Middle Class Angst
There is a common misconception among environmentalists and peak-oilers (I count myself among both) that cars created the suburbs. The car suburb, however, became what it is with regard to cars only incidentally. The real motive for the suburbs was plain garden-variety white supremacy. Cars simply became necessary to facilitate the spatial segregation that simultaneously confined African America largely to decaying urban spaces and built the ‘burbs as white enclaves. It’s not that simple any more, of course. All things change all the time - as we’ll see momentarily - but it was white fear and loathing of the Dark Other that set the whole process in motion.
The sudden discovery - still ongoing - that most of us (more than half the US now lives in Suburbia) are trapped here if and when our private automobiles run out of gas (or the money to buy it), came after suburbanization was a fait accompli. This is the stage in any historical process where people begin to indulge themselves in disambiguation of the past - simplifying what has happened until it appears that it was predictable all along. Since we believe this - that things are predictable - we are easily convinced that correlation equals causation in our reconstructions of history; and weThere is a common misconception among environmentalists and peak-oilers (I count myself among both) that cars created the suburbs. The car suburb, however, became what it is with regard to cars only incidentally. The real motive for the suburbs was plain garden-variety white supremacy. Cars simply became necessary to facilitate the spatial segregation that simultaneously confined African America largely to decaying urban spaces and built the ‘burbs as white enclaves. It’s not that simple any more, of course. All things change all the time - as we’ll see momentarily - but it was white fear and loathing of the Dark Other that set the whole process in motion.
The sudden discovery - still ongoing - that most of us (more than half the US now lives in Suburbia) are trapped here if and when our private automobiles run out of gas (or the money to buy it), came after suburbanization was a fait accompli. This is the stage in any historical process where people begin to indulge themselves in disambiguation of the past - simplifying what has happened until it appears that it was predictable all along. Since we believe this - that things are predictable - we are easily convinced that correlation equals causation in our reconstructions of history; and we… FULL PART ONE
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The deepest fear in suburbia, never spoken aloud, is that when this epoch unravels, Suburbia’s citizens quite simply will not know how to survive. Even the veterans of war who withdraw back into these spaces are largely incapable of the most basic skills that will be required in a non-technocratic world: building healthy soil, making food, collecting potable water, basic medicine… seed-saving, canning, pickling and fermenting… all lost; and so Suburbia will fight tooth and nail for its “entitlement” to the entropo-technocratic life-support system, even as that system withers away.
Instead, our masculinized version of any post-collapse - which we have compartmentalized into a “fantasy” that cannot be touched by our day-to-day - is what we have borrowed from direct and vicarious experience of the military… a Mad Maxish world of roaming armed conflict. This will never happen.
The real choice that Suburbia will face is one between fascism or self-sufficiency, which is a choice - as well - between spiritual death or spiritual renewal.
The political identity of Suburbia that grew out of the spatial re-coding of white supremacy as sui generis … class, itself re-coded as meritocracy… is expressed as the strip mall, the homeowners association, and the PTA.
The gravitational pull of…
xenia:
When first arriving in NYC, I attended a set of classes which were meant to make us street-wise. Being eastern European and freshly off the boat, I wasn’t sure what that implied. I imagined that they would take us to projects where we would talk to armed kids, so that we would understand what their lives were like.
Instead, they were teaching suburban kids how to walk down the street. Act as if you had a clear goal, don’t establish eye-contact. As if the city, a “normal” if overcrowded city, were a war zone! One girl confided to be that the possibility of someone touching her while passing her on the street made her panicky. I thought she was sick.
Conversely, when I got my degree in Latin American studies and moved into a suburb because I could not do anything else, I realized that suburbs were straight out of hell. The worst was the monotony. At least I succeeded in not having a car; sometimes I bike to work, sometimes my partner drives me. When I can walk in a city, be it NYC or Europe, I cry on the first day out of sheer relief. Drinking a bottle of cheap wine at a restaurant and walking to the hotel can make all the difference in the world.
4 December 2007, 12:02 pmKim Sky:
Absolutely love your analysis and descriptions of suburbia — the safe world!!!
I am very curious as to why you believe that any post-collapse will NEVER devolve into a “a Mad Maxish world of roaming armed conflict.”
AND. The choice to address the Church — the place where suburbanites seek meaning. Wow. I have difficulty gleaning meaning from any of the stuff that comes from the Bible. For me, the word genuine jumps to the forefront. To proselytize to the burbanites using their bible — in attempt to promote the truth or strategic rational thinking — toward self-sufficiency rather than fascism, feels fundamentally false. Either I will eventually believe my own dishonest propaganda, and/or I will join those suffering spiritual poverty?
Your appeal for a new human, “… there has to be a new mimetic, a new way of being that builds the community and with it a new human individual. It has to be the opposite of the fascist mimetic, the mimetic of empire. There can be no scapegoats, or the community will be shattered in recurring cycles, and power will be regenerated through each sacrifice.”
Having just completed a book about Fascism: “Fascism - Past, Present, Future” by Walter Laqueur, @1996 … You’re comments I posted above reminded me of the beginning aims of Fascism. Some of their lofty principles were: An integrist movement that promised to unite all people, creating a new society with new kinds of human beings. A promise for a new synthesis of nationalism and socialism, class differences must be reduced, national solidarity restored. It vowed to place the national interest ahead of the egotism of individuals [provide a more effective government than democracy].
Granted your statement did not include a “national” rap.
But, Democracy had become incapable of addressing the crisis that faced modern capitalist states: insecurity, economic and political crisis.
I guess what I’m attempting to say, is that perhaps no ideology — Christian nor democractic — will save us from the fascism.
Thanx for your brilliant, thought-provoking work.
Kim
4 December 2007, 2:47 pmMichael Anderson:
As if to demonstrate your point, I read an article on HuffPo just now (link below). Thanks, Stan…I live there, too (for the nonce), and your article crystallized thoughts that had been roaming around in the back of my head! I can walk to essential services, luckily, but Salem, Oregon is NOT a town set up for bikes!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/whats-so-great-about-gat_b_75122.html
4 December 2007, 3:30 pmDan Dashnaw:
Thanks again, Stan for another trenchant analysis. I never thought about how racism could be a factor in the shaping of suburbia, but in is impregnated in the “marketing” of suburbia. i grew up as an only child white kid in Dorchester Massachusetts, which in the early 60’s was a poor black neighborhood in Boston. We moved in 1964 to an area that was pushed by the Realtor as “more like us”. i think that suburban progressives have a problem recognizing this dimension, and I thank you for bringing it to my consciousness. I also applaud you for the intellectually brave recognition of Christianity as a useful mimetic that could galvanize community in an otherwise collapsed and frightened suburbia. It’s a brave observation. We took your advice and joined a local church last year, and it was a trans formative experience. The minister, and the members of the congregation that we have come to know have enriched our lives greatly. We were not then, and are not now “devout”. But we have community, and many new friends. Thank you for the advice.
4 December 2007, 5:30 pmLegume Sam:
I can see that I’m going to have to address the fascism meme at some point, since after all it’s so prevalent in the discourse at DKos — but I’ll put out my initial bias on the fascism meme, and then try to understand the phenomenon more deeply from there.
IMHO the reason why fascism looks so likely at this point is that the capitalist system is rather close to exhausting its growth potential (having exhausted much of the Earth’s biospheric capacity), and so the capitalist system is closing in on itself, and stamping out its own civil liberties in one last great push to profit off of the world’s miseries.
If any sort of neo-fascist dictatorship comes out of the Bush administration’s abrogation of civil liberties, I can imagine it doing an incredible amount of destruction, but I can’t imagine it lasting terribly long. When original Fascism was at its peak of power, in the 1930s, there was still plenty of world-space for the capitalist system to conquer for the sake of “growth,” and the Fascist regimes were contender regimes, attempting to “catch up” with the dominator nations (the US, the UK, France) in economic development. By the time Fascism gets ahold of the United States in the 21st century, life may have devolved to the point described by Octavia Butler in Parable of the Sower/ Parable of the Talents. Or it will be like Bosnia during the war, to use a similar analogy.
Btw, Paulo Freire recommends in his incredible Pedagogy of Hope that revolutionaries should take up Bible study, for something like the reason you cited…
4 December 2007, 5:43 pmCharles:
I agree with Legume Sam that it is important for us to be on guard against fascism. We have to play a Paul Revere role for the 21st Century, sound the alarm. The war on Iraq violates the specifically anti-fascist UN law prohibiting Crimes Against Peace , i.e. aggressive war. Herman Goering was convicted under that law, not Crimes Against Humanity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_against_peace
I run across reluctance on the internet left to use the word “fascism” or “pre-fascist”.
5 December 2007, 3:35 pmPhilip:
“Suburbia” is not a uniform place. In metropolitan Washington, DC, as in metro New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, et al, suburbs are a mixed bag. Many are mixed racially, many are predominantly African-American, Latino, or both. Some are lower income. Certainly the wealthier suburbs are predominantly Caucasian, and it appears these are the places that Stan and others here mean by “suburbia.” In this light, it appears that the struggle against fascism will be the same as in the cities, a class war. Capitalism has no choice but to suppress civil liberties in a last ditch effort to ensure the continued permanent war economy. Without war, the ruling class falls, but without peace, we are all doomed. “Suburbia” has its own contradictions, and sides in this conflict, as do the cities. (Rumsfeld still lives in the city, but Ashcroft lives in suburbia.) Personally, I think American Fascism will have a Christian tinge, so I fear any steps toward popularizing that most prevalent excuse for genocide.
5 December 2007, 5:37 pmEugene Johnson:
This is a racist nation built in large part on racist ideals of white supremacy. The pattern is continued to this day though in a “kinder gentler” form, as it were (if you can really consider it kinder and gentler). White supremacy is systematic and present in all forms of American society. No surprise the the social structures are set up to insure white supremacy continues. However, coming out with a white hood over your head isn’t considered PC anymore, and thus, it is more underground, and blatant folks (like the Skinheads, KKK, Aryan Brotherhood, Hammer Skins, etc.) are looked down upon though they are more honest about their racism than say, the way too numerous white male politicians.
As an indigenous person in this society where MY LAND is occupied by a brutal and genocidal force currently known as The United States, it is rare that a day doesn’t go by that my wife and I don’t experience one form of racism or another. My favorite:
I went to a Skinhead rally that was happening in a SW neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, looking to crack some heads, or at least give it a good try. The Skinheads didn’t show, so a friend of mine and I went to an honoring diversity event in Multnomah Village. I was introduced to one of the organizers, and because I am an Indian who LOOKS Indian, the man asks: “Are you a dancer?” You see, Indians have to fit in a racist box even in communities that allege to honor diversity. “No!” I told him. “I’m a political activist. I want everything back. All of it. Absolutely everything.” His head snapped back three times, and then he went in to talking history of Wounded Knee, which he got inocorrect in part. Why is it white folks always want to talk about indigenous history and not indigenous current? and especially not indigenous future.
Racism has MANY forms. It doesn’t just come in name calling, lynchings, or good old fashioned raping Indian kids in boarding school. It is STILL a prevalent force that needs to be dealt with, like war and the economy…but those are for another discussion.
5 December 2007, 8:36 pmStan:
Suburbia is more racially diverse, but there is a class division there that Lassiter describes very well. It is not as it was during its origin phase.
