Surrender to Utopia

The typical U.S. anti-socialism meme resembles this recent post in Common Dreams: "Socialism goes against human nature. Humans are greedy creatures, just look at a toddler crying if it doesn't get the toy someone else has. In adults, the greed becomes more sophisticated and predatory. So I hate to agree with the scums on the Right, socialism IS utopia." - Common Dreams, "Is Obama a Socialist?" comment on Sept.27, 2009

The reply, which I fully endorse, went as follows: "But other aspects of human nature include solidarity, sacrifice, cooperation, and compassion - aspects which our society does not usually reward. Should our society reward these aspects, and there is no reason why it can't, then we can have a society that reflects these more cooperative, if not humane, aspects of human nature rather than the self-centered and destructive aspects our society does reflect. Societal design isn't written in stone, it isn't delivered by the gods, it is a manifestation of social and political choices. Different choices will yield different outcomes. Socialism does not go against human nature, as you suggest, it merely appeals to different aspects of human nature than capitalism does. Socialism is not utopia, and the 'right' is wrong to say so, and you are wrong to believe it is so." - Common Dreams, "Is Obama a Socialist?" comment on Sept.27, 2009

But we must go farther. The choice of whether to reward greed and self-interest or cooperation and compassion is not a neutral one. Another part of human nature, as well documented in history as greed and war, is the human tendency to transcend its own nature, to constantly repudiate a static condition in which no moral or spiritual growth occurs. There is a logic to social and political choices that truly inspire humanity. Socialism may not in and of itself be a utopia, but utopia lives within all of us and drives to constantly create and destroy all would-be utopias.

The Siren Call of Ecological Despair

Erich Fromm, who has a section in the "Sane Society" called "The Principle of Nonfrustration" seems particularly relevant to the current ecological crisis. As Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World, the principle of the current world order is: "Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today." Happiness has become the instant realization of wishes, and these wishes, moreover, are largely dictated by corporate marketing departments who form the personal images that we unconsciously emulate.

In the context of the current climate crisis, this attitude translates into deliberate self-deception. Psyches formed by the principle of non-frustration cannot cope with our inherent limitations. We are impelled to achieve higher and higher degrees of satisfaction, which in real terms mean greater and greater exploitation of the world's limited resources. To accept this reality would mean a sudden and devastating sense of despair. Eventually, if we had the courage, we would crawl out of that despair, but being the people we currently are, we simply can't face it. We WILL have our satisfaction, even if it means starvation for hundreds of millions of our fellow creatures.

We have been transformed into a system of desires and satisfactions. This is the system that guides us without the use of force. No matter what the depth of our disappointment with the satisfactions on sale, we return to them again and again because alternatives have been systematically excluded from consciousness. We are eternal infants, never weaned from our receptive orientation. Aldous Huxley described it well, "There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist." - Brave New World.

Indeed, the temptation to save the planet sheds dim light compared to those temptations to which we have become addicted. And the corporations continue to sing their siren song and we, unlike Odysseus, are not bound to the ship's mast, but steer passionately toward the empire of illusion:

"First you will raise the island of the Sirens,
those creatures who spellbind any man alive,
whoever comes their way. Whoever draws too close,
off guard, and catches the Sirens' voices in the air -
no sailing home for him, no wife rising to meet him,
no happy children beaming up at their father's face.
The high, thrilling song of the s=Sirens will transfix him,
lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses,
rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones..."

- The Odyssey, Book 12, verses 44 - 52.

Capitalism and the Technologies of Desire

I applaud Robert Jensen's spirited defense of the "narrow gate," in his recent article, Is Obama a Socialist? Reflection on the Degradation of Politics and the Ecosystem. His is one of many efforts to break through the constricted vision of twentieth century ideologies to embrace the many dimensions of liberation: economic, political, and even religious.

The demonization of "socialism" plays a central role in the capitalist strategy of consent that tells us much about why it has succeeded so spectacularly against its rivals. This communication strategy represents "socialism" as the repression of the unlimited ("free") indulgence of desire which corporations constantly encourage. This is represented symbolically by the "nanny" state, a potent image that embodies the repressive morality which it fears. The real content of the word "freedom" in modern political speech is "immediate satisfaction of desire", in particular the artificial desires that are stimulated to a fever pitch with the apparatus of modern marketing.

Capitalism enslaves the imagination through a highly-developed technology of desire. Capitalism captures and distorts human desire so that rather than serving the good of humanity or the glory of God, desire operates according to the golden rule of production for the market. This insight has major consequences for progressive counter-strategies.

Capitalism is successful because it creates a constant stream of new desires which demand immediate satisfaction. By redirecting desire into these carefully controlled channels, attention that might be directed to social concerns follows the groove of personal satisfaction and image. It works by convincing us that this system alone lets us participate in images of personal success. We participate in these images through the stimulation and immediate satisfaction of artificial desires, with all the infantile reasoning that this implies and encourages.

Religious mythology as represented by the "mega-church" phenomenon also plays a significant role. "Sinfulness" in the form of greed, sexual indulgence, selfishness, drugs, and corruption embodies the image of a "fallen" world that can only be magically redeemed. It becomes part of orthodox religious belief that the features of contemporary capitalism are the unalterable features of fallen humanity. Rather than believing that we are God's agents who can liberate ourselves through his gifts, as Jesus taught, we are forced into the belief that "Jesus" will magically liberate us through miraculous events. These beliefs reinforce the faith that capitalism can continue forever.

For instance, George Gilder says, "... man is not finite; the human mind is not bound in material brain...the energy crisis is essentially a religious disorder, a failure of faith. It can be overcome chiefly by worship; by a recognition that beyond the darkness and opacity of our material entrapment is a realm of redemptive spirit, reachable through that interplay of faith and fact which some call science, others poetry, but which is most luminously comprehended as forms of prayer." - George Gilder, The Spirit of Enterprise.

This is precisely the idolatry which enraptures the contemporary religious mind and cultivates the belief that the "creativity" of our economic system will always save us, no matter what "reality" may say. The fuel behind the fire that is devouring our planet is the constant stimulus of new desires which can only be satisfied by the organized productive capacity of globalized capital.

Resistance to climate change can't gain traction because it presents itself as a restriction on the satisfaction of infinite desire. The dynamic of capitalism is that we can become endlessly more through the multiplication of new technologies. Climate change activism opposes this irrationalism, and so can be easily characterized as dull, repressive, and totalitarian - in a word "socialist".

What Jensen and contemporary socialists call for is the liberation of desire from this bondage. Submission to this bondage is rapidly destroying its own ecological foundation, which is right now causing natural destruction that will take millennia to heal.

Capitalism creates a spiritual void and then fills it with an unending stream of artificial desire to quell the boredom and despair engendered by the thwarting of social development.

Squandered Summer? or the Maestro?

If only it were just a matter of a squandered summer. Frank Rich's editorial in the New York Times this Sunday "Obama's Squandered Summer" focuses on the tactical and strategic errors of the Obama administration, but a shift of perspective quickly unblurs the actual scenery and highlights the superb successes Obama has achieved this summer. His behavior this summer appears incompetent only if one assumes that his goal was to get a health care package that addressed the needs of ordinary Americans. If, on the other hand, he was responding to the needs and desires of the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, then his strategy has been a model for others to emulate.

Writers who are given a national stage usually reinforce the notion that presidents are primary actors within the drama of national politics, that their decisions and tactics are decisive factors guiding the development of the historical moment. This meta-message is far more important that the well-wrought details of their critiques. As long as we focus on personality and style, the real forces behind the health care debacle can be safely ignored.

