Afternoon Delight!
Please don't hesitate to enjoy the equally worthy comments.
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
Apr 6, 2010
Perhaps even Ezra Klein can drum up...
...enough animus to oppose this:
Well, so much for net neutrality
h/t and all credit to lambert
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Excellent piece on the subject, here @ FDL.
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What was I going on about? Oh, the new fascism...
Well, so much for net neutrality
h/t and all credit to lambert
*
Excellent piece on the subject, here @ FDL.
*
What was I going on about? Oh, the new fascism...
On The Superiority of Cats
My cat has the remarkable capacity to forget when I last fed him. That I enslave myself to a clock, his sideways glance seems to say, has no bearing on his appetite.
Lest We Forget
Lest we forget:
"...The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and usefu[l] instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management...."
Benito Mussolini, 1935
Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- attributed to Benito Mussolini
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I don't think that the American corporate state has a 1:1 correspondence with that outlined by Mussolini. In fact, I think we ought to understand it as a different beast, entire.
For one, ours seems far more beholden to corporations (as to why, below) than Benny would have liked. For Mussolini, the State (Hegel's State, his spirit of history, itself) represented the highest conception of human activity, it embodied the best of Man:
"Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists."
Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism
Heady stuff, however awful and adolescent.
I cannot really imagine the chief bankster at Goldman Sachs going full hog for it. Nor do I imagine Barack Obama wandering the West Wing, quaffing draughts of golden ale, quoting Benny whilst tapping the ash of his Nat Sherman into the White House china.
Mussolini's fascism, like that of Hitler, and the related falangist and peronist states arising in Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia and Lebanon, represents the emergence of this doctrine and practice within the context of the Westphalian order.
National fascisms, straining against the constrictions of Westphalia, but defined by the borders, trade relations, concepts of nationality and colonial resource extraction of the Westphalian age.
Not so, that which now emerges from the continuing fallout of the Second World War. World War II ended with the unraveling of the Westphalian consensus. The division of the world into Soviet (later, ChiCom), Euro-American and "Third World" blocs, following the American nuclear atrocities in Japan, inaugurated an interregnum.
During this period, ending roughly with the last Bush Presidency, the Westphalian nations (and their heirs, namely the US, India, Japan and China) exceeded their former national limits, creating over the decades (sometimes in fits and starts, and not without repeated conflict) a global monetary and trade superstructure which obligated those same nations to break with the Westphalian tradition of national sovereignty.
Sovereign states have, for the better part of four decades, ceded a number of their functions to supranational trade organs, trade compacts which benefit the "real victors" of the Second World War: corporations, zaibatsus and combines (for example: Krupp, Bayer, Daimler, Fiat, Mitsubishi et al survived the conflagration, despite the near complete destruction of the states which hosted them).
Retaining warmaking capabilities, and domestic police powers, as well as a number of the older mechanisms of population governance, these states nonetheless shifted their enforcement focus from the protection of national interest (however variously defined) to the protection of corporate interest, called otherwise, neoliberalism.
As formerly sovereign states adopted the neoliberalism (called neoconservatism in the States) of the post-Westphalian interregnum, the various governments of those states began to use their offices and power to undermine the buttresses of the state itself: borders, national identity, language and national capital. Liberating capital from protective and legal frameworks (both at home and abroad), while allowing private banking and corporate firms to manage and circulate it, the neoliberal governments waged a series of offensive wars, embargoes, SAPs and police actions against intransigent former colonies still "mired" in the Westphalian vision of the nation-state (though never part of that consensus) whose leaders (yes, often brutal, thuggish tyrants) resisted the liberation of capital and the weakening of national identity: North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Panama, Serbia; these same post-Wesphalian governments undertook, as well, occupations of so-called "failed states" where sufficient structure for the protection of corporate interest did not obtain, but where resources abounded: Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Bosnia, et cetera.
What has emerged from this process is the second stage, or second form, of fascism proper, the corporation.
Lest we forget, this second stage fascism no longer requires adherence to national myths. Dispensing with the vulgar racial and lingual fealty to a national entity, to a homeland, the new fascist organizations function without the self-imposed limitations of cultural identity, and in fact do better without them.
Topical tolerances of lifestyle and cultural difference (formerly disdained within the national context, one which required a type of homogeneous conformity to the traits of national, religious or moral membership - see the assimilation of the Irish and Italian, but the exclusion of blacks) do not hamper their operation, nor the accumulation of power within their hierarchies
(A person inclined to see the Tea Party revanchists as a rearguard of the old order, of the dying nation, clinging to national myths, clinging to a social-religious framework which included them by excluding others, which in short, defined a White nation, might have an insight or two...)
To this emerging order, we should understand, do people like Barack Obama give their effort and loyalty. Gaining control of the government, they continue to serve the order which produced them, using that government to effect the further dismantling of the nation, and the national myths, in favor of the new fascism of the extra-national corporation.
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(A hint, perhaps, as to why - despite extraordinary opportunity, public support and a rare lock on government power - they nonetheless did not construct a national health program, but instead crafted a legal edifice which placed more of the former Commons under the control of corporations.)
And a warning to the national fascists of Israel: at some point your affliction, your ironic embrace of Hitlerian national myths, of the primacy of your nation over those of your neighbors, will embarrass the leaders and princes of the European, American, Chinese, Indian and Brazilian corporate fascisms - and they will cut you loose...
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My first introduction to the unraveling of Westphalia, an indispensable book, timely nearly two decades after publication: Van Creveld's The Transformation of War
The Face of A Fascist
Source: AP
"JERUSALEM — Israel's hard-line foreign minister warned Palestinians on Tuesday against plans to unilaterally declare independence next year, saying such a move could prompt Israel to annex parts of the West Bank and annul past peace agreements.
The remarks by Avigdor Lieberman took aim at a Palestinian policy that has emerged as U.S. attempts to restart peace talks have stalled...
...The international community has welcomed Fayyad's reform efforts, raising fears in Israel that a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood could win international recognition.
Lieberman warned that Israel would not tolerate such a step, and could revoke a series of agreements made under the so-called Oslo interim peace accords of the 1990s or even annex parts of the West Bank.
"Any unilateral decision will release us from all of our commitments and will allow us also to make unilateral decisions," Lieberman was quoted as saying by the Ynet news Web site.
"For example, imposing Israeli sovereignty on certain areas, cutting off all kinds of ties and transfers of money and a string of benefits and agreements put into place since the Oslo accords," he said.
An official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said it is Israel's long-standing policy that unilateral moves by the Palestinians draw similar action from Israel. He spoke on condition of anonymity because there was no official comment on Lieberman's remarks...."
