The immediate crisis and menace of white Christian supremacy

The most important contemporary social issue related to religion in the United States is the dramatic rise of violent white Christian supremacy.  This toxic tendency was imported to the Americas by the conquistadors and colonials and has been present ever since (Zinn, 2003).  Progress has been made throughout history, but the process is cyclical.   

Since the “war on terror” was announced there has been virulent racism and bigotry targeting anyone from the Middle East, or anyone who even remotely looks like they are, and all Muslims.  Trump’s campaign promoted this form of racist bigotry by advocating a “Muslim ban” and has since his assumption of the executive been fighting to fully enact such a religiously bigoted policy.  Trump’s bringing such racism and bigotry to the executive has emboldened white Christian supremacists.  This is evidenced by the events in Charlottesville where white Christian supremacists marched through the streets chanting, among other racist slogans, “Jews will not replace us”, before one of them drove through a crowd of counterdemonstrators in an act of domestic terrorism, killing Heather Heyer.   

The recent act of domestic terrorism, the mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh perpetrated by a white Christian supremacist, illustrates the life or death significance of these social issues related to religion in the United States.  These movements of white Christian supremacy that have recently erupted in heinous acts of terrorism must in the immediacy be opposed by any means necessary.  Constructive social outreach, exchange and education ought to be pursued in order to at minimal temper such hatred, bigotry and racism.  It is devastating that what Sigmund Freud diagnosed as the narcissism of minor differences appears to be ineradicable, though his prognosis of it as a relatively harmless manifestation of aggression is fatally erroneous (Freud, 1989), it must at all costs be defused.    

           

References

Zinn, Howard, (2003). A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. HarperCollins. 

Freud, Sigmund, (1989). Civilization and Its Discontents (p. 72). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1930). 

Trump's Assault

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice.  He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” – Karl Marx 

The assumption of the executive by Donald Trump is a naked expression of the emptiness of United States representative democracy, and consequently the most damning.

Beyond the subversion of democracy by the electoral college, created in the drafting of the Constitution for the purpose of securing slavery and the political power of the slave states, the foundation of representative democracy in the United States is itself an erosion of democracy.  

 

Noam Chomsky observes that the form of ratification whereby two positions are offered and the voter merely selects one of the two positions is an impoverished form of democracy.  He observes further that the electoral process in the United States decades ago became “stage-managed elections, with the public relations industry” managing.  Trump’s campaign turned this tragedy into an utter farce, with a reality-show celebrity and his cadre of ultra-right-wing media propagandists (Bannon and others) turning the election into a complete spectacle.

Ever since the end of the Cold War and the hostilities with jihadi terrorist groups (most of whom were either directly or indirectly organized and armed by the United States) the so-called “war on terror” has effectively replaced the cold war ideology of anti-Communism hysteria.  Trump has taken this already shameful and violent history of aggression and pulled away the masks, revealing the naked racism and bigotry undergirding the rationalizations for imperial hegemony and extending this towards outright ethnic cleansing with, conspicuously, the fight for a “Muslim ban.” 

With the vicious history of the United States’ depredations in the middle east which has stoked the fires of conflict there since the end of WWII (Iran in 1953, etc.) and exacerbated by George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq (the international crime of aggression), of Trump’s new developments has been to toss a Molotov cocktail into the fires in the form of declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel while the Israeli state continues to occupy the Palestinian territories and expanding settlements into them.

Trump’s erratic and unhinged threats to North Korea are putting the entire human species and most others as well into jeopardy.  The international politics of the Trump administration are entirely inadequate and often dangerous, yet the threats to North Korea of a nuclear strike are of altogether another category.  It’s enough that human civilization has since the cold war only by a miracle avoided nuclear holocaust (Chomsky, 2016) while the United States and others have ensured the failure of the nonproliferation treaty (Chomsky & Barsamian, 2017), requiring more miracles yet still.  To trespass beyond such a terribly precarious reality and threaten a nuclear armed state with a nuclear strike is something like combining the game of chicken and Russian roulette into the most dangerous, potentially terminal game ever played. 

In light of Trump’s comments about the fascist violence and terrorism in Charlottesville and every comment that he has so far uttered regarding the “Muslim ban,” immigration and the border wall, it is evident that the only consistent position and policies for which Trump advocates and attempts to enforce are those of white Christian supremacy.  It is of principle importance to resist the Trump-led whitelash and one must defend oneself and one's allies by any means necessary.

