An open letter to Obama supporters in the 2012 presidential election

An open letter to the supporters of Obama in the 2012 presidential election:

The constraints on a modern president...

Why the 2012 Election is worse than ineffective...

And what you really need to do if you want “hope” and “change”

Introduction—A retrospective on four years of “hope” and “change”...

If you are an Obama supporter, you are probably somewhat disappointed in the outcome of Obama's first term as president. If you are honest with yourself and think back to the original hopes you had for Obama's first term, the current situation should seem bewildering to you.

It is quite far from those original hopes, no?

Then you must ask yourself, how could your expectations have been so wildly innaccurate?

Perhaps you were naive about the pressure Obama would face from the right. But surely you did not just expect the right wing to go away. Surely the eight long Bush years had acquianted you well enough with just how tenacious the right wing could be. Surely you know that Obama will face just as much pressure from the right during his next term, assuming that he obtains it.

Obama had filibuster-proof majorities in both branches of Congress. He had an historically strong mandate for change.

By all reasonable expectations, he should have been able to meet the material and ideological resources of the right wing head-on and prevail, especially when it came to policy proposals that were overwhelmingly popular—policy proposals that should have even made political sense promote vociferously (the list of which is too long to count).

Considering that he did not, one must explain why this occurred, so that it should not happen again.

One theory might be that Obama was trying to commit political suicide. I don't consider this a likely theory, so we'll move on.

A popular theory among liberal critics of Obama is that he is a weak politician who too easily compromises with the right wing. Assuming that Obama is indeed a psychologically weak individual incapable of holding his ground, we must ask ourselves how we did not recognize this during the 2008 presidential primaries, such that we could have nominated a different candidate. We need to know so that we do not make this same mistake again...assuming that this "weakness" is indeed the reason for Obama's disappointing behavior.

Some liberal critics have also supposed that Obama was being disingenious. Perhaps he never really intended to do all of the things he said he intended to do.

If one or both of these two popular liberal theories about Obama are accurate, one must be consistent and acknowledge that most Democrats appear to be afflicted by the same syndrome of political weakness and/or dishonesty. They consistently fail to stand up to Republicans as much as they promise.

The more honest liberal critics, such as TheYoungTurks host Cenk Uyghur, do proceed along these very lines and indeed find it strange that Democrats overwhelmingly seem to have been afflicted by this malady of political weakness and/or dishonesty over the last 12 years, whereas Republicans seem to have caught hardly any of this flu going around Washington.

These more honest liberal critics eventually come to recognize that this is not some contagious illness at work, but rather, a political "red-shift" that seems to weaken leftists, strengthen rightists, and inch the entire public discourse towards the right over time.

This political "red-shift" is visible throughout 20th century American history.

Modern Democrats would feel right at home among Eisenhower's Republicans. Green Party progressives like the infamous Ralph Nader would have felt right at home among New Deal Democrats.

We hear much criticism of Obama from the right that he is a "socialist." Please. If you compare Obama to a real American socialist like, for example, Eugene V. Debs, you'll find a gulf as big as the Grand Canyon.

As liberal comedian Bill Maher recently quipped, Democrats are now the party of the right, and Republicans are now the party of the insane asylum.

How did it get like this? Why do "leftist" politicians systematically weaken on their leftist positions and drift to the right?

Once again, some honest liberal critics are astute enough to observe that there is enormous "corporate" pressure in this direction.

What is the nature of this corporate pressure? Obviously there is lobbying. Men in nice suits meet with politicians and try to persuade them of the efficacy of their pro-business, anti-tax, anti-labor, anti-social program proposals.

In an of itself, this should not be enough to account for a systematic shift to the right. After all, are politicians incapable of disagreeing with these men in nice suits? Do our politicians mindlessly agree with the last thing that they heard? I'd like to give them more credit than that.

You'd think that most politicians would be capable of sitting down with a lobbyist from United Healthcare and saying at the end of the meeting, "I've heard what you've said, but I must respectfully disagree, I remain convinced that we need to push for a public option in healthcare."

Even if a politician hears from 12 United Healthcare lobbyists in a row, that politician must still understand, if he/she has any brain at all, that for every lobbyist he/she has just heard from, there are millions of people who do emphatically want a public option in healthcare but who personally didn't get the chance to travel and present their cases on that day.

If this polite exchange of ideas with lobbyists was all that was going on, then on what grounds could we point to lobbying as the corrupting influence systematically shifting our politicians and political system to the right?

Some will argue that lobbyists corrupt our politicians by bribing them.

While there are plenty of documented cases of this happening (particularly in indirect ways, such as by promising politicians lucrative positions on boards of directors after their political terms have finished), I don't think it happens enough to explain systematic catering to "corporate" interests, unless we are willing to accept that we as voters are systematically bad at noticing that all of our candidates are evil, treacherous con-men. (And why is the field of candidates only filled with such men?)

Many voters will repeat the cliché that "politicians are crooks" while insisting that "my congressperson is different" and that they will be voting to re-elect this incumbent in the next election. Both statements can't, in general, be simultaneously true.

If you are in any way thinking of engaging in the political process, you are probably convinced, as I am, that the field of candidates can't possibly be devoid of well-meaning individuals.

Unlike many critics of Obama, I'll even assume that Obama himself is well-meaning (although I'll show how this assumption is, in the end, irrelevant once one understands the constraints on a politician in the context of modern capitalism).

Well then, what exactly is pushing Obama to the right, if it is not intellectual debate with lobbyists or bribes from lobbyists?

One obvious answer would be campaign financing. Obama must please corporations so that he can get campaign financing from them in order to win re-election...so the argument goes. This argument holds out hopes for liberal critics that, if only we could reform campaign financing, our political system would no longer be dysfunctional and unresponsive to our opinions. As I will show, this is a naive assumption that does not take into account the full range of powers of corporations. They can do much more than simply withhold campaign financing.

Anyways, if campaign financing were the main reason for why Obama or any other politician catered to corporate interests, we would expect to see every once in a while a politician (or Obama himself next term) get re-elected and ignore his corporate sponsors now that they had nothing more to offer in terms of political advantage, would we not?

This is the major problem with the campaign financing explanation--it does not explain the pro-corporate behavior of politicians during lame-duck terms. Conventional political theory assumes as a commonplace that politicians orient their behavior and policies so as to maximize their chances of getting re-elected. This conventional political theory, however, doesn't explain anything in lame-duck situations where politicians have no self-interest in behaving a certain way so as to get re-elected. What factors then could continue to drive them to the right, towards catering to corporate interests?

The political application of the economic power of capital

Let's return to lobbying for a moment. Assuming that there aren't outright bribes being negotiated, what do politicians and lobbyists talk about? What is the nature of their conversation? Is it an intellectual exchange about the abstract desirability of various policies?

Part of the conversation might address such points, but if I were the owner of a corporation (that is, a "capitalist"), I'd tell my lobbyists to do the following: threaten politician X with X, Y, Z if the politician does not do what we tell him/her to do."

Now, by "X, Y, and Z," I don't necessarily mean personal threats to the politician or his/her family, although I can't discount the possibility that such threats occasionally take place. More straightforwardly, though, corporations can simply threaten to do any one of the things that they, by virtue of their economic power, are capable of doing so as to politically devastate the politician.

What exactly are these powers that corporations have? Let's see:

First and foremost, the owners of corporations (capitalists) can organize as a class in order to be prepared to collectively perform all of the following to the degree of maximum effectiveness. (Capitalists do this as a matter of course even in times when they are getting their way without having to flex their muscles. They are conscious enough of their long-term interests to know that there might come a time in the future where they might indeed have to flex these muscles).

1. Capitalists (including, but not limited to those that directly own the media) can fire journalists who cover the wrong things and can promote coverage that strengthens their ideology and/or that is critical of a particular politician or political trend. Contemporary and historical examples of this are commonplace. ("So institute a publicly-funded media like PBS or the BBC." liberal reformists will say.)

2. Capitalists can fund political movements that are favorable to their interests. (Historically, numerous right-wing groups in various countries have received funding from corporations).

3. Capitalists can lock out their workers from their businesses, thereby punishing the politician and the country for unfavorable policies. (Rare, but corporations are prepared to do this if the situation calls for it).

4. Capitalists can flee the city/region/country, taking their capital and jobs with them, and thereby punish the politician and the city/region/country for unfavorable policies. (Quite common). This is arguably their most powerful indirect weapon, as it can plunge a country into economic ruin.

