Though this image would seem to have nothing to do with the text below, it is offered here as a kind of mandala, an object of meditation, an icon of intimacy with Nature and therefore a representation of our perceptions, our minds, our bodies, our world – everything that capitalism is methodically destroying. (An evening grabshot c. 2002 from the side yard of the cabin where I lived for 13 years in rural Thurston County, the exquisite blue shift of the slow Pacific Northwest twilight clearly visible thanks to the superb capability of the emulsion. The south-east position of the rising moon shows I made the picture near the time of the Summer Solstice.) Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011; Kodak 800 color negative film, Pentax K1000, 70-210 f/4-f/5.6 Tokina zoom wide open, probably at 1/125th of a second.
*
AS MOST OF you know, I am unapologetically and unabashedly a socialist, an ideology I embraced in my earliest teens at the same time my experiences in the workplace began teaching me the extent and magnitude of our oppression by capitalism.
But only within the past two years have I come to believe capitalism is genuinely Evil: that it is the closest approximation to the biblical notion of Absolute Evil the human species has yet produced and embraced; that capitalism's core precept of infinite greed as ultimate virtue makes capitalism the most deadly malignancy ever to metastasize throughout H. sapiens sapiens.
What then is socialism?
Contrary to what the capitalists would have us believe, socialism is not some pie-in-the-sky scheme for a Santa Claus utopia.
Instead it is genuine economic democracy – worker ownership and control of all business and industry – which is precisely how socialism defends the people of genuinely socialist nations against the Evil inherent in capitalism.
As to the nature of capitalist Evil, it is repeatedly demonstrated by Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile and a long litany of other notorious despotisms including Saudi Arabia and post-Communist China. The hideous historical truth so proven is that capitalism will inevitably transform itself into tyranny, precisely as it is now doing here in the United States.
But the antivenin that heals the capitalist serpent-bite is much more than passionate speeches, provocative bumper-stickers and defiantly red flags and armbands.
Socialism demands an economically aware population collectively committed to one another's sustained well-being, a commitment that in turn requires that quality the Jesuits call “an informed conscience,” which typically means a great deal of ongoing work both mental and physical.
More than that, socialism necessitates Community – upper-case C – a quality hopelessly alien to the malevolently self-absorbed Walkman zombies, cellphone compulsives, psychotic car-huggers and suicidally stupid voters who make up the vast Moronic Majority that unforgivably handed the United States over to Wall Street (and thus to neo-fascism) via the 2010 elections.
Which is precisely why I do not believe socialism can ever be made to work in the United States.
As a people we are entirely too amorally greedy, too vindictively selfish, too ignorant, too anti-intellectual, too mean-spirited, too xenophobic, too petty, too malicious.
The ultimate proof of our collective malice is the radical shift to unabashed despotism overwhelmingly approved by the 2010 voters: the elevation of Big Business bosses to divine-right monarchs and the reduction of everyone else to abject slavery.
Now as a result of the 2010 election we have capitalist governance in action at every level, federal, state and local: absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.
*****
Though I no longer consider myself a Christian – while I find much of aesthetic, moral and emotional value in the messages of Mary and Jesus, I cannot abide the Church's endless centuries of misogyny and hypocrisy – it is true that in recent years I have become a firm believer in the concept of Original Sin.
For those unfamiliar with Christian theology, Original Sin is the notion our species is inherently defective, that without some sort of intervention (the Church would say by divine grace; psychology would say by the superego), we are damned from birth to be nothing better than another Ted Bundy or Elizabeth Bathory.
In any case I regard the United States – the once-promising experiment in Constitutional democracy the voters themselves have reduced to the United Estates of Big Business (the Wall Street Plantation complete with Moron Nation slave quarters to breed an endless supply of cheap throw-away labor) – as the most damning evidence of Original Sin this pollution-ravaged planet has yet spawned. While Hitler's Third Reich can be attributed to the dark undertow of German history, the self-inflicted death of the American Experiment and the concurrent murder of the American Dream have no such obvious explanations.
For example, note how here in the United Estates, the Hard Right's terror of government and the Left's loathing of Big Business are equally justified by real-time atrocities. This is because the Hard Right's apostolic worship of the capitalist aristocracy and the Left's equally fervent adoration of government bureaucracy are each implicit endorsements of tyrannical intent – the same dread impulse that lurks at the epicenter of capitalism itself.
So much for the notion of individual liberty – or of Constitutional democracy in general.
Then there is the fact we have all, like Pavlov's dogs, been conditioned to drool at the sound of a bell.
The dogs associated the bell with food and drooled in intelligent hunger; we humans associate the bell with cash registers and drool in mindless greed.
Such is original sin, from which the species canus is obviously (and blessedly) exempt.
