Management from above (or why democracy is just another despot)
Facebook again. I have close to 800 “friends” now, which Dunbar’s number tells us is impossible. If I wait an hour, I’ll have dozens and dozens of posts and links to read. Many of my friends are self-described activists, so I get plenty of bad news.
I have friended a lot of political people who are issue-affinity friends. They read something that perhaps demonstrates anti-racism, or an acknowledgement of male power in society, or something from my earlier days as a leftist organizer, or about my ever-more-visceral opposition to (all) war; and they assume that I am within their own ideological constellation.
My Facebook friends see me post my own share of bad news. There’s plenty to go around. And my bad news, like their bad news, is often about people in power, about people who want power, and about the people (and even nature itself) who suffer under the power of others.
There’s a tendency to assume that if we share certain discernments about a situation, then we share an opinion about what ought to be done about it.
I abhor war, therefore I must also invest myself in the struggle to elect antiwar candidates, for example.
This is a non sequitur. I do not invest myself in these struggles, except where they are revelatory — deepening our discernments — because…
ONE, as the kind of heterodox Christian I personally am, I foolishly, irrationally, and absolutely recognize only one sovereign — a Palestinian Jew who was executed as a political prisoner two milennia ago — and…
TWO, as a purely intellectual conviction in our shared and observable world, I do not believe that management-from-above and peace are compatible, no matter who the managers are. In other words, I think we often are wasting our time.
On #1, I won’t engage the theological argument on FB, because its pointless to argue conclusions when we don’t share epistemoloigcal premises.
On #2, I do argue the intellectual points, because they are about what we can observe in our shared universe.
My FB friends assume that I, like they, want to seek power — collectively, of course — to fix the things that other powerful people are allegedly responsible for. This point-of-view, that someone has to exercise power against power, is absolutely hegemonic. Few people will even bother to question it.
Republicans believe this. Democrats believe this. Residents of the US believe this. Most people outside the US also believe this. The evangelical right believes this. The secular left believes this.
As a society, we are absolutely committed to the idea of “the management of society from above,” a Yoderian turn of phrase, the contest being over who will be the managers, and what will be the management philosophy.
People are jarred, disappointed, even angry, when I don’t support their actions on behalf of this conviction of the necessity of managerial rule. Specifically, there are two recurrent points of disagreement that seem to exercise my friends and me: elections and my pacifism.
I’ll find another time and place to explain my pacifism, with the note that many of the people who actually oppose pacifism have never taken lives… so when they go on hypothetically about why they would resort to violence, they really really do not know what they are talking about. They’re just constructing neat scenarios that never come to pass neatly.
Elections! The heart of democracy by some accounts.
If anyone has any evidence that elections in the US have shifted power from the ruling class, I’m all ears. And don’t tell me FDR. He was driven to do the things he did by the threat of mass destabilizations in the teeth of a depression. And he rescued capitalism, as usual, with war…including the racist roundup of Japanese-Americans.
Being short on the matter, I don’t give a shit about “democracy.” In practice, it’s just been a way to justify 51% forcing themselves and their grandiose schemes on the other 49%. The argument that it is the best of several bad choices still assumes that we need top-down control, because it is always compared to other top-down philosophies and practices.
I’m still carrying a grudge about wasting 12 years of my life in a “democratic” institution called public school, where children — who should be exploring their own curiosity in a diverse world — are imprisoned and trained like lab rats, and segregated by age, creating one of the monstrosities of modernism — youth culture, a thing separate from the age-diverse world where they might learn something interesting and practical instead of memorizing test answers and saying the damned pledge allegiance. Compulsory public school has, more than any other single thing, driven a wedge between generations and left our children vulnerable to the stupidity of their equally inexperienced peers and predatory advertising.
I know we aren’t going to see the end of the state any time soon, but does that mean we have to keep making it the center of our universe? It has never been subject to popular control; and never will be. Managerial systems naturally tend to consolidate the power of the managers themselves.
We aren’t going to see the end of hateful people or vengeance or corruption in our lives either, but we don’t have to base our existence on how we relate to these people and things. We encounter them, just as we do the state, on a case by case basis, and when the time comes to disobey, we need to be able to take our licks. State violence reveals the state for what it is. That’s why the Freedom Riders got the hell beat out of them, and won the day. Fighting back only makes us like them. And contesting for their power only wastes our efforts or coopts us into their power as player in this fixed and malevolent game.
As long as we continue with the delusion that we need the state, or that we need to fight the state with the same kind of force the state uses, we will remain apart from what really matters: each other. Our mangerial society has placed a force-field of isolation around us all, and subsitututed rules and regulations for the bond between souls. Moreover, the modern managerial society has taken moral responsibility away from the individual, and thereby metastasized the lonely narcissism that infects modern society.
