Dance Like No One is Watching
One of my super-rich fishing clients, in moments of reflection, tries to explain that "you can do well and do good". This puts a moral glazing on his disproportionate wealth. He also believes that all political conflict is "solved" by both sides moving to the glorious middle. Both bourgeois ideas I find dangerously subversive to the project of justice as I will try to explain.
The first concept is exactly what got us into Iraq, not to mention providing justification for all forms of colonialism and empire building throughout history and into the present. Is Iraq "a graveyard of good intentions or chaos stemming from greed? This delusion of a win-win situation where one can help people while exploiting and maiming them helps many Christians sleep well at night. Whether intellectual failure, cognitave dissonance or, as my wife prefers to think, apoligetics for good old greed, Jesus was making a statement when he chased the moneyboys from the temple. As for politics, the idea is not to solve all conflict ( welcome to totalitarianism) but to resolve issues through an adversarial process. Consensus and collaboration may be useful at times but it can also easily be a mechanism for entrenched power to maintain the status quo. Opposition parties are intrinsic to democracy and advocating their weakening is another aspect of self delusion or cynical greed.
"The main objective of the US food assistance program is to purchase surplus commodities from agribusiness." Did you see the fake presidential debate on West Wing? The Republican (Alan Alda) argues Africas' endemic poverty and food insecurity stems from "a lack of capital". There is a lack of global capital? No one could make this claim seriously, but then he proposed lowering taxes as the solution. So.
I have been debating with those who equate "smash the state" with breaking windows, an ethos adopted by some at the Summit of the America's. Locating power is not simple, but I know it does not reside in buildings. The structures we need to demolish are systemic and conceptual and having stood at the front lines, facing well armed shock troops, I know how entrenched the guardians of property are. Discipline is needed to pick battles well. I have argued here for reinvigorating praxis, for getting off the pot as it were, but action must be strategic.
"I place my bet on the weak force of those alter-globalisation movements ( movements that are still heterogeneous, still somewhat unformed) ,full of contradictions,but that gather the weak of the earth..." Jacques Derrida
posted by troutsky @ 9:19 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Jesus was certainly making a statement when he chased the moneymakers out of the temple. He said at another time that one cannot serve God and money.
But does that mean capitalism needs to be scrapped? It's something I wrestle with, but I think it needn't be.
Still, it shames me to no end to see Christians who equate exploitation and cheap taxes with loving thy neighbor.
If you have time, read Rerum Novarum. The Pope lies out Catholic teaching in regards to socialism and capitalism.
Is that the title of a book he wrote? Do you know who publishes it? I (and many others)are trying to figure out what socialism for the 21st century could possibly look like.The easy part is the critique of capitalism but it, and Marxism ,is a place to start.At times I think people worship "the invisible hand" of the market as though it were a diety. Have you ever tried to wade through Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose or Foucaults Pendulum? Dense but worthwhile, epecially for someone who has studied Catholicism.
I haven't. There is so much to read and so little time. I realize I am young, but it's a bit frustrating when school bogs me down. Ah well.
I think I'll have to get a list of some good reading from you when Christmas break comes around. I'm hoping to tackle Les Miserables over Thanksgiving and re-read Orthodoxy.
Rerum Novarum is an encyclical, and a good one. I've linked it here.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html
Let me know what you think if you have a chance to get to it.
Steel Magnolia,wondering where you went? Do you view history materialistically, as the constant clash between forces over control of resources? Is there a force at work that could cause a "Great Remembering"? Marx rejected as "utopian" the notion that an awakening of conscience could propel people to "do the right thing" as it were, and so proposed that emancipation of the exploited could only take place through a physical reversal in the ownership of the means of production, from private to collective, the action precipitated by some crisis.Can we imagine such a system of collective ownership, where the state truly is "of the people ,by the people, for the people" and so inessence,ceases to exist (at least in the form we now associate with it)? That to me is a moral vision , born of wisdom.The human Knucklehead Factor( different from human "nature")will work to subvert it but that only means it needs a better system of checks and balances, not that it fails theoretically.Poor Elvis was a prisoner of his wealth and fame(and upbringing and psyche)but he was always happiest when he was giving away cadillacs.
Post a Comment
<< Home