Once we step away from personalities, it quickly becomes obvious that Obama is carrying out the interests of his class, conveniently masked by his progressive image. He is serving the interests of the health insurance industry because they are representative of those who have advanced his career and who will support his continued advancement as long as he is useful to them. Public opinion counts for nothing in this realm.

"Obama is a master when it comes to embodying what the formerly left Christopher Hitchens once (in a book about the Clintons) called 'the essence of American politics' - 'the manipulation of populism by elitism.' The president is a maestro at executing what former Clinton administration official David Rothokopf calls 'the violin model,' under which 'you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.' In other words, 'you' gain and keep office with populace-pleasing progressive-sounding rhetoric but govern in standard service to existing dominant corporate and military institutions." - Paul Street, "They Employ a Lot of Our Friends: Left Reflections on Obama's Corporatist Health Care Speech", Sept. 12, 2009.

Don't Feed the Frenzy

Many liberal pundits have fallen into a frenzy of Obama-bashing, but they’re blasting at the wrong target. Obama is not the cause of this crisis. He stands at the end of a long trail of decisions made by powerful elites in business and government over many decades. These decisions box the type of decisions that can be made into tight crevices, into one of which Obama is now cramped. One man, even if he is President, can't reverse the momentum of that long trail. As beautiful a sight as it would be to see Obama challenging the power of Wall Street, we can easily foresee what the consequence would be. The ruling elite would find a way to remove him, either politically or physically, if necessary.

However, a real leader would have used the opportunity, even if he faced certain defeat. He would realize that "the political center" is an optical illusion. He would have instinctively understood that Republican support could only be a cruel hoax. Instead, he would have rallied his newly fledged legions of young fans and proclaimed positions radical enough to get them excited, even if he secretly knew they would face severe obstacles. He would set the bar high enough for real achievement to be possible.

But Obama was not that leader. The reason he never challenged entrenched power is that he was chosen by that power to fulfill specific corporate goals. This is how David Michael Green characterizes the health care debacle, “I mean, if you had asked me in January, ‘How could Obama bungle this program most thoroughly?’, I would have written a prescription that varies little from what we've observed over the last eight months: Don't frame the issue, but instead let the radical right backed by greedy industry monsters do it, on the worst possible terms for you. And to you. Don't fight back when they say the most outrageous things about your plan. In fact, don't even have a plan. Let Congress do it. Better yet, let the by-far-and-away-minority party have an equal voice in the proceedings, even if they ultimately won't vote for the bill under any circumstances, and even while they're running around trashing it and you in the most egregious terms. Have these savages negotiate with a small group of right-wing Democrats, all of them major recipients of industry campaign donations. Blow off your base completely. Cut secret sweetheart deals with the Big Pharma and Big Insurance corporate vampires. Build a communications strategy around a series of hapless press conferences and town hall meetings, waiting until it's too late to give a major speech on the issue. Set a timetable for action and then let it slip. Indicate what you want in the bill but then be completely unclear about whether you necessarily require those things. Travel all over the world doing foreign policy meet-and-greets. Go on vacation in the heat of the battle. Rinse and repeat.” David Michael Green, “After Obama”, Sept. 4, 2009. This wonderful paragraph may not be simply a caricature of incompetence. The result of his political moves will be the defeat of real health care reform for at least the next four years. There are many who would consider that a significant success.

Another foreseeable result of the cumulative crises which he is bound to mishandle will be the election of a far-right Republican president in 2012. This Republican may have the intellectual chops of an Arnold Schwartzenegger or the feckless, good-old-girl charm of Sarah Palin, but it won't matter. This president will take orders from the same corporate headquarters as Obama, but with the incomparable advantage of arriving after 4 years of feckless "liberalism." It's the Hannity and Colmes strategy. Use a cartoonish liberal cliche to highlight the granite chin of fascism.

This new president will be empowered to wipe away what's left of the Constitution, establish military rule, and eliminate all government programs other than the armed forces, law enforcement, and the prison system. Anything less will be characterized as "Obamism.”

The hard truth is that we love our illusions and no longer care whether they are grounded in reality. Obama provoked the illusion of liberalism, evoking memories of real decency once embodied by the term. And we bought the illusion, secretly knowing that it was no longer possible. Once the chosen messiah failed to live up to the illusion he represented, the crowd turned vicious. But the illusion had already worked its magic. The purpose of the brilliant marketing campaign was accomplished. Now it is simply a matter of re-establishing dominance from Caracas to Kabul. And that is the formula for insanity. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Smart Power: the Obama Way

There is a pattern in Obama's behavior. First, he makes a strong rhetorical flourish that apparently contains a ringing endorsement of liberal policy. However, on close examination, it is found to contain subtle hedging, a slight obscuring of the issue inserted to provide cover for later. This is usually followed by a lengthy phase in which right wing forces accuse him of "socialism" in various verbal disguises or openly. Rather than countering these forces with a strong and principled defense, he "reaches out" to the other side in a way that allows them to provide the default framing of the issue. It is here that he maneuvers most skillfully, but emphatically not for the liberal position he apparently endorsed at the beginning. Expect no "simple, pithy formulas" here.

The current frame of the debate is that the health insurance industry is an unchangeable fact of nature, which may need a tweak here and there, but is fundamentally inalterable. Once that's conceded, the public option has already been implicitly removed from consideration. Instead of choosing to fight against the right-wing onslaught, by, for instance, using those who staffed his campaign to pack town hall meetings, he uses the noise provided by the right to make an ascending series of concessions until he arrives at the place he intended to be in the first place. The basic intent is to make a tweak or two to the current system so that it can more efficiently extract profit from patients. Once the battle has been lost, he will make "the moral case for reform." In this way he covers the final retreat by using his liberal credentials.

But notice how he has built up his political credit with both the right and left. To the left, he provides rhetorical concessions. To the right he provides the substance of what they want but rebranded to make it more palatable. For instance, the proposed non-profit co-ops, which act as a flimsy nightgown to cover the real deed. Taxpayer money used to subsidize the health care plan will go straight towards health care company profits, while they provide the same shoddy care as before. Thereby, he maintains his true power base. His role is to provide marketable justifications for maintaining the current relationships of economic and political power. In that art, he is a master.

The Fetishism of Commodities

The best way to understand this idea and its power is by considering a product such as a Nike tennis shoe. In some societies, teenagers have killed for a Nike. No one dies for not having a Nike, but having one fills a psychological need so powerful that it can sweep away moral inhibitions, even those regarding human life. There seems to be a mysterious and infinite being behind this commodity which promises profound personal fulfillment. Nike is not a tennis shoe, but a life model, as the publicity agent puts it.

So what is this mysterious being who can command human sacrifice? A fetish is an inanimate object such as a tree, a stone, a statue etc. that has been given human properties. It has become infused with a supernatural personality and often commands worship and sacrifice. A commodity is a manufactured object such as a tennis shoe, but its distinguishing characteristic is that it is produced for the purpose of getting something else, profit, rather than fulfilling a real human need, though it may do that as well.

Now when the teenager seeks for a Nike, he is not actually seeking an efficient and comfortable shoe, he is seeking a relationship with a power outside himself. He knows that in order to have a chance of being accepted by the right gang, the tennis shoe is the condition of possibility. But the tennis shoe would not be the passport to acceptance unless it had an aura about it that spelled success, achievement, a life model. Those who don't attain to this aura have failed in some essential and mysterious way.

