Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

The Potlatch Ban (Canada)

History

Potlatch, in Chinook jargon refers to “the different ceremonies among [the] many nations of the Pacific Northwest that… [include] feasting, dancing and giving gifts to all in attendance”. The British Columbia Indian Office, specifically the Indian Commissioner, I.W.Powell, had found the native peoples to be rich and hardy, but also found they appeared as if they were poor. This finding led to further research on the subject of Potlatches where it was found that to the indigenous peoples, the Potlatch was a great institution. It encouraged people to give away their earnings and possessions in exchange, the giver would receive a great deal of respect and be seen as honourable to his tribe and others.

However, John A Macdonald did not see this tradition as valuable or appropriate and, under the guise of unifying the Dominion of Canada, encouraged the government to lay “an iron hand on the shoulders of the [native] people” by restricting some of their non-essential, inappropriate rituals and leading them towards what he perceived as a ‘healthier’ European mindset. Work thus began on an amendment to the Indian Act of 1880. Some criticized the idea, such as James Benjamin McCullagh in his essay on the tribal lifestyle of the indigenous peoples of Canada, The Indian Potlatch.

In the third section of the Indian Act, signed on April 19, 1884, it was declared that:

Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the “Potlatch” or in the Indian dance known as the “Tamanawas” is guilty of a misdemeanor, and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than six nor less than two months in any gaol or other place of confinement; and every Indian or persons who encourages… an Indian to get up such a festival… shall be liable to the same punishment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Potlat ... 8Canada%29

[American Dream]

Their thoughts are not exactly my thoughts but I did think that this manifesto from the first edition of Race Traitor was worth posting:

http://racetraitor.org/

Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary


The white race is a historically constructed social formation - historically constructed because (like royalty) it is a product of some people's responses to historical circumstances; a social formation because it is a fact of society corresponding to no classification recognized by natural science.

The white race cuts across ethnic and class lines. It is not coextensive with that portion of the population of European descent, since many of those classified as "colored" can trace some of their ancestry to Europe, while African, Asian, or American Indian blood flows through the veins of many considered white. Nor does membership in the white race imply wealth, since there are plenty of poor whites, as well as some people of wealth and comfort who are not white.

The white race consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society. Its most wretched members share a status higher, in certain respects, than that of the most exalted persons excluded from it, in return for which they give their support to the system that degrades them.

The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race. Until that task is accomplished, even partial reform will prove elusive, because white influence permeates every issue in U.S. society, whether domestic or foreign.

Advocating the abolition of the white race is distinct from what is called "anti-racism." The term "racism" has come to be applied to a variety of attitudes, some of which are mutually incompatible, and has been devalued to mean little more than a tendency to dislike some people for the color of their skin. Moreover, anti-racism admits the natural existence of "races" even while opposing social distinctions among them. The abolitionists maintain, on the contrary, that people were not favored socially because they were white; rather they were defined as "white" because they were favored. Race itself is a product of social discrimination; so long as the white race exists, all movements against racism are doomed to fail.

The existence of the white race depends on the willingness of those assigned to it to place their racial interests above class, gender or any other interests they hold. The defection of enough of its members to make it unreliable as a determinant of behavior will set off tremors that will lead to its collapse.

RACE TRAITOR aims to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race. It will encourage dissent from the conformity that maintains it and popularize examples of defection from its ranks, analyze the forces that hold it together and those which promise to tear it apart. Part of its task will be to promote debate among abolitionists. When possible, it will support practical measures, guided by the principle, Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity. Dissolve the club

The white race is a club, which enrolls certain people at birth, without their consent, and brings them up according to its rules. For the most part the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the costs. When individuals question the rules, the officers are quick to remind them of all they owe to the club, and warn them of the dangers they will face if they leave it.

RACE TRAITOR aims to dissolve the club, to break it apart, to explode it. Some people who sympathize with our aim have asked us how we intend to win over the majority of so-called whites to anti-racism. Others, usually less friendly, have asked if we plan to exterminate physically millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people. Neither of these plans is what we have in mind. The weak point of the club is its need for unanimity. Just as the South, on launching the Civil War, declared that it needed its entire territory and would have it, the white race must have the support of all those it has designated as its constituency, or it ceases to exist.

Elsewhere in this number, readers will find an account of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and some of the events it set in motion. Before the Civil War, the leading spokesmen for the slaveholders acknowledged that the majority of white northerners, swayed above all by the presence of the fugitive slave, considered slavery unjust. The Southerners also understood that the opposition was ineffective; however much the white people of the north disapproved of the slave system, the majority went along with it rather than risk the ordinary comforts of their lives, meager as they were in many cases.

When John Brown attacked Harpers Ferry, Southern pro- slavery leaders reacted with fury: they imposed a boycott on northern manufactures, demanded new concessions from the government in Washington, and began to prepare for war. When they sought to portray John Brown as a representative of northern opinion, Southern leaders were wrong; he represented only a small and isolated minority. But they were also right, for he expressed the hopes that still persisted in the northern population despite decades of cringing before the slaveholders. Virginia did not fear John Brown and his small band of followers, but his soul that would go marching on, though his body lay a-mould'rin' in the grave.

When the South, in retaliation for Harpers Ferry, sought to further bully northern opinion, it did so not out of paranoia but out of the realistic assessment that only a renewal of the national pro-slavery vows could save a system whose proud facade concealed a fragile foundation. By the arrogance of their demands, the Southern leaders compelled the people of the north to resist. Not ideas but events were in command. Each step led inexorably to the next: Southern land-greed, Lincoln's victory, secession, war, blacks as laborers, soldiers, citizens, voters. And so the war that began with not one person in a hundred foreseeing the end of slavery was transformed within two years into an anti-slavery war.

It is our faith - and with those who do not share it we shall not argue - that the majority of so-called whites in this country are neither deeply nor consciously committed to white supremacy; like most human beings in most times and places, they would do the right thing if it were convenient. As did their counterparts before the Civil War, most go along with a system that disturbs them, because the consequences of challenging it are terrifying. They close their eyes to what is happening around them, because it is easier not to know.

At rare moments their nervous peace is shattered, their certainty is shaken, and they are compelled to question the common sense by which they normally live. One such moment was in the days immediately following the Rodney King verdict, when a majority of white Americans were willing to admit to polltakers that black people had good reasons to rebel, and some joined them. Ordinarily the moments are brief, as the guns and reform programs are moved up to restore order and, more important, the confidence that matters are in good hands and they can go back to sleep. Both the guns and the reform programs are aimed at whites as well as blacks - the guns as a warning and the reform programs as a salve to their consciences.

Recently, one of our editors, unfamiliar with New York City traffic laws, made an illegal right turn there on a red light. He was stopped by two cops in a patrol car. After examining his license, they released him with a courteous admonition. Had he been black, they probably would have ticketed him, and might even have taken him down to the station. A lot of history was embodied in that small exchange: the cops treated the miscreant leniently at least in part because they assumed, looking at him, that he was white and therefore loyal. Their courtesy was a habit meant both to reward good conduct and induce future cooperation.

Had the driver cursed them, or displayed a bumper sticker that said, "Avenge Rodney King," the cops might have reacted differently. We admit that neither gesture on the part of a single individual would in all likelihood be of much consequence. But if enough of those who looked white broke the rules of the club to make the cops doubt their ability to recognize a white person merely by looking at him or her, how would it affect the cops' behavior? And if the police, the courts, and the authorities in general were to start spreading around indiscriminately the treatment they normally reserve for people of color, how would the rest of the so-called whites react?

How many dissident so-called whites would it take to unsettle the nerves of the white executive board? It is impossible to know. One John Brown - against a background of slave resistance - was enough for Virginia. Yet it was not the abolitionists, not even the transcendent John Brown, who brought about the mass shifts in consciousness of the Civil War period. At most, their heroic deeds were part of a chain of events that involved mutual actions and reactions on a scale beyond anything they could have anticipated - until a war that began with both sides fighting for slavery (the South to take it out of the Union, the north to keep it in) ended with a great army marching through the land singing, "As He died to make men holy, let us fight to make men free."

The moments when the routine assumptions of race break down are the seismic promise that somewhere in the tectonic flow a new fault is building up pressure, a new Harpers Ferry is being prepared. Its nature and timing cannot be predicted, but of its coming we have no doubt. When it comes, it will set off a series of tremors that will lead to the disintegration of the white race. We want to be ready, walking in Jerusalem just like John. What kind of journal is this?

RACE TRAITOR exists, not to make converts, but to reach out to those who are dissatisfied with the terms of membership in the white club. Its primary intended audience will be those people commonly called whites who, in one way or another, understand whiteness to be a problem that perpetuates injustice and prevents even the well-disposed among them from joining unequivocally in the struggle for human freedom. By engaging these dissidents in a journey of discovery into whiteness and its discontents, we hope to take part, together with others, in the process of defining a new human community. We wish neither to minimize the complicity of even the most downtrodden of whites with the system of white supremacy nor to exaggerate the significance of momentary departures from white rules.

We should say that there are some articles we are not interested in publishing. Since we are not seeking converts, we probably will not publish articles which lecture various organizations about their racial opportunism. Also we probably will not publish articles promoting inter-racial harmony, because that approach too often leaves intact differential treatment of whites and blacks and provides subtle confirmation of the idea that different races exist independently of social distinctions.

In the original film version of ROBIN HOOD (starring Errol Flynn), the Sheriff of Nottingham says to Robin, "You speak treason." Robin replies, "Fluently." We hope to do the same.