5. Capitalists can convince the military (whether ideologically, or with a handsome bribe for its leading generals if need be) to stage a coup and suppress (i.e. kill or detain) the offending politician and/or political movement. There are many historical examples of this as well.

These are standing threats of which only the most naive national politician could be unaware. Therefore, getting rid of lobbyists would hardly fix the problem of the political system being unresponsive to our concerns because lobbying is merely the most discrete and gentlemanly way of reminding politicians of these standing threats from the capitalist class that politicians must first and foremost address. And I'm sure capitalists could devise other avenues of communication if needed.

Consider one example from current politics: the financial crisis in Greece.

You can bet that all of these threats I enumerated above are ultimately "on the table" in the current financial crisis in Greece. Perhaps nobody is explicitly talking about some of these threats (such as a coup) right now, but the unspoken possibility of such an event already structures the context of the negotiations.

The basic outline of the crisis is, the Greek state doesn't have enough money to pay its debts. The Greek state needs to get more money somehow, either through raising taxes on some portion of the population, or through cutting government spending...or the Greek government can default.

Greek capitalists (and by "Greek," I don't necessarily mean that they speak Greek and live in Greece. I am including, for example, American or French or German capitalists who have investments in Greece) don't want Greece to default (it means capitalists with investments in Greek bonds don't get their money), and these capitalists don't want to pay any more taxes. Instead, they want the Greek government to obtain the necessary funds by cutting the funding of social programs.

There is, of course, the standing threat of Greek capitalists withdrawing their money out of Greece if the Greek state were to attempt to raise taxes on them. That would make the Greek state's financial situation much much worse, so the Greek state is at the mercy of these capitalists and must serve them.

That said, the Greek government is afraid to cut social programs because the Greek government honestly fears revolution from Greek workers. So the Greek government is paralyzed, unsure of how to safely evade revolution while also pleasing capitalists with investments in Greece.

In the case that the Greek government cannot be persuaded to cut social programs to the degree of Greek capitalists' liking, these capitalists can go to the Greek military to see if the Greek military is interested in putting in power a different regime that is willing to make those cuts to social programs. If the Greek military ends up being unwilling to do such a thing, capitalists with investments in Greece are likely to find the French, German, and American militaries more than "helpful" in this regard.

The only way that Greek workers can avoid spending cuts to social programs is if they make capitalists with investments in Greece (and capitalists in general) sufficiently afraid of the revolutionary seizure of those investments and the possible ignition of a wider revolution in Europe, such that these capitalists will be willing to say to the Greek state, "We'll compromise and pay part of the bill (or all of the bill) in higher taxes or defaults, so as to avoid precipitating a revolution."

Of course, not all capitalists or their political servants agree right now about the best course of action. Different individuals and sub-groups of the capitalist class have different perceptions of the objective layout of the situation, and particularly of the risk of revolution or radicalization posed by the Greek crisis. So you have a tremendous debate going on regarding how to approach the crisis.

Nevertheless, these are the constraints within which a Greek version of "Obama" would have to operate, lest he be vilified by the capitalist press or thrust out of office by a coup, or lest his country be abandoned by international capital or invaded by a foreign state representing the international capitalist class and intending to make sure that Greece continues paying its debts to the international capitalist class.

Although our country is not quite in the same degree of crisis right now, these are fundamentally the same considerations that Obama, or whoever else gets elected, must face. The question of, "Can I do X (such as a public option in healthcare)?" must always be accompanied by, "What will capitalists say about X?"

The only way that a theoretically well-meaning Obama can convince capitalists that something like a public option in healthcare is okay is if he can convince these capitalists that such a measure is necessary in order to diminish or forestall radicalization among the working class (and, to be clear, by "working class," I mean everyone who works for another person, corporation, or institution for a wage or salary, rather than making a living off of capital investments). If Obama cannot convince capitalists of this, then he simply cannot pass something like a public option in healthcare (and the increased taxes on capitalists to pay for the social policy) without risking capital flight, negative press, and (if the offense is deemed severe enough), a coup attempt.

It does not matter who is in the White House; these same constraints will apply. Some candidates might happily and willingly serve international capital. Some candidates might secretly chafe at these constraints. But the objective results will be largely the same. International capital keeps its servants on a tight leash.

If it looks like more leftist reforms are attained (or these days, maintained) during Democratic presidencies, it is usually because these presidencies also happen to come at a time when the working class is more mobilized politically and more threatening to the capitalist class, and capitalists are more willing to grant reforms in order to de-radicalize the working class. It has nothing to do with the qualities of the person in office, which is why when we elect an ostensibly progressive candidate like Obama, but do little to mobilize the working class, cultivate class consciousness, and threaten the capitalist class, the capitalist class grants Obama very little leash, and his presidency ends up disappointing liberal hopes.

The self-defeating nature of liberal reformism

There are two ways to go from here. One way is to acknowledge that we only get reforms when the capitalist class is genuinely afraid of working class revolution, regardless of who is in office, and therefore if reforms are still our goal (despite the fact that we've thereby also demonstrated that the entire political system is out of our control and functions in the interest of the capitalist class), we must pursue those reforms by cultivating class consciousness and advocating revolution so as to alarm the capitalist class sufficiently in order to enjoin our politicians to grant reforms so as to de-radicalize us.

The problem with this approach is that such reforms are inevitably short-lived because as soon as the capitalist class senses satisfaction and de-radicalization among the working class and judges it safe to take these reforms away, it will. The liberal reformist is thus caught in an impossible situation. The liberal reformist must somehow maintain working class consciousness and mobilization at just such a level so as to frighten the capitalist class to grant reforms, but ostensibly at not such a high level that we risk working class revolution ("The horrors!")

Furthermore, once the capitalist class figures out that the rhetorical revolutionaries are indeed just liberal reformists at heart, the capitalist class will no longer take their activities seriously as a threat because the capitalist class will know that the liberal reformists will do everything to decrease working class consciousness and mobilization of their own accord at the moment when it threatens to turn revolutionary, and therefore the capitalist class need not worry about needing to do anything on its own in order to grant reforms and de-radicalize the working class, as the liberal reformists will never allow the situation to get this far in the first place.

In other words, trying to reform capitalism will be an incoherent, unceasing, and self-defeating task that will inevitably end in a capitulation to whatever the capitalist class deems appropriate. These are the pathetic and hopeless prospects for liberal reformists, even after being armed with an accurate understanding of how our current political system works. (The prospects for the liberal reformists who still mistakenly think that voting for Obama will help attain their goals are even more pathetic and hopeless).

The rule of the working class—the only coherent goal

The far more coherent option is to simply commit yourself, as a member of the working class, to the task of obtaining political power for you and your class so that you are no longer held hostage politically (not to mention economically) by the capitalist class.

(Note that I have so far only made political arguments for working class revolution. There are, of course, numerous economic arguments that can be made as well).

"The working class doesn't run America, but we make America run." We already run things under the authority of our capitalist bosses and politicians. Why not obtain authority over what we already do?

Practical thoughts on working-class revolution and working-class democracy

The rule of the capitalist class is democratic internally, but despotic with regards to the rest of us. It should be blatantly clear from what I have outlined above concerning the political power of organized capital that capitalists have no intention of ever allowing our cause of working-class political and economic self-government to triumph. We must be ready for when the capitalist class inevitably calls up the military to protect its class rule, but if we are indeed ready and determined, the military will abandon its orders or even join our righteous cause as it has on many relatively bloodless revolutionary days of the past.

Just as the capitalist class is democratic internally but despotic towards the rest of us, our rule as the working class will be democratic internally, but our offer to those capitalists who are not willing to become a fellow member of the working class will be, at best, exile to Afghanistan or some hopeless place still undergoing the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Specifically, the rule of the working class will be a direct democracy, both politically and economically. Politically, we will elect delegates to local, regional, national, and international drafting committees. These delegates will be immediately recallable upon petition of a certain reasonable percentage of the population. The delegates at each level will be charged with drafting legislation at each level, which we will then directly vote on with weekly ballots. Being a "citizen" will not be a passive afterthought, but an active, exciting, and meaningful engagement with direct political power over our lives.

Even so, if we only had political direct democracy without also economic power, that would only mean that we as citizens would be granting ourselves the luxurious privilege of directly negotiating with the capitalist class regarding the terms of our surrender in exchange for their patronage.

That's why workers' control, both legal and practical, over all productive assets is a concomitant requirement of political direct democracy. By “workers' control,” I very simply mean governing our working lives and our economy through directly democratic workplace councils and drafting committees of similar structure to what I described politically.

