into the science rooms of the secular public educational system.

The truly baffling aspect of this movement is that they aren’t a bunch of religious fanatics living out in the wild. They live in modern suburbs, drive cars, enjoy modern medicines and vaccines developed through medical knowledge only made possible with an understanding of the evolution of viruses and diseases and yet they still fervently cling to a myth created through the ignorance of the human species at a time when people thought that, rather than bacteria or viruses, invisible demons and spawns of Satan were possessing people (in a manner similar to the way in which “body thetans” attach themselves to people in the crazed space opera of Scientology) thus making them ill.

These people believe that the universe shows intelligent design, the same universe that is absolutely seething with dark matter and black holes, unable to support life anywhere but in the most miniscule galaxy on a tiny planet that is still cooling while the tectonic plates continue to shift, causing earthquakes and volcano eruptions, not to mention the hurricanes, tornadoes, mud slides, wild fires, thunder storms and other natural catastrophes that maim and kill millions without much if any warning at all.
To choose only one example of the human body, the means of taking in air for the lungs and liquids and food for the stomach all funnel through the very same place, many times causing people to choke, gasp and actually suffocate and die. That doesn’t strike me as anything like intelligent. Furthermore, 99.9% of every species that has ever existed has gone extinct. That doesn’t to me suggest intelligent design, if anything it strikes me as malevolent design.

The creationist demand to teach biblical myth alongside and as an alternative to scientific theory, specifically, Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution, is predicated upon neither evidence nor logic generally, but rather upon faith. As Christopher Hitchens, who can be insufferable, as I’ve written about, asks, where would this end and why? Why just the biology class room and Christian extremist dogma? Why not in conjunction with chemistry also teach alchemy? Or how about astronomy followed by astrology? The straightforward answer is because that would be absurd and insulting to the intelligence of the teachers, the students and the general public (religious extremists notwithstanding), not to mention stultifying of the intellectual growth of American children already ranked rather poorly internationally.

As comedian and columnist for the Independent, Mark Steel wrote, “[i]f all theories are given equal status, teachers could say: ‘Your essays on the cause of tornadoes were very good. Nathan’s piece detailing the impact of warm moist air colliding with cool air, with original sources from the Colorado Weather Bureau, contained some splendid detail. But Samatha’s piece that went ‘Because God is cross’ was just as good. So you all get a B+,’” thus humorously illustrating the “god of the gaps” fallacy as well as the sheer craziness and stupidity of the creationists.

Israel’s terrorism in Gaza

2009-01-23T16:16:00.000-08:00

The estimates of Palestinians killed in the recent Israeli invasion and destruction of Gaza runs somewhere around 1,184, including 844 civilians and 281 children; although these are surely underestimates (decomposing bodies are still being unearthed from rubble in areas that the IDF wouldn’t allow entry to humanitarian organizations). It must be noted that the overwhelming number of people killed were noncombatant civilians, many times apparently intentionally targeted, as in the Zeitoun massacres (although, as Noam Chomsky observes, it matters little whether they were intentionally targeted or whether they have been killed out of “depraved indifference,” which is arguably more heinous), the bombing of a United Nations compound “which contained the UNRWA warehouse” which held “’hundreds of tons of emergency food and medicines set for distribution…to shelters, hospitals and feeding centers,’” all destroyed, and other similar examples. Israel used white phosphorous (which can burn through skin down to the bone), which is a war crime, one among many others committed by Israel, bombed schools, police stations, Mosques, villages, homes, refugee camps, hospitals and ambulances, more war crimes, and decided to begin the assault, as Chomsky writes, “shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.”

The above alone, hardly the totality of horror Israel inflicted upon the Gazan population, is clearly indefensible, disproportionate and evil. The pretext Israel used to unleash its violent blitzkrieg upon Gaza was the firing of homemade rockets into Israel (rockets that have accounted for the deaths of eleven Israelis in the three years between 2004-2007, according to B’Tselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), which are war crimes. However, U.S.-Israeli propaganda pretends that these rocket attacks threaten the very existence of Israel and its military, one of the most technologically sophisticated and the fourth largest on the planet Earth – a claim so preposterous as to not warrant a response – that the rockets are entirely unprovoked and simply the product of the inherently savage “two-legged beasts” (to borrow a slur used by Israeli politicians). However, the rocket attacks were a reaction to Israel’s ending of the ceasefire when they killed six Palestinian militants on November the fourth, as Amnesty International and others report, and the brutal and relentless blockade of Gaza that has turned it into essentially the largest prison on Earth.
Ha’aretz, one of Israel’s main newspapers, also reported that the invasion of Gaza had been planned six months in advance, even as the ceasefire was initially being negotiated. It was these rocket attacks Barack Obama referred to when he said that “if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that.” Noam Chomsky points out that he is only “referring to Israeli children, not the many hundreds being torn to shreds in Gaza by US arms.” Outside of this one comment Obama made, he remained silent, an act of political cowardice. This doesn’t bode well for the future. Neither does the fact that Obama’s Chief of Staff and his adviser, Rahm Emanuel and Dennis Ross, are both Israel-first extremists. Obama’s silence on the death and destruction in Gaza was a shaming moral disgrace and his most recent comments about Israel-Palestine represent a continuation of carte blanche support for Israeli aggression, expansion and rejectionism. Chomsky observed on Democracy Now! that "the thrust of his remarks...is that Israel has a right to defend itself by force, even though it has peaceful means to defend itself, that the Arabs must—states must move constructively to normalize relations with Israel, but very carefully omitting the main part of their proposal was that Israel, which is Israel and the United States, should join the overwhelming international consensus for a two-state settlement. That’s missing."

While Israel no doubt is entitled to security – although Israel pursues expansion over and against security at every turn – Hamas does not pose an existential threat to the state of Israel. Furthermore, there are multiple ways by which to pursue security and reduce terrorism. I’ve discussed these subjects before here on my blog and will put this discussion to the side for now. The most obvious way forward, the first step, is the peace process, which, since the election of Sharon, has been aborted.
Hamas, in fact, has called for a reengagement of the peace process, which Israel views as a threat, the “Palestinian peace offensive” as they call it. The state of Israel, it’s militant and illegal settlers and the ultra-Zionists in Israel and world over don’t want peace with the Palestinians, they don’t want the two-state settlement, they want all of Palestine and the eradication of the Palestinians, to “wipe them all out,” to quote a crazed ultra-Zionist at a recent pro-Israel demonstration in New York (note that no one presents these facts as justification for an invasion of Israel). They don’t want a viable Palestinian state, they want to reduce the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into unviable, disconnected ghettos that will be so unbearable that no one would want to stay, continuing a central Israeli policy explicitly made manifest by Moshe Dayan. As Noam Chomsky observes: “The plan for the Palestinians under military occupation was described frankly to his Cabinet colleagues by Moshe Dayan, one of the Labor leaders more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Israel should make it clear that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads." Following that recommendation, the guiding principle of the occupation has been incessant and degrading humiliation, along with torture, terror, destruction of property, displacement and settlement, and takeover of basic resources, crucially water.”

Chomsky fleshes this out writing that "[t]he rocketing is criminal, and it is true that a state has the right to defend itself against criminal attacks. But it does not follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. That goes far beyond any principle that we would or should accept. Nazi Germany had no right to use force to defend itself against the terrorism of the partisans. Kristallnacht is not justified by Herschel Grynszpan's assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris. The British were not justified in using force to defend themselves against the (very real) terror of the American colonists seeking independence, or to terrorize Irish Catholics in response to IRA terror - and when they finally turned to the sensible policy of addressing legitimate grievances, the terror ended. It is not a matter of "proportionality," but of choice of action in the first place: Is there an alternative to violence?

Any resort to force carries a heavy burden of proof, and we have to ask whether it can be met in the case of Israel's effort to quell any resistance to its daily criminal actions in Gaza and in the West Bank, where they still continue relentlessly after more than 40 years.

Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel. Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words."

Israel claimed that its war aims were to “discredit” Hamas and evoke from the Palestinian population a rejection of Hamas, this of course being the textbook definition of terrorism: punishing civilian populations for political ends.
The destruction of Hamas is impossible, for every Hamas leader killed another will take his place, an even more radical militant. Just as Israel’s disastrous invasion and destruction of Lebanon in 2006 didn’t eradicate the Hezbollah – instead emboldening the terrorist elements within the resistance and shoring up sympathy for the Hezbollah even among Christians, Druze and so on – so too has Israel’s invasion and destruction of Gaza not evoked a rejection of Hamas, but rather served beyond anything Hamas could have done themselves to shore up sympathy and support. An illustrative example is the reaction from one of the “moderate voices in the Arab world, Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who said on January 6 that ‘The Bush administration has left [Obama] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza…Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza.’” Gabriel Kolko, one of the leading historians of modern warfare, observes that Israel “has produced horror in much of the world, creating a new cause which has mobilized countless numbers of people – possibly as strong as the Vietnam war movement. It has made itself a pariah nation – save in the United States and a few other countries. Above all, it has enflamed the entire Muslim world.” Not only has Israel failed at its stated objectives, to “discredit” Hamas and end the rocket attacks – just before the ceasefire Hamas lobbed many rockets into Israel proving that they were still capable of doing so – it has helped garner sympathy and support for Hamas, enflamed not only the entire Muslim world, but the entire world generally. Noam Chomsky has for many years pointed out “that those who call themselves ‘supporters of Israel’ are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction.”

President Obama: Results and Prospects (EFCA)

2008-12-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

Even detractors have observed that Barack Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States is an historic event. No one can reasonably deny this. That an African-American family is going to be living in the White House in a country that was founded upon the enslavement of African-Americans, slavery having been written into the founding document, the so revered Constitution, is a momentous achievement and a testament to the courageous activists who struggled for decades for freedom, democracy and social justice, many of whom gave their lives in the struggle.

As Noam Chomsky observed in a speech he gave in Boston:

“In fact, it’s historic in a broader sense. The two Democratic candidates were an African-American and a woman. Both remarkable achievements. We go back say 40 years, it would have been unthinkable. So something’s happened to the country in 40 years. And what’s happened to the country- which we’re not supposed to mention- is that there was extensive and very constructive activism in the 1960s, which had an aftermath. So the feminist movement, mostly developed in the 70s-–the solidarity movements of the 80’s and on till today. And the activism did civilize the country. The country’s a lot more civilized than it was 40 years ago and the historic achievements illustrate it. That’s also a lesson for what’s next.”

The implicit point being one that I have made many times, even having dedicated a blog post to the topic: that change does not come from some benevolent state power, by some idealist leader who initiates change him/herself, but rather from organized, sustained social activism.

One of the first tests here is EFCA (the Employee Free Choice Act, which would, as labor journalist and lawyer Steve Early wrote in Counterpunch, “amend the 73-year old National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) so that private sector employers have to bargain with their employees when a majority sign union authorization cards. Just as the NLRA did, as a centerpiece of the New Deal, EFCA would encourage collective bargaining to raise workers’ living standards and restore greater balance to labor-management relations. Beginning in the late 1930s, this federal labor policy helped create a vast new post-World War II American middle-class.”

During the campaign Obama made clear his support for EFCA and there has recently been alarm that Obama may be backing away. As Steve Early wrote “when Obama introduced his top economic advisors on Nov. 25 and talked about steps to ‘jolt’ the economy in January, EFCA was not part of the package. More disturbingly, his new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, declined to say whether the White House would support EFCA when he was questioned about it at a Wall Street Journal-sponsored ‘CEO Forum’ earlier in November.”

Steve Bene recently wrote in the Washington Monthly that Rahm Emanuel, speaking “at a Wall Street Journal CEO Council Conference…explained that Barack Obama would pursue an ambitious agenda and planned to ‘throw long and deep.’” When Emanuel was asked by a “member of the business audience…about Obama’s support for” EFCA, “Emanuel responded, ‘Let me take your question and go somewhere else.’”

Yet as Bene points out, through reference to an article on the Huffington Post by Sam Stein:

“An aide to Barack Obama reaffirmed the President-elect's support for the labor movement's chief legislative priority in a one-word statement issued to the Huffington Post on late Tuesday.

Asked if Obama's support for the Employee Free Choice Act remained as strong as his public proclamations suggested on the campaign trail, transition spokesman Dan Pfeiffer responded, succinctly, ‘Yes.’

The reaffirmation may not seem like a political breakthrough on its surface. But in the current political climate, in which the Obama team has steadfastly refused to comment on various legislative priorities, it does signal that the President-elect is not shying away from progressive pledges made during his campaign.”

All hope is not yet lost, although being that EFCA is vehemently opposed by big business -for example, billionaire and cofounder and former CEO of The Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, “during an Oct. 17 conference call about card check (a provision of EFCA), shrieked that “This is the demise of a civilization…This is how a civilization disappears. I’m sitting here as an elder statesman, and I’m watching this happen, and I don’t believe it." - clearly there is going to be strong resistance from the corporate world.

As Lee Sustar reported for the Socialist Worker: “Today, labor hopes that things will be different with Obama, and is putting money and resources into ensuring that they will be.

But getting EFCA passed into law--and the success of union drives in the future--will require a greater mobilization and activism than labor has seen in many years. Everyone who wants to see workers organize to fight for their interests should get involved.”

This leads to another important factor that Chomsky addressed in his speech:

“Obama did organize a large number of people and many enthusiastic people in what’s called in the press, Obama’s Army. But the army is supposed to take instructions, not to implement, introduce, develop programs and call on its own candidate to implement them. That’s critical. If the army keeps to that condition, nothing much will change. If it on the other hand goes away activists did in the sixties, a lot can change. That’s one of the choices that has to be made.”

Let us not only hope for the latter, but actively organize and do all within our power to ensure it, not only with regards to EFCA and labor, but with progressive causes generally (environmental, feminist, LGBT, human rights, immigration, anti-war, health care, economic issues and so on).

Barack Obama for President

2008-10-27T03:56:00.000-07:00

Todd Chretien makes the argument in the Socialist Worker for apparent complete voter abstention November the fourth, a tactic even many anarchists critique as extreme and many times counterproductive; Noam Chomsky’s comments being here relevant.

For instance, surely it is better to have Obama become President and support bills that make it easier to join Unions - such as EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act - and thus actually organize workers than to have McCain’s opposition. Smaller and compromised reforms can play a small part in a larger and completely autonomous program: such as organizing workers into Unions, establishing a strong Union movement, this in turn helps instill class consciousness as Marx phrased it and, as some left-Marxists – Anton Pannekoek coming to mind – observed: trade unionism plays a necessary role in class struggle, it could serve as the embryo from which a completely autonomous workers’ movement could emerge from.

It is true as surely the International Socialist Organization would argue that, as Pannekoek wrote: “trade unionism is an action of the workers, which does not go beyond the limit of capitalism. Its aim is not to replace capitalism by another form of production, but to secure good living conditions within capitalism. Its character is not revolutionary, but conservative…So there comes a disparity between the working class and trade unionism. The working class has to look beyond capitalism. Trade unionism lives entirely within capitalism and cannot look beyond it. Trade unionism can only represent a part, a necessary but narrow part, in the class struggle. And it develops aspects which bring it into conflict with the greater aims of the working class.”

But from the confines of “…the narrow field of trade union struggle widens into the broad field of class struggle. But now the workers themselves must change. They have to take a wider view of the world. From their trade, from their work within the factory walls, their mind must widen to encompass society as a whole. Their spirit must rise above the petty things around them. They have to face the state; they enter the realm of politics. The problems of revolution must be dealt with.”

But for the short-term it makes a difference to the impoverished, the hungry, the sick and so on whether or not there is going to be four more direct years of anti-union policy, regressive taxation, tax cuts and large subsidies for the upper most bourgeois, mass home foreclosures, unlimited debt, not just an imperial refocusing on Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also potentially war with Iran and other potential McCain administration targets. Not to forget that McCain's choice for Vice President, Sarah Palin, agrees with Cheney's treacherous and false belief that the Vice President is "in charge" of the Senate and that she "can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes..."; such as legislating hate and discrimination, she's vehemently opposed to gay marriage and equal rights, even further restrict abortion rights or worse and so on (recall that the next President is likely to nominate a few Supreme Court Justices, we can't afford any more nominated by the likes of McCain and Palin).

Surely all of this matters to the ordinary population, which is why the population is going to hit the polls in droves and elect Obama in a landslide; possibly why Chretien is so complacently dismissive of voting for Obama.

A vote for Obama to ensure the demise of the neoconservative foreign policy establishment, among other things, does not mean that those few moments in a booth marking a piece of paper will render the voter incapable of, after leaving the polling station, organizing an autonomous opposition (completely independent of the Democratic party).

The IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World Union) has been conducting a successful international campaign to unionize Starbucks baristas , among many other actions, and in the United States baristas are constantly being fired for attempting to unionize: if for only this reason Obama should be voted for by people concerned for the working class, he will support policy that makes it easier for workers to join unions and McCain won’t, that’s a difference that matters.

Industrial Feudalism

2008-10-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

It is many times argued, though admittedly less now during the global economic crisis, that global capitalism has improved life for everyone and has furthered freedom, democracy and human rights. As is often the case, it is of great value to investigate such doctrinal claims and, as is also often the case, when such an investigation is undertaken, it is soon found that reality is the direct opposite of the specific doctrinal dogma.

Let’s first examine the claim that global capitalism has improved everyone’s life for the better. Setting aside the factual basis of this claim, let’s assume it is true, is the fact that a specific system improves welfare an argument in its favor? As Noam Chomsky observes: “No…there were rising standards of living in slave societies. Slaves were better off in the early nineteenth century than the early eighteenth century. Is that an argument for slavery? It’s a terrible argument.”

The mere fact that life has improved within the confines of a capitalist system is not intrinsically an argument in favor of that system, just as the fact that life having improved within the institution of slavery was still not an argument in favor of slavery. Chomsky notes that the same argument would hold for Stalinism: economic conditions in the Soviet Union improved under Stalinism, but that's still not an argument in favor of Stalinism.

Having easily discarded the notion that capitalism is just simply because society has improved over the last several decades, let’s return to the initial presupposition: that capitalism is improving living standards for everyone. Has capitalism made life better for most people?
The populations of early Britain, Chile, Colombia, Haiti, Indonesia and various other nations which were forced – by dictators such as Pinochet and Suharto and capitalist "reform" enforcing organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization – to suffer under neoliberal economic policies – essentially “free-market” dogmas, although free-trade never entered into the picture in any meaningful sense - may have something to say about the effects of capitalism and neoliberal economic reform and their relation to the improvement of life.

Let’s take only the example of Colombia. Noam Chomsky writes of the populations resistance to the neoliberal capitalist reforms being forced upon the population against its will:

“In Colombia, however, the military armed and trained by the United States has not crushed domestic resistance, though it continues to produce its regular annual toll of atrocities. Each year, some 300,000 new refugees are driven from their homes, with a death toll of about 3,000 and many horrible massacres. The great majority of atrocities are attributed to paramilitary forces. These are closely linked to the military, as documented in considerable and shocking detail once again in February 2000 by Human Rights Watch, and in April 2000 by a UN study which reported that the Colombian security forces that are to be greatly strengthened by the Colombia Plan maintain an intimate relationship with death squads, organize paramilitary forces, and either participate in their massacres directly or, by failing to take action, have ‘undoubtedly enabled the paramilitary groups to achieve their exterminating objectives.’ In more muted terms, the State Department confirms the general picture in its annual human rights reports, again in the report covering 1999, which concludes that ‘security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups’ while ‘government forces continued to commit numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings, at a level that was roughly similar to that of 1998,’ when the report attributed about 80 percent of attributable atrocities to the military and paramilitaries. The picture is confirmed as well by the Colombian Office of UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson. Its director, a respected Swedish diplomat, assigns the responsibility for “the magnitude and complexity of the paramilitary phenomenon” to the Colombian government, hence indirectly to its US sponsor.”

