Meditations on America and the the Flight of the Oozlum Bird

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Just the other day I saw a well-known documentary, "Food Inc", which shines a light on the physically and morally toxic American food industry. I found myself getting very depressed about all the young people, especially poor, young people developing diabetes. Fully half of minority children are set to develop this disease

Being a Celt, certain types of sadness are pleasurable for me in a way similar to the Portuguese "saudade," and so I tend to nurse melancholic feelings along to see what juice they have in them.... Melancholy is like the dear brother pig, all of whom, except for his death screams, is either useful or delicious.

Thinking about Food Inc and ruminating on the sadness that the story of all the overweight, diabetic poor people dredges out of me, I remembered something that Felipe González, the former president of Spain, and an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, once said about Americans.

I'm quoting from memory, González said something like, "Americans are sad people, I find them touching" (me enternecen). My first reaction was to find his remark condescending and offensive, but after thinking about it at length, I decided he was right.

What is this sadness, where does it come from, what is it about?

Everybody, even Thomas Friedman, has read that bit in the Communist Manifesto, describing the action of capitalism on society that goes, "All that is solid melts into air" The full, famous paragraph goes like this:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” ... for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation ... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (emphasis mine)

Taking that as my text, I would preach that as America is and always has been the absolute vanguard and the world's most enthusiastic advocate of capitalism, logically no other people have ever felt capitalism's effects half as directly or half as powerfully as Americans have. If we add to that the deracination of the process of immigration, then we also talking about people who have had all the defenses and the retarding effects of "feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations" already stripped from them when they arrived.

More than even the British who invented capitalism, Americans therefore stand naked before the forces that "melt all that is solid into air" with all that is holy profaned.

That leaves the American "at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind".

How to avoid that self-examination is the central task that Americans have set for themselves.

This has led to a frantic search for new "veils of religious and political illusions" to make all of this contemplation of "his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind" bearable.

This explains to some extent the obsession with entertainment, the idolatrous celebrity culture and growing religious eccentricity.

The man and his companion whose statue grace this post might be apt symbols of an industrial effort at distraction from the "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" and the "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation", as shown in "Food Inc", which make up the actual warp and woof of our lives.


The consolation would be that since American society has advanced far further on this road than any other, if capitalism is ever to take the path of the Oozlum Bird*, it will happen in America first. DS

*The Oozlum bird, also spelled Ouzelum, is a Legendary Creature found in Australian and British folk tales and legends. Some versions have it that, when startled, the bird will take off and fly around in ever-decreasing circles until it manages to fly up itself, disappearing completely, which adds to its rarity.

Why do they suddenly quote Marx and Gramisci in the Financial Times?

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All of a sudden Karl Marx and Marxist thought are being talked about in the most unlikely places... like the Financial Times. Here is a sample that I identify a lot with from Gideon Rachman, the FT's chief foreign affairs commentator. Like Rachman, when I was a student I couldn't make any sense of Marx either.

"The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.” That statement from the Prison Notebooks of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was a favourite of student Marxists when I was at university in the 1980s. Back then it struck me as portentous nonsense. But Gramsci’s observation does resonate now – in an age of ideological confusion. Gideon Rachman - Financial Times

It is a little like what Mark Twain said,

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

Commenting on Gideon's Gramsci quote, I would counter-quote with what Marx himself said on the transition from one historical period to another, something which so many of us feel is happening right now

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.

Quite naturally, there are many people who believe that Marx's thinking is valueless because the Soviet Union collapsed in ruin and that Marx was to blame for it. They forget that Marx didn't create the Soviet Union, Lenin did that, using Marx as an intellectual tool. Where Marx said, not before "material conditions have matured in the womb of the old society itself", Lenin believed that the "new social order" could be delivered by Caesarian section. He was wrong and instead of the the moneyless, classless society that Marx vaguely predicted would succeed our system, Lenin gave birth to a sort of state capitalism, whose definition might have been the old soviet joke, "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".

Having said that, it is doubtful if the czarist regime could have ever industrialized Russia, defeated Nazi Germany and put the first man in space as Lenin's creation did. The irony of course being that the USSR's collapse made a perfect example of what Marx had said, that "new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself." Lenin's C-section revolution produced a rigid, dogmatic system that couldn't adapt to the post-industrial, information society trends. They were the ones that were "old". In the end they were brought down because their brand of "capitalism" was more fragile than ours, which as we are discovering now, doesn't mean that our system isn't also fragile.

