Rad Choice Dude

The current epoch presents an interesting paradox in the context of global politics. In global affairs, economic analysis has been abandoned for cultural policy. Politics proper, politics as a struggle for power, has been abandoned for politics as negotiation between interest groups. The conservative position seems to be characterized by a demand for separate cultural identity, the liberal position defined by multicultural-permissiveness. However, our paradox actually exists within a series of unexpected congruencies. For within continental philosophy, theorists have drifted towards postmodernism, generally criticizing the current global order as homogenizing, and conservative. The coincidence is that post-modern philosophy, in an attempt to understand how exclusion can exist within “inclusive” philosophies, has elevated the idea of cultural difference to a position of inherent value, perfectly aligning themselves with today’s modern “information age” liberal democratic, global, tolerant capitalism. The congruency between neoliberal politics and postmodern philosophy constitutes the greatest threat to genuine emancipatory change. Our revolution should instead re-examine the relevance of Marxism, as Marx puts it “Communism is…not a state of affairs…to be established, an ideal to which reality [has] to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

            “Tolerance” has become the panacea of the ruling class but is actually a symptom of de-politicization. What is lost is the struggle based identity of greater commonalities that cut across different identities that can serve as an actual basis for authentic challenges to power structures. This is where the postmodernist would oppose “meta-narratives” that attribute such a commonality and “limit” diversity, which will maintain the status quo. The existence of power structures seems to under dispute as well as neoliberals paint capitalism as both “the worst but only system we have” and then prescribe more of it to solve global oppression. The “false” antagonism exists between “global civil society” and fundamentalism (as Fukuyama called “20^th century ideology”). Postmodernists, like Foucault, instead suggest an “open-space” where identities struggle for “hegemony” as Deconstructionist set about “subverting binaries”.

            The paradox emerges when we recognize the escalated violence of “capitalism with a human face”. The system will be instead maintained by such books as Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, as future George Soroes and Bill Gateses begin to assimilate a postmodernity of fluid identity and rhizomatic organization to increase profitability within digital capitalism, utilize charity to maintain power structures, and further demand the individuals of the 1st world to become postmodern subjects, a fluid being who’s cynicism turns them to hedonists, the perfect consumer, capable of fully disavowing complicity by buying “Fair trade coffee” from Starbucks, apathetic to the corporation’s violent treatment of unions. The paradox: our position as dedicated leftists, in fidelity to emancipation, must oppose the liberal position in global politics and demand a firm identity based in a common human culture, in search of a truly radical politics. We must refuse to see all global problems as problems to be solved by “tolerance”, re-politicize economics, and demand truly emancipatory action in the form of political struggle.

Sartre is a Psychoanalytical Symptom

When I first read Sartre, it was like I had been an existentialist all my life without knowing it. He described the feeling, not just the reasoning, behind philosophy. Quite honestly, I have a very strong, natural inclination to dissent and whenever I feel as though I am on the conservative side of a debate, I get anxious. That is how I usually felt when trying to defend German idealism in the face of what felt like not only towering truth (ironic) but a superior position of dissention in the works of Sartre. There was a reason, however, or more of a feeling of an unfinished thought, that prevented me from becoming an existentialist outright. I found the words in the work of Slavoj Zizek, a contemporary philosopher who work aims at the revitalization of Marxist politics with an infusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a means of returning to modernism in the face of the postmodern order, existing in “postindustrial” or “postmodern” capitalism, our modern “risk society”. The similarities in Sartre’s dismantlement of universal meaning and Zizek’s analysis of our abandonment of modernity are astounding and I finally find my answer to Sartre’s existentialism.

First, there is the rather uncanny parallel between Sartre’s literary descriptions of the Nausea and Lacan’s Real in psychoanalysis. The Nausea, as described in the novel, is where the protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, experiences a distinct anxiety where he feels that objects and situations around him directly inhibit his ability to define himself.
His perception of these object and situations and ideas becomes one of sheer repulsion, where he is nauseated by some horrifyingly unknowable aspect of these objects. He describes this as he stares at a cherry tree, which I think symbolizes for Sartre the entrenched order of arbitrary meaning. The tree, as he examines it, becomes composed of all manner of vile and conventionally-recognized-as-putrid substances. He describes it with such utter and vehement repugnance it begins to go beyond description, despite Sartre’s wonderful exemplification of his literary talent when he draws this description out. The nature of this horror becomes clearly definable as it being unknowable. There are three distinct reasons why the Nausea is a perfect example of the Lacanian theory of the Real. The first is that Sartre expresses Nausea to be our universal reaction to a similar affliction of arbitrary meaning. Lacan of course describes the Real as a universal participant in our psyche in which our mind constantly grapples with our inability to relate with everything around us. For example, Lacan says that we can never know the chair as anything other than “the chair”. We will never be able to comprehend any real qualities or ever have a complete knowledge of every aspect of the chair. We can only interact with its Symbolic existence. We, the signifier, can never know the signified. This is the traumatic aspect of the Lacanian Real. If we were to describe the Real, as Zizek does in one of his many entertaining metaphors, it would be a pulsating, horrific mass that seeps. The Nausea can now be seen to consciously describe our horror of having no relationship to the Real.

Now, Sartre’s remedy for this common symptom was to recognize that there is no meaning, there is no God, and there is no Humanity. Zizek has a term for this “being of meaning”. He calls it the Big Other. The Big Other, or the Master Signifier, is the thing that overall determines the “symbolic order”. For example, the Big Other of the Medieval Ages was God. All things we related to in terms of God. Leaders were legitimized by God, both calamity and miracle was attributed to God, all art and culture was defined by God, and our interactions with all objects were through God. The tree is beautiful; it is a creation of God (yes, the relationship is better described by a semicolon than ‘because’). Sartre contended that we must do away with this Big Other, it has been our oppressor. Zizek, however, has much to say about this absence of meaning. It all begins with his critique of the modern world. We live, he says, not in a modern world but a world of postmodern capitalism. The May 1968 rebellion has been co-opted and we are now entering the “third spirit of capitalism (1)”. The free market of Marx’s era has been replaced. Capitalism is no longer a force of hierarchalizing authority. It is now a force of enabling fluidity. We are encouraged to have fluid identities and encouraged to search for our Self and do what we please in a societal perusal of what becomes jouissance (literally, orgasmic pleasure, pleasurable experience). Our postmodern identity is a perfect model for a consumer. We are encouraged to make “free choices” about what consumer items to buy and what activities to participate in and what clothes to wear, what music to hear. But that is because of the good old Marxist understanding of “commodity fetishizism”, where we attribute fantastic qualities to the products. (Aside, it is amazing the prevalence of Marx’s forecast those many years ago, especially before the idea of advertisement had really been explored). We are convinced that buying Abercrombie and Fitch clothing will turn us into the unbearably sexy image on their paper bags. We are convinced that the kind of music you listen to can describe you, whether you are “gangsta” or “indy”. But it has been taken to the next level as well. Fifty years ago, men bought cologne so as to express their masculinity. Now young men bathe is Axe body spray because that is how a man smells. Not to express themselves, the product is now what describes “masculine” thus the very concept of this idea is what is now owned. Thus is the same with concept of “cool”, you listen to “cool” music, not to express how cool you are, but to be, by definition “cool”. There is, now a ready made list of items and such to consume to define your identity as you please, which constantly growsm constantly in a state of becoming. But of course, this is another subject altogether and I digress.