Chomsky goes on to observe that “deplorable socioeconomic conditions persist, leaving much of the population in misery in a rich country with concentration of wealth and land-ownership that is high even by the shameful standards of Latin America generally. The situation became worse in the 1990s as a result of the ‘neoliberal reforms’ formalized in the 1991 constitution, which reduced still further “the effective participation of civil society” in policy formation by ‘reforms intended to enhance executive power and reduce the autonomy of the judicial and legislative branches, and by concentrating macroeconomic planning in the hands of a smaller circle of technocrats’—in effect, adjuncts of Washington. The ‘neoliberal reforms have also given rise to alarming levels of poverty and inequality; approximately 55 percent of Colombia’s population lives below the poverty level’ and ‘this situation has been aggravated by an acute crisis in agriculture, itself a result of the neoliberal program,’ as in Latin America generally.
Chomsky is quoting Arlene Tickner, general coordinator of the Center for International Studies at the University of the Andes, Bogota.

The illustrative example of Colombia generalizes around the world, everywhere such capitalist measures are implemented and enforced, predominately against the will of the population and with violence to quell any resistance by said population, poverty increases, democracy is subverted, freedoms are restricted, violent anti-union campaigns are fought and so on.

So, capitalism improving standards of living is not alone an argument in favor of capitalism and, furthermore, the presupposition that capitalism inculcates improved standards of living, freedom, democracy and respect for human rights is fallacious in the first place.

Apologists for corporate state-capitalism like to point out how modern corporations are trying to incorporate benefits and bonuses for their workers, as though this justified the existence of inorganic entities defined by corporate lawyers egregiously misusing the fourteenth amendment to define corporations as persons with the rights of such, but without the social responsibility of persons.

But the ultimate question is not one of simply improving already poor conditions, but of freedom, democracy and human rights.

It must go unnoticed by most people – especially the previously mentioned apologists – that corporations are in essence totalitarian. They are structured hierarchically with dictates flowing from the top on down and those on the bottom – labor – have essentially no input into the functioning and managing of the corporation: that is what totalitarianism is.

With some perverted form of representative democracy in the political arena, most people seem to fail to notice that within the realm of economic life, they are essentially voiceless and dominated by the interests of unaccountable tyrannies: corporations, conglomerates and so on, which just dominate the political and economic realm.

The problem of industrial feudalism is not only one of standards of living – which are violently denigrated within capitalist systems, even more so the “freer” the market is – but of freedom and democracy. Should people, the ordinary population, workers and so on have the ability to democratically run industry and the economy? Or should private, unaccountable tyrannies be allowed to continue to dominate in a totalitarian fashion?

Apologists would at this point argue that it is less efficient to allow democratic control over industry, therefore justifying corporate domination. To again quote Chomsky:

“So if you care about what is actually happening, the economy is moving towards totalitarian control, or mercantilistic control, and the claim is, as it has been since the late 19^th Century, there is no alternative. And in a sense there isn’t, if the only alternative is markets, which are too destructive, so you have to have administration [a mixture of corporation and government control, with corporations having the advantage]. But then there’s the obvious question: why does the administration have to be totalitarian? You could say the same ting about governmental structures. In some respects they may be more efficient when they have totalitarian features, but that’s not an argument for them.”

A viable alternative would be the open and democratic administration of the economy by the workers and the population generally through workers’ councils, service collectives and community cooperatives. As John Dewey once phrased it: “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” It’s long overdue to cast some light on this shadow and do away with it's source once and for all.

Police-State Violence

2008-09-02T16:02:00.001-07:00

I have been keeping a relatively close watch upon not only both 2008 national conventions – the DNC as well as the RNC – but the protests against them and the police provocation of and reaction to the protests also. There are many people who appear shocked and outraged that the state police trapped by way of encircling a peaceful march and protest in Denver for several hours, kicking the media out of the area and then, after hours, illegally arrested after unnecessarily provocative aggression, hundreds of peaceful protesters on willfully fraudulent charges. There are just as many people – as is evident by the number of hits the video documented evidence has garnered online – outraged over the case of a high-profile example of police violence in New York when a police officer standing in the middle of the street decided to disrupt a peaceful biking protest by walking over towards an oncoming biker and body checking him onto the sidewalk and subsequently charging the biker with assault on a police officer among other fraudulent offenses.

These instances can only come as a surprise to those who have not fully reviewed the history of power relations not only in America, but globally all throughout history. It is simply a truism that where a state power exists, so too exists state enforcement mechanisms, i.e., state police, national guard, military power, economic concentration and so on, and it is equally true that state powers exist so as to ensure and protect the power of the state and its operators and interests (in the case of America, to protect the “minority of the opulent” against the “rabble masses” as James Madison so bluntly phrased it at the Constitutional Convention; in effect to protect the status quo class structure of domination).

This has historically been the case, whether with regards to nobles and serfs, or CEO’s and workers; the hierarchy has existed for centuries. Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in The Prince: “In every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the populace and that of the upper class…all legislation favorable to liberty is brought about by the clash between them,” his observation, put into writing in the sixteenth century, remains true to this very day. It was later observed rather eloquently in the Communist Manifesto that “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

The fantasy that state police exist primarily so as to protect the public would be hilarious if the opposite were not so violently the case. America’s labor history reveals the extent to which the state police will beat and murder in the interests of those in power. The thirties are replete with Pinkerton’s beating and killing workers attempting to unionize their workplaces and obtain living wages; cracking skulls with batons, shooting people in cold blood.

In Subterranean Fire Sharon Smith describes the Ludlow Massacre as illustrating “the level of wanton violence corporations inflicted upon striking workers in this era. On the morning of April 20, 1914, the private army of John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, along with state troops, opened fire upon striking mining families sleeping inside their tent colony. The minors fired back for hours, but eventually ran out of ammunition. The guards then went on the rampage, drenching the tents with oil and setting them on fire, beating and shooting the now unarmed miners while smashing up their personal belongings. Thirteen women and children burned to death, and three strikers were executed on the spot. The strike did not end there – rather, it turned into an all-out war. The UMWA, the Colorado Federation of Labor, and the Western Federation of Minors issued a joint call for their members to take up arms, distributing weapons and ammunition. On April 28, the minors defeated both state and private troops. President Wilson responded by sending the U.S. Army to occupy the region, which they did until delegates to a UMWA conference finally surrendered in December, after more than a year on strike.” America’s labor history, as well as most of the world’s also, is replete with just this sort of murderous hostility of the state and major centers of power (corporations and so forth, for instance: John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company) towards the working class and social progress.

That the state powers would behave in such a capacity was already taken as a matter of fact by the more observant, Machiavelli (previously cited) and, as I like to quote (due to its precision), Rudolf Rocker’s observation in Anarcho-Syndicalism that: “As long as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges.”

There is also the long and bloody history of the systematic campaign of genocidal oppression of the Native American Indians - being sent on order of President Jackson, for instance, on a murderous expulsion along the “trail of tears” - the institution of slavery, the hatred of racism and the far-reaching consequences of both, the subjugation of women, the oppression of gay people and so on. In all of these cases, the state reflected the interests of the minority elite (corporations, highly concentrated centers of capital and so on) who supported the status quo class, race and sex relations. It was only through major and sustained popular social protests and movements that the state and corporate sectors were forced to concede civil rights.

There is then the violent history of COINTELPRO and various other secret state sponsored programs of subversion and terrorism. J. Edgar Hoover (a rabid racist) “rose to national prominence when he was appointed chief of the General Intelligence (anti-radical) division of the Justice Department in 1919, shortly before the notorious ‘Palmer raids,’ in which some 4,000 alleged radicals were rounded up in 33 cities in 23 states…” Noam Chomsky writes. “The ‘Red Scare’ served to control labor militancy, dismantle radical parties, frighten liberals, and buttress an interventionist foreign policy. Hoover’s FBI undertook the very same tasks, and has conducted them with considerable success.”

COINTELPRO was responsible for the deaths and detainments of countless radicals, union leaders, civil rights leaders and so on. An infamous example of the murderous capacity of COINTELPRO is the violent assassination of the Chicago Black Panther, Fred Hampton who was shot in his head with a shotgun as he lay asleep or otherwise incapacitated in his bed. As Chomsky writes: “…Fred Hampton, who, along with Mark Clark, was murdered in a pre-dawn Gestapo-style police raid – the phrase is accurate – in December 1969, with the complicity of the FBI, which had turned over to the police a floor plan of his apartment supplied by an FBI provocateur who was chief of Panther security. The floor plan no doubt explains the remarkable accuracy of police gunfire, noted by reporters. Hampton was killed in bed, possibly drugged; according to eyewitnesses, murdered in cold blood.”

This is but one example of the extent of COINTELPRO’s operations. Chomsky goes on to write that “[t]he record, which is by now extensive, demonstrates that the FBI was committed to attacking the civil rights movement, blocking legal electoral politics, undermining the universities and cultural groups (e.g., the largest black cultural center in the West, in the Watts ghetto), and disrupting political activities of which it disapproved by any means required, including the extensive use of provocateurs, arson, bombings, robbery and murder.”

COINTELPRO also relied upon illegally obtained information through spying and other unjust means of coercion (break-ins, beatings, etcetera), reminiscent of the Bush Administrations warrantless wiretapping and the recently exposed Maryland State Police’s illegal, undercover spying operation of Peace and Anti-Death Penalty Groups.

There is also the history of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the protests against it and the ensuing police violence and riots. With the continued, unpopular war in Vietnam, the military draft, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and general state violence and corruption, there was massive popular opposition to the Democratic party. This was made manifest most explicitly through the protests of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Many were wary of having protests in Chicago (such as SDS organizers), considering that then-Mayer Richard J. Daley “called on police to ‘shoot to kill’ rioters following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April,” as Issue 60 of the ISR quotes.

The ISR then puts the following question to Wayne Heimbach (a former SDS organizer and witness to the events): “The violence at the Democratic Convention has been historically referred to as a ‘police riot.’ What do you think of this?” Wayne responds by saying that “[t]he police were a disciplined force in Chicago. If they were told to do something, they did it. If they were told not to, they didn’t. This is not to suggest that they weren’t excessive, it’s rather to suggest they were told to be very forceful in their work…The police were quite efficient in moving in formation to force protesters from different sections of a neighborhood into smaller and more controllable areas. Riot implies they were somehow out of control. Generally that was not true. Even when they were particularly violent – like when they targeted protesters who had already been bandaged – you felt it was part of a larger plan…”

Wayne makes visible, by reference to physical events, a crucial point. It’s not that the state police are rioting and completely out of control, they are almost methodically doing just what they were instructed to do: to provoke, disrupt and dismantle, by any means required. In most instances wherein there is on display state-violence against the state’s own population, the state is not protecting you, “it’s population” (a terrible phrase, clearly derived straight out of the lexicon of totalitarianism, due to the inherent implication that a population is the property of the state), it is protecting itself, it’s affiliates (CEO’s., state representatives and so on) and its power from people like you, it’s own population.

There’s a term for a state which relies upon the subversion, disruption and repression through violence of state police, military and generally armed forces to repress mass social movements disliked by those in power, it’s called a “police-state.” Which, when the peaceful Denver protestors began to be encircled by riot police in full gear who were closing in on them and about to become violently aggressive, they pointed out by rhetorically chanting “What does a police-state look like? This is what a police-state looks like.”

Oliver Stone's Wall Street

2008-07-27T03:02:00.000-07:00

One of Oliver Stone's best films. As much as I thought from time to time while watching the film that it may be a bit of an exaggerated caricature I was floored to find out that the most extreme parts of the film - such as the "greed is good" speech...(read more) - was actually derived from real-life situations and events - the "greed is good" speech having been influenced by speeches and comments made by Carl Icahn - a notorious corporate raider - and arbitrageur Ivan Boesky who, in a commencement address for UC Berkeley's School of Business Administration said, "Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy..." During the "greed is good" speech in the film I was also reminded of Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan's claim that "what each person seeks in an ideal situation is mastery over a world of slaves." These real-life individuals and comments help illustrate that as much as the film may appear to produce extreme caricatures, the film actually presents a rather moderate depiction of these sort of amoral, greedy corporate-capitalist raiders and mafia dons.

Outside of Wall Street being thematically relevant and grimly prophetic, having anticipated the rampant corruption and greed of the "excesses of the eighties" and the systematic corruption and destructive avarice of the capitalist system in general - most recently made manifest through the early 2000 corporate scandals, such as Enron's - the film is well written - the story is a real human drama, a typical Oliver Stone portrayal of the dialectical struggle between good and evil - brilliantly directed, acted and executed. Both Charlie Sheen's and Michael Douglas' performances were excellent; Douglas rightly won an Oscar for his performance. Martin Sheen, playing Charlie Sheen's character's labor union father and serving the role of the moral backbone of the film, also delivered.

The underlying moral story line many times is presented as too obvious; Oliver Stone tends to ravish his points across without any subtlety or nuance. I want to be provoked to think about the underlying moral story; I don't want it explained to me. I'm torn over this specific point though, the criticism may be overly harsh; after all, the criticism predominately stems from such aspects of the film as the Gordon Gekko character, who, in the final analysis, is actually very much true to life. That may be the real conflict here, that real life in this instance is just an absurdity and cannot be portrayed in any way, doing justice to reality, with subtlety and nuance. In any case, Wall Street should be mandatory viewing.

"Liberal Fascism": A Critique from the Left

2008-06-18T22:14:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton is a fascist for advocating public advertisements that offer tips on how to raise children, according to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, but Reagon, Bush I and II, Kissinger, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and their support, to limit myself to only a single example, for overt, violent and objective fascism, such as the neo-fascist, paramilitary, guerrilla death squads in Latin America, isn't even mentioned!

Also not mentioned is the Ku Klux Klan, which was the first proto-fascist (I use the term despite the caveats necessitated by Zizek's analysis) movement in America, nor does Jonah bother to mention any of the real-existing fascist groups and movements in America - such as the KKK, neo-Nazis, white nationalists generally, vigilante border groups, etcetera - because that would at the same time demonstrate the truth of American fascism and falsify his entire Ann Coulter-reminiscent, far-right political screed...fascism is a product of the so-conceived political right, always has been and continues to be.

Another peice of alleged evidence offered by Jonah is the fact that The New Republic - which he argues isn't actually liberal, it's progressive and somehow progressive is actually a code word for racism and collectivism, as he mumbled on Jon Stewart's show, yet we on the left know how far to the right, how subservient to power, the TNR really is - allegedly wrote kind words about Benito Mussolini, yet unmentioned, for reasons which seem apparent immediately, is the glowing review the recently deceased William F. Buckley Jr. (the crown-prince of conservatism, representing the right without question or ambiguity) penned for 'General Franco' in Jonah's ideological backwaters of the National Review; (lets also not forget the shared ideological commitments of the socioeconomic dogmas of 'the Chicago Boys', Friedman, Greenspan, the IMF, the WTO, Pinochet, Suharto and so on).

I would think that we would also do well not to forget that Benito himself publicly declared in a speech railing against Italian liberals who were asking for the actual programs as were to be implemented by Benito that "fascism is anti-liberal."
There is also for Jonah the inconvenient fact that fascism has been well studied and thoroughly analyzed in academia and has been decisively placed on the right of the political spectrum (are there any real arguments against this conclusion? No).

Another laughable argument Jonah concocts is the trivial observation that "many" Nazis were vegetarians and concerned with the organic and the environment. Jonah implies that, therefore, the animal rights and ecology movements are fascist, which is a juvenile and obvious non-sequitur, literally analogous to arguing that Hitler had a mustache, therefore, mustache's signify fascism. He cannot refrain himself from reminding everyone that the Nazi party itself was allegedly rife with homosexuals. What he neglects to mention (rhetorical question: what are his views on homosexuality again?) are the scores of homosexuals massacred in Nazi death camps because they were gay. Jonah's argument is revisionist history at its worst and most hateful. Jonah's neglect of the holocaust's inclusion of homosexuals brings to bear another point about Jonah's inference that the Nazis were socialists.

The Nazi party, being fascist, was by definition not socialist, hence the separate term and category.
As soldiers who were with Hitler testified, Hitler was ideologically-rabidly anti-Marxist and anti-socialist, in part due to his crazed anti-Semitism - as 'spartacus' online chronicles "[h]is fellow soldiers described him as 'odd' and 'peculiar'. One soldier from his regiment, Hans Mend, claimed that Hitler was an isolated figure who spent long periods of time sitting in the corner holding his head in silence. Then all of a sudden, Mend claimed, he would jump up and make a speech. These outbursts were usually attacks on Jews and Marxists who Hitler claimed were undermining the war effort."
Hitler constantly ranted and raved about Marxism and Bolshevism as being Jewish conspiracies to take over and control the entire world.

spartacus continues;

“Hitler saw socialism as part of a Jewish conspiracy. Many of the socialist leaders in Germany, including Kurt Eisner, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Toller and Eugen Levine were Jews. So also were many of the leaders of the October Revolution in Russia. This included Leon Trotsky, Gregory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Dimitri Bogrov, Karl Radek, Yakov Sverdlov, Maxim Litvinov, Adolf Joffe, and Moisei Uritsky. It had not escaped Hitler's notice that Karl Marx, the prophet of socialism, had also been a Jew.

It was no coincidence that Jews had joined socialist and communist parties in Europe. Jews had been persecuted for centuries and therefore were attracted to a movement that proclaimed that all men and women deserved to be treated as equals. This message was reinforced when on 10th July, 1918, the Bolshevik government in Russia passed a law that abolished all discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.

It was not until May, 1919 that the German Army entered Munich and overthrew the Bavarian Socialist Republic. Hitler was arrested with other soldiers in Munich and was accused of being a socialist. Hundreds of socialists were executed without trial but Hitler was able to convince them that he had been an opponent of the regime. To prove this he volunteered to help to identify soldiers who had supported the Socialist Republic. The authorities agreed to this proposal and Hitler was transferred to the commission investigating the revolution.

Information supplied by Hitler helped to track down several soldiers involved in the uprising. His officers were impressed by his hostility to left-wing ideas and he was recruited as a political officer. Hitler's new job was to lecture soldiers on politics. The main aim was to promote his political philosophy favoured by the army and help to combat the influence of the Russian Revolution on the German soldiers.

Spartacus

Here is more to supplement the background of Hitler, Nazism and fascism proper:

“The behaviour of the NSDAP became more violent. On one occasion 167 Nazis beat up 57 members of the German Communist Party in the Reichstag. They were then physically thrown out of the building.

The stormtroopers also carried out terrible acts of violence against socialists and communists. In one incident in Silesia, a young member of the KPD had his eyes poked out with a billiard cue and was then stabbed to death in front of his mother. Four members of the SA were convicted of the crime. Many people were shocked when Hitler sent a letter of support for the four men and promised to do what he could to get them released.

