Pope Benedict Mistakenly Corrects Himself.

As readers of these woodchips might know, we have long been impressed by Pope Benedict’s erudition, kindliness and (very dry) wit. It has seemed to us that Benedict has been unfairly libelled by a materialist-liberal press out to destroy his moral authority and animated by a long standing ideological hatred of the Catholic Church.

This is not to say that we chipsters are out to defend everything the Church does or teaches. But it is to say that the Catholic Church stands for and advocates an existential-moral tradition which is deeply and extensively thought out and which deserves considered respect.

The Church’s sexual doctrine is grounded in its greater concepts concerning the sanctity of all life. In the Church’s view, there is an animating life-force which permeates all of Creation and with which we do best to harmonize ourselves.

The harmony spoken of is not some hippiesque, religious kitsch of floating with the flow in Aquarian, Gurdjieffian “self-realized” bliss. “I am in touch with Me and Myself” is not the harmony the Church references. The harmony referenced is greater than that which can be conceived, and encompasses things which appear to us as evil as well as good.

Most fundamentally the Church rejects Manicheism - the notion that the cosmos can be divided into opposed forces of good and evil. Orthodox Christianity insists that it is all good, even the bloody and useless Crucifixion of God himself. Therein is the paradox; and there too the heresy of Puritanism which thinks we can explain away what we don’t like and kosher our way towards something called “goodliness” by making ourselves clean and useful.

Karl Jung put it simply enough. In the end, he said, man has a choice either to deny or to affirm. There is, ultimately, no reason to chose one or the other; but everything else flows from the decision made.

It is foolish, we think, to hope for that day of redemption when “stalk and flower” shall perceive that “no foot of man shall crush them.” (Wagner, Parsifal.) Nature is full of crushing and violence and bloodied tooth and fang. But when we behold this mighty and radiant work which lies between two eternities of darkness, do we reject it or accept it? God, we are told, beheld his Creation and affirmed that it was good.

But if we choose to accept it, we necessarily chose to accept things which are beyond our comprehension and perhaps beyond our strength to bear. We choose not to deny some part of it that may be baffling or inconvenient or unpleasing to us.

And yet, it is this rejection that forms the basis of the materialistic liberalism of the present day, which trumpets a propaganda of convenience and utilitarianism guided only by ego. Would that this were true Epicurianism; for, Epicurus was a brilliant and serious philosopher. But it is not; and there is a difference between what Epicurus taught and mere self-indulgence.

In excoriating what we have called “materialistic liberalism” we do not mean to say that we oppose specific policies advocated by so-called “liberals” -- in particular policies on contraception, marriage, abortion, or termination of life. What we mean is that these policies are not well-grounded in a coherent moral view that goes beyond mere expedience. And, assuming there is nothing wrong with advocating expediencies, it is still childish and vituperative to attack the Church for trying to advocate something more permanent and solid.

Given these considerations, we have been open to hearing what Pope Benedict has had to say on love, faith and social justice. We wish some of his more antagonistic critics would actually take the time to read him and, if necessary, to trouble themselves reading the great authors of the Helleno-Christian tradition with whom Benedict is carrying on a discussion.

What we have taken away from his encyclicals can be distilled into three primary points.

On the question of social justice, Benedict reminds us that regardless of historical conditions and irrespective of the particular type of political-economy we chose, our private and public actions must be animated by a preferential option for the poor. The phrase, if pondered, needs no further explanation.

On the question of faith, Benedict reasserts that faith is not an interiorized, subjective attitude but a social phenomenon. Faith is not me, my interpretations and my Cosmic Teddy Bear guiding me into the wilderness; but rather a habit of hope which springs from and exists only in civilised communion with others. Just as a life force animates all of creation and is impossible without the creation it animates, so too faith is impossible without the society it nurtures.

On the question of love, Benedict unequivocally moved to make one of what he wryly calls “tacit corrections” of unchangeable doctrine. Eros, he said, was not to be seen as the opponent of true spiritual love but as rather the natural and necessary precursor to deeper and higher forms of caring for one another. Eros could not be viewed simply as a “biological” mechanism but should be seen as the delightful and urgent process by which we are pulled out of ourselves, towards another whom we come to know, appreciate and care for in ever deepening and more permanent ways.

Those three propositions have struck us as fundamentally and radically progressive. And it has struck us as shameful that avowedly progressive elements in Western (and particularly Anglo-American society) have ignored the opportunity and hand offered by the Pope.