In a sense we may be about to die of success, we may be spinning off the road, like a car in an ice storm. We like to think that our system is about "freedom" and democracy, but it is probably about consumption. We produce more and more stuff with fewer and fewer people; pay is stagnant for the mass of consumers, who can only stay in the game with credit, which has dried up. But it was grand while it lasted. That is what the soviet block never managed to do.

Here is a classic joke from the now defunct German Democratic Republic.

A man is walking home from work, when he sees a long line forming in front of a government store, he asks the people what they are in line for and they tell him "lemons"... Frantically he runs home, arriving much earlier than normal, and finds his wife in bed with his next door neighbor, confronting them furiously he shouts:

What are you doing here, don't you know that today they are selling lemons?

What brought the GDR down and the rest of Really Existing Socialism, including the USSR along with it, was not really people's chaffing under the repression of totalitarianism, but rather our system's miraculous ability to produce and distribute an infinite variety of affordable consumer goods, which their godless, planned economy couldn't. Free health care, social equality, guaranteed employment, good schools (Angela Merkel graduated from the University of Leipzig) and guaranteed housing couldn't compete with our cornucopia.

The essence of our system is a quite recent -- and never before in history achieved -- endless variety of things, many of them amazingly cheap, to choose from.  Think about it, you wander into a shopping mall looking to buy some deodorant and you'll be forced to choose between dozens of different brands at many different prices until you find exactly the one that suits your pocketbook or your "unique lifestyle" and image. You can eat your favorite fruit at any time of the year, flown in from the other side of the planet. This is freedom!

However it appears that we produce more and more with fewer  and fewer people and the majority's earning power has stagnated to the point where the newly impoverished would-be consumers can only pay to play by going deeply into debt. And now credit has dried up.

So Marx's idea expressed in "Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", was that when our system reached its full potential, its inner conflicts would cause it to collapse.

What would that "full potential" look like?

Maybe it would be interesting to look into the opinion of venture capitalists, after all they risk their money on predicting that future. I recently stumbled on an interesting one, Steve Jurvetson, who is a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson a firm with affiliate offices in more than 30 cities around the world and over $7 billion in capital commitments. The video I am featuring below comes from the Stanford Center for Professional Devopment, and in it Jurvetson speaks about the future. He is a very effective communicator and allthough a lot of what he says sounds like pure science fiction, it most certainly isn't. 

Jurvetson gave the lecture in the video below at Stanford back in 2009 and although it is an hour long, I think that anyone interested in where the world is heading should watch it carefully.  Even stop the video and go back and watch and listen to some parts more than once.

This is the Kurszweil chart that Jurvetson uses in his presentation.  I am putting here so that you can study it it in detail. DS

Wile E. Coyote enters into contradiction (beep beep)

“The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.” [Marx - Capital, Volume III, Chapter 30]

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There are certain ancient temples, where, perhaps once in decades, the sunlight will shine through a tiny, hidden crack in the temple wall and for only a moment illuminate a small, unnoticed, obscure, hieroglyph among thousands... the one that contains the mystery of mysteries... The old chestnut quoted above is like that, for decades and decades it made little sense and now, sweet mystery of life, at last I know the meaning of it all.

It goes like this:

Because of the intense pressure of needing to be "competitive", over the years business has found ways of producing more and more things to sell, using fewer people at home or using "cheaper" people in other countries to produce them. That is why for many years now workers salaries have been more or less stagnant in real terms. This makes it difficult for impoverished people  to purchase all the things that business can produce. This has been "solved" on one hand by more and more "efficiency", technology and cheap foreign labor (thus keeping salaries and prices down) and by lowering interest rates below the rate of inflation, practically begging them to take loans so, in this way, people wouldn't notice that they were poor... almost like giving money away... almost.

Like when Wile E. Coyote, out chasing the roadrunner, runs off a cliff and everything is fine until he looks down and then hoo hooo hooooooooooo thud he crashes to the canyon floor, the lenders got nervous, didn't want to loan any more and wanted their money back, but there actually wasn't any money there when the credit dried up.

Here we see that the "invisible hand" has been working for years and years like a cosmic Bernie Madoff... but unlike in Bernie's case, now the rest of us have to do his time.

But hey, it gets worse.