Incidents such as these worried many Germans, and in the elections that took place in November 1932 the support for the Nazi Party fell. The German Communist Party made substantial gains in the election winning 100 seats. Hitler used this to create a sense of panic by claiming that German was on the verge of a Bolshevik Revolution and only the NSDAP could prevent this happening.

A group of prominent industrialists who feared such a revolution sent a petition to Paul von Hindenburg asking for Hitler to become Chancellor. Hindenberg reluctantly agreed to their request and at the age of forty-three, Hitler became the new Chancellor of Germany.

Although Hitler had the support of certain sections of the German population he never gained an elected majority. The best the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) could do in a election was 37.3 per cent of the vote they gained in July 1932. When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the Nazis only had a third of the seats in the Reichstag.

Soon after Hitler became chancellor he announced new elections. Hermann Goering called a meeting of important industrialists where he told them that the 1933 General Election could be the last in Germany for a very long time. Goering added that the NSDAP would need a considerable amount of of money to ensure victory. Those present responded by donating 3 million Reichmarks. As Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary after the meeting: "Radio and press are at our disposal. Even money is not lacking this time."

Behind the scenes Goering, who was minister of the interior in Hitler's government, was busily sacking senior police officers and replacing them with Nazi supporters. These men were later to become known as the Gestapo. Goering also recruited 50,000 members of the Sturm Abteilung (SA) to work as police auxiliaries.

Hermann Goering then raided the headquarters of the Communist Party (KPD) in Berlin and claimed that he had uncovered a plot to overthrow the government. Leaders of the KPD were arrested but no evidence was ever produced to support Goering's accusations. He also announced he had discovered a communist plot to poison German milk supplies.

On 27th February, 1933, someone set fire to the Reichstag. Several people were arrested including a leading, Georgi Dimitrov, general secretary of the Comintern, the international communist organization. Dimitrov was eventually acquitted but a young man from the Netherlands, Marianus van der Lubbe, was eventually executed for the crime. As a teenager Lubbe had been a communist and Hermann Goering used this information to claim that the Reichstag Fire was part of a KPD plot to overthrow the government.

Hitler gave orders that all leaders of the German Communist Party should "be hanged that very night."Paul von Hindenburg vetoed this decision but did agree that Hitler should take "dictatorial powers". KPD candidates in the election were arrested and Hermann Goering announced that the Nazi Party planned "to exterminate" German communists.

Thousands of members of the Social Democrat Party and Communist Party were arrested and sent to recently opened to concentration camp. They were called this because they "concentrated" the enemy into a restricted area. Hitler named these camps after those used by the British during the Boer War.

Left-wing election meetings were broken up by the Sturm Abteilung (SA) and several candidates were murdered. Newspapers that supported these political parties were closed down during the 1933 General Election.

Although it was extremely difficult for the opposition parties to campaign properly, Hitler and the Nazi party still failed to win an overall victory in the election on 5th March, 1933. The NSDAP received 43.9% of the vote and only 288 seats out of the available 647. The increase in the Nazi vote had mainly come from the Catholic rural areas who feared the possibility of an atheistic Communist government.

After the 1933 General Election Hitler proposed an Enabling Bill that would give him dictatorial powers. Such an act needed three-quarters of the members of the Reichstag to vote in its favour.

All the active members of the Communist Party, were in concentration camps, in hiding, or had left the country (an estimated 60,000 people left Germany during the first few weeks after the election). This was also true of most of the leaders of the other left-wing party, Social Democrat Party (SDP). However, Hitler still needed the support of the Catholic Centre Party (BVP) to pass this legislation. Hitler therefore offered the BVP a deal: vote for the bill and the Nazi government would guarantee the rights of the Catholic Church. The BVP agreed and when the vote was taken, only 94 members of the SDP voted against the Enabling Bill.

Hitler was now dictator of Germany. His first move was to take over the trade unions. Its leaders were sent to concentration camps and the organization was put under the control of the Nazi Party. The trade union movement now became known as the Labour Front.

Soon afterwards the Communist Party and the Social Democrat Party were banned. Party activists still in the country were arrested. A month later Hitler announced that the Catholic Centre Party, the Nationalist Party and all other political parties other than the NSDAP were illegal, and by the end of 1933 over 150,000 political prisoners were in concentration camps. Hitler was aware that people have a great fear of the unknown, and if prisoners were released, they were warned that if they told anyone of their experiences they would be sent back to the camp.

It was not only left-wing politicians and trade union activists who were sent to concentration camp. The Gestapo also began arresting beggars, prostitutes, homosexuals, alcoholics and anyone who was incapable of working. Although some inmates were tortured, the only people killed during this period were prisoners who tried to escape and those classed as "incurably insane".

Hitler's Germany became known as a fascist state. Fascist was originally used to describe the government of Benito Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini's fascist one-party state emphasized patriotism, national unity, hatred of communism, admiration of military values and unquestioning obedience. Hitler was deeply influenced by Mussolini's Italy and his Germany shared many of the same characteristics.”

So, in summary, the Nazis effectively seized power on the backs of industrialists horrified of a potential Russian-Bolshevik-like revolution in Germany (and here would be a good place to recommend the reading of the left-Marxist, anti-Bolshevik writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Herman Gorter and company, the Junius Pamphlet and Gorters 'Open letter to Comrade Lenin' coming to mind) by whipping up fear-mongering and red-baiting among the reactionary bourgeoisie. After they rose to power among their first actions was to destroy the labor movement and trade unions; which, if one were to know anything at all about socialism, one would already know that this policy was and is diametrically opposed, fundamentally and in essence, to even the most basic of socialist principle - the labor movement and trade unions being the life blood of socialism. It was for these reasons that union leaders, labor activists and socialists, communists and anarchists of all stripes were among the first to populate the Nazi death camps (along with Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and so on), in the instances wherein they were not killed outright.

Jonah's vulgar revisionist history is, in the final analysis, reminiscent of David Irving's work. In fact, his entire inverted screed is what one would expect were Ann Coulter and David Irving to co-author a book.

Anarcho-Syndicalist Council Communism

2008-05-03T02:14:00.000-07:00

I began by comparing Pannekoek’s council communism with Rocker’s anarcho-syndicalism in the previous post and in this line shall I further illustrate the convergence between the two tendencies upon the question of parliamentary parties and state power.

Pannekoek explains that “today belief in the party constitutes the most powerful check on the working class' capacity for action. That is why we are not trying to create a new party. This is so, not because our numbers are small -- a party of any kind begins with a few people -- but because, in our day, a party cannot be other than an organization aimed at directing and dominating the proletariat. To this type of organization we oppose the principle that the working class can effectively come into its own and prevail only by taking its destiny into its own hands.”[1]

Rocker concurs writing that “[p]articipation in the politics of the bourgeois states has not brought the labour movement a hairs' breadth closer to Socialism, but, thanks to this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned to insignificance. The ancient proverb: 'Who eats of the pope, dies of him,' has held true in this content also; who eats of the state is ruined by it. Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labour movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.”[2]

The left-Marxist Paul Mattick explains further that “the parties of the workers, like those of the capitalists became limited corporations, the elemental needs of the class were subordinated to political expediency. Revolutionary objectives were displaced by horse-trading and manipulations for political positions. The party became all-important, its immediate objectives superseded those of the class. Where revolutionary situations set into motion the class, whose tendency is to fight for the realization of the revolutionary objective, the parties of the workers ‘represented’ the working class and were themselves ‘represented’ by parliamentarians whose very position in parliament constituted resignation to their status as bargainers within a capitalist order whose supremacy was no longer challenged.”[3]

Mattick explains that instead of a vanguard party leading the workers, the workers will themselves spontaneously create the necessary organizations required in order to give birth to the embryonic social structure of the future socialist society: “The Groups of Council Communists recognise also that no real social change is possible under present conditions unless the anti-capitalistic forces grow stronger than the pro-capitalist forces, and that it is impossible to organise anti-capitalistic forces of such a strength within capitalistic relations. From the analysis of present-day society and from a study of previous class struggles it concludes that spontaneous actions of dissatisfied masses will, in the process of their rebellion, create their own organisations, and that these organisations, arising out of the social conditions, alone can end the present social arrangement.”[4]

I do, however, agree with Mattick when he explains the role of the Groups of Council Communists:

“The Groups do not claim to be acting for the workers, but consider themselves as those members of the working class who have, for one reason or another, recognised evolutionary trends towards capitalism’s downfall, and who attempt to co-ordinate the present activities of the workers to that end. They know that they are no more than propaganda groups, able only to suggest necessary courses of action, but unable to perform them in the ‘interest of the class’. This the class has to do itself. The present functions of the Groups, though related to the perspectives of the future, attempt to base themselves entirely on the present needs of the workers. On all occasions, they try to foster self-initiative and self-action of the workers. The Groups participate wherever possible in any action of the working population, not proposing a separate programme, but adopting the programme of those workers and endeavouring to increase the direct participation of those workers, in all decisions. They demonstrate in word and deed that the labour movement must foster its own interests exclusively; that society as a whole cannot truly exist until classes are abolished; that the workers, considering nothing but their specific, most immediate interests, must and do attack all the other classes and interests of the exploitative society; that they can do no wrong as long as they do what helps them economically and socially; that this is possible only as long as they do this themselves; that they must begin to solve their affairs today and so prepare themselves to solve the even more urgent problems of the morrow.”[ 5]

Arguably one of the best distillations of the argument against state power was formulated by Rocker in the following passage:

"As long as within society a possessing and a non-possessing group of human beings face one another in enmity, the state will be indispensable to the possessing minority for the protection of its privileges. when this condition of social injustice vanishes to give place to a higher order of things, which shall recognise no special rights and shall have as its basic assumption the community of social interests, government over men must yield the field to the to the administration of economic and social affairs, or to speak with Saint-Simon: 'he time will come when the art of governing man will disappear. A new art will take its place, the art of administering things.'
And his disposes of the theory maintained by Marx and his followers that the state, in the form of a proletarian dictatorship, is a necessary transitional stage to a classless society, in which the state after the elimination of all class conflicts and then of classes themselves, will dissolve itself and vanish from the canvas. This concept, which completely mistakes the real nature of the state and the significance in history of the factor of political power, is only the logical outcome of so-called economic materialism, which sees in all the phenomena of history merely the inevitable effects of the methods of production of the time. Under the influence of this theory people came to regard the different forms of the state and all other social institutions as a 'juridical and political superstructure' on the 'economic edifice' of society, and thought that they had found in that theory the key to every historical process. In reality every section of history affords us thousands of examples of the way in which the economic development of a country has been set back for centuries and forced into prescribed forms by particular struggles for political power."[6]

[1] Party and Working Class by Anton Pannekoek

[2] The Objectives of Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker

[3] The Masses and the Vanguard by Paul Mattick

[4] Council Communism by Paul Mattick

[5] ibid

[6] Anarchism Its Aims and Purposes by Rudolf Rocker

Anarchist-Marxist Convergence: Part One

2008-04-07T17:44:00.000-07:00

I have not yet gone into too great a detail regarding the underlying socio-political theory which animates this blog. Although it is rather obvious from the title of the blog as well as from the content of the posts, the operative underlying theory has been and continues to be derived from the anti-capitalist, anti-state, socialist-left, the specificities of this theory have not yet been fleshed out in detail.

As comrades of mine already know, the specific tendency which animates my perspective is a dialectical convergence between several dynamic traditions. It would be impossible to give a full account of the various interrelated tendencies which converge and supplement the general underlying theory in a single post without doing a grave injustice to all of the separate yet related tendencies as well as to the dialectical amalgamation there from derived.

This post shall then be the first in a series of serial installments within which I will hence forth describe the specific individual tendencies which I draw from, their history, and their coalescing with various other related tendencies.

I will begin by drawing attention to the convergence and near indistinguishable nature of the anarcho-syndicalist tendency, represented by the anarchist theorist Rudolf Rocker, and the council communist tendency, represented by the left-Marxists Anton Pannekoek and Paul Mattick.

I have noticed that what Noam Chomsky pointed out is correct, that there is a fundamental convergence between anarcho-syndicalism – best expressed by Rocker’s work of the same title – and left Marxism, such as Pannekoek’s council communism. In fact, I am uncertain what differentiates Pannekoek’s council communism from Rocker’s anarcho-syndicalism.

Both posit that capitalism must be dismantled, socialism being the alternative. That strikes are the primary method by which the proletariat achieves class consciousness and is, as Rocker claims, “the focal point of the political struggle.”[1] Pannekoek explains “…mass strikes of the workers tend to become most serious attacks against State power, that fortress of capitalism, and most efficient factors in increasing the consciousness and social power of the working class.”[2] Rocker concurs stating that, “the strike is for the workers not only a means for the defense of immediate economic interests, it is also a continuous schooling for their powers of resistance, showing them every day that every least right has to be won by unceasing struggle against the existing system.”[3]

It was this premise that was the cause of conflict between Kautsky and Luxemburg. Luxemburg rightly took the position that the mass strike was foundational to any revolutionary socialist movement, as she said “the mass strike is the first natural, impulsive form of every great revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the more highly developed the antagonism is between capital and labour, the more effective and decisive must mass strikes become.”[4]

Both Pannekoek and Rocker conclude that workers’ councils have and shall be established spontaneously and organically through trade unionism and strikes and that these councils are in embryo the organism of the future socialist society. They realize that organization is required in order to achieve workers’ control and that it is through strikes and the subsequent organic formation of workers’ councils that this organization will develop.

As Pannekoek explains, “In a big strike, all the workers cannot assemble in one meeting. They choose delegates to act as a committee. Such a committee is only the executive organ of the strikers; it is continually in touch with them and has to carry out the decisions of the strikers. Each delegate at every moment can be replaced by others; such a committee never becomes an independent power. In such a way, common action as one body can be secured, and yet the workers have all decisions in their own hands.”[5]

He goes on to explain that “Councils are the form of organization only for…the working class as a whole..They originate and grow up along with the first action of a revolutionary character. With the development of revolution, their importance and their functions increase. At first they may appear as simple strike committees…In a universal strike the functions of these committees are enlarged. Now delegates of all the factories and plants have to discuss and to decide about all the conditions of the fight…When the revolution develops to such power that the State power is seriously affected, then the workers’ councils have to assume political functions…They are the central bodies of the workers’ power…”[6]

Rocker points out that “The lancehead of the labour movement is, therefore...the trader union, toughened by daily combat and permeated by Socialist spirit. Only in the realm of economy are the workers able to display their full social strength, for it is their activity as producers which holds together the whole social structure, and guarantees the existence of society at all...the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society, it is the germ of the Socialist society of the future, the elementary school of Socialism in general. Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable."[7]

The points of convergence are many and the examples here are merely first approximations.

[1] Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker

[2] Strikes by Anton Pannekoek

[3] Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker

[4] The Mass Strike by Rosa Luxemburg

[5] Workers’ Councils by Anton Pannekoek

[6] ibid

[7] Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolf Rocker

Anti-Americanism and Totalitarianism

2008-04-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

I would be willing to wager that just about every social activist and dissident has at one time or another been charged with the so horrific crime of “anti-Americanism.” One simply cannot within the rotting economic and reactionary social climate today so prevalent present damning analysis and critique of state power without large segments of society, most likely proto-fascist segments, instantaneously spewing forth hysterical charges of “anti-Americanism” and other related slurs and rhetorical bile.

What is “anti-Americanism” and just what qualifies one as being “anti-American” or “un-American”? Simply asking this question and searching for an adequate answer goes a long way in demonstrating that “anti-Americanism” is simply empty, reactionary propaganda and smut, derived straight out of the ideology of totalitarianism.

In a totalitarian society the state, party or dominant institution of concentrated power, used to exert the ruling elite’s dominance over the larger population - through the military, guerilla death squads, massive ever-present propaganda campaigns and so forth – is the mafia Don and any attempt to challenge the Don’s position of power is met with an immediate reaction, in many places imprisonment, torture and murder; in other places, propaganda campaigns to marginalize and demolish the theorists and their analyses and critiques through media networks owned by massive multinational corporations running twenty four hours a day.

When one searches for the answer to the questions previously posed one finds that what constitutes anti-Americanism ranges anywhere from organizing terrorist attacks on innocent civilians, such as the attacks of 9-11, perpetrated by al-Qaida, all the way down to the act of exposing and criticizing the United States for its egregious abuses of state power; a recent example being the murderous bombing of Basra, which has so far led to the deaths of more than 300 people. Which illustrates rather well one of the underlying assumptions and fallacies of the ideology which supports the charges of anti-Americanism, that there is no distinction to be made between state power, the government and its affiliates, and the general population and that any action by the state power is by definition just.

This gross conflation causes many problems and allows the possibility that the state power will be defended over and against general populations and mass social movements, even when the state’s actions are illegitimate or when the state is itself illegitimate, as all states ultimately are. This view, which reflexively adopts the positions of the state and the powerful, many times in direct opposition to social movements and the general population, is also expressed in international law.

As Noam Chomsky observed, “international law is, in many respects, the instrument of the powerful: it is a creation of states and their representatives. In developing the presently existing body of international law, there was no participation by mass movements of peasants. The structure of international law reflects that fact; that is, international law permits much too wide a range of forceful intervention in support of existing power structures.”

This is of course not to undermine all of international law, which is arguably the best and most enlightened attempt to create a coherent system by which to defend human rights and so forth; as Chomsky goes on to say, “in fact there are interesting elements of international law, for example, embedded in the Nuremberg principles and the United Nations Charter, which permit, in fact, I believe, require the citizen to act against his own state in ways which the state will falsely regard as criminal. Nevertheless, he's acting legally, because international law also happens to prohibit the threat or use of force in international affairs, except under some very narrow circumstances, of which, for example, the war in Vietnam [as well as the present war in Iraq] is not one. This means that in the particular case of the Vietnam War, which interests me most, the American state is acting in a criminal capacity. And the people have the right to stop criminals from committing murder. Just because the criminal happens to call your action illegal when you try to stop him, it doesn't mean it is illegal.”

Returning to the conflation of state power with the general population and culture at large, Arundhati Roy illustrated the absurdity of the conflation, which is inherent within the charge of anti-Americanism, by asking what anti-Americanism actually means. She asks “[d]oes it mean you are anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to freedom of speech?...That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?

This sly conflation of America's culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. government's foreign policy (about which, thanks to America's "free press", sadly most Americans know very little) is a deliberate and extremely effective strategy. It's like a retreating army taking cover in a heavily populated city, hoping that the prospect of hitting civilian targets will deter enemy fire.

But there are many Americans who would be mortified to be associated with their government's policies. The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. government policy come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what the U.S. government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Anthony Amove to tell us what's really going on.”

The doctrine that underlies the charge of anti-Americanism is better understood within a broader context. Chomsky provides the context thusly:

“The people who are called ‘intellectuals’ are those who pretty much serve power. Others may be equally intellectual, but they're not called intellectuals. And that goes all the way back to the origins of recorded history. Go back to the Bible; who were the people who were respected, and who were the people who were reviled? Well, the people who were respected were the ones who, a thousand years later, were called false prophets. And the ones who were reviled and jailed and beaten and so on are the ones who years later were called prophets. And it goes right up until today. In the United States, people respected Soviet dissidents, but they weren't respected in Soviet society. There, they respected the commissars. So you are a respected intellectual if you do your job as a part of the system of doctrinal control. Raise questions about it and you're just not acceptable -- you're anti-American or some sort of shrill and strident something or other. Why was Walter Lippmann one of the "responsible men," while Eugene Debs was in jail? Was it that Walter Lippmann was smarter than Eugene Debs? Not that I can see. Eugene Debs was just an American working-class leader who raised unacceptable questions, so he was in jail. And Walter Lippmann was a servant of the major powers, so he was respected. And it would be amazing if it was anything else.”