From Race Traitor no. 1 (Winter 1993)

[Plutonia]

The Potlatch Ban (Canada)

History

Potlatch, in Chinook jargon refers to “the different ceremonies among [the] many nations of the Pacific Northwest that… [include] feasting, dancing and giving gifts to all in attendance”. The British Columbia Indian Office, specifically the Indian Commissioner, I.W.Powell, had found the native peoples to be rich and hardy, but also found they appeared as if they were poor. This finding led to further research on the subject of Potlatches where it was found that to the indigenous peoples, the Potlatch was a great institution. It encouraged people to give away their earnings and possessions in exchange, the giver would receive a great deal of respect and be seen as honourable to his tribe and others.

However, John A Macdonald did not see this tradition as valuable or appropriate and, under the guise of unifying the Dominion of Canada, encouraged the government to lay “an iron hand on the shoulders of the [native] people” by restricting some of their non-essential, inappropriate rituals and leading them towards what he perceived as a ‘healthier’ European mindset. Work thus began on an amendment to the Indian Act of 1880. Some criticized the idea, such as James Benjamin McCullagh in his essay on the tribal lifestyle of the indigenous peoples of Canada, The Indian Potlatch.

In the third section of the Indian Act, signed on April 19, 1884, it was declared that:

Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the “Potlatch” or in the Indian dance known as the “Tamanawas” is guilty of a misdemeanor, and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than six nor less than two months in any gaol or other place of confinement; and every Indian or persons who encourages… an Indian to get up such a festival… shall be liable to the same punishment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Potlat ... 8Canada%29

They (potlatches) continued in secret, AD. When I was a kid, I knew people who attended one while it was still illegal.

[American Dream]

They (potlatches) continued in secret, AD. When I was a kid, I knew people who attended one while it was still illegal.

Resistance is...inevitable...

[Plutonia]

They (potlatches) continued in secret, AD. When I was a kid, I knew people who attended one while it was still illegal.

Resistance is...inevitable...

Yeah. I think that's part of what TPTB don't want us to ever see- that despite the "rules", prohibitions and what-not, control can never be 100% and that some people at least will find the spaces where they can keep doing their thing.

[American Dream]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/print/3751/

The Ambiguous Legacy of ‘68

Forty years ago, what was revolutionized -- the world or capitalism?

By Slavoj Žižek June 20, 2008


In 2005, France saw an increase in violence and damages
caused by suburban rioting around the country



In 1968 Paris, one of the best-known graffiti messages on the city's walls was "Structures do not walk on the streets!" In other words, the massive student and workers demonstrations of '68 could not be explained in the terms of structuralism, as determined by the structural changes in society, as in Saussurean structuralism. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's response was that this, precisely, is what happened in '68: structures did descend onto the streets. The visible explosive events on the streets were, ultimately, the result of a structural imbalance.

There are good reasons for Lacan's skeptical view. As French scholars Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello noted in 1999's The New Spirit of Capitalism, from the '70s onward, a new form of capitalism emerged.

Capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process -- which, named after auto maker Henry Ford, enforced a hierarchical and centralized chain of command -- and developed a network-based form of organization that accounted for employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. As a result, we get networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in teams or by projects, intent on customer satisfaction and public welfare, or worrying about ecology.

In this way, capitalism usurped the left's rhetoric of worker self-management, turning it from an anti-capitalist slogan to a capitalist one. It was Socialism that was conservative, hierarchic and administrative.

The anti-capitalist protests of the '60s supplemented the traditional critique of socioeconomic exploitation with a new cultural critique: alienation of everyday life, commodification of consumption, inauthenticity of a mass society in which we "wear masks" and suffer sexual and other oppressions.

The new capitalism triumphantly appropriated this anti-hierarchical rhetoric of '68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism and "really existing" socialism. This new libertarian spirit is epitomized by dressed-down "cool" capitalists such as Microsoft's Bill Gates and the founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

What survived of the sexual liberation of the '60s was the tolerant hedonism readily incorporated into our hegemonic ideology. Today, sexual enjoyment is not only permitted, it is ordained -- individuals feel guilty if they are not able to enjoy it. The drive to radical forms of enjoyment (through sexual experiments and drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when "the spirit of '68" had exhausted its political potential.

At this critical point in the mid-'70s, we witnessed a direct, brutal push-toward-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: first, the search for extreme forms of sexual enjoyment; second, the turn toward the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism); and, finally, the rise of leftist political terrorism (Red Army Faction in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.).

Leftist political terror operated under the belief that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed in capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative. Only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence could awaken them.

What these three options share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement, and we feel the consequences of this withdrawal from engagement today.

Autumn 2005's suburb riots in France saw thousands of cars burning and a major outburst of public violence. But what struck the eye was the absence of any positive utopian vision among protesters. If May '68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the 2005 revolt was an outburst with no pretense to vision.

Here's proof of the common aphorism that we live in a post-ideological era: The protesters in the Paris suburbs made no particular demands. There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, non-articulated resentment.

The fact that there was no program in the burning of Paris suburbs tells us that we inhabit a universe in which, though it celebrates itself as a society of choice, the only option available to the enforced democratic consensus is the explosion of (self-)destructive violence.

Recall here Lacan's challenge to the protesting students in '68: "As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one."

And we did get one -- in the guise of the post-modern "permissive" master whose domination is all the stronger for being less visible.

While many undoubtedly positive changes accompanied this passage -- such as new freedoms and access to positions of power for women -- one should nonetheless raise hard questions: Was this passage from one "spirit of capitalism" to another really all that happened in '68? Was all the drunken enthusiasm of freedom just a means to replacing one form of domination with another?

Things are not so simple. While '68 was gloriously appropriated by the dominant culture as an explosion of sexual freedom and anti-hierarchic creativity, France's Nicholas Sarkozy said in his 2007 presidential campaign that his great task is to make France finally get over '68.

So, what we have is "their" and "our" May '68. In today's ideological memory, "our" basic idea of the May demonstrations -- the link between students' protests and workers' strikes -- is forgotten.

If we look at our predicament with the eyes of '68, we should remember that, at its core, '68 was a rejection of the liberal-capitalist system, a "NO" to the totality of it.

It is easy to make fun of political economist Francis Fukuyama's notion of the "end of history," of his claim that, in liberal capitalism, we found the best possible social system. But today, the majority is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula for the best of all possible worlds, all that is left to do is render it more just, tolerant, etc.

When Marco Cicala, an Italian journalist, recently used the word "capitalism" in an article for the Italian daily La Repubblica, his editor asked him if the use of this term was necessary and could he not replace it with a synonym like "economy"?

What better proof of capitalism's triumph in the last three decades than the disappearance of the very term "capitalism"? So, again, the only true question today is: Do we endorse this naturalization of capitalism, or does today's global capitalism contain contradictions strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?

There are (at least) four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property rights for so-called "intellectual property"; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, new forms of apartheid, in the form of new walls and slums.

The first three antagonisms concern the domains of what political theorists Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call "commons" -- the shared substance of our social being whose privatization is a violent act that should be resisted with violent means, if necessary (violence against private property, that is).

The commons of external nature are threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to forests and natural habitat itself); the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity) are threatened by technological interference; and the commons of culture -- the socialized forms of "cognitive" capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. -- are privatized for profit. (If Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have owned the software texture of our basic network of communication.)

We are gradually becoming aware of the destructive potential, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, that could be unleashed if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run.

Economist Nicholas Stern rightly characterized the climate crisis as "the greatest market failure in human history."

There is an increasing awareness that we need global environmental citizenship, a political space to address climate change as a matter of common concern of all humanity.

One should give weight to the terms "global citizenship" and "common concern." Doesn't this desire to establish a global political organization and engagement that will neutralize and channel market forces mean that we are in need of a properly communist perspective? The need to protect the "commons" justifies the resuscitation of the notion of Communism: It enables us to see the ongoing "enclosure" of our commons as a process of proletarization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance.

It is, however, only the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded that properly justifies the term Communism. In slums around the world, we are witnessing the fast growth of a population outside state control, living in conditions outside the law, in terrible need of minimal forms of self-organization. Although marginalized laborers, redundant civil servants and ex-peasants make up this population, they are not simply a redundant surplus: They are incorporated into the global economy, many working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no adequate health or social security coverage. (The main source of their rise is the inclusion of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First World countries ruining local agriculture.) These new slum dwellers are not an unfortunate accident, but a necessary product of the innermost logic of global capitalism.

Whoever lives in the favelas -- or shanty towns -- of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, or in Shanghai, China, is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieues -- or outskirts -- of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago.

If the principal task of the 19th century's emancipatory politics was to break the monopoly of the bourgeois liberals by politicizing the working class, and if the task of the 20th century was to politically awaken the immense rural population of Asia and Africa, the principal task of the 21st century is to politicize -- organize and discipline -- the "destructured masses" of slum-dwellers.

If we ignore this problem of the Excluded, all other antagonisms lose their subversive edge.

Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development. Intellectual property turns into a complex legal challenge. Biogenetics becomes an ethical issue. Corporations -- like Whole Foods and Starbucks -- enjoy favor among liberals even though they engage in anti-union activities; they just sell products with a progressive spin.

You buy coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value.

You drive a hybrid vehicle.

You buy from companies that provide good benefits for their customers (according to corporation's standards).

In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases, and NewCorp's Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.

In contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have "nothing to lose but their chains," we are thus ALL in danger of losing ALL. The risk is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subjects deprived of substantial content, dispossessed of symbolic substance, our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

These triple threats to our being make all of us potential proletarians. And the only way to prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively.