It was thus with a certain dismay that we read Benedict’s latest address to the American bishops in which he said,

“[P]articular mention must be made of the powerful political and cultural currents seeking to alter the legal definition of marriage. The Church’s conscientious effort to resist this pressure calls for a reasoned defense of marriage as a natural institution consisting of a specific communion of persons, essentially rooted in the complementarity of the sexes and oriented to procreation. Sexual differences cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the definition of marriage. Defending the institution of marriage as a social reality is ultimately a question of justice, since it entails safeguarding the good of the entire human community and the rights of parents and children alike."

“POPE DENOUNCES GAY MARRIAGE” blared the headlines. He hadn’t before, but he has now. Insiders may know that the Pope really did not draft the remarks, just as he does not draft the scores of homilies, greetings, letters, exhortations, advices etc. issued by “the Vatican” in any given week. Perhaps he was cornered by “conservatives” in the hierarchy opposed to his “tacit corrections.” But it makes no difference, the bull bears his seal.

It is a shame that Benedict has fallen in with those reactionary pharisees in the Church who would rather blast at homos than raise so much as a timorous voice against the devastation done to society and society’s children by neo-liberal economic policies, neo-conservative killer drones, pollution, prostitution and slave labor. A sentence can undo a corpus and damnation as well as salvation ensues from a single step.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2012.

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Holmberg's Mistake as Policy

In his provocative study of pre-Columbian AmerIndian civilizations (1491), historian Charles C. Mann discusses what he calls Holmberg’s Mistake.

Between 1940 and 1942, anthropologist Allan Holmberg went to live among the pre-historic Sirionó of Bolivia whom he described in a later best-seller titled Nomads of the Longbow (1950). According to Holmberg, the Sirionó were “among the most culturally backward people of the world” living in naked hunger under haphazard lean-to’s exposed to rain and vermin, without husbandry or agriculture, without religion or music and incapable of counting beyond three -- the very picture, Holmberg concluded, of “man in the raw state of nature” by-passed by 20,000 years of slow and painful progress.

As it turns out, Holmberg was completely wrong. Far from having glimpsed through the historical hour-glass at Man’s wretched and beastly prototypes, Holmberg had stumbled across the debased and degraded remains of populous civilizations wasted by epidemics and reduced to servitude by a predatory colonialism, aided and abetted by the Bolivian military. The Sirionó were not “wandering” in the forests but hiding from their abusers. “It was as if,” Mann writes, one “had come across refugees from a Nazi concentration camp and concluded that they belonged to a culture that had always been barefoot and starving.”

For some reason, I thought of Gaza. Contrary to the propaganda of our Times, Palestine had not been a “desert” but a fertile land of villages and orchards from whence the bourgeoisie of Europe obtained their olives, fruits and jams. Today, Gaza is a vast walled-in ghetto, steeped in its own sewage, enduring endemic shortages of water, electricity and food, its children suffering from chronic malnutrition. In such conditions, cultural and political cohesion necessarily fragments. Today, the Palestinians are increasingly incapable of concerted political action. They lack not only the wherewithal but, increasingly, the intellect and the will. They are, before our eyes, being reduced to a lumpen sub-proletariate capable only of primitive outbursts which are easily controlled and slapped down by their thuggish Jewish overlords.

But it is not just Gaza. Around the world we can witness instances of physio-social degradation as policy: the favelas of Brazil or Peru where ragged children sniff glue for breakfast and whore their bodies at night; the stinking garbage heaps of Mexico, India, Pakistan, China which --in place of rich and fertile earth -- form the “substrata” of existence. We see the policy at work in the blasted rubble of Iraq, in the squalid, leaky tenements of St. Petersburg and in what affirmative aktion and benign neglect have done to African Americans as to American Indians before them. Firewater and crack are worth legions of cavalry or booted SWAT teams.

More ominously (if that can be believed), we see the policy at work in the indignant austerity riots breaking out in Europe. What has to be realized is that the world’s banker governments are institutionalizing austerity so as to make scarcity and scrounging a permanent way of life for billions of human beings. This policy is no longer even spoken of as a temporary “belt tightening” -- as if being put on a healthy regimen of exercise and diet. The ever subserving press is subtly massaging the way we speak so as to induce an acquiescence of austerity as normal and natural.