Anti-Americanism, a derivative of anti-nationalism, as Arundhati Roy points out, is fallacious on the basis that it assumes the person so classified “is against his or her own nation and, by inference, is pro some other one. But it isn’t necessary to be ‘anti-national to be deeply suspicious of all nationalism, to be anti-nationalism. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.”

In the final analysis the charge of anti-Americanism, hurled with such vitriol, is but one extension of imperial power and the propaganda which serves this power; dissidents, no matter the support they enjoy, and critics of excesses of state power and abuses of human rights and so forth, are automatically deemed “anti-American” and are thus marginalized and dismissed before their analyses and arguments are even heard. The charge is thus used as an ideological weapon, derived from the ideology of totalitarianism, by which critics of state power are bludgeoned into marginalization, in the very same way Soviet dissidents were treated with the charge of being “anti-Soviet.”

As Arundhati Roy goes on to say: “The term "anti-American" is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely - but shall we say inaccurately - define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

Collective Punishment and Terrorism

2008-03-03T22:13:00.000-08:00

It is without controversy among rational people the realization that collective punishment – a tactic defined under international law as a war crime – is in no way a proper means by which to pursue conflict resolution.

Setting aside for now the moral and legal aspects of collective punishment, examining the tactic on purely pragmatic grounds, one finds that outside of the tactic being sinister and evil ethically speaking, and in breech of international law, a gross violation of human rights, the tactic is not only impractical, it is, in fact, counter productive, ensuring the opposite effect as the one so desired; the effect so desired being peace and security, or so proclaim propagandists for collective punishment. Collective punishment and the inevitable exacerbation of the circular violence which it necessarily provokes only ever serves as fuel to the fire, intensifying the internecine violence.

It is always of benefit to investigate the real-life application of such tactics and doctrines as collective punishment. Arguably the most explicit and depraved example is provided to us through the Israel-Palestine conflict, specifically, Israel’s imprisonment of, latest incursion into and siege of the Gaza strip.

Israel’s brutal and vicious siege on Gaza is intended to continue the policy of strangling the Palestinian will to resist by dolling out violent retribution to the entire civilian population based upon the misconceived notion that these actions will turn the population of Gaza against Hamas. The same policy for which the murder and mayhem wrought upon the Lebanese people is to blame, the illusory and sinister notion that by terrorizing a population for the actions of an armed resistance or a band of terrorists one can turn the population against the resistance and/or terrorists.

As the consequences of the destruction of Lebanon by Israel attest, collective punishment not only does not turn the general population against the resistance or terrorist bands – in this case, Hezbollah – it actually strengthens the resistance and/or terrorist bands; in the case of Lebanon it served beyond the wildest dreams of the Hezbollah to further radicalize the population of Lebanon, shore up sympathy and support for Hezbollah and ultimately embolden the terrorist elements within the resistance.

Returning to the situation in Gaza, Israeli leaders argue that the existence of the Hamas regime in Gaza and the firing of Qassam rockets by Palestinians at Sderot, an Israeli town on the other side of the Gaza border, leave no alternative to collective punishment. However, as Uri Avnery wrote in an insightful Counterpunch article, “[s]everal months ago, Hamas proposed a ceasefire. It repeated the offer this week [late January]. A ceasefire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the ‘targeted’ assassinations and the blockade…Why doesn’t our government jump at this proposal? Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do…The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank…In simple and blunt words: the government sacrifices the fate of the Sderot population on the altar of a hopeless principle. It is more important for the government to boycott Hamas – because it is now the spearhead of Palestinian resistance – than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media cooperate with this pretence.”

As was the case with Israel’s murderous collective punishment of Lebanon, so too has Israel’s policy of collective punishment in Gaza not only failed, but, even further, has provoked, as anticipated by security analysts and most observant people, just the opposite effect: growing support for Hamas.

The Israeli siege of Gaza began with the complete sealing of the border, producing, in effect, the largest prison on earth. In late January the Israeli Army would not allow either fuels or medical supplies to enter Gaza, as a result of this blockade Gaza was plunged into darkness. This is collective punishment – in breech of Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention - on a sinister scale with consequences which affect the entire population.

Dr. Mona El-Farra, a physician and human rights activist living in Gaza city, described the specific consequences of this policy for the Al Shifa hospital: “I’ll give you the example about Al Shifa hospital, a government hospital and the last hospital in Gaza state. There are 100 patients in the intensive care unit, and those patients’ lives are seriously threatened because if the fuel runs out, that means the machines will go out, and they will die at that moment. Another 400 patients are facing the same destiny if the power stays cut off.”

Israel then proceeded to send ground troops into Gaza, as Jean Shaoul reports, “targeting militants in and around Jabaliya refugee camp. They killed 61 Palestinians, at least two dozen of whom were civilians, including a baby, and wounded about 200, 14 of them critically…Gaza’s streets are deserted. Universities and schools have closed.”

The operation, dubbed “Hot Winter,” has killed seventy-seven Palestinians in two days. As Amy Goodman reported on Democracy Now!, more than 112 Palestinians have been killed and “[a]ccording to Gaza health ministry statistics, twenty-two children were killed [now twenty-five according to Amnesty International]. More than 350 people were wounded. Since last week, three Israelis have died: one civilian and two soldiers.”

Amnesty International reports that “Israeli forces also destroyed houses and property across the Gaza strip, including at least two medical facilities…” Amnesty International went on to observe that “the Israeli military air strikes and artillery attacks on the Gaza strip were being carried out with reckless disregard for civilian life” and that “Israel has the legal obligation to protect the civilian population of Gaza…These attacks are disproportionate and go beyond lawful measures which Israeli forces may take in response to rocket attacks by Palestinian armed groups.”

Amid all of this violent chaos, the Israeli puppet Mahmoud Abbas has himself suspended peace negotiations and cut off all contacts with Israel; demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt the counterproductive consequences of the policy of collective punishment. Now not only are the populations of the Occupied Territories not turning against Hamas, but even the traditionally sniveling Israeli puppets, like Abbas, are turning more and more against Israel.

The policy of collective punishment and the consequences which it necessarily entails demonstrates that the term “collective punishment” is simply a transparent euphemism for terrorism. To violently punish an entire population for political ends, to, say, completely seal the Gaza border, to cut off entry of fuel and medical supplies, to then invade Gaza and indiscriminately murder innocent men, women and children noncombatants in the stated desire to elicit from them revulsion of Hamas and a desire to accept any unjust solution to the conflict so long as the destruction and murder ends, is the elementary, textbook definition of terrorism.

Socioeconomic Crises

2008-02-11T15:18:00.000-08:00

Whenever socioeconomic issues emerge and are discussed there tends to arise the common misconception that economic crises, such as increasing national dept, are entirely independent of social crises, such as an increase in infant mortality rates, and that “the economy” is some sort of transcendent entity unto itself.
In the final analysis, economic issues are social issues, and the economy, as Karl Marx revealed, is nothing more than the social relations of production, the asymmetrical relations of power – with bosses and workers and with, as Cornel West observes “those at the top who will be able to live lives of luxury and those whose labor will be both indispensable, necessary, but also exploited in order to produce that wealth” – and the disunity between the forces of production and the relations of production.
For instance, the ability to drill for oil and to use the oil drilled to produce fuel is socially in common, it is a collective effort, however, the final product and the capital there from earned is not shared, it’s usurped by a small, elite class, the bourgeois. Thus, to speak of “the economy” as some sort of singular, transcendent entity unto itself is erroneous.

Turning now to the interrelation of economic and social crises, the current sub-prime mortgage crisis provides and illuminating example.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis is a prime example of the crises provoked by capitalist socioeconomics long ago exposed and critiqued by, most famously, Karl Marx and socialists such as Rosa Luxemburg.
The sub-prime mortgage crisis is in essence the inevitable manifestation of the crisis of overproduction Marx wrote about, despite the adaptation of capital through credit, which Luxemburg wrote about. Luxemburg observed that “[w]hen the inner tendency of capitalist production to extend boundlessly strikes against the restricted dimensions of private property, credit appears as a means of surmounting these limits in a particular capitalist manner.”
The sub-prime mortgage boom, a boom the Economist called the “largest financial bubble in history,” was fueled by credit. People seeking to obtain new houses, borrowers who had low credit and/or low income, were directed towards sub-prime mortgages, the interest rates of which were usually two to five percentage points higher than on prime loans. The idea being that these mortgages provided a way for borrowers who might not otherwise qualify for loans to buy homes.
However, as Petrino DiLeo writes, “this sector has morphed into a classic predatory lending environment. Stories are emerging of mortgage brokers fudging applicants’ incomes on forms or ignoring it entirely--and rushing through approvals on loans that have little prospect of getting paid back.”
This “predatory lending environment” emerged because Wall Street banks, investment firms, mortgage companies and even the storefront mortgage broker operations were motivated to push this boom forward – “even if that meant making loans to borrowers who wouldn’t be able to afford the terms, or steering customers with better credit into more unstable mortgages that, at first glance appeared cheaper” – because of the prospects of profits in the millions; “whether borrowers missed payments, refinanced their loans or paid off the mortgage too early.”
Petrino DiLeo points out that the sub-prime loans “were enticing to a secondary market” also, “in which bankers packaged mortgage loans in large numbers and sold them to the biggest investors as giant bonds.”

While it lasted the sub-prime mortgage and housing boom was a great success, “the largest financial bubble in history,” yet no so great for the borrowers who had been huckstered into the shyster deals when their mortgage rates were adjusted and they were forced to foreclose and lose their homes. Unfortunately for many of those who exploited the situation and benefited from the boom, the crisis soon became there’s also.
As Rosa Luxemburg explains: “If it is true that crises appear as a result of the contradiction existing between the capacity of extension, the tendency of production to increase, and the restricted consumption capacity of the market, credit is precisely…the specific means that makes this contradiction break out as often as possible. To begin with, it increases disproportionately the capacity of the extension of production and thus constitutes an inner motive force that is constantly pushing production to exceed the limits of the market. But credit strikes from two sides. After having (as a factor of the process of production) provoked overproduction, credit (as a factor of exchange) destroys, during the crisis, the very productive forces it itself created. At the first symptom of the crisis, credit melts away. It abandons exchange where it would still be found indispensable, and appearing instead, ineffective and useless, there where some exchange still continues, it reduces to a minimum the consumption capacity of the market.”So, when the market began overproducing houses and the borrowers were unable to pay off the loans, the “largest financial bubble in history” exploded. As Joel Geier points out, proving Marx’s theory of capitalism’s crisis of overproduction and Luxemburg’s theory of the role credit plays in such crises, “the enormous profits from [the sub-prime mortgage boom] produced the typical capitalist cyclical outcome - an overproduction of houses, which could not be sold at the usual profit. A year ago construction activity and housing prices stagnated and then fell, coincidentally just as the resetting of mortgage rates began. People found that with falling home prices they could not refinance, and were now stuck with these higher, unaffordable rates. Within a few months, half a million families couldn’t make their mortgage payments and lost their homes…Beyond the human tragedy, this will add to the large inventory of unsold houses, further depressing prices. Many mortgages will be greater than the house is worth, which in turn will lead more people to walk away from homes with inflated prices, producing even more forecloses, and further price declines. And of course the banks are now refusing to make mortgages in declining or unstable markets, narrowing the pool of potential buyers [just as Luxemburg argued, “credit melts away”]. It is the mad logic of the capitalist market in crisis spiraling downward and producing the worst housing depression since the 1930s.”

As is illustrated by the specific example of the economic crisis of the sub-prime mortgage bust, economic crises are also necessarily social crises because they carry with them consequences for the society as a whole and, in fact, the world. The housing crisis has now rippled around the globe. The crisis is in fact provoking a possible recession. Joel Geier explains: “Now that housing prices are falling, increasing house debt as the vehicle to maintain living standards is over, and retail sales to working-class families are sliding.All of this is cutting into profits, the dynamic that drives the capitalist engine. In the last quarter, profits fell by 8 percent from a year ago, the first decline in the mass of profits since the last recession. With less profit, business spending for capital goods is being cut back. All the elements of a recession have been slowly unfolding for months. But this is more than an ordinary recession, it is also the opening of an international financial crisis unlike any in the post-Second World War period. The massive build-up of toxic debt is threatening the functioning of the international financial system. The banks have been forced in the last two months to write down $80 billion of bad mortgage debt. Conservative estimates are that they will have to take losses of $300–400 billion in the next year—if the economy doesn’t go into recession. Citibank, the largest American bank, had to take a $6 billion loss in November, and is expected to take between $10–15 billion more in the next three months, on its worst subprime mortgages alone. Like other banks it also has severe problems with its corporate debt book, and its off-balance-sheet subsidiaries, which it did not put up capital reserves for. The most important international bank may face a capital crisis because it does not have adequate reserves to cover all of its bad loans.”

In the final analysis, it is always the working class that pays the bills. All the recent talk about “fiscal responsibility” means cuts in social spending and a renewed propaganda campaign for privatization, which is most assuredly a social problem; it’s not just a social problem, it’s actual class warfare. Unemployment is rising, wages are stagnating and have been for several years, inflation in the price of food and fuel has also risen and this is all destructive of working-class living standards. Not to mention the millions likely to lose their homes due to the sub-prime disaster.
These are the results of the inevitable crisis of the capitalist system, a system founded upon avarice and exploitation, yet, unlike the formulations of many Marxist theoreticians, capitalism is not going to by its own internal contradictions dismantle itself. It is going to take dedicated, sustained and renewed activism from the left to ensure that rather than the capitalist system driving the majority of society into the ground, it is dismantled and replaced with a just socialist system. As Rosa Luxemburg aptly summarized it, we must decide between either “socialism or barbarism.”

State Power and Social Movements

2008-01-17T02:00:00.000-08:00

Standard service-to-power, state-reverential propaganda has it that progressive gains are doled out by benevolent state power rather than forced out of the state by organized and sustained social movements. A particularly repugnant version of this myth was offered by Hillary Clinton in an interview on Fox News recently when she said that “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do; presidents before had not even tried. But it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives, because we had a president who said, “We’re going to do it,” and actually got it accomplished.”

Hillary should be ashamed. I cannot even think of a more vulgar formulation of the bourgeois argument that inverts social history so egregiously. Apparently Hillary would have us all believe that Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel (the Jewish MLK Jr.), A. Philip Randolph (beloved trade unionist), Bayard Rustin (revolutionary civil rights activist), A. J. Muste (socialist civil rights leader) – in fact, Randolph and Rustin were principle architects along with MLK Jr. of the famous march on Washington, and it was they who rallied the unions – all of the freedom riders, all of the thousands of activists “whose sit-ins and other organizing forced the government to do something about Jim Crow segregation” didn’t really matter or paled in comparison to the awe inspiring benevolent justice of Lyndon Johnson. As Elizabeth Schulte points out, “Clinton would rather identify herself with Johnson, a Southern politician who was unrelentingly hostile to the civil rights movement as he came to power,” than the nameless thousands of activists who risked their lives and well being organizing and resisting in the streets.

Hillary Clinton’s formulation of the standard rank defense of state power is a mythology of history. Such social gains as civil rights were not enacted by some benevolent state power, some southern white gentleman, but rather, the state was forced to make concessions and concede such gains in the face of massive social protest and activism.

When citizens today not only forget that the rights they enjoy were not initiated by the state - having instead been forced upon the state by massive social protest and upheaval - but go even further and mistakenly believe that the rights they so enjoy - which are being attacked all over again through state mechanisms such as the NSA and policies and laws such as the PATRIOT ACT and Homeland security - were initiated by the state, repressive state forces are then free to conduct business as usual without criticism, objection or even an awareness by the people.

Such historical mythologies, only being tenable with a complete misunderstanding or ignorance of social and political history, is an actual danger.

The government does not exist to protect the common person; insofar as it does, it does so because of the generations of social protest and activism which force the state to grant ever more rights and freedoms. Ultimately states exist – especially in the United States as formulated in the constitution – so as to protect the existing order of power relations and class structure. The state, in pursuit of a true people's democracy and social freedom, requires dismantling.

Humanism and the Occupation of Iraq

2008-01-07T17:08:00.000-08:00

The January/February issue of The Humanist magazine features an article by Jende Huang entitled “Fighting for Iraq: A Case for Liberation.” Huang’s article presents what amounts to a vulgar defense based upon spuriously applied humanist and Enlightenment values[1] of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This defense is a blight, both morally and intellectually, upon an otherwise consistently eloquent and insightful publication.

Huang argues that “the justification for such an endeavor can be drawn from Enlightenment values as well as common human decency,” the endeavor being “the opportunity to free the Iraqi people from decades of oppression;” oppression which manifested itself through “forced deportations, secret arrests without cause or justifications, torture, political suppression, and murder.”[2] Yet Huang fails to recognize that the correct way to liberate a people oppressed so is not by dismissing international norms and laws[3] and it is not through an unjust, illegal and immoral military invasion and occupation which completely devastates a country and its people, but rather, in the case of Iraq, by supporting movements within Iraq consisting of Iraqis liberating themselves; such as the 1991 Shiite uprising which had the potential to overthrow Saddam, but which the United States did not support, thus ensuring its failure.

Furthermore, in Huang’s view, it appears that the will of the Iraqi people is either irrelevant or negligible, which is bizarre considering his defense of the invasion and occupation is allegedly predicated upon the liberation of the Iraqi people and the desire to develop a viable democracy. The will of the Iraqi people is clear. They want a withdrawal of the occupying forces, which they consistently regard in polling as producing more violence than it prevents; which is understandable for sure, the U.S. military occupation has further wreaked havoc on an already devastated country and people who had suffered through not only the brutal and savage Saddam regime, but also the murderous sanctions regime, initiated by the U.S. endorsed and implemented by the U.N.

Huang does mention the extensive polling of Iraqi public opinion by citing the minority in a single poll who expressed “that the U.S. should remain until security is restored.” Looking at the May 2004 poll sponsored by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority, one finds that “roughly 80 percent of Iraqis had ‘no confidence’ in US-led forces to improve security and that most ‘would feel safer if Coalition forces left immediately.’” This sentiment has remained strong and consistent throughout the extensive polling of the Iraqi people. As Kevin Young pointed out in a Counterpunch article on the subject, “[w]ith similar consistency, Iraqis have voiced strong opposition to the presence of occupation forces. In August 2005, 82 percent were ‘strongly opposed’ to the occupation; in Junuary 2006, 87 percent favored a timeline for withdrawal; a year later, in September 2006, 71 percent wanted a full withdrawal by mid-2007.” The “March 2007 poll commissioned by US, British, and German news corporations…found that 78 percent of Iraqis ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat’ opposed the occupation.”

The will of the Iraqi people is as clear as it could ever be. Were Huang to be at all serious about the liberation of the Iraqi people and were he at all concerned for the elementary tenets of democracy, he might concern himself with the overwhelming will of the Iraqi people.