As for Christian tinge, does the Christianity of Martin Luther King fall into that category? Karl Barth? Tony Benn? Robert Malachy Burke? Walt Brown? Hugo Chávez? Dorothy Day? Percy Dearmer? Tommy Douglas? Diane Drufenbrock? Thomas J. Hagerty? Keir Hardie? Thomas Hughes? Sir David Fletcher Jones? George Lansbury? John Ludlow? Charles Kingsley? Walter Lini? Desmond Tutu? Margaret MacDonald? F. O. Matthiessen? Frederick Maurice? Jurgen Moltmann? Gustavo Gutierrez? Brian P. Moore? Reinhold Niebuhr? Dorothee Sölle? Flannery O’Connor? R. H. Tawney? Norman Thomas? Paul Tillich? Cornel West? Jackson Stitt Wilson? Edvard Kocbek? Vekoslav Grmi?? Frank P. Zeidler? Paulo Freire?
Not sure Christianity (as you have overgeneralized it) requires popularization. It seems pretty popular right now. Compared to people in the US who professs to be socialists, I’d say they have us about 100,000 to 1.
Can you describe what this “class war” you cite will look like? I mean that sincerely. I’ve stated that if this “middle class” is not engaged enough to inoculate a critical fraction of them against right-wing demagogues, they will throw their support behind reactionary political leaders (who are not the same as capitalists, but having studied fascism, you know that, right?). I will further state that most of white working class America has not only been duped into racial reaction and violent masculinity, it has been formative of both out of self-interest. I think the history backs me upon that. So if you know a framework, in particular an organized or institutional framework, outside religion, where these folks can really be reached… I’m all ears.
Perhaps if we keep selling the liberals among them ten different competing party papers at every demo on the DC mall, they’ll have a mass epiphany and flock to the ten flags of our class-war parties. Then they’ll take up arms and build barricades at every cul-de-sac. Game over. We win. Hooray.
Have you read the Bible?
That’s communism being described there.
5 December 2007, 8:58 pmCharles:
I agree with looking for liberation theologists as allies in struggle. However, Christianity is radically contradictory in the sense that it has both People’s revolutionaries in its history ( many listed by Stan) , _and_ fascists ( and liberals , for that matter)
Also, Republicans and Democrats outnumber socialists 100,000 to one, so that fact alone is not sufficient to recommend Christians. Lots of US Christians are of the George Bush variety. Investigation of Christians for aiding radical movement must proceed with the caveat on rightwing Christians ( obviously )
6 December 2007, 12:10 pmsks:
hey stan long time no speak, best wishes…
Eugune: Good coments, and as a Puerto Rican, I know exactly what you mean. Even activists don’t want me talking about stuff that is not in my little activist box. Happens to women, to afro-americans, to gays, etc. The worse part if when people that are not white males contribute to this either by silence or by compliying with the requirement to only speak about “their” issue.
As to your comment on “skinheads”, as this is a sub-culture that has been co-opted by a certain style of euro-looking white supremacy, I understand the misunderstanding. But the bulk of skinheads are just alienated middle-class (mostly white) kids into Jamaican music from the 60s and Fred Perry (and other British) clothing. A small number of them are actually revolutionaries of all stripes (Red and Anarchist Skinheads, etc)
The problem with skinhead is gender politics, a discussion for some other time.
(Try to find and see “Skinhead Civil War” a PBS/Frontline short documentary on the early 1990s violent war between anti-racist and racist skinheads in Portland, Oregon. It is a bit sensationalist, but clarifies a lot of things.)
(Stan: as to Christianity vs Socialism in the population of the USA, the ratio seems right if you count the Christian left as in the socialist camp, if not, we even worse :P)
6 December 2007, 5:18 pmsks:
I think suburbs as special phenomena are over-rated: cities have ghettos too. “Gated communities”, now, those get my juices flowing. I can’t thing of anything more feudal and scary than them.
6 December 2007, 5:22 pmPhilip:
There have been many attempts to create a mass labor party, perhaps most recently with the 2004 “Million Man March” organized primarily by sectors of the Teamsters and the Longshoreman’s Union. These efforts ultimately faltered, but they have also shown glimpses of what could happen when working people organize and fight back. What many often call the “middle class” is what I would call the working class, and I have a more difficult time reaching conclusions about the attitudes of hundreds of millions of people. Yes, many white men have been “duped” into racism, but many American men and women of all races have been duped into supporting imperialist war as well, arguably out of “self-interest.” But we still struggle against those attitudes, and often win.
What I am calling class war are the everyday struggles that pit working people against the owners of society — the struggle for health care, for decent housing, for education, for safety — albeit a one-sided war. In our very often atomized society, we tend to view these as heroic individual struggles — fighting our insurance company or our bosses for health coverage for that chemotherapy we need, for a raise or a bonus — but this is because most of us have no political vehicle to struggle with us, for us. We do not often struggle collectively, but when individual struggles can develop into collective struggles, we have a more evenly-matched, if not mismatched in our favor, class war. This is why I always emphasize independent (of the major political parties) mobilization and organizing around common issues and concerns. Check out the Defenders organization in Richmond, Virginia (http://defendersfje.tripod.com/id3.html), a predominantly African-American group organized initially around criminal justice issues but which has grown into something much bigger and powerful. This is just one example of local democratic organizing, but a good one.
I do not mean to disparage christians as individuals, who certainly fill the ranks of many important organizations and roles, but I do not see how “Christianity” as a mobilizing force can be anything other than reactionary. Argentina, Spain, and Italy, are only a few places off the top of my head where christians had to fight “Christianity” over the issue of fascism — and lost. Do we assume American “Christianity” will align with the people’s struggles or the state? I think we all know that answer.
6 December 2007, 5:59 pmskol:
Charles: I don’t get it. You’ve heard of Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion”, right? How asinine can you get? The Religious outnumbe us atheists (and agnostics and everything in between) by maybe 1,000,000 to one!
6 December 2007, 6:07 pmI might be misinterpreting you here, but how is it that you say Christianity says this but Christians can say this? I thought we were thinking about the individual here, many many of whom agree with “us” on many things. It’s obvious we’re entering a period of rapid and destabilizing change, and with that goes a crapload of meaning. Remember Marx? “Religion is the opiate of the masses”. Makes ‘em feel meaningful, if that’s what the context was (iirc). As has been said before, our church has become the mall, and the mall isn’t hanging around. There’s cracks appearing already. This might sound real cold, but it’s a ticket in, isn’t it? Please elaborate.
Stan:
Do we? Your conclusion has already been smuggled into your premise, by treating “Christianity” as if it were monolithic. (But by answering your own question, you tip us off that you were being rhetorical.)
The social gospel became so powerful in many Latin American struggles that the state sponsored the assassination of priests. How far do you think the Civil Right struggle would have gone had it not been grounded in Christianity?
Did you read the piece?
And the white working class did not get duped into racism; they helped develop it. The ruling class took good advantage of it; but if you are giving us the ole “Black and white unite and fight!” slogan, sorry… been there, done that… in Charles’ alma mater in fact. It’s not that simple, starting with the fact that the relation is not simply workers against owners, but nation against nation, a far deeper and more complex relation that is more colonial than classed. Read Ignatiev, Roediger, Allen, et al. It’s a shitty formula (BAWUAF), because it is based on a shitty analysis.
The same problem exists with this reduction of Suburbia to a working class with false consciousness… more antiquated orthodoxy trying to shoe-horn evolving reality into an ossified theory.
6 December 2007, 7:55 pmPhilip:
For a discussion about religion, this is getting a bit nasty. I am accused of “trying to shoe-horn evolving reality into an ossified theory” yet you want me to accept the “social gospel” for political grounding of contemporary politics? Talk about “ossified theory”! If people want to be religious, study ancient texts, and believe in miracles, unseen higher powers, and the “son of god,” that is their business. I have a great deal of respect for the many good and progressive and often leftist Christians (and Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, et al), many of whom have been (dare I use the word?) comrades over the years.
I was raised in Catholicism and understand that world very well, but my rejection of it was accompanied by its rejection of me. I know there is more to Christianity than Catholicism and that it is not monolithic, but it makes no sense to ignore the sexism, homophobia, and racism endemic to this largest of Christian sects that I and millions of others have experienced. There are “good” religionists and “bad ones, but while psychologically sustaining for many people, religion is not a basis for political organizing or action.
7 December 2007, 10:12 amskol:
Since when?!! As if anyone is going to suggest Catholicism (or Islam, or Judaism, or anything)! Your reaction to it notwithstanding, it has been the most important basis for political organization and action for millenia. Has that changed?
7 December 2007, 5:06 pmskol:
That was kind of a harsh comment. I’m sorry, Philip. I just think that there is a status quo, but people have the choice of which road they take.
7 December 2007, 5:18 pmStan:
Philip, no one has gotten nasty with you. You are making arguments against straw men (just one fallacy you have deployed); and the arguments are polemical statements. We let some of that go on here, but you cannot expect not to be held accountable for it.
Moreover, you are saying things that are clearly and demonstrably wrong, e.g.,
We’ve already cited the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and alluded to others. The leader considered so dangerous by the US in Haiti that he had to be removed twice by coups was an ex-priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide, and his Lavalas political movement was organized in the Ti Leglis (local churches).
If you make nonsensical statements like that, you should expect someone to say that it’s nonsense.
7 December 2007, 5:46 pmmetis seeker:
I think some here are missing the point that Stan is trying to make in regards to Christianity and social organizing.
I think Ched Myers points out quite well (many great videos of his speeches and bible studies can be found on youtube) is that in Christian organizations and their interpretations of Christianity have mainly followed two trends - one is the conservative track, which is now becoming increasingly political and a liberal one in which Christianity is interpreted to be a kind of socially disconnected moralism. (He says it much better than I - see the video of him speaking about the Parable of the Sower) In this way, clearly Christianity for the most part is either working against or is ambivalent about necessary social change. However, we shouldn’t let this current state of inertia to blind us from an incredible potential.
This potential can be based upon the fact that Mr. Myers and many others like him have a incredibly compelling biblical hermeneutic which shows that many biblical stories are radically political and advocates for the kind of political decentralization (the tower of Babel story being the most primordial) that is discussed here and which Stan has pointed out above in quoting Acts.
The fact that the bible can be reinterpreted in this way is important because of the bible’s cultural significance. (and this isn’t just some sort biblical cherry picking – a compelling case is made that the biblical authors had this in mind and that early Christianity was radical and was hijacked by empire from Constantine on). In the cultural landscape of this country, besides TV consumerism what other cultural entity has as much exposure and as much mythic power as the bible? For anyone that reacts against this importance I would like to hear of an alternative cultural symbol that does. Manifestos have a poor track record, were as Stan says how could we imagine the Civil Rights Movement without Christianity? People are drawn to stories not lectures.
It is going to take social minded people to evangelize their churches to this biblical perspective. Which brings to mind another potential aspect of Christianity - where else do people gather together anymore in their community? It seems the Church and the mall and sports arenas are about the only places, only one of which do people still talk to each other. Blogs are great, but if we are concerned with relocalization, where physically is this discussion going to take place at? We can artificially set up meetings and teach-ins, but I think the kind of more spontaneous conversations that change hearts and minds of those who aren’t “in the choir” come in less structured conversations. I think socially minded people don’t examine their own liberal enculturation of Christianity, which served as a kind of odd disconnected compulsory function.