Zizek goes on to describe another idea, called the “Other of the Other”. Zizek theory is that capitalism has done away with the Big Other. We live in a world without inherent meaning, without Symbolic efficiency, without any relationship to the Real. It is very much in the interest of capitalism to keep us one hundred percent unsure of our identity and our relationship to the Real so that our now “care of the self” or our search for our self simply becomes one enormous, unending, continuously changing and fluid shopping spree. We live IN A WORLD WITHOUT MEANING. This is where the Other of the Other comes in. Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek (London: Routledge, 2003) composes it well.

“Zizek talks about a belief in an Other of the Other, in someone or something who is really pulling the strings of society and organizing everything, as one of the signs of paranoia. Needless to say that it is commonplace to argue that the dominant pathology today is paranoia: countless books and films [and Tea Parties] refer to some organization which covertly controls governments, news, markets and academia. Zizek proposes that the cause of this paranoia can be located in a reaction to the demise of the big Other:
‘When faced with such a paranoid construction, we must not forget Freud's warning and mistake it for the "illness" itself: the paranoid construction is, on the contrary, an attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real "illness", the "end of the world", the breakdown of the symbolic universe, by means of this substitute formation.’ Looking Awry: an Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture)”

Zizek says we need the Big Other, we need meaning in our lives. This is why we must return to modernists like T.S. Eliot who despair at a world where we live in a meaningless “wasteland.” This is a greater subject as well but it may suffice to say that our lack of meaning, our lack of an Other, is what causes us to have Nausea, it was causes us to despair and become unsecure. This is why it is in the best interest of postmodern capitalism for us to become postmodern subjects. I jump ahead a little so we’ll come back to this.

Finally, the unifying similarity that shows the Nausea to be a symptom of lack of meaning rather than a symptom of false meaning is the similarity between “existential dread” and the psychoanalytical idea of jouisannce. Existential dread is a term coined by Sartre to describe the feeling people have when they realize that there is no meaning, that there is no Big Other. The dread is because we cannot cope with the complete freedom, the complete responsibility for everything we do. Jouisannce is a term that is predicated of the Freudian ideal of the “pleasure principle” and the “death drive”. The pleasure principle is the fact that humans prefer pleasure over pain and seek pleasure and avoid pain. This is counteracted by the “reality principle” where over time the brain begins to realize that pain must be born sometimes when necessary. Thus, the pleasure principle has a limit on it. But, the subject always attempts to transgress this limit, “go beyond the pleasure principle.” This, however, results in pain since the amount of pleasure a subject can endure is limited. Beyond pleasure is pain, and the subject finds pleasure in this pain. Lacan calls this painful pleasure jouissance because jousissance is suffering. The term expresses the paradoxical satisfaction the subject derives from his symptom or the suffering he derives from his own satisfaction. Couple this with Zizek understanding of postmodern capitalism:

“For Zizek, lacking the prohibitions of the big Other, in these conditions, the subject's inherent reflexivity manifests itself in attachments to forms of subjection, paranoia and narcissism (Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003),”

and you begin to see the connection. The lack of a Big Other, leaves us as subjects COMPLETLEY free. Postmodernism grasps this, but their answer to the problem is wrong. Again Zizek:

“In order to ameliorate these pathologies, Zizek proposes the need for a political act or revolution - one that will alter the conditions of possibility of postmodernity (which he identifies as capitalism) and so give birth to a new type of Symbolic Order in which a new breed of subject can exist. (Tony Myers in Slavoj Zizek, London: Routledge, 2003)”

Existential dread then seems to describe a symptom of freedom without meaning, freedom without relation to reality. We are free, yes, but we are free in the sense that we are falling through space, in no direction with no relation. At that point, hedonism seems like a perfectly fine idea. Wearing Nike clothes produced in an African sweat shop is fine because you are free without meaning, you are in space, the child means nothing to you. This freedom leaves us without the ethical conviction that “Nazis are bad”. The fact that the African child worked for twelve hours that day and his hands have been bloodied for the 25 cents he received means nothing, because there is no meaning. Jouissance comes back into the picture because what we do in postmodern capitalism is we embrace our meaningless freedom because we find satisfaction our symptom. We find pleasure in this new painful meaninglessness. We then hold on to our symptom because it is all we have left, thus transferring to “fetishism”. Like when a family member dies, we may hold on to a piece of cloth because within the cloth, the person lives on. This applies in a macro sense as well: our collective paranoia, narcissism, and I would contend to add materialism and consumerism to the list. This is your freedom: Starbucks or Dunken Donuts because beyond the taste nothing really matters.

Sartre is still a philosopher that I will cherish. His literary talent and his role as a dissident intellectual place him far beyond most other philosophers. As I have said, I believe the role of the intellectual is to BE what he believes, like Gandhi and to much extent Sartre. But I have come to realize that meaning is all we have. Purpose is all we have. And that is what postmodernism is trying to take from us. Purpose. (Matrix 2?) All of the symptoms Sartre describes are true, that is why I love his work. I feel what he describes often and I know others do as well. But what I feel when I begin to think about the world and who I am and WHY I am, I find that the source of my consternation is how thinks don’t link up, how things don’t relate. How things seem meaningless. Sartre and Zizek have lead me to discover something. I would rather die for revolution, for humanity, than live in any New York City penthouse with all material desires fulfilled as a postmodern subject, a consumer. Because otherwise, we are merely floating in space.

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What a tangled WWW we thread...

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Isolated individuals acting as networking hive of Facebooks and cell phones, spinning webs of gossamer information and desolated reality amongst thousands of fractions of humans as zeros and ones surround them.

You amputated human with binary conversations of two dimensional depth with equal perspective, as you swim through information paying as much attention to each as you do each of the falling raindrops on a rainy day.

Words, words, words as they flow back and forth, messages, information, data, you process and spit back are you really human? What makes interaction human, by God, it is eye contact, the gift of gab is as useful as one finger typing now days, all this nonsense we must speed it up, faster, more productive, get more done, we have so little time on this planet so we get things done as we waste it on the Internet. See my Face, ones and zeros, you can read me like a book, this is my identity, a Facebook.