Hopefully, I've managed to communicate an idea that lies at the heart of our economic system and has profound religious overtones. Such is the fascination that keeps the tremendous talents that we have potentially, the talent to create harmonious ecologies, to bring out the human potentialities of technology, to create a world centered on the fulfillment of human need locked tightly behind the walls of fantasy. Here we rot in the capitalist Disneyland while the life that sustains withers and dies in the onslaught unleashed by our lack of responsibility and infinite appetite for self-indulgence.

The Illusion that Power can Produce What the Heart Desires

The illusion that prevents the acceptance of liberation theology is that spirituality involves turning away from this world to another world where we will one day make our home. God has already given us our home. It surrounds us on all sides. In the conventional view of Christianity the things of this world are of little value or moment because they are destined shortly to be transcended by altogether different reality in which our eternal destiny will be realized. Therefore, good spiritual practice means to regard material reality lightly, as a symbol of the spiritual realities where we will one day find our true home.

But the question liberation theology asks is: "Are there actually two realities, one spiritual and the other material, between which we must conduct a careful balancing act?" Or is there perhaps a single reality within which the totality of our destiny must be played out? The theology which labels itself "liberationist" and which I believe forms the basis of a new reformation of the Christian faith, answers that there is a single reality which is spiritual and material at the same time.

What has worked most powerfully against the acceptance of liberation theology by today's Christians is one of the most sophisticated systems of manufactured consent ever created. This manufactured consent, well-analyzed by Noam Chomsky among others, consists of a corporate-controlled media that carefully frames every issue to support corporate interests. It creates a system of mutually reinforcing messages that define the frameworks within which all issues can be debated. It inculcates the illusion of freedom of debate in order to more effectively constrain the terms of the debate. Points of view such as liberation theology are mysteriously excluded from the dialogue.

Of course, recent trends in Christian theology have also served to exclude anti-capitalist viewpoints. But these trends did not arise in an economic and political vacuum. So dangerous is the viewpoint of liberation theology to the dominant classes in the U.S. that its language has been made incomprehensible to those whose minds have been formed by neoliberal ideology. In fact, the dominant religion in the U.S. is the fetishism of commodities, a form of idolatry that most Christian communities have embraced and branded with a set of Christian themes.

But is not the very purpose of religion to tear us away from the things of this world so that we can rest in the love of God? It depends on what we mean by "love of God". "The spirit of Yahweh is the spirit of interhuman justice-definitive, total justice. Luke describes such justice in this way: "The whole group of believers had one heart and one soul, and no one called his own anything that he had; rather they held everything in common' (Acts 4:32)." (Miranda, Marx and the Bible). Note that love of God is described in economic terms - shared ownership, the end of individual possession, and sharing of talents are the key elements which express the disciples' living out of the resurrection of Jesus, as is made explicit in the following verse, "With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all." (Acts 4:33). "For faith in the resurrection of Jesus reveals that salvation stands not for accumulation of wealth, but for the formation of human communities where all people are acknowledged, irrespective of wealth and other social characteristics." Jung Mo Sung, "Desire, Market, and Religion", p. 25.

The love of God and living out the resurrection by the Apostles was located particularly in the sharing of material possessions, which was regarded as a sign of the Kingdom of God. In their eyes, the life of God was expressed in the community of goods, the unity of individual and community that formed the basic social unit of the kingdom. They never considered the abandonment of the material world as a requirement of the kingdom of God, which would forever be found in this world of inextricably intermeshed spiritual and material reality.

Property for People, Not for Profit

The starting point of a Christian political system originates from the Fathers of the Church such as St. John Chrysostom: "There is something terrible about greed, any guilty of it shall be be expelled from the Church." The central principle of Christian communism can be described as follows: "Enjoying goods alone means losing them, harming both the social whole and oneself. The crucial idea here is that of benefit. Since everything belongs to God we are only beneficiaries of existing goods, and there can be no private property in the strict legal sense of exclusive rights, this right being limited, if not repealed, by the normative obligation to be useful: 'Everything belongs to God...do you not know that we will be called to account if we make poor use of it?" - Clement of Alexandria.

This principle means that a political system in which property rights trump all other values is anti-Christian at its root. Traditional Christianity has always argued that property rights are relative values and should be subordinated to spiritual values. In other words, an economic system based on the profit motive cannot be made to conform to Christian principles because it is based on greed from the root. Current economic theory further assumes that the sum of personal greed-based activity will result in the greater good of the whole, which is blatantly contradicted by the facts of our world, not to mention being the mirror opposite of Christian morality.

From the perspective of traditional ethics, "...when the usefulness of the goods produced and consumed no longer drives economic activities, but exchange value and limitless accumulation through money mechanisms, the property-owning individual falls prey to the illusion of boundless life - and the community is destroyed." Hinkelammert, "Another World is Possible". Therefore the economic and political system I would advocate would involve a rational and collective planning process for production that would focus on human need. It would regard the excessive accumulation of property by individuals or small groups as a crime against the good of the whole. It would be a world in which useful goods were distributed to all according to their need and to which each would contribute according to their talents. Such an economic practice would promote the values of sharing over competition, in accordance with Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.

According to Christian teaching, human beings have the potential for both deep moral degradation and high spiritual attainment. Therefore a Christian economics is not one that regards all behaviors which might lead to growing profit margins as equally desirable. Some behaviors, such as compassion, sharing, care for the poor, diligence, concern for quality, craftsmanship, and so on should be encouraged, while others such as uncontrolled lust, greed, foolish self-indulgence, wastefulness, shoddy workmanship, escapism, desire for power over others, destructiveness and others, are to be discouraged by the economic system, as well as every other social mechanism. In an economic system which makes profit the supreme value, Christian values must necessarily be ignored and degraded.

So how can we envision an economic system that promotes the teachings of Jesus? The purpose of economics, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is to provide a field within which we can strive for greater and greater heights of moral virtue. That perfection cannot be served by endless arrays of wasteful and spiritually harmful commodities which encourage foolish self-indulgence and lack of compassion for our brothers and sister who have less. More radically, a production system that doesn't consider the ecological impact of the goods that it produces and fails to meet human needs is corrupt in its root and must be abolished for the sake of human and natural life. That is the true "pro-life" position that Jesus calls us to.

Economics must promote the deepening of our humanity, not the proliferation of useless and destructive "needs." The economic picture which currently reigns is the mirror opposite of one that would promote the proliferation of higher needs, the need to love, the need for truth, the need for honor, and all that these needs imply about the true direction of human evolution. The proliferation of unnecessary material goods, especially considering the wars and theft that they necessarily entail, is a mark of shame on the human race, one that we will be long cleansing ourselves of.

Has the human race deteriorated to the point that it is no longer capable of imagining a world in which the products of spiritual achievement can be measured by other standards than their profit potential? What tyrant constrains us so fiercely that we can't think outside of the box of the commodity? The lure of endless quantity leads us to the destruction of ourselves and our planet.

In the words of John Bellamy Foster: "The goal must be the creation of sustainable communities geared to the development of human needs and powers, removed from the all-consuming drive to accumulate wealth." - John Bellamy Foster, "The Ecological Revolution", 2009

If Christianity doesn't mean this, then it has become one of the idolatrous powers which is destroying human life on this planet and has lost whatever tether it may once have had to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

What is to be Done? Part 1

The following is the first part of an essay which seeks to probe the empire for weaknesses arising from the economic crisis in order to identify a way forward for leftists. In the first part, I sketch out the current situation.

The current economic “crisis” is a crisis only for the poor and the middle class, which is scheduled for extinction. This “crisis” represents the consolidation of the economic power of the wealthy by a vast transfer of wealth from public to private hands. But this massive grab of economic power could end by destroying the class that believes itself to be making its domination permanent, and therein lies the opportunity to be explored later in this essay.