Source.
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I really enjoy the word magic of treating "the international community" as a self-directing agency with personality traits. It allows the writer of this article to present the complex, varied moves and counter-moves of hundreds of persons, representing an equal number of interests and power blocs, as a single will. A single will dedicated to backing the "reforms" of the current Palestinian puppet head. Reforms which, of course, will sadly fail.
I love the conceit of "US attempts to restart peace talks." Note to writer: you lie. The US - as represented by HRC, Obama, Gates, most national elected officials, the military CoCs, the neo-feudalistic economic power houses and the federal secretariats - has no structural interest in peace. Our government retains its cohesion, to the benefit of the moneyed class, by waging constant low and high grade war. The last three generations of American princes have sent so many billions of dollars (our labor, stolen) to Israel precisely so that Israel can wage war - a long, slow occupation and theft of indigenous Palestinian land. So that Israel can maintain the capacity for a brutal, decisive hot war.
Avigdor Lieberman does not represent an anomaly, or a worst case scenario. He represent the honest face of Israeli policy, as funded by the American government.
It took a nightclub bouncer to strip away the veil and show, for however brief a time, what the scions of the State of Israel have always done: take what does not belong to them, and make it their own, breaking agreements on the flimsiest of pretexts, to justify brutal oppression with false equivalencies.
So that they can continue to take land and destroy lives.
So that they can feed themselves at the expense of others.
A word for this: colonialism.
A term for the method by which they enforce their will, within Israel proper and without it: national fascism.
Apr 5, 2010
Liberation or Power (Part One)
"The armed faction lies.
They recreate the state through their action."
~ Utah Phillips, "I Will Not Obey," Fellow Workers (with Ani DiFranco)
Possessed of a strong social skepsis, but rejecting my own complacency as an organ purges toxins, I often find myself caught in a tension between desire and observation. Specifically, desire for free community, for insurrectionary liberation; and the observation that the spectacle to which I belong has a greater continuity than my own desires, that the accumulation of power constantly threatens my desire with subsumation, sublimating liberation within the need to survive the totality of that control.
I need to feed myself, my children. I need to keep the flat clean, and the car maintained. Or I have to make the bus on time. Everyone within my class, it seems, shares these same needs, these second order obligations. We have shelter, if only tenuously. This week, we owe the gas monopoly. Next, the lights. Then the rent, and all the various fees which in fact act as rent. We have our needs met, barely, bleeding always a sizable portion of our labor outward into the accumulation and power of those who rule. Our effort, their resource. And the fulfillment of those needs comes coupled always with the anxiety that breeds alienation.
Never enough, the satisfaction of those needs, balanced always against retreating desires. Desire repressed, abandoned. And the firm knowledge that next week might tip us off the edge. Casting us out, spinning us away from the forced participation which also provides the ground in which we learn to market our desire, competing against our need, a community of chains. Selling labor, alienating desire - we arrive at a parasitical bondage, leeching off our own repression and angst (and doubly so for those separated further by gender and race) to drive us towards an ever retreating satisfaction.
I have armed my desire, in the past, in small ways and several near to courting danger. So equipped, I overcame an instance or some agent of the machinery of control. The risk tremendous in the face of a pervasive, learned, spectacular culture of obedience. The obedience of invisible chains, bonds fashioned of our continuing defeat, our blind complicity in the alienation of our own desire. We sell our labor, and the exchange binds us to those who live fuller lives at our expense, turning us also against one another, subjects to a distant game of thrones, vying and competing for access to the keys by which we loosen those chains.
Caught up by our own desires, desires now shaped as traps, each fulfillment coupled with some degradation, some extra obedience, some additional hour, or week, or lost night with friends and lovers given over to the production of someone else's fuller life, concentrated in rent, and property, in the bullets and bombs which can any day break us. Spent on the cops, and the cameras, the pundits and the panderers, their labor also accumulated and alienated, to serve our continued and common oppression.
Rebellion liberates, but it provides no guide, of itself. The act of insurrection, petty or great, solitary or in union, breaks obedience, casting the colonial outpost out of the mind, or at the least depriving it of effect (if only for a moment in the history of a life). It does not grant a necessary clue as to what comes next.
Rebellion can free a life. Makhnovists and Catalonian anarchists, the Commune before the fall, Red Emma with a whip, or Thoreau behind bars. A child brimming with joy at the first uttered, "No!" A young lover, her first kiss offered as a forbidden consent.
It can also lead us to forget the origin of our desire, and its aim, to give instead all weight to the taking of it, to the force of arms, to the settling of accounts, to the claiming of the instruments of oppression.
Thinking thus, I've shunned a specific revolutionary impulse, the desire to seize control, to seize "the state." I acknowledge this desire, and the momentary purity of retribution, of justice armed. I will not repress it.
And then I think, I consider. At least, I try.
What must a person become, to operate that machinery of control, to have armed staffers, the power of coercion, and the hierarchy which turns other human lives into buffer zones, armor and expendable flesh?
Not for me. Not for me. Nor ever will I gift my labor to those who want it, even if the avenue to power winds through so-called free elections, through the auctioning of fealty for ballots and favorable legislation.
Seizing power, gaining an office, building a movement to take control of the machinery of state - these do not appear to fundamentally alter how how people apply that power, use that control. Power requires obedience, requires people willing to do as told. Someone must give orders, and others must obey.
Seizing the state, or gaining office, does not alter the contract of obedience. The power, preserved itself by the retention of biddable servants, vests in the doing of it. To achieve an end from a position of power, a person must give orders that others follow.
Call it what you will, just don't call that liberation.
The occupant of an office may represent a snaphot of revolutionary or voter desire, but that desire does not itself erase or eliminate the power that one wields, with the office.
Again, to have power, a person must possess others who obey. Obedience does not liberate. It validates oppression, regardless of the aim. The inducements of power follow on the use of it. Benefits accrue, as do allies and factions. Power opens up the possibilities for the fulfillment of desire, for the discovery of new pleasures and the expansion of old one.
Power rewards he who wields it, and he who seized it to liberate himself must control others to maintain it. His liberation becomes, with the exercise of power, the oppression and destruction of others, their lives consumed that his remains full.
Power requires hierarchy. Someone has to obey. In a private firm, a managerial feudalism, a military chain of command, an ecclesiastical order, a bureaucracy - power adheres to the occupant of an office because he can claim resources and obedience. The exchange of one set of officeholders - even by revolutionary overthrow - does not overturn or transform the culture of obedience. It does not abolish, of its own, the chain of command. The staff remains, and soon enough someone will use them, so long as they obey.