Why stop with instant messaging what about future messaging, anticipatory responses, written in a vowel-less alphabet of pure efficient nonsense as you transfer ready-made greetings and messages and fulfill what is now the motions of a conversation, all within a second, a moment, an infinitesimal fraction of your time so that you may do other things, important things, many things and do them faster and take less time with each person so that you may speak to more people, more accounts, I have A MILLION FACEBOOK FRIENDS! NOW LET ME TELL THEM HOW HAPPY I AM!!! But pause to play the flash game that is advertising masculine scents in a bottle...

Is this what capitalism thinks a “community” is? Watch as your personal interactions become commodities...

Viva La Revolucion

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We are now living in postmodern capitalism, a world of fake and constant free choice, the choice between Wal-Mart and Target, Starbucks or Dukin' Donuts. It is a hedonistic world of perpetual desire, a world of multi-lateral, multi-national, multi-cultural exploitation.

A world where exploitation has been almost entirely exported to Third World countries while we live in middle-class here. While antagonisms continue to fester here, we have seen what the new breed of capitalism will be. The bailout was only one example of how capitalism will have to reinvent socialism in order to survive. Big corporations do not want a free-market, they want a government that minimizes their investment and venture risk, a government that is focused on protecting the property of the few. Corporations are the new face of muli-cultural perspective, globalization the harbinger of the free-movement of property and the enslavement of people.

The corporations of this country fear the fundamentalist right-wing, though they have been their tools for all these years. That is why the face of the bailout was that of the Democratic Party, those poor, boring scapegoats on which the basic function of our society now relies. If fundamentalists were to have their way, how would companies secure bailouts should their risky investment schemes fail, how would they maintain the steady, cheap labor of illegal immigrants, how would they avoid the protectionism of global trade?

They have thus turned to the liberals of this country, the sorry excuse for a left wing-representation. The liberals, as opposed to left-wingers, have become the new pillar upon which global capitalism stands. Through self-described intellectualism, liberals have cynically recognized that a truly egalitarian society is impossible and so they pay lip service to these ideals as they allow for “necessary exceptions” and bailouts to occur. This new constituency has given rise bullshit terms like “fair trade coffee beans” and biodegradable smoothie cups. Starbucks, the new liberal commercial spin still participates is the most brutal anti-union action of any American country and companies like Wal-Mart exploit the welfare-to-work programs of this country to secure indentured slaves to do subsidized work. No, we don’t live in a purely and clearly fascist society. We live in the new bastard child of neo-liberal socialism.

Socialism has been co-opted, we must examine the root of the problem, which is the coercion of labor by holding our survival as individuals for ransom and the idea of private property. We must not simply abandon capitalism and socialism, but begin the war of symbolic violence against property while practicing non-violence towards humans. Yes, blow up corporate art, deface corporate property, and trespass on corporate land. Do not enact your symbolic violence of the private property of the ones around you. Demonstrate the illusion of the private to them by destroying the belongings of corporations, entities of pure property and no humanity. This will radically reverse the trend of the modern world which will sacrifice humanity for the sake of property.

The revolution will be psychological. We must refuse to be victims of the psychological “disavowal”, where we accept these problems as the truth as a means of saying “That is enough now let me live my life.” We must not use the disavowal to rhetorically recognize the structural violence of this system as a means of justifying our passive existence in a consumerist life. We must force ourselves to recognize the harsh Real, the reality of the death and suffering that we are complicit with. We must see that we are murderers and feel this guilt, to launch us into action. We must firmly recognize our Symbolic relationship with this Real violence, so as to stand firm in the face of the usurpation capitalism (like the manufacture of Che Guevara t-shirts by Banana Republic), and use this new strength to crush the Imaginary of the American Dream.

This is a call to the left. Wake up. The time has come to radicalize, to embrace and reclaim the roots of our country, the revolutionary traditions that are the blessing of democracy. We must reclaim our history, reclaim the Constitution and radically transform it. We must write a new Declaration of Independence. Yes, most of the Founding Fathers were rich land owners, bent on protecting their own property. Remember the ideas. When ask what he thought of Western Civilization, Gandhi replied “I think it’s a good idea”. Liberals/democrats/independents, you are fast becoming the new tools of global capitalism, even as you point and make fun at FOX news and the Tea Party. Look to them with fear, they are the Black Shirts, Stormtroopers. It took only two years for Hitler to take power. We face two futures: reactionary revolution and fascism, or the complete victory of neo-liberal capitalism and fascism. Let us envision another. Do not be content with buying your coffee from companies that practice exploitation Lite, to vote for vague campaign promises of “hope” and rhetorical liberal ideals like “change”. Fight for revolution, the only change worthy of humanity. The left wing of the country must spite the new-emerging Red Scare of Glenn Beck and proudly name themselves radicals, not liberals. Don’t fear the name “communist”. Wear it with pride, in the face of propaganda. Do not be afraid to begin from the beginning, as Lenin wrote in On Climbing a High Mountain, follow no dogmatic road. But do not be afraid of “conformity”. Anti-conformity is not valuable in itself, it is infinitely regressive and equally as blind as conformity. It is a vital tool against injustice and must be used as such. This is a call to the liberals of this country to stop, set down their double whipped whappachino moacha with peppermint, put down Newsweek and think. Are you really standing up for what you believe in?

It will not be a mission of moral relativity but a time to finally take the ethical stance of “No, I will not live at the cost of human suffering, imperialism in the Middle East, dictatorships in Latin America, utter enslavement in Africa, and the death of industrial workers in Virginia and the Gulf of Mexico etc. No, I will not live at the cost of future generations as the world in which I live is sucked bare of all natural beauty and resource. No, I will not be a person who would rather ask the question of ‘What do I want?’ than ‘What is right?’ No, and I will not do so with a passive statement of my opinion. I will act. ” We must refuse to be affected by the psychological disavowal of the harsh Real, so as to live a more peaceful life, and recognize the fact that we are all murderers for the lives that we live. The revolution begins in you.

New Populist Focus for Radicals

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When George Bush Jr. won the presidency, a lot of really intelligent people looked around and asked what the hell the people of this country were thinking? They wondered if their country was truly full of stupid people, truly full of ignorant people. They sneered at the sentiment expressed by the Republican voter; "He seems like a nice guy, or someone I would like to have a beer with." A lot of my contemporaries were compelled to make some of the same statements of contempt for this feeling. I believe that this generalization is wrong, elitist, ultimately counter-productive, and that there is a need for a refocusing of left-wing populism.