I don’t think this should be the only strategy in our “bag of tricks” so to speak. But in terms of leverage in our communities, I think we would be remiss to ignore it.
7 December 2007, 5:50 pmCharles:
skol:
Charles: I don’t get it. You’ve heard of Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion”, right? How asinine can you get? The Religious outnumbe us atheists (and agnostics and everything in between) by maybe 1,000,000 to one!
I might be misinterpreting you here,
^^^
CB: Yes, Skol, I don’t quite follow your criticism of me. I’m from an atheist political tradition that doesn’t always make religion an automatic “enemy”. Marx’s famous discussion of religion as opium of the people , and heart of a heartless condition, expresses understanding of why religion must continue to exist as long as there is the distress of class exploitative society. The Bolsheviks had to be hard on the reactionary Russian Orthodox church as a source of lots of bad ideas for the peasants, but the US Reds were allies with the Black church in the Civil Rights movment.The Deacons for Defense were a main part of the Communist Party in Alabama. Also, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Sojouner Truth and Harriet Tubman, many other Abolitionists were inspired by revolutionary reading of the Gospels, as Stan seems to be suggesting some here.
So, this is one of those things were we have to make a concrete analysis of the concrete situation . There are usually some Christians who read the Bible and Jesus’ story as a basis for social activism , for the poor, for peace, for charity, etc.
^^^^^^^
but how is it that you say Christianity says this but Christians can say this? I thought we were thinking about the individual here, many many of whom agree with “us” on many things. It’s obvious we’re entering a period of rapid and destabilizing change, and with that goes a crapload of meaning. Remember Marx? “Religion is the opiate of the masses”. Makes ‘em feel meaningful, if that’s what the context was (iirc). As has been said before, our church has become the mall, and the mall isn’t hanging around. There’s cracks appearing already. This might sound real cold, but it’s a ticket in, isn’t it? Please elaborate.
&&&&&&&
7 December 2007, 6:39 pmCB: Peace on Earth. Good will toward People !
DeAnander:
Romero was considered so effective a political leader that it was necessary to assassinate him.
I do think Philip’s argument is internally contradictory; if the Church has been such a powerful and effective force for perpetuating a rightwing political agenda and ideologies, then it is, indeed, a basis for political organising and action, and is working as such — very well too — for rightwing organisers. The real question seems to be, can the framework of church and church-going work just as well in support of a left/labour social agenda? of a anti-racist agenda? of a gender justice agenda?
Philip seems to feel that (institutional) Christianity is so tainted by its failures and crimes that it cannot be redeemed (some ironies there…); but I know there are ex-CP members who feel exactly the same about the CP and communist political parties and revolutions in general. I doubt that we can look back on any organised human social institution and not find an historical tradition of abuse and crime committed under its banner, as well as an historical tradition of the creative use of that banner to encourage social justice efforts. F’rexample the banner of “the family” is used by hateful homophobes as well as by well-intentioned folks like PFLAG…
7 December 2007, 7:17 pmStan:
At Insurgent American, if you click Video, then scroll down to the category “Social Gospel,” we have linked three Ched Myers videos… the Parable of the Sower included.
BTW, Legume Sam also posted links in his comment above to science fiction author Octavia Butler, who wrote a bood called The Parable of the Sower, as well as one called The Parable of the Talents (another allusion to the parables of Jesus).
7 December 2007, 9:02 pmLinda c:
“Social Gospel” - all you have to do is walk into a “church” in the south. Southern Gospel can only be categorized as Social. If you want to know and feel the local flavors of the community - go to church. If you can be accepted into one of these churches, you are accepted into the community.
My 82 yr. old mom is a matriarch in her church. She will openly and proudly proclaim to you that her beliefs lean on the strengths of her community - which is her church. Ask my mom - She will tell you that without community there will be no future for the children.
Just a little input from a community minded non-believer. Stan is on a track that has been a part of southern life for generations - that is - the “gospel” is the glue that holds the family/community together and makes them strong. Therefore, if it is getting into these churches to work with the “believers” to make the communities “social” - OMG what a more simple way is there to go???
7 December 2007, 10:52 pmDeAnander:
BTW, I also have some misgivings in this arena, mostly because even the most radical of the liberation theologians still stumble and lose the plot when they get to gender and duality; the usually brilliant and lucid Illich tied himself in knots over gender, as did Berry and others.
Jesus (as quoted anyway) however didn’t have a lot to say about enforcing gender roles or gendered power — that was all Paul. In fact one could say (and I think I will join a long line of radical writers in saying) that what is today known as institutional or Constantinian or “conservative” Christianity is in fact Paulism, and that the few glimpses we get of an historical Rebbe called Joshua ben Joseph suggest that he was far less interested in people’s gender and gender conformity than in the state of their souls and their relations with their wider (he sometimes emphasised “wider”, as in the parable of the Good Samaritan which Illich takes as the central, irreducible message of the NT) community. A N Wilson’s thoughtful little book Jesus: A Life is of interest in its attempt to understand the historical split between the Paulists and the Galilean sect.
There is some slender evidence that some earlier Christian communities disregarded physical sexing in marriage, emphasising that marriage is a partnership of souls, and souls are above and beyond the physical world and the “mere” (ahem) body and its appendages. However there seems to be some indication that this license may only have applied to men [gee, why are we less than astounded]. It’s an interesting subculture of Christian historical research and (of course) highly controversial, but I don’t find it terribly encouraging because it seems to hinge on the cultish fascination with the spiritual as separate from and superior to the physical, a dualism rooted in gender and (imho) biophobia (here Berry is very sound indeed) and underlying many contemporary social pathologies…
7 December 2007, 11:20 pmLinda c:
De,
I agree with you totally.
In the south, the church is the foundation of the community. It is riddled with racism, sexism, and every type of phobia that is out there. The sad part of this is that the community is based on racisms.
The foundations of the church is the Bible. That in itself leaves the foundations of the community filled with cracks that an educated person can enter. The Bible in the south is open wide to interpretation. Therefore, the teachings in most white southern churches are based on patriarchies racisms.
The way Stan is interpertating these scriptures is very strong and forthcoming. It is spontaneous and therefore attractive to the matriarchs of the communities. Yes, you are so right with all of the wrongs of religion, and because of this people are searching. When people as a community start to search and listen - it opens doors for those that have an alternative solution.
8 December 2007, 1:33 amPhilip:
I thought I was making a basic, post-Enlightenment point, but it seems to have been lost in my own failure to adedquately articulate. When I said “religion is not a basis for political organizing,” what I meant is that it is not an APPROPRIATE basis for political organizing, it is not where “progressive” secular people should look for social change. Religion (Christianity in particular) is inherently divisive as it excludes those who do not believe its particular set of myths, whether they be members of other religions or reject all religions. This is why I alluded to my own extremely negative, lifelong experiences with the Catholic Church. I realize that many Americans (allegedly) identify as “Christian,” but what is being suggested here by Stan, DeAnander and others is that “we” infiltrate the suburban churches and engage in biblical interpretation to somehow win over this segment of the population (to what I am not sure). Am I creating another straw man here? Then please tell me: what is the point of this?
But what I was really responding to was what I considered to be the nastiness of Stan’s statement: “And the white working class did not get duped into racism; they helped develop it. The ruling class took good advantage of it; but if you are giving us the ole “Black and white unite and fight!” slogan, sorry… been there, done that.” After years of reading Stan’s books, hearing his lectures, and reading this blog, I cannot tell you how dispiriting it was to read such a defeatist and repugnant rant. No wonder you are searching for political relevance in the “ossified texts” of the Bible. Racism is far more complex than this formula of blaming the white working class for racism, but this is beside the point. If we cannot agree that black/white/brown united struggle against our common oppressors is the only way forward, then you all better get on your knees and hope for divine inspiration because you’ve got no future on this planet.
8 December 2007, 2:07 pmStan:
Let me say right up front that I am opposed to “infiltrating” anything. This is one of the absolutely most unprincipled methods of many so-called marxists, and it goes well with saying that religion “is not an APPROPRIATE basis for political organizing, it is not where ‘progressive’ secular people should look for social change.” I am a member of a church; and I am certainly not there to infiltrate it. I also don’t have the arrogance to believe that the other people there might not be able to teach me as much as I might teach them. I am there to be in community; and that is pretty different from the icy instrumentalism of of “infiltration.”
Struggle has to be more than “against” something; or no one is having it. “Progressive secular” people (read: the right kind of people) better be prepared to look for social change wherever it presents itself as a possibility… not in abstraction and generalization. And they better be prepared to accept leadership from whomsoever the organic leadership of these initiatives are.
“If we cannot agree that black/white/brown united struggle against our common oppressors is the only way forward…” What?!
The ONLY WAY forward. Yet you trivialize people’s religious impulses as “myth.” Perhaps we should substitute the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” There’s a fine myth.
Your implicit claim –even after you have been corrected already for making patently false generalizations about religion — that religion is “inherently divisive as it excludes those who do not believe its particular set of myths, whether they be members of other religions or reject all religions” — is false. Wrong. Incorrect. Erroneous.
Take the time to see the Ched Myers video. Listen to what he is saying about the role of stories. WE are not looking to “infiltrate” churches to introduce some subversive “interpretation.” When viewed outside its awful history as a state religion, much Christian practice (in which faith itself is seen as practice… read the Epistle of James… its short), beginning with its originator, the subversion has always been there.
If anyting is in dire need of demystification these days, it is The Enlightenment, with its rape metaphors and male conquest memes.
8 December 2007, 6:01 pmJames M:
It is good to see it clarified that this is not some kind of infiltration / subversion mission. That would be just another continuation of the military-minded mode of organizing that seems to plague the (patriarchy-ridden) Left. It has its time and place, of course, but it’s not the only valid paradigm.
As much as I am being won over by the “Feral Scholar” school of thought that appears to be forming on this, I would like to counsel perhaps a little softening of the reaction to some of the naysayers. Some of them are hard-headed, arrogant, and ideology-addicted, yes, but others are coming at it from a place of having been religion-damaged. There are a lot of people who’ve experienced their own religious indoctrination as a form of abuse, and it need not come in the form of a lecherous priest. My definition is more expansive here. Telling little kids, for instance, that they’re sinners damned to Hell from birth unless they obey the dictates of the big scary man in the sky probably would fit any reasonable definition of emotional abuse, I’d think.
So while I’m tending to agree with Stan, et al, about community-building, I know from my own experience that stepping inside a Christian Church brings up a lot of baggage and bad memories. So I’m not surprised by Philip, for example, citing his “negative” experience of Catholicism. I guess the folly, though, is broad-brushing an entire concept — religion — on the basis of personal bad experiences. The emotions, however, have an understandable way of overpowering rationality here.
To sum up, what I’m saying is that it may be helpful to keep in mind that not everybody rejects this concept of allying with churches out of arrogance or adherence to dogma — some are just people who’ve been burned, and are understandably wary of repeating the experience. Perhaps any outreach in this regard could take that possibility into account.
8 December 2007, 7:36 pmmetis seeker:
DeAnander - I’d be interested in reading about your specific criticisms if Illich and Berry views on dualism and gender.