Seizing power does not translate into the elimination of those armed or obedient staffers because the taking of power preserves it.
To take power, you have to preserve it...
They recreate the state through their action."
~ Utah Phillips, "I Will Not Obey," Fellow Workers (with Ani DiFranco)
Possessed of a strong social skepsis, but rejecting my own complacency as an organ purges toxins, I often find myself caught in a tension between desire and observation. Specifically, desire for free community, for insurrectionary liberation; and the observation that the spectacle to which I belong has a greater continuity than my own desires, that the accumulation of power constantly threatens my desire with subsumation, sublimating liberation within the need to survive the totality of that control.
I need to feed myself, my children. I need to keep the flat clean, and the car maintained. Or I have to make the bus on time. Everyone within my class, it seems, shares these same needs, these second order obligations. We have shelter, if only tenuously. This week, we owe the gas monopoly. Next, the lights. Then the rent, and all the various fees which in fact act as rent. We have our needs met, barely, bleeding always a sizable portion of our labor outward into the accumulation and power of those who rule. Our effort, their resource. And the fulfillment of those needs comes coupled always with the anxiety that breeds alienation.
Never enough, the satisfaction of those needs, balanced always against retreating desires. Desire repressed, abandoned. And the firm knowledge that next week might tip us off the edge. Casting us out, spinning us away from the forced participation which also provides the ground in which we learn to market our desire, competing against our need, a community of chains. Selling labor, alienating desire - we arrive at a parasitical bondage, leeching off our own repression and angst (and doubly so for those separated further by gender and race) to drive us towards an ever retreating satisfaction.
*
I have armed my desire, in the past, in small ways and several near to courting danger. So equipped, I overcame an instance or some agent of the machinery of control. The risk tremendous in the face of a pervasive, learned, spectacular culture of obedience. The obedience of invisible chains, bonds fashioned of our continuing defeat, our blind complicity in the alienation of our own desire. We sell our labor, and the exchange binds us to those who live fuller lives at our expense, turning us also against one another, subjects to a distant game of thrones, vying and competing for access to the keys by which we loosen those chains.
Caught up by our own desires, desires now shaped as traps, each fulfillment coupled with some degradation, some extra obedience, some additional hour, or week, or lost night with friends and lovers given over to the production of someone else's fuller life, concentrated in rent, and property, in the bullets and bombs which can any day break us. Spent on the cops, and the cameras, the pundits and the panderers, their labor also accumulated and alienated, to serve our continued and common oppression.
Rebellion liberates, but it provides no guide, of itself. The act of insurrection, petty or great, solitary or in union, breaks obedience, casting the colonial outpost out of the mind, or at the least depriving it of effect (if only for a moment in the history of a life). It does not grant a necessary clue as to what comes next.
Rebellion can free a life. Makhnovists and Catalonian anarchists, the Commune before the fall, Red Emma with a whip, or Thoreau behind bars. A child brimming with joy at the first uttered, "No!" A young lover, her first kiss offered as a forbidden consent.
It can also lead us to forget the origin of our desire, and its aim, to give instead all weight to the taking of it, to the force of arms, to the settling of accounts, to the claiming of the instruments of oppression.
*
Thinking thus, I've shunned a specific revolutionary impulse, the desire to seize control, to seize "the state." I acknowledge this desire, and the momentary purity of retribution, of justice armed. I will not repress it.
And then I think, I consider. At least, I try.
What must a person become, to operate that machinery of control, to have armed staffers, the power of coercion, and the hierarchy which turns other human lives into buffer zones, armor and expendable flesh?
Not for me. Not for me. Nor ever will I gift my labor to those who want it, even if the avenue to power winds through so-called free elections, through the auctioning of fealty for ballots and favorable legislation.
Seizing power, gaining an office, building a movement to take control of the machinery of state - these do not appear to fundamentally alter how how people apply that power, use that control. Power requires obedience, requires people willing to do as told. Someone must give orders, and others must obey.
Seizing the state, or gaining office, does not alter the contract of obedience. The power, preserved itself by the retention of biddable servants, vests in the doing of it. To achieve an end from a position of power, a person must give orders that others follow.
Call it what you will, just don't call that liberation.
The occupant of an office may represent a snaphot of revolutionary or voter desire, but that desire does not itself erase or eliminate the power that one wields, with the office.
Again, to have power, a person must possess others who obey. Obedience does not liberate. It validates oppression, regardless of the aim. The inducements of power follow on the use of it. Benefits accrue, as do allies and factions. Power opens up the possibilities for the fulfillment of desire, for the discovery of new pleasures and the expansion of old one.
Power rewards he who wields it, and he who seized it to liberate himself must control others to maintain it. His liberation becomes, with the exercise of power, the oppression and destruction of others, their lives consumed that his remains full.
Power requires hierarchy. Someone has to obey. In a private firm, a managerial feudalism, a military chain of command, an ecclesiastical order, a bureaucracy - power adheres to the occupant of an office because he can claim resources and obedience. The exchange of one set of officeholders - even by revolutionary overthrow - does not overturn or transform the culture of obedience. It does not abolish, of its own, the chain of command. The staff remains, and soon enough someone will use them, so long as they obey.
Seizing power does not translate into the elimination of those armed or obedient staffers because the taking of power preserves it.
To take power, you have to preserve it...
Apr 3, 2010
The Other Catholics
I knew mostly Discalced Carmelites, Franciscan and Jesuit radicals long on the Berrigans and short on Rome, liberation theologians and firebrand priests and nuns masquerading as quiet parish votaries, as a child.
I had the good fortune of continued correspondence with Fr. Berrigan, over the course of a number of years, until the retirement home no longer took my calls.
I think I lucked out.
And when it came to sex scandals, Father H fell in love and courted his mistress for the better part of twenty years, til the Vatican rats caught on and kicked him to the curb. Sister C left orders, entire, for the husband she still has.
I think I lucked out.
I had the good fortune of continued correspondence with Fr. Berrigan, over the course of a number of years, until the retirement home no longer took my calls.
I think I lucked out.
And when it came to sex scandals, Father H fell in love and courted his mistress for the better part of twenty years, til the Vatican rats caught on and kicked him to the curb. Sister C left orders, entire, for the husband she still has.
I think I lucked out.
Wherein Ethan reminds me that no one has...
...decided to develop the work of Sheri Tepper into modern film or television:
"But the overall pattern stands: the men are in action! They're doing world-shaping important things! The women are cheating on their husbands or getting married (or is she?) or being pregnant or being brutalized by men."
Read the whole thing.