The system of working class direct democracy has functioned perfectly well in the past...to the extent that such a system was allowed to work (up until such instances of working class direct democracy were forcibly crushed by capitalist armies that had overwhelming help from armies of workers who were misguidedly loyal to the capitalist system--most notably, during the Paris Commune and the Spanish Revolution of 1936, to name the most well-known examples which remain, nevertheless, conspicuously absent from most working class historical memory).

The system of working class direct democracy will function even more effectively now, given modern technological advances and the overall elevation of the population's level of education over the last 130 years.

Conclusion—if not voting for Obama, then what?

The only thing preventing us from working class direct democracy is that currently a majority of the working class does not share this intention. We need only spread thoughtful class consciousness about the way capitalism and its political system works, and about the possibilities for assuming political and economic power democratically amongst ourselves, the working class.

We will not accomplish these tasks by voting for Obama. As a matter of fact, publicly defending the idea of voting for Obama is worse than ineffective. By validating this political process that misleadingly promises voters political power and seeks to obscure the political power of organized capital, you mislead the less class-conscious members of the working-class and set back the point at which they will become class-conscious allies in the class struggle.

One way we can spread class consciousness is through class-conscious intellectual debate—the very sort in which I am engage you, the reader, right now.

Another way is to participate in instances of class struggle in a way that illuminates the workings of the capitalist system, the necessity of revolution, and the possibilities for working-class self-organization and government.

For example, if I were a Greek worker, right now I would be trying to explain to fellow members of the Greek working class exactly what I explained above in terms of my analysis of the interests of the capitalist class regarding the Greek crisis, my analysis of what capitalists are prepared to do to defend those interests, and my analysis of what we could do to not only defend our immediate living standards, but also awaken class consciousness among other Greek workers and workers internationally and organize for the attainment of power internationally as a class that will put an end to the exhausting and never-ending class struggle.

In the midst of any instance of class struggle, we class-conscious workers must raise this issue of working class political power explicitly and repeatedly. If doing so allows the capitalist class to rally liberal forces and non-class-conscious workers against us and thereby make our immediate task of defending our living standards more difficult, that is only because our cause is still weak and most workers are still not class-conscious.

The way to address this problem is not to back away from any attempt to explicitly raise class consciousness (which is what the capitalist class wants to intimidate us into doing), but rather, to raise the issue of class consciousness and working class political power even more vociferously, so as to put ourselves in a stronger position with more class-conscious working-class allies to help us defend our immediate interests as well as further spread class-consciousness.

If that entails a temporary rallying against us and a setback in our defense of our immediate living standards, then we must say, so be it. Running from the fight (not explicitly raising the issue of class consciousness and working class political power) will only put us in the future in a weaker position, less able to even defend our immediate interests, much less spread class-consciousness and organize for revolution.

Indeed, this is what has happened to our cause during the last 30 years. We class-conscious workers have not explicitly made the case for class-consciousness and working-class political power (so as to not frighten away less radical allies from immediate class struggles over living standards), and now workers who should have been our allies at this point are under the sway of capitalist ideology more than ever before. We must end this failed strategy of “stealth politics” at once and explicitly raise the issue of what we ultimately mean to do—put the working class into political and economic power.

This quest for working-class democracy is a tall task, but it is the only cause that reliably promises “hope” and “change.” Other efforts amount to no more than counting on the capricious sense of fear of the capitalist class in the hopes that we may wring some reforms out of them before they realize that, insofar as we do not explicitly advocate class consciousness and working-class political power, we are paper tigers.

Reformist efforts are self-contradictory. Reformist victories gained in the process of striving explicitly for working-class political power will be a nice (but inherently unstable and ephemeral) side-effect of the march towards working-class rule. We must constantly point out the opportunistic and ephemeral nature of pro-working-class reforms relinquished by capitalists in their moments of fear, and we must continually strive for working-class political rule, regardless of reformist victories given and threatened to be taken away, for working-class self-government is the only path towards reliable control over our lives and improvement of our well-being.

Keep this thought in mind as you watch the meaningless spectacle of the 2012 presidential election unfold.

Capitalists And Other Parasites: Controversial Implications for the Role of the Market in Post-Capitalist Society

Capitalists And Other Parasites: Controversial Implications for the Role of the Market in Post-Capitalist Society

Introduction: “Where the hell have you been?”

For the past few years, I have been laying low in the arena of radical politics. After the failure of the radical momentum during the Bush years to materialize into any lasting systemic change, and with Obama's “hope-inspiring” presidency assimilating a lot of the remaining activist energy into superficial liberal do-gooder-ism and easily-assimilated renovations of capitalism, I felt in some vague way that it was time to step back from radical politics for a while.

In the meantime, I have been exploring other tools (such as psychedelics) and the prospects for using these tools to facilitate radical social and ideological change. I have also been musing on the reasons for the failure of the radical momentum of the Bush years. I think it is pointless to keep on trying to do the same things when it is apparent that their outcomes are not living up to your expectations. In such a case, your model of social reality is badly malfunctioning, and it calls for a fresh look at your philosophy and your programme from the ground-up.

So this is what I will be doing—first by re-establishing from first principles a primary motivation for being against capitalism and for pursuing a radical political programme (rectifying capitalist parasitism), and then by critiquing some cherished dogma about that political programme itself (by arguing that the Market will actually remain an indispensable institution in any post-capitalist society, for precisely the same reason that the transcendence of capitalism was needed in the first place—the need to overcome social parasitism).

Motivations for Radical Politics

I have been to many political events at which speakers have shouted passionately through their microphones that capitalism is an “injustice.” Oh, how I loathe the obfuscation that this word creates! As a word, it is the perfect tool for organizers to rally groups together that really, philosophically, have no business attending the same rally. Everyone can oppose “injustice” (regardless of the fact that the word will have wildly varying connotations and implications for liberals and radicals). As we see, the word “injustice” is actually the worst word for actually explaining anything coherently, so I will not be complaining that capitalism is “unjust.”

For me, capitalism is flawed mainly for two specific reasons: having to put up with social parasites (capitalists), and having to go through life not having any real power politically or economically (which is odious for both material and existential reasons). I also object to it vaguely in a third way for the type of culture and bourgeois values that capitalism seems to cultivate. Nevertheless, I will only be focusing on the first motivation in this article.

Capitalism As Parasitic

It is a very simple thing to demonstrate that capitalists, insofar as their role as “owners of capital” is concerned, are parasites. (By “capitalists, insofar as their role as 'owners of capital,'” I mean, disregarding any accidental aspects of the capitalists such as whether they happen to also contribute effort and ingenuity while managing their capital, and paying attention only to the essential feature of being a capitalist. If a capitalist also wants to work as a manager, then a wage (not profit) remuneration comparable to the pay for another wage worker would be justified for that capitalist-as-manager. But let us consider the capitalist-as-capitalist). To demonstrate this, I will come up with a capitalist who functions only as a capitalist.

Consider a capitalist who has hired out the working of his machinery to workers, the managing of these workers to managers, and the financial and legal representation of his estate to lawyers. Let's say this capitalist gets in a car wreck and is made into a virtually brain-dead vegetable. Even so, while he lies in his hospital bed in a vegetative state, money will continue accruing to his name from the operation of his business. He need not even have his wits about him in order to make sure his funds do not get embezzled—if the law is functioning properly, it will monitor that for him. Years later, when he magically awakes from a coma, his estate will be waiting for him, larger than ever before.

Clearly his money that he originally saved up has been “working” for him, or rather, the resources, machinery, and human labor purchasable with that money has been working for him. Perhaps he is only remaining even from his purchase of labor, and it is his machinery and resources that are making money for him. Let's see if that's true.

Let's imagine that, without using his machinery, a man can farm 5 bushels of wheat a day. With his machinery, a man can farm 20 bushels of wheat a day. It would appear that the machine is responsible for farming 15 of the wheat bushels, since the change in the input was the machine, and the change in the output was the 15 bushels.

Consider it from the man's perspective, though: the machine, standing alone by itself, farms 0 bushels of wheat per day. With the man's help, the machine farms 20 bushels of wheat a day. From the man's perspective, by the same calculus, he is entirely responsible for the 20 bushels of wheat farmed.

How then, is one to divide up the produce of 20 bushels between man and machine (or owner of the machine who is dedicated to the notion of not having himself work, but rather living as a pure capitalist)? Obviously, the man should get somewhere between 5 and 20 bushels, and the machine should get somewhere between 0 and 15 bushels.