Democracy makes us liars. Look at the grotesque apologetics deployed by “liberals” (I am emphatically not liberal! nor conservative! nor progressive!) to justify continuing support for the institutional cesspool called the Democratic Party. We stifle our basic powers of observation on behalf of a game that we never win and that never stops and that we never win and that never stops; and we would become like them if we did. We jump on the great hamster wheel of democracy, cycling through election after election, complaining about the things we have abandoned to management for this vanity, and blame those who say no to the wheel.
Anonymous:
Perhaps you will elaborate on the matter of pacifism on another post, but I had just finished reading a chapter named “Moral Imperialism and the Iron Logic of War” in your “Full Spectrum” book. Reading this chapter really surprised me, because I believe that you are, and have been for some time, a pacifist (by “pacifist”, I am aware that you do not mean that we hold hands all day and sing Kum By Yah, not to say that I don’t enjoy a good song now and then).
However, in the chapter mentioned above, it seemed as if you were suggesting that any leftist movement that has any hope of surviving most own up to the fact that these movements might need to take up arms if struggling against a violent and powerful state (which most states tend to be).
I only have a few explanations for this:
1) I grossly misread this chapter. You may have not been calling leftists to arms, as much as pointing out the harsh truth that any struggle worthy of its name will always be met with physical force; we need to drop this notion of an aesthetically pleasing revolution where none of the participants get hurt.
2) I did not misread the chapter, but you changed your mind over time. It would be an abstraction to hold to this idea that a philosopher’s ideas do not drastically change over time e.g. Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault.
3) I missinterpretted your current pacifism.
4) I did not misread/interpret either ideas, but rather I need to investigate further into how these two ideas are only incompatible on the surface.
Thanks.
8 September 2010, 9:53 pmAnonymous:
In case I did not make this clear…
I was merely asking which of my four explanations above is true? If anyone has other suggestions, I am definitely all ears.
8 September 2010, 9:56 pmStan:
I can hit you with an email offline, anon.
On FSD, I’ve changed since then. (Lord, I would hope! It’s been what, almost seven years.) I was still committed to violence as a means for changing society. But society is already violent. Violence just changes us. I hadn’t let go of the Man quite yet, in spite of my stated opposition to male power. Women use violence, but it is still a male thang, and still considered the way to truly male actualization.
9 September 2010, 1:19 amTom:
Stan — thanks for sharing your thoughts, and in such a mind-jarring way. I am currently teaching an Honors section of Glboal Issues at a small university in Texas. In this GI course, I stress the importance and influence of the media on any and all “Global Issues.” One of the books I require is Chomsky’s “Media Control.” Your article serves as a jumping off point for several challenges the students need to be offered.
9 September 2010, 7:44 amWith your permission, I would like to copy your article and share it with my class.
Stan:
One of my insomnia rants in a classroom? I’ll be curious to hear the outcome. (-:
Anyone engages on the theological aside (controversial among most churches), refer them to John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. That will give them a fine dislocative jolt.
We’ve been taught to think that the state emerged to control social pathologies. That’s really the epistemological hurdle, isn’t it? But the state – and the classes that controlled it – have been the author of most of those pathologies.
Thanks for the VOC. And let me know how the young’ns react. Wish I could take your class.
9 September 2010, 8:56 amCharles:
I think in line with your discussion, according to the Text, when Jesus went through the temptations in the desert, the Devil told him he (the Devil) was the head of all the worldly governments.
Some secular leftists see one ultimate goal as the whithering away of the state, which implies a non-violent end of it.
“Power” by definition is some people having control over some other people. Even though “All power to the People” is a favorite slogan of mine, it is logically absurd. If All the People had All the Power, it wouldn’t be power anymore.
Anyway, “We the People” as the first words of the US Constitution implies that the People are the source of all power, obviously, only a theoretical and fake assertion. But it is a correct concept, popular sovereignty as better definition of democracy than “majority rule”.
“Democracy” ,as some say, is still a form of the state (special repressive apparatus, armed personnel, prisons, etc.) When the state whithers away, it won’t be democracy; it will be the Queendom of Heaven on Earth/the Realm of Freedom.
9 September 2010, 9:35 amKeith:
The best example of elections shifting power from the ruling class in the US that I can think of is Huey Long in Louisiana. He cut corners, was ruthless, went too far plenty of times, but was more effective at smashing through oligarchical barriers to equity than any politician perhaps in US history. T. Harry Williams wrote his definitive biography, if you’re interested. Love him or hate him, he showed what one person, with enough commitment and discipline, can accomplish even with the entire system stacked against you. Would love to hear a thoughtful analysis of the model he offered, which apparently only a bullet could stop.
9 September 2010, 6:28 pmStan:
Well, the Obamans on FB told me to grow up and to learn some “realpolitik.” They accused me of name-calling. Then I was banned from commenting, because I dissed their guru for being a killer and a liar. Since I couldn’t answer there, I’ll answer here.