"But the overall pattern stands: the men are in action! They're doing world-shaping important things! The women are cheating on their husbands or getting married (or is she?) or being pregnant or being brutalized by men."
Read the whole thing.
Wherein MJS drops an asteroid on a field of pretense...
Enjoy.
Excerpted teaser:
"...I found myself remembering the poky little holy-roller churches in the nowhere town where I grew up – remembering, and wondering, really, wouldn't I be having a better time there? Oh, sure, those congregations were desperately ignorant, superstitious, benighted – anything you like, in fact. And if I were there – I might soon want to be back at Strephon's house. But even so, there was something admirably irruptive and from-below, something Dionysiac and self-determined, something bloody-minded and unpersuadably stubborn about those little conventicles. The holy-rollers had pinned their hopes on an awfully long shot. But at least it was a hope in something bigger and better than meritocracy.
Real hope for serious social transformation – if anybody were offering such a thing – might give religious hope some competition. But what people are actually given is a choice between religious hope, however tenuous, and the no-hope of an educational regime that starts winnowing people into brights and not-so-brights in nursery school. Perhaps it's hardly surprising that people who got winnowed out early might feel more kindly toward God than toward the Brights -- toward a God who, as the famous young lady sings, is wont sometimes to put down the mighty from their seats, and exalt the humble; toward a Messiah whose low opinion of scribes and Pharisees – the liberals of their day -- is well-documented and pungently expressed.
The flyovers' atavistic churchiness is, I think, of a piece with their dislike of liberals – a dislike which wounds, and aggrieves, and puzzles the liberals themselves no end. Can't they understand, the liberals plaintively ask, that we have their best interests at heart? We're trained, educated, conscientious, highly professional people – why don't they trust us..."
Excerpted teaser:
"...I found myself remembering the poky little holy-roller churches in the nowhere town where I grew up – remembering, and wondering, really, wouldn't I be having a better time there? Oh, sure, those congregations were desperately ignorant, superstitious, benighted – anything you like, in fact. And if I were there – I might soon want to be back at Strephon's house. But even so, there was something admirably irruptive and from-below, something Dionysiac and self-determined, something bloody-minded and unpersuadably stubborn about those little conventicles. The holy-rollers had pinned their hopes on an awfully long shot. But at least it was a hope in something bigger and better than meritocracy.
Real hope for serious social transformation – if anybody were offering such a thing – might give religious hope some competition. But what people are actually given is a choice between religious hope, however tenuous, and the no-hope of an educational regime that starts winnowing people into brights and not-so-brights in nursery school. Perhaps it's hardly surprising that people who got winnowed out early might feel more kindly toward God than toward the Brights -- toward a God who, as the famous young lady sings, is wont sometimes to put down the mighty from their seats, and exalt the humble; toward a Messiah whose low opinion of scribes and Pharisees – the liberals of their day -- is well-documented and pungently expressed.
The flyovers' atavistic churchiness is, I think, of a piece with their dislike of liberals – a dislike which wounds, and aggrieves, and puzzles the liberals themselves no end. Can't they understand, the liberals plaintively ask, that we have their best interests at heart? We're trained, educated, conscientious, highly professional people – why don't they trust us..."
Rattled Sabers Fall From Their Sheaths
"Evidence shows Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons, U.S. President Barack Obama told CBS on Friday, adding that he felt his administration should continue the pressure on Tehran to cooperate with the international community over its contentious nuclear program."
Haaretz.com
"Indeed, less than two months ago Obama’s own spokesman Robert Gibbs claimed Iran didn’t even have the ability to enrich uranium beyond 20 percent, let alone to rich to weapons grade, which would be above 90 percent. Just days after Gibbs made this statement he insisted that the US would not rule out attacking Iran."
Antiwar.com
Remember this?
The difference between the War Hero and the Constitutional Scholar?
The War Hero sometimes let his inner clown get the better of the script.
Haaretz.com
"Indeed, less than two months ago Obama’s own spokesman Robert Gibbs claimed Iran didn’t even have the ability to enrich uranium beyond 20 percent, let alone to rich to weapons grade, which would be above 90 percent. Just days after Gibbs made this statement he insisted that the US would not rule out attacking Iran."
Antiwar.com
Remember this?
The difference between the War Hero and the Constitutional Scholar?
The War Hero sometimes let his inner clown get the better of the script.
A Reminder, With Irony
h/t liberal catnip
The irony part (starting at 1:23) -
Candidate Obama: "In what's become a bit of [a] regular occurrence, in this campaign, Senator McCain once held a different position on off shore drilling. And it's clear why he did . It would have long term consequences for our coast lines, but no short term benefits..."
Accumulation
A question, and a gnat of a problem:
Assume an economic community wherein each person starts from a baseline, some agreed to fundamental minimum beneath which no one person or group of person can theoretically fall.
Assume also a "free labor market" where a person (or persons) can do whatever available work she pleases, remunerated according to the direct value produced by labor.
How would people store/record these personal receipts?
Labor banks?
And how would a community forestall the accumulation (and trade in) of un-expended labor credits, and perhaps the development of a monetary commodity of un-used labor value?
I know, I think, what the Soviets would do (and disagree). And in labor transactions mediated through capital, accumulation provides an engine, as an essential element. Wrapping my head around the discouragement of accumulation, in even the most mutualist society, presents perhaps an insoluble problem, at least for now.
Assume an economic community wherein each person starts from a baseline, some agreed to fundamental minimum beneath which no one person or group of person can theoretically fall.
Assume also a "free labor market" where a person (or persons) can do whatever available work she pleases, remunerated according to the direct value produced by labor.
How would people store/record these personal receipts?
Labor banks?
And how would a community forestall the accumulation (and trade in) of un-expended labor credits, and perhaps the development of a monetary commodity of un-used labor value?
I know, I think, what the Soviets would do (and disagree). And in labor transactions mediated through capital, accumulation provides an engine, as an essential element. Wrapping my head around the discouragement of accumulation, in even the most mutualist society, presents perhaps an insoluble problem, at least for now.
Price Signals
Having squandered my morning attempting to translate the dense language of marginalism, marginal utility and price signals into a form easy enough to discuss without jargon; having failed to do so, since so much of these theories appear to depend on a specialization of language, as jargon, I've decided to focus on one specific knot of the problem:
Price signals.
As I read it, adherents of market pricing (and planning advocates critical of the same) treat with price signals as an independent signifier, somehow emanating a communication to consumers and producers, of a preference for some commodity.
As a message which independently emerges from human decisions, to self-regulate production and exchange.