Huang’s absurd claim that “we” have the “obligation to fight alongside the Iraqi people” is made nonsense by the sobering fact that the Iraqi people fighting are fighting against the occupation and thus the United States military machine. The “obligation to fight alongside the Iraqi people” is made impossible when the Iraqi people are fighting against the occupation of their country by U.S.-led Coalitional forces.

Huang is correct to point out that “the march toward some from of democratic governance” will not “flow” from “the barrel of a gun,” which makes nonsense of his general thesis - a defense of the invasion and occupation as forces of liberation which will allegedly initiate the development of democracy – and supports the accurately applied humanist position, articulated in the pages of Free Inquiry, that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was an unjust, illegal and immoral war, that, says Paul Kurtz, converted “the presidency into a bully pulpit for God, which simultaneously masks underlying imperialist economic ambitions while it suggests divine sanction for American policy.”

The humanist and Enlightenment values Huang speaks of, let alone “common human decency,” rather strongly opposes the contemptuous dismissal of international norms and laws and the violent invasion and occupation of other countries for strategic political and economic reasons. The way to justly liberate a people and develop democracy is not with “the barrel of a gun,” but rather by supporting the people and movements working towards liberation and democracy through political and economic support and by rallying the international community around the people's movement.

[1] Values which elsewhere were applied virtually unanimously against the invasion of Iraq, such as in, for one example, Free Inquiry, the magazine published by the Council for Secular Humanism.

[2] Huang would have us all forget that the Bush administration and its allies have trampled on habeas corpus, the foundation upon which the judicial system is built, kidnapped suspected terrorists, sending them to Abu Ghraib and black site dungeons around the world in order to be tortured.

It is this government, sanctioned in our name, conducting secret kidnappings, revoking basic civil and human rights and torturing those who have been kidnapped without charge or trial that Huang would have “liberate,” in a moral crusade, the people of Iraq who have been subject to for so long just the same sort of treatment only on a much more sinister scale.

[3] “International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment..after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal. In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: ‘I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.’”

Hitchens, Chanukah and Imperialism

2007-12-17T00:26:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens recently produced a vulgar screed against Chanukah with his Slate article entitled "Bah, Hanukkah." The general impetus which stimulates, for Hitchens, attacks such as this, is the frightful imperialist dogmatism of secular tribalism. The aggressive imperialist attitude that the West should invade the near-East due to the perceived or real fact that the West is more secular, more advanced and simply better is, outside of being objectively ethnocentric and possibly racist, clearly dangerous; it is precisely what Stalin argued for.

This tribal attitude appears to be the underlying motivation for Hitchens’ scurrilous historical screed against Chanukah. Hitchens makes manifest the vulgar tribal tendency through the failure to make the fundamental distinction between historical religious content and the content of the religion’s adherent’s beliefs and practices. The vast majority of modern Jews, virtually all of them so far as I can tell, do not view Chanukah as a celebration of Jewish fundamentalism, as Hitchens erroneously claims in his screed, but rather, Jews view Chanukah – a holiday of far less religious significance than Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Passover and Shavu’ot, in fact, Chanukah is not even mentioned within Jewish scripture – as progressive Christians view Christmas; as a time to share with family and community, to give and receive gifts, share love and fraternity and celebrate life, which is why the rituals are family-based and communal.

Hitchens then castigates Michael Lerner for observing that “Hellenism was ‘imperialistic,’” which, in the case of the Seceucid Empire, it clearly and without controversy was. I know little about the relevant history, but, is it not the case that the Maccabean Revolt was, in fact, a revolt against the imperial invasion perpetrated by the Seceucid Empire? The answer seems clear enough to me. This being the case, clearly the Maccabees had the right to defend themselves against the invading forces, regardless of the alleged archaic, cruel and fundamentalist nature of the form of faith they practiced and believed in. A culture’s alleged general irrationality and backwardness is neither a justification for nor an argument in favor of its invasion and oppression.

This really is the heart of the matter. Hitchens is of the Stalinist opinion that secular betters not only have the right, but even further, the actual obligation to invade, convert or destroy the culture and society of those whose faith is found to be wanting. This is nothing more than the militant tribal atheism as preached by Stalin, finding direct parallel with the pronouncements of Mohammad as dictated in the Hadith, incidentally, the founder of the religion Hitchens could not see destroyed soon enough.

Norman Finkelstein has observed that Hitchens lacks principle and that this lack of principle accounts for the opportunist outbursts that Hitchens is well known for, his recent screed against Chanukah being only the most recent example, his opposition to abortion being another. Finkelstein pointed out that “two altogether opposed political stances can each draw an audience’s attention. One is to be politically consistent, but nonetheless original in one’s insights; the other, an inchoate form of apostasy, is to bank on the shock value of an occasional, wildly inconsistent outburst.” Finkelstein’s point being that Hitchens lacks principle and relies upon the shock value of wild outbursts in order to get the audience’s attention, for reasons which seem clear enough.

I believe that this is roughly accurate – as is evident in the debate about the Iraq war between Hitchens and George Galloway, wherein Hitchens mocks those in the crowed who oppose imperialism[1] - but, even more relevant still is Noam Chomsky’s observation that Bolshevism – which Trotskyism is a variant of, the tendency which Hitchens self-professed for some time – and bourgeois market-society, corporate state-capitalism, share many similarities, such as central management and a vanguard of revolutionary conscious, intellectual betters[2], the ranks of which Hitchens would clearly count himself among.

Chomsky observes that “similar considerations may explain in part the appeal of [Bolshevik] doctrines to certain segments of the Western intelligentsia, as well as the ease with which many of the same people switch to the more typical stance of the intelligentsia: service to their own state, either in a managerial or ideological capacity. The doctrine of state worship has not dramatically changed, though it is shaped by a different assessment of how one can gain privilege and a degree of power.”

I believe that this background sheds light on and helps better understand Hitchens’ apparent lack of principle and undeniable abandonment of the socialist left. It’s not so much that Hitchens lacked leftist principles, it’s that he shared the principles of the kitsch-left, of Bolshevism, and that these principles were and became ever more indistinguishable for him from the principles of the bourgeois intelligentsia emanating from within the corporate ruling class of market-society.

[1] Imperialism being, as it is, an integral and central concern of the left, this was one of the early and unambiguous pieces of evidence that Hitchens had become a political apostate. His scurrilous attack on Chomsky – the very same ad hominem attack the right has been churning out to fit the varying circumstances since the sixties, the one which can be read in its laughably crude and ignorant form in The End of Faith by Sam Harris – being yet another.
As Finkelstein correctly points out, attacking Chomsky is something a bit too much like a political coming of age ritual, every far-right hack and left-apostate has engaged in this orgy of propaganda, from Hitchens to Kaplan, Harris to Horowitz.

[2] Mikhail Bakunin critiqued this conception of a ruling intelligentsia as being "a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars,” who will seek to create “the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and elitist of all regimes.” Bakunin’s critique anticipated Antonio Gramsci’s exposition of the “organic intellectuals,” the “thinking and organizing element of a particular fundamental-social class. These organic intellectuals are distinguished less by their profession…than by their function in directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong.”

Terrorism

2007-12-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

"Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” – Noam Chomsky.

At this point in time many atheists and non-believers revere Sam Harris as one of the preeminent “new atheists.” My blog post entitled “Secular Tribalism” was in part a response to this phenomenon of “new atheism;” which is nothing new, the term is misleading for several reasons, it’s simply extremist, narrow-minded and tribal atheism.

The entire phenomenon of new atheism has emerged mostly from the smoldering rubble of the twin towers. It is more of an emotionally hysterical response to 9-11 than it is of scientific inquiry; thus accounts for the sudden concern for “Islamic terrorism” when, in fact, such terrorism had been occurring for years.

Sam Harris is one of the leading figures of the assault on religion, from violent to benign, and argues that terrorism as it is emanating from the Arab world is produced within and through the paradigm of Islam. Were it not for the metaphysical beliefs in the principles of martyrdom, argues Harris, the Arab world would not be producing suicide terrorism. However, Harris relies upon neither empirical evidence nor any sort of scientific data set; he simply propagates anecdotal stories and intuitive hearsay.

Scott Atran, the world's leading specialist on the subject of terrorism and also, if it is of any interest, an atheist, points out that, through studying every case of terrorism recorded in modern history, there is found an inverse correlation between suicidal terrorism and such things as Mosque attendance, knowledge of the Qur’an and involvement with Islam. Suicide terrorism is motivated by moral outrage stemming from desperate situations and small, tight groups which form strong familial bonds. The moral outrage being stimulated by, for instance, the ongoing military occupations of the West Bank, Gaza and Iraq and all of the evil which then necessarily follows.

Taking a more historical view of this one can go all the way back to what is referred to as the “Golden Age of Islam,” which spanned from approximately the eighth century to the fourteenth or fifteenth. During this time Arab culture did very well with the presence of Islam. The Andalusian philosophers usually debated within the confines of Islam. On can take a look at the work of Ibn Rushd, for example, a semi-materialist, and find serious philosophy which incorporated Aristotle’s work. During the so-called “golden age” there was a lively and diverse Islamic intelligentsia ranging form the orthodox to the utter heretical.

Extremists such as Harris either have to ignore or distort this period. Some go so far as to argue that the end of the golden age was the result of Islam itself. Scott Atran points to the “golden age” and the fact that “all of a sudden it disappeared” and then asks “what happened, was there a flip-flop of an essence?” His response, as is mine, is of course not. As he continues, there “were massive waves of Mongols and other Asian hordes and then the colonials completely sundered the Arab heartland.” The devastation of the Arab world not being the inevitable product of Islam, but rather, Western colonial-imperialism and its nefarious consequences.

Atran points out that only now is the Arab world being reconstituted, very slowly, and that the “jihadis see themselves as the vanguard of a massive, transnational, media driven political awakening of which the Arabian mythos…is the motive to reconquer dignity.”

The usual and predictable response of the extremist to this history is to charge the individual who is presenting it with offering apologetics for Islam, for calling for “understanding” of terrorism as if to justify it.

This is, of course, standard propaganda. No one is arguing for the understanding of terrorism in order to justify it or excuse it. Serious people, such as Scott Atran and Noam Chomsky, are calling for understanding in order to better understand the sources and motivations for terrorism in the full range of complexity in the socio-political and historical contexts from which they arise to therefore be more equipped to eradicate terrorism.

In the Arab world there are very serious grievances felt by the populations and from these grievances terrorist groups organize and use as a pretext said grievances so as to appear as a vanguard of the oppressed and impoverished. If anyone is at all serious about eradicating terrorism, one would not only combat the terrorist groups, an entirely valid tactic, but, they would also address the very real and serious grievances of the populations, in order that terrorist bands no longer be able to present themselves as a vanguard of the so aggrieved.

Unfortunately, powerful states such as the United States, Israel and Russia are not concerning themselves with said grievances. They are instead occupying Middle Eastern territory, carrying out collective punishment – which only serves, as security analysts have for a long time pointed out, to further radicalize the populations and embolden the terrorist elements – and, in fact, organizing, supporting and arming various terrorist groups. It must not be forgotten that the mujahadin, which later became al-Qaeda, was organized, armed and trained by the CIA in order that they might be used in the proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

To solve the problem of “Islamic terrorism” requires a deeper and more serious analysis of the situation from which it emerges. The reactionary and blind response that is the claim that terrorism is motivated solely by the principles of Islam is just plain ignorant. Another very serious factor which must be either ignored or dismissed by the extremists such as Harris is that the extremists are viewing, in the words of Neil deGrasse Tyson - a well known astrophysicist and, like both Atran and Chomsky, also an atheist – “suicide bombings as some kind of intrinsically noble exercise within the paradigm [of Islam] and abhorrent from the outside, but, would there be suicide bombings if the Islamic community had their own air force and tanks? I don’t think so. They would be invoking the military machines that the rest of the West has available to itself.” Atran responds by saying that the jihadis he interviews “say so quite specifically”; which accounts for the fact that when attempted suicide bombers are interviewed and asked what their motivations were they rarely if ever invoke Islamic metaphysics, instead referring to the plight of their benighted brothers and sisters in the Occupied Territories, the moral outrage Atran speaks of.

The real threat of “Islamic terrorism” is not a threat of the religion of Islam, for Americans and the West generally, the real religious threat comes from Christian extremists, not radical Muslims, it is a threat of Western Imperialism and the blowback which it quite understandably and predictably instigates. The religious threat in the United States, again, comes from Christian extremism rather than radical Islam. The United States is one of the success cases of Muslim integration. The only problem, and it is a real problem, stems from anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim bigotry. However, this is not to imply that criticism of Islam or of Islamic practices is parallel to bigotry. The point is that the hysterical claims that Arabs and Muslims, by virtue of being either Arabs or Muslims, are lesser than other people or are more dangerous and savage, are claims manifesting the most archaic form of bigotry that should at least have the decency to present itself from under a white hood, in order that there be no confusion.

This sort of conflated anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry Edward Said referred to as “Orientalism” in his book of the same title. Said argues that “Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge…My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting…I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact – and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.”

So-called Islamic terrorism is not only largely the product of colonial-imperialism, but, furthermore, it is then incorporated within the intelligentsia as propaganda to help further the imperial ambitions of the state power to which the intelligentsia is subservient. Such is the case of the conjured al-Qaeda hysteria. As Scott Atran points out, al-Qaeda is no longer a going threat and the mujahadin do not constitute an existential threat at all, they never have. Orientalism and this conjured al-Qaeda hysteria – Islamic terrorism – is nothing more than the new paradigm of imperial propaganda; it has now effectively replaced the anti-Communist cult which stoked the fires of the Cold War mythology.

Harris plays his atheist part in perpetuating this imperial propaganda by incorporating the ultra-right screeds produced by the neoconservative likes of Samuel P. Huntington, Bernard Lewis and Alan Dershowitz and then regurgitating their theses in his books, articles and speeches.

Ultimately, to solve the problem of terrorism, keeping to just the terrorism of others, does not include the eradication of the religion of Islam, it requires a solution to the socioeconomic and political conflicts which readily give rise to general discontent and moral outrage which are then used as pretexts by terrorists so as to fashion themselves as a vanguard of the people.

In this sense, Northern Ireland is a perfect example. Though some people, such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, pretend that the conflict was solely motivated by religion, it was clearly a political conflict. The solution of the conflict was not to eradicate religion. As Chomsky points out “The right approach [to solving the problem of terrorism] is not only well known, but has been carried out with success…IRA terror was quite a serious matter. For a long time, Britain responded with violence, escalating the terror. Finally, Britain (with US support) began taking seriously the real grievances of the Catholic population. Terror reduced, terrorists were isolated. Northern Ireland is not utopia, but the improvement in the past decade is remarkable.”

Direct Democracy: Mob Rule

2007-11-18T16:42:00.000-08:00

This tired argument, that direct democracy is tantamount to “mob rule,” is nothing more than archaic bourgeois propaganda. The arguments which, after little support if any at all is provided, conclude that “those who own the country ought to govern it,” as John Jay opined, or that the system should “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” rabble masses, to quote James Madison, the main framer of the United States constitution, are clearly exploitive, authoritarian and vulgar apologetics for elite, highly concentrated centers of power and wealth, whereby said centers of wealth and power are protected over and against the “rabble masses,” who are “too stupid to govern.”

The arguments, besides serving as vulgar propaganda for unjustified hierarchy and domination, are rather degenerate and reveal such a lack of faith in the common person so as to make one wonder about the psychological constitution of those waging the argument. Furthermore, direct democracy, a society governed by the people who reside within it, simply does not constitute a “mob.” It is, to the contrary, highly concentrated centers of wealth and power, as has been amply demonstrated time and time again throughout the course of history, which tends to more thoroughly debase and corrupt decent human capacities and behavior.

Where direct democracy has existed and been implemented, successfully, such as in the pre-Israel Kibbutzim, common people having been freed from the arbitrary and coercive institutions of concentrated power and wealth and the hierarchy, domination and oppression inherent therein, actually exhibited exemplary moral behavior. I am certain that it will be unnecessary for me to run through the verbose index of people and parties who became so violently debased and corrupted through centers of highly concentrated power and wealth that they began to behave as though they were literally evil incarnate. The common saying “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” being apropos.

It is my firm belief that only when such unjustified, arbitrary and coercive institutions of highly concentrated power and wealth, characterized by hierarchy, domination and oppression, whose primary function is to defend the existing edifice of power relations, class domination and the interests of the elite wealthy few, are abolished, will human society then truly begin to flourish. Only with the dismantling of authoritarian institutions, which inevitably repress decent innate human capacities, while stimulating the more base of human capacities and behavior, being replaced by open, voluntary and participatory institutions, will human social and economic structures serve the community, rather than the profit-driven, wealthy, elite few.

With decent literacy and educational levels - which shall surely rise parallel to the abolishment of the drive to privatize education and the dismantling of an educational system which stresses competition and testing over and against cooperation, smaller class sizes and better conditions – and the harnessing of the high-tech industry in order to make the process of direct democracy more fluid, efficient and faster – such as communication networks, the internet for instance – makes the prospects of direct democracy even more feasible and coherent than it has ever before been.

Process Theism

2007-10-24T01:03:00.000-07:00

It strikes me as manifestly obvious that the position of theism has been by the ever mounting critique of skepticism reduced to such a significant extent that what is now left is hardly anything more than a faint wisp of belief.

That is, essentially, the history. Of the once overwhelming, omnipotent, omniscient deity – or deities depending on the culture – so portrayed, there now exists, due to the ever expanding library of human knowledge, only the vague, vestigial conception of a deity surrendered to the last boundaries of as yet unattained human knowledge.

So, for example, restricting myself to the religion of Christianity, god was once and in fact continues to be seen by vast populations as an invisible-super-intelligence capable of, among other things, intentionally physically altering the nature of the universe on a large scale – possibly wiping up a hurricane in response to an increased acceptance of homosexuality or dissolving a tumor residing in a child’s brain, while at the same time allowing thousands more to be born with painful deformities and dying of vicious diseases – whereas now, in articulate circles, the conception has been reduced to a god limited in power and ability; as process theology says: “Not even divine power can guarantee that accidents will never happen or that tragedies will never occur.”

It appears to me that process theism is something a bit like an amalgamation of neo-Hegelian pantheism, where god resides within or is the entirety of the ever expanding and unfolding universe and reality. However, there remains no serious or definitive explanation of the nature of god outside of the claim that god is “a cosmically all-inclusive being-in-becoming” whose attributes include being “supreme in power, knowledge, and goodness,” while also embodying “other-relatedness” and “dual transcendence.” With such vague descriptions of the invisible and conscious entity-force we are to accept as god, process theism appears to have reduced the concept to a thin specter of virtual nothingness; although, to be fair, it is as coherent a definition of god as any. Furthermore, the evidence of such a god is effectively nonexistent while the logic, as Hartshorne concedes, does not prove such a god exists.

The fundamental flaw in process theology, in the final analysis, is that it strives “to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted,” claims Whitehead. Process theology must necessarily accept that human nature is as such that it will be possible for humans to accurately and completely interpret “every element of our experience;” a position for which I can find neither an historical precedent nor any indication that the future shall prove to be different.

Our goals and theirs

2007-09-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

Those of us who argue for a fundamental transformation of existing society, consisting of an expansion of both the spheres of democracy and freedom, are inevitably faced with the reactionary condemnations of those who represent and defend the existing social structure. Hurled at us are charges of “utopianism” and “idealism,” claims that our arguments, criticisms and alternatives are “unrealistic,” and “unattainable.”

