Betrayal, Genocide and the Quest for a New Vocabulary

“TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO HAVE A REVOLUTION”: another of my hitherto unpublished Occupy Tacoma photos, this from an informational demonstration in October 2011. Pentax MX, SMCP-M 100mm f/2.8, Fujucolor 800. Exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

IT'S A RARE occasion when the comments I write for other websites are so topically apt I can use them here with minimal editing and no introductory paragraphs. But it seems this week I hit the trifecta, with posts about the Obama Administration's apparently methodical betrayal of the New Orleans African-American community, austerity as a euphemism for genocide, and our desperate need for a new vocabulary of revolutionary socialism.

The result, its separate parts identified by subheads, is an essay detailing major aspects of the tyranny that now shapes our daily lives. Yet despite its grim portrait of our increasing subjugation, it uncharacteristically ends on a distinctly positive note. But its positivity is not the imbecility of hope, the slavish yearning for progressive change begrudgingly handed down from above, the junkfood Antoinette cupcakes occasionally doled out by corrupt, tyrannical politicians who represent only the One Percent. It is rather a curiously compelling intuition of consensus oh-so-slowly being born at the grassroots level, a vision as much libertarian and Gaian as it is paradoxically Marxian, a coalescence thus far so subtle it remains beyond our normal perception even as it promises to grow, in time, powerful enough to shake the United States and its global empire as nothing has shaken the world since the Soviet Revolution of 1917. 

Katrina Murder Cops Freed: Deliberate Prosecutorial Misconduct? 

 

We must ask ourselves whether the Obama Justice Department – especially given the racial implications of the Katrina murders – knowingly conducted a prosecution so deliberately flawed it would have to be overturned. 

In other words, is the reversal of the New Orleans convictions yet another result of the signature Obamanoid strategy of publicly supporting progressive change while secretly working for its antithesis?

The question is legitimized by Obama the Orator's many shape-shifts into Barack the Betrayer – for example how he clamored for restoration of constitutional governance even as he nullified the Bill of Rights by imposition of total surveillance. His repeated concealment of reactionary purposes behind Big Lies of progressive intent provides a strategic parallel that suggests the prosecutorial misconduct may have been carefully scripted precisely to void the verdicts. 

The outrageous magnitude of the misconduct – as if it were designed to be so extreme even judicial dullards could not overlook it – surely underscores its suspiciousness.

As to the beneficiary of such Chicago-type treachery, it would of course be the One Percent Obama so obediently serves – the white aristocrats who are ruthlessly gentrifying New Orleans and thus have a huge stake in terrorizing its black population.

How ironic – yet how typical of Obama's conduct in so many other matters – if the nation's first African-American president were to emerge as the Ku Klux Klan's strongest ally in the White House since Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge.

*****

Slay the Safety Net/Kill the Poor: But None Dare Call It Genocide

 

The food-stamp cutbacks are part of a much larger bipartisan war against lower income people, which the Republicans and the Democrats alike know will kill many of its victims and which is intended to do just that.

These killings include approximately 45,000 persons who are murdered each year by denial of health care which -- in civilized nations -- is considered a human right. But the death toll goes far beyond that dismal demographic. Were the body-count expanded to include those slain by joblessness, bankruptcy, foreclosure, evictions, welfare cutbacks and homelessness, plus all those driven to suicide by these same conditions, the annual slayings would number in the hundreds of thousands. 

And these deaths are not accidental. They are the deliberate means by which capitalism rids itself of those of us who are elderly, disabled, chronically unemployed or otherwise no longer exploitable for profit.

The politicians, who serve only the One Percent, are well aware of what is being done. But the charade of democracy enables them to perpetuate their cunningly engineered system of  homicide by abandonment -- and thereby to exterminate us without the public embarrassment of death camps.

 

Yet no mainstream journalist -- including the reporters and commentators of the mainstream Left -- dares call this ongoing atrocity what it truly is: genocide. 

*****

We Need a New Vocabulary of Class Struggle and Public Morality 

 

While I heartily applaud Professor Richard D. Wolff's quest for more accurate functional definitions of capitalism and socialism, we also need a new terminology with which to clarify the resultant societal conditions, particularly the historical truth of class warfare. But more than that, what we need -- what we most desperately need -- is a vocabulary that acknowledges the ultimate morality of socialism versus the ultimate moral imbecility of capitalism.