The problem is, however, that there are an infinite number of ratios that fulfill this system of equations. Mathematically, this situation could be represented by:

5 < X < 20

0 < Y < 15

X + Y = 20

Where X is what the man earns, Y is what the machine earns, and X + Y is what they produce together. If we rearrange the last equation so that the Y is by itself, we get Y = 20 – X. If we graphed these equations, it would look something like this:

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e326/Zeiter/economic-situation1.png

Choose any point along the red line between the blue f(x)=15 line and f(x)=0 (the x axis), and you will fulfill the systems of equations. We could, for example, split it up 10 and 10. We could split it up as 12 for the man and 8 for the machine (meaning, the owner of the machine). Interestingly, if we took the midpoint, we'd end up with 12.5 for the man and 7.5 for the machine, which seems to maintain the difference between the pre-combination productivity of each input by itself, while distributing the increased productivity from the combination evenly among the two, from the standpoint of the human (he was producing 5, now the output is 20, there's 15 surplus production to assign, so he gets what he was already producing, plus 7.5, while the machine gets what it was already producing, plus 7.5).

Furthermore, whichever point on the red line between f(x)=15 and f(x)=0 that we choose, it will be in the interest of each party to agree to. Even if we choose a point like 5.0000001 for the man and 14.9999999 for the machine, it it is still technically better for the man than the alternative of refusing the deal and continuing to work on his own, producing 5.0000000 bushels. Likewise, if we choose a point like 19.999 for the man, and 0.001 for the machine, it is still technically better for the machine (or, the capitalist owning the machine) to agree to this deal, than to get nothing at all.

Given that there are these infinite possibilities, where does the deal actually get made in real life? This is where “supply and demand” comes in, which essentially, when it concerns how one earns one's livelihood, boils down to “which party is less desperate for the deal and thus has more leverage?” If the capitalist is starving, absolutely must make some money, and is absolutely dead set against doing any work himself, then he must basically accept whatever he can get, even if it is something like 0.5 bushels for him and 19.5 bushels for the worker. Obviously, this scenario is not common. Much more common would be the opposite scenario, where the worker is starving and must do anything to increase his earnings, even if it means taking a deal like 5.5 for him and 14.5 for the machine (capitalist). In general, the deal will tend towards one of these extremes depending on who is most desperate. Only if the desperation on each side happens to be perfectly balanced would you get a deal like 12.5 for the man and 7.5 for the machine (the midpoint, as mentioned above).

The situation above is more reflective of the haggling that might go on between a medieval freeman peasant and lord rather than between a wage worker and a capitalist because the “worker” in the above example always has the option of working alone for 5 bushels/day and subsisting. The situation of a wage worker is far more disastrous because he has no land to fall back on to produce a subsistence of 5 bushels/day. His alternatives are, don't combine with the capitalist's machine (and land, etc.) and produce 0 bushels, or combine with the capitalist and produce 20 bushels. This is the situation that Marx was describing when he said that a precondition for capitalism was that labor had to become a commodity, meaning, something that had no use-value in-and-of itself to the worker that possessed it, but rather, something that only obtained value when sold (to a capitalist), something that only had “exchange value,” in Marx's words.

For the capitalist, the situation is the same as before: his machinery (and land, etc.) will produce 0 bushels without the worker, or 20 bushels with the worker. So the system of equations we are dealing with in this case is:

0 < X < 20

0 < Y < 20

X + Y = 20

Where X is what the man earns, Y is what the machine earns, and X + Y is what they produce together. If we rearrange the last equation so that the Y is by itself, we get Y = 20 – X. If we graphed these equations, it would look something like this:

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e326/Zeiter/economic-situation2.png

This graph looks similar to the one before it, except for the subtle difference that the endpoints are different. The extreme cases are:

1. The man earns 0.000001 bushels, and the capitalist earns 19.999999 bushels.

2. The man earns 19.99999 bushels, and the capitalist earns 0.0000001 bushels.

The midpoint in this case would be each party earning 10 bushels.

Once again, there are an infinite number of points on this line between these endpoints for which it would be in the “interest” of both parties to agree to the deal, compared to what each party could obtain without the deal. So, how does a ratio actually get chosen? By supply and demand, or as it should perhaps it should be called in instances where it holds the livelihoods of people in the balance, “the law of desperation.”

In most cases, the worker is going to be more desperate than the capitalist for a number of obvious reasons that I don't need to go into right now (less reserve capital stock for hard times, capitalist has option of having himself work his machinery (land, capital, etc.) rather than employ a worker, etc.) So the deal is going to tend towards 0.000001 bushels for the man, and 19.99999 bushels for the capitalist.

However, there is a factor that prevents the deal from ever sliding all the way to this extreme: the worker, being a factor of production for the capitalist, needs to be able to maintain himself (physically, mentally, emotionally, etc.) in order to be able to work the next day for the capitalist, for the capitalist's sake. It would be a shortsighted capitalist who abused and prematurely ruined his tools. Therefore, in practice the earnings of the worker will settle towards a minimum of how much it takes for him to reproduce his own labor. This also, includes, by the way, the cost of raising the next generation to continue on his labor when his own body inevitably wears out.

What we have arrived at is the realization that any talk of “the worker gets paid exactly what his labor is worth” is hogwash. The worker gets paid what it requires for him to maintain himself as a working tool of the capitalist. The reality is, there's no objective way to determine “what his labor is worth” in this situation. It is anywhere on the red line, from 0 bushels to 20 bushels.

The closest thing you might point to as an “objective worth” of the worker's labor would be the midpoint: 10 bushels, splitting the earnings (not the profits, but the earnings!) right down the middle in this case with the capitalist. In fact, it does not take long to realize that, according to this analysis, splitting the earnings right down the middle will always be the midpoint where the worker's labor by itself can produce 0 bushels (because he lacks any means of production to work on, even land), and where the capitalist's machinery/resources will produce 0 bushels on their own without any human input (as they always will).

I am skeptical of how “objective” even this midpoint is, though, because it takes no account of how complex, expensive, or efficient the capitalist's machinery is. It could be a simple plow, or it could be a supercomputer, and in each case both the capitalist and worker by themselves will start out producing 0 bushels alone, and then together the full product (whether it is 20 bushels with the plow, or 2 million bushels with the help of the supercomputer), and the midpoint will be either 10 bushels, in the first case, or 1 million bushels in the second case, but in either case the midpoint will still mean 50% for the worker. This intuitively just doesn't make sense to me.

What I think this thought exercise demonstrates more than anything, I think, is that the law of “supply and demand” (or the “law of desperation,” as it might be named in these instances), warps any agreements to the extremes of what is minimally acceptable to one of the parties, in comparison to some much worse prospect that really should not even be an option in a humane society in the first place (starvation). In any conceivable situation, this will be to the supreme disadvantage of the wage worker. The agreement will be so warped to the extreme against him that he will effectively be paid however much the capitalist can afford to squeeze out of him (the only impediments being the need to maintain the worker in working condition, and the threat of working-class rebellion). If we cannot consider this parasitic, then what can we?

In a broader sense, should we not object to using other human beings' situations of desperation against them out of simple emotional revulsion to it? It would be like seeing someone drowning in a flood and offering them a rope for an infinite amount of money—all the money that the person will ever make in life subsequently, minus the amount needed for his/her own maintenance. Sure, the person still has an “interest” in accepting the deal because the only alternative is certain death, which is worse, and you can still say that you are doing the person a “favor” because, even if accepting the deal, that debt-burdened person will still be better off than had you never shown up...but such a deal is at one of the very extremes on one of our lines, and it just feels wrong from the standpoint of our emotions as social animals needing to cooperate in good faith with others in our species, historically and today, in order to survive. And yet we allow the operation of this “law of desperation” in millions of instances in our society every day.

If I sound like I'm objecting to this on moral grounds, and not grounds of objective material class interest, as any good Marxist should, it's because I am. Now, I'm not saying that this is immoral because of what some God or holy text says. I'm saying it is immoral because I viscerally feel that it is immoral, probably because of certain genetics that most humans share that give us an instinctual sense of some social situations being “moral” or “immoral.” I don't care if I never convince the capitalists of the immorality of this, as long as I can convince enough workers of it.