The first is involved in the rather pathetic ability of the left-wing, whose ideology would most behoove the working class, to mobilize populism in their favor. There is some groundbreaking political analysis being done by a young man in California, Michael Shellenburg (as I read in Sun Magazine), who has the opinion that the reason a man like John Kerry, an intellectual and a war-veteran, could not win against a man like George Bush Jr. was that people felt (key word there) that Kerry, were the to sit beside him in a bar, would judge them on their intelligence, while Bush would judge them on their values. I think this holds enormous and powerful truth. Even though I think Democrats and Republicans are cut from the same cloth and represent the same fascist ideology of capitalism, even though I think that these two parties are different only in words not in actions, I see a new direction for Lefties in this new decade.

If perhaps, we could develop a movement that perhaps applied to working class people rather than intellectuals alone, would have more working communists and a lot less "liberal communist" or "communist CEO's" like Bill Gates. Contrary to current popular belief, communism is an ideology that maintains a majority of the homey-values of the inherent working class of America. In fact, it would maintain these values with high priority and with action, rather than with the lip-service that is payed by our current political system. Imagine a government that does focus on community, does give self-determinative powers to individuals, expands liberty, and values hard work and strong ethics for their own sake.

I have been noticing a lot of rather common patterns in our lexicon of communal and common knowledge. We hear it referred to as "common sense" as a means of contrasting with high-level intellectual discourses commonly displayed by most left-wing representatives. There is a enormous amount of powerful truths that have been left untouched by the liberals of the Democratic party and even the more egalitarian left-wing, who have turn their nose up at such vulgar excuses for reason and policy (I use the word vulgar because its Latin root literally means common people as it refers to Vulgar Latin of the common folk). Their reasons, ironically, have been rather reactionary, a capitulation to the right-wing who has ,rather unopposed, swept in an placed themselves as the representative of the down-to-earth-salt-of-the-land-hard-working-folks, even though i out of a hundred of them come from working class backgrounds and they routinely represent large business interest rather than working class interest. They have gotten very good at choosing hot-spot populist topics and then going against the stream of their ideology to convince the working class that they are on their side, ie. immigration and gun-laws or Constitutional Rights (this is so long as they can maitian a right-wing fundamentalist Supreme Court that will happily reinterpret the Constitution to give citizen rights to Corpoations that are in reality merely property entities).

Communism above all other ideologies aligns itself with common people because it means to maintain individual liberties in the face of tyrannical Capital, as it is by nature, it means to establish strong locality and community to nourish and protect that individual, it means to extend all of the fundamental thing included in the Bill of Rights and more importantly the ideas expounded (and then forgotten) within the Declaration of Independence, it means to raise the standard of living for people in general through the more efficient use of resources, labor, service, and the priority to deal with every humans' need, and finally it means to compensate every individual justly for the hard labor they do for the nation. Are these not all pillars of populist sentiment?

Communism means to protect the values of this nation. It means to actually realize the American Dream as an ideal rather than a vague and empty fantasy, it means to value hard work and personal ethics in each individual, it means to help the sick and feed the poor, it means to help the children learn to be healthy and more importantly happy humans (not just how to be adults...), it aims to allow the private practice of Church with the invasion of the public, it means to protect the individual liberties of the people like free speech, free thought, free press, free expression, and free life, it means to defend family, in contrast to the way that Capital has destroyed them and rebuilt them in a twisted and exploitable fashion, and finally it means to protect working class people, who only wish to live lives in peace and in the pursuit of happiness.

I think a new era of left-wing populism is possible. I think it will begin when the left wing reclaims the inherently Radical ideas that are responsible for this nation's founding. It can be very persuasively argued that the Constitution was written merely to protect the property rights of the New ownership class of this country, of white men and rich men, and it has been done so by the Left for ages. While we can recognize this and rejects this founding factor, we must also recognize that the people of this country are just like any other and have root in nationalism. The movement will not be a fascist one, built upon flag waving and anthem singing, it will be a people's movement focused on making life more livable in this country. And there are some ideas, especially in the Declaration of Independence, that can help take us there. We merely have to reclaim the historical precedence for egalitarianism, revolution, freedom, equality and justice for all that is within this nations founding. We need to act in a manner that actively rejects the negative factors of our founding and rather than rejecting the entirety of our founding, we need to reclaim it and make it our own again. (A great expansion on this, put in nice, big intellectual words for your convenience can be found in Slavoj Zizek's new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce somewhere near pages 130-140.)

Unnamed by W.H. Auden

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Auden: A poet for our times


I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

The Courage of Nonviolence

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The Courage of Nonviolence manifests in different ways. It can mean the courage to resist persuasion, to struggle against active coercion, the wit to avoid manipulation, or the consciousness to stand firm in contending with persuasion. Every individual has a perspective independent of others. This perspective is a development of infinite variables of influence on a person, completely unique in comparison to other individuals. This creates an inevitable conflict. The odds are that a person will meet another person who has conflict with their own perspective, whether that is in personality, opinion, or objective. The question is how we resolve this conflict.

A person now has the choice to engage in violence, or to not. Violence is the use of forces to physically harm (irritation of one's weaknesses) and thus persuade another individual to conform to, maintain, or occupy their perspective. Some have different ways of justifying violence, whether it be for an objective that they subjectivity hold to be of more value than the person they commit violence against, a conscious justification, or whether it is from shear impulse of fear or anger or even hate. It of these subconscious impulses that are the most common causes of micro-personal violence and it is of these I will first address.

Fear is an instinct that serves of value to us, as is anger, and to some extent hate. They are all devises of the individual, designed to protect the individual. Fear induces automatic responses that remove us from potential harm, physically or other wise. Anger causes responses to prevent further harm in the future, to exploit fear in someone else, or protect one's self from fear or sadness. Hatred is the most basic and feral self-defense mechanism, one that defies definition more so than other emotions. Hatred can be used to protect us from recognizing similar traits in other individuals that we don't like in ourselves, to protect ourselves from the psychic implications of harming others, to protect ourselves from things or people that make us experience feelings we are not comfortable with, or to protect ourselves from many other emotions or conscious realizations that could lead us to conclusions that we are not comfortable with. People hate others who make them feel guilty, people hate those who make them feel inferior, people hate those that they do not understand, all a means of protecting one's self from harm, emotionally, mentally, physically, or even intellectually. These are core devises we use to remain out of harms way. And they are all proponents of violence.