The Chinese and the Indians are not content with pressing their noses to the candy store window, they want to consume too. Here is my favorite conservative economist Martin Hutchinson on what is coming down the pipe:

I have been predicting for some time now that the inflation-suppressing effect of globalization would soon come to an end, with unpleasant results for all the cheap-money western economies. The decision by the Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn to raise wages in its 300,000-employee Chinese factory by 30%, with an additional 66% to be paid as bonuses based on output, suggests that the cost revolution in outsourcing is now fully upon us. Needless to say, we are wholly unprepared.(...) Food prices in India are currently 16.7% above those of a year ago, while overall wholesale price inflation is rising at 9.6%. Like Chinese, Indian labor costs are outpacing any possible productivity improvements, with wage rises of as much as 20% in urban areas. Not only does this indicate that Indian interest rates need to rise sharply from their current 3.75%, but it also suggests that outsourcers are going to find India as well as China an increasingly expensive place to do business.(...) If the two largest sources of cheap labor that provide manufacturing and service capacity for globalized businesses both have high inflation and there are few alternatives available, then the conclusion is inescapable: cost inflation is about to hit Western economies in a big way.(...) Western sentimentalists are rejoicing currently at the vast improvements in living standards for the Foxconn workforce. They should withhold their joy; the long-term costs of those wage increases will be paid in the West.

So on top of unemployment, stagnant salaries, paying down debt, reassuring the markets and no credit, we are going to have inflation too. The answer to all of this of course is more productivity, more efficiency, not raising salaries, while inflation eats away what little buying power those salaries had.

But, of course if people are out of work and prices are going up, they are not going to be buying much stuff, so a lot of Chinese and Indian factories are going to close

This is what the old guy who opened this rant used to call "contradictions".

The result... Well, many years ago, when I was a little boy, my dad, who though a Brooks Brothers clad executive, was a fanatical Democrat, used to play a practical joke at election time; when he took cabs or went for lunch at expensive restaurants, he would leave really stingy tips with a cheery, "Vote Republican!".

When I was a boy that was a joke...

Nowadays that is probably what the people getting stiffed are going to do... vote Republican.

That is the part old Karl never really got figured out. DS

Bush to Blago to Madoff: a triple play from hell

We can't tax or spend our way out of this mess. The bad debt must be defaulted, and this will mean bankruptcies among both people and companies (including banks) - lots of them. This is inevitable. Market-Ticker

“I have abandoned free-market principles to save the free- market system” George W. Bush

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the U.S. and China are becoming two countries, one system. How so? Easy, in the wake of our massive bank bailout, one can now look at China and America and say: “Well, China has a big-state-owned banking sector, next to a private one, and America now has a big state-owned banking sector next to a private one. China has big state-owned industries, alongside private ones, and once Washington bails out Detroit, America will have a big state-owned industry next to private ones.” Thomas Friedman

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Masters of the craft often insist that it is essential to write every day if you are going to build any writing muscles, there seem to be neural paths that need to be blazed between brain and hand in order to write and the only way to blaze and nurture them is by steadily putting words onto a white space. My brief experience tells me that this is true.

I came to writing late: analyzing world affairs meant having to write on a daily basis and having to write turned into loving to write and that helps me to write every day: a beneficent circle.

The problem in facing the white space is usually where to begin, but world news has always provided me with a wide variety of themes: every morning there was some new event to start the flow of words and ideas moving.

The last few weeks have been heavy going though.

Bush to Blago to Madoff is not the kind of triple play to have the fans on their feet, hoarse from cheering. A steady diet of writing about nothing but criminal stupidity and decadence on a massive scale is finally as appetizing as chugging a barium shake.

However the quotes from Bush and Friedman that top this post give me a glimmer of hope that certain veins of mineable mineral may lie hidden gleaming within our depression-bound dung heap.

It seems sure now that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the ideological struggle against its real-existing socialism, rather than leading to the kingdom of heaven of market capitalism has, in fact, led to some sort of surprising synthesis, which we might tentatively call "don't-look-now-socialism".

The bottom line is that the political system of the United States will not tolerate those classic economic forces, the very rock upon which they have built their church; it will not permit the forces that Reagan called "the magic of markets", to wreak their "creative destruction" on the lives and futures of America's children, aged pensioners, middle class home owners, students, farmers, autoworkers and the assorted consumers of junk food and Chinese Gewgaws.

The system won't tolerate the market cleaning up its own mess because the system is afraid that the aforementioned victims might just turn around and burn the mother down.