This reply was blocked from the comments section by someone who has since unfriended me.
10 September 2010, 7:50 amDave Blalock:
Hey man, I say “Right Fucken On!” to your Obama FB reply above… The person who unfriended you aint worth keeping. I too am an Army volunteer 1968-1971. What I had learned in Vietnam and since then has taught me to distrust & oppose every politician and the whole rotten system.
Several hours ago I watched an extreamly interesting documentary film that traces the hitory of psywar operations from the Iraq War back to WW1.
http://dprogram.net/2010/09/08/video-psywar-the-real-battlefield-is-your-mind/
I know that you were in the army alot longer than me and am curious as to what your take is on this film?
10 September 2010, 10:35 amTimothy R. Anderson:
Nice work, Mister Stan Goff.
Timothy R. Anderson
10 September 2010, 11:52 amSteve S:
Stan– “This point-of-view, that someone has to exercise power against power, is absolutely hegemonic. Few people will even bother to question it.
Republicans believe this. Democrats believe this. Residents of the US believe this. Most people outside the US also believe this. The evangelical right believes this. The secular left believes this.”
The US Social Forum, which has as credible a claim as anyone to be a more or less central gathering place of the US left, doesn’t tend to highlight ‘taking power’ perspectives. And anarchist perspectives are quite a bit stronger in the World Social Forum; in practice,more or less dominant outside of the NGO cliques (I keep using the phrase ‘more or less’ because the Social Forum practice resists taking a firm political line that can be highlighted or critiqued; this is symptomatic of the more general critique of traditional ways of thinking about politics and power).
10 September 2010, 1:03 pmMichael Anderson:
It is a process, coming around to a point of non-violence. I took a final step (one of several) getting rid of the weapons I owned, and it was a jarring experience, because I still realized I had a piece of me that felt defenseless without an “implement of destruction”, to quote Arlo Guthrie, in my possession. That feeling is gone now, replaced by a more certain course of (non-violent) responses and thinking, and, as you said, the willingness to take some lumps (and a lot of those lumps are economic), that I know will evolve further as time goes on. I still feel doubt, anger and fear sometimes, but the way is set.
Thanks, Stan
10 September 2010, 1:36 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
If I may be forgiven for indulging in that USA English-speaker pastime of problem-solving by over-taxonomizing, I like to distinguish between majoritarian “democracy” and consensus democracy (or “real” democracy). My profile pic is a cartoon of a line of sheep streaming through a high school gym toward a ballot box, each with a card of either a right boot or a left boot. Overhead hangs a giant boot, poised to strike all. That pretty much sums it up for me =-)
Or to put it another way… Majoritarian is authoritarian – demand consensus-based, non-hierarchical decision-making!
Also, since you brought up FB, I have to add that “I believe you have a TEA Party consciousness” LOLZ!!!
10 September 2010, 2:09 pmaskod:
I could easily imagine the rant being delivered by one of those old testament preachers.
Wile I agree with the content – democracy is management from above, it does corrupt – I have a hard time abandoning the election circus. After all it is an acceptable room to also discuss policy (or at least, that is the case in Sweden) as long as you are ready to leave the thinktanks chatterboxes and their reflections on facebook and head out on the streets with your pamphlets and talk to people.
So I guess my own solution (not _the_ solution, I think the belief in _the_ solution is harmful) is to try and participate with open eyes.
10 September 2010, 2:49 pmVJP:
Stan, I’ve always scratched my head at your revulsion of public education. Consider this: I was the daughter of immigrant parents who expected nothing of me beyond being a good daughter and reproducing. Public school in upstate NY in the 1950s [due to Sputnik], begged to differ. I had a handful of teachers & profs who provided support when my parents & family did not. We had a deal; I would give them the grades they wanted, and they would leave me alone. In one of my biology classes, I was the *only* female. I finally earned a Master’s [in higher education] when I was 45.
10 September 2010, 4:31 pmThe best thing about public education is that it’s free, but it may save as many as it fails, although I have no proof of this. It could be an immigrant belief system.
Aside from all that, good response about not shutting up! I used to be put in the classroom’s closet for not shutting up.
Paul:
Hello Stan, I’ve never been in or near a war but I’ve been to Vietnam twice in the last 5 years. Just going there and knowing of the on going suffering 30+ later years helped wake me up to what war is all about. The on going effects of agent orange, unexploded land mines (I know a woman there who as a little girl picked a small mine and carried it home- luckily, it did not go off!) old crippled men (some undoubtedly from the war) reduced to begging in the street and this I’m sure is just scratching the surface. Wars do not end when the bombs stop falling.
