keep the dream alive

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I Have A Dream" speech, in which King spoke about his dream of racial equality and freedom. But King wasn't just a prominent civil rights leader. He was also a radical activist, pacifist, and revolutionary who became a tireless advocate for the most downtrodden, oppressed, and marginalized among us; and while his "I Have a Dream" speech was a seminal moment in the civil rights movement, his dream ultimately extended to all Americans.

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

The day he was assassinated, King was in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting a strike of black sanitation workers who were fighting against unequal wages and poor working conditions, as well as for union recognition. King wasn't just a champion for civil rights, he was also a champion for economic justice, freedom, and peace, using his style of nonviolent direct action to fight against racism and the Vietnam War as much as for major economic reforms.

For me, King's revolutionary spirit is characterized by these words, which were given in a speech at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination:

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

I'd always known that King was a revolutionary figure in American history due to his well-publicized fight for civil rights, but it wasn't until I heard those words for the first time that I finally realized just how revolutionary he truly was. In a world where people often assume that violence is the only effective means of change, King showed us by example just how powerful nonviolence can be in combating everything from racial inequality to social injustice in all of its forms.

Before his untimely death, King, along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was helping to organize the Poor People's Campaign, a national campaign designed to address the issues of economic justice and housing for the poor in the US. Months before the march, King told reporters, "I think that the time has come, if we can't get anything done otherwise, to camp right here in Washington just as they did with the Bonus March—just camp here and stay here by the thousands and thousands until the Congress of our nation and the federal government will do something to deal with the problem [of poverty]"—a tactic that was similarly adopted by a budding Occupy movement 43 years later in protest against social and economic inequality following the 2008 global financial crisis.

King was in the middle of crisscrossing the country, trying to mobilize what he called a "multiracial army of the poor" to march on Washington to demand an Economic Bill of Rights, when he took that fateful detour to help support the Memphis sanitation workers. In King's absence, the march on Washington was led by Ralph Abernathy, his wife, Coretta Scott King, and Jesse Jackson, and culminated in what became known as Resurrection City, an encampment on the National Mall housing somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people.

King was undoubtedly a brave man. He received numerous death threats, but he was willing to give his life for what he believed in, never letting the hatred of others deter him from doing what he thought was just, right, and for the common good—perhaps in part because he knew that his death wouldn't be in vain, that the momentum of change was too great to be stopped by the death of one individual. As King said in a speech he gave the night before he was assassinated:

And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Like most of the people we tend to commemorate, whether via national holidays or annual acknowledgments, King wasn't perfect. He had his flaws and vices, and he made mistakes just like everyone else. But unlike other giants of history who I personally don't think deserve our admiration and praise (e.g., Christopher Columbus), he does, if only because he did more than most to actively change the world for the better, fighting against ills of society like economic exploitation, inequality, racism, militarism, and nationalism.

As we honour his legacy and recall his words half a century ago today, it's my hope that his example will inspire us to not be afraid to make a difference, to courageously dive in and get our hands dirty working alongside our brothers and sisters all over the world in trying to shape a better future. King saw with profound depth the mutually-dependent relationships that underlie this fragile thing we call life, and encouraged us to see them as well—a realization he believed necessary for peace on Earth:

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can't leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that's handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that's given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that's poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that's poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you're desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that's poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that's given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.

We've certainly made a lot of progress in those 50 years, but his dream, and the dream of so many others like him, is far from being fully realized, and there's a lot more work that needs to be done to make it a reality. We can't just rest complacently on past gains and simply pay lip service to the vision and hard work of others—we have to pick up their banners and carry on where they left off. King's speech laid out a blueprint, and his organizing helped lay the foundation; but it's up to us to make manifest the future people like King and the participants of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom dreamt, fought, and even died for.

heading in the wrong direction

Personally, I think starting yet another war/military action in the Middle East is a bad idea, and I'm extremely skeptical of the US's reasons for doing so. US military intervention across the world has rarely, if ever, been for purely humanitarian reasons; and the majority of our repeated interventions in the Middle East have been detrimental to all parties involved, in my opinion. It's almost like we haven't learned our lesson about throwing our military weight around whenever we don't happen to like what someone else is doing.