The true legacy of '68 is best encapsulated in the formula Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible! (Let's be realists, demand the impossible.)

Today's utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely. The only way to be realistic is to envision what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.



Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He has also been a visiting professor at more than 10 universities around the world. Žižek is the author of many other books, including Living in the End Times, First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? He lives in London.

[American Dream]

http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/ ... osion.html

The Racial Wealth Gap’s Larger Than Ever

The racial wealth gap has been enormous ever since the Census Bureau began measuring it 25 years ago. But it has never been larger than today. The median wealth of a white family is now at least 20 times higher than that of a black family and 18 times that of a Latino family, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Pew looked at wealth numbers between 2005 and the technical end of the U.S. recession in 2009. It found that the racial wealth gap exploded in that time period, as blacks and Latinos suffered dramatic blows from the collapsed housing market. Median wealth—the net value of your assets versus your debts—fell by 66 percent among Latino households and 53 percent among black households, while it fell just 16 percent among white households. By 2009, median black and Latino families each held less than $7,000 in wealth; the median white family held $113,149.




That’s a lot of numbers. But they all add up to something quite simple: When the economy struggles, those who are least secure get crushed. That’s nothing new, and neither is Washington’s refusal to deal with it. With the exception of the aggressive efforts to create a white middle class following World War II, U.S. economic policy has never encouraged economic equality. What’s new today is how much economic policy actually facilitates inequality.

Certainly the recent explosion in the wealth gap is owing to the fact that the little wealth black and Latino families hold is disproportionately locked up in homes. White families are far more likely to have jobs with retirement accounts and investments in the stock market. Those black and Latino families that have wealth depend on the housing market for it.

But that’s still more symptom than root cause. Black and Latino families are also far more likely to live in places crawling with expensive, deceptive consumer lending of all sorts, from car loans to refinance mortgages. They are more likely to turn to that lending because they make less money and because they already hold less wealth to cushion themselves in tough times. It’s an ugly cycle: inequality across the economy creates demand for predatory credit to bridge the gap, which in turn worsens inequality.

So things are right now growing dire in communities of color—with home wealth evaporating, joblessness lingering and wages falling, people have never been more vulnerable to predation. That’s a problem for people of color, yes, but it’s also a problem for the entire economy. After all, we already know what happens when we leave huge segments of our economy open to predatory credit—see under: subprime mortgages and global economic collapse. And with blacks and Latinos already accounting for roughly a third of the people whose labor and spending create the economy—a share that will increase dramatically in the next generation—this sort of deep inequality is simply untenable.

Richard Wolff: Debt Showdown is "Political Theater" Burdening Society’s Most Vulnerable

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/28/r ... _political

RICHARD WOLFF: The most amazing thing to me is that we talk about fixing a government budget that’s in trouble, and we don’t talk about the revenue side in a serious way. That is an amazing thing. If you look at what happened to the American budget over the last 20 or 30 years, the culprit is obvious. We have dropped corporate taxes. We have dropped taxes on the rich.

Let me give you a couple of examples to drive it home. If you go back to the 1940s, here’s what you discover, that the federal government got 50 percent more money year after year from corporations than it did from individuals. For every dollar that individuals paid in income tax, corporations paid $1.50. If you compare that to today, here are the numbers. For every dollar that individuals pay to the federal government, corporations pay 25 cents. That is a dramatic change that has no parallel in the rest of our tax code.

Another example. In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.

So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority.

AMY GOODMAN: And the argument that you give the money to the corporations and to the banks, and they will help people? They are the generator of jobs?

RICHARD WOLFF: The Republicans say it, and President Obama has said it repeatedly. He is going to provide incentives, he said, for years now. He is going to provide inducements and support for the private sector to put people back to work. We have a 9.2 percent unemployment rate. That’s what it’s been for the last two years. That policy has not worked. If corporations were going to do what the President gave them incentives to do, they would have done it. They’re not doing it. There’s no sign they’re going to do it. You have to face: that policy didn’t work.

What’s the alternative? Well, we don’t have to look far. Roosevelt, in the 1930s, the last time we faced this kind of situation, went on the radio in 1933 and 1934, and he gave speeches. And in those speeches, he said the following: if the private sector either cannot or will not provide work for millions of our citizens, ready, able and willing to work, then the government has to do it. And between 1934 and 1941, the federal government created and filled 11 million jobs.

The most amazing thing in the United States is not that we are not doing it. The most amazing thing is, there’s no bill to do it, there’s no discussion to do it. The president of the country never refers to it, keeps telling us—and the Republicans do the same—that the private sector is where we should focus our expectations. The private sector has answered: "We are not going to hire people here. We’re either going to hire no one, because we don’t like the way the economy looks, or we’re going to hire people in other countries, because they pay lower wages there." That’s a response of the private sector taking care of itself. It’s not a responsible way to run a society.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://thefirecollective.org/Opinion/zi ... arity.html

ZIZEK ON THE VIOLENCE OF CHARITY

POSTED ON Dec 29, 2009




"Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way... liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system."



Nobody has to be vile

by Slavoj Zizek

Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us (and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate – that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?

Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.

So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today, they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.
Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.

Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days; collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success. Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten commandments in the French magazine Technikart:

1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.

2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.

3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.

4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.

5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.

6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.

7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.

8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.

9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.

10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.

Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.

Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their companies was as important as the direct political struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company, paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive in post-apartheid South Africa.

Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the internet?

Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money). Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it (or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so, and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the majority, to help those in need).

Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent, humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have enough to eat?’

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.

Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.

[American Dream]

http://workersolidarity.org/?page_id=78

Where We Stand

Workers Solidarity Alliance was founded in November 1984. This statement expresses our shared political perspective. This statement was approved by the members of WSA in April 2008. If you agree with this statement, join us!

Where We Stand

Anti-capitalism

Capitalism is a system of oppression. A small class of capitalists owns the companies, production equipment, apartment buildings, and other economic assets. This puts them in control of our work and of the whole society. The working class is forced to rent our working abilities to the capitalists in order to live. The capitalists’ relentless drive for profits means they will speed up work, pollute the environment, or ignore unsafe conditions if it will help them make more profit.

The capitalists’ efforts to control our work and govern society led to the creation of a third class — the managers and elite professionals who staff the hierarchies of the corporations and the state. The subordination of the working class to the capitalist and bureaucratic classes is a system of oppression because it denies us control over our lives and subordinates life to the capitalist search for profit.

The ability of the elite classes to exploit our labor and dominate us has been limited throughout the history of capitalism by revolts and mass struggles of ordinary people. The working class can liberate itself through the development of self-managed mass movements that develop through the class struggle. We thus advocate a strategy for social change “from below,” based on mass participation, direct democracy, collective direct action and self-managed mass organizations.

The State

The modern state is controlled by hierarchies of managers and elite professionals, and politicians drawn from the capitalist and bureaucratic classes. The top-down armed bodies provide the state’s ultimate power.

These hierarchies separate the state from authentic popular control. This enables the state to govern society in the interests of dominating classes. The armed violence of the state is the last line of defense of the elite classes.

To maintain its ability to govern, the system needs to retain legitimacy in the eyes of the population. During periods of upheaval or severe class conflict, the state may offer concessions to the oppressed. This is the origin of the “social wage” — Medicare, welfare benefits, affordable housing subsidies, public transit subsidies, and so on. The revolutions and worker rebellions of the early 20th century led to the various “welfare states” in the core capitalist countries.

Although we support struggles for reforms, how changes are fought for makes a difference. We oppose a strategy for social change centered on elections and lobbying because it focuses on political leaders gaining power in the state rather than building mass movements and collective struggle. Because the state is an institution of class domination, there is little hope for the liberation of the working class through the capture of the state by a political party.

By building on the state, state socialism tends to empower the bureaucratic class. In the so-called “Communist” countries, such as the old Soviet Union, China and Cuba, a new dominating class emerged — political functionaries, industrial managers, elite planners, and military leaders. The capitalists were expropriated but the working class remained a subordinated and exploited class.

Anti-imperialism

Capitalism has always been based on imperialism. Imperialism is a system where the elite classes in some nations use their superior economic and military power to dominate and exploit the people and resources of other countries. The elite classes of the dominant capitalist powers suck wealth out of the less powerful countries through debt, corporate investment, and unequal power in trade.

Modern imperialism is based on the division of the world into competing territorial states. The competition of states generates the arms race and war. We support popular struggles against both military and economic expressions of imperialism.

In countries resisting invasion or domination by the major capitalist powers we support movements of workers and peasants in these countries, not their local states or local elites. We oppose the U.S. embargo against Cuba, but we do not support the bureaucratic ruling class that runs the island.

In situations where a “national liberation movement” aims to oust a pro-imperialist leadership in a country or fight an occupation, we support mass movements of workers and peasants in their struggle but not the state-building project of a “national liberation” political party. Real self-determination of working people requires the development of self-managed unions and popular organizations that exercise independence in relation to boss groups.

Imperialism can only be brought to an end by a social transformation throughout the planet which eliminates the system of competing states and exploitative class systems. The human species needs to evolve a new form of world association that respects the autonomy and differences of all communities or ethnic groups while allowing for democratic decision-making, rooted in grassroots institutions such as delegate congresses, to resolve global problems.

Internationalism

The support of the American federal state and corporations for authoritarianism and anti-labor repression in the third world undermines the bargaining power of workers in the USA. The threat of relocation to Mexico or elsewhere has been used to extract concessions on wages and working conditions. The imperialist role of the U.S. federal state is a bi-partisan affair, supported solidly over the years by Democrats as well as Republicans. This imperialist role is against the interests of workers in the USA as well as other countries. A common struggle with workers in other countries strengthens our fight against the bosses in the USA.