“Jesus (as quoted anyway) however didn’t have a lot to say about enforcing gender roles or
gendered power”
From what I’ve come across there seems to be a lot less on this than liberation theological readings of the bible. Its unfortunate that what there is in this area seems to negate the lived experience of gender by saying in a sense that it isn’t an issue because Christianity is only concerned with the state of one’s soul, irrespective of gender. This is exactly the criticism that liberation theology makes against the establishment - the negation of people’s lived social experience.
Its been awhile, but I remember reading Journeys By Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power by Rita Nakashima Brock for a class once. What sticks out most in my mind was her reading of the story of Jesus healing the hemorrhaging woman:
Luke 8:43-48 says, “And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped. ‘Who touched me?’ Jesus asked. When they all denied it, Peter said, ‘Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.’ But Jesus said, ‘Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.’ Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. Then he said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.’”
What is not spoken about in traditional readings of this text, which only focus on the faith of the woman, was that she was violating purity laws by even being out in a crowd - let alone touching Jesus, if she was menstruating (which Brock reads in the subtext to “a problem with bleeding”). The statement “the power has got out of from me” is interesting and can be read as a transfer of power (both in a spiritual and social context) from Jesus as a man to the “lowest” of women (given her perpetual “unclean” status). This to me always stuck in my mind as a biblical story story that seemed to be speaking directly to gendered power.
Given all the other contradictory aspects of the bible that do enforce gender roles I do think that this kind of reading is much more difficult than a liberation social reading. This was the issue that Brock was dealing with was how far one could take this kind of hermeneutic. However, this not being her only example, there still is doubt room for this kind of discussion to take place.
8 December 2007, 8:03 pmStan:
For the best thing I’ve read so far on the New Testament and gender, I’d go to Crossan and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, and thd subject of “open commensality” (there is that food politics again).
-Crossan
On The Parable of the Banquet (where Jesus asks his host of the woman he has brought — uninvited — to the rich man’s table, “Do you see this woman?):
The story of Jesus protecting a woman about to be stoned for “sinning,” when he steps between the executioners and the victim and tells them “he who has not *sinned* cast the first stone.”
His exhortation not to divorce has to be contextualized historically (as does open commenslity), and is explained in the aforementioned version of the Bible, that men routinely “divorced” women as a way of cutting them of from their access to food and shelter… which then reduced them to penury or prostitution.
His attack on the patriarchal family (that state-religions have re-interpreted as an excuse for war), and one that may fit with the story of “virgin birth”, is found in Mark iirc, where he says his movement will turn family member against family member.
What I am learning from this latest journey is that (1) I have a lot more to learn, and (2) that one has to contextualize historically, then find the present-day analog.
The Tower of Babel story, for example, is clearly an anti-imperialist fable told around Hebrew fires against Babylon (the Empire of the Bronze Age) and matches very closely the teachings of Jesus later on against centralization. This, in turn, reflects the story of Exodus, where the journey to freedom is fraught with temptation (to return!) and to re-establish the “idolatry” of the slave-masters in Egypt (and Egypt becomes a metaphor for the economically stratified society.
The three issues that stand out for me now — at this early stage of study — on Christianity are (1) the contradiction between faith-community and state-religion, (2) the false dichotomy of faith and works, and (3) Bibilical literalism.
On the latter, the kind of literalism we apply now (either as proponents or opponents of religion) have nothing to do with the non-literalist approach of theologies of liberation. jesus himself is reputed to have spoken in parables, which represented truths not directly described (literally).
So in the same way we can refute the Biblical literalism of what Myers calls the Docetic heresy (that religion is about magic in the past and reward in the future), we have to call secular critiques — like some above — to account for implicitly or explicitly claiming the literalist viewpoint is that of all Christians, then proceeding to critique only that vewpoint… the straw man fallacy.
http://www.ubcmn.org/sermon20061008.htm
On James’ description of the baggage of Christianity and people being burned, what stands out for me, coming as I do from an engagement with the secular left, is how closely these experiences mirror each other. No one who has called for the socialist transformation of society (as I have repeatedly and urgently) has been able to avoid the (often polemical, but valid nonetheless) experience of the USSR, or the endless sectarian bifurcations of that particular “left.”
The stories and exegeses of stories in the Bible and elsewhere are epistemological frameworks, and they are subject to evolution or they will lose relevance aside from a select few acolytes who have withdrawn inside some orthodoxy. As Myers points out, we are bombarded with stories every day… each tv ad is a story, telling us how to live. This is the process of mimesis… of modeling and psychic mimicry.
In the accounts we develop via the social gospel, those who have chosen the “radical discipleship” of Berry, Illich, Myers, et al, are required to “wrestle with God” (questioning the nature of things), that is, to remain open to further revelation about how we can “love one’s neighbor as ourself.” Love being an active verb, just as faith is manifested in the active demonstration of that love. When we are confronted with the revelations, I would say, as some of us have been, of radical feminism, we are just as duty-bound to do something about it — in ourselves and in the world — as Gutierrez told Latin America that discipleship could not ignore the revelations of historical materialism.
It is interesting to me — again, at this stage in my own studies — that Tillich desribes “sin” as a systemic condition, and not some contingent infraction, that is alienation from God (which he says does not “exist”). Which is also alienation from nature, and from one another. Oddly enough, alienation — not economics — is the entry point for Marx in his own studies; and alienation is the basic condition of women in patriarchy.
http://www.godweb.org/shaking.htm
9 December 2007, 8:00 amPhilip:
Whoa. I guess one of the prerogatives of running your own blogsite is you can be as dismissive and bombastic as you please with those with whom you disagree. Religion has been a hugely divisive force in my life and in the larger community where I live, apparently experiences about which you have far deeper insight than I. (Talk about your “male conquest memes.” Jesus Christ.) I also assert, with more than ample foundation, that religion has served to divide people nationally and internationally in many, many ways, hence my assertion about religion and divisiveness. This is not to say religious practice is without its benefits for some people, but you might take just a moment to comprehend how the rest of us have experienced “the Good Book” and its zealots over the years, and who want no part of that “community.”
9 December 2007, 3:26 pmRandy Morris:
I find myself in the position of seeing two sides of the “Christianity Issue” being dealt with here. I grew up seeing almost nothing positive in the religious institutions around me (white, male, California and Arizona suburbs mainly). Until just recently, politics and religion was oil and water as far as I cared (with charismatic, proselytizing churches being the fire on the oil).
What changed my mind was the welcome I felt when we were invited into the southern church communities along the Gulf March route. It was an overpowering social experience that forced me to rethink my estimation of church as community and a force for good. I still don’t attend a church at home because I haven’t found one here in rural Wyoming that feels welcoming, but I would go back to the ones I visited in Alabama and Mississippi if they would have me.
Religion isn’t necessarily divisive, I have come to learn. Dogmatic people, however, often are. Another example of the oil and water metaphor in my life has until recently been “Marxists.” Prior to lurking at Feral Scholar, every enclave of Communist, Socialist, or any other related “-ist” I encountered turned out to be as close-minded as most of the dogmatic religious fanatics who had turned me against religion.
I feel lucky, in a way, that I came to Feral Scholar not knowing squat about alternative politics. What I did come equipped with was solid knowledge of a whole lot of negatives, e.g., the United States has no sense of community left; it is impossible for Civilization (Capitalist or Communist) to coexist within the balance of Nature; my vote ain’t worth poop; etc. Over the last few years, Stan, De and the others here have helped me see new possibilities for social and political change, as well as new ways of interpreting old institutions in relation to politics and community. Feral Scholar has given me a framework within which to understand where so many of my “negatives” arise from, and then begin to seek positive change.
I’m gonna stay with these platitudes for now, as I really don’t lecture well. Thanks for listening.
Randy
9 December 2007, 8:44 pmmetis seeker:
I’d like to echo what Randy has said above and give thanks to Feral Scholar, which I’ve been haunting for a few years now. On the one hand I must say I that I am a bit surprised to be in a discussion about biblical interpretations, given the “materialist” character of the site (whatever that means - goes to show you that the need for ideological boxing by way of terminology is useless), but then again I am also not surprised given the non-dogmatic character of the site as well.
What I am most thankful for toward De, Stan and other contributors here is an (ongoing) education in radical feminism, which has been exciting to combine with my other scholarly passion: religious existentialism, esp. that of Tillich, Buber and most influential for me Kierkegaard. (I was enthused to see Stan open the door for me on this one with a reference to Tillich)
Stan:
It is interesting to me — again, at this stage in my own studies — that Tillich desribes
“sin” as a systemic condition, and not some contingent infraction, that is alienation from
God (which he says does not “exist”). Which is also alienation from nature, and from one
another. Oddly enough, alienation — not economics — is the entry point for Marx in his own
studies; and alienation is the basic condition of women in patriarchy.
To put more of a point on it - to me it seems that inherent in the theology of Tillich is that the existential (or systemic condition as you put it) state of sin (as alienation from God and nature) is one and the same as the fundamental feminist understanding of masculinity as conquest and alienation. (I’m thinking here of the excellent short film linked here on the pervasiveness of the conquest meme)
(In this way, a reinterpretation of the traditional Garden of Eden story and the fall from grace proves very interesting)
Anyways, to me this connection with the existential state of sin and gendered masculinity (with its connections to “civilization”) seems a connection that is inherent but not well explored in a lot of the religious existentialist writers I have studied. I would really like to see this connection more explicitly made and to learn more about where others who have a more radical interpretation of the bible have erred in this regard. (its easy now for me to see the blatant misogyny prevalent even on most progressive sites, but I no doubt have more to learn where gendered power blindness is more “subtle”)
Stan:
The stories and exegeses of stories in the Bible and elsewhere are epistemological frameworks,
and they are subject to evolution or they will lose relevance aside from a select few acolytes
who have withdrawn inside some orthodoxy. As Myers points out, we are bombarded with stories
every day… each tv ad is a story, telling us how to live. This is the process of mimesis… of
modeling and psychic mimicry.
This brings to mind the sermon you linked to by Rev. Donley where he says that Jesus in his teachings was choosing Genesis over Deuteronomy and so in his teachings was always doing biblical hermeneutics of his own. I can remember being surprised when seeing the Hebrew Tanakh with the Midrash exegesis of biblical passages by various Rabbi’s in columns right next to the passages themselves. This recognition that biblical stories require exploration is often lacking in mainstream Christianity (esp. that of Catholicism of which I was raised and may be influencing Phillip’s misunderstanding of religion’s potential) and is exactly what what Jesus did in his own radical interpretations via the less “scholarly” parables. In this way, bible study has a lot of potential because it is one of the few places where people (outside of the secular left, in some cases) get together face to face and discuss and explore the stories that society is mimicking and decide if they are those that we should be mimicking in deep and thought provoking ways.
[On a somewhat unrelated note - has anyone seen the documentary Manufactured Landscapes? It is a visually powerful film that really brings home the lessons I’ve been gleaning from reading Hornborg etc. on the massive scale of the entropic transfer of energy via consumption. def suggested]
10 December 2007, 4:54 ammetis seeker:
Moderators:
Could you put the paragraphs that I quoted from stan’s comments in quote form? I forgot the wordpress tag to mark text as a quote. Thanks!
10 December 2007, 4:58 amjimi 45:
SKS is correct regarding Eugene’s comment. I became involved with the (non-/anti-racist) skinhead subculture in 1988, and having had a friend lose his life because of over-simplification of skinheads’ racial politics, I think the conflation of “skinhead” with “racist” needs to be addressed. I would rather die for something that I believe in than something that I bitterly oppose–a luxury my anti-racist skinhead friend Dave was not afforded.