In the United State, the regime has simply written off 40 million Americans. They are the “structurally unemployed”. They are, literally, no longer counted. As for the official poor which are counted, Romney’s disdainful answer was “they have their cake.” In times past, a remark like that would have cost Romney and his family brood their heads. Today it paves his way.

As for those above the official poverty line, they have their amusements and teeVees -- technologically complex devices which produce (mirabilis dictu!) the same stupefying effect as primitive rattles and drums.

An equally stupefied “educational” system inculcates people with a stuffing of half-truths, simplicities, and outright nonsense. What Americans are hardly aware of is that the moronization of culture applies equally to the country’s intellectual elite who are themselves careless of grammar (without which acuity is not possible) and ignorant of historical and cultural paradox (without which perspective is not possible).

In Europe, even Der Spiegel, which is hardly Die Zeit or Le Monde Diplomatique, chokes with disbelief on the sheer imbecility of U.S. political “discourse”. In contrast, the New York Times and WaPo report without a blanch, the beyond Dada inanity of the GOP debates. It is as if the press seriously reported on the hee-hawing of donkeys.

The collective mental degradation thus perpetuated is no different than Himmler’s notorious educational programme for occupied Russia. No need to teach the Slavs to count beyond ten, he said. The purpose now, as well as then, goes deeper than getting the oppressed to accept their overlords. It is rather to get them to accept their misery. It is to insure that when the time comes to toss more millions on the garbage heaps of society, people will be too goddamn stupid to notice. In fact, they will think they are well off, like the denizens of Stanislaus Lem’s Futurological Congress who inhabited a hallucinogenically induced happy, prosperous realité faux.

The sad thing is that there is a trip-line beyond which recovery is no longer possible. Like desertification, or acidification, Holmberg’s mistake teaches us that generational deprivation reaches genetic threshold past which the damage is permanent. One is left with a species that is itself little more than vermin. In fact, biologically speaking, vermin are better off. Who knows... perhaps spiritually as well.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2012

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Heresy in America

A friend Woodchips asked us what we thought of Chris Hedges' recent article decrying evangelical Christianity as a fascist ploy.

Oh bah.

Chris Hedges is one of those St. Johnny come-latelies who read Thucydides at age 40 and then "discover" all sorts of neat and nifty insights which they sagaciously blab about in Jane Fonda style to gaping groupies. He is part of a coterie of "liberal" mutual back-scratchers and self-promoters. As a whole, they are the prime products of America's dismal, dysfunctional educational system, given to emitting such blooping barbarities as, "I just had an epiphany!!!" Oh wow... [FN-1]

Hedges latest opus on "Christian Fascism" is a case in point.

First off, it is hand-me down material. He ought to at least give credit to Upton Sinclair who --- back in the Thirties -- coined the bon mot that when "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." Snore.

Secondly, these morons -- including Sinclair -- are too scrambled-brained to figure out that the coming of fascism to America would be a good thing. For them, "fascism" serves as the bete noire in a neo-manichean weltanschaunng. It is the Big Yuk Icky Poo of all phoochies. In truth, fascism is very simply the "middle way" between true socialism and true liberalism (capitalism). It posits neither laissez faire nor the abolishment of classes but rather the cooperation between classes in a coordinated scheme of collective and mutual responsibilities. Bismarck came up with the idea. Croley cribbed it (The Promise of American Life (1909)) Teddy ran with it (Osawatomie, Kansas), FDR Calvinized it and Hitler melded it with Pan German jingoism. But from the point of view of political economies, it is all the same thing.

By its very nature, fascism entails a high degree of police power (aka state regulatory power) -- what the GOP bitches and moans over as "gubmint intrusion". They key is how to exert police power over the economy, zoning and like matters without intruding on privacy and political/religious/cultural expression. For a while, the USA, whose fascism was lite opera rather than Wagner, probably did the best job of modulation.

There were some systems, notably Franco's Spain, which looked fascist but really were not. They looked fascist because they spoke the same kind of cultural nationalism that Germany and Italy were speaking, because they were all allied against Soviet Communism and because they all repressed opposition. But Franco's Spain, "betrayed" the Falange (the "National Syndicalists") and ended up simply a reactionary military dictatorship, with virtually none of the social safety net that characterized Germany or even Italy .

