28 April 2008

HERE IS WHY I'M A MARXIST. HERE, I THINK ...YES, HERE IS MOSTLY EVERYTHING I THINK ABOUT POLITICS:

Raise an eyebrow, when the mind protests too much. Or when culture does.

Raise an eyebrow when you wonder, as you’ve been subtly taught to wonder: "Can you believe how cruel and irrational the world used to be? Wouldn’t it suck to live back then, in the vague past, in olden times? Subject, as the people were, as we now assume, to the whims of elaborately cruel emperors and barons and absolute monarchs?" Ah, those awful days of crueler rulers... we’ve come along way, right?

Remember the holocaust?

Remember how quickly it was archived, tucked away into deep, dark history, misshelved in the "premodern horrors" section?

Did you check between the Bronze Age and Early Modern Europe? Because there’s no way that thing was spawned by modern-day capitalism! No freaking way...Stalin’s Russia, now there’s a monstrosity rightly associated with the economic system (nominally) in place at the time.

Purges, that’s what you get when you try to be communists! Because, as we all say, as though we’d memorized this script: "Communism works... in theory, but not in practice. Look at Stalin’s Russia."

"How do you get purges? Communism ...How do you get a holocaust? How do you shut the fuck up and stop asking so many questions?"


Well, now that the wars are all over, and all the dogs of Europe have stopped barking, and fascism, slavery, superstition, the English system of weight and measures, and unkindness have all been forever banished--now that the past is finally over, aren’t you glad? Do you ever think about how you take for granted little things, like leisure time, and dinner, and the History Channel? If you do think about it much, I pity you. Because I think you’re being deliberately misled.

Is the world really less cruel than it once was? Is it as kind now as it insists, so loudly, through popular history so seldom followed up by solid research?

We have a habit of "looking back" (as an unwittingly motivated and coordinated culture) on the "bad old days" to ratify the current state of things, the current distribution of social power, by implying that things are great–now that we’ve emerged from racism, or militarism, or a Red Scare, or the absolutely ruthless exploitation of the poorest of the poor.

But the truth is, it’s status quo, or, perhaps, things have gotten worse. The working class is still kept from consciously coordinating any of its actions, by racism and other carefully orchestrated, self-defeating postures (though, in an appalling irony, we’re unconsciously, culturally maneuvered into these very postures, which we like to imagine are "our own opinions.") And we’re still starting wars. And exploitation is more ruthless than ever... only it’s now outsourced to the third world, where it conveniently escapes the attention of guilt-stricken first-worlders, union organizers, and militants, changing all of these into something (semi-rich and) very strange: complacent consumers, Democrats, and "ivory-tower academic types." They are thereby rendered conveniently harmless or inarticulate, they’re all conveniently cut off from the third world that’s being worked to death by our corporate class.

We’re all so happy to remain unaware of the misery we’ve outsourced to the third world, where it waits, where it takes the current, still-spectral form of true international Communism, breathing faintly down our necks, soon raising one hand to tap us on the shoulder and get us to turn around for just a second ...where it waits to blow up in our faces once and for all, destroying this cruelty-powered economic arrangement of life, laying waste to capitalism, but killing God knows how many good people in the stampede.

It must have been awful living in the Middle Ages, don’t you think? Do you think? Why don’t you spend your time thinking about how awful it would be to live in 2008, in the wrong (i.e. larger) part of the world. Why doesn’t the History Channel tell you that story over and over and fucking over? Do you suppose there’s a reason we’re rather told about the elaborate cruelty of Caligula, or the brutal rituals used to reinforce relations of power among the Inca, or how shitty and degrading it must have been to be a medieval peasant? (Hint: yes, there is a reason...) (I’m only talking down to the vulgar Marx-bashers, mind you.)

We’re still lost. Lost deep, and deeper, in the nightmare of the dark.

So many clever people have forecasted the end of this arrangement of life, and, despite some sound reasoning, they always get it wrong. I don’t want to try my own artless hand at divining a date for the end of capitalism, or prophesying an exact schedule for the rise of true World Communism. But I want to suggest that things look shaky with the world.

Now, I’m not calling out "iceberg." And I would like (having thought out a tough ethical dilemma) to encourage our corporate filth to keep plowing full steam ahead.

Oh, about all this and, simultaneously, my blog title: History unfolds like clouds take forms. That’s what clouds do: take form. And take form, and take form, amazing, bewildering us, making fools of what weathermen we have. Changing into something always new and never quite what we imagined. Weathermen always get it wrong. But I rest assured of this, and you can too: sooner or later, it has to rain.