The argument that our socialist-humanist goals are utopian, unattainable and thus unworthy of pursuit is nothing more than a transparent and empty reactionary defense waged, predominately by those who have a vested interest in the current organization of society, in order to protect the existing edifice of power relations and class structure.

The socio-political landscape is carved by the conflicts and arguments arising from within it and from without it. Society makes progress through conflict and in conscious life by argument and disputation. In this sense society evolves dialectically through socio-political conflict. There are many instances, even keeping only to the history of the United States, where were it not for the “extremists,” “fanatics,” and “utopists” who regarded compromise as disgrace and morally unacceptable – for instance, fanatic abolitionists such as John Brown – progress may very well have not been achieved, certainly not as soon as it did; and with regards to such monumentally important questions as slavery and freedom, immediacy is very much of the essence.

It is our immediate task to not only argue and struggle for what is plausibly attainable immediately, but, even more so, what is ultimately just and ethically right; regardless of whether or not it is in the short term likely to be achieved. We refuse to subvert ethical principle, justice and freedom for shrewd and opportunist short-term gain which is in the end fundamentally inadequate and indefensible.

It is the goal of those who have a vested interest in the existing order to condemn as outrageous and unrealistic our goals. It is our goal to falsify their reactionary condemnations by way of action.

Socialism

2007-09-11T00:24:00.001-07:00

The mere utterance of “socialism” is today likely to illicit gasps and conjure up images of dictatorship and mass murder. As Erich Fromm points out “one can understand the reaction only if one appreciates the degree to which words can assume a magical function, and if one takes into account the decrease in reasonable thought, that is to say, objectivity, which is so characteristic or our age. The irrational response which is evoked by the words Socialism and Marxism is furthered by an astounding ignorance on the part of most of those who become hysterical when they hear these words.” That the term is today so loaded, rational discussion about the substantive content thereof then becomes in many instances utterly impossible; especially within the United States where the violent historical residues of the “red scare” are still today percolating.

Socialism is in reality a vast and widely diverse tendency which ranges from anti-state, anarcho-syndicalist conceptions of social organization – constituted by workers’ councils, service collectives and community cooperatives – to state-socialist, Marxist-Leninist conceptions based upon the “dictatorship of the proletariat” which may manifest itself through a new ruling elite or “vanguard,” around which a new exploitive class inevitably emerges. When I discuss socialism, I mean by the term only the first briefly sketched tendency.

Libertarian-socialism and anarcho-syndicalism both represent the socialist tendency which understands that for a new socialist-humanist society to be brought about - a classless society free of exploitation, division and oppression - the workers and people must themselves be the ultimate force of transition; by way of trade unions, syndicates and the people organizing themselves generally, through such actions as the general strike, protest and resistance.

A common criticism of socialism is that such a fundamental social reorganization is unnecessary, that “representative democracy” and parliamentary politics can and are the machines through which a free and egalitarian society are to be achieved and that any attempt to dismantle the current capitalist, state-structure is inevitably bound to lead, apparently by the iron laws of theory and ignoring counter examples, to despotism.

The criticism is so much propaganda. Today modern democracy - having now achieved universal suffrage, not by the grace of a benevolent state-power, but, by the courageous, sustained activism of workers and people – has after hundreds of years definitively demonstrated that it is nothing more than an apparatus which vigorously defends the possessing classes and the status quo.

As Rudolf Rocker points out: “Political rights do not originate in parliaments, they are, rather, forced upon them from without. And even their enactment into law has for a long time been no guarantee of their security. Just as the employers try to nullify every concession they had made to labour as soon as opportunity offered, as soon as any signs of weakness were observable in the workers' organizations, so governments are always inclined to restrict or to abrogate completely rights and freedoms that have been achieved if they imagine that the people will put up no resistance…Political rights do not exist because they have been legally set down on a piece of paper, but only when they have become the ingrown habit of a people, and when any attempt to impair them will meet with the violent resistance of the populace."

He goes on to say: "Participation in the politics of the bourgeois states has not brought the labour movement a hair’s-breadth closer to Socialism, but, thanks to this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned to insignificance. The ancient proverb: "Who eats of the pope, dies of him," has held true in this content also; who eats of the state is ruined by it. Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labour movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed the belief in the necessity of constructive Socialist activity and, worst of all, the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.”

That “representative democracy” does not now nor ever has concerned itself with the will of the people is a truism with historical and contemporary examples existing in abundance. That an overwhelming majority of the population agrees that space should not be militarized, that weapons of mass destruction should not be proliferated, that Social Security should not be destroyed, that there should be increased federal funding for social programs such as education and health, and that the Kyoto protocol should be signed, while government policy is diametrically opposed, is illustrative of this fact. Even more illustrative, the majority of American citizens, over seventy percent in fact, believe that the United States should follow the standards of the United Nations Charter and many other “quaint” products of civilization – to quote Alberto Gonzales - which the United States government views with contempt.

This wide disparity between the public’s will and the policy of “representatives” both breeds alienation and apathy among the people and demonstrates rather conclusively that democracy in the United States is only in the business of furthering the interests of the “opulent minority” – as James Madison phrased it – or, in other words, the privileged, property owning business sector.

Corporate domination of the democratic process has given birth to so slight a difference between the only two viable political parties that any significant difference is either illusory or negligible. American democracy has always, as evidenced by the Madison quote, been a plutocracy, but it is now virtually a single party system, the business party, within which there are two slightly different factions.

As Paul Kurtz points out: “Lobbyists subvert the integrity of the Congress and of state legislatures throughout the land by buying influences and votes. Big oil, media, pharmaceutical, tobacco, gambling, insurance, and financial companies thus dominate the legislative process. For example, the banks and credit card companies charge usurious rates and use deceptive marketing practices, fleecing millions of unwary consumers and forcing them into bankruptcy, yet effective legislation to protect consumers was blocked in Congress by the banking industry. Surreptitiously, large companies are now reducing retirement benefits with nary any political opposition. Corporations today-such as General Electric and Exxon-Mobil-are earning huge profits.”

In order for a true democracy to exist and flourish the state apparatus which only serves to defend the interests of the powerful and wealthy must be, along with private ownership of the means and modes of production, dismantled. In its place should be a “society that is organized on the basis of organic units and communities,” organized through “the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization, which might be national or even international in scope…the decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return and in which, in fact, they live.” In essence, a “federated, decentralized system of free associations incorporating economic as well as social institutions,” as Noam Chomsky so succinctly put it.

Homophobia: Institutionalized Bigotry, Cultural Phenomenon

2007-08-20T23:53:00.000-07:00

There is no longer rational argument regarding whether homosexuals choose to live a “gay lifestyle” or whether being homosexual is the inevitable product of ones biological nature. All the relevant organizations are in agreement – the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Counseling Association, the National Association of Social Workers, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Association of School Psychologists, etcetera– homosexuality and bisexuality are just as much natural manifestations of human sexuality as is heterosexuality. While it is true that there is no conclusive empirical evidence that homosexuality is genetic, it is also equally true that there is no conclusive empirical evidence that heterosexuality is genetic; what is evident from the relevant scientific studies is that homosexuality is no more a conscious choice than is heterosexuality. The most obvious and easy to understand study concerns homosexual and heterosexual reactions to male and female pheromones. The studies findings illustrate that homosexual men and heterosexual women are attracted to male pheromones, unconsciously, which supports the hypothesis that sexual orientation is ruled, not by free-choice, but rather, by ones biological constitution.

That aside, there remains a significant percentage of the population, certainly in the United States, who are convinced that not only is homosexuality a choice, but, it is an immoral choice that leads to moral depravity. Thus large segments of society are motivated to seek political means of disenfranchising the rights and humanity of homosexuals. The violent animus with which homosexuality is subjected to in America is, in large part, animated by the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and the synthesis of this extreme religiosity with radical conservative politics. However, religious and political extremism alone do not fully account for the sweeping homophobia manifested in American culture.

There has always been and is now a resurgence of what is referred to as the “cult of masculinity” in American culture; this phenomenon being most explicitly manifested within the religious right. This cult, much like the woman-hating “cult of domesticity,” begins by indoctrinating the young. Young boys are bombarded with hyper-accentuated and unrealistic views of what “being a man” consists of and how to go about becoming a man; they are indoctrinated with unnatural and unhealthy definitions of “manhood.”

Current research demonstrates that males, during the course of a week, experience a wider range of emotion, typically, than do females, and young boys demonstrate conclusively that males are just as subject to feeling and expressing emotion as any female. Yet, through the cult of masculinity, young boys are taught early in their development that to experience certain emotions and, even further, to express certain emotions which are viewed as being effeminate and thus weak - the cult of masculinity being as it is a residue of the nefarious ideology which viewed, and still in large part continues to view, women as inferior, weaker, less intelligent and ultimately subservient is why emotions and behavior associated with feminine attributes are automatically deemed “unmanly” and “weak” – is wrong, unnatural and unmanly. Thus for a young boy to cry is unacceptable, the boy must be chastised for “acting like a girl” for “not being a man,” the boy should just “suck it up like a man” and pretend as though he were an unemotional and static organism without feeling.

Another scientific study demonstrated that homophobic men, being shown gay pornography, inordinately become aroused. It is also an objective fact that an overwhelming preponderance of anti-gay bigots who spend considerable energy combating human rights are, in fact, themselves gay. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Queen Gertrude, in response to a character in a play repeatedly professing loyalty to and love of her husband, says “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” This is equally true of a majority of the most persistent and vitriolic anti-gay bigots, such as the now notorious Ted Haggard. When the anti-gay bigots expend such an inordinate amount of time and energy railing against homosexuality and homosexuals I say, “they doth protest too much, methinks.”

In order to resolve the violent anti-gay bigotry festering in the American culture we must not only oppose the Jim Crow-like laws which disenfranchise gays - treating them as unequal, less deserving of fundamental human rights and without dignity - we must not only oppose anti-gay bigotry being both cynically and sincerely implemented, malevolently, as a political policy used to stir up and rally those whose primary concern is eviscerating gay-rights and, no need to be confused, gays themselves; but, we must go further, we must also actively and persistently combat the nefarious “cult of masculinity,” which is poisoning our societies children at this very moment. We must teach our children, most conspicuously young boys, that to be emotional and to show emotion, even to others of the same sex, is only human, it is our nature. We must teach our children that to seek deep and sustained emotional and sexual relationships is a defining characteristic of the human species and that the seeking of such relationships is natural and healthy, regardless of the sex of those in the relationship.

Globalization

2007-07-26T02:59:00.000-07:00

Those who are accused of being anti-globalization - a position which, by implication, is taken to be archaic, isolationist and selfish – are, in fact, the exact opposite.

The overwhelming majority, if not all, of those who are accused of being anti-globalization are actually in favor of globalization. People such as me, who are so accused, are, despite the propaganda, in favor of a highly integrated world system; a system whereby national boundaries gradually dissolve into the global community as a whole.

It is not that I or anyone else accused of being anti-globalization are actually against globalization, it is that I and many others are opposed to a specific from of globalization, corporate globalization. A globalization focused upon and centered around the furtherance of the neo-liberal, capitalist market-economy. The globalization of massive privatization of such requisites for survival as water, the globalization of development projects and “labor” reforms which push people off of their lands and out of their jobs; in short, the globalization of only money, goods, patents, and services, or, the “free-market,” and all of the inhuman injustice which it necessarily produces.

I fully support and, in fact, dream for another form of globalization, in direct contrast to corporate globalization. I hope for and support social globalization; the globalization of human rights and solidarity, the globalization of universal suffrage, of the free movement of people, of free associations, of women’s rights, of gay rights, of religious, political and economic freedom, complete and unfettered; in short, the globalization of human rights, solidarity and justice.

Fascism: The Roberts Supreme Court

2007-06-29T09:15:00.001-07:00

In light of a few of the most recent Supreme Court decisions, namely the upholding of a ban on late-term abortions and the now only few days old ruling against affirmative action, it is clear that the highest court in the United States both cares nothing for precedent – an illusion many abortion rights advocates held on to for dear life – and cares nothing for either women’s or minority’s rights in general.

Many attempted to placate those worried by the appointment of radical conservatives to the Supreme Court – social conservative, Catholic extremists – with sweet talk about the respect Roberts and Alito allegedly had for precedent, a nefarious lie now laying exposed after only a few rulings.
Affirmative action has been a cornerstone of American judicial law for forty five years, and rightly so; there is a reason why Colin Powell, by no means a liberal, and the military wrote an amicas curia in support of affirmative action, without affirmative action we wouldn’t even know Colin Powell’s name.
The affirmative action ruling has served as daunting testament to the irrelevance of precedent in the views of the radical Catholic Judges. There is now no rational reason whatsoever to believe that the Judges will care anything for precedent when they review Roe v. Wade.

The latest vicious attacks on minority’s rights are but a prelude of what is to come in the later decades of the now, on balance, fascist court.

Secular Tribalism

2007-06-27T02:24:00.000-07:00

The startling tendency of the unsophisticated atheist to conjure up illusory amalgam groups, totally homogenized and undifferentiated, in order to entirely separate the faithful from the skeptics and unbelievers - the latter being, by definition, good and the former being, by definition and regardless of the content of belief, evil – is fanatic secular tribalism, pure and simple.
The atheist who closes ones eyes in the face of the staggering diversity of religious groups and sects and instead simply pounds ones fists and shrieks aloud that all adherents of religion are raving lunatics and savage terrorists is practicing a from of infantile and narrow-minded thinking that most closely resembles religious extremism. Rather than putting forth the minor effort required to adequately discern the various distinctions which are to be found among immense groups, especially religious, the unsophisticated atheist instead conjures up and believes in a viciously dichotomized world.
In such a worldview there simply is no room for the modern and liberal Muslim who prays five times a day yet defends as strongly as any atheist the principle of free expression. It must be denied that there exist Christians who regularly attend Church services, may contemplate the possibility of an afterlife, yet who view the bible as the fallible product of human endeavor and even question the very divinity of Jesus. It is taken as a matter of course that there is no such thing as the observant Jew who questions even the very existence of a supernatural entity. Instead, every Muslim is understood to be violently hostile to modernity, free expression, women’s rights and so forth; never mind reality. Every Christian is understood to be a bible pounding, anti-gay, anti-science demagogue and every Jew is seen as a torah waving, devout and viciously tribal religious maniac.
There is a startling, even hateful, Stalinist character to this sort of puerile, demagogic tendency. In fact, it is also strikingly biblical, either you are in “our” tribe or you are in the “evil” tribe and “our” tribe – by virtue of being the “chosen” tribe in possession of the infallible “truth” – may do as it so pleases to the so deemed “evil” tribes.
This tendency of secular tribalism must be exposed and combated wherever it is to be found, it is an actual danger.

Reaction to Rushdie's knighthood is beneath contempt

2007-06-25T20:14:00.001-07:00

That Salman Rushdie’s “knighthood” should evoke from Islamic extremists violent reaction and “offense” is itself offensive. Free-speech is a principle upon which I shall not waver. If Islamic extremists, religious lunatics and fanatics, feel that the mere writing of a book – which the most extreme and reactionary Islamists have not read and most likely could not – justifies calls for murder and suicide bombing, I have to say that their violent opinion is beneath contempt. Their extreme, bigoted and violent views simply serve no practical role in either the judging of the literary worth of works of fiction or the rewarding of those who produce exemplary literature, such as Salman Rushdie.
It is the decision of the British who they knight - for reasons which they so choose, in this case, very good reasons indeed - and the reaction of crazed Mullahs in Tehran and in Pakistan are simply irrelevant and beneath contempt. Freedom of speech simply cannot be denigrated on account of violent religious hysteria.
As for the so-called “moderates” and “liberals” who advocate the taking of said violent views as justly put and further, worst of all, sympathize with the small factions of Islamic extremists who claim “offense” and who advocate murder, suicide bombing and violence in general, I wonder if they realize that by so doing they are legitimizing as the true voice of Muslims world over the violent extremist fringe which, in reality, a majority of Muslims reject as blasphemers and apostate lunatics. They are, in effect, legitimizing as representative of all Muslims the very extremists who put to death moderate and liberal Muslims, shame on them.

Jesus Camp

2007-04-09T22:46:00.000-07:00

After keeping my distance for some time I finally broke down and decided to watch Jesus Camp and in so doing my apprehensive suspicions regarding the films contents were not only confirmed, but, furthered immensely. Jesus Camp is the most effective horror film of the year, never mind the fact that it is a documentary and there are scenes of hysterical, albeit unintended, irony and humor.

The first scene which offers to us the main documentary character, Pastor Becky Fischer, displays Fischer working herself, and subsequently the crowd which is mainly comprised of young children, into a hysterical frenzy wherein she proclaims, in part, that “We got too many Christian grown ups who are fat and lazy. They don’t want to give up their evening meal, they don’t want to fast for a three day fast or a forty day fast,” which may be the most ironic statement in the entire movie - excluding for now the ringer of hypocrisy Ted Haggard - for Pastor Becky is grotesquely obese and seems to not only refuse to give up her evening meal, but, seems as though when off camera she does nothing other than gorge her repugnantly fat and hippopotamus-like face. After ranting and raving like Joseph Goebbels at the Weimer rally, Pastor Fischer claims that “President Bush brought some real credibility to the Christian faith” after which I was forced to pause the movie in lieu of my inability to cease laughing uncontrollably. If the Christian faith must resort to President Bush for “some real credibility” then it is clearly but a short time until the Christian faith collapses in on itself for lacking anything which can even be remotely considered anything of the same species as credibility.

Apart from the laughable insanity, of which I have just provided a few examples, the movie contains, what must be considered by conscionable human beings concerned for the communal well being of children, moral abominations and a fundamental example of an ethical crisis. For example, the documentary follows a little ten year old girl whose passion is dancing, she clearly loves to dance, but, due to being so grossly warped by her parents maniacal Christian faith, this little ten year old girl says “When I dance I really have to make sure that’s god, because people will notice when I’m just dancing for the flesh and I do that sometimes, I must admit that and I really need to get over that.” After she said that I was in utter shock and had to rewind the scene and watch it again in order to regain myself, it honestly made me nauseous. There is absolutely no reason, no reason whatsoever, that any parent should indoctrinate their children with such poisonous dogma, such nefarious self-degradation and guilt. This girl is a prepubescent ten year old and her parents have no business of indoctrinating her with such overt sexual repression and guilt before she is even sexually developed; such thoughts, quite simply, have no business running through her mind. To instill in children such loathsome sexual repression, before they have even begun to reach sexual maturity, is far beyond depraved and immoral, it is tantamount to psychological terrorism.

While I am on the subject of psychological terrorism I must mention some of Pastor Fischer’s evil comments. While pacing back and forth in front of an auditorium full of young children like a tiger with mad cow disease, Fischer, while discussing the subject of sin, yells “while I’m on the subject let me say something about Harry Potter. Warlocks are enemies of god…had it been in the old testament Harry Potter would have been put to death!” While this is no doubt true, the Pentateuch is essentially a verbose index of death sentences, it is of the most reprehensible actions to indoctrinate young children with such life-negating, violent and hostile fear-mongering, it is, again, a fundamental example of psychological terrorism. Preaching vengefulness, hatred and murder are not subjects for which young children should ever have to be subjected to, shame on this crypto-Nazi of a Pastor.