Economic interdependence and global capitalist power mean that a revolution that can liberate the working class from capitalist oppression needs to spread across national borders. An international movement is needed to defeat the bosses.

As internationalists, we advocate solidarity between workers in different countries, and the development of a trans-national unionism that can coordinate struggles across borders. As such, we encourage actions by workers in the USA to support worker freedoms and worker actions in other countries. We advocate the building of links between workers across borders, especially links with independent unions, autonomous mass popular organizations, and workers organizations who are close to our perspective.

We support efforts within the unions to break the American labor movement from any alliances with the U.S. State Department or other agents of American corporations abroad. The labor movement in the USA must not be used as a tool of corporate profiteering and imperialist austerity in other countries.

Anti-racism

In in the history of capitalism, racism has always been linked with the class system. Modern racism was developed to justify the enslavement of black people and the seizure of the lands of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. People of non-European origin were labeled “inferior” to justify worse treatment.

Our subordination to employers generates a constant struggle over control of our work and the division of the economic pie we produce. Discrimination creates resentments and divisions. By setting groups against each other, racism weakens our class power. All working people lose from this, including the white working class.

Racism isn’t just ideology or overt prejudice but also exists as a pattern of relative advantage or disadvantage. Racist patterns in society push people of color to the bottom. Thus struggles often have both a class and a race dimension, such as struggles against police brutality or against gentrification and evictions or struggles against anti-immigrant attacks.

We oppose racism in all its forms.

Groups that are subject to a particular form of oppression, on the basis of race or gender or nationality, will have concerns that arise from that. This is why we support autonomous social movements of specific communities. Through a process of dialogue, the specific concerns of oppressed communities can be brought into a common working class movement. The aim should be for the spirit and aspirations of groups subject to specific forms of oppression to be a part of the overall working class movement, and expressed in the life and aims of unions and other mass organizations. Incorporating the aspirations of oppressed communities benefits the working class as a whole. Greater unity makes for a stronger movement, and a stronger working class can make gains that benefit everyone.

Anti-sexism

Inequality between men and women existed long before capitalism. As capitalism developed, the ability of women to earn a living outside the home was restricted. These restrictions on the entry of women into the larger economy made women dependent on men. The restricted opportunities for women in the labor market also made it easier for employers to pay women lower wages. Patriarchal capitalism has benefited from the free labor of women in the home, raising the next generation and caring for male wage-earners. Married women who work for wages are still burdened with the “double work day.”

Society’s lack of support for the raising of children is part of the pressure that forces women into the role of primary child-raiser. Being the primary care-giver puts women at an economic disadvantage. Poverty among single mothers also affects their children. We believe that the larger society needs to provide more collective support for the raising of the next generation, such as providing free, quality child care and generous parental leaves for both men and women.

Like racism, sexism is a source of division in the working class. When people assume that men have primary responsibility for earning an income and women have primary responsibility children and maintaining the home, the struggles of women as workers, and wage equality for women, will be regarded as less important than the struggles of male wage-earners.

The struggle for the liberation of women is part of the struggle for a free and egalitarian society.

Because most women are part of the working class, the liberation of women won’t be complete without liberation from the class system. Nonetheless, women can make gains through struggles within the existing society, as women and as members of the working class. As with other specific groups within the working class, we support autonomous organization of women.

Queer Liberation

Patriarchal capitalist society holds most people to rigid gender roles and types of sexuality. These expectations breed homophobia and transphobia, sow divisions in the working class, and limit the possibilities for all people to have fulfilling lives.

Because oppression based on sexuality and gender is distinct from class oppression, though linked to it, we support autonomous organization to end these forms of oppression. We also urge worker and community organizations to support the struggles of people who are oppressed on the basis of gender identity and consensual sexual relationships.

We seek a social environment where people are not trapped by oppressive social norms but are free to develop sexual expressions, gender identities, and relationships that are right for them.

Unionism

The working class does not develop the capacity to liberate itself overnight. Through a more or less protracted process, the working class can break through fatalism and longstanding habits of going along with hierarchy, overcome internal divisions (such as along lines of race or gender), and develop the skills and self-confidence, solidarity, and organizational strength needed to mount a fundamental challenge to the dominating classes.

The economy would grind to a halt without our work. This is the source of the collective power of the working class. Large-scale solidarity such as general strikes builds in the working class a sense of our ability to change the society. Self-management of unions and other mass organizations develops in the members a sense of confidence in our abilities and of our capacity for running things ourselves. Widespread self-management of mass movements sets the stage for self-management of society.

After World War II, control of the American unions by a hierarchical structure of paid officers and staff became entrenched. Unions limited their focus to narrow economic issues, and routine bargaining, sector by sector. The general strikes and pitched battles of the years before World War 2 were a fading memory. The labor bureaucracy’s monopolization of relations with the employers tended to make the members dependent on them. Workers came increasingly to regard the union as an external service agency. There was less emphasis on the workers’ own action “in union” with each other.

The paid hierarchies are allergic to militant action, wanting to minimize legal and financial risks to the union organization that is the basis of their career. They work to contain workers’ struggles within the framework of longstanding relationships with the employers. National unions may impose a dictatorship called a trusteeship on local unions that pursue a more independent and militant course.

To have a labor movement that can be more effective as a fighting force today, and develop the potential to replace capitalism with economic self-management, a different kind of unionism needs to be developed.

The type of unionism that we advocate is self-managed by the members, works to spread solidarity and link up with workers in other countries, encourages mass participation, fights against all forms of inequality and discrimination, and rejects any idea of “partnership” or “common interests” with the bosses.

To transform the American labor movement, we support efforts to build new self-managed unions independent of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions in situations where this makes strategic sense. At the same time, we cannot hope to play a role in many workers struggles, to put forth our ideas and our program, if we remain aloof and abstain from them simply because many of them take place within the AFL-CIO or Change to Win unions. So long as workers struggles are organized through these unions, we participate in those unions and their struggles.

We also support the building of autonomous rank-and-file movements in the AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions, independent of the bureaucracy. The sort of rank-and-file opposition movements that we support should not aim at merely electing a different leadership, but should aim at changing the union into a social movement based on mass participation and member control.

For unions to be self-managing, this starts with the importance of the general meetings of the members to make decisions. To prevent the organization becoming dependent on a small number of people, executive committee posts should have term limits. This needs to be combined with a systematic approach to training members in all the tasks needed in running a union.

Full-time paid officials no longer suffer the daily indignities of subordination to the bosses. The often high salaries of union bureaucrats in the USA separate union officials from the conditions of life of union members and encourages officials to look at the union as their personal ticket out of the working class. We believe that the number of paid officials in the labor movement should be kept to a minimum. Local unions should avoid paid officers as much as possible. If workers feel that a paid officer is needed in a particular case, their pay should be limited to the average wage level of the workers. Half-time paid officers are better than full-time because at least the person still works under the bosses part of the time.

Genuine self-management of a union goes beyond the formal structure and also depends on active participation and education of members.

Community Organizing

The class struggle is not limited to the workplace but also spreads out into the broader community, in areas like housing, gentrification, transportation, pollution, welfare rights, police brutality. To challenge the dominating classes in society, the working class needs a movement that can address these struggles and the issues of the day. We support the development of mass self-managed organizations in the community such as tenant organizations or transit rider unions.

Developing links between labor organizations and grassroots organizations rooted in working class communities and communities of color is a way to strengthen struggles in both areas, and prefigures the sort of working class alliance that is needed to fundamentally challenge the dominating classes for control of the society.

Workers centers are a type of community-based worker organization that has provided a grassroots alternative for workers in recent years. As with other labor organizations, we support worker control of worker centers and oppose top-down control by a paid hierarchy.

Working class communities can also develop various types of member-controlled, democratic economic institutions such as worker cooperatives, housing cooperatives, and community land trusts. Worker cooperatives can be used to provide jobs, provide services the movement needs, and illustrate the possibility of a society based on self-management. At the same time, the potential of worker cooperatives is limited by competitive pressures in an economy dominated by the big capitalist companies. Forming worker cooperatives is a useful tactic, but we don’t see this as a strategy that can liberate the working class from the class system.

For a Self-managed Society

To liberate itself from subordination to dominating classes, the working class must dismantle the hierarchical structures of the corporations and the state. The working class, through its own united action, must seize and manage directly the entire system of production, distribution and services.

Self-management must not be limited to the workplaces but must be extended throughout the society and to governance of public affairs. Self-management means that people control the decisions that affect them. The basic building blocks of a self-managed society would be assemblies of workers in workplaces and of residents in neighborhoods. These assemblies would be federated together throughout society.

The transformation of society that we seek isn’t limited to breaking down the power of dominating classes. The revolution must also unravel the state, patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism.

To replace capitalism, we do not support “market socialism” where workplaces are the collective private property of groups of workers. Market competition would pit workers against each other and lead to new privileges and the re-emergence of a class system. The land and means of production must become the common property of everyone in society.

The alternative to bureaucratic central planning and market exploitation is a system of grassroots social planning that begins with the participation of people where they live and work, and horizontal interaction between communities and the workplace organizations. Proposals that affect larger geographic areas or whole industries can be developed through congresses of delegates from the base assemblies.

Re-designing jobs and getting rid of dangerous or polluting technology will be priorities in a social transformation that aims at human liberation and environmental sustainability. Liberation from class domination means systematically developing the potential of all working people, and dissolving the power of the bureaucratic hierarchies of professionals and managers. To ensure that everyone can effectively participate in decision-making, jobs need to be re-designed so that conceptual and decision-making tasks are integrated with the tasks of doing the physical work.