It is clearer than ever that the impoverished form of democracy within the United States is inadequate for the attending to of the most serious and pressing issues.  It recalls to mind Rosa Luxemburg writing in her Junius Pamphlet, before she was murdered by the Freikorps, elements of which fermented into the Nazi party: “Friedrich Engels once said: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’  What does ‘regression into barbarism’ mean to our…civilization?...A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means…The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization.  At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences.  Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it…either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration – a great cemetery.  Or the victory of socialism…”

Chomsky, Noam, (2016). Who Rules the World? (pp. 100-114). Metropolitan Books.

Chomsky, Noam, Barsamian, David, (2017). Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy (pp. 108-109). Metropolitan Books.

Observations on contemporary resistance to proto-fascism and violence

To consider the advocating of erratic violence against the proto-fascist elements in the contemporary United States (which have always been latent, yet have taken to the streets more markedly since Trump’s assumption of executive power) it is worth observing some significant elements of the situation. 

There is a conspicuous lack of principle and analysis in the comments advocating violence.  In fact, many of the comments are so utterly devoid of reasoning that there is little to merit the taking of them seriously as genuine expressions of belief and practice.  The phenomenon of trolling, so rampant as it is on the internet, necessitates any serious person posting assertions to buttress them with at least a minimum of evidentiary premises.    

When calculating the ethical calculus of actions and tactics it is required to assess the predictable consequences of the actions and tactics being advocated and engaged in.  As a general principle, physical violence requires meeting a very significant burden of proof.  It must be stressed that within the current United States’ specific situation, violence is only ethically valid as a means of self-defense; in fact, such is essentially always the case. 

When there are confrontations in the streets between the racist, proto-fascist movements and those groups of people opposing them, it is crucial that one be nonviolent, lest one be guilty of igniting a highly combustible situation.  When one is confronted by violence, no doubt self-defense by any means necessary is justified.  Yet when there are racists and proto-fascists in the streets in whatever number they are, charging them and assaulting them with violence is not self-defense, to the contrary.  Further, when assaulting these repugnant people one of the most predictable consequences is their further entrenchment into their hideous ideologies and their engagement of violence in reaction. 

There are by far too many unhinged, armed white supremacists, many of whom are literally itching to harm people and those who are homicidal, if the violence is yet latent, it is irrational and unethical to assault and provoke these elements from their latencies into overt action. 

Those advocating “combat” are a combination of insincere, irrational and unethical in whatever specific composite. 

It is again worth taking account of the conspicuous lack of expressed principle and analysis of those advocating violence.  There has been clearer expressions of principle and analysis, if still fallacious in important ways, by Leninists, Maoists and other deviations from the communism of the “Marxist” movements.  This is another of the instances in which the holders on to the Bolshevism long since passed and discredited are in welcome agreement to other leftists in their revolutionary analysis. 

Don’t advocate assault and violence, instead organize. 

God as First Cause

The “first-cause” argument for God may be one of the most blatantly 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 must have 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 that everything must have a cause, God too must have a cause and the cause of God must have a cause and so on to infinity.  If God does not require a cause then the first premise, everything has a cause, is false. 

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

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

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

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

The problem with the argument predicated upon time has been known since at least the work on General and Special Relativity by Albert Einstein.  Einstein calculated that time itself is relative and can be warped.  The Big Bang hypothesis, proposed due to the Doppler Effect, suggests that the observable universe was produced by the explosion of a dense, hot initial state of gravitational singularity and has been offered by many a theologian as support for the cosmological argument’s second premise.  While current work on this is pure speculation, the best guesses by the most acclaimed physicists in the field point out that time is the relative fourth dimension of the universe created by the Big Bang and that time more or less dissolves the closer it gets to the gravitational singularity.  Discussion of time with regards to the origins of the universe and the Big Bang may very well be nonsensical. 

The second premise cannot currently be verified one way or the other and cannot therefore sustain conclusions.  While work is still being conducted on the nature and origins of the cosmos it is beyond rash to draw any definitive statements and arguments about it, which is why the conclusion only further exacerbates current work.  While it remains unknown why there is something rather than nothing it only confounds this 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 sufficient reason is not given as to why God must be the cause.  It would be as logical to argue that extra-dimensional space aliens were the first cause or that the universe is the product of the functioning of a super-computer. 

Furthermore, the argument only establishes a first-cause in the past; it does not demonstrate the continued existence of this first-cause.  The argument that everything contingent must be caused does not demonstrate that the first-cause continues to exist presently or eternally and it does not elaborate any qualities of the first-cause (such as life, consciousness and so on) which undermines the very purpose of the argument.  The argument against an eternal universe being contradictory because of the paradox of an infinite cycle of time concluding equally applies to an eternal God.      