Fear caused impulse independent of conscious thought, as a means of circumventing our typical thought process. It is the dictator of the democratic sanctity of our minds. It seeks to avoid deliberation in an effort to be efficient. The end product is almost indefinitely poorer than that of deliberation. This could be something to be said of conversation and argumentation, something people typically shy away from for the sake of protecting their own understanding, to prevent their own anchor from becoming loose, regardless of what ground it may rest in. Anyway, fear elicits responses that are not conscious. Humans are conscious beings. That is what makes us human, our ability to think independently of our instinct or intrinsic nature. Fear is an animal response. Fear is cowardly. Whether you value bravery or not, there is something to be said in fighting yourself and winning. Their is at least some value in being courageous and opposing a foe who knows you better than anyone and hold more control over you that even you do at times. To refuse to act violently as a cause of fear is by far the easiest to justify logically and condone as wrong. It is however, the hardest to resist. The ability to control our fear, however, is our ability to be human. To give in to that, we now are inhuman, we dehumanize ourselves. In the face of the loss of our inclusion to our race, we must beat back our instincts and refuse to act in fear. Even if that fear is the fear of death itself. That is true courage. Courage is not to be fearless when committing acts of violence. Violence is perhaps the easiest forum in which to fearless, in the security of our own fear, anger, or hatred. To face foes who are so impersonal to us, versus the foes you know the best that resides in you, is not true bravery. To act in the security of these emotions who serve as a buffer against harming yourself as you cause other to suffer. Irreversible damage is done to those who commit harm on others. Others who must occupy this perspective every day must conjure feelings of hate, anger, or fear to protect them from the mental degradation committing violence on other causes us. To refuse to give in to these emotions that sanctify our acts of violence, to allow them to protect us from the responsibility of our actions, is true cowardice. This is true fear. Real courage manifests itself in the face of our final foes. Ourselves.

In the medium of anger, control of our actions would sometimes seem to manifest independent of our own will. It would seem as if someone else is driving us. people who have experienced acts of severe anger describe moments of "blacking-out" and then coming to to face actions they feel were committed independently of their our determination. This is at its core the realization of the instinctual, bestial, residual subconscious being inside of us taking control. It would seem an indomitable foe, like a boulder that roles down the steep side of a mountain, gaining momentum until we are now powerless to stop it. We must move aside or be crushed. Anger causes many other things. Their is a delineation between the anger of our conscious mind, and that of our animalistic inclinations. Conscious anger is the product of conflict with our consciously determined values and that of an outside entity and is under our complete control. It is then only logical to surmise that the use of violence is never a very logical choice in comparison to those that would in the long run prove to be much more productive. One doesn't need to whip a slave into working. One can free him, feed him, and show kindness to him. He will then be inclined to help you split that pile of wood outside as a sign of gratitude or a reciprocal act of kindness, etc., and he will do it with less dissent and more passion than that of a broken man. This is of course only one example, but it holds some universal truth. Kindness will forever elicit the same, no matter how long it takes. The real danger of anger is of the kind we would propose we have to control over. The boulder of our fury can carry us away down slopes of indeterminable depths. But suppose the boulder never got rolling. What causes us to get angry and lose control. Many consciously angry thoughts can spiral out of control and leave us wondering who was driving our actions. It all comes down to conscious control. We must tame the beast that is liable to take control of our actions. This metaphor is not-exclusively one that is based in Christian interpretations of our desire to do evil. It cannot be because my metaphor exclusively condemns violence which the bible does not do so exclusively. However, their is some merit in interpreting the need of many humans to blame their actions on an actor that is independent of themselves. The Devil of the Christian Bible can easily be a metaphor for our emotions and subconscious, one that defines both the role of anger, hate, and fear to cause negative things to happen and as another for the needs an individual has to transfer the responsibility of their actions to another being. Perhaps this is selling your soul to the Devil, allowing your controllable consciousness to be usurped by the uncontrollable impulse of your subconscious. I digress however. The point is that people have the ultimate control over how their anger will affect them. They have the ability to focus anger and to have it mean something other than a manifestation of your individual need to justify an act of violence. We must hold ourselves accountable for what we do rather than allow our anger to protect us from the guilt, or such other feelings, an act of violence against another human causes us.

Hatred is by far our most sinister foe. It can be justified consciously; it can be a virus of our subconscious. It may be argued that it is the easiest or the hardest to insight, it all depends on the context of our hate. I say it is our hate because it is our own. It is our own self's devise to protect us from harm. Do we give in to this cowardice of the self? Because it is truly cowardly to hide within the vestiges of our own hate rather than do battle with our self and come to terms with out actions or with our feelings. True bravery squares off with our own reality, with the reality that is our perspective, that perspective that defines us and changes what it sees. We change for the sake our own humanity or for the protection of another persons humanity. This is true courage, to change rather than to become static and wallow next to the furnace of our hate that keeps us war, to brave the potentially icy depths of self realization and responsibility.

True courage forsakes the safety of our objective hate, our irrational anger, and our cowardly fears. To master these instincts is true courage. Each of these are the sole proponents of violence against others because they justify our violence and protect our minds from the harm it does to our humanity. A true hero refuses to commit violence, even in the face of ourselves. Even in the face of our death.

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Communism

Karl Marx via last.fm

Before I write anything else, some clarifications should be made. This is going to be a long read. It is less of an expository or persuasive essay than it is a topic lecture. Or a hybrid. Humor me.
The governments that have called themselves Communistic have all been intrinsically fascist governments.
Communism has never been seen in the world. It has never been tried. Nor socialism to the extent that it was described.
If the first statement is true, then it can also be assured that Fascism and Communism are mutually exclusive ideas.

Thus, the first contention. The governments that have been erected around the globe over the ages have all come to the same end. A revolutionary utopia of the working class, to the despair and darkness of fascism. Why is this? Some say it is because it is inherent in the ideology of revolution. Many believe revolution simply replaces one class of elites with another. This is consistent with the scientific theory of revolution. One radical regime shall be replaced by another. But of course, I disagree. Instead, I believe that the inherent problem with these communistic countries was not revolution itself, it was the manner it which it was carried out in every instance. This manifests in two ways.

One, the revolutions in all of these countries were led by an elite or a caste of elites, ie. the Russian Vanguard and the Maoist Jesus-Christ-ifacation of the Chairman. These are specifically doctrinal aspects of what Frederich Nietzsche the "over-man" or The Will to Power. They are foundational aspects of fascism as the "strong leader", an example of supreme existence to be modeled by the people. This was why one group of elites replaced the previous tyrannical ones in these countries. They were a ideological and dogmatic interpretation of philosophical communism which meant that these humans were handed too much power and it inevitably corrupted them.