Off the top of my head I would say that the consumer society, whose cornucopia of abundance buried real-existing socialism, succeeded in becoming the absolute motor of the US economy by drumming into people's consciousness that they are unique and special individuals whose wants and desires must be discovered, cultivated and satisfied.

Try telling a spoiled child that he or she has just been drafted into the world's "reserve army of labor", then stand back and watch them trash the nursery.

For the American economy to look them in the eye and tell them they are just so much dirt is not a message that a consumer with a "unique life style" can easily digest.

So here we are in the closing days of 2008, watching Adam Smith, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper and Milton Friedman lie moldering on the ash heap of history, while Karl Marx daintily brushes the ashes off his old suit and goes over his notes. DS

Get on your Marx

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At this writing I am sixty four years old and the immense bubble that has burst and is now deflating all around us has been inflating itself since I was a tiny child.

This bubble world is the world that I have always lived in and, unless you are considerably older than I am or live in an undeveloped country then, it is your world too.

When I was very young the "commie menace" hysteria began, and one of my earliest TV memories in suburban America, beside Howdy Doody, of course, was of the McCarthy hearings and the Korean war.

Karl Marx and all who sailed in him were taboo, trefa, haram. Compared to what Karl Marx was then, today's villain, Osama bin Laden, is Brad Pitt.

Then, later on in high school and especially in the atmosphere of 1960s college life, it was titillating to provoke teachers and parents, and especially the friends of parents, with snippets from Marx. During the Vietnam war it was a way of showing "attitude".

But truth to tell, the bubble world that we lived in was so different from the world Marx described that none of what he said made that much sense. In fact, looking back, I would say the whole point of our now fast disappearing bubble was that it was created so that Marx would not make any sense.

Until recently the original Karl has never spoken to me that directly. However, I have always found myself gravitating toward people like Marvin Harris or Eric Hobsbawm, formed in Marxist analysis: I love the way Harris explains why the Aztecs were cannibals and I love the way Hobsbawm writes history as a process, not as a series of biographies of "great" men. I could be considered a "contact" Marxist, like somebody who gets stoned off the stuffy air in places where other people are smoking quantities of hashish. But, "Das Kapital" itself was fairly impenetrable for me... As I said, I had trouble relating to its cold dissection of the 19th century English economy. My 19th century England is Dickens and Conan Doyle.

Now, as I try to balance the contradictory warnings of people who I think make sense, people like Nouriel Roubini, Paul Krugman, James Kunstler, Peter Schiff or Angela Merkel, all their takes on the crisis that I read are like the famous Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant: each of them is describing accurately what comes to their hand, but I get the feeling that none of them is describing the whole animal. Therefore I think that all of them are right and all of them are simultaneously wrong.

Thus, searching for some synthesis, I am beginning to discover Karl Marx in the same way that a traveling salesman who with a bad hangover in a flea bitten hotel, far from home in the middle of a bad night, in the middle of a bad week, might open a Gideon Bible and discover Jesus.

The first thing I think it is important to do is to separate Marx from Lenin. Lenin is action, he breaks and recreates: Lenin is to political action what Pablo Picasso was to painting. Marx for Lenin is only like a cookbook to a great cook: a starting point. What he was interested in was the chopping, the dicing and the frying... what ended up on the plate. Lenin is all "see snake, kill snake".

Marx for Marx is a bit different I think.

Although Marx said that understanding the world was only useful as a way of changing it, he was mostly about the understanding and understanding is what we need now.

As I fumble with the keys, Marx seems to me to say that capitalism is a historical process that will, as time goes on, become so contradictory as to destroy itself.

The old boy thought that the great day was not that far off and that it would happen in some highly advanced country like Germany. When Lenin made a revolution in primitive, illiterate Russia and called it Marxist, most Marxists, like most millenarians always do, swallowed their doubts and, like the "end of days" crowd, waited to ascend into heaven ... many were still waiting when the Soviet Union imploded.

In my opinion what Marx got wrong was the timing and what Lenin got wrong was the place. Capitalism wasn't ripe yet.

Perhaps, with the fulfillment of its potential that globalization represents we are actually going to live to witness the capitalist version of the Rapture.

The logic would be that the USA is the cutting edge, the vanguard of capitalism, and that unlike all other advanced capitalist nations, in America the economic system is not overlaid on a centuries old, traditional culture. In the United States of America the economic system is the culture itself. Eb-dee eb-dee eb-dee ebdee- That's ALL FOLKS!