*****
The most brilliant strategy the capitalist Ruling Class ever devised was the methodical education of the entire U.S. population in its credo of absolute greed and limitless selfishness, which until after World War II was a system of moral imbecility exclusive to the moneyed aristocracy and a few criminals, many of whom in fact secretly worked for the aristocrats.
But by making greed and selfishness the nation's cultural cornerstones – by conditioning everybody in the Working Class to believe there is no higher virtue than greed and no greater good than selfishness (and therefore to be as viciously self-serving as the capitalists themselves) – the Ruling Class ensured it was protected by a new consensus, a consensus of useful idiocy: the same toxic consensus that destroyed the labor movement and now keeps us shackled forever in the slave pens of Moron Nation.
The resultant avarice and malfeasance perverts governance at every level in the United States and thus – exactly as the capitalists intended – so discredits government, it dooms forever the possibility of an emergent socialism. The following report, from the local Ruling Class daily, provides a classic example:
“A Tacoma man pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to illegally using his former job with the state Department of Social and Health Services to sell confidential information, netting himself about $108,000 over a decade.”
For those of you who live elsewhere, DSHS is the Washington state welfare bureaucracy. It is more notorious for its vindictively self-serving arrogance than even the legendary New York State Department of Motor Vehicles, though in truth the perpetrator of this particular crime did nothing more than carry the unwritten DSHS ethos to such an extreme his prosecution was inevitable.
And just what is that ethos? National data leaves no doubt: the Statistical Abstract of the United States tells us that, from 1970 through 1990, the state and national welfare bureaucracies feathered their nests with a 5,390 percent hike in administrative expenses – and paid for it, in part, by slashing stipends and services to the needy by 66 percent.
From the perspective of its operators, the U.S. welfare system is therefore nothing more than (another) sinecure for the bourgeoisie: a jobs program that – even before the Ruling Class decided to shut it down completely – was already run at the expense of the people it was intended to protect.
Obviously – and contrary to decades of Ruling Class propaganda – the real welfare fraudsters, the true welfare queens, are the welfare bureaucrats themselves.
While the aforementioned Tacoma felon's behavior is surely glaring, the attitude that produced it – raking in often-generous paychecks by self-righteously pretending to help lower-income peoples – infests the entire Moron Nation welfare bureaucracy in every jurisdiction and at every level.
Yes, admittedly I bear the welfare bureaucrats a huge grudge: 24 years ago the DSHS 'rats not only maliciously denied me vocational rehabilitation but – when I protested the denial – retaliated by vindictively proclaiming me “permanently unemployable.” In other words they deliberately destroyed my life, condemning me to the hopeless and steadily worsening poverty that now makes death all too often synonymous with rescue.
What was done to me cannot be forgiven. It was so embittering my fury thrust me, for a time, into the camp of libertarian conservatism. Even now, that foolish apostasy long behind me, I remain angry; the fact my anger is so absolutely justified refuels its fires daily. It is an anger I will carry to the grave if not beyond.
But rather than let it gnaw away my flesh, I behave like the professional journalist I was for most of the the 31 years before DSHS completed the ruination begun by the fire that destroyed my life's work and the devastating clinical depression that inevitably followed: I channel my anger into photography and writing.
Hence this, Outside Agitator's Notebook. DSHS hurled me outside the workplace and forever locked the door, but it cannot stop me from agitating.
Hence too my personal slogan: In these times, survival is is an act of revolutionary defiance.
*****
Speaking of hard times, we should never forget the statistics that framed the welfare bureaucracy's viciousness toward me c. 1987-1989: not Reaganoid cutbacks (though those hurt too), but the 5,390-percent hike in administrative costs financed by the 66-percent shrinkage in welfare checks, food stamps, medical care and – yes – rehabilitative services.
The same thing is happening again: todays welfare bureaucrats – once more following the example of our capitalist overlords – are preserving their own jobs by looting the programs that helped sustain the millions of us who are denied work.
These 'rats are thereby functioning as would-be Eichmanns in capitalism's program of genocide by abandonment and neglect, victimizing those of us who are elderly, disabled or inescapably poor (I am all three) – those of us on capitalism's death rosters because we are no longer exploitable for profit.
*****
Meanwhile the capitalists themselves – and even more so the fawning functionaries who directly serve as the capitalists' lackeys – are every bit as malicious as the bureaucrats, to which I can attest from the many years I spent as a reporter covering consumer protection issues.
A typical example is an ongoing struggle with the Internet service-provider Comcast. Now though – no longer protected by my former Working Press status – I'm the victim.
Here's the story:
Until 2010, I paid my monthly Comcast bill electronically and always on time. But the locally owned bank with which I had banked since 1993 was driven into failure by the federal government. (The feds forced the bank to make sub-prime real estate loans through Fanny Mae, and then – catch-22 – shut down the bank for making those very loans.) And when an East Coast megabank took over, we customers lost our ability to make electronic payments; the East Coast megabank refused to provide a service we on the West Coast had long taken for granted.