Self-emancipation of the working class requires that the working class gain power over society. But the working class can only actually exercise power by doing so collectively through institutions of popular self-management. A self-managing society needs a governance structure through which the people make and enforce the basic rules of the society and defend their social order. We envision regional and national congresses of delegates elected by the base assemblies that would have the basic power of making decisions about social rules and society-wide priorities. Proposals of the congresses that are particularly controversial or important should be referred back to the base assemblies for decision.

The hierarchical professional military should be replaced by an egalitarian people’s militia. During the process of social transformation, we are opposed to any armed bodies that are not under the direct control of the working class mass organizations. The working class needs to make sure that when the dust settles there’s not some hierarchical armed power that can be used by an elite to defend some new system of boss power.

Ecology

The ecological crisis of our time has its roots in the capitalist market. Companies only worry about things that have a market price. Corporations shift real human costs onto others when their pollution has ill effects on worker health, or working class neighborhoods or communities of color. Businesses pollute because they don’t have to pay for the real costs to humanity from their pollution.

We envision a world where common ownership of the earth, a socially controlled economy, and the direct democracy of communities acts as guardian of ecological sustainability.

Political Organization

We advocate the development of an anti-authoritarian political organization where membership is based on a shared political perspective. Without a shared perspective, disagreements on basic points can get in the way of joint activity and cooperation.

Political ideas and strategies need to be informed by practical experience. This means that the political organization needs to bring together activists who are rooted in working class communities and their mass organizations and struggles. Through our active presence we can learn from others. Through our participation and organizing activity, and the influence of our ideas, we can build a social base within the working class for our anti-authoritarian approach to social transformation.

Through organization activists can avoid isolation, participate in discussions with other activists who have different experiences, and get together for common political work. Through organization we can pool resources and sustain publications and other efforts to build a visible presence for our ideas.

We advocate an approach where activists work to spread widely within the rank and file of movements and mass organizations the self-confidence, knowledge, skills and opportunities for decision-making participation needed to make self-management an effective reality. We want mass organizations to be self-managing and we work for this aim in such organizations and to counteract bureaucratic or authoritarian tendencies.

We reject the Leninist theory of a “vanguard party” which seeks to manage the movement for social change as a prelude to seizing state power. This approach fails to see the danger of concentrating decision-making and expertise into the hands of a few. The liberatory social transformation that we seek will not be brought about by a political party running a hierarchical state but through the creation of institutions of collective self-management by a working class mass movement. “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.”

We do not claim to have the final “correct line” or all the answers.

[American Dream]

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/newagemp.html

The New Age Mythology

by Michael Parenti

There are many roads to political quietism. In contrast to the cynical defeatism discussed in the previous chapter are the beliefs of the 1960s youth culture or counterculture that carried over to what is called the "New Age" approach of today; an amalgam of Eastern mysticism, Western occultism, self-help psychology, and alternative health practices. In place of political impotence, New Age enthusiasts teach a kind of personalized omnipotence, reducing social problems to a matter of interior mind-set.

NEW CONSCIOUSNESS, OLD PROMISES

Some people indulge in New Age enthusiasms by reading and practicing on their own and occasionally attending a workshop or lecture. Others submit to the regimens of one or another cult. New Age books, artifacts, and programs constitute a billion-dollar industry. A 1978 Gallup poll estimated that some ten million Americans were engaged in some aspect of Eastern mysticism. Additional millions of adherents embrace the more secular "self-help" approaches.

New Age consciousness has some things to its credit. Back when the good life was defined as the immobile life (the less physical exertion expended, the better), New Age adherents were jogging and doing yoga and aerobics. While soft-drink companies were pushing their sugar-ridden products and the meat and dairy industries had us convinced that daily servings of beef and milk were vital to our health, New Age nutritionists were promoting the benefits of a sugar-free, low-fat, whole grain intake. While agribusiness thought nothing of spraying crops with toxic pesticides and utilizing chemicalized food processing, New Age proponents opted for organic and natural foods.

While the medical establishment monopolized what still passes for health science, New Age adherents pursued less invasive and sometimes beneficial alternative treatments. It was the established allopathic medical practitioners who for centuries bled their patients, burned and poisoned them with mercury, chained and tormented the mentally ill, ordered homosexuals and recalcitrant women into insane asylums, and spread a variety of fatal diseases in their filthy hospitals while remaining steadfastly ignorant of minimal sanitary standards. Today many physicians remain just as ignorant of nutritional science, preventive medicine, and alternative treatments.

At the same time, some New Age practitioners are themselves not above promoting dubious claims. They offer workshops in self-realization, dream harnessing, guided imagery, visualizations, primal screaming, channeling, rolfing, polarity balancing, aura readings, tarot readings, palmistry, psychic readings, gemstone healing, astrological charting, rebirthing, levitation, spiritual counseling, and other strategems. The promised payoffs range from minor practicalities to miraculous cures, from being able to keep a neater home to transforming one's entire personality.

In the diverse array of enthusiasms that come under the New Age rubric, two general orientations might be discerned. There are the "inspirationists," who focus exclusively on benefits in the here and now, and the "spiritualists," who tell us that the material world is but a passing shadow compared to the mystic realm beyond, where transcendent bliss awaits us. Many New Age theories are not new at all, being borrowed from Yoga, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen Buddism, and other ancient disciplines, transmitted by gurus from India and Tibet or, as it might be, from Brooklyn and California.

What I want to criticize are not New Age practices—some of which strike me as possibly beneficial, others as grossly counterfeit—but the way New Age notions discourage engagement with social problems and political realities. [1]

HYPER-INDIVIDUALISM AND SELF-EMPOWERMENT

Both inspirationists and spiritualists believe that individuals have great untapped powers within themselves that have been overlooked or kept submerged. Inspirationist guru Leo Buscaglia tells us "You do have magic. Get in touch with it. . . . It all starts with you. You make the world." [2] For the spiritualists, this internal power reservoir is linked to a metaphysical realm. The goal is to experience "the larger reality of the sacred wholeness that lies at the heart of being, to become one with the cosmic One. [3] Whether inspirationist or spiritualist, the supreme guide for comprehending the world is to be found in solipsistic experience. The approach is not much different from psychotherapeutic methods that brush aside the victimizations of the real world; what counts is how reality is perceived. [4] As est founder Werner Erhard proclaimed, "Reality is make-believe." [5]

Intuition is valued over reasoning. The New Age approach to knowledge is quite different from the scientific method that seeks empirical evidence, replication, and validation, and treats purely subjective experiences as largely unreliable. In the New Age mode, the more subjective and grounded in personal feeling a perception is, the more true it must be. The very ineffable quality of an experience is taken as evidence of its depth within oneself and its veracity and reality—as with mystical revelation and other experiences of faith.

The sociologist Charles Horton Cooley once said that a separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience. Yet many New Agers place great value on a self-contained individuality. To need others is viewed as a sign of insufficiency, rather than a normal desire of social beings. To be in need of no one is supposedly to be more developed and liberated. [6] Thus are the unfortunate necessities of modern-day isolation transformed into virtuous accomplishments.

Not all New Age advocates are of this persuasion. Those who have been called the "touchy-feelies" do not promote individual detachment; just the opposite. They congregate to touch, smile, laugh, and cry together, always with lots of hugs. Here too, the emphasis is on self-affirmation.

New Age self-centeredness resembles the hyper-individualism of the free-market society in which it flourishes. Under capitalism, self-reliance is glorified (most persistently and most ironically by those corporate interests that themselves depend on the government for all sorts of services and supports). The corporate capitalist myth of "rugged individualism" features an atomized person, attached to no one else (except possibly an isolated family molecule), producing and consuming for himself or herself, owing nothing to society for whatever he or she accomplishes. [7] Society becomes an amalgam of self-interested beings who enter into market relations that reduce other people to instrumental values. In their focus on the self, the yuppie and the yogi are not that far apart.

In truth, no human accomplishment is an autonomous thing. The athlete, the artist, the business leader, the scientist, and other such achievers, all draw upon the accumulated skills and material resources of those who preceded them and those who currently work with or for them. Even the other-worldly guru is dependent on others who feed and shelter him while he ventures into "higher realms." Peter Mann sums it up:

Every privilege, every object, every "good" comes to us as the result of. . . the shared labor of others; the language we use and the beliefs we hold and the ways we experience ourselves. Each of these involves a world of others into which we are entered every moment of our lives. Idly, for instance, we take coffee and sugar in the mornings, and even that simple act immerses us immediately in the larger world. Both the sugar and coffee . . . have been harvested by specific persons, most probably in a country where the land belongs by right to others than those who [now possess] it, where the wages paid those who work it are exploitive and low. No doubt, too, the political system underlying the distribution of land is maintained in large part by the policies enacted and the armies acting in our name. . . . [T]he coffee . . . has nothing to do with individual will and everything to do with economics and history. [8]

What the New Age ideology leaves out is the common struggle for collective empowerment and social betterment. It is one thing to affirm our faith in the value of the individual and something else to reduce all valued affirmations to individual experience, to see reality only through the prism of self.

PERSONALIZED OMNIPOTENCE—WITH NO VICTIMS

Once we treat interior experience as all-important, it is but a short step to claiming a personalized omnipotence. As New Agers frequently say, "You create your own reality," or "You choose your own reality." Everyone is supposedly the author of his or her fate. Self-help inspirationist Buscaglia instructs us: "If you don't like the scene you're in, if you're unhappy . . . change your scene. Paint a new backdrop. Surround yourself with new actors. Write a new play—and if it's not a good play, get the hell off the stage and write another one." [9] Social reality becomes nothing more than a matter of mind-set and self-will.