What morons like Hedges do, is to adopt without knowing or understanding the communist/socialist critique of fascism as being a "degenerate form" of capitalism. What communists meant was that fascism represented capitalism in its death throws -- a rear-guard action designed to placate the masses with social benefits (false embourgeoisement is the technical term) while holding onto the essentials of capitalist privilege. The communists were not "opposed" to fascism. They welcomed it in so far as it represented what they felt was a necessary historical progression away from liberalism. They opposed it in so far as fascist regimes repressed them and insofar as fascism promoted itself as a permanent socio-economic solution. They just as much opposed the so-called "social democrats" or reformist socialists whom Lenin scathingly called "social chauvinists". FN-2

Third. What Hedges (and Sinclair) fail to understand is that "Christian Fascism" came to America on the fucking Mayflower. It is what this country is about and it is why FDR had to Calvinize his varietal fascism with recourse to a fog of homiletic tissue about liberality towards the deserving poor.

It's pretty simple, actually. The individualism and subjective refuge Hedges blabbers about is the damn essence of the Protestant Heresy. Pope Benedict criticises the Lutheran "mistake" as an interiorization of faith which, properly speaking, is essentially and necessarily social. De Tocqueville critcised the phenomenon as "individualism" -- a word he coined and which he did not intend as a compliment. Marx criticised the same attitude as a Robinsonnade which he says is the hobby-horse of capitalist apologetics: me, my hatchet and the wilderness... blah blah blah.

The idea that "God leads me to my wealth" is hardly a new thing. It is what this America is about. The whole country is simply "Satan's Synagogue" (Sahagun's apt phrase for the heretical "reformists"). It is collectively steeped in the atomization of self and self-delusions. In this respect there is no difference between evangelical fundamentalists and their dialectical opponents, the advocates of Foetus Flush and Self Realization. The reason the country is mired in a so-called "culture war" is that has fallen into the pit of self-love,

" .... l'amour de soi-même, et de toutes choses pour soi ; il rend les hommes idolâtres d'eux-mêmes, et les rendrait les tyrans des autres si la fortune leur en donnait les moyens ; .... On ne peut sonder la profondeur, ni percer les ténèbres de ses abîmes. Là il est à couvert des yeux les plus pénétrants ; il y fait mille insensibles tours et retours. Là il est souvent invisible à lui-même, il y conçoit, il y nourrit, et il y élève, sans le savoir, un grand nombre d'affections et de haines ; il en forme de si monstrueuses que, lorsqu'il les a mises au jour, il les méconnaît, ou il ne peut se résoudre à les avouer." ( La Rochefoucault, Maximes)

Who also said, aptly enough, that youth thinks of itself as "free and natural" when it is in fact no more than "ignorant and ill-polished". I've liked La Rochefoucault since I was 19. Maybe Hedges and his groupies will get around to discovering him one day.

©WCG, 2012.

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Hunting the Wrong Beast

Once again, elements of the secular and corporate media have raised the hew and howl against Pope Benedict XVI for -- or so they say -- condemning homosexuality as a “threat to humanity.” The Pope said no such thing.

One wonders if there are people whose need for self differentiation is so strong that they yearn to be persecuted from which conflict they draw a sustaining, albeit, negative energy.

There is little to wonder that the corporate media, under the guise of social “liberalism”, wishes to destroy the moral authority and credibility of the Church which, notwithstanding irredentist excesses on its own part, is often the only voice of connection and sanity in an otherwise increasingly deranged and debased world.

In the traditional New Years welcome to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican and after the usual pleasantries, this is what the Pope said:

"Today’s meeting traditionally takes place at the end of the Christmas season, during which the Church celebrates the coming of the Saviour. He comes in the dark of night and so his presence is immediately a source of light and joy (cf. Lk 2:9-10). Truly the world is gloomy wherever it is not brightened by God’s light! Truly the world is dark wherever men and women no longer acknowledge their bond with the Creator and thereby endanger their relation to other creatures and to creation itself. The present moment is sadly marked by a profound disquiet and the various crises – economic, political and social – are a dramatic expression of this."

Why not a headline saying: Pope Decries Materialization of Nature as a Threat to Existence Itself.

The Pope went on to “address before all else” the global economic crises which he said required all countries, particularly the developed ones, to fashion policies which not only “shore up national economies” but “which ensure that all can lead a dignified life and develop their abilities for the benefit of the community as a whole.”

Why not a headline saying: Pope Calls for Economic Policies which Promote Individual Dignity and the Public Good.

The Pope then addressed the Occupy and Indignado movements, particularly those in the Middle East, stating that the “need for social solidarity” should not be turned into a “mere means for maintaining or seizing power.” He then called for national reconciliation in Iraq and a solid two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Why not a headline reading: In Wake of Failure of U.S. Interventions, Pope calls for National and Inter-Ethnic Reconciliation in Middle East.