The most vocal portions of the “left” in the United States fail to see the holistic nature of the globalist strategy of capital. The anti-war movement seems to believe that one man, Barack Obama, can make a decision that will lead to the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East. The reason this is not possible is because the conquest of major portions of the Middle East is key to the control of Central Asian energy supplies, which is itself part of a much larger plan for global market control. Obama has fully accepted this plan or he would not be President today. His job is both to pursue the strategy and to damp down criticism, a job he has been doing quite effectively. Obama, far from representing a reversal of the drive toward neocolonialism, has refined but also intensified that strategy.

The truth that is so difficult to face is that the empire, by its nature, demands total control. We name this entity as “empire” precisely for that reason. The driving engine of its current moves in the Middle East is not simply to obtain oil. No doubt, the U.S. will obtain the oil, but it could have done this by many other means than military conquest.

The military element serves several purposes. In order to successfully camouflage these moves toward domination, enemies must be manufactured. It is now becoming clear that one of the primary purposes of the Iraq occupation was to give the intelligence agencies a chance to manufacture enemies in order to justify our conquest of the Middle East. Massive random round ups, accompanied by lengthy incarceration and torture, have turned a generation of Iraqis against the U.S. The same process is now being pursued in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where drone attacks have displaced millions of Pakistanis. These attacks ensure a sufficient level of hatred for the U.S. that we will be able to justify military interventions for decades to come. There will be no withdrawal from Iraq.

The point is that their tactics cannot be understood in isolation or explained by simplistic short term gains. The ruling elite thinks in much larger terms and the left must match their globalized aims with a global understanding of its own. Note carefully that we are not making statements about the morality of individual members of that class, which vary widely. We are making statements about the logic of imperial control which always tends toward gaining control of all aspects of society in order to ensure an undistorted flow of property accumulation into the coffers at the center of power.

The role of the media in this strategy is to imbue the world population with a fatalistic acceptance of the inevitability of the current system. News shows are designed to trivialize the consequences of imperial control by framing such events as having no more significance than a pop star’s latest hair style. A serious message is interwoven between the trivialities, but the trivialities make the serious message of fear easier to ingest.

One of the major factors lying behind the weakness of current resistance movements is the rejection of totalizing ideologies by the academic mainstream, the post-modernist trend that finds its media reflection in the trivializing framing noted above. Clearly the ideology of empire is a totalizing ideology, a scientifically elaborated set of strategic initiatives centered on the accumulation of capital which regards the welfare of the majority as of no consequence to its calculations. Human beings are merely human capital to be used or disposed of as necessary for the maximization of accumulation. The resistance to this ideology must have a concept of the total system and its tactics must be a reflection of this understanding. The inability to make scientifically valid propositions that potentially form a system of ordered truths make resistance to the real global power impossible because it prevents the emergence of a unified front with broad agreement on principles. Perhaps this is the primary purpose of encouraging academic trends such as post-modernism, especially when they accord so well with neoliberal economics. Such movements dissolve the potential power of the resistance at its foundation. To face a totalizing class enemy with ideologies that are localized and identity-based is to disarm oneself by default.

So the beginning is to banish the illusion that the empire can gradually evolve into something less brutal, less intrinsically inhuman. Its fundamental nature is control which must spread from one node of human activity to the next until its steel-laced spider web forbids any chink of light.

Yet in creating this web of night the empire destroys the very engine of life that it depends on in order to survive. Human capital can be kept in peak operating condition only through the fuel of hope. Once hope is removed and we are told that the current world situation is the “end of history”, that reason and humanity have nothing further to offer than the endless asymptote of capital accumulation until the ruling elite disappear into a black hole of their own infinite wealth, then the motor that drives the whole machine starts to grind loudly. This is the despair and its companion cynicism that currently grips most of those who inhabit the outer circles of the neoliberal hell. And this is the basis of real hope.

Rubble

"I realized I had never understood the true meaning of 'rubble.' Such and such was "reduced to rubble" is a phrase we hear. It is different seeing what demolished buildings actually look like. Buildings in which people were living. Buildings from which hundreds of broken bodies have been removed; so thorough a job have the Palestinians done in removing the dead from squashed dwellings that no scent of death remains. What this task must have been like, both physically and psychologically, staggers the mind.

We pass police stations that were simply flattened, and all the young (most Palestinians are young) officers in them killed, hundreds of them. We pass ministries, bombed into fragments. We pass a hospital, bombed and gutted by fire. If one is not safe in a hospital, when one is already sick and afraid, where is one safe? If children are not safe playing in their schoolyards, where are they safe?" - Alice Walker, "The Best Place One Could be on Earth", July 26, 2009.

"How doofus humans are going to look -- we thought as we marched, sang, accepted our handcuffs -- still firing rockets into apartment buildings full of families, and dropping bombs on school children and their pets, when the ice melts completely in the Arctic and puts an end to our regressive, greed sourced rage forever." - Alice Walker, "The Best Place One Could be on Earth", July 26, 2009.

"Doofus" is not exactly the word I would pick, but it does express the absurdity of our violence and greed in a way that celebrates the wisdom of the earth. It reminds us of the spiritual powers that lie behind all that we see, before whom we are mites crawling on the surface of mystery. Moreover, this mystery has a personality and a love that will one day put an end to our raging greed, and there's not a damn thing we can do about that.

Breaking the Border of Humanity

Until we feel the humanity of other peoples of the world, for instance Afghanis and Pakistanis and Hondurans, with the same intensity that we demand respect for our own, so far will our humanity be degraded and ultimately destroyed.

But a larger vision needs to be invoked. Our denial of our duties to humanity works in both directions. We have refused our duty to help create a world where everyone has adequate nourishment and health care while the rest of the world has desperately pleaded for our help. The fact that for a fraction of the cost of our luxuries this could be accomplished imposes the absolute moral obligation to do so. If our churches actually followed the teachings of Jesus, this would be beyond doubt - and would be the central moral imperative of a genuine Christianity. The tragic flaw of the American personality is complete blindness to our inherent relationship to other peoples and the natural environment, all of which have been transformed into objects to be consumed for profit. This denial of responsibility on a global scale will ultimately destroy us.

The Church of Benedict XVI continues to subsist in a world of Platonic forms untouched by history, untouched by the misery inherent in the capitalist world order that is determined to extract the last dribble of profit until the planet is reduced to a scalding desert. Regarding this system of economic idolatry, the Church is silent even as it proclaims eternal verities to the starving.

In contrast to God's attempt to share our humanity in Jesus' life and death, the Church worships an objectified God, a God who underwrites the ruling economic order, a God who can't be bothered with the massacre of Gazans, as Pope Benedict recently demonstrated in his visit to Israel.

In this regard, the Nonviolent Jesus calls out to the Honduran people to ignore the lies of the U.S. government and joyously to affirm the model of Hugo Chavez' Bolivarian Revolution as the authentic model for liberation from the dictatorship currently being imposed by U.S. corporate interests. How ironic that the U.S. State Department is currently publishing long discredited lies about Venezuela drug trafficking in Columbia. Colombian military cohorts in Honduras now want a share of the profits as well and Washington is doing everything it can to enable them to open new drug trafficking routes through Honduras.

The Honduran president has the opportunity at this moment to go beyond words, as we all do, and to march toward his capital holding the spirit force, the "truth force", the satyagraha of his people, in his heart. It could mean his death, but it would acquire a force that would place a permanent mark on the spirit of American. Or in the words of Eva Gollinger, "Personally, I think he needs to just continue inside Honduras, despite all risks, and fight to reunite with his family and his people, who have been risking their lives now for almost one month, struggling to defeat the coup regime." - Postcards from the Revolution, July 24, 2009.