SKS is again correct in pointing out that (all) skinhead subculture’s issues lie more in gender politics is also correct, although I would add that it hardly stops there as the violence, mysogyny and jingoistic nationalism run deep in even non-/anti-racist skinhead variants.
Indeed, it for these reasons that the skinhead subculture is one with which I certainly wouldn’t have gotten involved had I known at twenty what I now know at forty. (And yet, since becoming a skinhead twenty years ago, I continue to have a love-hate relationship with my chosen subculture and have never totally disavowed my involvement with it despite its deep flaws.)
Also, I must second Stan’s comments re:Christianity. The so-called “Christian right” is only one (rather extreme) example of a Christian worldview. Some of my graduate colleagues in the Religion in the Americas track are studying precisely the Latin American Christian worldview Stan has described. Monolithizing these Christians with the Christians of far right is, indeed, doing them a disservice. Christian socialism exists and, as Stan has pointed out, it has some textual (and historical) precedents. (Although it might be problematic to boil such statements down into a declaration that “Jesus was a Marxist”!)
10 December 2007, 6:20 amstacia:
This is a really exciting topic to think about so I appreciate Stan’s courage and imagination for pursuing it on this blog.
I was raised in a small rural Baptist church that had strains of both fundamentalism and Pentecostalism, which usually don’t go together. It was narrow in its outlook and oppressive in its judgments, particularly on my mother, who as a young single mother was very threatening, and when she was at her most vulnerable she was quite savagely demonized as a sinner, which led to lasting trauma for my family. On the other hand, there was real community at this church, lots of knowledge and wisdom from the farmers and factory workers who made up the congregation. I also got a great education there, reading from the most important work of literature in the Western tradition. Only the King James Version of the Bible seems like the real thing to me, the Shakespearean majesty of the language, the beautiful cadences and rhythms which have inspired some of the greatest speakers in American history.
I do wonder, though, if its realistic to think that Christianity, having been such an important part of what got us into the mess we’re in, can then be turned around to lead us back out, starting with the Christian relationship to the earth. Compared to other creation stories, Genesis does not treat all creation equally. God gives Adam dominion over the earth. Not stewardship, but dominion. Who knows what the original Hebrew meaning of the phrase was, but commonly understood, the world was God’s to give away. Creation was created as property.
I also wonder if Christianity isn’t inherently anti-democratic, if it’s just a coincidence that after its establishment as a state religion, democracy was basically dead in Europe for nearly 2000 years. Maybe any state religion would have killed democracy, but the religion(s) Christianity replaced in Europe were village religions. If the Roman gods had conquered all Europe, say, instead of Christianity, it might have amounted to the same thing, but there’s just something kind of morally totalitarian about monotheism combined with evangelism. The relationship between God and humanity is that of omniscient father and obedient child. Those personalities who broke out of that and displayed intellectual curiosity (Eve) or a certain brassy chutzpah (Lucifer) which I think of as indispensable qualities of a revolutionary (to say nothing of a sense of humor), certainly did not advance very far in God’s system.
But—to borrow the words of another great thinker, ‘you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.’ Christianity is what we have a heck of a lot of in the USA, and the Bible is the book to deal with. The life of Christ, like elements of all great literature, complicates and contradicts much of what else is said in the Bible. If to be a Christian essentially means to imitate Christ, I don’t think it much matters if a Christ-imitating revolutionary goes to church or not. He called church ‘wherever two or more are gathered in my name.’ From that point of view, a protest is church, a vigil is church, a 12-step meeting or a kitchen table is church, and my classroom, where I sometimes teach the (KJV) Bible, is church. Sometimes even church is church. Myself, I can’t hack church. I’ve tried, but it makes me nervous. They’re just too damn nicey-nice there, as if that’s what it’s really all about.
But I love your quest, Stan. Your thinking has always meant the world to me. Thank you.
10 December 2007, 8:42 amStan:
I just had a conversation with a friend. She pointed out that I am often “chivilrous,” that is, I am far more diplomatic with women than I am with men when I debate.
This is probably true, and it reflects my own male socialization as well as a personal failure of introspection. This does not mean I now need to be more conscious of this (though I do) and be as sharp in my debting style with women as I am with men. It means I need to find a way to make my debating points that do not come off as combative with other men.
My content disagreements with Philip still stand, but I feel I owe him an apology for the style of debate I have used with him, and my own failure to properly respect and account for his possibly quite traumatic experience with a church.
I am the last one to defend much of what has happened to Christianity since Constantine’s conversion; and as Wendell Berry says, “the indictment of Christianity … is, in many respects, just. For instance, the complicity of Christian priests, preachers, and missionaries in the cultural destruction and the economic exploitation of the primary peoples of the Western Hemisphere as well as of traditional cultures around the world, is notorious. Throughout the five-hundred years since Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the evangelist has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming that his cause was the same as theirs. Christian organizations, to this day, remain largely indifferent to the rape and plunder of the world and of its traditional cultures. It is hardly too much to say that most Christian organizations are as happily indifferent as most industrial organizations to the ecological, cultural, and religious implications of industrial economics. The certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation.”
This is not the whole story, but it is important, as are the personal traumas of those who have felt their personhood under attack from institutionalized religion.
The purpose of this conversation was to explore potentialities, not to write hagiographies in defense of a “position.”
And the way I speak with others says as much about my character as the content of my arguments say about my thought-process. In the former, I have found myself lacking in this case, Philip; and I herein publicly apologize, because my tone with you was taken in public.
I am sincerely sorry.
10 December 2007, 9:00 amStan:
On the above reference to civilization, both the Old and New Testaments contain within them very direct critiques of “civilization,” that being Egypt (the land of slaves, ie, social stratifiction), Babylon (the tower of Babel, or ‘monoculture’ that God has to destroy through cultural rediviersification), and Rome (where the monetized economy is critiqued by refusal of a coin with Caesar’s image on it - render unto Caesar what is Ceasar’s).
Agreed that “Jesus was a marxist, anarchist, et al” doesn’t quite pass the test, or some very important reasons. Personhood then was not seen as personhood was redefined by The Enlightenment, and both Anarchism and Marxism are outgrowths of that era and its episteme. Comparisons and analogs are important at the same time that we are intentionally cognizant of the ways in which knowledge was differently constructed. Hat tip to my teacher and profeessor Frank Reuter, who used Chaucer and Shakespeare to teach me not how to revere the canon or adopt the values therein, but to understand something of personhood in the Middle Ages and Rennaissance and how it was constructed by the society. (Frank lurks here from time to time, so this is an appreciative shout-out to him… now himself reaching toward agrarian.)
Jesus was an illiterate peasant, who nonetheless took the stories that were passed along through the synagogues, observed the world around him, and made some radical determinations about how to change it.
10 December 2007, 11:49 amCharles:
Philip:
There have been many attempts to create a mass labor party, perhaps most recently with the 2004 “Million Man March” organized primarily by sectors of the Teamsters and the Longshoreman’s Union.
^^^^^
10 December 2007, 3:36 pmCB: By the way, this was titled the Million _Worker_ March.
Charles:
Egypt (and Egypt becomes a metaphor for the economically stratified society.
^^^^^
10 December 2007, 3:56 pmCB: I would like to hear the Egyptians’ version of what happened with the Hebrew’s . I reread the sections lately when what’s hisname - Joseph with his coat of many colors - was sold into “slavery” by his brothers, then to make a long story short, eventually, Joseph was Pharoh’s “chief economist” made money on a drought, and then brought all his tribes to Egypt, and the Egyptians didn’t crack down on them until they started to out populate the Egyptians in their own land. I’m not sure Egyptian “slavery” was not more like apprenticship with a culture that had developed some advances. As I say, I’d like to hear the Egyptians’ version of what happened in all this.
Charles:
The ONLY WAY forward. Yet you trivialize people’s religious impulses as “myth.” Perhaps we should substitute the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” There’s a fine myth.
^^^^^^^
10 December 2007, 4:13 pmCB: There’s a great possibility that radical , human liberationist Christians like John Brown would have understood the validity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Civil War to end slavery was a holy Christian war from the standpoint of Christians like John Brown and Harriet Tubman. Harriet Tubman carried a Bible and a gun in the Underground Railroad. She led troops into battle in the war.
Stan:
In Terry Bisson’s excellent speculative-historical fiction novel, Fire on the Mountain, Harriet Tubman does not have an epileptic episode (as she did, preventing her from being at Harper’s Ferry as planned), and her tactical acumen leads Brown’s troops to victory, sparking a generalized slave rebellion that alters the whole course of US history. Brown so admired Tubman (in real life) that he referred to her as General Tubman.
Dennis O’Neil’s fine antiracist blog is named after this book.
Brown’s political roots, however, were Free-Stater, folks who hadn’t the slightest interest in being proletarians (Brown was a small businessman and sheep-farmer).
10 December 2007, 6:17 pmNil:
Legume Sam usefully says: “If any sort of neo-fascist dictatorship comes out of the Bush administration’s abrogation of civil liberties, I can imagine it doing an incredible amount of destruction, but I can’t imagine it lasting terribly long. When original Fascism was at its peak of power, in the 1930s, there was still plenty of world-space for the capitalist system to conquer for the sake of “growth,” and the Fascist regimes were contender regimes, attempting to “catch up” with the dominator nations (the US, the UK, France) in economic development.”
Just so, which is why the real places to fear an actual something like fascist _regime_ is similarly in nations trying to ‘catch up’ the actual centers of capitalist power. One would think that the de-nationalization of “Empire” would make this sort of thing obsolete (there can be capitalist class in all nations, although some more than others), but apparently not. Any place where there is a formerly middle class that feels cheated out of their share of the world capitalism, is ripe for fascism. Which is why for the present, while there are growing neo-fascist movements in the US, an actual fascist government seems pretty unlikely to me—our own capitalist classes are still too power, and our own middle classes still too in fact privileged.
Now, if the US suffers the serious downturn in world power and wealth among other capitalist centers that some are predicting… then THAT would be the time to seriously worry about the fascists coming to state power. (The US neo-fascists are worth worrying about in their current smaller numbers and little chance of taking state power mainly as a prophylaxis against this coming potentiality).
10 December 2007, 6:38 pmLegume Sam:
As Kees van der Pijl points out in his books, there were two types of “state complex” which formed in the era of expanding capitalism: 1) the “Lockean heartland,” which offered its people a veneer of “human rights” and “democracy,” and 2) the “contender states,” which often resorted to authoritarian “Hobbesian” regimes in order to “catch up” in capitalist development in a forced-march fashion.
(I suppose that you could also consider 3) proxy or weak states as a third type of “state complex,” yet such entities are really adjuncts to the Lockean heartland.)
Now that, with ecological/ economic/ political crisis all looming at once, world-society appears to be losing this pattern. Any pattern of “fascism” that appears in the US, supposedly a part of the “Lockean heartland,” reveals a sort of elite desperation about the progress of the system as a whole.
10 December 2007, 11:19 pmCharles:
Brown’s political roots, however, were Free-Stater, folks who hadn’t the slightest interest in being proletarians (Brown was a small businessman and sheep-farmer).
^^^^^
CB: Take your point, though in W.E.B. Dubois’ biography of Brown, Brown proposes a utopian or communal business philosophy, wherein all the sheep farmers in his group would share equally in the money. No competition. Somehow I think he would understand Owenite Utopian socialism, and the importance of workers in the production process.
