23 December 2013

Capitalism's Deeds Reveal Its Intrinsic Evil; Identity Politics Exemplify the Cunning by Which We Are Kept in Slavery

CAPITALISM DEFTLY CAMOUFLAGES its evil behind innumerable Big Lies and a facade of constitutional democracy. But we see its hideous truth in the atrocities the U.S. Empire commits abroad.  Here at home we see the same capitalist savagery manifest in the eviction of that older woman I wrote about  four  weeks ago
 
We also see it in ever more glaring evidence of the desperate poverty that now oppresses fully half the USian population: young workers missing teeth due to the definitively capitalist combination of sweatshop wages and prohibitive dental costs; formerly middle-class parents whose jobs were outsourced, whose mortgages were foreclosed, who were evicted into homelessness and whose children now live as street urchins; formerly secure elders now dependent on soup kitchens as their only defense against starvation. 

All these atrocities and innumerable more – think Bhopal or Deepwater Horizon  or Bangladesh – are the essence of capitalism in action. Capitalism's defining premise is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian principle our species ever asserted, the ultimate example of the biblical exhortation, “by their deeds shall ye know them.” Though I am not a Christian – though I can never be a Christian – these words attributed to Jesus surely apply to recognizing the evil capitalism inflicts on all but the obscenely privileged few. 


*** 

 
Witnessing that eviction four weeks ago was wrenching for many reasons, but the most painful was the extent to which the woman's frantic scurrying about the ruins of her life reminded me of my own helpless behavior after the times my identity was violently obliterated.

I write this statement knowing it will be challenged by anyone who stubbornly clings to identity politics. How could I, a so-called “privileged white male,” presume to imagine suffering a loss such as that Tacoma woman suffered. (Yes, despite the socioeconomic lessons of the past several decades, there is still a legion of useful identity-politics idiots who serve the Ruling Class by fostering the hostility of one Working Class identity group toward all other Working Class groups.) 

The hypothetical identity-politics question – and I have no doubt it will be asked in real time – reminds of an incident in Manhattan c. 1983, when a white female personnel executive rejected my employment application because it had taken me until I was 36 years old to earn my bachelor of arts degree. According to this personnel officer, the duration of my educational effort combined with the fact I “had all the advantages of being a white male” to prove I was “obviously not serious about doing college-level work.” Therefore – or so she reasoned from her (genuinely) privileged Ivy League background as she looked down upon me from her managerial throne – I was unsuitable for editorial employment.

By the diplomas and certificates on her office wall, this young woman had undoubtedly lived a sheltered, pampered life – a prerequisite of graduation from any of the prohibitively expensive Ivy League schools that train the sons and daughters of the One Percenters and their most valued Ruling Class servants. Moreover, her reference to white male advantage made it clear she was blinded by identity-politics resentments. She could not imagine any seemingly successful, apparently middle-class white male encountering genuinely insurmountable obstacles. Hers was the same Ayn Rand/New Age hybrid of presumptuousness that believes unemployability is merely a state of mind: “change your thinking and you change your reality,” no revolution required. From her perspective, there was nothing in the world so daunting it could delay a white male's baccalaureate degree by 14 years, unless of course the male in question was “not serious” – that is, too lazy. 

Thus does identity politics eliminate empathy, which in turn eliminates class solidarity, blinding huge segments of the 99 Percent to the fact all USian Empire subjects whether proletarians or peasants and regardless of our gender or race or ethnicity are sisters and brothers of the Working Class. 


***


The bitter truth of my own life is that I was never middle-class enough, much less successful enough, to be financially secure. Even at the height of my journalism career, whether as a daily-newspaper news-editor in Northern New Jersey or as the editor-in-chief of an international trade-journal in Manhattan, I was never more than a paycheck or two away from financial ruin. 

Though I have never been thrown into the street with all my possessions, I was ousted by family treachery from a place where I had lived for 11 years and assumed I would spend the remainder of my life. The ouster, which occurred in 2004, is a perfect example of why to me the term “family” is a synonym for all sorts of unpleasantness including rejection and betrayal, which were the everyday norms of my childhood, and genuine risks of bodily harm or death, which thank Goddess occurred only rarely. 