I'm not extremely well-versed on the matter, but I think we probably could've done a lot more in the way of negotiations and humanitarian assistance to help the people of Syria besides give our lukewarm support to the opposition when the civil war began over 2 years ago instead of waiting until now to really get involved (especially since we've supported Assad in the past, much as we did Hussein, Mubarak, etc.). And instead of a bombing campaign, I think we should do things like start giving out a mass of visas to Syrians who want to leave and help them escape this chaos.

That said, I can certainly understand the feelings of people who think that Assad has crossed some kind of moral line by using chemical weapons, assuming he has (evidence is sketchy at the moment), and that immediate, international intervention is now required. It does sound particularly horrific and terrifying, perhaps in part because we're not as used to hearing about people being killed with things other than bombs and guns and missiles. But assuming that Assad did use chemical weapons to kill people, what's the difference? How is using chemical weapons to kill people fundamentally different than using conventional weapons to kill them? Why is one more acceptable than the other?

Why does Secretary of State Kerry, for example, feel that killing people with things like drone strikes and troop surges (which kill civilians along with militants) is OK, but killing people with poison gas is a 'moral obscenity'? It's like, "Well, they're only killing the opposition and civilians with guns and tanks and bombs, so we'll just sit back and let things play out. Oh no, they're killing people with chemicals, now's the time to step in!" Killing people in general is terrible and should be unacceptable, not just killing people with x method. Why does the precise method of killing really matter? It just seems kind of arbitrary to me to be honest.

And if it really is such a 'red line,' then maybe somebody should've 'intervened' when we killed tens of thousands of civilians with two atomic bombs, including thousands from radiation exposure, during WWII, or when we dropped napalm on French towns like Royan near the end of the war, or when we dropped Agent Orange all over the jungles of Vietnam, etc. Are we the only ones allowed to use weapons of mass destruction? Or how about when our allies use them, like Israel's use of white phosphorous (which can be considered a chemical weapon when used directly against people) in urban areas of Gaza?

People keep saying that Assad has broken international law by using chemical weapons (even though we don't know for sure he actually ordered their use), which gives us the right to start shooting missiles into Syria. But has anyone stopped to think that these rules seem to be arbitrarily imposed by those with the most/biggest weapons? When we or our allies use them, it's cool and they save lives or something, but when other nations we don't like at the moment use them, they've broken 'the rules' and get bombed/invaded.

That's not to say that I'm a fan of Assad's, or that I condone the use of chemical weapons, which I don't. But I do think all the rhetoric coming out of the US about international law and humanitarian intervention is a bit hypocritical and too little too late (2 years and 100,000 casualties too late to be exact). I'm also afraid that bombing and/or invading Syria will only make the civil conflict more violent and bloody, as well as draw in more participants, spreading the violence throughout the Middle East. If we truly want to help the people of Syria, I think we should really find a way that doesn't simply involve more violence.

That's my two cents, at any rate.

secrecy 1, transparency 0

Well, the news is in. Pfc. Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified information, including a video of a 2007 US helicopter attack in Baghdad in which civilians, including two journalists, were killed.

It seems like only a few decades ago, people who exposed the state secrets and abuses were considered whistleblowers and given relatively fair trials, even under a Republican administration (e.g., Daniel Ellsberg). Today, they're tortured and given 35 year sentences (which is actually on the 'lenient' end), and under a Democratic administration no less. The news of Manning's sentence and the ongoing hunt for Edward Snowden brings to mind a paragraph from Hal Draper's prescient 1967 article "Who's going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?":

So besides Tweedledee-Tweedledums and besides the Lesser Evils who really are different in policy from the Greater Evils, we increasingly are getting this third type of case: the Lesser Evils who, as executors of the system, find themselves acting at every important juncture exactly like the Greater Evils, and sometimes worse. They are the product of the increasing convergence of liberalism and conservatism under conditions of bureaucratic capitalism. There never was an era when the policy of the Lesser Evil made less sense than now.