If this is really a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end then it would be natural for the whole thing to start rotting where it has developed to its fullest.

So it stands to reason that if this system ever finally "enters into contradiction," that is to say, is torn apart by the conflicts of interests and the subsequent struggle between its different elements, then logically it will happen first and most clearly in the USA.

What would be an example of "entering into contradiction" a sign of this "End of Days"?

The "inflation versus deflation" polemic is that sort of contradiction: destroying the value of the currency in order to make possible consumption of foreign goods which must be paid for with the worthless money that we print and give to other countries that in turn have to lend it back to us without hope of payment in order to keep their own populations employed and doing all of this, not because we are stupid, but because any other alternative would be so painful and disruptive as to be unthinkable.

Getting into that sort of idiotic shit and not being able to get out of it could be called "entering into contradiction". The bubble has run out of road.

Anyway I'll keep on reading and trying to make reality and what I read fit together somehow. DS

The Oozlum protocol

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Yesterday, I wrote about Stanley Anne, Barack Obama's mother.

Her life and the life of her children, which, if you have lived in expatriate communities as much as I have, are not that unusual or exotic, sadden me. Some unbreachable loneliness, some endless purging of context, of freedom as a curse more than as a blessing.

All of it is deeply familiar to me and it brings back memories of dozens of Americans: families, broken, half-families and wandering individuals that I have known over the years. Some of them, when I ever think of them, I miss. Ships that pass in the night. Many farewell dinners. Too many.

Take my true love by her hand lead her through the town
Say goodbye to everyone goodbye to everyone

She and her children are people I could have easily known; I think I would have liked Stanley Anne and I imagine she would have liked me too; intelligent, flakey people with a sense of humor often have.

Being a Celt, certain types of sadness are pleasurable for me in a way similar to the Portuguese "saudade," and I tend to nurse melancholic feelings along to see what juice they have in them.... Melancholy is like the dear pig, all of whom, except for his death screams, is either useful or delicious.

Thinking about Stanley Anne and ruminating on the sadness her story dredges out of me, I remembered something that Felipe González, the former president of Spain, and an extremely intelligent and perceptive man, once said about Americans.

I'm quoting from memory, González said something like, "Americans are sad people, I find them touching" (me enternecen). My first reaction was to find his remark condescending and offensive, but after thinking about it at length, I decided he was right.

What is this sadness, where does it come from, what is it about?

Everybody, even Thomas Friedman, has read that bit in the Communist Manifesto, describing the action of capitalism on society that goes, "All that is solid melts into air" The full paragraph goes like this:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” ... for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation ... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (emphasis mine)

Taking that as my text, I would preach that as America is and always has been the absolute vanguard and the world's most enthusiastic advocate of capitalism, logically no other people have ever felt capitalism's effects half as directly or half as powerfully as Americans have. If we add to that the deracination of the process of immigration, then we also talking about people who have had all the defenses and the retarding effects of "feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations" already stripped from them when they arrived. More than even the British who invented it, Americans therefore stand naked before the forces that "melt all that is solid into air" with all that is holy profaned.

That leaves the American "at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind". How to avoid that self-examination is the central task that Americans have set for themselves.

This has led to a frantic search for new "veils of religious and political illusions" to make all of this contemplation of "his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind" bearable.

The man and his companion whose statue grace this post are symbols of an industrial effort at distraction from the "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" and the "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" which make up the actual warp and woof of our lives.

The consolation would be that since American society has advanced far further on this road than any other, if capitalism is ever to take the path of the Oozlum Bird*, it will be in America first. DS

*The Oozlum bird, also spelled Ouzelum, is a Legendary Creature found in Australian and British folk tales and legends. Some versions have it that, when startled, the bird will take off and fly around in ever-decreasing circles until it manages to fly up itself, disappearing completely, which adds to its rarity. Other sources state that the bird flies backwards so that it can admire its own beautiful tail feathers, or because while it does not know where it is going, it likes to know where it has been.

What has been lost?

Gandhi with women workers in Lancashire, September 1931

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This photograph of Mahatma Gandhi surrounded by cheering women workers in Lancashire was taken in 1931.

1931 was a bad, bad year in the industrial world and the women in the picture are "workers". It isn't difficult to imagine that there lives were easily as hard, and probably a good deal harder than those of the natives of the rust belt small towns that were the object of Barack Obama's "Bittergate" remarks.