The second point is tied to the first. The number one reason that communism has never actually be tried is because instituting a communist economic system in a society that has hardly gone through the capitalistic phase of human development is inherently going to lead to one thing: monopoly over all capital by the central government, not the abandoning of the idea of capital itself. Ownership to one totalitarian government rather than the abolition of ALL ownership. Dictatorship, economic and political and then social. The rhetorical ideas of Communism are potent and if used lightly will be corrupted in the worst possible ways, because there are parts of the ideology humans as a race are not ready for. Advocating a system of central government, nationalized industry, unity to the point of homogeneity and single-mindedness can only possibly be misconstrued as fascism in the current epoch. Here is why. Marx was not an ideologue. He was a scientist, one who outlined social rules and then a method. The doctrinaire interpretations of Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, Maoist, Fidel-ist (the list could go on)communisms miss the point. The "science of the proletariat" (As labeled in Jack London's book The Iron Heel) IS NOT AN IDEOLOGY. That is what Marx meant when he said "I am not a Marxist". He meant that he did not subscribe to the new reactionary, algorithmic deviations of his science. Strictly speaking, communism is not even a political philosophy. Hegelian influences on Marx were technically very minimal, Marx really only adopted the dialectics, creation through conflict of opposing sides, in the context of his social law of "social evolution” and the historical interpretation of history through class antagonism. This is where the real reason that these governments were not communism manifests. They forgo "social evolution", instead adopting the all applicable dogma of the newly interpreted “Marxism and Leninism”, trying to apply the ideology as an algorithm capable of solving all worldly problems. This is inherently wrong. Social evolution specifically prescribes social developmental phases in between the 'predatory phase of human development' and communism. Not to confuse the reader, but a "communist government" is in itself a contradiction, the goal of communism being a stateless society. There must be a not only governmental and industrial development of the human race, but in that same manner, a gradual individual progress to be a better species. The understanding of the bigger picture, the value of the many over the few, the sacrifice of self interest for the common good must be learned if the human race is going to survive. There are intermittent points that need to be build upon, and by essentially jumping ahead of development, the 'communist governments' developed into a perverse and twisted brutalization of communism.


The time before the Proletariat Revolution in Russia, the early 1900's, during the age when Socialism was understood to be the most progressive of ideas, not an ideology or dogma. If Lenin knew how far he has set the human race back, he would have done it differently. By giving the elites fodder to attack what has been painted as 'communism', the old socialist truths of the 1900's have been lost beneath a propaganda flood of biblical proportions. The image of 'socialism' has gone from the people owning the means of production to becoming aligned with fascism.

I find it interesting that no Nazi Party or an offshoot of it has ever been outlawed in this country, while the Revolutionary Communist Party has bee outlawed numerous times over the past century. It makes you wonder what the elites intend for the people. Is it for the sake of ideologically confusing them to the point that buzz words like 'commie' and 'Nazi' mean the same thing? They seem to have succeeded.

In Defence of Idealism

Image via Wikipedia

Idealism carries a connotation. A connotation that is now used in a similar manner to the one imposed on the word ‘utopia’. The word utopia has been used in mainstream media, and subsequently common discussion, to conjure up images of impossibility, an idea that is unrealistic. And so we have come to the old contest, ideas over reality. Realism has been a common ward of both Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative. The common allure is one of pragmatism, realistic aims and goals, a TRUE understanding, rooted in reality and so on. It is rare in discussions that you will find someone criticizing another’s realism. Often, when someone’s suggestion is denounced as unrealistic, they often go on the defense, claiming that they are realistic.

But here, I choose to contend. My contention begins that just because an idea is “idealistic” doesn’t mean it is not significant if not superior to a “realistic” idea. In fact, realism is useless without idealism, because without ideas, there could be no realistic norm.

Let me explain. Typically, the perceived value of realism is its connection and reality, to our current reality more specifically. But relativity is everything. When someone criticizes a certain idea for being "idealistic", their alternative would be that the person offer a more "realistic" idea. But here is the problem with being "realistic" all the time. It is relative to the reality we have now. It is inherently passive. It is the single largest factor in preventing change. When someone decries an idea as unrealistic, they advocate remaining in this current reality. They advocate fear of change, passivity in ideas, and the overall cowardice by cowering behind the enormity of the reality idealism questions.

Idealism, in contrast, is the basis of all change. In a real world (the irony is not lost on me) example, the idealistic designs of John Locke and then the Founding Fathers succeeded in changing our reality, changing the rules of the world and microcosm we live in. Had John Locke decided to remain "realistic" his radical ideas would instead have been the passive conservative-liberal thought process,
one simply content with quibbling over the most pointless and now relatively insignificant aspects of a monarchy-based society, and freedom absent reality… much in the same manner as most political commentators today act. They are content to squabble about insignificant “ideology-lite” and the most insignificant portions of the organization of our society. Like health-care. We are still worrying about the insurance-companies and not about 10,000 people dying a year from being uninsured. This is like John Locke complaining about someone censoring his article addressing the price of grain in England during his epoch. It misses the point.

The point is not that day to day problems are not worth solving. The point is that we lack the macro-understanding of our reality, instead choosing to operate within it's "realistic" boundaries, rather than exploring "idealistic" ideas like the freedom of press for John Locke and free health care for citizens of the richest country in the world(or simply that dead people = more important than less profit… novelty). More discussions should be held with more contending idealism, less small-minded quibbles over the allocations of resources in an inefficient and inherently unequal and freedom-less reality. We must break down reality, in favor of understanding the root causes of problems, rather than be satisfied with fixes within the boundaries of "a realistic" understanding.

The Orgins of The Modern Advertising Industry

Noam Chomsky via last.fm

Advertising permeates the majority of our interactions with even the most insignificant portions of our lifestyle. Its newest breed is targeting ways to attack our subconscious, subliminally installing conventional mainstream views and values. The most disturbing aspect of this new spawn is evident in its ability to go completely unrecognized and thus unchallenged. Advertising has already won half the battle while we slept in our four thousand square foot mansions. It has convinced us that it is completely harmless, a nuisance if anything. It has attacked our ability to challenge and think. There is one other industry that displayed striking similarities with modern advertising today. This piece will address striking similarities and almost complete parallels between the advertisement industry and the now extinct propaganda industry.

What is advertising? Advertise: to promote publicly; broadcast to increase sales. Advertisement: public notice or announcement. -- The Oxford American Desk Dictionary. Propaganda: an organized program of publicity. -- The Oxford American Desk Dictionary

In the years before Nazi Germany, 1900-1935 specifically, the term propaganda was very openly used, without the connotation it has today. Even liberal intellectuals in the then prospering Socialist party called their newspapers and pamphlets 'propaganda'. It was a rather neutral term until The National Socialist Party took power in Germany. They began to use the conventional tool of 'propaganda' to lie, throw things out of proportion, and thus completely control public opinion. Nazi Germany had not only control of the news, Josef Goebbels was the head of the entertainment industry and fine arts as well. This destroyed the neutral idea that was propaganda and replaced it with radically different connotations. The Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Germany was the single driving force behind the unprecedented rise of Nationalism in Europe in a century. The German people harbored not only hate for the European Jews, but the unwavering belief that they were just. Moreover, this came from the fact that 90% of their interaction was propaganda.