These three categories of re-definition -- functional, societal and moral -- are already underway, and not merely by Professor Wolff's laudable efforts. The one great contribution of the Occupy Movement to this process was its resurrection of class struggle, the defining reality of capitalism that -- in the United States -- is hidden from all but the most astute observers. But even Occupy's long-overdue replacement of the soporific terms "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" (or "Ruling Class" and "Working Class") with the more energizing "One Percent" and "99 Percent" has not sufficed to awaken the woefully dumbed-down USian masses. As a fellow Occupy activist so memorably said to me in late 2011, "the 99 Percent is broken." Thus the most vital struggle of our time -- indeed the most pivotal conflict of our species' history -- remains disguised as academic esoterica. Occupy began redefining economics as politics, but until the political becomes personal, the clash over humanity's future (or indeed whether we have any future at all), will remain marginalized -- in the cunningly blindered eye of the USian public, hardly more relevant than Medieval schoolmen debating how many angels might fit on the head of a pin. 

How then do we redefine the political to make it personal? 

The method -- small-group consciousness-raising -- was perfected by feminists in the middle 1960s. Though the USian branch of second-wave feminism was later co-opted by the forces of capitalism, its original ideological framework was socialism. Thus feminist grievances were initially shaped by the contrasts between socialist humanitarianism and capitalist savagery. The Occupy Movement made a similar attempt to articulate grievances. But it did so in the self-defeating context of the rabid anti-intellectualism that has become the defining characteristic of how the USian 99 Percent has been (deliberately) broken. To shout for example "stop foreclosure" is not the same as correctly asserting "foreclosure is malicious victimization by moral imbeciles called capitalists." But without formal ideological reference (or at the very least an implicitly ideological analysis), the latter statement is impossible to make with sufficient authority to overcome decades of capitalism's victim-blaming Big Lies. Predictably, the Occupy effort thus disintegrated -- mostly due to the Ayn Rand contempt and hatefulness with which anti-union "progressives" regard organized labor and working-class peoples in general. More to the point, Occupy's failure at consciousness-raising demonstrates the failures of the movement's (white/bourgeois) majority, not the method itself. To make the personal political, we must therefore follow the example set by second-wave feminism before its co-optation. We must answer, both implicitly and explicitly, the core question of USian consciousness: "what's in it for me?"

Though various polls indicate an extremely high level of USian disgust with public morality, those same polls paradoxically rank morality as amongst the least important considerations in shaping national political views. (See for example http://www.gallup.com/poll/154715/americans-negativity-moral-values-inches-back.aspx.) But the cleverly induced disconnects between the deliberately oppressive state of the national economy, the degree of one's personal wretchedness and the lack of national morality can be overcome by restatement of economic issues in moral terms. Thus I urge resurrection of an old but enduring socialist slogan: "from each of us according to our ability, to each of us according to our needs." I also urge us to coin new, forceful truthful definitions of both socialism and capitalism. Accordingly, I offer my own re-definition of capitalism, one I have regularly used here in Outside Agitator's Notebook and in other Internet posts since 2009: 

Capitalism: infinite selfishness elevated to maximum virtue.

Alternatively: 

Capitalism: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue.

 

This accurately defines capitalism in terms of what it demands of its adherents. A somewhat more detailed definition follows:

Capitalism: the deliberate rejection of every humanitarian precept our species has ever dared assert.

 

The unchallengeable authority of these words -- the manner in which they hoist capitalism by its own petard -- is that they are merely a slight paraphrasing of capitalism as defined by Ayn Rand, Wall Street's messiah of moral imbecility. 

Which leads directly to a description of what was always the norm in the colonial domains of capitalism but has now become the new paradigm of USian homeland governance as well: 

Capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percenters; seductive rewards for the politicians, professionals, technicians and thugs who serve them; merciless subjugation and genocidal poverty for all the rest of us.

 

Such is the tyranny that now defines our lives. Hence I pray others will contemplate these definitions as a starting point for a new dialogue and improve on them or in any case disseminate them as part of the vocabulary of a new socialist revolution. Though this revolution has yet to tell us its name, its approach is undeniable. It is already recognizable as a hybrid of Gaian feminism, Marxism, democratic practice and libertarian localism -- a healing and redemptive ideological pragmatism that is gradually giving birth to a new solidarity. It is evolving despite the One Percent's imposition of the total-surveillance police-state and seizure of the technologies we mistakenly believed would facilitate our liberation. It is only a matter of time until someone articulates it in a manifesto so urgently compelling we are at last mobilized to rise up and save ourselves, our children and our planet. 

LB/22 September 2013 

-30-