Fischer, her insatiable appetite for terrorizing the youth not yet satisfied, goes on to tell the young children “you’re one thing when you’re at church and another thing when you’re at school with your friends. You’re a phony and a hypocrite,” after which a number of the children begin to cry, a little boy actually collapses to the floor curling up into the fetal position shaking with convulsive tears. This is child abuse to an unfathomable level and should not go unpunished.

As a rather explicit illustration of the exclusionary, superiority and neo-fascist dogmas instilled within these children a boy explains in one scene “Whenever I run into a non-Christian there’s something that always doesn’t seem right, there’s always something that makes my spirit fell yucky.” Of course he is wrong to ascribe his feeling of unease to his “spirit,” for the source of his unease is surely the fear-mongering indoctrination which he has been gratuitously fed by his parents and elders who teach him that all non-Christians are evil, sinful, on their way to hell and some – such as the literary character of Harry Potter, for instance – are so evil that their murder is warranted; yet another example of the child abuse and psychologically inflicted trauma which is on display all throughout the film.

There is another scene wherein the lunatic Pentecostals amass a substantial group of young children only to teach them that abortion is murder and that they, being “god’s righteous judges,” must put an end to abortion. They then work the children into such a hysteria that some have tears running down their face as they shake, tremble and speak in tongues; speaking in tongues being a recurring phenomena in this film, which, the first time I saw it, made me laugh so hard I was forced to pause the movie. Near the end of the, I don’t even know what to call it, (rally?) the children pump their fists in the air and chant “Righteous judges!” over and over again. I can only imagine that this is what it must have been like to attend the Nuremberg Rallies.

The portion of the film which covers Ted Haggard – “Big Gay Ted” as gay columnist Dan Savage refers to him - may be the most vertigo inducing experience in all of film, Haggard being the former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals and the former Pastor of the mega-church New Life Church who resigned his duties after the scandal wherein it was exposed that he paid a homosexual prostitute for methamphetamine and sexual favors. In part of his sermon he claims that he has “…a ten year rule about dating. If you married someone thirty years older than you, I hope he dies so you can get his money,” after which he began to cackle like a warlock himself, it sent chills down my spinal column. Then, the climax, which is perfect, shows Ted Haggard being interviewed and saying, in true Jack McFarland effeminate form, “It’s a fabulous life!”

There is a scene wherein Pastor Fischer is sitting in her home salivating over the footage that had thus far been obtained and she then begins to foam at the mouth, saying “Some extreme liberals, they have to see this and start shaking in their boots…the intensity that you see in these kids, there’s no doubt they have got be watching this and going ‘oh my goodness’” I hate to disappoint, but, I was not shaking in my boots over the extreme and sick indoctrination of these children with exclusionary and hostile dogmas, I am merely concerned that the repugnant treatment of the children is going to lead to serious neurosis and trauma, I worry about their futures and their psychological well being. These crazed Pentecostals are raising a generation of psychological cripples, of guilt ridden, anxiety riddled, delusion driven, fantasy intoxicated cripples. These children are going to face serious psychological pathologies, traumas and abnormalities when confronted with the real world later on in life and I fear for them; I cannot even imagine what it must be like to be a five or six year old forced to the brink of emotional collapse – in almost every scene the children are brought to tears - by ones parents and elders all in the name of a false mythology.

In summation, the only right way to end this review, is to quote the crazed comments of a little girl who says “My dad says that when the missionaries are about to go somewhere dangerous they jump around yelling Martyr, Martyr, Martyr! It’s cool.” Obviously, in the heart of America, pathological parents and fascist Pastors are raising a generation of children who will subsequently become either psychologically disturbed and emotionally broken or the Christian equivalent of Al Qaeda militants.

Being Muslim is not a crime

2007-03-11T21:46:00.000-07:00

There is one issue upon which liberals and conservatives alike appear to be in general consensus, the vilification of Muslims. In a U.S.A Today/Gallup Poll thirty nine percent of Americans admit to “feeling some prejudice against Muslims.” A similar percentage of Americans agreed with requiring Muslims, which would include U.S. citizens, to carry a special ID “as a means of preventing terrorist attacks in the United States.” Twenty two percent stated that they would not feel comfortable with Muslims living in their neighborhood while both liberal and conservative periodicals, such as The Progressive and The FrontPage Magazine, have propagated rhetoric which both agrees with and encourages such views.

I really should not have to point out that these sentiments are strikingly reminiscent of Nazi Germany, the “special ID” being a virtual parallel between the Star of David which Jews were forced to wear. Singling out an entire religious and ethnic group of human beings only by virtue of their belonging to the group is wrong, by definition. The fact that many Americans are openly doing so in modern times is only further evidence that human civilization is yet but a yearling in evolutionary maturation; modern, first world, industrialized society appears to still fervently cling to the religious practice of fashioning a scapegoat upon which to cast its every sin and fear to then be ritually sacrificed thus, as religious theory goes, purging the sins and fears of the society and therefore serving as an act of purification. It seems fairly evident that Muslims have now become the scapegoat of choice for a significant percentage of Americans.

The vilification of Muslims is as transparent as it is both fallacious and wicked being the product of ignorance, bigotry and fear-mongering. There are 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide; I shouldn’t have to point out that they are not all terrorists, just as I should not have to point out that not all Christians are abortion doctor murderers. While it is certainly true that there are radical Muslims practicing a nefarious form of Islam, an Islam which celebrates the metaphysical principles of martyrdom for example, it cannot be legitimately argued that all Muslims accept such forms of Islam. Furthermore, and this is my main argument, by so grossly generalizing, castigating and vilifying the entirety of the Muslim population one is effectively alienating the most crucial asset of a serious enlightenment and reformation movement within Islam, the liberal and moderate Muslims.

When bigoted fear-mongers construct and argue for a stark dichotomy, “either you are for terrorism or you are for freedom,” they are, in effect, not only conflating reality, but also further exacerbating the fundamental problem. Many Muslims reject as strongly as anyone else the terrorism being condoned and propagated by the extremists within their religious ranks, but, when the only alternative offered them is the western accusatory and bigoted caricature of “pluralism” and “freedom” it is not at all too difficult to understand why some may find the choice unappealing.

When political officials publicly declare a “war on Islam” the moderate Islamic impulses which are an absolute necessity in the reformation of radical Islam are by default alienated and estranged, pushed away by the generalization that is conceptualizing Islam as an amalgam of violent terrorists, suicide-bombers, fascists and savages. Human civilization is no more at war with Islam as it has been as still is at war with Christianity; civilization is at war with dogmatic, exclusionary and violent extremism and only an idiot or a sociopath – or, more appropriately, a political criminal - would alienate and deny the moderate impulses which are an absolute necessity in the remediation thereof.

The Nefarious Cult of Scientology

2007-03-07T17:34:00.000-08:00

Scientology is a cult whose primary concerns are money and power, power inasmuch as it advances monetary income. I have long despised Scientology after having read Lafayette Ronald Hubbard’s views on psychology and psychiatry and after having become acquainted with the entire demagogic aspect of the pseudo-psychological and space-age religious cult.

There are several theories which attempt to explain Hubbard’s and thus Scientology’s irrational and vitriolic campaign against psychiatry. One theory posits that after Hubbard had been diagnosed as psychologically unsound by Naval psychiatrists and thus discharged from the Navy he nurtured a desire for revenge. Another conceives that Hubbard developed a dislike of psychiatry after the APA rejected his book Dianetics essentially calling it a hoax and a potentially dangerous fraud; the Scientific American review being a perfect example.
Both of these events actually occurred, however, it remains unknown whether either are the cause for Hubbard’s latter vilification of psychiatry. I will not now go into the debates surrounding these theories.

What is important is that, like all religions, Scientology has conjured up it’s own illusory scapegoat upon which to cast it’s “sins of all humanity” and around which to organize a demagogic assembly of religious fanatics, Tom Cruise being an illustrative case in point.

Throughout the entirety of human history religions have incorporated scapegoat’s, in ancient Greece – as elsewhere and even before – a shamanistic priestly class protected the ancient society from plagues, famines and virtually anything that would serve detriment to the society by performing certain religious ceremonies, chiefly among them, human or animal sacrifice or the expelling of a pharmakos, which translates to scapegoat. Such a ceremonial ritual has been part and parcel of religions over the centuries and is still firmly established in modernity, fundamentalist Christians demonizing homosexuals and abortion doctors, Muslim extremists vilifying Jews and Scientologists fashioning psychiatry and psychiatrists as their own personal pharmakos.

It is informative to read the pamphlets and, essentially, the screeds Scientology offers regarding their views on psychiatry. It is most remarkable in light of the fact that it is indisputable, and generally conceded by any serious Scientologist that Hubbard was, at the very least, influenced by the psychiatry of his day, Freudian psychoanalysis. In my analysis Hubbard was not merely influenced by Freud, in fact, he completely usurped an elementary conception of the Freudian theory of the mind; the elementary conception being a testament to the general ignorance of Hubbard, a science fiction author by trade. I will not go into great detail regarding Hubbard’s expropriation of Freudian theory, although I could further elucidate the general points which follow.

Hubbard writes that “the mind has three major divisions,” which are the analytical, the reactive and the somatic mind. Without going into great detail this conception is in effect a spurious conception of the Freudian theory of the mental apparatus which is composed of what is unconscious, preconscious and conscious, otherwise know as the Id, Super-ego and Ego. The Scientology somatic mind is a poor counterfeit of the Freudian id, they both consist of basic impulses, the basis of the psyche and the lowest manifestation of the mind. Dianetics, Hubbard’s book which laid the foundation for the cult, is essentially pseudo-psychology based on a tenuous understanding of Freudian theory and occult, science fiction voodoo (the latter being Hubbard’s area of expertise).

After Dianetics had been rejected from all respectable psychiatric and medical associations Hubbard began to write negatively about psychiatry. In his short book Scientology The Fundamentals of Thought Hubbard begins the book by attacking psychology, in particular Wilhelm Wundt, on the second page of the first chapter. Hubbard writes: “This man conceived that man was an animal without soul and based all of this work on the principle that there is no psyche.” He then writes of Wundtian psychology by saying: “It taught that man was an animal. It taught that man could not be bettered.” Hubbard is correct on one ground, that Wundt and Wundtian psychology views “man” – the human species – as an animal; specifically, as a highly cognitively developed and socially evolved animal, and correctly so.

It may or may not be true that Wundt himself objected to the supernatural notion of souls, although, if he did he did so with logical validity and parsimony. However, it is certainly true that, while psychology may not outright reject the conception of a soul, the field of psychology does not even consider the soul and, again, rightly so. Psychology is a science and science is guided by scientific naturalism, the supernatural has no place within a legitimate scientific field. However, Hubbard’s claim that Wundtian psychology “taught that man could not be bettered” is simply diametrically opposed to reality. One need only open a psychology text book or visit with any psychologist to know this is a blatant and nefarious lie, demonstrably so. One of the major components of psychology, clinical psychology, is literally built upon the premise that “man” can be “bettered.” Clinical psychology’s explicit intent and pursuit is the remediation of psychological disorders; that is why it exists.

Hubbard writes far more disturbing falsifications and ad hominems regarding psychiatry and psychiatrists, in fact, Scientology has an entire website and magazine dedicated to the sole purpose of fashioning psychiatry as its pharmakos. Hubbard, when he later incorporated into the self-help, pseudo-psychological voodoo that is Dianetics the space-age religious aspect, he fashioned into his dogma - among other tenets which include intergalactic space aliens (Xenu, not to be confused with Xena), UFO’s, volcanoes wired with thetans (souls) and nuclear bombs, etcetera - intergalactic psychiatrists who were themselves the source of great evil and mischief, essentially, the Christian equivalent of Satan or the Norse equivalent of Loki.

Scientology can be criticized on a plethora of grounds, some more compelling and more demanding of direct action than their views and castigation of psychiatry. However, this particular subject has long been for me a source of exasperation. Clearly Scientology is a demagogic assembly of religious fanatics propagating a campaign of distortion and vindictiveness. Scientology is a cult of aggressive greed and avarice and belligerent, even violent, psychological terrorism.

The Religious Right: Campaign of Immorality

2007-02-08T00:50:00.000-08:00

The new radical right, or religious right as it is often called, is hysterical over alleged moral and social issues. They claim to be offended and disgusted with the social environment and the moral degradation thereof. In their view nothing currently demands more immediate and serious attention than the social moral decay of America.

This extremist minority has become, since the late seventies, one of the more proficiently mobilized political factions in the U.S., demanding that their agenda be taken seriously and dealt with accordingly.

It is first worth noting that this faction, while referring to themselves with such titles as “the moral majority,” are neither moral nor in the majority. It is further worth noting that while they maintain their immediate concern is the moral crisis of society they not only fail to acknowledge serious moral crisis – such as civil rights of the past and present - they sometimes even hold real crisis in contempt. Their primary concern is political in nature rather than moral. For if their concern were merely moral they could simply live their lives according to their own moral standards while others lived their lives to their own moral standards, but they wish to legislate their pernicious ideologies making their movement explicitly political.

They spend vast amounts of energy deriding vulgar language and depictions of sexuality claiming that such things are indicative of the decay that is our culture all the while opposing abortion and thus women’s rights, same-sex marriage and thus gay rights, welfare programs and thus ignoring the plight of the impoverished, etc. They not only oppose abortion rights, but, they also predominately oppose all aspects of women’s rights won by the feminist movement which is exemplified, to provide one example, in their accusations of working women having neglected their children’s needs.

In light of the real social crisis in America, such as the stagnation and increasing poverty of the lower class, the abysmal nature of both the medical and educational programs (for example: the attempt to destroy social security or the teaching of maniacal propaganda to children, i.e. creationism and abstinence only sex education), the absolute disregard for fundamental aspects of a free and civil society (as in the disregard for habeus corpus and the barbaric support of torture), the vilification of Hispanic immigrants, the disastrous effects of the drug prohibition (such as the ever increasing evolution towards a police state and the disregard or blatant contempt for the fourth amendment), the fascist program of legislating hate and bigotry (such as constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage), the overt hostility towards progressive goals long since won by the social movements (such as the hostility towards the success of the feminist and civil rights movements, i.e. the anti-abortion pro-submissive-housewife and the anti-affirmative action ideologies), etc. I believe these all serve as far more pressing issues than the utterance of “fuck” or the depiction of a breast.

While the fanatical religious right clamors on in their intolerant and exclusionary neo-fascist political campaign which seeks to undermine four decades of social progress and insure no more is made, there are serious and dire social and political crisis which demand attention. As is so often the case with the religious, those making so much noise about their moral principles are, in theory and in practice, the most perverse pariahs of morality; for it is worse than immoral to neglect the real injustices and depravities of society, it is to be complicit with them.

A Distinction Within Religious Criticism

2007-01-25T12:50:00.000-08:00

Intelligent, discerning human beings are able to distinguish between the criticism of religion in general as opposed to the criticism of the behavior of the particular religions adherents. It is further obvious to anyone willing to do some reading that all three Abrahamic religions contain a disturbing amount of incitements to violence and conflict. A large portion of the Pentateuch is essentially a long index of death sentences while the Gospels generally reaffirm, uphold or approach the commandments ambiguously and throughout the Qur’an are found similar edicts.
For an individual to claim that one religion is “better” than another based upon the adherents’ behavior is to fundamentally miss the point.
For an adherent of a religion with such genocidal commandments to behave in accordance with modernity, the adherent is embracing information, logic and ethical principles outside of the specific religious worldviews fundamental commandments – commandments which have not been erased from the religions canon - and ignoring certain passages found within the text upon which the religion is based, thus ignoring specific aspects of the particular religion. Furthermore such an adherent is very clearly ignoring explicit commandments which incite violence and aggressive conflict, while doing absolutely nothing in the way of extricating such incitements from the religions scripture. This is dangerous, for as Sam Harris adeptly illustrates, such moderation as exemplified in the ignoring of nefarious aspects of a religious text – which explicit commandments seem to object to – is simply that, a neglect of the incitements. This offers no bulwark against the persisting violence and savage aspects of the religion in general. It allows the possibility for any number of adherents to later embrace such barbarism.
So long as the religions proclaim that their books are holy, sacred, or worthy of our consideration whatsoever, while not outright expunging the nefarious aspects, they are necessarily allowing, at least implicitly, the incitements to violence and conflict to remain a part of the religion. Only when such incitements are completely abolished, until they are entirely extricated from the religious scriptures, are the religions then free of being charged of association with such views and incitements.
It is an elementary truism that what is ignored today yet allowed to persist may tomorrow be once again embraced. To argue that Islam as a religion is any more intolerant or violent than either Christianity or Judaism is to fail to understand the nature of religious criticism and to fail to make the most rudimentary of distinctions. There is no dispute that currently Islam as it is being practiced by its adherents is more violent and nefarious than either Christianity or Judaism, by way of statistics. However, the religions all share an almost entirely equal amount of culpability so far as the contents of their religious texts are concerned; while such commandments remain in the religious texts, so to do they remain a part of the overall religion in general, irregardless of whether or not they are currently being acted upon.
Islam is, statistically, currently motivating the most violent and aggressive adherents; however, there was a period in history when Islamic adherents were the more peaceful and tolerant. Christianity and Judaism both share past histories of the violent and aggressive nature inherent in their scriptures being acted out through their adherents as commanded by the corresponding religious texts. So long as such commandments remain a part of the scriptures, and thus a part of the religions, so to remains the possibility that the adherents of these religions may once again adopt an affirmative view of the violent and aggressive commandments.
It is an objective fact that the three religions which have been mentioned all share an equal amount of culpability for the incitements to violence and conflict which exist in the religious texts upon which the religions are founded; and unless or until such savage and genocidal filth is eradicated from the texts this will remain a truism. No one religion is superior to the others in this fundamental sense.

The Origins of Religious Impulses

2006-12-15T02:45:00.000-08:00

I believe those who say that religion is ineradicable in humans, especially so long as humans fear the dark, death and the unknown, may very well be correct. I remain convinced that Freud was right, certainly regarding a substantial amount of the religious, in The Future of an Illusion wherein he explained that religion, as it was and is predominately being manifested, is the product of wish fulfillments, these being the cheapest forms of emotions and ambitions. That it is the product, the resolving manifestation, of the fear of an impersonal and random nature. As Freud says: “Man’s self-regard, seriously menaced, calls for consolation; life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors.” These terrors which are inculcated by nature, specifically the anxiety of helplessness, are resolved by humanizing them, by ascribing the random, impersonal, many times unjust and frightful machinery of nature human characteristics; such as will, intelligence, emotion and justice.
It is Freud’s theory that so long as humanity experiences such an anxiety of helplessness, such a burdensome fear of death, the dark and the unknown so shall there be religion. I am certainly in agreement, however, I am of the opinion that there are a number of reasons that may incite religious belief and behavior beyond wish fulfilling.
Another theory, of which I am skeptical of and of which Freud later dealt with in the beginning of Civilization and Its Discontents, is that the religious impulse emanates from a particular feeling. A feeling which a friend of Freud’s called “a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic’.” Freud’s friend went on to claim that this feeling was a subjective truth, it did not require faith to accept. However, it did not assure one of immortality, or any of the other illusions of religion, it merely brought forth the energy with which organized religion then buttressed such articles of faith to.
Freud first responds, as do I, that no such feeling is recognizable to him. He then provides a long and thorough explanation outlining an individuals’ development of a sense of ego, or “ego-feeling” as he phrased it, and the fact that such an ego is only a minute portion of the entire mental apparatus of the unconscious. He goes on explaining that an infant is not yet aware of its ego as distinguished from the external world and only through experience of sensations is such a distinction realized and made conscious. Meaning that, regarding sensations and feelings, the ego originally included everything, only later separating the external world from itself. Freud says “Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive – indeed, an all embracing – feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.” The implication of this being that in some people such a primary ego-feeling may persist to a greater or lesser degree and, if so, it would exist along side the more distinct “demarcated ego-feeling of maturity,” the “ideational contents” of which would be identical to the feelings of limitlessness and of the ‘oceanic’ feeling thus accounting for the natural origins of such a religious impulse; an impulse Paul Kurtz has appropriately labeled “the transcendental temptation.”