This illustrates the strength of any kind of program that involves public opinion or even economic inclination. In American politics, it is a known fact that the candidate that can put his/her face on more posters or surfaces than his or her opponent, is going to win the election.

Propaganda has not ceased to exist. The open industrialization of propaganda has disappeared. What party does not hurl the brand of ‘propaganda’ at the media of the opposition, and when has the reproach not been hurled back? The term has reached an all-pervading use; the correct application of the term is rare. Under these circumstance, no matter how much the elite would dream doing so, an organized form of propaganda in the interest of the elite is not possible. Simply because, everyone is paranoid of open propaganda of his or her opposition party, and thus acutely tuned to the use of propaganda, seeing it everywhere, challenging it constantly.
This is my contention. The elites have chosen a new medium. They have left the masses to their squabbling, their identity-politics, and have taken the industry underground.

The elites of the capitalist system of bred a new system of propaganda. This new form of propaganda has been allowed to permeate or daily lifestyles. Advertisements adorn bottles, cars, buses, enormous signs, 60% of TV and radio, and other daily objects. The pen you may be writing with may be adorned with a private business. The drive to work is accompanied by enormous billboards along the freeway. The TV show you love and Idol-ize (get it?)is permeated with sponsors and then commercial breaks. The social networking site you use to idly chat and gossip with friends has been completely spread with dozens of ads a minute. It is everywhere.

Advertisement is crucial to the market; it is needed to promote widespread sales and is another venue for competition. Advertisement itself is a large industry, providing jobs, college degrees, market enhancement, competition between firms and even artistic output. It allows any business, should they have the funds, to promote themselves freely and increase sale. It is key to the capitalist system...

Who are these elites? They are the rich, simply put. They are the people who benefit from your exploitation, the people who benefit from your misfortune. They have many names. The bourgeoisie, the aristocrat, the capitalist, the CEO, are all names for the same group of people. They are the ten percent, who wield ninety percent of the wealth and power in this country.

The elites have made a new institution, one who’s task in to lambast the people of America with economic inclination from every direction. The advertisement industry is simply the elites new medium for completely replacing independent thought with mainstream partiality to materialism. These billboards deliver one message. Buy, buy, buy. Consumerism at its finest, blind purchase into the capitalist system, the open exploitation for our joy in visual stimulation.
Advertisement in Modern Society
a. Exploits the masses joy for visual entertainment, the chemical need the human brain has for stimulation, to make profit.
b. Exploits the talents of people in the system to perpetuate its own means i.e. jobs, college, degrees, training the people to make the advertisement for them.

Advertisement has taken the place of propaganda in society. The industry has adapted to barrage us with materialistic goods and new superficial desires and fashions. It has become the new way to train the American people to conform to the devises of capitalism. It has become the new form of "off-job control", an off-shoot of the Tayloristic practices of modern manufacturing, a way to influence our choices and actions in more and more venues of our lives. Advertisement is not just the silly Six Flags man jumping up and down to a bouncy beat. It is a new form of manufacturing desires and needs in the public. It is the new, organized program of publicity of a thousand different interests from a thousand different interest groups. And it is all about how YOU have new attitudes and opinions based on these interests. This subliminal attack on our personal agency will result in the complete dependency on materialism, superficial objects, until we truly will define our worth my the amount of money or things we have. Look in the mirror. Do you not already see glimpses of this specter, haunting your very features?

After all, when the elites are trying to run the show, the last thing they want is interference from the masses. What better way to keep them out of the way than organizing a publicity industry focused on refocusing our attention and lifestyle on things like fashionable consumption and what new toy/tool they will tell you is a "necessity".

Let the people who are supposed to be running the show do so without interference from the mass of the population, who [being unintelligent and ignorant] have no business in the public arena. And from that idea grew enormous industries, ranging from [private] universities to advertisement, all very consciously committed to the belief that you must control the attitudes and opinions, because otherwise the people are just too dangerous.-- Noam Chomsky

Realize what they are doing to you, that is the first step. Then, we must take up arms against it. We must beat back this greedy intrusion into our lives and fight the exploitation that has been so deviously disguised, we must break free.

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Examining Capitalism

It is historical to say that all past systems of government have been discovered to be faulted. It is inevitable that the people discover that there are better ways of doing things, humans have adaptation pre-programmed.

However, by the same logic, the system, now defunct, must have been better than one preceding it. The the consequential functionality is much harder to perceive these days but no less, capitalism had its time.

A system of private ownership and undiscriminating opportunity was something of dreams and utopia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Capitalism was radically different. It was so progressive, it was revolutionary. It was the dangerous, liberal idea of its time, an experiment that was decried as 'Utopian', people thought it would never work.

To truly reach the depth of thought I wish, while still keeping you, reader, in pace with these thoughts, let's have some definitions.

Feudalism: A political and economic system of Europe from the 9th to about the 15th century, based on the holding of all land in fief or fee and the resulting relation of lord to vassal and characterized by homage, legal and military service of tenants, and forfeiture.--The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.

In other words, feudalism was a system that was based on economic and ancestral standing. You can understand why a world of equal opportunity could hold such allure to people who lived their lives the way their fathers did, people who knew their children would till the same land for all their lives. This political system was based on economic hierarchies, Kings ruled lords, lords ruled knights, knights ruled serfs, and serf owned nothing, not even themselves. Now, while that sounds like the majority were living in wealth and social standing, the reality is the ratio of lords to serfs was probably 1 for every 10,000 (approx. number, undoubtedly more) This system was explicit in exploitation of the masses. These people lived on the same land, worked it all their lives, kept ten percent of what they harvested in return for the simple right to live on the land of a lord they had sworn servitude to.

Capitalism: an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, esp. as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth. --The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.

My definition will differ, due to the actual functional nature of capitalism. The free market is not exclusively an economic system. Economics, loosely defined, is the manner in which goods and services are distributed. Politics, loosely, are the decisions of how to implement this distribution. They are not mutually exclusive.

The capitalist system is also a social system, as much as the feudalistic system was. I will elaborate later.

However, democracy and capitalism are not synonymous. Democracy can be implemented independent of the free market. This discrepancy leads to one conclusion. American democracy is imperfect. Capitalism leeches the justice, equality, and liberty of democracy for personal gain, much like a parasite.