That seems, on the short and long analysis, like so much hokum, like a belief in humors and demons, used to explain a sniffling nose, or a sneeze.
It erases human agency, the decisions of those attending to the production or sale of a commodity, placing instead a ghost (the signal) in a ghosted machine (some assumption of a macro-economy which exists as an order of magnitude emerging from and independent of human choices).
It reminds me, almost exactly, of the argument that "monopolies are natural," that they develop as a topographical feature of human exchange, piezo-entelechies independent of the persons doing the exchanging.
Price signals.
As I read it, adherents of market pricing (and planning advocates critical of the same) treat with price signals as an independent signifier, somehow emanating a communication to consumers and producers, of a preference for some commodity.
As a message which independently emerges from human decisions, to self-regulate production and exchange.
That seems, on the short and long analysis, like so much hokum, like a belief in humors and demons, used to explain a sniffling nose, or a sneeze.
It erases human agency, the decisions of those attending to the production or sale of a commodity, placing instead a ghost (the signal) in a ghosted machine (some assumption of a macro-economy which exists as an order of magnitude emerging from and independent of human choices).
It reminds me, almost exactly, of the argument that "monopolies are natural," that they develop as a topographical feature of human exchange, piezo-entelechies independent of the persons doing the exchanging.
Apr 2, 2010
...on the way out the door.
The rub: I don't know if I embrace, fully, the implied homogeneity of class, the uniformity of class values, or the mysticism of dialectical materialism, especially following Engels' interpretation of the far less certain, and far more fluid Marx. Marx presages an awareness of the impact of material effort on material-chemical thought, and how culture and power develop in these ecologies. Engels prophesies a perfect future of crystalline harmony, and calls it science.
Historical materialism I can accept, but not the assumptions of the Dialectic. I think I've come to understand antagonism, contradiction and opposition, but I reject the religious assumption that all events and objects contain, somewhere, somehow, within themselves, and within aggregate sets of themselves, antitheses which must express as manichean divisions resulting in future syntheses, expressing thereafter self-contained antitheses, and so on and so on.
See comrade Rosa for a much better dismantling of Hegel's Mysticism than I can ever offer.
Marx provides an articulate (and often dryly humorous) set of analytical tools, which often require the user to extract them from the accretions of Engel's interpretations, redactions and resetting - as well as those of Lenin, Trotsky and subsequent schools of pro- and anti-Marxist thought.
Historical materialism I can accept, but not the assumptions of the Dialectic. I think I've come to understand antagonism, contradiction and opposition, but I reject the religious assumption that all events and objects contain, somewhere, somehow, within themselves, and within aggregate sets of themselves, antitheses which must express as manichean divisions resulting in future syntheses, expressing thereafter self-contained antitheses, and so on and so on.
See comrade Rosa for a much better dismantling of Hegel's Mysticism than I can ever offer.
Marx provides an articulate (and often dryly humorous) set of analytical tools, which often require the user to extract them from the accretions of Engel's interpretations, redactions and resetting - as well as those of Lenin, Trotsky and subsequent schools of pro- and anti-Marxist thought.
Mine Own Limitations, Revealed (yet again)
In responding to this, JR Boyd asked me to consider the following:
"I would encourage you to think about the way in which class struggle informs this dynamic. The ruling class has particular objectives, but they are to a greater or lesser degree frustrated by the "everyday choices" of ordinary people. So far as the "arena of power" goes, think about the ways in which prevailing class power depends on the relative subservience of everyone else, and how the ruling class must modulate its approach in cases where people depart from their assigned roles. What we get in reality is a synthesis of this balance of power, reflected in society and its institutions. But where the balance lies precisely is something we want to be aware of, as it can explain a lot about what is going on around us and why."
(I can see now that my argument flirted with a pervasive pessimism, one which I nonetheless loathe to extirpate.)
Incredibly challenging insight, and great grist for the mill. I find that a worthy response proves more difficult than originally I imagined...
"I would encourage you to think about the way in which class struggle informs this dynamic. The ruling class has particular objectives, but they are to a greater or lesser degree frustrated by the "everyday choices" of ordinary people. So far as the "arena of power" goes, think about the ways in which prevailing class power depends on the relative subservience of everyone else, and how the ruling class must modulate its approach in cases where people depart from their assigned roles. What we get in reality is a synthesis of this balance of power, reflected in society and its institutions. But where the balance lies precisely is something we want to be aware of, as it can explain a lot about what is going on around us and why."
(I can see now that my argument flirted with a pervasive pessimism, one which I nonetheless loathe to extirpate.)
Incredibly challenging insight, and great grist for the mill. I find that a worthy response proves more difficult than originally I imagined...
Apr 1, 2010
Also Quoteworthy
"...But the notion that the Tea Party constitutes a threat to the legitimacy of the U. S. state is absurd. The Tea Party participants are not anti-state, rather they want to take control of the government at all levels in order to impose their vision of society, as muddled as it is. They would not dissolve state structures, nor would they diminish the power of the police and the military, both of which rely upon the state for resources and legal authority."
from American Leftist
So what about the TPs frightens professional liberals?
The competition?
from American Leftist
So what about the TPs frightens professional liberals?
The competition?
In the department of beating the horse to glue, already...
"Israeli planes and helicopters carried out at least seven missile attacks on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Friday, causing damage and slightly wounding two children, Palestinian witnesses and officials said.
They said four air strikes took place in open areas near the central town of Khan Younis, the site of a deadly clash last week between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen.
Two caravans were destroyed there in Friday's attack but there were no casualties, officials said.
A fifth missile hit a cheese factory in Gaza City, setting it on fire, witnesses and Hamas officials said. Hospital officials said two children were injured by flying debris."
Reuters.
...can't wait for the sternly worded reprimand from Hopey Changey.
They said four air strikes took place in open areas near the central town of Khan Younis, the site of a deadly clash last week between Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen.
Two caravans were destroyed there in Friday's attack but there were no casualties, officials said.
A fifth missile hit a cheese factory in Gaza City, setting it on fire, witnesses and Hamas officials said. Hospital officials said two children were injured by flying debris."
Reuters.
...can't wait for the sternly worded reprimand from Hopey Changey.
Thought for an afternoon without rain...
Poppet Bush broke the old order.
Barack Jesus Reagan just got started building up a new one.
Conspiracy?
Nyet, tovarisches.
For profit, did Poppet break the old order's back - profit in the conquering and losing of Mesopotamia, of tax cuts timed with endless war time spending. With Part D and the final shiv between the ribs, the monetizing of the federal secretariats. The already coming end of the Westphalian age got a boost, but it started to unravel way back with Mao.