In my opinion, once people start to realize that simply voting for one party or the other (an electoral version of the 'lesser of two evils' principle) doesn't really make that much of a difference, that there's something inherently wrong with the system itself, the better off we'll be. And that goes double for those of us on 'the left' since one of the biggest problems with the lesser of two evils strategy is that it consistently pulls the Democrats farther to the right (e.g., in many ways, Nixon was arguably more liberal than either Clinton or Obama).

I think it's high time we started thinking outside the box of two-party electoral politics, stopped blindly supporting the lesser evil as our sole act of political activism, and started doing more to hold those in office accountable for their actions, which includes rallying around government whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden.

pointing in the right direction

In David Graeber's latest piece, "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," I think he makes an important point/argument in the way he reframes the conversation away from the problem facing capitalism being the underutilization of labour (i.e., we need more jobs/to work more hours) — which is how it appears from the standpoint of capital and its need to increase the production of surplus value — and towards the existence of unproductive, 'bullshit' jobs, reasserting the need for "allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas" rather than creating even more superfluous jobs and/or increasing work hours. Where I'm not sure I entirely agree with Graeber, however, is when it comes to the absence of an "objective measure of social value," particularly from the wage-labourer's point of view; and I think Jehu via his blog The Real Movement makes a valid counterpoint that:

Even if we ignore the question of economic value, the social (moral) value of labor can only be the value it has for the very physical existence of the worker. If labor were not tied in any way to the physical existence of the worker who performed it, then and only then can the individual properly assess the value she puts on her activity. In other words, the determination of the social value of labor to the individual is only possible with the complete abolition of wage labor. The 'profound psychological violence here' is not that one feels the labor one performs is superfluous, but that despite the obvious unproductiveness of almost all labor at present one must perform it to survive.

That said, I completely agree with Jehu that "Graeber opens up the most important argument that can be held by activists at this time and I hope his piece is just the beginning of the discussion that is long overdue."

forgetfulness

Watched Sylvia last night, which inspired me to write a poem instead of the usual things.

"forgetfulness"

I'd forgotten
 the love and the passion and the promises
  the selfishness
 the lies
and the beautiful way you have of telling them
It feels like I'd waited for you for eternity
 then one day
  you were just
 there
as if you'd fallen from heaven like a bolt of lightning
 rending my life
  asunder
And I was willingly deceived
Because I understood you
I saw into your soul
 your pain
  your lust
  your despair
 your childlike innocence
your insatiable desire to be acknowledged
It was as if we were one
In you I saw my reflection
 and I was
  seduced
We were cut from the same cloth
Almost as if we were meant to be
 the other's
  undoing
Our passion was like the fires of hell
 unquenchable
  merciless
And their all-consuming flames made our betrayals
 that much sweeter
I'd forgotten
Because it was the only way to survive
 without
  you
Remembering was like a tidal wave of emotions
 smashing down upon my fragile countenance
  again and again
 with such savage and unrelenting fury
I was completely
 shattered
And my sole yearning was to forget
 once more
  the love and the passion and the promises
  the selfishness
 the lies
and the beautiful way you have of telling them
To sail down the river of forgetfulness
 and crash
  into the waiting arms
   of oblivion

japan says fukushima leak worse than thought, government joins clean-up

Deja vu. A frightening article from Reuters about the ongoing effects of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster:

Japan says Fukushima leak worse than thought, government joins clean-up

Further evidence, in my opinion, that we need to collectively change our behaviour, particularly the ways we produce our means of subsistence. Being the pessimist that I am, however, I doubt that we're going to in time to prevent our actions from doing even more irreparable harm to the planet. Capitalism has become the dominate economic system worldwide, and with it, rampant consumerism, depletion of natural resources, and industrial pollution on a global scale. The market itself is designed to give people what they want, regardless of the consequences, and it's frankly unsustainable.