At the core of the definition of capitalism are the words "free market". This also translates into a free-for-all, which is the full realization of capitalism, little or no regulation of the market. Logically, in a contest, it is inevitable that there will be a winner and a loser. It is intrinsic in capitalism that there will always be at least one divide. Winner vs. loser, rich vs. poor, bourgeoisie vs. proletarian. It is empirically and logically obvious that a free market will leave the majority at the bottom because their can really only be one winner.

I will say this straight. The free market leaves absolutely no one watching the actions of these private interests. This leaves a system of rules, ethical and practical, absent from the system. This is the first way that capitalism becomes a social system. Conservatives seem to think that the answer for this problem is simple. And even better it is constitutional. Religion.

These groups now claim that they are directed and humbled by the "invisible hand" of holy morality. I understand that this is the wrong application of the term, I use it to illustrate the thought process that is behind this choice of ethical dictation. It is invisible. In fact, it is entirely absent. The intrinsic problem with faith-based punitive measures are that they are typically enacted late. This leaves the wrong-doer the "freedom" to act with no direct consequences, at least not in this life. The point of directing the market is so that people, here, is justice.Just as we regulate society (no murder), the market is regulated. For justice, equality, and the subsequent freedom of these to ideas. Leaving the discipline to the after life isn't much of an incentive, especially for people who have all the worldly luxuries to gain for their actions. And thus, things become even more entwined. As the parasite of capitalism continues to drain the equality from Democracy, the infection of sham religion begins to decay liberty. This constitutional right is becoming so unchecked, these vines will soon choke the life from the tree of liberty. Religion leaves too much power in too few hands. Massed religion is by its nature divisive. Not wrong, that is for another essay, but it separates people, adds another layer to the individuals identity and the resulting division. And now it is creeping into places it shouldn't, like government, school, policy, and now war. Refer to this essay: "Jesus Killed Mohammad" by Jeff Sharlet.
It isn't that freedom of religion shouldn't be protected with utmost passion; that is just it, it isn't. Since the majority of people in American prescribe to Christianity, not many remain to stand up for the minorities. So the Christian Right can operate absent of opposition, hiding under the guise of “freedom of religion” while denying others theirs.
But I digress. Forgive me.
Capitalism assures no discipline. It assures no accountability, responsibility, nor does it sponsor justice. This is where, when Democracy attempts to dislodge the parasite, the thing clamps on hard and burrows deeper to avoid extradition. When justice is pursued in this country, money comes before minority, cash comes before casualty, profit before protection of natural rights.
In a system presided over by profit, a morally devolved object by its inherently greedy nature, the inevitable occurs. Democracy is just a word when it goes to the highest bidder.

The final and most terrible aspect of the capitalist system is its naturally global ambitions. The inevitable globalization of profit leads to what Chomsky calls "third-worldization" (pHD = right to make up words), or the division of wealth into high an low extremes. Ten percent of the population lives with ninety percent of the wealth. Democracy is theirs. The inevitable outreach into foreign markets is not only dictated by the search for more profit, it is intrinsic in the production system of capitalism. Consumerism, a topic within itself, sponsors what Marx called the "Theory of Overproduction". In few words, the capitalist means of production produce more consumables than Labor, or the people, can buy back. They refuse to pay the workers enough even to establish consumerist equality. A helpful graphic...

Soon, their is simply no capital in the hands of Labor to buy back material from Capital.

But the truly devastating effect of capitalism comes from the aggressive means by which it realizes profit. The continued globalization of profit leads to world wide "free-for-all" model, where on economy stands above the rest. The de facto economic empire will inevitably lead to the single executive, just as on a national level.

This is a model intrinsic in the functionality of capitalism. The single winner, or group of elites, wills stand above the rest, above the misery and poverty of the third world. And it will come here. Reform means nothing. Charging the brick wall a little slower will still end up with broken appendages. The system is systematically flawed. Being reactionary in nature, capitalism will not simply ave us as the wage-slaves we are today. Things can only go backwards as we accept more more reactionary means of social and economic organization. It will make slave of us all. Slaves to materialism, slaves to profit, slaves to capital, saves to the elite. Is private ownership really a factor in freedom? Maybe in 1776. Capitalism has had its time.

The People

Two hundred and thirty seven years ago, our founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.They signed in the face of execution, invasion, and shame. They did so because they new what they were doing was right. This day has been retold differently every time. And each time to fit the tellers agenda. The right-wing and the left-wing share pride in this day. The day they talk about, varies in the details.

The truth. These men were radicals. The very idea of freedom, independence from the Divine Right of Kings, was revolutionary. This was the next of many revolutions, where the people rose above the exploitation, the separation, the inequality. They made better a system of governing man. In short, in 1776, the idea of private property, freedom of speech, press, religion, and the right to petition and assemble were the most liberal, progressive forms of ideology of the time period. These men stood above the exploitation, taxes taken taken from them with no return from their government. They took a stand against the oppressors, and stood for freedom, advancing liberty's cause just a little bit further.

It has been nearly two hundred and fifty years since the day that natural right was signed into law. It has been nearly a quarter of a century, since men sought to rise up against injustice, oppression, and exploitation. It has been two hundred and fifty years since these men and women stood for freedom. It has been two hundred and fifty years...and the people of America are still not free.

Look to the American man. Look to his daily lifestyle. The man must leave his home in the morning and he must work all day to receive a mere fraction of what his labor is worth. He must come home, labor through the financial papers that demand his hard earned money. He must try to explain to his children why he must leave everyday so early and come home so late. He must explain to them that they too, some day, must make a family and leave for work every morning and come home late every night so that they might earn the wages to keep them alive. The tragedy of this situation does not arise from the fact that we as people must work. All labor is an honor. The injustice is the way that the system deems to distribute the product of this labor of the people, so that there is always someone who will have more. The very fact that a human being, one who we call our equal, is given an unequal share of the product of our labors, is an injustice, that we must tell our children that this is what they must do, so that their children, and their children, and theirs as well must be satisfied with this system.

The poverty of this nation will never amount to the terrible suffering that the people of the third world will experience. The injustices the oppressed people of the world must live under far outweigh the injustice we face here. The exploitation the masses of these countries are subjected to goes above and beyond that of which our people suffer. But I say this to you.

There is only one difference. The injustice, and the oppression and the exploitation of us, the people of the United States of America, exhibits only one difference from these poor, abused people of the Earth.

Here in American, it has been disguised better.

The reality is the the Kings of now still get our money. They still use it for their own means. They still have more influence over policy and politics than we do. they have their interests, one hundred and eighty degrees of ours. To me, international CEO carries only the infinitesimal difference from Kings. There are a lot more of them, and they wear no crown, disguising themselves as equal citizens, while oppressing and exploiting in ways King George couldn't have dreamed.