They are cheering in solidarity with a man that wants to destroy their empire.

What was the culture that produced this picture and what happened to it?

What has happened since then is the stupefication of the left.

The hymn of the British Labor (labour) Party is entitled "The Red Flag", which is sung to the melody of the German Christmas carol, "O Tannenbaum". The opening verse goes like this:

The people's flag is deepest red,

It shrouded oft our martyr'd dead
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold.

Then raise the scarlet standard high,
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the red flag flying here.

That's what the ladies in the photo sang and they believed it.

With the coming of Tony Blair or more exactly, the coming of the conditions that brought Tony Blair, cruel parodies of "The Red Flag" circulate, here is one of the better ones:

The people's flag is palest pink
It's not the colour you might think
White collar workers stand and cheer
The Labour government is here
We'll change the country bit by bit
So nobody will notice it
And just to show that we're sincere
We'll sing The Red Flag once a year

The cloth cap and the woollen scarf
Are images outdated
For we're the party's avant garde
And we are educated
So raise the rolled umbrella high
The college scarf, the old school tie
And just to show that we're sincere
We'll sing The Red Flag once a year

But the cruelest parody I've ever heard of "The Red Flag" opens:

The working class can kiss my arse
I've got the foreman's job at last

The rest is too rough for a family blog

What Obama said had some truth in it, but what was (I think the new Americanism is) inappropriate was the flip tone employed. There is something serious here that deserves discussion.

Karl Rove made a point of underlining the Marxist, "religion is the opium of the people" tone of Obama's remarks. Turdblossom has a point, but, in fact, in the original quote, in contrast to Obama, Marx's tone is filled with impassioned compassion and respect for the people's religiosity.

"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

"The heart of a heartless world". Now how does that compare to:

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”

One is a noble sentiment, nobly expressed and the other is something you might hear at a vernissage. Shallow, condescending. And then, when cornered Obama didn't defend the idea... and it can be defended as Marx went on to say,

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

Now, what Marx is saying makes no mention of the existence or nonexistence of God. Here, on this point, Marx like the Gautama Buddha, keeps a "noble silence". He is only talking about using religion to keep people from examining their actual lives: alienation. Or as Joe Hill sang:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
To tell you what's wrong and what's right
But when asked about something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet

Chorus
You will eat bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die -- that's a lie.

And the starvation army they play,
They sing and they clap and they pray.
'Til they get your all coin on the drum,
Then they'll tell you when you're on the bum.

Chorus
You're going to eat bye and bye, poor boy,
In that glorious land above the sky, way up high.
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die -- dirty lie.
Holy rollers and jumpers come out,
And they holler , they jump, lord they shout.
Give your money to Jesus they say,
He will cure all your troubles today.

Chorus
And you will eat bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

If you heart for children and wife,
Try to get something good from this life.
You're a sinner and a bad man they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.

Chorus
You will eat bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.


Working men of all countries unite,
Side by side for freedom we will fight.
When this world and its wealth we have gained,
To the grafters we will sing this refrain:

Chorus
You will eat bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry.
Chop some wood it'll do you good,
You will eat in that sweet bye and bye.

Yes, You will eat bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky.
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die -- that's a lie.

As a matter of fact, I personally believe in God and I have always found what Marx said deeply spiritual. Gandhi himself synthesized all the contradictions implicit here. That's another reason the Socialist ladies in the picture were cheering him.

In short Obama said what he said and as Arianna Huffington was thousands of miles away in the South Pacific, staying on "billionaire Obama backer" David Geffen's 454-foot yacht, like in "the people's flag is palest pink," she didn't kill the story in time and Obama got caught.

This was even a better opportunity for him than the Wright-race speech to say something noble and to educate his listeners... as is his want, but he didn't step up, he choked.

And I think that if you think this stuff and say this stuff, you have to defend this stuff, because it has a pedigree and can be defended without offending. Or don't think it or at least have the mother wit not to say it anywhere to anyone except maybe to Michelle when the lights are off... Not even then, people get divorced and ex-wives of famous men write books.

For me this confirms my impression of Barack Obama as an American Tony Blair with a fantastic tan, but without Blair's self discipline.

Is this an endorsement of Hillary Clinton?