Benedict then returned to the question of youth, and the need for an educational response to young people’s “demand” for truth, justice and peace. In this connection the Pope stated:

“Education is a crucial theme for every generation, for it determines the healthy development of each person and the future of all society. It thus represents a task of primary importance in this difficult and demanding time. In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and States; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue.”

How in the world does this equate with “homosexuality imperils civilization”? It does not. Benedict simply expressed the traditional view in most societies the educational formation begins most fundamentally within the family context.

Jean Piaget, the groundbreaking cognitive psychologist (1896-1980), would hardly disagree. In Piaget’s view, which is now generally accepted in the scientific community, a child’s character and intellectual development are formed less by formal training and teaching than through processes of assimilation and accommodation within his immediate social environment. It was with reference to this developmental setting that Piaget stated, "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.”

It is hardly a secret that the Church’s moral doctrine is cut from a unitary cloth the fundamental weave of which is the sanctity and natural unfolding of all life. In the Church’s view, abortion and environmental protection are not separate issues.

Thus, in his diplomatic address, the Pope went on to state that policies which “promote abortion for reasons of convenience or for questionable medical motives compromise the education of young people and, as a result, the future of humanity.” He then concluded his address stating,

“Finally I would stress that education, correctly understood, cannot fail to foster respect for creation. ... Environmental protection and the connection between fighting poverty and fighting climate change are important areas for the promotion of integral human development.”

The way in which Benedict’s remarks get distorted by the secular and corporate press is nothing short of malicious or hysterical. And what the hysteria overlooks is the subtlety with which Benedict opens Church doctrine to accommodation.

The Pope did not state, as John Paul II would have, that a child’s proper education could take place only within the traditional setting of heterosexual marriage. He stated rather that “among” educational settings “pride of place” went to the traditional family unit. Well ... duh. Most of the world is, after all, heterosexual and, ergo, child bearing. It is really rather petulant to expect the Pope to not address what concerns 90% of humanity in order to specifically validate LGTG issues. What the petulance ignores is the immense flexibility built into the phrase “pride of place.” Yes, the traditional male-female family may sit at the head of the table but that does not ipso facto exclude other families from sitting at the table too.

Equally ignored was the flexibility inherent in a criticism of abortion “for reasons of convenience” or “questionable medical motives”. The use of such phrases clearly implies that there may be reasons for abortion which are necessary and/or beyond dispute.

It is also beyond dispute that, within the Church, there are hardline conservatives, such as Madrid’s Cardinal Ruoco Varela, who categorically condemn all abortion and all “alternative” sexuality not aimed and intended at procreation. But Pope Benedict is not among them. He has consistently worked quietly and subtly to manoeuver the Church into a more assimilative and accommodation position on sexuality which, at the same time, does not give into the disconnected, self-gratifying expediency of materialistic, social-liberal thought -- what used to be called libertinage.

It seems that elements in the so-called “left” want the Church to change positions with alacrity of a Romney and to announce opinions in the sterling timbre of a Jane Fonda. It will do neither, and thank God for that.

This is not to say that the Church does not need to further “refine and develop” doctrines on sexuality which have hitherto injured too many at the expense of an all embracing charity. Benedict himself has wryly acknowledged the roll of such “tacit corrections” within the Church’s magisterium. Those who would welcome such adjustments would do better to leave off hunting beasts to snarl at and listen more carefully to the sparrow on the branch.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2012

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The Fetish of Individualism Strikes Again

“A debate has arisen within the Occupy movement about gender equality and how it relates to the interests of the 99 percent. Leela Yellesetty explains why the Occupy movement must embrace women's rights.” -- Socialist Worker, 13 December 2011

Sigh. Once again, the “Left” dissipates into a pot pourri of “me, myself and mine” proving, once again, its incapacity to focus on structural economic issues.

The fetish of individualism is so pronounced in the United States that even putative socialists are indisposed to thinking in social terms. “Socialism” becomes the label stuck atop an aggregated heap of personal piss-offs and entitlements.

It is thus that the average leftist protest becomes an “all inclusive” carnival parade of issues: Out of Iraq! Free Biafra! Seattle Clinic Defense! Support Teachers Local 876! Gay Marriage Now! Legalize Marijuana! But All and Everything is not a focus. Is it any wonder the “Left” never gets anywhere?