Such notions can be carried to chilling extremes by right-wing ideologues. Thus Eileen Marie Gardner, special assistant in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan administration, maintained that even the handicapped and disabled make their own destiny:

They falsely assume that the lottery of life has penalized them at random. This is not so. Nothing comes to an individual that he has not, at some point in his development, summoned. Each of us is responsible for his life situation. . . . There is no injustice in the universe. As unfair as it may seem, a person's external circumstances do fit his level of inner spiritual development. . . . Those of the handicapped constituency who seek to have others bear their burdens and eliminate their challenges are seeking to avoid the central issues of their lives. [10]

These "central issues" include Down's syndrome, multiple sclerosis, paralysis, spina bifida, and other incapacitating afflictions.

Gardner's obscurantist notions bear a strong resemblance to the yogic view that congenital disabilities are deserved, for they reflect the karmic development of one's soul. In other words, if you were born with cystic fibrosis, it is a punishment for the sins of past lives. The same holds for one's class condition. As a disillusioned Hindu devotee puts it: "Our spiritual leader taught us that if you are born a poor peasant in a Third World country, destined to live out your life in hopeless poverty, it is because you acted badly in past lives. Conversely, if you are born to wealth or accumulate it, it is because you have earned this good fortune through previous good actions. It is yours to enjoy guilt-free." [11]

One critic interviewed therapists and est devotees who maintained that individual will is all-powerful and determines one's fate, that those who are poor and hungry must have wished it on themselves, that suffering is merely the result of imperfect consciousness, that those who live well amidst so much deprivation have a higher consciousness, that someone who had been raped and murdered in some way willed it, that the victims of the Holocaust brought themselves to their awful fate, and that whatever one thinks to be true is true, for truth is identical to belief. [12]

When injustice is recognized, it is given an individualized genesis. Social, political, and ecological problems "are part and parcel of our way of viewing ourselves and the world. . . . Nothing short of an inner revolution in the way we experience the world will truly help solve them. " [13] It follows that "you cannot hope to improve the world until you first set yourself aright." Once that is accomplished, you may find nothing wrong with the world. A brochure for a New Age workshop entitled "A Course in Miracles," tells us that "love" is what "happens when we stop trying to change the world, and change our minds instead about how we see it. . . . We are not victims of the world, and when we understand this we learn to forgive others, enabling us to forgive ourselves." [14]

If there are no victims, there are no victimizers. We are all equally responsible for the world's ills, both the powerful and the powerless, the oppressor and the oppressed, the rapist and the raped, the child abuser and the abused child, the exploiter and the exploited, the warmonger and the war victim, the polluter and the sickened, the greedy few and the needy many. Commenting admiringly on how South African Bishop Tutu preached "humility and forgiveness" in the face of tyranny, one writer concluded, "If we truly want peace, shouldn't we stop passing judgment on others and look into our own hearts, so that we, too, don't become part of another collective evil? . . . Who are we to say that those dead [Nazi SS] soldiers at Bitberg were guilty? It is too easy to project our own aggression onto an evil other.'" We must not ignore "the thinly veiled hatred within our own hearts." [15] Resentment and anger are the problem, not the social injustices that might cause them.

For the New Ager, a calm mind is essential for spiritual progress. Unselfish personal actions may be advocated as a way of healing and nurturing the self (which makes them anything but unselfish), but political action against unjust policies is thought to encourage antagonisms and personal negativity. [16] In The Greening of America, a book that lamentably became a best-seller in the early 1970s, inspirationist Charles Reich tells us, "Nobody wants inadequate housing and medical care—only the machine. Nobody wants war except the machine. . . . There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in America." Reich further assures us, "All that is needed to bring about change is to capture [the machine's] controls—and they are held by nobody." Messy questions about state power and class privilege, economic exploitation, and inequitable life chances are reduced to life-styles. "The way to destroy the power of the corporate state is to live differently now. The grand strategy is this: resist the state, when you must; avoid it, when you can; but listen to music, dance, seek out nature, laugh, be happy, be beautiful. . . ." [17]

One New Age devotee criticized the environmental movement for "broadcasting a doom, gloom and guilt message" and "projecting waves of doom and disapproval" that have caused the movement to be "disregarded for so long." But luckily "the tide is beginning to turn. It is being realized that the way to bring healing change is to love and nurture ourselves and others; to have fun, to enjoy delicious food, to cultivate prolific gardens [and] make beautiful clothes." [18] To be sure, there is nothing wrong and much good in loving and nurturing ourselves with fun and food. What is wrong is the notion that those activities will rectify the terrible realities of the ecological crisis. Such nostrums seem more like a way of wishing away that crisis.

For most New Agers, involvement in worldly affairs is little more than a distraction from self-development. The yogi Swami Sivananda advises, "Reform yourself. Society will reform itself. Get worldliness out of your heart. The world will take care of itself. Remove the world out of your mind. The world will be peaceful. That is the only solution. . . . If each man [sic] tries to work out his own salvation, there will be nobody to create the problems." [19]

The New Age nexus is largely a class-bound indulgence. One study shows that most cult followers are college educated Caucasians from upper- or middle-class homes. [20] Drastically underrepresented are impoverished farm laborers, unemployed factory workers, besieged inner-city dwellers, battered women, and other victims, who have a need for empowerment and protection that has little to do with the rarified refinements of self-absorbed consciousness. How do we empower ourselves without also acting on the social conditions that limit our life chances and our ability to be empowered? "The personal is political" means that political realities have a dimension in our personal lives. But it does not mean that the political can be reduced to the personal.

Most New Age leaders manifest a level of thought and information regarding gender, racial, and politico-economic struggles that is not very profound, being ingested mostly from conventional mainstream news sources. What Jeffrey Masson says about many psychotherapists would hold for most New Age leaders. In their world view, "there is no class analysis, and no [concern about] poverty, inequality, hunger, or traumas such as war, rape and child abuse." [21]

New Agers claim, but do not demonstrate, that improvement of self will lead to improvement of the world. Without denying the desirability of self-improvement, we might ask, does there exist a two-step process: first, I reform myself, then the world around me? Do devotees ever feel sufficiently enlightened, energized, and self-empowered to do battle with the injustices of the larger world? Most New Age enthusiasms do not bestow a more developed ethical commitment. The goal is self-gain not moral advancement. [22] A New Age ideology that says only you, not the world, needs fixing is not likely to produce dedicated reformers. One personal growth practitioner noted, "People have taken est, and now they want a business plan"; now they seek classes in "prosperity training and creative financing techniques." [23] They become careerists within the system, not crusaders against it.

What we call the "self" and "inner consciousness" are not finished entities, rather they are intimately linked to social experience. Individual realization needs community and communion with others. [24] To be sure, we all have a subjective, intrapsychic environment that sometimes needs tending to. But we should not overlook how the process of democratic struggle itself can help bring about inner growth, as we become participants in worldly affairs.

"GOD IN ACTION": MONEY AND POWER

New Age gurus advocate spiritual regeneration while themselves manifesting a notable fascination for material acquisition. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one of the gurus who came here from India to do good and ended up doing well, had this to say when interviewed in the Washington Post:

Q: You're a multimillion dollar corporation. You have property all over.

A: But that is not yet enough. Want more and more. . . . Here I sit with all the possiblities. I need as much money as possible.

Q: Why don't you raise money and distribute it to needy people? Would this not be a more effective way to bring about change?

A: No, no, it's not the money that can make one happy.

Q: How can Third World people think about their consciousness when they're hungry?

A: If they use their brain properly . . . the infinitivity of nature will make them capable of not only earning their ordinary bread but very first-class bread. [25]

Phil Laut of Theta Seminars (a western Massachusetts association calling itself a collection of "divine beings in the self-improvement business") conducted a "Money Seminar" in which he proffered these revelations: "What actually creates money is the mind. . . . Money in the material universe is like God in the spiritual. Money is God in action." Nor is there not enough to go around. That sort of thinking divides people. "If you resent rich people, you'll never become rich." [26] One student at this seminar, an ironworker, injected a dash of reality: "At my job I inhale cast-iron dust, so naturally I associate work with suffering. . . . I have to suffer in order to make money." Did he not therefore have the right to resent his rich and exploitative employers? Laut responded, "So you feel . . . 'the more money I have the more I have to suffer.' How can you increase your income with an attitude like that?" The worker was describing an occupational victimization—which the enlightened teacher reduced to a subjective attitude within the victim.