For one, capitalism's need for continual economic growth requires a continual increase in consumption, and in turn, continually expanding markets and/or an increase in population to create and sustain such growth. This, naturally, tends to lead to consumerism, which has its own downsides, such as environmental degradation, the depletion of natural resources, and the promotion of unnecessary and even harmful jobs as long as they contribute to growth. In addition, the planet's resources are limited, and its ecosystems relatively fragile.

The cumulative cost of negative externalities produced by companies like BP are hard to calculate in dollars; but their cost in terms of quality of life for us and future generations is simply too high, in my opinion. Moreover, I don't think that production, distribution, and exchange should be left to the whim of some supposedly self-regulating 'invisible hand' that guides production in global capitalism and directs "industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value." While value can include things like quality of life and so on, it's often limited to profit by the system itself since profit is not only the driving force behind capitalism (and hence economic behaviour), but the metric by which success is most often measured. And governments don't necessarily perform the role of regulator any better, more often than not colluding with capital to the detriment of workers, consumers, and the environment alike.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, there's no panacea for the myriad of problems we face as an ever-evolving, technologically advanced, and increasingly globalized species with an unprecedented ability to change and shape the environment. But I'm strongly convinced that any long-term solutions lie not with governmental agencies or the ephemeral and God-like invisible hand, but with a politico-economic system that's not centred around the idealization of profit, and which promotes the existence of an informed and engaged working class possessing a direct say in how production, distribution, and exchange is carried out. /rant

blah blah capitalism blah blah

Watching ABC's This Week yesterday, I started thinking about whether our fucked up political system is fixable. It seems to me, for example, that most people tend to think of the bourgeois state in general, whatever its size or character, as simply a collection of elected and/or appointed individuals; and that if we want to change the way things are, we can simply change the individuals who compose it. The reality, however, is a bit more complicated than that, in my opinion. The state isn't just a collection of people, it's also the political representation of capital, the social relation, that subsumes the capitalist class and working class alike, and which seeks to help resolve the reoccurring crises of overaccumulation that result from the intrinsic contradictions within the capitalist mode of production itself.

In this capacity, then, the state, even with an overwhelmingly working-class majority, is still the representative of capital, the social relation, and depends on the continued existence of capitalism. As capitalism develops, and both the mass of superfluous (i.e., unproductive) capital and labour increase in conjunction with efficiencies in production, causing the rate of profit to fall and a shrinkage in the absolute mass of profit created, the state, in conjunction with capital, must find ways to overcome this, whether through encouraging debt spending (which itself is somewhat paradoxical in that it essentially provides this 'life-support' by consuming superfluous capital to facilitate expansion in the private sector instead of employing it productively), the opening of new markets, the 'creative destruction' of superfluous capital (mostly through state consumption), or creating ways to increase the mass of profit that via evolutions (i.e., innovations) in the means of production and finance that, in turn, set up the conditions for further overaccumulation and crises.

Changing the players in this game doesn't change the game so much as the moves that are made within it—the object being the continual expansion of capital. So while one individual may favour austerity while another may favour increased state spending, and one may be for gay marriage while another against, they're all still ultimately aiming for the same goal as each is constrained and compelled by certain 'blind' material forces at work, i.e., the underlying contradictions that constantly push capitalism to the point of collapse and thus requiring ever-increasing intervention on the part of the state to prop it up and stimulate the production of surplus value, basically treating the symptoms and not the disease since none of these solutions can permanently prevent things like overaccumulation, the rate of profit to fall, or reductions in the mass of profit. And the longer it takes for us to realize this, the longer it'll take for us to find a better alternative. As @Damn_Jehu argues via Twitter against redistributionism:

The mode of production concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, while redistribution seeks to unconcentrate it. The effort to redistribute wealth only gives rise to forces within the mode of production itself that leads to greater concentration. [...] An increasing mass of workers is rendered superfluous to production, but this is no less true for an increasing mass of capitalists. This really has to be emphasized: BOTH the working class and the capitalist class is rendered superfluous to production due to the development of the productive forces of society. This most emphatically is not a problem simply for the working class alone. Both, therefore, are responding to a real present danger to their existence as classes, when they turn to the state to resolve the crisis. The crisis does not simply threaten the existence of one class or the other, but both, i.e., it threatens the existence of capital itself.