(Note, also, that I am criticizing the law of supply and demand only insofar as it is used in absolutely essential transactions that inherently have an element of desperation in them. I am not objecting to someone in a village market somewhere selling a pair of shoes to someone else according to the laws of supply and demand...unless that person is going to die without that pair of shoes and is so desperate that he must agree to the deal, no matter what the cost. As I will explain later, I actually consider the market in many situations to be indispensable).

Since there is no “objective” way to divide up the worth of labor and machinery when they are joined together, then I propose that we make sure that we never have to! There is no question of this division when a worker is working his/her own means of production. It is when a means of production is operated by someone other than the person who owns that means of production that we run into this insoluble problem of finding an objective division of productivity and have to resort to a barbaric law of desperation to cut through the infinite mathematical indeterminacy.

What, then, if we stipulate in our society: no absentee-operation of any means of production? That is to say, no operation of a means of production by someone who does not own it. As a corollary, of course, it would follow: anyone who is allowed to use a means of production becomes an owner of it. Cooperative ownership would be a precondition for cooperative labor. Therefore, if you don't want others jointly owning something that you currently own by yourself (such as a handsaw, a small machine shop, or a large factory), then don't agree to have others work with those means of production with you! (In reality, there would be no means of production capable of employing more than several people in solitary hands because these would be the obvious targets for workers to take over outright during a revolution).*

Note that, if the workers were feeling really unjustifiably generous, then they could even take over these multi-employee enterprises with compensation to their former owners. The compensation to the former owners, however, would be in the form of property that could never be employed as a profit-earning means of production ever again. It could always be sold, but what was bought in exchange or it could also not be used as a means of production for earning absentee profit.

In my mind, this “absentee profiting,” of off means of production by people who are not working them, the lack of equal profit by the people who are working those means of production—this parasitism, this is the essential feature and problem of capitalism, and what I've outlined here is, I think, an easily-imaginable and feasible way of running our society otherwise.

*By the way, if you are worried that loaning your toothbrush to your friend will make him “part owner” of your toothbrush, then all I have to say is, it will be the domain of law, legislation, public opinion, and common sense to stipulate what sort of things would be covered by this principle, and what sort of things would not be.

The Indispensability of the Market

I've already gone over how capitalism is parasitic, and how that parasitism can be removed. Now, I'd like to attack a sacred taboo of the radical left and explain why the “Market” might actually be essential to preventing other sorts of parasitism. (Note the distinction between capitalism, which I defined very specifically as abstentee ownership of means of production by non-users, and the Market, which has the same common sense definition as it probably does for you).

Humans seem to have a natural aversion to parasites, whether biological or social. We sense that leeches, intestinal worms, ticks, etc. are bad for our body. Regardless of whatever diseases or annoyances they bring with them, at the very least they deprive our body of its resources and make us expend more effort in order to manufacture those lost resources. This is the essential feature of a parasite as far as this discussion is concerned.

Humans also seem to be averse to social parasites. We have many social institutions designed to disincentivize social parasitism. Some, like “the Market,” are quite visible in our contemporary world. Throughout human societies that have traded in markets, the agreement has been that neither side wants to give away something for nothing, and so in order to get something, you must give something that the other person finds valuable in return. The logic of the Market is, if you don't produce some good or service that others in your society find useful, you starve and die.

The Market seems emotionally callous, and it is indeed emotionally callous, but throughout history it has been supplemented (and, for probably all of prehistory, overshadowed) by another mechanism designed to disincentivize social parasitism, one that I might call “economic morality.” This mechanism, far from being emotionally callous, is very emotionally rich—but really, just as brutal. The logic of this system says, “If you don't produce something for us, we will still feed you so that you don't starve, but meanwhile we will also throw dirty looks at you and make you feel like an outcast until you produce again.”

When radicals in modern capitalist countries look at hunter-&-gatherer societies, radicals often construe a peaceful tribe in which everyone magically gets along without the use of a market. “Everybody shares.” Primitive communism. One idea is that, if primitive communism worked, then industrialized communism could work too.

I don't necessary disagree. Industrialized communism could work—except that it will come with the same price that primitive communism comes with, which is a communal life that must reprimand you morally with social scorn and ostracism when you don't “share” equally. It is a social life in which the accounting is done in emotional rather than numerical terms. How much someone owes you is determined by the magnitude of your vague sense of disgust and annoyance at their laziness (or by your vague sense of admiration at their help they've given in the past, as the case may be).

Do you think that any primitive tribe allows any and all members to do nothing socially-useful? No, the question would hardly ever come up because it would be something that “just wasn't done.” You would have been taught from childhood in various implicit ways that everyone had to have a role in the tribe. Some, such as the shamans, might not even produce food or other physical necessities, but would rather attend to the medical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of the tribe. But everyone would have to have a role, and not necessarily just any role, but specifically, something that contributed to community life. Needless to say, this role need not take up all of one's time (or perhaps any more than 4 hours a day, if some studies of the work-habits of primitive tribes are to be believed). But nevertheless, there are mechanisms other than the Market in place to disincentivize social parasitism.

I suspect that many small radical cliques get the impression that industrialized communism could work, and that everyone would indeed “pitch-in” and take out the garbage when needed, etc., because it works well within their own small clique. And indeed it can work well in situations where strong emotional ties bind people together and make them emotionally accountable to each other. In such cases, the garbage does, in fact, get taken out.

However, even in these harmonious cliques I do think that there does emerge after a while an awareness that a (different) sort of calculus is actually going on—that they have simply replaced money with social approval. Petty hostilities flare up from time to time, bearing witness to the unseen, but felt, emotional calculations going on underneath, of the likes of “He's really annoying me. It seems like he takes out the garbage consistently a little less often than me. I'm starting to resent that.” Except, unfortunately, I don't think activists in radical cliques are so conscious that these are where some of their “problems” are coming from because they don't want to acknowledge that a sort of calculus is still going on. It reeks too much of “the Market,” but unfortunately having demands placed upon oneself in exchange for either money or social approval is a hard fact of human social existence.

There are, granted, a few situations in any human society where these calculations don't come into play, where we unconditionally bestow love and care and resources and attention on people with no expectation of recompense and with no thought of it constituting social parasitism—we do this with children, the elderly, and with various types of individuals who are deemed to be unable to help themselves (although if there is any suspicion that these people could indeed be helping themselves, then the care is given only alongside subtle or not-so-subtle hints of social disapproval, so these are not true examples, as the emotional “economic morality” calculus is still very much in play—such as when the Salvation Army feeds the homeless only on condition that they listen to a bunch of Jesus talk).

Note that some people (including myself in the past) have tried to make the argument that the decision to help children is actually done as a sort of social contract with the unspoken expectation that those children will help their parents in old age. I don't doubt that this comes into play, especially as the child gets older. However, I suspect that we mainly help young children and the elderly because of emotional attachments and pre-rational instinct (not that these activities are necessarily bad just because they are pre-rational! Or rather, these activities might be pre-rational from the standpoint of maximizing one's resources, but entirely rational from the standpoint of tapping into the ways in which we are hardwired as humans to find joy in life.)

It is an important fact that the two major exceptions to the human aversion to parasitism, children and the elderly, take place within the family. Pre-rational emotional bonds of a strength that can only be forged by a lifetime of intimate contact are what enable these otherwise parasitic relationships to be rewarding for other, incalculable reasons. Even the most cult-like and insular of radical cliques will have difficulty establishing this sort of intimacy.

In any case, radical cliques have the calculus of “economic morality” to fall back on in order to disincentivize parasitism, but that only can work within the radical clique, where individuals are emotionally accountable to one another. When it comes to interacting with strangers in mass society, strangers cannot be relied upon to not be parasitic because there is no emotional accountability. One doesn't have any way to shame these strangers or make them feel dejected and outcast for being parasites. Therefore, if one has ruled out the market as a check on social parasitism, you potentially allow social parasitism to run rampant. The Soviet Union gets unfairly beat up on, I think, for how it supposedly fostered laziness. I think most people overstate the case and ignore the subtle social pressures to work (as well as overt political pressures) that, I'm sure, continued to operate, quite apart from any economic pressures. Nevertheless, in a purely communist society (which the Soviet Union was far from being), I do foresee laziness as possibly being a problem.