The Return of the Assassins

Obama’s primary imperial mission is to reinstate U.S. dominance in those areas where it has waned in recent years due to movements of popular resistance. Today this drama is playing out primarily in Latin America and portions of the Middle East. His strategy, likely to be effective, is to subtly manipulate the framing of events so that the result will reinforce corporate domination while appearing to support “democracy” in those countries. The following article is a speculative reading of recent events in Honduras based on the study of previous U.S.-orchestrated coups in Central and South America.

The coup in Honduras may well become a model for the re-imposition of control by the military and their corporate sponsors in Latin America. Rather than openly denouncing the coup, Obama and Clinton have framed the crisis as contending concepts of legality - on one side the legality of the electoral process and on the other side, the contested legality of the call for a constitutional referendum. Ostensibly standing above the warring sides, Obama calls for “negotiations”, an irreproachable moral stance. But, as Eva Gollinger puts it so well, “The question still remains as to why negotiations - imposed by the United States - are even taking place. By giving the coup government equal participation in a ‘dialogue’ to find a solution, their illegal actions are being legitimized. This creates a dangerous and unacceptable precedent for other undemocratic groups seeking to remove their elected leaders from power and then ‘negotiate’ a resolution, gaining ground politically and weakening the democratic system.” – Postcards from the Revolution, July 8, 2009. Note carefully how well Obama has positioned himself politically by this call for negotiations. Notice also how adroitly it sets up his next move, which will likely be the gradual silencing of Zelaya and the legitimizing of the coup-based government. And the coup de grace to Zelaya will be accompanied by passionate protests against violations of democracy.

By framing the two parties as political equals, whereas in fact one party’s only claim to legitimacy is an act of blatantly illegal violence while the other side has all the force of international and national law supporting him, Obama has provided strong, though tacit, support to the coup leaders. Now that the other countries of the region and Zelaya himself have accepted this imposed equality, much will have been accomplished. In addition to confirming their political power, the coup leaders’ violence will have been recognized as a path to political leverage which will be implicitly supported by the Obama administration. This lesson will be carefully absorbed by closely watching military leaders in other Central American countries. Like Reagan, Obama has discovered the secret of keeping his glory bright while promoting U.S. interests through unrelenting violence. As savvy political observers might have expected, nothing came of the much ballyhooed “negotiations” on Thursday, July 9 which were supposed to occur between Zelaya and the coup leaders. In fact, no direct negotiations took place between Zelaya and the coup leaders at all. Zelaya met with Oscar Arias and then Roberto Micheletti met with Arias. The political reality is that such “negotiations”, in which neither side directly bargains with the other, but merely states their non-negotiable positions to a “neutral” third party, is merely a delaying tactic. They lengthen the time that Zelaya is out of power and allow the coup leaders to establish facts on the ground which will strengthen their political leverage.

At this point, everything depends on framing. As Reuters reported it, “The stumbling block is that the de facto government accepts the return of the constitutional government," [Organization of American States chief] Insulza told reporters in Washington. ‘Everything else is negotiable.’” Note the phrase, “de facto government”. This “de facto” government has been placed in the decision-making position regarding the return of Zelaya. Whether it does or does not, “everything else is negotiable”, which, of course, includes all of Zelaya’s reforms, such as providing a livable wage for the poor.

Another purpose of the “negotiations” strategy, is to place Zelaya in the humiliating position of having to debate the lies perpetrated by the coup leaders and enthusiastically repeated by the corporate media that he was trying to extend presidential term limits. The big lie technique has been very successful in this regard. Zelaya in fact proposed a constitutional referendum that made no mention whatever of presidential term limits. The true story is provided by Eva Gollinger, “Major international media are still reporting the reason behind Sunday's coup as an alleged ‘reelection’ attempt by President Zelaya. But in reality, Sunday's scheduled opinion poll was not a reelection bid by Zelaya, it was a non-binding consultation with the people of Honduras, backed by more than 800,000 signatures from Honduran citizens that would merely consider the possibility of adding a 4th issue to the election ballot this coming November, when presidential elections are to be held. The question posed for Sunday's poll was: ‘Do you agree that, during the general elections of November 2009 there should be a fourth ballot to decide whether to hold a Constitutional Assembly that will approve a new political constitution?’” Nothing about term limits was mentioned.

During the face-to-face meetings with the de facto government which will ensue, Zelaya’s return to the presidency will likely be contingent on his willingness to abandon the substance (though maybe not the “style”) of these reforms, along with his renunciation of membership in ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas). If he clings to these positions, he will be castigated in the international press as an “ideologue”, or a tool of Chavez, which will frame him as unworthy of his position as President (a “dictator”) and therefore justifying the action taken by the coup leaders. If, on the other hand, he becomes “reasonable” and abandons his mild reforms, he will be praised for his “statesmanlike” behavior. If sufficiently obedient to the neoliberal agenda, he may then be returned to power, but having abandoned his base, he will be so weakened that when elections take place, the candidate supported by the coup leaders will likely win, thus accomplishing the primary political goal of the coup by the Obama administration. Obama will then praise the triumph of “democracy” in Central America.

The beauty of this strategy is that all Obama and Clinton have to do to accomplish it is to make lots of vague statements condemning the coup and cutting off token amounts of military aid. Simply by neglecting to perform any act that would actually accomplish his return, which they can justify as a non-interventionist policy, they ensure that neoliberal policies will be enforced while keeping their hands clean. If Senor Zelaya finds himself unable to land in his country’s airports because of U.S. funded air power, that’s unfortunate, but the result of an internal struggle that the U.S. has no right to interfere with. The corporate media can be relied on to frame the story as the attempted return of a dangerous leftist to power, one supported by Chavez, Ortega, and Castro. Obama can then continue to claim the moral high ground while letting the situation drift in the coup leaders’ favor. The social forces that now support Zelaya will be worn down with time. Gradually, the Honduran people will get used to dictatorship and the de facto will morph into the constitutional, though not without “controversy”.

Thus the first step in the reversal of recent gains in Latin America for economic justice will have been accomplished.

God will Judge Israel

"At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital in the Gaza Strip. His name was Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob, and he was suffering from a lung infection which was treatable." - John Pilger, "Smile on the face of the tiger", June 11, 2009.

In the Talmud, it says, "Whoever saves a single life is as if he saved the whole world, whoever destroys a single life is as if he had destroyed the whole world."

"Denied basic equipment, the doctors in Gaza could do nothing. For weeks, the child’s parents had sought a permit from the Israelis to allow them to take him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where he would have been saved. Like many desperately sick people who apply for these permits, the parents were told they had never applied. Even if they had arrived at the Erez Crossing with an Israeli document in their hands, the odds are that they would have been turned back for refusing the demands of officials to spy or collaborate in some way." - John Pilger, "Smile on the face of the tiger", June 11, 2009.

In December and January of this year, Israeli forces brutally massacred hundreds of helpless civilians in Gaza, many of them children, a crime that will be remembered for generations to come. They have continued their slow-motion genocide by denying basic supplies and humanitarian aid to the Gazans. They have gone so far as to threaten to murder those bringing aid to the Gazans, even though they were in international waters and included former Congresspersons and Nobel Prize winners.