The “Left” -- if it wants to be truly left -- needs to focus on structural issues; that is, on issues that concern how the economy is controlled and managed as a whole. Once the Left focuses on our economic modus operandi, the qui bonos will fall into place. Squawking chicks do not gather the worm.

The reasoning process of squawking chicks is illustrated by Yellesetty who declaims that “women are disproportionately impacted by the budget cuts that are shredding the social safety net.” Yellesetty acknowledges that the greatest disproportion lies with the “1 percent” who reap the benefits of “the most unfair tax structure in the country.” Nevertheless, her point is that, as a woman, she is more of a victim than gays, blacks, Native Americans, one-legged veterans and, of course, white working males. And so, a general, structural phenomenon gets particularized behind the veneer of an objective, sociological measurement -- in this case of the degree of impact.

From this artifice of Superior Victimhood, Yellesetty then turns her wrath upon the Occupy Movement which she says “is not immune to the sexism that is pervasive in society as a whole.” In other words, where women are concerned, the 99 Percent are as bad as the One Percent. Her proof? “A case in point was the sexist "Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street" video I wrote about a few months back ('No place for sexism in Occupy').”

Ah yes! In America, even progressives are puritanical. One supposes that Yellesetty would insist that we all march with mortifiers strapped to our thighs. No impure thoughts on the road to Perfect (Feminist) Socialism! (So much for Soviet Life pictures of muscled males and full breasted women building dams or bringing in the sheaves).

From this premise, once removed, Yellesetty then declaims against the “gender inequality” which she says pervades the Occupy Movement. By “gender equality” Yellesetty means: “the question of reproductive rights.” And in her lexicon “reproductive rights” includes “defend[ing] clinics against the anti-choice bigots who regularly picket them.”

Since men don’t reproduce, the word “equality” is a soft way of saying that men get to have sex without consequences and, therefore, so should women. And of course, Yellesety’s right to abort includes suppressing the First Amendment rights of those who disagree with Roe v. Wade because they are bigots who should not be permitted to “interfere” with “gender equality.”

From this rather dubious landing point, Yellesetty leaps to her conclusion which is that the Occupy Movement should make “reproductive rights” (and bigot-suppression) a central demand.

The leap is accomplished by unvarnished insult. According to Yellesetty, such “bigots” (like those who interfere with gender equality) include those in the Occupy Movement who think that the movement, should be focus “exclusively on corporate greed and the issues that unite the 99 percent.” Period. Q.E.D.

Actually, the economic inequities of capitalism produce “impacts” far more extensive and injurious than even an outright denial of abortion rights. Yellesetty might not want to hear that, but it’s a fact.

Under the spurious banner of “gender equality,” Yellesetty’s demand is fundamentally a-social. Its focus is on a paradigmatic individual right. The merits and contours of this right are not the point. Whatever they may be, they do not concern how society is structured and functions as a whole.

Neither do gay rights, black rights, disabled rights, gun rights, peer-to-peer rights, copyrights, prayer-rights, enlistment rights, victim rights and the whole panoply of squawking-chicks-assembled rights.

Such divisive hot button issues are honey and nectar to the One Percent, whose focus is exclusively on profit and screwing the 99 percent. Why do banks and corporations fund both parties? Why do they collaborate and coddle with Pinochet, Putin and Deng Xiaoping? Because ultimately they don’t give a rat’s rump about the very “hot button issues” they stir up. They have a modus operandi and it is called capitalism.

At bottom, capitalism is non-ideological. It is an economic technique. It can only be met by a counter modus operandi -- an equal but opposite material economy that relegates ideological squabbles to the back of the bus.

©Woodchipgazette, 2011.
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A Sha Nah Nah Revolution?

One of the truly amazing things about capitalism is its ability to trivialize anything it touches.

We never thought much of Flower Power as a political force; but we thought even less of daisy-decals stuck onto beetles, which metamorphosed into sunny smiley faces which in the end became the Walmart logo.

Similarly, we have not been very sanguine about the ultimate prospects of the Occupy Movement, the collective impulse of which strikes us as being counter-historical and slotted for failure without or without a strategic program.

Nevertheless, we would like the movement to have a fair crack at its paragraph in history even if it yields no more than les evenements of '48, '72 or 68.

Instead, the Occupy Movement has been reduced to the level of fracas at the frat house. Will Bloomberg evict the occupiers? Will the occupiers re-takey Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza? Whose panties will get stolen this time?