No, but one can say this for Hillary, she is so phony, so artificial, so contrived, that you could think that, somehow, somewhere, cowering at the bottom of her soul, there might be a real person hoping to get a chance to spring out.

As to the Democrats and America itself, my inner Lenin tells me things are going to have to get much, much worse, before they ever get better. DS

Islam versus Marxist-Leninism

David Seaton's News Links

What makes the situation today more explosive than the cold war in the difference in ideological potency between Islam and Marxist-Leninism. Marxist-Leninism had a great attraction for young, nationalist intellectual elites in the third world and gave them an organizational structure, international connections and financing for forming a revolutionary vanguard and cadres.

However Marxism never had much attraction in itself for the masses in Muslim countries (or any other for that matter) and neither did proletarian internationalism. A traditional "ultra-nationalist-international" is a contradiction in terms. But, Islam squares that circle: Islam works on the level of the most militant, nationalist chauvinism, while at the same time being totally international constantly searching for common denominators among Muslims everywhere.

In the cold war equation there was no wild card factor like Israel, which at the same time stimulates nationalist and internationalist feelings among the masses and elites alike in Muslim countries. This is what makes political Islam so revolutionary... Really, all that was necessary was to add modern communications (Internet and Satellite TV) and the Israel/Palestinian/Iraq conflict to the waiting Umma to get critical mass. DS

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night... blogging

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism". British Ministry of Defence Report on the future

David Seaton's News Links
After reading the quote from the British MOD report, read Harold Meyerson's well documented article from the Washington Post and then ask yourself how long it will be before the service workers, whose work makes life possible organize and strike and how long before the middle classes, whose only capital is their knowledge of information systems rebel and join them too.

Knowledge workers are today's true, world-proletariat, without whose labor nothing functions. The post-industrial knowledge worker is truly within the contemporary system in the same way that the industrial worker was within his or her system. It could be called the "vanguard" or "aristocracy"of the service sector whose problems Meyerson outlines. When the knowledge workers and the service workers join forces the world will change like a nuclear chain reaction. Therefore we can expect that the system as it is will make a herculean effort to keep this from happening. Traditionally the tools for preventing unions of such revolutionary potential from forming have been xenophobia, nationalism, religious manias and war. All of them are on today's menu.

Only organization at the grass roots level: unions, workers, students, Internet, micro-financing and NGOs and constant dialog and sharing of information can keep those sinister forces from derailing or co-opting this movement. DS

Harold Meyerson: A Dream Short-Circuited - Washington Post
Abstract: An analysis of Internal Revenue Service data from 2005 that became available showed that the bottom 90 percent of Americans made less money that year than they had in 2004. According to a study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, total reported income in the United States increased by 9 percent in 2005 over its level in 2004. All of that increase, however, came from the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, and the wealthiest 1 percent experienced an increase of 14 percent. Among the remaining 90 percent, income actually decreased by 0.6 percent. And 2005, let us remember, wasn't a year of economic downturn. The American economy was humming along. It was only the American people who weren't doing very well. What all this amounts to is a triumph of corporate and financial power, and of the conservative economics that shores it up. Once upon a time, American prosperity actually benefited Americans. From 1947 through 1973, productivity in the U.S. rose by 104 percent, and median family income rose by an identical 104 percent. Those were also the only years of real union power in the United States, years in which one-quarter of the workforce, and in some years one-third, was unionized. Apparently, this level of worker power and mass prosperity proved intolerable to our financial elite and their political flunkies. Since the '70s, American business has generally done its damnedest to keep its workers down. Employers routinely opted to pay the negligible penalties for violating the National Labor Relations Act rather than permit its employees to join unions. In 1969, according the National Labor Relations Board, the number of employees who'd suffered illegal retaliation for exercising their right to join or maintain a union was just over 6,000; by 2005, that number had risen to 31,358. According to a study out this January from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, fully one in five activists on unionization campaigns are illegally fired. And as worker power declines, so do living standards. Secure retirement pensions are history; employer-provided health benefits are going fast. To all of this, conservatives offer no remedy whatever save to make things worse. Employer-provided pensions collapsing? Let's gut Social Security, too. Health insurance tottering? By all means, let's preserve our private, for-profit system, which currently fails to cover 47 million of our fellow Americans. All income increases going only to the rich? Let's switch to a flat tax (Rudy Giuliani's most recent brainstorm), which further shifts the tax burden from the upwardly mobile rich to the downwardly-mobile everyone else. READ IT ALL