One rather far-out solution that I could envision, aside from the Market, would be if it was mandatory for every citizen to take a dose of LSD or some other psychedelic once a week. What this might effectively accomplish would be to reproduce the intimacy and emotional accountability of the family on a society-wide level, such that “economic morality” could disincentivize social parasitism not just among a small emotionally-intimate group like the family, but between you and any stranger you meet on the street as you both stare into each others' souls, loaded on LSD. You wouldn't be able to say to yourself, “So what if that random stranger thinks I'm a social parasite. I don't care.” because that person's seemingly-telepathic voice of disapproval of you would be intruding into your mind, and you would not be able to avoid the emotion of guilt that would arise. Not that it would often come to this, though. You might end up identifying with some far larger altruistic interest, from the pharmacological influence of the LSD, in the first place, so as to prevent any impulse towards social parasitism from even arising. Anyways, compared to this, I'm sure relying on the Market to dissuade against social parasitism would be far less controversial (lol).

Now, I think the Market should disincentivize social parasitism in the same way that the family does. The Market should never cause one to die because of being a social parasite (i.e. turning the “law of supply and demand” into “the law of desperation,” as I mentioned earlier); it should only make you a little uncomfortable. The only reason it allows you to die from being a social parasite currently is because it makes workers more desperate to agree to deals more advantageous to capitalists. But the emotional logic of this is completely foreign to us (my probable readers in the industrialized West) when we consider that there is probably no family in the industrialized world that would allow one of its members to die just because it was being parasitic. (People make much of the legend of the Inuit ceremony of shipping a dieing elder out on a chunk of ice to die of exposure precisely because it seems so crazy to most others. Likewise, in the same way, the Chinese practice of aborting female fetuses just because the families anticipate the girls being economically parasitic strikes most people in the industrialized West as barbaric). Families do, however, have other, slightly more gentle ways of making social parasitism uncomfortable and of incentivizing one to not be a social parasite. This is what the Market should do as well.

Finally, as further evidence that the Market is indispensable, I would point to how it always spontaneously reconstitutes itself after any revolution, even revolutions explicitly with the object of getting rid of the Market. Sometimes revolutionaries will say that they are “getting rid of money,” only to institute “labor-time vouchers” or other sorts of ostensibly fairer currency. But the function being fulfilled is still the same, whatever the name of the currency. In much the same way that I consider workers' councils to be the obvious primary institution of proletarian democracy because of their spontaneous emergence in pretty much every proletarian revolutionary attempt, I consider it a point in favor of the indispensability of the Market, the fact that people continually see a need to resurrect it, or something like it with a different name, every time it is disrupted.

Conlusion: Where this fits in the broader picture of my vision for post-capitalist society

My ideal radical programme would include the following:

*Workers' democratic control of the means of production.

***Democratic determination of workers' relative profit remuneration at each enterprise by the workers themselves. (Technical experts and ingenious managers can be paid more, if the other workers deem it fitting. And vice-versa).

*The Market for distribution.

*A legislative government of recallable delegates whose permanent job is to draft legislation that they think will be relevant to the voters who will then vote on the legislation directly with weekly ballots put up to a direct vote.

*A recallable, impeachable executive with extremely limited powers and many Constitutional restrictions placed on it.

*A recallable judiciary (because if I cannot count on the eventual sagacity of the masses, then this project is dead in the water in the first place).

*A revolutionary or Constitutional transition, with or without partial compensation to the owners of capital, I don't really care either way. Whatever looks most feasible. (Mind you, any compensation would be in property that could not be, henceforth, employed as capital to make a further profit).

In many ways, this is where I began my journey as a proponent of radical politics in junior year of high school, before I had ever heard of anarchism, back when I naively thought that these had to be entirely original ideas (because I had never heard them from anyone else before). In time, I would learn that these ideas had somewhat of an historical precedent, particularly in the form of the individualist anarchism of Benjamin Tucker, and the anarcho-syndicalism of the Spanish CNT.

It always seems more legitimate to have some sort of historical precedent behind your ideas, so that it doesn't just sound like you are a lone lunatic shouting in the wind. That, perhaps, partly explains why I soon abandoned some of the more nuanced and compromising touches of my radicalism and accepted, partly on faith, that the anarcho-communism of Kropotkin could work. And indeed, when you read his “The Conquest of Bread,” or “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” he does put forward a rather compelling case for a thoroughly communist society. Marx, then, of course puts forward a very compelling case for why the change will never happen through constitutional means. I am familiar with all of these arguments. And yet, as I've thought about things, I wonder.

I consider it an open question whether the change that I envision could be brought about legally. Certainly it would never be without the active military resistance of capitalists and their militaries, but might we still be able to give some legal legitimacy to the transition as well? Certainly, I've always been convinced that this sort of fundamental change could never come about unless it were popular, unless it had at least a majority of support among the population. So my primary goal has always been to change minds first, or rather, to encourage class consciousness in general, and I have always been critical of reform-oriented radicalism that considered this sort of reflection and talk the mere idle banter of ideas. Well, as Marx once said, “thought becomes a material force the moment it influences the masses.” Or something like that. I can't bother to look it up.

In any case, thanks to this reflection, I've come to the startling conclusion, against my own will, really, that the Market will actually remain indispensable, even in a post-revolutionary non-capitalist society. I say “against my own will” because it would be a much tidier intellectual package, and a much more popular one among the Left, to remain with the notion that communist distribution could work, but I've come to the conclusion that this notion retains its vigor only in large part because radical cliques can rely on “economic morality” to give a semblance of the feasibility of altruistic harmony within their own ranks—a harmony that they mistakenly assume will flawlessly extend to encompass the entire society, given the correct initial conditions. Even if economic morality could extend to the rest of society, would we want it to? It might feel a lot like living in a Massachusetts Puritan village, complete with occasional witch hunts to root out the unpopular social parasites by less formal means that the Market can accomplish.

On Psychedelic Culture and Modern Mystery Religions

First, in order to put what I'm about to say in an intellectual context, read this:
http://www.techgnosis.com/mindstates.html

For a while now, I've been flirting with the idea that the proper response to religious fundamentalism in the world today is not some self-assured secularism that is dismissive of "ecstatic states" or and the whole notion of an enchanted universe, as I used to think. More and more, I am coming to the conclusion that the answer is a culture of pluralistic mystery religions.

The modern application of the Greco-Roman mystery religion template would perhaps be characterized by three things:
1. The primacy of a direct communion with the divine—often with the aid of ancient psychedelic sacraments, as in the Eleusinian Mysteries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries#Entheogenic_theories
2. An organizational framework involving mentorships, apprenticeships, rites of induction, and other community practices to facilitate shared communion with the individually-experienced divine and to help integrate this divine experience into the rest of one's experience. Today's psychedelic youth culture could probably benefit immensely from access to such frameworks.
3. A non-exclusivity that allowed for one to be simultaneously a member of multiple mystery cults and/or the civic or imperial cult(s) as well. This would constitute a huge much-needed paradigm shift in religious practice away from the grasping, dominating, repressive, adherent-hoarding modus operandi of today's religious fundamentalism (which includes the dangerous, greedy modus operandi of Scientology, a modern mystery religion that gives the whole idea of mystery religions a horrible name).

What modern irreligion lacks is a sense of gravitas. In contrast, a key characteristic of these mystery religions would be their deadly seriousness—about fun, esoteric knowledge, and the fun of esoteric knowledge. Christianity has given us the funny idea that spirituality cannot be recreational, and that recreation cannot be spiritual. The mystery religion framework offers a rebuttal to this odd notion, which is why they might be the perfect template to potentially help us integrate our pluralism of psychedelic experiences into a shared communion—a communion that embraces the pluralistic individualism of the original experiences, the desire to connect these experiences with those of others within some dynamic, emergent mythology, and the prospect of combining so-called "recreational" psychedelic use with "spiritual" psychedelic use into one endeavor.

Nationalism as a Vehicle for Universalism

Nowadays we are not used to thinking of nationalism as being "on the left," but once upon a time that was the case. Not too long ago, there was a vibrant black nationalism on the left (whereas nowadays it is either non-existent or, as with the New Black Panther Party, taken over by reactionary, non-universalist Muslims). I just wrote a blog post about how the Hippie movement could have manifested itself—and in my mind much more successfully so—as a left nationalist movement. There used to be a secular Arab nationalism on the left in the Arab world. There used to be leftist national liberation movements all throughout the 3rd world. Nowadays we only have Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia as the only real outposts of left nationalism remaining (and maybe Uganda and some other countries that don't really show up on our political radar screen).