You can bet your last doughnut that the cops have been ordered not to do something stupid, outrageous and escalatory like blasting a rubber bullet into some pretty coed's eye. They have no doubt been issued strategic doses of prozac to keep their aggro levels in check. The kleptocracy wants to keep things as "sha nah nah" as possible -- good clean tussle-fun between our dear raucus kids (learning all aboout democracy) and our stern but patient campus constables.

If only we could bring back the Everly Brothers...or at least the Kingston Trio. We could turn the "movement" into a post-millenial version of occupying a telephone booth.

The worst thing that could happen to the movement is that it be turned into a cultural artifact... a street version of Beach Blanket Babylon, the "world's longest running musical revue" now going on 40 years of repeat original outrageousness. At that point middle aged couples from Iowa come to Oakland or New York to watch the occupiers do their monthly park takeover.

We have met the revolution and it is ours. None of the world leaders are loosing a night's worth of sleep over indignados or ninety-niners. They are off tete a teteting, trying to figure how much inflation to impose on us in order to save the banks.

Occupiers circa 1959

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Confluence and Coincidence -- the Calculus of 99 Percent

What do the 99 Percent stand for? Since the OWS movement started, that has been the question repeatedly asked, not only by corporate politicians and pundits but also by voices from the progressive-left. The frustrating non answer from “the movement” has been: nothing & everything.

This formlessness makes people decidedly uncomfortable. Geometry is a fundamental construct of the human mind and, as a result, the need to “box things in” becomes a basic intellectual urge. “Ti esti?” -- “what is it?” was the first and most annoying question Socrates kept asking.

Among political analysts and strategists, the Socratic question gets translated into: How can you achieve anything if you don’t lay down goals and demands? The question is certainly not illogical. Apart from boxing things in, if you don’t have a formulated destination, how can you get there, wherever there might be?

Isn’t the calculus of politics all about platforms and goals? It is. But the calculus of history -- that is, of whether movements will be successful or not -- is a different issue. What makes things happen and why do they happen the way they do?

Once Newton had explained the motions of the heavenly bodies and why things fall the way they do, Western philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Marx applied their minds to deducing the laws of history. If we can figure this out, so the thinking goes, we can soothsay the future.

Tolstoy was skeptical. His epic ‘War and Peace’ was an account of individuals within the inexorable flow of events. At the end of the novel he wrote an “Epilogue” in which he sought to explain the “calculus of history.”

Tolstoy dismissed the notion that “the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades” or “the ferment of the peoples of the West at the end of the Eighteenth Century” could be explained by the activities of popes, magnates or kings and “their mistresses and ministers.”

The French, he says, did not invade Russia because Napoleon wrote certain letters to Vienna and issued certain orders on a particular date. “Why then did the French invade Russia?” Tolstoy asks. “Because the impetus of the nation drove them there; and when the impetus was spent they receded back home. The letters and orders of Napoleon simply coincided with the will of the people; other letters he wrote, which did not, are simply forgotten.”

By a confluence of motives, Tolstoy did mean an identity of motives, or in other words, a shared platform of goals. On the contrary, he assumed that the 100,000 individual motives that made up the Army of the French were entirely idiosyncratic. The motives, each different from the other, simply flowed together and gave rise to an impulse in a given direction.


Just as Tolstoy was dismissive of attributed causes which seek to explain an event, he was equally unimpressed by strategies which seek to bring about a result. His hero of the war was General Kutuzof who was excoriated as an incompetent as he retreated before Napoleon’s advance and hailed as a hero as he advanced after Napoleon’s retreat.

Kutuzof understood the “calculus of history;” Napoleon (at that point) did not. In Tolstoy’s opinion, the calculus of history is formed by the swelling confluence of a myriad of individual motives and impulses which are beyond human calculation.

Tolstoy’s Epilogue finds little resonance in an epoch addicted to the scientific method. We want maps not the meandering of a herd. The Occupation Movement, we are told, needs a brilliant, cunning strategist in the order of Carl Rove or at least in the magnitude of Lenin!

The historians among the strategists will argue that the Occupiers will fail unless they come up with a strategy. After all, is it not true that the Peasant’s Revolt in 14th Century England and the Peasant’s War in 16th Century Germany failed for want of a map?

This is not a patently unreasonable argument; but it is based on a false historical premise. The picture painted by the 14th and 16th century feudal-bourgeoisie was that of a rudderless mob of angry, dirty, uppity peasants who, being ignorant, resentful and dirty got what they deserved. Most subsequent historians have simply accepted the propaganda of the triumphant party as fact.