For awhile, I thought we had learned from this tragedy. I was wrong. People here are so distant from all the harm being done in their name, watching TV, going about their lives in a fog of materialism and blissful ignorance. It is a shame that on this day 9.11.10, we will not think about all of the Iraqi and Afghan scarred, displaced, wounded and dying (none of whom had a thing to do with 9.11) rather we will celebrate war as a way to solve problems, flags, fire fighters, police and of course the military. We should remember the lives lost and slow down a little and consider our own actions / inactions.
I’ve learned a tremendous amount from your site and FB postings, Thanks Stan. If forgetting what war is all about means growing up, I think I’ll also pass.
Thanks again Stan,
-Paul
11 September 2010, 10:16 amKim Sky:
Looks like your best stuff is on FB.
Lovely response, full of passion! Too bad those other folk will be deprived of this comment because of ONE “friend”.
Take good care, I’m still waiting with bated breath for that article on coups!
Kim
11 September 2010, 2:17 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
From what I know of Sweden, voting there is a very different beast than in the USA. Sweden’s GINI index and dearth of trans-national corporations indicates there is not the kind of grossly disproportionate clustering of wealth in the hands of so few. Additionally, government does not consolidate the same kind of political power within itself as the USA government does. We are moving to your neighbor to the north and west (Norway) next year, which is more like Sweden than the USA. Even a “fundamentalist” anarchist such as myself has had to wonder if I will find a politics within which I could feel progress happening once I get there. But I suppose I’ll have to wait until then to know. In short, I don’t think you should chastise yourself for voting the same way that people in the USA who are so beholden to partisan politics should =-)
12 September 2010, 7:53 amCurt:
The story of Jim Zwerg is very emotional. But the suffering of those who got their bodies broken during the civil rights struggle could have been for nothing if not for…………….and now you know the rest of the story.
13 September 2010, 9:44 amJT:
Does anyone have Stan’s facebook address?
STAN: Just “Stan Goff.” I think.
13 September 2010, 10:14 pmCurt:
The Cross and the Switchblade.
14 September 2010, 8:26 amAnother very emotional testimonial.
I read it in Junior High School.
Would I have read it if I had never gone to a public school or a private school replacement?
Did this book effect only me?
Can it effect others?
Is this book still read in US schools today?
If not why not?
With out public schooling to aupport the reading of this book would anyone read it?
Does it matter? Is the Cross and the Switchblade obsolete? Are there now better books in print to make the point that how a person makes a living is important not just how good a living one has?
Am I, a person who does not earn a living, allowed to say that how one earns a living is important?
Timothy R. Anderson:
There are, of course, persons within businesses that benefit from the ongoing American-led Multi-National military presence in Afghanistan. Rarely named are they !
Blackwater / ” Xe “, General Dynamics, KBR , Boeing, Lockheed Martin,
Northrop Grunman, DynCorp, General Electric, and others. I think it is helpful to remind the civilian population of the USA that those “war-related
expenses” take up a significant chunk of the money pool. And I know
that, right now, there are many American civilians who just are NOT paying attention. I get that. I do.
But they’re also other Americans who see it, more, for what it actually is. And there are those Americans who do NOT plan on allowing the diseased minds in positions of power to commence a military draft to boss their sons and their daughters into directly participating in the disaster that the diseased minds in positions of power have created.
There ARE those Americans who do NOT plan to let the diseased minds
in Washington D.C. use their sons and their daughters as cannon fodder for their disaster.
Timothy R. Anderson
14 September 2010, 1:22 pmCharles:
Right on ! Timothy A.
Charles
15 September 2010, 2:27 pmCurt:
PRUSSIAN VIRTUES,
17 September 2010, 6:17 amThere is an official list of Prussian Virtues on WIKI.
It was once said that such a list is good for running a concentration camp.
I challenge (dare) someone to make their own comments about this Wiki list of Prussian Virtues.
Jan Martell:
I just saw this review on Upside Down World. It looks like a relevant read.
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/uruguay-archives-48/2693-book-review-dispersing-power-social-movements-as-anti-state-forces
18 September 2010, 11:42 amMichael Anderson:
Musicians beware! Neoliberalism at it’s finest. This reminds me of the Dixie Chicks video, “Shut Up and Sing”.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5663
Honduran Regime Targets Musicians
Café Guancasco, a favorite of the coup resistance movement, sees concert attacked by police and milita
And one more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/us/27wiretap.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet
As Peak Oil spins out its effects, Inverted Totalitarianism will give way to the more old-fashioned kind.
27 September 2010, 9:59 amMichael Anderson:
Obedience (but not without Frankness)
WTF? IT would seem from real-world experience that obedience PRECLUDES anything RESEMBLING frankness! What a lie!
Gatto’s “An Underground history of American Education” talks about the Prussian education system that was imported to this country in the 19th century, as a result of the industrial revolution.
27 September 2010, 10:26 am