As a result I had to start paying Comcast by snail-mail, which meant my payments – typically around $50 per month – were now always a few days late. My alternatives were to start paying a month in advance (impossible given the financial realities of life on Social Security and Medicare) – or to find a new bank (impossible because when you're on Social Security direct-deposit, changing banks means that – thanks to bureaucratic sloth – you run the risk of going at least two months without income).
When I explained my circumstances, Comcast refused to change my payment date but did waive its outrageous $7.99 late fee...until a couple of months ago, when I discovered I had been slammed with an $18.99-per-month service upgrade I never ordered. Of course I immediately and rather forcefully threatened a formal consumer-protection complaint, which scared Comcast into canceling the upgrade and adjusting my bill accordingly.
But now my newest bill again contains the $7.99 late fee – and this time when I telephoned to appeal it as before, the answer was a polite version of “fuck you” – a response later reiterated by a district supervisor who flatly stated “we are not going to waive any more late fees,” her Teabagger down-with-Social-Security-recipients/all-power-to-the-corporations attitude evident throughout our increasingly adversarial conversation.
Which is where things stand now. Either I figure out a way to pay Comcast a month in advance, or I'm off the Internet.
It's yet another example of capitalism in action: economic assault against a disabled, retired $14,000-per-year Social Security recipient, my merciless assailant the sneering representative of a company that paid CEO Brian Roberts a compensation package valued at $31.1 million in 2010, including a bonus of $10.9 million.
Thus life under capitalism increasingly resembles life in prison: the little guy – male or female – is always bent over a garbage can and forcibly raped.
No wonder the gangbangers seem so indifferent to punishment.
*****
Lastly, there is the appalling shallowness of the pseudo-Leftist bourgeoisie's response to the atrocities capitalism is inflicting on workers in the Middle West and South:
Andy Kroll, who writes for Mother Jones, recently argued in an essay initially published in TomDispatch and republished by Common Dreams and Truthout, that the clenched-fist tattoos now fashionable amongst University of Wisconsin students are proof of a mass awakening to class struggle.
Mr. Kroll's absurdly shallow reasoning – no it was not an All Fools joke – is available here:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/31-12
In response I wrote the following:
I read Mr. Kroll's piece seeking some reason to be hopeful and instead found the opposite.
Indeed Mr. Kroll does answer his own question – "some... wanted to get tattoos of one of the most enduring images from the protests" – but he is too PollyAnna delusional to understand what he observed: the birth of a fad, not of a revolution.
Members of a serious resistance movement would not wear such identification (lest it give them away to the secret police), nor – more to the point – would a serious resistance movement squander its time contemplating such meaningless Britney Spears-type trivia.
Obviously the labor movement is dead: capitalism has destroyed it, and – in the inevitable transformation to fascism that is the ultimate fulfillment of capitalism – so dies the U.S. experiment in constitutional democracy. What we are therefore witnessing is not just the final murder of unionism but the methodical extermination of all remaining vestiges of U.S. humanitarianism.
Meanwhile, Moron Nation, as always, remains devoted to appearance over substance and clearly lacks (even in nuclear engineering mode) the knowledge and intellectual acumen to foster and sustain a new labor movement – or for that matter any kind of resistance movement at all.
Sadly I am reminded of the post-Soviet disclosures that are in fact the final repudiation of the so-called "revolution" of the 1960s: the formidable Soviet intelligence apparatus, devoted as it was to agitating Marxist revolution everywhere on the planet, closely scrutinized what was happening in the United States during the '60s.
The Soviet spooks – arguably the most skilled intelligence operatives in human history – concluded that the African-American rebellion and other such minority uprisings offered genuine potential.
But – prophetically it turned out – the Kremlin analysts then denounced the alleged "rebellion" of U.S. white youth as a mindless fad fueled by the same combination of willful ignorance, savage anti-intellectuality and unprecedented moral imbecility that spawned Reaganomics and is now ensuring the ultimate victory of capitalism the simpering Mr. Kroll refuses to acknowledge.
His delusion is our detriment: until we acknowledge the magnitude of our defeat, the true depth of our powerlessness and the unmitigated horror of the slave-camp future that awaits us, we will remain unable to formulate an adequate resistance.
And I fear that will never happen: apparently we are already too dumbed down – too moronated into Moron Nation – to distinguish between a tattoo and a manifesto.
LB/3 April 2011
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Agree 100% and from a Catholic perspective....and just a side but related note - as a dialysis patient on Medicare I get the Euthanasia talk a couple of times of year - its masked as the "this your choice should you want to refuse care, we'll make you as comfortable as possible until the end" talk...after which I sign some documents...I have been seeing this coming ever since my "red" days on the front line...The Pope calls this a culture of death and he is right on the money - with the death of critical thinking right at the top of the list...Its time for a wake - your place or mine?
Posted by: Melinda Mohn | 04/06/2011 at 05:29 PM