Westphalia's time has passed.
Enter Captain Peace Prize, sweet Barack Jesus Reagan.
Again, no conspiracy. We hoi polloi had had enough, taking change all serious like, and even giving credence to Latino labor sentiment. And though they'd put us down in a pinch, the Wall Streeters and Colorado Springers still need us to float some debt and buy, buy, buy. Or at least fork out enough in the user fees and payroll taxes to fund the gutting of the Commons, to bring it to it's bitter end.
Barack, the pacifier, the change agent, shifting swiftly from sloganeer to "sell out," whale killing, oil drilling, brown children blood spilling, taking back the hope and giving us the hopium.
Seducer man, giving away the dope, later to charge for it. The price: just a little compromise, every now and then. And then some more. Until we cheer what we condemned, and our moral sense resembles mad cow brain three minutes before the moment of death.
But, soon they can afford to spring clear of us, these new Corporate men, get us an easy dole and lifetime subsistence, effect the transformation of the last dregs of the Commons into a full time market spectacle, hoodooing us along until we reach our dead ending, so much fodder, so many lumped and lacking even proletarian sense.
What next?
Monkey wrench it, comrades. Go bizarre and unwieldy. Grow like mold and find the cracks, the spaces between the tiles. Press and press, and keep on fragmenting, keep on changing, red queen the Red Queen and bring Hob Robin back to play the aces.
Barack Jesus Reagan just got started building up a new one.
Conspiracy?
Nyet, tovarisches.
For profit, did Poppet break the old order's back - profit in the conquering and losing of Mesopotamia, of tax cuts timed with endless war time spending. With Part D and the final shiv between the ribs, the monetizing of the federal secretariats. The already coming end of the Westphalian age got a boost, but it started to unravel way back with Mao.
Westphalia's time has passed.
Enter Captain Peace Prize, sweet Barack Jesus Reagan.
Again, no conspiracy. We hoi polloi had had enough, taking change all serious like, and even giving credence to Latino labor sentiment. And though they'd put us down in a pinch, the Wall Streeters and Colorado Springers still need us to float some debt and buy, buy, buy. Or at least fork out enough in the user fees and payroll taxes to fund the gutting of the Commons, to bring it to it's bitter end.
Barack, the pacifier, the change agent, shifting swiftly from sloganeer to "sell out," whale killing, oil drilling, brown children blood spilling, taking back the hope and giving us the hopium.
Seducer man, giving away the dope, later to charge for it. The price: just a little compromise, every now and then. And then some more. Until we cheer what we condemned, and our moral sense resembles mad cow brain three minutes before the moment of death.
But, soon they can afford to spring clear of us, these new Corporate men, get us an easy dole and lifetime subsistence, effect the transformation of the last dregs of the Commons into a full time market spectacle, hoodooing us along until we reach our dead ending, so much fodder, so many lumped and lacking even proletarian sense.
What next?
Monkey wrench it, comrades. Go bizarre and unwieldy. Grow like mold and find the cracks, the spaces between the tiles. Press and press, and keep on fragmenting, keep on changing, red queen the Red Queen and bring Hob Robin back to play the aces.
Open Palm, Closed Fist
I don't know much. Reasonably intelligent, relatively curious - sure. But, I long ago coded myself to avoid certainty, or the presumption of omniscience. On top of fulfilling the role of boorish bores, resolutely certain people tend to fuck shit up a lot. "Really self-convinced" might as well equal "inquisitionally holy," and folks caught up in their own holiness (even if they worship no gods) soon enough conclude that everyone else has too much sin.
I still figure out how to act like an asshole at least half the time, on any given day, but I think I've at least learned to tweak that native tendency toward uncertain and self-doubting assholishness.
This post, then, in the key of “typing out my ass, but what the hell”:
I don't think the world necessarily divides readily into twos. Either/or postulates, hemispheric counter-positions, mutual antagonisms might fill a human need, mayhap, but not a universal one.
I'll kick that towards the old king's Saxon: yes and no, right and wrong, good and evil don't really make sense when put to the eye.
Coming at this another way, to have "right and wrong" you also have to have a perfect standard by which to judge what events and people fall on one side, and what events and people fall on the other. Picture that standard as a membrane, a division which sorts the myriad events and choices of any persons, or set of persons, in any place, during any time, into one of two categories. For the standard to work, it has to fulfill an absolute, unchanging, irreversible, untouchable and perfect function. It cannot fall to persons to decide it. If people have a hand in deciding the standard of right and wrong, it no longer works as a standard.
But, for any person to know that a particular example of conduct falls into one of the two categories, that standard must also remain intelligible, accessible and communicable within the contingent events of human action. People must have the capacity to decide their choices according to that standard, communicate them and then follow through. They must retain the capacity to interpret it, and apply it to changing times, or it becomes first opaque, and then inapplicable.
A standard of right and wrong, to work as a standard, must embody in each and every person, at each and every point in human space and time, both rigid perfection (to identify right and wrong, while excluding personal bias) and fluid contingency (that people might choose their conduct, and conform to it).
An imperfect perfection. A black whiteness.
A chimaera.
Perhaps, I think, because the world really doesn't divide up into neat, tidy sets of (X v. Y), (X and Y), (X or Y), right and wrong, or good opposed to evil.
We divide the sum of events, according to mutable, febrile inconstants which we then treat as cold, clean universal standards. We lie to ourselves, and call it universal truth. I don't mean to suggest that a person ought not judge, ought not choose a course of action with regard to an ethos, or principles. Only that we would serve ourselves well by treating those principles as contingent upon the consequences that ensue from the using of them, in the first.
What the fuck does this have to do with anything, especially anything related to just getting to tomorrow?
Quite a bit, I think.
We tend, I think, to treat with human choices and human interactions (never mind all the non-human shit which has a habit of intruding into our fantasy of humanistic mechanism) as if we need only see them through one of two lenses. The yes lens. And the no lens. 1 and 0.
Yes - do some thing, make some choice. Or, no - don't do that. We define the foundation of our choices, and our possibilities, by these limitations. Further, we tend to hardwire our yes and no judgments to predetermined responses, and loyalties.
For example: “Smoking is unhealthy and wrong, so smoking must be stopped, so smokers must be ostracized and smoking made expensive, so that smokers will learn to do good to themselves, so that smokers can be saved from the unhealthy wrongness that they do to themselves, so that unhealthy wrongness can be further purged from the world.”
We ignore consequence in favor of intent, and the judgment/reaction syndrome metastasizes into oppression, of self and others. By wiring our faith in immutable standards to either/or judgments and predetermined reactions, we fall fall prey to all-or-nothing thinking, and worse, all-or-nothing emoting.