Engels was a capitalist , and understood the dictatorship of the proletariat very well, though he didn’t seem to have any interest in being a proletarian. Marx coined the phrase , but wasn’t interested in being a proly.
11 December 2007, 4:13 pmStan:
And who would? Being a proletarian is the pits.
11 December 2007, 5:04 pmCharles:
Well one said factory work mortifies the body and ruins the soul. I know Shaniece felt like she was going to prison every night shift at the Ford plant. Alienation. Patricia didn’t complain as much when she started working at the Chrysler engine plant.
On the other hand, my softball teammates, who are auto workers of 25 and 30 years, don’t seem to have such bad lives. The late Lee Cain and Lasker Smith, prolies of 40 and 50 years, had respectable lives. Can’t say they were less happy than your average accountant or store owner.
Being petit bourgeois can be the pits too. I’m not sure the other classes and strata have so much better lives than prolie’s.
The only way to do it rich ( smile)
12 December 2007, 1:30 pmStan:
Or New Agrarian.
The point some of us have been making about working and thinking outside the existing box.
The majority of proletarians these days are living in third-world urban hell-holes, after having been pushed off their land.
The whole marxian teleology within which proletarian revolution nests is based on the affirmation of what we now know to be an unsustainable industrialism, one in which the concept of fetishism was not yet applied to industrial instruments of production. Moreover, the proletarian only exists in relation to the bourgeois, and is therefore as dependent as the bourgeois on the perpetuation of industrial capitalism. This more than any other single factor accounts for the absence in history of proletarian-driven revolution and the abundant historical examples of proletarians falling into line behind capitalists in a crisis.
12 December 2007, 4:01 pmDeAnander:
Whereas most of the actually existing resistance to the bourgeois agenda came from land-based movements: indigenous resistance, and egalitarian agrarian groups like the Diggers come to mind…
OTOH we can’t erase or ignore historical instances of regressive, patriarchal, racist etc. politics among both petty and prosperous agriculturalists… merely being agrarian or embedded in directly productive biotic stewardship doesn’t make people play nice automatically; but an egalitarian/commensalist ethic combined with the anti-Taylorist specificity and emplacement of an agrarian sensibility, that seems to have potential…
12 December 2007, 4:22 pmStan:
Yea, dig it. Pun intended. Go through, not back.
Went to a meet-up of NC Powerdown last night to give an impromtu talk. Very interesting. Everyone gets peak oil, but many do not get male-dominator bombast, many do not get that the *choices* they make are makrs of privilege, and many were resistant to my message on gender/conuest.
OTOH, one of my church co-members showed up and just quietly listened. And I met an amazing couple — Stephen and Rebekah Hren — who are about to publish a book with Chelsea Green on how to refit an urban/suburban house to take it off the grid (which they have done in downtown Durham). He’s a carpenter. She’s a solar electrician.
Stephen made a very unwelcome but important point for the crowd we had there. One of the imperatives of an new agrarian era, of urban/suburban agrarian communalism… whatever… has to be that people cannot simply move every three years because the grass looks greener somewhere else. This is seen as a basic freedom and entitlement in our society… but part of our ethos has to include staying put wherever possible (not running off to the countryside to enclose your own space and ride out the crisis, et al), and transforming what we have (my own insistence that suburban transformation is necessary). Also taking property off the market forever.
There are exigencies that do not allow this to be some absolute (like migra status, major life shifts, inevitable job demands, etc)… but this is a distinctly different idea from the adventurist fantasies of many (males) about moving to the country, setting up wind power, and buying some guns.
I want to echo De’s point here, too, that without the active insistence on a feminist standpoint, every political project will default to patriarchy.
13 December 2007, 7:22 amLegume Sam:
I argued in much similar vein on DKos for a movement to defend the right to live off of the land; it didn’t quite catch on…
13 December 2007, 11:31 amCharles:
Sure think outside the existing box. But treat your new thoughts as hypotheses, preliminary conclusions.
Peasants on the land reputedly live in “pits” too. Why do you think so many of them move off the land and into the cities, like Mexico City ?
STAN: Because they were pushed off the land, not because they just “left” it. In Haiti, I’ve stayed in slums and with peasants… there is no comparison. I’ll hang with the peasants any day.
13 December 2007, 11:34 amCharles:
The whole marxian teleology within which proletarian revolution nests is based on the affirmation of what we now know to be an unsustainable industrialism, one in which the concept of fetishism was not yet applied to industrial instruments of production. Moreover, the proletarian only exists in relation to the bourgeois, and is therefore as dependent as the bourgeois on the perpetuation of industrial capitalism. This more than any other single factor accounts for the absence in history of proletarian-driven revolution and the abundant historical examples of proletarians falling into line behind capitalists in a crisis.
^^^^^
Maybe
13 December 2007, 11:35 amCharles:
Whereas most of the actually existing resistance to the bourgeois agenda came from land-based movements: indigenous resistance, and egalitarian agrarian groups like the Diggers come to mind…
^^^^
13 December 2007, 11:45 amCB: And Russians, Hungarians, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cubans, Laotians, Angolans, South Africans, Yemenis, Columbians, Nicaraguans, and many , many more nationalities, in their tens of millions, led by Communist Parties, Leninists.
DeAnander:
Agreed that Leninists did organise many peasants as well as labourers, but almost always (iirc) with the pie/sky promise of industrial cornucopia: The Grand Plan for the Reorganisation of Nature. Compounding returns were to be extracted from the biosphere by rapid industrialisation, the only difference (from C19 capitalist dreamland) being that the loot would be shared out among the proletariat instead of pocketed by the idle rich. The basic programme — of looting and burning the entire biotic infrastructure to fuel enormous human population growth in the quest for a dream-world of technocratic ease and “efficiency” — was the same right up to the point where the money got counted out and handed around.; which is very late in the game in terms of the damage done.
In short, the Communism of industrial cornucopians is a commensalism which stops abruptly at the boundaries of the human (”civilised”) species and doesn’t acknowledge that the entire biosphere — soil biota, flora, fauna, fungi — also has to receive according to its needs and give according to its abilities. Looting and vandalising the biotic infrastructure to concentrate all wealth in the pockets of homo sap is just as stupid a political model as looting the peasantry to concentrate all wealth in the pockets of the aristos; as w/in human culture, there’s a degree of selfishness, accumulation and expropriation in an ecosystem that’s intolerable and leads to systemic weakness and breakdown.
A sustainable Communism would have to acknowledge the community of extrahuman life that supports human life, much in the same way that Marx’s theory of labour value acknowledged the contribution of the labourer to finished industrial goods. All that conventional Communists did was move the predation barrier downwards to exclude (in theory) other humans, while happily practising contemptuous liquidationism against every other life form (cf Lake Baikal and other great acts of eco vandalism). [I pause to offer a hat tip to the symbiologists of the Soviet school and the losing battle that Soviet environmentalists fought against the centralising/industrialising mania of the Party, but with the usual/obligatory disclaimers about the embarrassment of Lysenkoism…]
13 December 2007, 4:34 pmCharles:
with the pie/sky promise of industrial cornucopia: The Grand Plan for the Reorganisation of Nature.
^^^^^
Well this is not exactly what was promised. It’s a mocking, paraphrase.
At the time of these efforts, global warming and fossil fuel crisis were not known, so the above is a bit misleading
13 December 2007, 4:51 pmCharles:
There is a qualitative difference between humans of working , exploited classes and plant and animal species upon which humans live. I disagree with your blurring this distinction. The species that are our food and source of other use-values must be preserved, and therefore not overexploited. But it is moral and meet and right and necessary to exploit them at a level below causing them to go extinct. It is not moral to exploit humans.
As far as mocking use of “dreamland” and “cornucopia” , “looting” and “vandalizing” , this is a bit unfair in that it uses hindsight knowledge of the ecological pollution we know of now to attribute stupidity to Communists many years ago when these consequences of the industrial technological regime were not known. Engels wrote on ecological pollution and exhaustion in an ancient society, demonstrating understanding of ecology equivalent to yours above, in the sense that humans “can’t eat their seed corn” or destroy the material environment upon which they depend. Marx wrote extensively on how capitalist agriculture was depleting the soil. Materialism inherently has an ecologically balanced position, and understands that a predator is the number one group that doesn’t want its prey species to go extinct. It was a Soviet who invented the term “biosphere”.
So, the Communist commitment to industrial production is in a period when the data on damage to the human ecological niche was not known; and the above is a mischaracterization of the Communist mentality on these issues.
13 December 2007, 5:14 pmCharles:
No a Soviet didn’t invent “biosphere”,but put it in eclogical context
The term “biosphere” was coined by geologist Eduard Suess in 1875, which he defined as:[1]
The place on earth’s surface where life dwells.
While this concept has a geological origin, it is an indication of the impact of both Darwin and Maury on the earth sciences. The biosphere’s ecological context comes from the 1920s (see Vladimir I. Vernadsky), preceding the 1935 introduction of the term “ecosystem” by Sir Arthur Tansley (see ecology history). Vernadsky defined ecology as the science of the biosphere. It is an interdisciplinary concept for integrating astronomy, geophysics, meteorology, biogeography, evolution, geology, geochemistry, hydrology and, generally speaking, all life and earth sciences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere
13 December 2007, 5:17 pmCharles:
STAN: Because they were pushed off the land, not because they just “left” it. In Haiti, I’ve stayed in slums and with peasants… there is no comparison. I’ll hang with the peasants any day.
^^^^^
CB: IT’s some of both. It is not true that all the leaving of land by peasants in recent times has been because they were pushed off the land. Some of them left looking for a better life.
Anyway, the point was that living as a peasant can be the pits just as much as living as a proletarian. That’s true.
Your framing it as if I’m saying I wouldn’t hang with peasants is a distortion. I have just as much respect for peasants as for city workers. I’m pointing out that the life of many peasants is just as much the pits as the life of many workers, which is how it came up here.
13 December 2007, 5:25 pmCharles:
STAN: Because they were pushed off the land, not because they just “left” it. In Haiti, I’ve stayed in slums and with peasants… there is no comparison. I’ll hang with the peasants any day.
^^^^^^^
13 December 2007, 5:28 pmCB: Many peasants around the world live in conditions as bad or worse than the slums of Detroit.
Stan:
I would add that the political movement that Charles cites has now tumbled into the dustbin of history. The Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, et al, after winning state power for Communist Parties, have either embraced capitalism or collapsed. Even Cuba, which has been an exception primarily based on their successes in breaking with ML industrial orthodoxies, has been forced to integrate itself to a large degree with the world capitalsit system’s monetized economy.
There is no more important project for the left than to fearlessly and honestly confront the question of why. Why did ML ultimately fail?
Some of the answer is already in front of us, and in our own “native” language, so to speak. Mode of production is the interactive sum of both instruments and relations of production. The attempt to retain the instruments developed by capitalism and impose — under the pressure of encirclement — new relations of production did not work except in the contingent context of war-communism, ie, the militarization of society.
Moreover, NONE of the countries cited above engaged in resistance to the bourgeoisie. None of them. These were mostly anti-imperial struggles, that is struggles primarily for national sovereignty. Russia’s revolution took its most turbulent social base from peasants who hated the aristocracy and the landlords.