The mother of all left-nationalisms, though, was once upon a time the French Revolution. The proponents of the French Revolution envisioned the French nation, not as what we would call today a right-wing *ethnic* nation, but as a (what we would call left-wing) universalist *civic* nation that would act as a vehicle for the universalism of the French Revolution (and so, to defend the French nation from the emigré plots and from the alliances of reactionary monarchs was to defend the French Revolution. Think of it as "Bourgeois Liberalism in one Country." Stalin would have understood).

That is, from its very beginning, the French nation was foremost envisioned as a social contract between individuals, and second (or not at all) as a primordial collection of ethnically "French" people (à la German nationalism) that should band together not because of political interest, but because of some shared primordial ethnic destiny.

In contemporary France there is, in fact, an official debate being held over how exactly to define the French nation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/08/france-national-identity-debate-race
Many French on the left view this "debate" as an attempt to redefine French nationalism from being a "nation civique" (that would universally welcome any immigrants who shared the républicain vision) to being a "nation ethnique" (that would not be as welcoming to immigrants, and that would try to (quite ridiculously) redefine the French as the descendants of the Gaulois, as the descendants of those who built Notre Dame—in short, as the French-speaking descendants of anyone who didn't arrive in France within, oh, let's conveniently say, the last 60 years.

The reason why this debate seems so ridiculous to me is that there really didn't exist a French "nation" as recently as 1789. There was, instead, a political entity (that happened to be called "France") being ruled by a monarchical dynasty that happened to contain within it many different nations, but that happened to later come (mostly) under the control of a new political system that transformed all of these different nations into one "French" nation. In a way, a civic nationalism would have been the only nationalism that would have made sense in 1789. Ethnically, in France there were people who spoke Alsatian, Breton, Basque, Gascon, Occitan, Provençal, le Français national (basically the Parisian dialect), etc. The culture of southern France and Northern France was very different. Some regions had had totally different levels of limited self-government before 1789. Some parts of "France" had only been recently acquired (Alsace) and were widely considered to be hardly ethnically French at all as late as 1939.

Rather, the ethnic French nation that nowadays co-exists in a subordinate role to the civic French nation came about precisely thanks to that civic nationalism—the levée en masse, the national education system founded in large part in order to spread republicanism to the whole population of France, etc.

Even with the partial consolidation of the ethnic French nation, though, there still remains a vibrant love of French "provincialism." In France nowadays most people would see no contradiction between celebrating provincial specificities (cheeses, wines, quirks of manner, quirks of speech, etc.) and being a French nationalist, precisely because the French nation is foremost a civic one that does not rely on ethnic commonality in order to define itself.

This is precisely how I envision my "nation of a thousand flags" project—that is, the advent of a nationalism (and I hope eventually a new corresponding nation) that not just tolerates, but simultaneously celebrates and draws inspiration from hip-hop, salsa, mariachi bands, Norse pagan heavy metal, Buddhist chanting, and what have you. This nation would be able to do this, and still stay coherent as a nation, only if it is defined as a civic (and potentially universal) nation.

Even so, France was theoretically supposed to be a "universal nation," but that didn't stop it from using its self-proclaimed universalism to justify imperialism under the banner of a "mission civilatrice." This is where we must supplement the ethnic/civic nationalism distinction with a mutually-exclusive distinction between nationalism and imperialism.

One could make the case that there is nothing contradictory between ethnic nationalism and imperialism, and while this is not quite true, one must admit that imperialism in the service of an ethnique nation has a certain logic. The ethnic nation conquers and subjugates a foreign group of people and exploits them, enriching themselves. Simple enough. But even in such a case as this, problems may arise for the ethnic nation.

We can see this in the case of Nazi German imperialism (which, one may suppose, had these same motives of plunder at heart). For example, whereas Hitler had wanted to rid Germany of foreign populations, in fact the war ended up bringing many more foreigners into the (newly-enlarged) Germany (even if the foreigners were non-citizens or industrial slaves). To a lesser extent, this has been a "problem" that Britain has recently been facing with regards to Afghanistan. It turns out that Britain's participation in the war there has helped to drive many Afghanis out of Afghanistan, and some of them have ended up in Britain, angering British nativists.

In the case of the U.S., we can see how imperialism can actually work antithetical to nationalism by looking at the U.S. military. This military is now a thoroughly non-national institution. It icharacterized by imperial ambition, bureaucracy, professionalism, careerism, and mercenary enticements, rather than the (ethnic or civic) nation patriotically upholding its nationalism. To be sure, the U.S. military often talks about "spreading democracy," (that is, the U.S.'s civic nationalism) to other lands, and soldiers often justify their participation in the military by saying that they just wanted to "serve their country" (ethnic nationalism) or "protect the Constitution" (civic nationalism), in reality I would wager that economic/career motives are by far the strongest factors in a person's decision to join the military nowadays, perhaps in conjunction with a personal penchant for that sort of line of work. In any case, we do not find U.S. soldiers in Iraq regularly singing the American equivalent of the Marseillaise or busying themselves with spreading republican virtues and republican ideas among the Iraqi population. Instead we find mostly a bunch of fratty guys being bros with one another, havin' fun, doing their job, occasionally raping some women or massacreing some Iraqis, or perhaps being thoroughly professional, but in any case not showing any special zeal for spreading the U.S.'s civic nationalism. What we are missing is a military that approaches the task of war not in the professional, non-ideological manner in an imperial army, but in the nationalist manner of citizen's defending the country.

And what is this country that the American military defends? Is it a national territory, or an imperial one? Considering how it includes territories such as Diego Garcia, Qatar, Kuwait, and all of the rest of the U.S.'s 700+ foreign military bases, it is clearly the latter.

There is a more fundamental distinction, though, between nationalism and imperialism other than the effects that the two have on a military. There is also the question of general motivation. An empire seeks only power. It does not care about the nature of its imperial holdings. The local people can believe in this religion or that, can speak this language or that, can hold this ideology or that, the empire doesn't care. It just wants to hold the territory and recieve taxes (or, in the modern version, provide access to that territory for corporations, which in turn will uphold the empire). A nation, by contrast, is an intimate community (whether for ethnic or civic reasons). A nation cares very much about what religions members of the nation hold, or whether the members of the nation can communicate with each other, or whether the members of the nation subscribe to the nation's civic nationalism. Nationalism is, then, by its nature more totalitarian-minded than plain imperialism. I consider this a good thing. To be sure, an empire can be more invasive. It can have more secret police. It can arrest more people. But the motivation is always simply to maintain its power. It is interested in getting rid of, or intimidating, its enemies; it is not interested in winning the allegiance of its internal adversaries (for the sake of national community...that is, unless such efforts can easily profit the empire's power).

Let's look at Nazi Germany, for example. Was Nazi Germany a nation, or an empire? Well, it would depend on the timeframe. One could make the argument that, up until the spring of 1939, Nazi Germany was a nation. But after its takeover of Czechoslovakia, (after its motivation was clearly no longer the reunification, protection, and regeneration of Germans, but the acquisition of imperial power and territory) it became an empire. This was the point, in fact, when many leftists such as Simone Weil decided that Nazi Germany's territorial demands were no longer legitimate. In his "Age of Extremes," British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm makes a comment that when he was in Germany in 1934 and saw French flags flying in the Ruhr, that even someone like him had to feel that there wasn't something quite right about that. If one reads the lyrics from the Horst-Wessel Lied, it almost sounds like Nazi Germany was a national liberation movement. "Die Knechtshaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit," etc. Well, the point here is that, at the *very least* (i.e. perhaps much earlier), Nazi Germany ceased to be a national liberation movement, and began to be an empire, in the spring of 1939.

And likewise, the moment that France came to rule over people whom it treated as second-class citizens, rather than equal members of the French civic nation, and the moment that it ceased to be concerned with spreading its civic universalism and became focused on acquiring imperial power, that is when its rhetoric about universalism became transformed from a beacon of hope to a cynical excuse for empire. That France's imperial ambitions (under Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, under the 3rd and 4th Republics) had an adverse effect on its original civic nationalism and universalist mission is obvious.

Therefore, any civic nation with universalist pretensions would do well to stay far away from any imperial temptation. It will only corrupt or override the universalist civic nationalism.

The Hippie Movement as a Völkisch Revival

The Hippie movement has long since been canonized in American politics as a left-wing, liberal/radical/libertarian movement, and to a certain extent that is true. But I think what made the Hippie movement so subversive, at least in its initial stages (up until 1969) was what we might call its "right-wing" element—its "völkischness." What we need more than ever in the U.S. today is an emancipatory movement that cannot be easily attacked from the right, and I think that the Hippie movement, in its initial stages, held this promise. If the Hippie movement had gone further with its völkisch element and had drawn some more concrete parallels with other historical manifestations of völkischness, then it might not have become so easy prey for the right-wing critiques along the lines of, "The Hippie movement is just a bunch of irresponsible brats who are weakening morality and society," etc.