But, what if we have more than two base choices? More than "vote for" and "vote against"? What if, foundationally, we've blinded ourselves to the two other (absolutely essential) primary building blocks of human choice?
What if, instead of "yes" and "no," as filters for our choices, we add in the two missing ingredients?
So that we get "yes," "no," "mayhap*" and "I don't know."
I don't have much truck with snout counting**, but imagine for a moment a voting scheme where the choices for a proposal, or candidate, rounded out to the four above, with caloric labor devoted and volunteers requested according to percentages, and the combinations of desire, and not merely to the tyranny of the all-or-nothing majority. And I certainly don't hold forth for the prison industry, but imagine a verdict slate that allowed for "yes, committed the act," "no, didn't do it," "might have done it, but we cannot tell for sure" and "we just don't know."
Sidewinding away, for a moment: when I take a step, I don't simply make a decision to place a foot forward. I take into account (not all of this immediately a matter of conscious inquiry) the terrain, what I do know. I map what I ought not do, to best insure that my foot does in fact fall where I please it to. I use yes and no perhaps hundreds of time, before my first muscle twitch triggers. But that doesn't describe the whole of the process. In order to step, the bodymind has to account for uncertainty, for partial knowledge (rainy day, leaves might cover a puddle) and for all that it doesn't know, all the possibilities not yet mapped by and stored in memory.
Yes, no, mayhap, I don't know. For, against, uncertainty, unknowns.
***
So what about that title? Open Palm, Closed Fist? Really? Going for the faux-zen thing, assclown?
Zen's not my bag, but yes, my wife thinks assclown describes me to a tee.
Okay, then.
I think that we could call the two predominant types of reaction to events, for individuals and in group dynamics, "open palm" and "closed fist." Yes, let's let stuff happen. No, let's fight this shit.
Faced with a crisis or change in conditions (human or nature made), some people and groups open up like a palm, ready to accept the unfolding of events. Faced with the same set of circumstances, others roll up like a clenched fist, ready to strike back at events, ready to assert opposition.
Some accept, some reject.
Not really a new insight, on my part, I know. I just have to scratch this itch, to come at it from a different perspective.
Imagine (pushy, this blogger, eh?) a group of people come together to perform some task, say organizing a local food network independent of industrial agriculture and box retail outlets. Imagine a modicum of success, such that their impact hits the radar of the authorities, or just the bottom line of the regional attempted food monopoly. A boss type might feel an immediate threat, close up his or her fist, and smash away, perhaps on a flimsy pretext, like a petty prior or a protest arrest. A boss type might also try to co-opt the anarchofoodies as "good citizens," as feed for the nightly news and human interest consumers, perhaps even bring in a few corporate sponsors. Closed fist, open hand. In the face of such pressure, the group might decide to bunker down, go on the defensive, playing into the cultivated fears of the lawn order aficionados who'll vote for this year's bumper crop of petty fief and office holders. Or they might choose to play along, turning exposure into exchange, and infiltration into misdirection.
Whatever the case (and I can think of dozens of permutations, offhand), either/or just doesn't cut it. Right way and wrong way judgments don't really help a group of people envision consequences, and they don't help the same people aim towards some provisional end. Because these judgment-reactions reduce options before events even unfold. In the face of state or corporate pressure, sometimes the open palm and the closed fist will both lead to a bad end.
When we cripple ourselves with these a priori assumptions about choices, and sets of choices, we mayhap lose sight of our aims. More to the point, we blind ourselves to consequence.
Recently apologists for Obama, in their urgent need to demonstrate filial piety, to affirm their reactions against the standards of their pre-existing judgments, set about savaging the President's detractors from the left, leaving in their wake a series of unintended outcomes, most notably the liberation of a number of memescapes and mememakers from the confines of institutional liberalism. Responding only with a closed fist, they appear to have shattered any number of emotional and philosophical loyalties, and doing so, set in motion the first ripples of an opposition to power which no longer pretends even a hint of fealty to the set piece of electioneering, an opposition drawing not only on those who've already long walked away, but those they themselves have scattered to the winds, in their urge to prove their devotion.
An object lesson, if only for a spell.
When we come together in the future, even in temporary community, to achieve some end, some act of liberation, some fulfillment of desire, I think we best serve (and enjoy) ourselves if we begin the process of unlearning the culture inheritance of yes/no, either/or, all or nothing, open palm or closed fist thinking and reacting which so far still governs much of the developing extra-political opposition to power.
Faced with a multitude of choices and avenues down which to wander, perhaps we ought to consider them all, play with them all, embrace, abandon and try them again, experimenting with and expanding the arena of our interactions to include all that we just don't know, giving social form to uncertainty and the hybridization and difference it engenders. So that our strength lies not in cohesion with and obedience to party or power, not in the coordinated and managed acceptance or rejection of events, but in the sheer riot of difference.
Let the bosses send their warriors and seducers against that.
* - I have a problem with the verb form, to be. But you can substitute "maybe."
** - All credit to Harry Turtledove
I still figure out how to act like an asshole at least half the time, on any given day, but I think I've at least learned to tweak that native tendency toward uncertain and self-doubting assholishness.
This post, then, in the key of “typing out my ass, but what the hell”:
I don't think the world necessarily divides readily into twos. Either/or postulates, hemispheric counter-positions, mutual antagonisms might fill a human need, mayhap, but not a universal one.
I'll kick that towards the old king's Saxon: yes and no, right and wrong, good and evil don't really make sense when put to the eye.
Coming at this another way, to have "right and wrong" you also have to have a perfect standard by which to judge what events and people fall on one side, and what events and people fall on the other. Picture that standard as a membrane, a division which sorts the myriad events and choices of any persons, or set of persons, in any place, during any time, into one of two categories. For the standard to work, it has to fulfill an absolute, unchanging, irreversible, untouchable and perfect function. It cannot fall to persons to decide it. If people have a hand in deciding the standard of right and wrong, it no longer works as a standard.
But, for any person to know that a particular example of conduct falls into one of the two categories, that standard must also remain intelligible, accessible and communicable within the contingent events of human action. People must have the capacity to decide their choices according to that standard, communicate them and then follow through. They must retain the capacity to interpret it, and apply it to changing times, or it becomes first opaque, and then inapplicable.
A standard of right and wrong, to work as a standard, must embody in each and every person, at each and every point in human space and time, both rigid perfection (to identify right and wrong, while excluding personal bias) and fluid contingency (that people might choose their conduct, and conform to it).
An imperfect perfection. A black whiteness.