It will not do to conflate capital, the social relation, with the capitalist class. Capital is a social relation subsuming both classes together. The ideal expression of capital, the social relation, is not the capitalist, but the state. Even in a democracy, with a huge overwhelming proletarian majority, the state is still the representative of capital, the social relation. It is not the representative of the workers, even if they consciously treat it as such, as in Social-Democracy. This argument, like the one on redistribution, is counter-intuitive, because it seems as if a working class majority must have an impact. But it does not. The state form cannot express the rule of the working class; it can only become a state capitalist. (31 Jul)

As I've argued before, our productive capacities are such that we no longer have a material necessity for capitalist wage labour or social relations, but the demand for profit creates an political-economic system that consistently depresses our productive capabilities and produces artificial scarcity, limiting the production and consumption of commodities to only that which can realize profit, among other things. We have reached an epoch of material abundance via the technological advancements and innovations of the past, but the old masters, who must increasingly rely on the state (so much so that the two are almost indistinguishable, with the state essentially acting as the national capitalist), are refusing to let go of their death grip on wealth and power, their ownership of the means of production, finance, etc., stalling our transition to a post-capitalist society.

What's worse is that most of us follow suit, fearing that society would drift into chaos and crisis and economic barbarism without them, without capital, wage labour, and profit, when the reality is that we're actually descending into chaos and crisis and economic barbarism because of them, because we refuse to let these relics of a past epoch go, because these things are holding us back and we lack both the imagination and the motivation to conceive of a future without them. We've reached a point where the working class, even with vast reductions in hours of labour and/or employment, consistently produces more than can be productively consumed in the capitalist production process (i.e., in a way that produces surplus value for the capitalist) despite no shortage of need.

And I think this is precisely what Marx meant when he wrote, "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." The world he foresaw is a world of material abundance and social equality, characterized by what he called "a community of freely associated individuals" rather than capitalists and wage-labourers, that no longer revolves around the realization of profit — with production primarily benefiting one class of owners and the state's primary purpose being the continued existence of an antiquated mode of production — but the needs of all. But that world, as @Damn_Jehu so tactfully puts it via Twitter, is only going to be realized once we, as a community of freely associated individuals, regain the capacity to imagine we can organize our own lives:

For 80 years liberals have been saying poverty and unemployment could be fixed by the state. The state has yet to fix either. At what point do we figure this shit out? How long will we continue to believe the myth. The belief that social ills can be fixed by political action is the single most debilitating illusion today -- democracy is the real opiate. The illusion that the state is a neutral instrument that can be wielded by society to address its defects is shockingly naive. It goes against every experience we have with it. We approach the state like black people approach the Constitution, always expecting the words of slaveholders to be made real for slaves.

"How can we eat without a job" = "Who will build the roads" = "If property is abolished who will own everything"[?] We have lost our capacity to imagine we can organize our own lives -- fully grown adults acting like coddled children. There should be no tolerance for this childishness among the working [class]. Grow the fuck up and take [responsibility]. When did your momma die and leave the state to take care of you? Everything the state provides for you it got from you, minus its cut. This infantilism has to end. The nanny state is an abuser and exploiter. The state provides nothing for you. Not a single thing. It takes from you [every day], all the time, without remorse. And then it has the nerve to ask YOU to sacrifice! The sheer gall of the state, of politicians, can only be explained by your own ignorance. (2 Aug)