A cult participant described a common problem within New Age organizations: the discrepancy in riches between leader and followers. "I know of several people who have several children who were living on less that $300 a month, and in some cases $7 a week. That disturbed me when I saw [the guru] with a fleet of Mercedes and Cadillacs and several homes." [27] How does the holy leader, who supposedly lives only to impart spiritual teachings, explain his or her opulent life-style? One guru contrasted himself favorably with the Indian ascetics who remove themselves from worldly temptations in order to progress spiritually. How much more advanced was he who could live uncorrupted amidst so much wealth—all of which supposedly gravitated to him because of his elevated spiritual state. The truth was, wealth came to him because his followers worked long hours at the guru's enterprises and lived in poverty so they could donate the better part of their earnings and life savings toward the further enrichment of their holy leader. [28]

Many (but not all) New Age businesses operate like other corporate enterprises. The Whole Foods Market in Berkeley, California, is a case in point. It offers organic foods and a community bulletin board. Its CEO described his enterprise as "driven by a vision of creating a better world" with management and labor working together "with openness, trust, community, shared purpose, joy, and love." [29] But not much love was shown to a worker who was fired for being an outspoken union supporter, nor to the other employees who went out on strike. Whole Foods was the only nonunionized supermarket in Berkeley, paying workers an average of $1 to $5 less per hour than the town's other supermarkets and offering inferior benefits. While its CEO claimed that the store was owned mostly by its workers, closer examination revealed that he and other upper-level executives possessed the vast majority of stock. Furthermore, Whole Foods Inc., the country's largest natural foods retailer, is partly financed by venture capital from firms whose portfolios include corporate polluters and contracts with the defense industry, the Air Force, and the CIA. [30]

As the guru is elevated, the followers are infantilized and diminished. Many persons (but not all) emerge from cults feeling embittered and exploited by the experience. They relate how their self-confidence was undermined, how they learned to distrust their own judgment, how they gave their money, labor, and uncritical obedience to the self-enriching leader, and how they were separated from former friends, given new names, identities, and belief systems. As one ex-votary put it, "It's classic brainwashing. They make them so they cannot fit in with other parts of society." [31]

Some New Agers believe "there are changes taking place internally in the whole nature of government and corporations" because more of their numbers are moving into positions of power. [32] There is no evidence to support this view. To the extent, if any, that corporations and government show regard for the public interest, it can be credited to the organized pressure of democratic forces and not to any new enlightenment manifested by those at the centers of wealth and power.

At least one erstwhile national leader now promotes a sort of New Age spiritualism. In 1992, the former president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel—who was raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a fervently anti-communist, wealthy family and who has reclaimed for his private ownership a publicly owned building and other holdings that once belonged to his family—called for a new breed of political leader, who would rely less on "rational, cognitive thinking," and show "humility in the face of the mysterious order of Being" and "trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world." We should have a "sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom," and the ability "to get to the heart of reality through personal experience." Havel lists the ecological dangers facing the world but denounces the idea of rational, collective social efforts to solve them. He denounces democracy's "traditional mechanisms" for being linked to "the cult of objectivity and statistical average." [33] He thinks he is being visionary when in fact he is putting forth an elitist subjectivism and antidemocratic obscurantism.

By propagating an apolitical Weltanschauung, New Age enthusiasms have done little to thwart the retrogressive forces that accumulate wealth and military power, destroy the environment, obliterate indigenous cultures, build authoritarian organizations, and oppress millions of people throughout much of the world. One might recall the counterculture that arose in Germany during the 1920s. German youth, mainly the offspring of affluent middle-class urban professionals, took to the countryside to rediscover nature, revived ancient festivals, and remained determinedly apolitical. Emphasis was on personal experience. These Wandervogel talked of an "Inward Way" to enlightenment. Change people, then society would change. Having ignored poltical realities for so long, they added little strength to the anti-Nazi movement. If anything, "they gave Hitler space."

Other secret cults emerged in Germany. Anti-Semitic, nationalistic, and atavistic, they glorified the primitive volk spirit and "pure" ancient Teutonic culture. [34] The Nazis were soon to exploit this marriage of occultism and nationalism. Hitler talked of the Volkgemeinschaft, one people bonded in mystical community under the leadership of the fuehrer. The Hitler youth movement copied the folk mythology, arcane symbols, and nationalistic racism of the earlier cults, adding a strong dose of Nazi discipline. [35] In addition, Protestant youth groups, or "Bible circles" abounded in Germany. By 1931, more than 70 percent of Bible circle devotees were pro-Nazi. [36]

A moving spirit of New Age thinking is the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jungian symbols and archetypes abound in New Age writings. Jung himself was an anti-Semite and Nazi admirer who talked of "the Jewish problem" and the differences "between Germanic and Jewish psychology." He thought well of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and saw Adolph Hitler as "the truly mystic medicine man . . . a spiritual vessel, a 'demi-deity.'" [37] When the president of the German Medical Society for Psychotherapy resigned because of the Nazi takeover in 1933, Jung filled the post and became editor of its official journal. In that capacity, he associated with Nazi sympathizers and Nazi psychiatrists like M. H. Goering, nephew of one of Nazi Germany's leaders Hermann Goering. Jung's journal carried occasional articles that quoted Hitler favorably, praised Nazism, and propagated racism, including a selection by Jung himself that talked of the deficiencies of the Jewish race and the moral superiority of the "Aryan unconscious." He hailed Nazism for energizing the deeper recesses of the Germanic soul. Not surprisingly, his work was quoted favorably by Nazi authors. [38]

Jung offered racist apologies for colonialism: "The savage inhabitants of a country have to be mastered. . . [The master] must be ruthless. He must sacrifice everything soft and fine for the sake of mastering savages." [39] Jung believed that the modern-day African and other non-Europeans had a more primitive mental development than the European and were childlike in their impulses and thoughts, or lack of thoughts. Referring to the primitive traces of his own unconscious Jung wrote, "I have been led by dreams, like any primitive. I am ashamed to say so, but I am as primitive as any nigger, because I do not know!" [40] After the defeat of Nazism, Jung began to heap criticisms on Hitler in an attempt to prove himself clean of collaboration. But he continued to spin theories about the biologically less-developed nature of the African's mind. [41]

Jung was immersed in mythology, spirituality, "archetypal memories," the wisdom of the "collective unconscious," alchemy, Teutonic mythology, and other occult phenomena—many of which interested the Nazis also. New Age ideology cannot be equated with Nazism just because it draws upon the work of a Nazi collaborator. But it is worth noting how Jung's obscurantism serves both, as myth is transformed in accordance with the demands of its historic audiences.

An alienating social matrix becomes fertile land for aberrant enthusiasms. Real grievances cause people to embrace hokey healers or fascist leaders. These false solutions do not make the original complaints any less real. The ancient Greeks understood that when we are divorced from the polis, deprived of engagement in the community by exile or by a tyrant, or confined totally to the privatized realm, we are denied our full humanity. Native American Indians and other indigenous peoples know that to inflict upon our natural environment a misdirected accumulation process for the enrichment of the few also removes us from our full humanity. Real self-empowerment should combine personal awakening with political concerns. We must show that greed and self-enrichment for the few should not be—and really cannot be—the way to a happy society for all. Blending private and public concerns is the best method of ridding ourselves of poverty, including the poverty of compassion and personal feeling that plagues too many of our citizens. All this is easier said than done. Whatever self-help is gleaned from New Age thought, it would seem that the political quietism it fosters does not bring us toward any real liberation—neither social nor personal.

Notes

1. For critiques of New Age practices by participants, see Martin Gardner, The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988); and Michael Rossman, New Age Blues (New York: Dutton, 1979). For a critical reading of recent New Age best-sellers, see Scott Tucker, "New Rage vs. New Age, Z Magazine, September 1992, pp. 50-51. A more sympathetic treatment is offered by Karen Trester, who sees the New Age as "a visionary movement" that challenges the status quo and existing cynicism and ennui. See her "The New Age Movement: Ideology, Practices & Politics," unpublished monograph, Green Bay, WI, 1992. For another sympathetic treatment, see Michael D'Antonio, Heaven on Earth (New York: Crown Publishers, 1992). [—> main text]

2. Leo Buscaglia, telecast, December 11, 1984; see also his book, Living, Loving and Learning, (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1982). [—> main text]

3. See Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992); Dennis Lewis, "Beyond Postmodernism," Yoga Journal, May/June 1992, p. 81. [—> main text]

4. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis, The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990), p. 107. [—> main text]

5. As quoted in the Utne Reader, March/April 1987, p. 97. Est workshops, which teach a mix of Zen meditation and personal-growth affirmations, have reached over 300,000 paying customers. [—> main text]

6. James Lynch, "Companionship, an Important Form of Life Insurance," Prevention, February 1978, pp. 100-102; Elfriede Kristwald, "Now They Call it 'Co-Dependency,'" Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1990. [—> main text]

7. See the discussion in C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). [—> main text]

8. Peter Mann, "The New Narcissism," Harper's, October 1975, p. 56. [—> main text]

9. Buscaglia, Living, Loving and Learning, p. 53. [—> main text]

10. Quoted in Molly Ivins, "Thanks for the Memories," Progressive, December 1988, p. 39. Gardner was eventually ousted from her post. [—> main text]

11. Margaret Noton, "Life with the Guru," unpublished manuscript, San Francisco, June 1992. [—> main text]

12. Mann, "The New Narcissism," p. 46, encountered New Age therapists and devotees of these persuasions. [—> main text]

13. Lewis, "Beyond Postmodernism," p. 81. [—> main text]

14. The workshop was offered by Dr. Kenneth Wapnick in Bellow Falls, Vermont, June 9, 1984. [—> main text]

15. Carolyn Slack Cage, letter to the Washington Post, May 13, 1985. [—> main text]

16. Some New Age groups like "Peace the 21st" are "politically involved" in their own way. They conduct group "actions" for peace by gathering once a month to meditate for an hour on world peace. These groups supposedly set up powerful waves of peace vibrations that change the course of history. [—> main text]

17. Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 305, 347, 348, and passim. [—> main text]

18. Letter by Chris Marsh in Natural News, May 1993 (published by Chico Natural Foods, Chico, CA). [—> main text]

19. Swami Sivananda, "Peace, Yoga Life, Winter 1984, p. 8. [—> main text]

20. Nancy Duvergne Smith, "Spiritual Despotism," New Age, March 1978, p. 37. [—> main text]

21. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Against Therapy (New York: Atheneum, 1988), p. 208. [—> main text]