 

The essential points about this argument are relatively elementary and the fallacies readily identifiable to anyone who takes time to consider them rationally.  This is why there are only ever illiterate charlatans who invoke the argument and never any serious philosophers, at least since St. Thomas Aquinas, and when viewing his philosophical work against the great works of philosophy, it seems to pale in comparison. 

Karl Marx and the State

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

In the general sense of the Left it is more than predictable that there should be not only misunderstanding but also an intentional misinformation campaign waged against an individual so greatly associated with revolutionary movements.  Within a hierarchically class structured society where there exists a ruling class with special privileges and power (among them, near absolute domination of the means of communication) it follows almost axiomatically that there should be waged a disinformation campaign against all that which threatens the current relations of power. 

The most common myth regarding Karl Marx involves associating him with Soviet Russia’s Bolshevism and state totalitarianism in general.  Exacerbating this confusion are the various self-described Marxists who are nothing more than the descendents of the Bolsheviks.  A great many so-called Marxists are Leninists, Trotskyites and Maoists of one form or another who, in concert with bourgeois propaganda, hold up Karl Marx and his work as the foundation for their positions and actions regarding the seizing of the state by a party dictatorship. 

With the self-described Marxists who follow in the footsteps of Lenin and company there is a great sense of anachronism.  It may have been quite forgivable for socialists living after Marx and before the dissemination of his unpublished works to assume that Lenin’s work and actions paralleled the work of Marx due to much of it remaining unpublished and unknown as well as suppressed by the Soviets.  Modern Bolshevik sympathizers have no such excuse.  Long has Marx’s unpublished works been rediscovered and distributed by people of a wide variety of political persuasions, largely beginning with the Marxist Humanists such as Raya Dunayevskaya, Erich Fromm and Maximilien Rubel, among many others, who popularized Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Dunayevskaya was the first to translate the manuscripts), among other lost and obscure texts.

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

With this established it is quite obvious that the bourgeois misinformation confuses the end whereas the so-called “Marxists” who follow the likes of Lenin, Mao and others confuse the means as well.  For the Manifesto does not contain the final word and was, in fact, itself revised with a forward (dated June, 24 1872), as described in Daniel Geurin’s No Gods No Masters.  Marx and Engels explain in the forward that “in many respects” they would now “rephrase” the Manifesto’s content regarding the state.  Geurin points out that “they cited in support of such redrafting ‘the practical experiences, first of the February [1848] revolution, then, to a much greater extent, of the Paris Commune, when, for the first time, the proletariat held political power in its hands over a two month period.’”  Marx and Engels conclude the forward by stating that all of this “means that, in places, this program is no longer up to the minute.  The Commune in particular has supplied proof that the working class cannot rest content with taking possession of the existing machinery of the State in order to place it in the service of its own aims.”      

The Paris Commune discussed in the forward is discussed at much 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 The Civil War in France.  The Paris Commune saw to the implementation in Paris of the federation of communes, the basis of libertarian socialism, and at once the 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 in the third part of the third address given by Karl Marx he writes that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” 

Following the unequivocal comment about state power, Marx then further analyzes the role of the state within developing industrial society.  He writes that “[a]t the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.”  He continues the analysis several paragraphs later when he writes that “[i]mperialism is, at the same time, the most prostitute and the ultimate form of the state power which nascent middle class society had commenced to elaborate as a means of its own emancipation from feudalism, and which full-grown bourgeois society had finally transformed into a means for the enslavement of labor by capital.” 

Marx’s analysis of the state is in this sense virtually indistinguishable from the analyses of many anarchists.  Rudolf Rocker is in a sense paraphrasing Marx’s analysis when 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.”

Marx’s analysis, in fact, anticipated the role of the state within Soviet Russia and the form of state capitalism ruled by a single-party dictatorship centralized within the state as manifested in Soviet Russia and in China.  It must not be overlooked that socialism never existed within Russia and 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 and so on) predicted that the policy of the Bolsheviks was going to lead to the state despotism that sunk the Russian people into the Soviet dungeon.  They argued that rather than replacing capitalist relations with socialist relations the Bolsheviks were merely condensing many capitalists into the single capitalist of the state.  The political economy of Soviet Russia remained capitalist.  It was the ultimate form of state capitalism, where the state is sole capitalist. 

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