But the propaganda is over-painted. The coming together of English, and later German, peasants certainly was that “swelling of impulses” which Tolstoy says is the calculus of history. But it is incorrect to say that the peasants had no platform. In both cases, the uprising had very specific demands.

The English and German peasant revolts provide a good historical analogy for today’s 99 Percenters. In both cases, the peasant class was being destroyed by excessive taxation and laws which embarrassed their economic development.

In order to see how this was the case, it is first necessary to disentangle one’s thought from the anti-feudal capitalist propaganda that passes for orthodox history.

It is typically said that the peasants revolted against the oppressions of serfdom. But that is incorrect. Since the 4th Century, serfdom had provided much desired economic security. It may have bound the peasant to his land but it also prevented foreclosure on his land. What is called feudalism was a complex balance of horizontal and vertical economic flows. What caused the peasants’ revolt was that, as feudalism gradually gave way to a nascent capitalism, the flows down were all but eliminated by the suck ups.

The unbalancing of the feudal equilibrium was not just a matter of taxation but also of the privatization of common lands. For centuries the common use of fields, forests and streams had served as a kind of “public service” to the peasantry and these were now be foreclosed on and handed over to private individuals. Thus, the Twelve Articles of the German revolt (1525) demanded the return of communal lands.

The disequilibrium was also the result of legal class war. A major cause of the English revolt was the Statute of Labourers (1351) which forbade workers from demanding better pay and working conditions. What was occurring in both England and Germany was a gradual but inexorable dis possession and reduction of what had been a stable and relatively prosperous class.

Of course it was entirely within the interest of the newly emerging feudal-bourgeoisie to mischaracterize the balance they were destroying, so that to this day people are taught and believe what boils down to capitalist revisionism. Feudalism was by no means perfect, but it was a remarkably stable, generally equitable, and culturally democratic system. It did not last near 1000 years by being unremittingly unjust.

Once feudalism is cast in a more balanced light, the analogy between the peasants’ revolts and today’s Indignados and 99 Percenters can be seen. In all cases a defined and previously secured class protests against economic pillage, political disempowerment and cultural monopolization.

In each of these cases, the problem of the movement was not a failure to formulate specific demands. Nor was it a failure of collective impulses. The peasants’ revolts ultimately failed because both the substance of popular impulse and the form of their goals failed to coincide with an historical cycle.


The peasants’ revolts illustrate that Tolstoy’s calculus is only half correct. It is not sufficient to say (as he would) that the revolts failed because the collective impulse “spent” itself. No impulse lasts forever. The question is whether the impulse engages into a wheel that moves events.

Here the prognosis becomes elusive. Whether we regard history as cyclical or progressive, the critical factor becomes knowing where in the historical cycle (or progression) the present moment stands. This in turn becomes a question of knowing whether the present moment is a time to build on pre-existing achievements or to destroy the existing order.

If the confluence of impulses flows in a destructive direction and if the “historical moment” is one which is fertile for destruction, then the “movement” will amount to something. If not, not e converso.

Is all this not just a pompous way of singing Que será, será? I think it’s a tad more than that. It gives us a set of values to balance-out in an historical equation.

The peasants’ revolts failed not because there wasn’t a confluence of impulses among the peasantry, but because that confluence did not coincide with a generative stage as represented by the capitalist movement. The West was not simply destroying something old but building up to something new. The peasants, for all their radical “communistic” articles, wanted to revert to the statu quo ante; a quo ante that itself had started when the collective impulse of the German Barbarians had coincided with the decadence of the Roman Empire in a moment that was fertile for destruction.

Those who are quick to quibble will point out that every end is a beginning and all creation entails destruction. And right they are. All I can say is that if soothsaying were a matter of mere logic anyone could predict the future. But soothsaying is not mere logic. The one-eyed Russian general sniffed the wind, the world historical Man of the Moment got it all wrong. In this respect, Tolstoy was right.

The absence of a platform by the 99 Percenters is not critical. A platform will eventually emerge from the confluence of impulses assembled; and that emergence will manifest democracy in its most raw and pure form.

But whether the 99 Percenters succeed, depends on whether their impulse is revolutionary or reformist and, whichever it is, whether the present historical moment is one of generation or decay.

That is my calculus.

©Woodchip Gazette, 2011
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