22. Marian Leighton, "Victoria Woodhull Meets Karl Marx: Spirituality and the Radical Movement," Liberation, Fall 1977, p. 20. [—> main text]

23. Bart Brodsky quoted in San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 5, 1986. [—> main text]

24. It should be noted that most schools of Eastern religion would agree that community and communion are desirable. But the emphasis is on changing one's own behavior, not that of others; hence, the lack of political involvement. [—> main text]

25. Washington Post, January 22, 1984. [—> main text]

26. Valerie Vaughan, "Money: God in Action," CenterPeace (Northampton, MA), March 1977, p. 3. [—> main text]

27. Quoted in Smith, "Spiritual Despotism," p. 81. [—> main text]

28. Noton, "Life with the Guru." [—> main text]

29. Whole Foods chief executive officer John Mackey, from a company position paper reprinted in Utne Reader, March/April 1992, pp. 75-77. [—> main text]

30. L. A. Kauffman, "Tofu Politics in Berkeley," Nation, September 16, 1991, pp. 294-296. [—> main text]

31. Smith, "Spiritual Despotism," p. 38. [—> main text]

32. An opinion enunciated by Will Noffke, of Shared Visions, a Berkeley personal growth center: San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 5, 1986. [—> main text]

33. Vaclav Havel, "The End of the Modern Era," New York Times, Op-Ed, March 1, 1992. [—> main text]

34. Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult (New York: Dorset Press, 1977), pp. 1-46. [—> main text]

35. John de Graaf, "The Wandervogel," New Age, March 1978, p. 47; Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult. [—> main text]

36. De Graaf, "The Wandervogel," p. 47. [—> main text]

37. Masson, Against Therapy, pp. 94-112; Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult, pp. 134-139. [—> main text]

38. Masson, Against Therapy, loc. cit. After the war Jung changed his tune and claimed he had spoken up for Jewish doctors and had been in conflict with the Nazis. Masson could find no evidence to support these claims. [—> main text]

39. Masson, Against Therapy, p. 115. [—> main text]

40. C. G. Jung, Collected Works, vol. 18, p. 286, cited in Farhad Dalal, "The Racism of Jung," Race and Class, 29, Winter 1988, p. 14. The editors of the Collected Works appended a footnote claiming that the word "nigger" was "not invariably derogatory in earlier British and Continental usage, and definitely not in this case." In fact, "nigger" was most certainly a derogatory term used by British officers in the nineteenth century against rebels in India and native peoples in Africa and by British leaders like Lloyd George—all well before Jung wrote. To claim that Jung was using some earlier innocent usage of the term is only one of a number of whitewash and salvaging jobs done on Jung by the Jungians. [—> main text]

41. See Dalal, "The Racism of Jung," pp. 1-22; also C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973; first published in 1963). [—> main text]

SOURCE: Parenti, Michael. Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. Chapter 2: The New Age Mythology; pp. 15-25, 175-177.



Dr. Michael Parenti is a progressive political analyst, lecturer, and author of 17 books including The Terrorism Trap (2002) and the forthcoming The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome. For further information see the Michael Parenti Political Archive.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Has Burning Man Reached Its Limits?

By Mark Heley
Created 07/29/2011

The selling of $1000 Burning Man tickets on eBay has shaken up the ethos of participation and radical inclusion. Despite the rhetoric and philosophy, it is no secret that some burners are more equal than others. What's new is that the most fundamental criterion of participation -- entry -- is now subject to market pressures.


The sell out of this year's Burning Man, for the first time ever, has created a firestorm of debate across the burner community. The sight of tickets being sold on eBay at around $1000 each has shaken up the burner ethos of participation and radical inclusion. For the first time, Burning Man now has to deal seriously with the issue of exclusion. Many veteran burners are finding themselves without tickets and are faced with the reality of being turned away.

Despite the rhetoric and philosophy, it is no secret that at Burning Man some burners are more equal than others. Although financial exchange is outlawed on the playa, Black Rock City is not an egalitarian state. The privileges of wealth certainly DO count for something in the 'gifting economy', where the ability to 'gift' can be reflected in the subtle hierarchies of theme camps. There are even neighbourhoods with clear social demographics: upscale suburbs of luxurious RV's close to the Esplanade and rougher looking shanty towns and favelas of tents and cars further to the back.

What is new to the equation is that the most fundamental unit of participation -- entry -- is now subject to the free market pressures of supply and demand. The Burning Man organization has (up until this point) run a pretty successful ticketing strategy with a ‘tier' structure that incentivizes early ticket purchase. There are also discounted tickets for those who can prove they are low income and artist bursaries, providing routes of inexpensive entry for the well prepared, talented and prudent.

What is perhaps most remarkable is that Burning Man has never sold out before. This new sense of limits creates a whole new set of issues that it will be interesting to see how the Burning Man organization and burner community deals with. The word from BMorg is that security will be 'stepped up' around the borders of the event to deter those without tickets from thinking about turning up to chance their luck. There has always been vigilance from the organization about intercepting and holding to account those who wanted a freebie. However, the ideology behind that policy was always that it was a necessary evil to create a fair and equal basis of participation, where everyone shares the basic costs of the event. How will that figure now the wealthy can buy scalped tickets on internet auction sites, while veteran burners who left it too late are to be excluded by the Black Rock sentinels?

Certainly one of the impacts will be for this year's event to highlight the unspoken divides that exists in American society, in this case between the very privileged that inhabit the temporary utopia of this year's edition of Black Rock City and not quite as privileged who would like to, but missed the boat/can't afford scalped tickets. As one person put it, 'Burning Man; the most diverse group of white people anywhere.' Will this year's event, whose theme is 'rites of passage', be a guilty pleasure for those attending? Knowing that friends and family who missed out are watching a tiny webcam broadcasting grainy postage stamp-sized footage from the playa, it might be. Although some smug ticket holders have taken up the stance of 'you snooze, you lose' in online comments, the divide is real and cuts deep. Why should we care? Perhaps because the ethos of Burning Man is one of the most potentially transformative of the American experience outside of Black Rock City. The burn is an induction camp for the world's most capitalist society into a new value system that transcends the dollar bill. It is a place where the experience of genuine community can be co-created and radical self-reliance road tested. At least, it used to be.

The truth is probably that this has been in the making for some time. The growth phase of Burning Man -- 'the boom years' that may now be past -- was in many ways an orgy of conspicuous consumption glossed with a 'gift economy' window display. Theme camps grew bigger, more hierarchical, more extravagant, and ever more vainglorious in their preening displays intended to outdo previous years and rival camps. The competition for the affections of fickle burners was stacked with increasingly bigger bars, bigger sound systems, and bigger name DJ line-ups. The Burning Man noughties were like a warped aping of an indigenous ‘potlatch', where tribal bigwigs sought to impress their rivals with bigger and better giveaways.

Maybe this year represents a turning point. Perhaps, the tide is turning back towards a more essential Burning Man experience that is less showy and puffed up. The Black Rock economy may have bucked the recession that has blighted the 'default world', but it too is subject to limits. An excellent blog by Caveat Magister on this subject is posted on the Burning Man website [1] and makes this point well:

It's surprising that a culture so focused on sustainability issues wouldn't have already been bracing for this: scarcity is *the* problem that the sustainability movement is trying to solve. If there's no scarcity, there's no need for sustainability. It's only when you have limited resources, limited energy, limited ... space ... that you ask "how do we best preserve this?"

While it may be irritating, or even heartbreaking, for the non-ticketed to experience a newly felt sense of exclusion, the most divisive issue of the sell out is almost certainly the scalping that is going on. Other festivals have had to grapple with this. Burning Man could perhaps learn a trick from Glastonbury Festival. Ticket buyers to the World's largest music festival have to submit a photo that is then attached to their ticket, making sale for profit much more difficult. To give the Burning Man organization credit, they have set up a clear guide for ticket exchanging (at face value).

In the case of Glastonbury, one of the other answers to the issue of demand greatly exceeding capacity turned out to create a giant double wall. At 16 feet high, and costing well over a $1 million dollars, it gives the whole event the appearance of being a massive hippie prison camp. Although a huge fence around the Playa is almost certainly not the solution, if Burning Man fails to address this issue pro-actively and creatively, it faces a real risk of becoming a caricature of the anarchic, edgy, and transformative experience it once was. Then again, this may be already happening despite the best intentions of BMorg.

One eBay listing advertises a deluxe Burning Man package for 10 friends that includes flying in by helicopter. This 'all-inclusive' offer can be had for a mere $95,000 and includes "lots of decorations for your bike. We will bring in lights, LEDs, and hot glue guns. You will have to decorate your own bike to stay with the Burning Man Spirit. Your bike is YOUR identity." Hopefully this listing is a joke, it certainly reads like satire. The 'Burning Man Spirit' is a powerful and flexible one and will almost certainly rise to these challenges. The question is whether or not Burning Man really can be 'all-inclusive'.


Source URL: http://www.realitysandwich.com/has_burn ... its_limits

Links:
[1] http://blog.burningman.com/2011/07/part ... rscarcity/

[norton ash]

Thanks for this thread, AD.

Confession. I sing absent-mindedly, and I plant my own earworms. For some time now, as I've read the title or clicked on this thread, I sing Ec-o-nomic Asp-ects of Looove.

to the tune of



Anyway, your thread has a theme song in my radio head, and I suppose the topic IS the shadows of love...

[Plutonia]

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/newagemp.html

The New Age Mythology

by Michael Parenti

Awesome AD. Parenti is