And I will add one other factor that always gets left out. Communists never prosecuted a thorough-going struggle against patriarchy. They adopted legalistic. liberal attitudes to women’s “equality,” which they subverted at every turn, and continued to maintain male gerontocracies at the Parties’ heads. The struggle against patriarchy cannot be separated from the struggle against masculinity-as-conquest … which, if taken up in earnest, promises the most profound change we are likely to see in human relations. There is simply no way to separate the struggle against patriarchy from the struggle against ecocide… and vice-versa; because without a fundamental epistemological shift, whatever contingencies we face, we will default to The Old Way
13 December 2007, 6:09 pmStan:
This is just utter nonsense, Charles. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. The Communist Party still runs China and Vietnam.
Ivan Illich was writing on these issues in the late 60s and early 70s, as were plenty of others. Silent Spring was published in 1962 (!). Arne Næss was writing on deep ecology in 1973. The Club of Rome published their findings in 1973.
And Marx’s writings were not “extensive” on this, but consist of a relatively small quantity of correspondence on Liebig’s theses… which Marx looked into late in life.
This is beginning to remind me of those full-automatic interventions I was encouraged to do when I was a member of the CP… and it begins to feel like a hijacking. Marx knew everything. Marx answered everything. Marx is the answer. Follow the Marxists.
13 December 2007, 6:52 pmrobert karaffa:
I’m not passing judgement on any comments set forth here. I read this blog religiously daily and appreciate what I see here more than what I see most anywhere else. Just want to say that I too have stayed with people in Cite Soleil and with peasants in Haiti at MPP outside Hinche on the central plateau of Haiti and in Campeche/Dumay and in the zone of Demier south of Leogane. I too will pick the peasants any day. Healthy animals (as long as Charbon/anthrax is not present) some sense of self-determination, clean water easily provided and maintained with great pride by the people with the help of technicians and an inexpensive supply line of water filters and their own charcoal and gravel gray water filters in the case of MPP. I have also had the opportunity to experience this in Kikuyu Division outside Nairobi and places near Tra Vingh in Vietnam where people that I met hadn’t seen white folk since 1968 and readily pulled up old shrapnel and even (!) unopened cans of Budweiser from tributaries of the Mekong along with the inevitable unexploded anti-tank rounds (this scared me a bit and the Cambodians I was with didn’t like me calling them Cambodians not Campuchea..sp??) Anyway to describe a place like Cite-Soleil is so difficult even with pictures that I dare not try. I know from reading parts of Hideous Dream that Stan has seen all of the above. But we as white US folks have only “SEEN” it, to imagine living a life in Cite-Soliel as so many thousands do, is so incredibly unimaginable to us, that I just don’t know what to say. People like Father Rick Frechette bury 100’s of people wherever they can on a monthly basis and I just can’t imagine his life and certainly the lives of the people whose bodies he buries. I will work in Haiti the rest of my life. It is my way of rebelling against the empire (one of the ways.) I want to find the power to change, as Paul Farmer puts it: The Pathologies of Power.
13 December 2007, 11:13 pmStan:
Cite Soleil and many of the Bidonvilles north and south are simply indescribable to anyone who has not set foot inside one of the “dwellings” there, and the latter are deadly landslides waiting for the next hard rain with population that are more than half children.
On the other hand when I spent a couple of months living with peasants in the mountains of the Northern peninsula, we had a spring, where one gathered water high and bathed/laundered low. We had beans and yams, enough to overfill my plate twice a day, with chicken or goat around twice a week. We had legume and lots of local veggies and herbs. We had nights filled with crickets and frogs instead of traffic and loudspeakers; and mornings with roosters and glorious sunrises. Bamboo and pay were fairly plentiful, and while people worked hard, there were decent intervals of rest and recreation and time spent talking with neighbors throughout the day. The soil loss and deforestation are less advanced there, but continue mostly as part of the general trend driven by the city… which uses charcoal to cook and wood to build. We burned deadfall wood, which is three times as efficient and does not cut live trees. Rice was paid for on the trips to town, and though the Artibonnite could grow all the rice the whole ocuntry needs, they were paying very high prices for subsidized US rice in the market. But where I was, rice was not necessary because yams were — honestly — everywhere.
14 December 2007, 7:47 amJosiah:
This may come out muddled, as it’s been a long day at work. But it seems to me that the shift in political focus being advocated here, from (as Nancy Hartsock might put it) the level of capitalist production to the level of biological reproduction (advocating permaculture and symbiotic human and non-human relationships versus the systematic exploitation of land and bodies in industrial-capitalist patriarchy), is tremendously important. But such a shift seems to open up a forked path that can lead either to a meaningfully large-scale linking of community movements (millions rejecting imported oil, long-haul food and consumer credit, and thus actually harming the multinationals), or an inoffensively small-scale lifestyle change on the part of a few thousand brave but ineffectual mavericks. This oversimplifies things a little, because another few decades of business as usual is not in the cards for ecological reasons. The danger is not that “off the grid” communities will be assimilated at the margins of an immortal American and European capitalism. I don’t believe that. And actual disruptions in rainfall patterns, resource supply chains etc. will make possible more consequential political action, both in the direction of re-localization and in that of paranoid macho white supremacy among downwardly mobile suburbanites against a media-crafted Triple Threat of Islamic terrorists, Latino immigrants and urban Black males. So there are major reasons to believe this kind of politics will be more fruitful than struggles centered on the workplace and the trade union. But this will only be true if local movements can be linked to together on a large scale, not under a centralized hierarchy but not completely fragmented, either.
This brings to mind something Mark Jones wrote nearly 10 years ago. I was reading the archives at LBO-Talk a few days ago, and stumbled on an exchange he had with the economist Michael Perelman that seems relevant to this discussion. Perelman was advocating local, sustainable agriculture, and Mark posed a question, which is not as rhetorically negative as it might seem:
“Michael, forgive me for being crassly obvious, but how are your urban archipelagoes
of market-gardens going to compete with Monsanto-driven, feedlot type modern
agribiz? We already have a lot of allotment and smallholding farming here [in the UK] BTW: a good friend of mine who is also the publisher of the other socialist publishing
house apart from Verso, spends his free time digging vegetables in his allotment.
The municipalities here have a long and creditable history of supplying half-acre
size allotments to very many local citizens. But it all doesn’t add up to a
pinprick compared to agribis. That’s OK because most of it is done for love and
self-consumed. But how will you compete? Isn’t the only decisive trend in the world
today, the tumultuous decanting of hundreds of millions of landless peasants into
the new megacities? Won’t the next century be about the temperate North feeding the
globally-warmed/dessicated South, with the final disappearance of the US family
farmer as a social couche alreayd a fact, and ag now a vertical, corporate
business?
Mark”
14 December 2007, 8:57 amStan:
This quote from Mark reminds me that he was struggling with the same questions the rest of the left is still largely ignoring. A few years later he was calling on folks to attend to people like Vandana Shiva.
For my own part, I think the question about agribiz is crucial, as is your question about the need for generalized political effort. In fact, they are in some respects the same question. The off-the-grid communities are important as laboratories, I think. But the real off-the-grid effort needs to be made inside existing “conventional” communities. I live in a suburban house; and I intend to be buried in the back yard.
I think of ths as a preparatory phase — this skill-acquisition, and cadre-development — that is analogous to the Cuban medical system. That is, train lots of doctors, then have them distributed inside local communities, where people can see them and rely on them as needed.
As you point out, the material limits of the system will create the need, by and by. Networking these seed-cadres is essential, and can create the basis for political solidarities and mass work. The “targets” of the latter will present themselves in the context of developments we can’t yet see.
Mark identified one main target. Agribiz. His strategic paradigm was still Party… that is, build toward mass, head-on confrontation. Ours should incorporate assymetry and agility.
One of the things that cointinues to interest me about left-libertarian coalition possibilities is that agribiz — now preparing to cash in on “energy self-sufficiency” schemes (read: more ethanol) — cannot exist without massive subsidization, opposed more enthusiastically by libertarians than socialists in my experience. These subsidies are also essential as an imperial tool of domination. There is huge potential for a global political project to end these subsidies, but there has to be awareness and agreement to take it on.
If Ron Paul — setting aside his other positions for a hypothetical moment — were president, he could not likely overturn Roe. It’s not within his authority as the Prez. He could, however, veto ag subsidies, and stop the war.
If we quit looking at things from the point of view of The Total Package political program, and think about what-if, we realize that these two changes would constitute a monumental — and positive — change on the American political landscape.
14 December 2007, 11:08 amCharles:
This is just utter nonsense, Charles.
^^^^^
14 December 2007, 11:29 amGive me a break, Stan. I don’t write nonsense.
Charles:
What are the lives of peasant women like, in general ? Nothing against peasants , of course.
14 December 2007, 11:31 amCharles:
And Marx’s writings were not “extensive” on this, but consist of a relatively small quantity of correspondence on Liebig’s theses… which Marx looked into late in life.
^^^^^
CB: They don’t have to be extensive. They have to demonstrate a point that the logic of Marxism means that Marxists materialists don’t ignore new developments ( and the specifics of climate change and oil depletion were no where near coming about in Marx’s lifetime; nobody was considering the human condition as having to take those developments into account then) in the human ecology and the material world; Marx’s and Engels’ brief writings on ecology mean Marxists don’t in the least ignore that ,now, drastic changes have to be made in the technological regime if oil is running out and causing global warming. It’s a very simple point. Your claim that Marxists can’t understand such a simple and fundamental material fact and exigency is insulting , slanderous, off, etc., and basically means your are not accurately saying what Marxism is. What you say sure doesn’t apply to my Marxism or Mark Jones’ or Lou Proyect’s. Marxism is able to turn on a dime , if the factual situation, the material facts, the concrete situation changes. This why your characterization of Marxism, or all Marxism, as religion and dogma is just off.
Engels said “Marxism is not a dogma , but guide to action.”
Read Gorbachev or something.
14 December 2007, 11:46 amCharles:
This is beginning to remind me of those full-automatic interventions I was encouraged to do when I was a member of the CP… and it begins to feel like a hijacking. Marx knew everything. Marx answered everything. Marx is the answer. Follow the Marxists.
^^^^^^^
14 December 2007, 11:49 amCB: This is an utterly false characterization of what I have said on this blog. You should be ashamed of yourself. Anybody can look back over what I have said here and see that the above is a slanderous caricature of what I have said. You are tripping.
Charles:
Moreover, NONE of the countries cited above engaged in resistance to the bourgeoisie. None of them. These were mostly anti-imperial struggles, that is struggles primarily for national sovereignty. Russia’s revolution took its most turbulent social base from peasants who hated the aristocracy and the landlords.
^^^^^^^
14 December 2007, 11:52 amImperalism is the bourgeoisie. Anti-imperialist struggles are anti-bourgeois.
Randy M.:
Charles, please explain to me how the Soviet Union was “anti-imperial.”
Randy
15 December 2007, 2:14 pmStan:
Now the thread, through substantial fault of my own, has been effectively hijacked. We are a mere millimeter from the Tralin-Stotsky Debate… an arcane pasttime of the left that effectively kicks the shit out of several dead horses.
When I have a bit more time, we can begin a thread on what we mean when we say “imperialism,” because the definition obviously has a great deal to do with how we assess what is or is not The Big “I”… something that can become — in an instant — hairsplitting semantics and moralizing, as opposed to an attempt to describe and analyze.