A chimaera.
Perhaps, I think, because the world really doesn't divide up into neat, tidy sets of (X v. Y), (X and Y), (X or Y), right and wrong, or good opposed to evil.
We divide the sum of events, according to mutable, febrile inconstants which we then treat as cold, clean universal standards. We lie to ourselves, and call it universal truth. I don't mean to suggest that a person ought not judge, ought not choose a course of action with regard to an ethos, or principles. Only that we would serve ourselves well by treating those principles as contingent upon the consequences that ensue from the using of them, in the first.
What the fuck does this have to do with anything, especially anything related to just getting to tomorrow?
Quite a bit, I think.
We tend, I think, to treat with human choices and human interactions (never mind all the non-human shit which has a habit of intruding into our fantasy of humanistic mechanism) as if we need only see them through one of two lenses. The yes lens. And the no lens. 1 and 0.
Yes - do some thing, make some choice. Or, no - don't do that. We define the foundation of our choices, and our possibilities, by these limitations. Further, we tend to hardwire our yes and no judgments to predetermined responses, and loyalties.
For example: “Smoking is unhealthy and wrong, so smoking must be stopped, so smokers must be ostracized and smoking made expensive, so that smokers will learn to do good to themselves, so that smokers can be saved from the unhealthy wrongness that they do to themselves, so that unhealthy wrongness can be further purged from the world.”
We ignore consequence in favor of intent, and the judgment/reaction syndrome metastasizes into oppression, of self and others. By wiring our faith in immutable standards to either/or judgments and predetermined reactions, we fall fall prey to all-or-nothing thinking, and worse, all-or-nothing emoting.
But, what if we have more than two base choices? More than "vote for" and "vote against"? What if, foundationally, we've blinded ourselves to the two other (absolutely essential) primary building blocks of human choice?
What if, instead of "yes" and "no," as filters for our choices, we add in the two missing ingredients?
So that we get "yes," "no," "mayhap*" and "I don't know."
I don't have much truck with snout counting**, but imagine for a moment a voting scheme where the choices for a proposal, or candidate, rounded out to the four above, with caloric labor devoted and volunteers requested according to percentages, and the combinations of desire, and not merely to the tyranny of the all-or-nothing majority. And I certainly don't hold forth for the prison industry, but imagine a verdict slate that allowed for "yes, committed the act," "no, didn't do it," "might have done it, but we cannot tell for sure" and "we just don't know."
Sidewinding away, for a moment: when I take a step, I don't simply make a decision to place a foot forward. I take into account (not all of this immediately a matter of conscious inquiry) the terrain, what I do know. I map what I ought not do, to best insure that my foot does in fact fall where I please it to. I use yes and no perhaps hundreds of time, before my first muscle twitch triggers. But that doesn't describe the whole of the process. In order to step, the bodymind has to account for uncertainty, for partial knowledge (rainy day, leaves might cover a puddle) and for all that it doesn't know, all the possibilities not yet mapped by and stored in memory.
Yes, no, mayhap, I don't know. For, against, uncertainty, unknowns.
***
So what about that title? Open Palm, Closed Fist? Really? Going for the faux-zen thing, assclown?
Zen's not my bag, but yes, my wife thinks assclown describes me to a tee.
Okay, then.
I think that we could call the two predominant types of reaction to events, for individuals and in group dynamics, "open palm" and "closed fist." Yes, let's let stuff happen. No, let's fight this shit.
Faced with a crisis or change in conditions (human or nature made), some people and groups open up like a palm, ready to accept the unfolding of events. Faced with the same set of circumstances, others roll up like a clenched fist, ready to strike back at events, ready to assert opposition.
Some accept, some reject.
Not really a new insight, on my part, I know. I just have to scratch this itch, to come at it from a different perspective.
Imagine (pushy, this blogger, eh?) a group of people come together to perform some task, say organizing a local food network independent of industrial agriculture and box retail outlets. Imagine a modicum of success, such that their impact hits the radar of the authorities, or just the bottom line of the regional attempted food monopoly. A boss type might feel an immediate threat, close up his or her fist, and smash away, perhaps on a flimsy pretext, like a petty prior or a protest arrest. A boss type might also try to co-opt the anarchofoodies as "good citizens," as feed for the nightly news and human interest consumers, perhaps even bring in a few corporate sponsors. Closed fist, open hand. In the face of such pressure, the group might decide to bunker down, go on the defensive, playing into the cultivated fears of the lawn order aficionados who'll vote for this year's bumper crop of petty fief and office holders. Or they might choose to play along, turning exposure into exchange, and infiltration into misdirection.
Whatever the case (and I can think of dozens of permutations, offhand), either/or just doesn't cut it. Right way and wrong way judgments don't really help a group of people envision consequences, and they don't help the same people aim towards some provisional end. Because these judgment-reactions reduce options before events even unfold. In the face of state or corporate pressure, sometimes the open palm and the closed fist will both lead to a bad end.
When we cripple ourselves with these a priori assumptions about choices, and sets of choices, we mayhap lose sight of our aims. More to the point, we blind ourselves to consequence.
Recently apologists for Obama, in their urgent need to demonstrate filial piety, to affirm their reactions against the standards of their pre-existing judgments, set about savaging the President's detractors from the left, leaving in their wake a series of unintended outcomes, most notably the liberation of a number of memescapes and mememakers from the confines of institutional liberalism. Responding only with a closed fist, they appear to have shattered any number of emotional and philosophical loyalties, and doing so, set in motion the first ripples of an opposition to power which no longer pretends even a hint of fealty to the set piece of electioneering, an opposition drawing not only on those who've already long walked away, but those they themselves have scattered to the winds, in their urge to prove their devotion.
An object lesson, if only for a spell.
When we come together in the future, even in temporary community, to achieve some end, some act of liberation, some fulfillment of desire, I think we best serve (and enjoy) ourselves if we begin the process of unlearning the culture inheritance of yes/no, either/or, all or nothing, open palm or closed fist thinking and reacting which so far still governs much of the developing extra-political opposition to power.
Faced with a multitude of choices and avenues down which to wander, perhaps we ought to consider them all, play with them all, embrace, abandon and try them again, experimenting with and expanding the arena of our interactions to include all that we just don't know, giving social form to uncertainty and the hybridization and difference it engenders. So that our strength lies not in cohesion with and obedience to party or power, not in the coordinated and managed acceptance or rejection of events, but in the sheer riot of difference.
Let the bosses send their warriors and seducers against that.
* - I have a problem with the verb form, to be. But you can substitute "maybe."
** - All credit to Harry Turtledove
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