But you can only lose your home once, and I lost mine – and my family as well – on the Summer Solstice Eve of 1945, when my mother sought to kill me. Based on independent evidence I gathered as a middle-aged adult, my death was to have climaxed a sequence of events my mother had been scheming since before my conception. I was not a love-child; in fact I was its opposite, a hate-child deliberately conceived to entrap my father into marriage. Though my father saved my life – a canceled meeting brought him home early on that pivotal Solstice Eve – now that I know the larger circumstances, I can understand and almost forgive what he did next. As if he were overwhelmed by the parental equivalent of buyer's remorse, a few weeks later he sought closed-door judicial permission to dump me in a state orphanage, but the judge forbade it. From then until I turned 18, I was never more than an albatross around the necks of my father and my new stepmother, his former executive secretary.

Meanwhile, to escape the looming public scandal of judicial actions in open court, my mother's wealthy parents paid for her confinement in a posh private insane asylum. She remained there until 1947, after which she obtained a court order decreeing I would spend the summers with her and spend the school years with my father and his wife. But from the moment my mother tried to celebrate the 1945 Solstice by her intended sacrificial act of post-partum abortion, all but one of her kin regarded me as an unwelcome reminder of bad times and scandalous events. The one exception was the blessed aunt whose later intervention saved me from dyslexia. In the eyes of my other maternal relatives, I was never more than a worm in the shining apple of the hypocritical bourgeois respectability they so carefully cultivated and so diligently maintained. 

Albatross and worm – so I remained until I moved out of my father's house and was freed from the judicial indenture of obligatory summertime visits to the domain of my mother. Thanks to my aunt, who in the summer of 1948 got me the tutoring that laid the foundation for all I later became; thanks to my father's books, which filled a wall 22 feet long and 10 feet high from floor to ceiling and overflowed into several glass-front bookcases; thanks even to my father himself, a master of Socratic method despite his rejection of me as a son and his failure as a parent; and thanks most of all to an inner strength I often cursed in please-let-me-die adolescent despair – I had managed to survive. Eventually I even thrived, though only for a bit. 

But then at age 43, just as it seemed I was approaching a peak of journalistic achievement, I was robbed of my life's work, stripped of all my identity and denied any further potential for anything humanly recognizable as success. The mechanism of my ruin was a fire I do not doubt but cannot prove was government arson – the event of 1 September 1983 that obliterated all my life's work and has ever since defined who I am, what I am and all that I will never be. 

In other words, I am no stranger to losses of the magnitude suffered by that shockingly unfortunate woman who was evicted from her home in Tacoma on what should have been called not an “anniversary” but rather our 50th annual day of mourning. There is not one scintilla of hyperbole in my assertion of empathy with her. But at least I have thus far survived all that has been done to me, and with all my heart I wish the same for the woman who was evicted. 

That is why, in the face of all that is being done to all of us, I long ago recognized survival as an act of revolutionary defiance – the very point at which the personal becomes political. 

It is a realization now made all the more poignant by a “happy holidays” convergence of complex medical problems that promise to reduce my 2014 to a year of unrelenting misery even before its arrival: Merry Christmas to me from a relentlessly hostile Jesus. 


*****


Relevant Remarks on the Comment Threads of Other Websites 

NSA Surveillance Program: It's Going to Get Worse”  Dave Eggers of The Guardian notes how the National Security Agency and its kindred secret-police agencies have effectively nullified all U.S. constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure. Moreover, he warns, history – specifically the post-World-War-II purge – proves that anything the government can employ to oppress us, it will eventually use without mercy. I agree, noting that a government does not collect such material without malevolent purpose. I also note it is increasingly obvious an enemy of the USian state is anyone who objects to capitalist savagery, whether they seek to abolish capitalism or merely reform it. “(F)rom the perspective of the One Percenters who own the government and the politicians, bureaucrats, cops, soldiers and religious authorities who make up the Ruling Class -- the enemy is anyone who dares challenge the present socioeconomic order.” 

Barack Obama Is Not George Bush”  Jonathan Chait of the Ruling Class journal New York Magazine pens a clever piece of Democratic Party propaganda, and I refute it as another of the party's pre-Congressional-election efforts to make us forget how Obama the Orator became Barack the Betrayer and thus revealed the party's new strategy for serving the One Percent: campaign as Democrats, rule as Republicans. Challenged to provide an alternative to capitalist governance by the One Party of Two Names – to posit a means of relief from the policies of absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for the rest of us – I answer that the winning methods of Councilwoman Sawant in Seattle teach us everything we need to build an effective 
resistance.


*****


Winter Solstice Greetings and happy holidays to all, even amidst this time of political strife and personal wretchedness.

LB/22 December 2013 

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