Hopefully, we can refer back to what we can establish… ie, what is the role and relationship to a core of an exploited periphery, how does it function concretely and legally, and what are the dimensions of our description of imperialism… spatially, in flows of energy and material, financially, militarily, et al.
Not cracking on you, Randy. You have simply followed the logic of what Charles and I established.
15 December 2007, 3:26 pmLegume Sam:
It’s always amusing to count the number of times the word “Marx” (in its various noun-forms) appears in Charles’s posts… the top score so far is eleven…
15 December 2007, 10:23 pmRandy Morris:
I am easily baited around the time a thread is dying, especially over what I perceive as belligerent dogma.
No offense intended Charles, but this site functions much better as a mind-expanding place for political lay-persons, one where everyone is willing to explain what the heck they are talking about to those of us who don’t speak the Lingua Esoterica.
Stan and De have made their views pretty clear concerning the inviolablity of the industrial model, as they have their attempts to find a new way to supplant it, and these are views I agree with wholeheartedly. Tell me about Marx, Imperialism, etc. as it relates to a non-industrial and non-patriarchal model and I’ll listen with bated breath.
Randy
16 December 2007, 4:04 pmxenia:
I visit this blog so I can develop myself as a human being, a woman and, yes, as a heterodox Marxist. Yes, industrialism was awful in many of its implications, and yes, I have lived with disgusting pseudo-bourgeoisie that the Yugoslav Communist Party had become. Sure, Marxism strictly by the writ can become a comic book.
Yet, I cannot imagine a truly leftist and radical person not being interested in aspects of Marx. I am very disappointed by the last few comments. I have seen some really reactionary and confused people leaving their comments here without being as severely mocked as Charles was. It will take me a while to come back.
STAN: I hope I can convince you to stay around. I don’t think anyone has mocked Marx; and I will take responsibility for having used — wrongly — too mocking a tone in response to Charles’ tendency to reflexively defend the CP line… and apologize to Charles if I have been offensive in my tone. Surely everyone here knows that the body of work that Marx left behind was indispensible… just as I feel sure he would have resisted that work being bunkered into an orthodoxy.
17 December 2007, 4:26 pmLegume Sam:
One text that might have enlivened this thread would be John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology, which does a meaningful job of finding ecological references in Marx…
18 December 2007, 1:56 pmTomThumb:
I have read that at sometime, probably later in life, when asked what he was, Marx said “one thing I know is that I am not a Marxist.”
19 December 2007, 3:44 amCharles:
I have read that at sometime, probably later in life, when asked what he was, Marx said “one thing I know is that I am not a Marxist.”
^^^
19 December 2007, 5:44 pmThis was a joke. There was a group calling themselves Marxists who had a poor understanding of it.
Charles:
Gorbachev, one of the pinnacles of modern Marxist thinking wrote on the importance of universal human values. He was referring to the need to place world peace and nuclear disarmament even above class struggle in some ways. Extending this thinking,many Marxist , _as materialists_ would place dealing with current environmental concerns as high as the class struggle. Materialism means at this level that we must survive materially , in the first place, before we can do anything else. Marxist materialism means we must be able to eat, sleep, be sheltered and physiologically survive before we can do anything else. So, of course, as global warming, ecological catastrophe and oil depletion become really proven threats to humanity ( they were not so fully proven in 1960 pace Rachel Carson or 1973 The whatchacallem of Rome; the Soviets couldn’t change state policy based on such early reports) Marxist materialists have to standup and listen and change thinking, which they are very capable of doing _once it is proven_, as it has been by now.
Yes, _Marxist Ecology_ is Marxist and ecological both.
19 December 2007, 5:53 pmCharles:
Stan and De have made their views pretty clear concerning the inviolablity of the industrial model, as they have their attempts to find a new way to supplant it, and these are views I agree with wholeheartedly. Tell me about Marx, Imperialism, etc. as it relates to a non-industrial and non-patriarchal model and I’ll listen with bated breath.
Randy
^^^^^^^
Randy,
I have to go now, but for starters, Marxism is materialism. Materialism places a lot of emphasis on material survival as a premise for all other human activities. The reason Marxism focuses on modes of production (not just industrial, but all the modes of production that preceded the current industrial technological regime, all the prior agricultural and gardening and foraging technological regimes through human history) is that the mode of production is how a human society makes its material living.
So, I hope you can extrapolate and see that the issuse of global warming, oil depletion and ecological systems breakdown very much impact our ability to materially survive, so they are of prime interest to Marxists who are in the first place materialists.
There remains the issue of forcing the bourgeoisie to change the technological regime or throwing them out and changing it. This is no small problem. Nor is the problem of coming up with a main energy source that will feed, cloth and shelter 6 billion people. But in any case , Marxists are in the forefront of trying to solve material problems of these types, and they aren’t stuck on stupid about finding new ways to deal with these enormous new problems for humanity.
Charles
19 December 2007, 6:04 pmCharles:
Charles, please explain to me how the Soviet Union was “anti-imperial.”
Randy
^^^^^^^
19 December 2007, 6:07 pmCB: This is a long discussion, but for starters, there was net flow of use-values from the SU to places like Cuba, or Vietnam etc. So, they weren’t colonies and the SU was not an imperialist power. The SU was the main bulwark of anti-imperialism through its existence.
xenia:
Apology accepted, Stan. Life is hard enough for all of us these days.
And Charles, sorry, but no-one can deny that the USSR had some very imperialist tendencies, many of which stem from the 19th century Russian empire. There was a layer at which multiculturalism was encouraged, but it was often idealized, reproduced as lovely folklore and not further explored (and I like folklore, btw). Russian identity was set up as the normative one. This had some good sides, such as the fantastic education in letters and science — listening to a 40 year old Ukrainian recite sublime poetry in Russian can bring be to tears; nevertheless, it was hegemonic and often oppressive and covertly racist.
As a Yugoslav, I find the contrast which developed after the breakdown of real existing socialisms quite interesting. In Yugoslavia, most reactionaries, even if they had belonged to CPY, switched to brutal nationalism in all of its variants, from pragmatic free-marketism to monarchism. Saying that Yugoslavia was not completely bad or artificial carries an immediate connotation of leftism, and precisely for that reason it is hated among nationalists, who want to preserve the tabula rasa created post 1991.
But my impression is that in the case of the USSR, a lot of people which defend it are merely dreaming of it as one of many incarnations of Russian glory (see those who admire Stalin — it is mostly for his “discipline”, his talent in “uniting the country”). A way to be honest and a better human being is to admit that many people who genuinely believed in communism were also disappointed and oppressed in the USSR. It was not only the suffering of liberals and aristocrats who played the piano and spoke French at home, even though that one has been romanticized, as in the poor, poor Russian princes who lost their palaces and became taxi drivers, blah blah.
After all, from my experience, people in real existing socialism did not oppose it only because they wanted commodities or the right to listen to Madonna. Most people I know who came to dislike the idea of communism did so because the party created a new ruling class which spoke of communism, but practiced something else. It was the hypocrisy and the greed of those at the top which collapsed those regimes, much more so than the lure of any imaginary “western” freedom.
Finally, I am not a Marxist because it is objective, scientific, progressive, or inevitable. Indeed, think the scientific claim is a big problem for Marxist theory and practice, as is the idealization of the young, muscled, androgynous industrial worker.
I am a Marxist because I admire the sharpness of many of old Karl’s analyses, but more importantly, because it is one tradition which is on the side of the poor qua poor, and I sorely miss that in identity politics. Without the Marxist practice, I would never had been able to afford the education I have had, or to fix my teeth. Given my family background, I would probably be a semi-literate, TV-consuming peasant who would feel something is terribly wrong with the world, but would not know how to articulate it, or defend herself against it.
19 December 2007, 9:03 pmRandy Morris:
Thanks Charles…I’ll cogitate on this.
Randy
19 December 2007, 9:51 pmRandy Morris:
Xenia, your accounts of personal experience relating to Marx and Communism are priceless—thank you. Your perceptions re: the imperialist nature of former SU also sits closer to my own.
Randy
20 December 2007, 12:50 amCharles:
Let me say I have enormous respect for Stan , who I only know through the internet, and his thinking on the internet. His persistent demand that women’s liberation be put at the top of the left program alone keeps him as an unsurpassed radical for today on my list. Of course, his focus on environmental issues just doubles that status.
And of course he is correct that there have been major problems with Marxism , the Soviet Union and CP’s. I have had direct experience and conflicts with the CPUSA , too.
Even with all that, I think that even the most rote learned , basic and vulgar Marxism has something to teach about 99.9 % of the people, given the current mass consciousness marred by so much bourgeois propaganda. If people learn the sort of elementary school level of Marxism, even as its form as a bit of “rigid dogma”, we can move to a next stage of more subtle and intellectually vigorous and flexible, and really profound truths of “advanced” Marxism.
20 December 2007, 1:30 pmCharles:
Xenia,
I understand your perspective. There is quite a lot there, and I won’t address all you say, unless the direction the thread has taken gets the ok to go on.
On imperialism and the SU, a very big topic, no doubt the Great October Revolution and what followed was not able to overturn the Russian empire ( “the prison house of nations”)”overnight”. But the policies of the SU were directed toward doing that. The Bolsheviks instituted what was basically an affirmative action program with respect to what had been the colonial nations of Russia. Of course, like anything , it wasn’t perfect, but it was historically successful compared to all other European colonialisms.
The main point I would make is that there was not economic exploitation of its formerly colonial nations, and even net flow of goods etc. to the former colonies from what had been the center of the Russian empire.
Surely, you are correct that the CP fell into the problems you describe. That was a great tragedy. But there were socialist achievements as well.
Myself, I _am_ a Marxist because of its practice in the world on behalf of the poor,like you _and_ because it is leading edge of social scientific truth we have. Of course, all truth is relative . There is no absolute truth. (See Lenin and Engels on that). It is the best we have got at this point in human history.
Anyway, if this line of discussion continues…
20 December 2007, 2:03 pmCharles:
Randy Morris:
Thanks Charles…I’ll cogitate on this.
Randy
^^^^^
20 December 2007, 2:04 pmThanks Randy. Hope we can bounce it back and forth some more.
Jonny:
Interesting thread..relating to Xenia’s point, I drove a couple workers from Carnival Cruiselines in my cab the other weekend, one czech and one formerly a Yugoslavian, both educated during socialism. I also drove an elite Canadian private school student the next day. The educations they described to me were almost identical; firm discipline in regards to studies, at least one second language (often more), focus on math, physics learning. The European kids of peasant and working-class origins had experienced what in my country only a tiny elite class receives.
20 December 2007, 4:44 pmCharles:
Climate & Capitalism 27/12/07
U.S. Ethanol and Amazon Forests: Echoes of Engels
In The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, Friedrich
Engels wrote:
“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human
28 December 2007, 2:16 pmvictories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us.
Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we
expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unfore–seen
effects which only too often cancel the first. …”
Charles:
The following ecologically wise and fundamental statement by Engels should put to rest forever any claim that Marxism is not just a ecologically conscious as any thing in the modern ecological movement.
And on the “conquest of nature” metaphor so important here, Engels says:
“Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature …” In other words, Engels has the complete opposite of the “conquest of nature” conception
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centers and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.
http://www.geocities.com/youth4sa/ape2man.html
28 December 2007, 2:34 pm