The current champion of Israel, Barack Obama, made a speech in Cairo the day after Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob died. The speech has been well-characterized as follows: "Naturally, unlike George W Bush, Obama did not say that 'you’re either with us or against us.' He smiled the smile and uttered 'many eloquent mood-music paragraphs and a smattering of quotations from the Holy Quran', noted the American international lawyer John Whitbeck. Beyond this, Obama offered no change, no plan, only a 'tired, morally bankrupt American mantra [which] essentially argues that only the rich, the strong, the oppressors and the enforcers of injustice (notably the Americans and Israelis) have the right to use violence, while the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the victims of oppression must... submit to their fate and accept whatever crumbs their betters may magnanimously deign suitable to let fall from their table.' And he offered not the slightest recognition that the world’s most numerous victims of terrorism are people of Muslim faith – a terrorism of western origin that dares not speak its name." - John Pilger, "Smile on the face of the tiger", June 11, 2009.

The people of Gaza have cried out to Yahweh and he has heard their cry. The Israelis will be destroyed, but not by our violence or the futile violence of the Palestinians, but by their self-inflicted destruction of their own humanity. What is the price of cold-blooded murder? The slaughter of thousands of innocent lives? From the viewpoint of the Domination System, there is no price to be paid for these crimes. But there is a God who cares about the widows and orphans which Israel has made.

The poor and needy ask for water, and there is none,
their tongue is parched with thirst,
I, Yahweh, will answer them,
I, the God of Israel, will not abandon them.

- Isaiah 41:17

What will the day of judgment mean for you, O Israel,
It will mean darkness, not light.

Oppression makes a wise man mad

Christians who truly believe that God can only be loved by doing justice to the oppressed must think through their convictions. To say that we are concerned about the poor, but that we have no competence in matters of social structure is a refusal of both responsibility and compassion. The attitude is well characterized by Walter Wink, a theologian whom I admire above all other living theologians, "No social struggle can hope to be effective if it only changes structural arrangement without altering their spirituality...We are not commission to create a new society; indeed, we are scarcely competent to do so. What the church can do best, though it does so all too seldom, is to delegitimate an unjust system and to create a spiritual counter climate. We may lack the wisdom to determine how homelessness can be solved; and our attempts as churches to feed, clothe, and house the homeless may only obscure the true causes of homelessness and fill us with false righteousness. But what we can do is create an insistent demand that homelessness be eradicated." - Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers.

Are we Christians incompetent to analyze the "true causes" of oppression? Have we not be commissioned to create a new society? Or did Jesus only commission us to found churches? Is the attitude above not simply another variation on the theme that spiritual and material concerns are safely isolated from each other? As the rulers of this society devoutly wish them to remain.

If Christ came to save the world, then did he only come to save it "spiritually", and not materially? "...is unrestricted fidelity to Jesus Christ to be reproached as preoccupation with the material? How are we going to give food to all who are hungry if we leave the means of production in private hands, which necessarily destine these means to the augmentation of capital and not to the satisfaction of the needs of the population?" And again, "The God of the Bible is knowable only in otherness, in the call for help of the poor, the orphan, the widow, the stranger...Our revolution is is directed toward the creation of the new human being. But unlike the attackers, we seek to posit the necessary means for the formation of this new human being. And the indispensable means is a new social structure." Jose Miranda, "Communism in the Bible".

The moral principle is that if you will the end, then you must will the effective means. Far from being incompetent to envision and implement new social structures, Christians led the way by founding communism in the Acts of the Apostles. It is only with the modern uncovering of the mechanism of social and economic oppression that Christians can take the next step toward the fulfillment of Jesus' vision. Only through common ownership of the means of life can that vision be fulfilled: "In conformity with the material position of the men belonging to this class, the first Christians put forward the demand for property in common - communism. What could be more natural? The people lacked means of subsistence and were dying of poverty. A religion which defended the people demanded that the rich should share with the poor the riches which ought to belong to all and not to a handful of privileged people; a religion which preached the equality of all men would have great success." - Rosa Luxemburg, "Socialism and the Church"

Communism was first established by Christians, as we learn from the words of a contemporary, "...these do not believe in fortunes, but they preach collective property and no one among them possesses more than the others. He who wishes to enter their order is obliged to put his fortune into their common property. That is why there is among them neither poverty nor luxury – all possessing all in common like brothers. They do not live in a city apart, but in each they have houses for themselves. If any strangers belonging to their religion come there, they share their property with them, and they can benefit from it as if it their own. Those people, even if previously unknown to each other, welcome one another, and their relations are very friendly. When traveling they carry nothing but a weapon for defense against robbers. In each city they have their steward, who distributes clothing and food to the travelers. Trade does not exist among them. However, if one of the members offers to another some object which he needs, he receives some other objects in exchange. But each can demand what he needs even if he can give nothing in exchange."

Such was the origin of Communism. The original Christians did not consider themselves incompetent to envision and implement new social structures, but considered such implementation the fulfillment of Jesus' vision of the kingdom of God. However, the effort ultimately failed because of an inability to challenge the underlying mechanism of wealth and poverty, precisely the weakness that continues to be encouraged among Christians today.

Economic conditions are far more compelling than the most insistent spiritual demands. If we truly love our neighbor, then we will create material conditions in which our neighbor can flourish. The Church continues to fail in this responsibility and its excuse is that "We are incompetent in matters of social and political structures." This from an institution that structured the politics of entire continents for centuries.

The more fundamental cause is fingered by Luxemburg, "The communism, this community of the consumption of goods, which the early Christians proclaimed, could not be brought into existence without the communal labor of the whole population, on the land, as common property, as well as in the communal workshops. At the period of the early Christians, it was impossible to inaugurate communal labor (with communal means of production) because as we have already stated, the labor rested, not upon free men, but upon the slaves, who lived on the edge of society. Christianity did not undertake to abolish the inequality between the labor of different men, nor between their property. And that is why its efforts to suppress the unequal distribution of consumption goods did not work. The voices of the Fathers of the Church proclaiming Communism found no echo: Besides, these voices soon became less and less frequent and finally fell silent altogether. The Fathers of the Church ceased to preach the community, and the dividing up of goods, because the growth of the Christian community produced fundamental changes within the Church itself."

The Christians among us today are sitting in Israeli jails for bringing humanitarian supplies to those who represent the face of Jesus today - the Palestinians of Gaza. Jesus lives in their dignity and courage in the face of a power structure that denies their right to exist.

"Israel’s murderous 22-day offensive last December/January left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties, 200 schools, 39 mosques and two churches damaged or destroyed. The International Committee of the Red Cross says the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza are 'trapped in despair', unable to rebuild their lives because Israel, having wantonly wrecked their civil society and infrastructure, is blocking efforts to bring in the necessary repair materials. Those on board the Spirit of Humanity were acting in accord with donors’ pledges of $4.5 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation and US President Obama’s request to Israel to let those supplies pass." - Stuart Littlewood, Dissident Voice, July 4, 2009.

Let all of our prayers be with the followers of Christ sitting in Israeli jails or in the words of Isaiah, "Justice will go before you/ And the glory of Yahweh behind you." - Isaiah 58:8

Christianity is Communism

To be a Christian is to fight for the poor. Not to fight for justice means not to know God. Therefore it is impossible to be a Christian and not to be a true communist, though the converse is not true.

Christianity is fundamentally incompatible with anti-Communism since communism is the primary social legacy of the Christian path to truth. More to the point in these days of "hope" and "change", Christianity is fundamentally incompatible with neoliberalism. No real "change" is possible unless capitalism is forcefully remounced.