For example, what if, instead, the initial Hippies had interpreted their movement precisely as a response to the weakening of morality and society under the capitalist consumerism of their parents' generation? What if the Hippies had said to the parent generation, "It is you who are being irresponsible, with your unhappy marriages, your unsatisfied, desperate wives escaping into painkillers, your sacrificing of real human relationships between husbands and wives for your childish, superficial status symbols that consumerist capitalism spits out at you, your abandonment of the democratic spirit of a free people in lieu of the drone-like spirit of the corporate yes-man...the Communists need not destroy your families, your sacred beliefs, or your democratic society...your cynical pursuit of the status symbols of consumerist capitalism have already accomplished this for you."

In contrast to this portrait of "Leave-it-to-Beaver-America," Hippies could have presented themselves as the responsible alternative, the alternative that would regenerate the American volk, that would regenerate human relationships and root them back into what really mattered—love, shared experiences, and satisfying work (rather than consumerism). The Hippies could have re-framed work as a satisfying communal experience to be accomplished among equals (instead of simply shunning work and "dropping out" and becoming consumers). The Hippies could have appeared as a force possessing more wisdom than the previous generation, as well as a freer, more democratic spirit befitting the United States of America.

In fact, I say, "The Hippies could have done all of this," but the fact is that some initial Hippies *were* doing all of this. What else was signified by the peasant dresses, the talk of "love," the "going back to the land" projects, in which people would theoretically make a living in order to live real human lives (sharing love and meaningful experiences and heartfelt beliefs) rather than work in order to buy pathetic status symbols.

Where it all went wrong, of course, is that the Hippie movement was hijacked by the same consumerist capitalism that it should have been more precisely targeting in the first place. Capitalist consumerism did not need productive workers, it just needed trendy consumers, so it suited capitalist consumerism just fine if the Hippie movement became a vapid, irresponsible movement of trendy consumers spending their middle-class parents' money on stupid status symbols of coolness and supposed "rebellion."

Is it crazy to think that a little bit of anti-capitalism from the right, and perhaps even a little bit more Spartan militarism, could have helped to save the Hippie movement from this awful fate? To be sure, the message would remain that of "love of friends," but it would also include "struggle with enemies," and would transform "love" from a passive emotion to a meaningful and deliberate conveyance towards other comradely human beings.

More thoughts on a new Left-Nationalism

Someone posted this video on the cabot-open list the other day:

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This is a must watch.

Get inspired.

That is all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVoaMlzvGIw&feature=response_watch

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And this was my response:

Yep, it sure is great when they get 'em young...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMoxZeTeRPE

I understand that we are all secretly yearning for a new universalism to bring humanity together out of its anomie and self-slaughter, but it makes my stomach convulse and my heart ache to see the oppressed minorities who have the most reason to resist opt for strands of religious universalism. Being all equal brethren under our common paternalistic authority, the Lord, does not interest me. I have not known self-proclaimed benevolent paternalism to ever be actually benevolent or fitting for adults (or children) who want to retain their dignity to follow.

Where is secular universalism in the Arab world nowadays? Secular Arab nationalism, secular Arab anti-imperialist and human rights groups? Likewise, where is secular Black nationalism in the U.S. today? Where can I find blacks, and whites, coming together on a platform of secular universalism...and, mind you, I'm talking about something much more substantial than the liberal universalism of Obama that guarantees that we all have the equal right to not have ourselves or our property to be bothered. Okay, sure, but is that all that we want politics to do?

Am I the only one in the U.S. that is yearning for the politics of the U.S. to be MORE totalitarian (in other words, to have politics invade MORE of our lives and do more to imbue our lives with more meaning)? Am I crazy in wanting that? I speak, of course, about not an authoritarian totalitarianism, but a democratic totalitarianism (sort of like the French Revolution on steroids), a democratic total-Weltanshauung (world outlook) to replace, equally, not only what I find to inherently be the hierarchical total-Weltanshauung of religion, but also the incomplete, petty, fussy, pathetic excuse for an inspiring Weltanschauung that is bourgeois liberalism. I want a politics that will imbue our lives with extremes of emotion and meaning...but I don't want a theocracy (which would, as it happens, accomplish those goals perfectly well).

It has always been accepted that religion is allowed to imbue our lives with meaning, but to turn to politics for that has always been seen as totalitarian and out of the proper scope of politics. According to classical liberalism, the proper scope of politics is confined to guaranteeing certain negative liberties (freedom from being harmed, etc.), which might make abstract sense, but applying only negative liberties, in practice, leads in practice to a skeleton of a society: fair, equal, just, but alienated, frustrated, pointless, uninspiring, depressing, etc. What about politics that don't just stand against something negatively (standing against infringement on property, liberty, etc.), but that also positively compel people to achieve certain accomplishments of meaning and greatness and excitement in their lives? This is the same lament that one hears from religious authorities about the problems of post-modern society, and I very much feel what they are saying and concur with them on this point. But I find THEIR solution intolerable. I am driven to desperately search for something else. But so far I have not found it, and I fear that I am the only one looking in this direction.

So far, the closest I have come to fleshing out these vague impulses that I feel has been to juxtapose something like this:

H. Rap Brown of the Black Panthers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMoxZeTeRPE

And something like this...

Laibach: Geburt einer Nation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YE_j0xIsJA
Laibach: Life is Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbB1s7TZUQk

...and insist that they can be organically and harmoniously fused, and that they are two sides of the same coin, of a similar current of feeling running throughout all of humanity. Just as Joseph Campbell has written about the common threads of the religions of the world, and how one can come to not just a passive common appreciation of all of them, but an active fusion of their best elements, and just how he wrote similarly about mythological archetypes in "Hero of a Thousand Faces," likewise I would like to construct a "Nation of a thousand flags." Not just passive "tolerance" of national "diversity," but a forceful integration of all of the most extreme, exciting, compelling, and meaning-imbueing aspects of the world's nationalisms. There was once upon a time when nationalism was on the left, not on the right. (The French Revolution, many third-world independence movements, black nationalism, etc.) Oh how I long to forge a new left-nationalism. The result would be a stark contrast with what I see as bourgeois society:

Laibach: Wirtschaft ist tot (The Economy is dead)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJGujbkUaCs

Sterile. Obtaining better "quality of life" and better "purchasing power" (Qualität des Lebens & großen Angebote (literally, "bargains")) at the expense of putting ourselves through the process of bourgeois domestication. Substituting a set of cruelly self-regimented accountant's indulgences for the wild and free indulgencies of organic life. Substituting the bleak and cold stoicism and strength of steel and obedient factory workers for the fiery, impassioned, yet resolute organic stoicism and strength of the "Life is Life" video, or of these videos:

Die Liebe ist die größte Kraft. Die alles schaft. ("Love is the greatest force. It can accomplish anything).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9va2Le-9ZU

Dead Prez - Way of Life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kEirYlSlgM

Despite the superficial difference in the "ethnic" wellsprings of these videos, I consider them to represent the same human longing for a free, indulgent, expansive, yet self-disciplined, strong, and meaningful organicism...and I could not think of a starker contrast to this organicism than the sterility and the guilty, suffocating self-loathing of the organic pleasures of worldly life that most religions maintain.

Long story short, I guess that's why my heart aches when I watch your video.

---Matthew

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One further thought:

Although it might seem at first like bourgeois society and religion are in an adversarial relationship, as it happens it seems to me like they are accidental (and unwilling) co-conspirators. Bourgeois society can't help but continue to have certain shortcomings that leave something to be desired from life (lack of meaning, etc.), and this constant source of problems is a boon for religion, as it gives religion a purpose and gives people a continued reason to flock to it. Then, with people going to religion as a compensation, people are contented, and bourgeois life is given no imperative to fundamentally change or revolutionize/transcend itself. So the two systems, even though they are oriented in opposite directions, end up enabling one another. This sly game has been going on for far too long for my taste. Though we may find escapism from bourgeois life's problems in religion, in the end I find it just as dissatisfying as escapism from bourgeois life via drugs or video games. Life still fundamentally feels empty. No, only an abolition/transcendence of bourgeois life towards some higher secular mission will save my heart and body from withering into dust.