The meaning of life.

2006-12-03T13:57:00.000-08:00

“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.” – Erich Fromm

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” – Carl Jung

“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.” – Carl Rogers

As our species throughout history attests, humans have pondered the fundamental philosophical question regarding the meaning of life since the ability to write and most likely the development of conscious self-awareness and a higher cognitive ability even before.
For a great number of people this question poses as a serious obstacle, one seemingly insurmountable, and one which is usually resolved through the most vacuous, superfluous and inept means possible, religion.
The principle aim of life, as far as I am aware and in the most rudimentary form, is to survive to the fullest efficacy possible and to replicate ones own genetic lineage. However, beyond these simple tasks – or difficult if you rather - the meaning of life is open to interpretation, it is to be discovered and affirmed by the individual for the individual. In an objective sense the meaning of life is as I described first, in a more subjective sense the meaning of life is infinitely open to interpretation. I would hardly expect two individuals’ specific interpretations of what the meaning of life is to be identical.
As a secular humanist I find the meaning of life to be, in a general sense, the pursuit of life in abundance, happiness, pleasure and love. In a more distilled sense I find the meaning of life to comprise a number of categories such as psychological, biological, social, political, scientific and philosophical. It begins, as I see it, with oneself, through discovering who one really is, and affirming this one develops a healthy and strong psychological awareness of ones own self and is then ready to pursue the other categories. One must realize and then develop the best of their abilities, which consists of cultivating in ones own personality, strength, lucidity, intelligence, a yearning for knowledge, skepticism, empathy and, as Carl Rogers phrased it, “unconditional positive regard.”
Built upon this, the meaning of life is now concerned with social aspects. I take it as the meaning of life to work towards the remediation and reconciling of social ills and conflicts, to help create a peaceful, cohesive and tranquil social environment and world-state. To help others realize and attain their highest potential possible. The meaning of life, socio-politically speaking, is to affirm universal human rights and decency and to work towards creating a citadel of peace and beauty, in this life, globally. It is to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ideals of democracy, freedom and the open society. It is to work towards increasing educational standards, literacy and cultural enrichment.
Scientifically and philosophically, the meaning of life is to better understand it. It is to work towards a comprehensive description of the universe which we find ourselves in and the functioning thereof. With the growth of our scientific knowledge comes, inextricably bound, advances in virtually every aspect of our lives. Advances in scientific medicine such as antibiotics, vaccines, modern techniques of surgery, anesthesia, pharmacology and biogenetic engineering has tremendously improved our prospects for a happier, healthier, longer and more fulfilling life. Scientific research has and will continue to elucidate our knowledge of the universe and our place within it through such facets as astronomy, physics, biology, genetics, psychology, sociology, etc.
It is, to me, the meaning of life to pursue these ends. The meaning of life is to not only survive and replicate, but to derive pleasure and happiness while doing so. It is to love life in its abundance, to seek and work towards creating and instilling more abundance and to share this love and experience with others.

Reconciliation

2006-11-29T10:47:00.000-08:00

There is much to be gained from debating and arguing against individuals who hold to opposing viewpoints and beliefs. I would even argue that it is foundational to elucidating and even discovering ones own beliefs in fuller form. However, the minor and major differences we all share contribute in painting the vast spectrum of humanity. These differences should not only be tolerated and accepted but celebrated, if at all possible, even shared. The only differences which should be opposed at all costs and without leniency are those causing undue harm and suffering.
The indisputable fact remains that we all, as members of the human species, have far more qualities in common with one another than we could ever possibly have in difference. In point of fact it is usually the similarities which give birth to larger differences, a phenomenon which Freud termed “the narcissism of the minor differences.”
It is all well and good to argue and dispute differing opinions, beliefs, values and philosophies, however, it is of the utmost importance that while doing so one keeps well in mind that they share much more in common with their antagonist than they may be willing to admit. One would do well to acknowledge the differences where they exist and dwell on them only as long as is required, for there comes a time when affirming ones shared humanity takes top priority. I encourage debate and argument for birthed of these activities is an increase in knowledge and understanding, as Thomas Jefferson said: “Difference of opinion leads to inquiry, and inquiry to truth.” However, there seems to be - certainly in our current social climate - something missing; the most crucial aspect is absent. Even while arguing, or at least when one is concluding an argument, there should be a level of reconciliation, of mutual understanding and acceptance, of genuine empathy. This reconciliation, founded upon empathy and – as Carl Rogers phrased it “unconditional positive regard” – is completely absent in our social discourse.
Even when one is at extreme odds with another in debate it is wise to keep in mind the fact that there are, in fact, far more similarities than there are differences. There should be a concerted effort to keep not only this in mind, but, to remain as civil as possible and to end a heated debate with reconciliation rather than vitriolic animosity. We need to affirm our shared humanity, with this alone the social discourse – and overall environment - would benefit greatly.

Defending Morality

2006-10-29T11:34:00.000-08:00

Morality, at its base, is centered upon the happiness or suffering of sentient beings and the realization that some actions are more conducive to ones own and others happiness or suffering. Actions and behavior can be deemed either ethical or unethical due to the natural consequences which they necessarily produce.
Moral relativism is an absurd obfuscation of this reality not to mention absolutely hostile to a true moral calculus. Moral relativism is, essentially, the ideology that all forms of morality are the product of culture and of society, which they are, but further that there is no foundation for which to measure the justification thereof, hence all morality is equally viable. At the heart of this ideology is a rather obvious contradiction: the claim that all forms of morality are equally viable, that all forms of morality should be respected, this is not a relative but an absolute claim and one which certainly runs into trouble when a cultures morality consists of negating other forms of morality; for if all forms of morality are true and one form of morality claims that all other forms are untrue then a conundrum is created for the relativist. Furthermore moral relativism neglects the science of humanity, psychology, wherein we learn that there is a human nature characteristic of the human species. What I find most repulsive in moral relativism is the notion that because it is the custom of a specific culture to degrade and devalue their women and allow what is essentially rape that this is permissible because it is their agreed upon morality. These relativists are either ignorant of or hostile to the reality that all women, all human beings for that matter, respond to rape and degradation negatively, the effects of rape and degradation of human beings is equally nefarious across the human spectrum regardless of ones specific culture. Moral relativism is the product of a perverse philosophy, which, in many ways, compares to nihilism.
Worse than the moral relativist is the religious moral absolutist who has received a morality from an alleged supernatural source. With religion one usually finds morality stood on its head, one finds a false morality, immorality. What many religions do with morality is separate questions of morality from true questions of happiness or suffering, they present hysterically absurd falsifications of morality, many of which are utterly immoral. Within the bible, both old testament and new, it is a moral proposition, commanded by god, that homosexuality is an abomination and carries with it the penalty of death. This moral proposition is a clear falsification of morality, there is no discernable suffering, homosexuality does not harm other people, it does not cause others to suffer and despite what fundamentalists claim homosexuality does not destroy “natural” families. However this moral proposition does cause suffering, it causes and justifies the degradation of homosexuals, it goes even further, it calls for the mistreatment of homosexuals, it calls for immorality. Religious morality is replete with such falsifications, such immorality, within its set of moral propositions; what a euphemism, what a true blasphemy, it is to even use the term morality in such an instance.
Whenever you hear the name “god” mentioned within the same breath as morality rest assure it stands for either a vacuous and superfluous platitude or the name by which one justifies the perversion of a true moral calculus.

Revisiting the Jesus Myth

2006-10-09T21:33:00.000-07:00

Viewing the story of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels as heavily influenced mythology is, essentially, the only legitimate understanding thereof. The historicity of Jesus can be debated and will likely be debated for years, however, there is absolutely no evidence suggesting that the accounts of the life and times of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels is anything other than a parsed together story, heavily influenced by the common mythology of the time and written with a concerted effort to align the story with the “prophecies” of the old testament.

As I said in my last post, Jesus allegedly died around the year 33 CE and Mark wrote the first gospel no earlier than 65 CE which leaves a three decade gap, in which the only documents in existence pertaining to Christianity are Paul’s writings. It is a very striking fact that in not one of Paul’s epistles does he make any mention of what we would consider the story of Jesus save for the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus into heaven. Paul makes no mention of the virgin birth, Mary, Bethlehem, John the Baptist, any of the miracles of Jesus – you would think that Paul would have mentioned a few of these alleged miracles in his attempt to convert new Christians – Pontius Pilot, any Jewish mob or any trial. I concede that these omissions do not imply, implicitly, that Paul was unaware of the story of Jesus as later portrayed by the NT gospels. However, these facts are suggestive and must not be overlooked.

In the three decade gap between the alleged death of Jesus and Mark’s writing of the first gospel the story of Jesus was kept alive and spread through oral tradition, a method which is exceedingly susceptible to convolution. It is very likely that while the story of Jesus was spreading it began to accumulate the characteristics of the common mythologies of the time. It is very likely that Paul either came before such an evolution in the story or was simply unaware of it. One must keep in mind that we are considering the first century and the archaic communication which is inherent therein. It is not a stretch of the imagination to conclude that the oral tradition of Christianity gave birth to a greatly exaggerated, added upon and altered story – the gospels were written between thirty and fifty years after the alleged death of Jesus, plenty of time for the evolution thereof – it is really almost impossible to believe that the oral tradition kept perfectly intact the entire account of the stories later relayed in the gospels, which differ amongst even themselves.

As I mentioned in my last post it is a very striking fact that Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, shares twenty or so characteristics with the common heroic figure, mythic figures such as: Oedipus, Theseus, Romulus, Hercules, Perseus, Zeus, Zoroaster, Thor, Tammuz, Orpheus, Mithras, Krishna, Horus, Hermes, Dionysis, Baal, Attis, Adonis, etc. I have already indexed the shared characteristics and will avoid redundancy here.

Having illustrated the shared mythological characteristics I will now endeavor to bring to the fore the theological and symbolic similarities.

Mithraism was a pagan religion which viewed the mythical Mithras as the mediator between humanity and the unknowable god who created all of existence. Mithraic communities expressed fraternal and communal spirit, their creed insisted on moral conduct, demanded abstinence and self control and postulated a heaven and hell; they sanctified Sunday and December the 25, Yule, this date was also a day referred to as Saturnalia – a dedication to Saturn’s temple – and it is widely believed that this date was chosen as the day to celebrate the birth of Christ, by Pope Julius I, in order to make it easier to convert the Roman pagans, Jesus was allegedly born in September. In any case many of the rites and sayings in Mithraism are similar if not identical to the sayings later attributed to Jesus. The Madonna and baby cults share their relation with both the Tammuz and the Egyptian Isis and Horus. The Christian celebration of easter also shares its origins with the Tammuz and their god Ishtar – pronounced “easter” – which is why easter is replete with fertility symbology.

With Apollonius Christ, the theological similarity is virtually identical. He preached “we cannot hate our fellow man” he created miracles, healed the sick, was accused of sedition in Rome and his followers, after his death, claimed that he had ascended to heaven and came to them in spiritual form afterwards. In fact the theology of Apollonius was so similar to that of Christianity there are records of early Church fathers mentioning and arguing against Apollonius’ divinity, again, using the argument that Satan used Apollonius as a way to deceive:

"How is it that the talismans of Apollonius have power over certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts. And whilst Our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" – Justin Martyr, early Church father

Apollonians, those who were followers of Apollonius, believed in the immortality of the soul and that upon death they would ascend to heaven. In fact, there is debate on whether or not Jesus had been conflated with Apollonius due to the similarities.

There are also striking similarities between Christianity and Zoroastrianism, the later predating the former. Many scholars credit Zoroastrianism with influencing the eschatology, angelology and demonology of Judaism. Judaism, of course, then influencing Christianity and Islam:

“it was from this very creed of Zoroaster that the Jews derived all the angelology of their religion... the belief in a future state; of rewards and punishments, ... the soul's immortality, and the Last Judgment - all of them essential parts of the Zoroastrian scheme.” – from The Gnostics and Their Remains (King and Moore, 1887).

Zoroastrianism had abstract concepts of heaven and of hell, personal and final judgment and even contains the concept of a coming messiah-like figure referred to as the “Peshotan.”

In light of all of this, viewing the story of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels as heavily influenced and convoluted by the common mythology of the time appears to be the only legitimate and firm contention. It seems abundantly clear that the gospel stories of Jesus have been parsed together, influenced and convoluted by various myths and written with a concerted effort to align the story with the “prophecies” of the old testament.

The Mythology of Jesus

2006-10-07T16:15:00.000-07:00

Jesus lived in the first three decades in the first century, allegedly dying somewhere along the year 33 CE, although there were groups of ancient Jews and Jewish Christians who believed that Jesus was killed a century before. The Gospels, beginning with Mark, were written after 70 CE That’s a four decade gap, the only information we have in the gap comes from Paul who claims that Jesus came to him and told him to spread the word. Paul wrote around eighty thousand words about Christianity, Paul’s documents represent, essentially, all we have with regards to the history of Christianity during this four decade gap. What’s further is that Paul was unaware of the “fact” that Jesus allegedly lived as a human on earth, he was unaware of the story of Mary, of Bethlehem, John the Baptist, any of the miracles of Jesus, Paul never quotes anything that Jesus allegedly said, Paul never mentioned the ministry of Jesus, Pontius Pilot, any Jewish mob, any trial; Paul was unaware of what we would consider the story of Jesus save for the last three events, events which Paul did not even place as having happened on earth. To Paul Jesus lived, died and ascended all within the confines of a mythical realm. I find it interesting, rather suggestive, that the only link we have between the time frame given for the life of Jesus and the appearance of the first gospels, Paul, never even believed that Jesus was a human being, he was actually unaware of the idea altogether.

When looking at the Gospels one must be aware of the fact that allegorical literature was very common at the time, many of the gospels – the apocryphal – were thrown out due to their being too unbelievable and based on folk lore stemming from a plethora of various other myths; there has been a concerted effort – the Jesuits being an example – of people actively attempting to demythologize the bible, trying to take away the folklore (such as the “virgin birth”).

The folklore inherent in Christianity was nothing new or original. Jesus shared some twenty odd characteristics with other mythical heroes, heroes such as Oedipus, Theseus, Romulus, Hercules, Perseus, Zeus, Zoroaster, Thor, Tammuz, Orpheus, Mithras, Krishna, Horus, Hermes, Dionysis, Baal, Attis, Adonis, etc. the shared characteristics being: the heroes mother is a royal virgin, stars appear at his birth, visited by Magi from the east, his father is a king, the circumstances of his conception are unusual, is reputed to be the son of a god, at birth there is an attempt by his father to kill him, but he is hidden away, is raised by foster parents in a foreign country, we are told nothing of his childhood, on reaching manhood he returns and goes to his future kingdom, after a victory over a king, a giant or a dragon, marries a princess, turns water into wine, heals the sick, performs miracles, becomes king, reigns uneventfully, proscribes laws, later losses favor with subjects, is driven from the throne of the city, meets with a mysterious death, death is often at the top of a hill, killed on a cross or a tree, his children if any do not succeed him, his body not buried, etc.

It is a staggering fact to note that Jesus shares the majority of these common hero characteristics with other heroic figures such as Oedipus, Theseus, Romulus, etc. There are other similar savior figures during the same time period such as Apollonius Christ and Osiris, however, nobody takes these stories as anything other than mythical despite the congruent similarity. I find it further revealing that those whose job it was to spread Christianity used the similarity it shared with all other mythology as an advantage:

“When we say that Jesus Christ was produced without sexual union, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended to heaven, we propound nothing new or different from what you believe regarding those whom you call the sons of Jupiter.” – Justin Martyr, church father.

What’s even more is that many pagans, after being proselytized to by the early Church fathers, claimed that what the Christians were saying about Jesus had been what they claimed about Dionysis for years and they didn’t actually believe in such myths either anymore. To which the early Christian apologists would respond with the claim that the difference being this time, with Jesus, the story was true, for it was Satan who counterfeited in advance the other stories with the foreknowledge that this day would come and wished to subvert it.

“For when they say that Dionysus arose again and ascended to heaven, is it not evident the devil has imitated the prophecy?” – Justin Martyr, church father

This is clear evidence that the early church was well aware of the fact that their story, their mythology, was perfectly similar to others which came before and in response to this had to resort to claiming that these other similar mythologies were the work of the devil, a sorry argument if there ever was. It is important to keep in mind that the first celebration of easter was in 2400 BCE long before any alleged existence of Jesus.

For thousands of years humanity has been obsessed with blood sacrifice, it is no coincidence that the story of the crucifixion of Jesus gave Christians a suffering and tortured hero whose flesh they could eat and whose blood they could drink – this is the absolute height of religious sacrifice - and for all those who claim that modern Christians are no longer obsessed with blood sacrifice I submit to them that they watch The Passion of the Christ, the most bloody, gory, violent movie of Jesus ever made and also, far and away, the most popular; many Christians claim this movie is the most profound ever made and it is centered around nothing other than blood sacrifice.

In summation of all of this I find it more than fair and logical to question even the very idea that Jesus ever existed. It seems far more plausible to me that the story of Jesus, the Christian faith, is nothing more than a parsed together story, incorporating the common characteristics of a heroic mythology with a concerted effort to align it with the “prophecy” of the old testament, and nothing more. Thus is, the mythology of Jesus.

The Opium of the People

2006-09-26T01:08:00.000-07:00

There is never a shortage of individuals misquoting Marx in order to make it appear that he presented sentiments parallel to claiming that religion was nothing more than opium, the only function of which was to drug the masses and dull the mind. This is, of course, inaccurate. What Marx actually claimed, in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, was much deeper in its analysis and broader in its implication. He says in his introduction:

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people… The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness….The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo….Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and cull the living flower.”

Undoubtedly many have already become acquainted with a portion of this quote, that religion is the “opium of the people,” but many have likewise failed to actually understand what Marx meant by this. He does not mean by “opium of the people” that religion drugs the masses so as to dull the mind, but, rather, religion is the opium of the people in the sense that it is that which consoles and gives comfort to those facing impossible circumstances. Marx is stating that, through class struggle, religion is wholly dependent upon and is birthed by the material and economic realities which society faces. To Marx religion is the manifestation of a societal defense mechanism, not only the expression of societies suffering but of its protest against it and this suffering is caused by material and economic injustices, political connivances. He believes that by criticizing and abolishing religion one would be able to inculcate within society the foundation for political revolution, or, at least, its evolution.