"Obama and his auto commission have decided to use the power of the capitalist state to impose a solution fully in keeping with neoliberalism. Whatever the ultimate outcome for GM and Chrysler, the industry would be modeled on the lean and mean transplants: competitive, profit-making machines with weak or no unions. Finance would retain a dominant role in deciding its priorities. And the demand for short-term profitability, discouraging longer-term investments and costly new technology, would come at the expense of the environment. The administration is using its power to force reluctant bondholders to accept hugely discounted returns, in the name of the broader interests of the capitalist class as a whole. It is using the threat of bankruptcy to force workers to accept further job loss, reductions in wages, benefits, pension rights, work intensification, and deteriorating working conditions. The firing of Wagoner was an effort to appeal to the growing anger of many Americans with the greedy CEO’s of the financial sector — while making no real fundamental changes, other than reinforcing the disciplining power of Wall Street financial interests. In a similar way, in appearing to be equally harsh with both bondholders and the UAW, the administration maintains a façade of fairness — even though workers will end up paying with their basic livelihoods and pensions."- Herman Rosenfield, "The North American Auto Industry in Crisis", Monthly Review, June 2009

The above is a key example of that which negates Christianity. Christianity is about social justice or it is an idol that puts its worshipers into a state of advanced stupor. We Christians are called to remove the workers of iniquity from the field of the world, not in a mythological way, following the Disneyland theology popular throughout North America, but in a real way, by eliminating the causes of injustice. In the real fields of the kingdom which we currently inhabit, the primary cause of injustice and environmental inferno is the ideology John Paul II referred to as savage capitalism. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of God, which exists beneath our feet on this beautiful earth. It is a spiritual realm indeed - the spirit of justice that lives within our hearts. There is no heaven other than the one that God creates in those hearts.

The concept of a kingdom that is not of this earth is completely unBiblical. When Jesus said, "I am not of this world,", he did not mean that he existed in some spiritual realm apart from the planet Earth. Instead, his statement had a spiritual meaning, "I am not of this system, but I bring a new system into existence with my presence, one in which the relations of domination and subordination no longer exist."

The Kingdom of God is among us.

"Oh, do not let the oppressed return ashamed!
Let the poor and needy praise Your name." - Psalm 74:21

"For God is my King from of old,
Working salvation in the midst of the earth." - Psalm 74:12

There is no Biblical concept of a permanent spiritual realm apart from the earth where we will one day live, abandoning the earth to its wickedness. Instead, the Bible teaches us that we must be part of the transformation of the earth into the Kingdom of God. We have failed our mission miserably and this failure is justified by escapist dreams of a heaven where all our earthly omissions will be forgotten. Deep down, each Christian knows that the gospel of Jesus Christ was not that there is a heaven where we can escape from all earthly suffering. Instead, the kingdom of God is within us and it blazes up whenever we fight for social justice.

The Way Forward

The following ideas are from a long-time struggler for social justice, Marta Harnecker, now living in Venezuela:

"1. Popular movements and, more generally, various social actors who are engaged in the struggle against neoliberal globalization today at the international level as well as in their own countries reject, with good reason, actions that aim to impose hegemony on movements. They don’t accept the steamroller policy often used by some political and social organizations that, taking advantage of their position of strength and monopolizing positions of leadership, attempt to manipulate movements. They don’t accept the authoritarian imposition of leadership from above; they don’t accept attempts made to lead movements by simply giving orders, no matter how correct they are.

2. Such a hegemonist attitude, instead of bringing forces together, has the opposite effect. On the one hand, it creates discontent in the other organizations; they feel manipulated, obligated to accept decisions in which they’ve had no participation; and on the other hand, it reduces the number of allies, given that an organization that assumes such a position is incapable of representing the real interests of all sectors of the population and often provokes mistrust and scepticism among them.

3. But to fight against an attempt to impose hegemony does not mean renouncing the fight to win hegemony, which is nothing but an attempt to win over and persuade others of the correctness of our criteria and the validity of our proposals.

4. To win hegemony, it’s not necessary to have many adherents from the beginning — a few are enough. The hegemony achieved by the Movimiento 26 de Julio (July 26 Movement), led by Fidel Castro in Cuba, seems to us to be a sufficiently convincing example of this.

5. More important than creating a powerful party with a large number of militants is establishing a political project that reflects the people’s most deeply felt aspirations and thus wins their hearts and minds. What is important is that its politics succeeds in procuring the support of the masses and creating consensus among the majority of society.

6. Some parties boast about the large numbers of militants that they have, but, in fact, they lead only their members. The key is not whether the party is large or small; what matters is that a majority of the people feel identified with its proposals.

7. Instead of imposing and manipulating, we need to convince and unite all who feel attracted to the project to be implemented. And we can only unite people if we respect others, if we are capable of sharing responsibilities with other forces."

I think what Marta Harnecker is saying here is extremely significant, especially when taken in conjunction with her first article. “But to fight against an attempt to impose hegemony does not mean renouncing the fight to win hegemony, which is nothing but an attempt to win over and persuade others of the correctness of our criteria and the validity of our proposals.” This is where much of the American left seems to break down. Since the vast majority of the American left arises in the universities, intellectual trends there have huge impact on political strategies. Post-modernism, which entered the scene in the 70s as a ultra-radical trend, has long shown its deep compatibility with the neoliberal empire. By characterizing traditional leftism as a totalizing ideology, an attempt to impose uniformity on meaning, this ideology has dealt a severe blow to attempts to create social justice. We must return to the straightforward strategy advocated by Harnecker – respect for all those social forces that resist neoliberalism and reasoned persuasion to a leftist perspective. We must become the free and open intellectuals and activists that our vision proclaims. I think particularly of Eugene V. Debs who acted as a passionate and deeply persuasive voice for those whose interests were ignored. The bonds of unity should be created through shared responsibilities in practice rather than striving for theoretical unity. These forces will coalesce when we develop the attractive power to bring them together. Theoretical unity must arise from practical unity. At the same time, we must acknowledge that the current political system is not an appropriate instrument for enabling the systemic change that is necessary. It is structured to redirect the energy for social justice into channels that doom that energy to support for neoliberal policies. I think her ideas represent a way forward, an abandonment of organizational egoism in support of the greater cause.

The Triumph of Illusion

The drumbeat of betrayal is relentless. So far Obama has broken every progressive promise. Let’s examine the record as laid bare in Paul Street’s recent article, “The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left”, znet, May 30, 2009, then we will examine the spiritual pathology that underlies the self-deception of progressives regarding “hope” and “change”. So far the record is blazingly clear. Obama has extended and intensified the previous human rights assaults of the Clinton and Bush years. He has acted vigorously to:

“* Significantly expand the reach and intensity of imperial violence (replete with the mass slaughter of civilians and the related escalation of targeted assassinations) in South Asia.
* Promote a notorious assassin and death-squad leader (Lt. General Stanley A. Chrystal - former chief of the military's special Joint Special Operations Command) to the position of Commander of U.S. Forces in the newly merged ‘Af-Pak’ war theater.
* Sustain the criminal occupation of Iraq beneath rhetoric of withdrawal.” Essentially, we must remain in Iraq as long as the world remains “dangerous and unpredictable”, which it might be for some time to come – at least until the capitalist cancer has managed to make over the earth in its own spiritual image.
“ * Increase ‘defense’ (empire) spending, consistent with the following statement in a report issued by the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley one day after Obama's presidential election victory: "As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend."
* Revive military commissions.
* Continue the practice of renditions.
* Maintain secret prisons for persons ‘held on a short-term, transitory basis.’
* Continue the unspeakable torture of prisoners by an ‘extrajudicial terror squad’ (Jeremy Scahill's description of the Pentagon's sadistic ‘Immediate Reaction Force’ in Cuba) at Guantanamo Bay.
* Advance the policy of ‘indefinite detention’ (potentially permanent incarceration) for Guantanamo prisoners for whom no legally compelling evidence can be marshaled.
* Intimidate England (with a threat to withhold intelligence data on potential terrorist attacks!) into preventing a Guantanamo victim from having his day in court on the Bush administration's torture practices.
* Sustain the Bush administration's abrogation of habeas corpus rights in regard to the roughly 600 "enemy combatants" kept at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan (where people rendered out of other countries like Yemen and England can be considered ‘war [-zone]’ prisoners!.
* Advance nauseatingly specious legal and moral arguments (‘better to look forward than backward’) to prevent serious federal investigation of the Bush administration's human rights crimes.
* Sustain George W. Bush's domestic wiretapping program.
* Invoke the ‘state secrets’ (akin to the divine right of kings) doctrine to prevent disclosure of evidence in response to lawsuits emerging from Bush era rendition and surveillance policies.
* Suppress photographic evidence of U.S. torture practices.
* Justify all this and more in the name of the supposed ‘global war on terror’ that was supposedly launched in legitimate defense against the supposedly unprovoked jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001.
* Disregard qualified progressive defenders of civil liberties and human rights from consideration for appointment to succeed Supreme Justice David H. Souter and to thereby counter the hard right leanings of the court's conservative majority.
* Send clear signals of intent to roll back and partially privatize Social Security and Medicare benefits.
* Betray campaign pledges to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to insert stronger labor and environmental protections.
* Betray campaign pledges of serious intent to advance an elementary and overdue labor law reform (the Employee Free Choice Act).
* Force and approve an automobile industry re-structuring that drastically cuts domestic autoworkers' jobs, wages and benefits while subsidizing General Motors' further shifting of jobs abroad. [8]
* Advance a tepid, business-friendly health care ‘reform’ that leaves the leading parasitic insurance corporations (major campaign sponsors of his) in power.
* ‘Methodically erase single-payer advocates from the picture’ (Glen Ford) of health care reform despite the fact that a majority of Americans have long favored a single-payer (‘Medicare for all’) health insurance system.
* Spend trillions of federal dollars on taxpayer handouts to giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign and who drove the economy over the cliff. Obama's Wall Street bailout rejects the elementary bank nationalizations and public financial restructuring that are required to put the nation's credit system on a sound and socially responsible basis, choosing instead to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries' toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management in place. It amounts to a giant effort to ‘keep perpetrators afloat’ (liberal economist James Gailbraith) through a scheme in which the government takes more than 90 percent of the risk but private investors reap at least half the reward. “

I replied to the article on znet as follows:
The response of progressives has indeed been disheartening, primarily because it indicates despair and detachment from reality. Despair because somehow the assumption has seeped into political discourse that Obama is the best progressives can realistically hope for these days. Such "hope" is just a mask for a practical abandonment of hope for significant change. However, the detachment from reality is more frightening because facing the truth of the situation provides the only possible remedy to despair. Our inability to face the facts about Obama before and after the election is part of a larger failure - the failure to penetrate to the core of the issues of economic power relations in this country and to realize that they can't be reformed, but only overturned.

As Christians, we cannot tolerate illusion. Jesus teaches us to look truth square in the face. We cannot join in the cynicism of believing that the Democratic Party represents a true alternative to the Republican Party. Only an economic system that privileges human need over the rights of property owners can conform to the promise of the Gospel.

The Death of Law

In the words of Brecht's Galileo, "Happy the land that has the rule of law, but sad the land that needs it." And few nations have starved for it more that the U.S. does at present. Barbaric as are Cheney's ideas about the necessity for torture, he is at least correct in declaring that there can be no middle ground regarding political commitment to the security state. Either one believes that national security is more important than the rule of law, as does Cheney, or one believes that the loss of the rule of law is a disaster beside which a dozen 9/11s pale into insignificance. Obama seeks a "centrist" path in this debate. This choice involves treating some people as without legal rights, specifically, "...even as he paid repeated homage to 'our values' and 'our timeless ideals,' he demanded the power (albeit with unspecified judicial and Congressional oversight) to keep people in prison with no charges or proof of any crime having been committed".

But there is no centrist path in this debate or rather moral crisis. Either one believes that all human beings have essential rights, no matter how "evil" they might be or one believes that national security concerns trump such legal rights. The centrist strategy results in focusing on the job of deciding who is "evil" enough to lose all their human rights. In time, legal ethicists will weigh in on the question and precise degrees of threat will be defined beyond which persons will lose all their humanity, and with it, our obligation to refrain from torturing, starving, or murdering them.

Much as I regret the conclusion, the "centrist" path of Obama may turn out to be far more degrading to our humanity that the open brutalism of Cheney. While the former vice president prioritizes the physical security of our citizens over human dignity, Obama exalts these values rhetorically while degrading them in practice in a way far more insidious, but probably much more to the purpose.

Capitalism - a Failed System

"Capitalism, in many respects, has become a failed system in terms of the ecology, economy, and world stability. It can hardly be said to deliver the goods in any substantive sense, and yet in its process of unrestrained acquisition it is undermining the long-term prospects of humanity and the earth." - "Capitalism in Wonderland", Monthly Review, April 2009.

""The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change, and the disease is the capitalist development model.”

— Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, September 2007

Humanity’s Choice

by Ian Angus

"Humanity today faces a stark choice: ecosocialism or barbarism.

We need no more proof of the barbarity of capitalism, the parasitical system that exploits humanity and nature alike. Its sole motor is the imperative toward profit and thus the need for constant growth. It wastefully creates unnecessary products, squandering the environment’s limited resources and returning to it only toxins and pollutants. Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much more is sold every day, every week, every year – involving the creation of vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, commodities that cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil like sewers for the disposal of industrial waste.

Capitalism’s need for growth exists on every level, from the individual enterprise to the system as a whole. The insatiable hunger of corporations is facilitated by imperialist expansion in search of ever greater access to natural resources, cheap labor and new markets. Capitalism has always been ecologically destructive, but in our lifetimes these assaults on the earth have accelerated. Quantitative change is giving way to qualitative transformation, bringing the world to a tipping point, to the edge of disaster. A growing body of scientific research has identified many ways in which small temperature increases could trigger irreversible, runaway effects – such as rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of methane buried in permafrost and beneath the ocean – that would make catastrophic climate change inevitable.

Left unchecked, global warming will have devastating effects on human, animal and plant life. Crop yields will drop drastically, leading to famine on a broad scale. Hundreds of millions of people will be displaced by droughts in some areas and by rising ocean levels in others. Chaotic, unpredictable weather will become the norm. Air, water and soil will be poisoned. Epidemics of malaria, cholera and even deadlier diseases will hit the poorest and most vulnerable members of every society.

The impact of the ecological crisis is felt most severely by those whose lives have already been ravaged by imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and indigenous peoples everywhere are especially vulnerable. Environmental destruction and climate change constitute an act of aggression by the rich against the poor.

Ecological devastation, resulting from the insatiable need to increase profits, is not an accidental feature of capitalism: it is built into the system’s DNA and cannot be reformed away. Profit-oriented production only considers a short-term horizon in its investment decisions, and cannot take into account the long-term health and stability of the environment. Infinite economic expansion is incompatible with finite and fragile ecosystems, but the capitalist economic system cannot tolerate limits on growth; its constant need to expand will subvert any limits that might be imposed in the name of “sustainable development.” Thus the inherently unstable capitalist system cannot regulate its own activity, much less overcome the crises caused by its chaotic and parasitical growth, because to do so would require setting limits upon accumulation – an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die!"