Guru-yoga and the Left: Prologue

On religion and ethics

I am going to be using "religion" in the pejorative sense below, distinct from any question of personal relationship to the 8th Dynamic/Absolute Truth/God Almighty. I am using Frank Zappa's definition:

"foolish rules, of ancient date
 designed to make you feel all great
 while you fold, spindle and mutilate
 the unbelievers from the neighbouring state"

Any Marxist, materialist or humanist should be able to argue that there are  materialist, humanist ethics: "shoulds" which come from the "is" of our lived experience, rather than being arbitraries. Mr Zappa again:
 
"Do what you want, do what you will,
 just don't mess up your neighbour's thrill, 
 and when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip 
 to help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip."

We would reject the speculation of religious scholars that the reason you can tell something is holy is precisely because it is irrational. (The question of whether there is such a thing as "divine" ethics which contradict humanistic ethics is something that we should leave well alone, although Sufis discuss it.)

So Zappa's definition of religion can be put in other terms as "a code of justifications for behaviour which contradicts the plain ethics of ordinary life". As Neil Gaiman put it: "something you know which I don't know which makes everything you do okay". Excuses for being an asshole, yes yes.

Given this, a religion (excuse-for-being-an-asshole) doesn't need God. It just requires some kind of idol (the State, the Revolution, the Clearing of the Planet, the Ascension), the service of which not only excuses but demands the suspension of the everyday duty of care towards one's fellow living creatures. It is the same as Giorgio Agamben's "state of exception" - the religious authority, or King (the two were not distinct originally) is that which tells you when it is okay to act like an asshole. And it is always a living person or persons wielding this power.

The Bible says thou shalt not kill, and then gives plenty of examples of justified and approved killing. The Qur'an explicitly says that there are times when religious law does not apply. Trotskyists know that all's fair (in principle) against the class enemy - lying, cheating, stealing, torture, if necessary for the Revolution. But only a big strong man - a ganzer macher, to use the Yiddish term - can act as an interpreter/judge and actually say "yes, this crime was in the greater good and was therefore no crime". L. Ron Hubbard wrote about this in the most explicit way.

So a religion gives guidance for the "state of exception" (the return to the law of the jungle), but only the Big Man can make such a declaration in individual cases. And this is why - and this is a Chaos Marxist aphorism coming up - the more dogmatic/literalist the organisation, the more a Big Man/Dictator will be necessary to interpret and execute the dogma/scripture. Imposition of rules = escalation of power to suspend the rules.

Now, a commentor on the fantastic anti-zionist blog Jews sans frontieres made the following observation in a comment:

members of left-wing groups do follow their ganzer-machers to an astonishing degree, however much the big man's latest whim makes the group a figure of fun or revulsion.

This is true to the extent to which the members of such a group are discouraged from having "their own politics" - i.e. their own individual ways of combining theory to practice - and have to have the Big Man do their thinking for them. Or in other words, the extent that "our politics" are theoretical positions instead of guidelines for behaviour.

This is the beginning of a series exploring the Ganzer Macher model of left-wing politics, based on my personal experience. To be, as they say, continued.

 
 

Work is work is work

In every era of class society, there has been a mystique woven around certain kinds of work - the idea that only a Special Chosen Few can do it, and therefore they have the right to own slaves / dispose of serfs / order common gutter proles around. In ancient Egyptian times, it was reading and writing (actually, that was pretty much the case in mediaeval Europe as well). In the early capitalist era, it was abstract, scientific thought and the ability to make arguments - you might remember in particular there were all kinds of "scientific" (by the lights of the age) studies made proven that women just could not think abstractly very much before their brains overheated or their wombs shrivelled up or something.

The modern capitalist era, based on increasing automation of production and outsourcing of manual labour to countries outside the noosphere of "Western media culture", has swept this all aside, because it has to teach higher order thinking skills to the vast majority of the working class or else live with the consequences of a permanent unemployable underclass. (Actually, they do a bit of both). Now, the mystique of labour inheres in two kinds of work:

- leadership skills (i.e. the cult of the CEO, management voodoo, etc).
- creative work;

Both these kinds of work are presented as if they needed a certain genius not available to common gutter proles. The first category carries with it the ideology that "the ruling class deserve to be where they are"; the second category carries with it the ideology that "middle-class occupations deserve a certain status in our society". As explored before, since the creative classes now provide the mass indoctrination/hypnosis necessary to keep the proles accustomed to their lot, via the media, it is vital that the ruling class cut them a significant slice of the pie.

A real revolution would have to spread not only Lenin's idea that "every cook can and will govern", but that - for example - every garbageman is capable of artistic expression, creative thought, and even religious ectasy. (As to the latter, remember that in every country the mass-market forms of religion are employed to give the gutter proles a metaphysical "high" every Sunday or Friday or whatever, in return for making shyster-clerics rich. R. A. Wilson was right that there'll be hell to pay when the proles work out that everyone can do this for themselves.)

So: any revolutionary organisation where leadership and/or creative thinking are reserved to a minority is simply reproducing the norms of class society and needs a shakeup. This is easier said than done, of course.

Our rulers think they're Yankees

More than in most current Latin American societies, the Venezuelan ruling and middle classes have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice their immediate economic interests, current remunerative opportunities, lucrative profits and income in pursuit of the high risk political interests of the US . How else can one explain their backing of the US-orchestrated coup of April 2002 at a time when Chavez was following fairly orthodox fiscal and monetary policies, and had adopted a strict constitutionalist approach to institutional reform? How else can one explain engaging in an executive and bosses 2-month lockout of industry and oil production, leading to the loss of billions in private revenues, profits and salaries and ultimately the bankruptcy of hundreds of private firms and the firing of over 15,000 well-paid senior and middle level oil executives?

Clearly the ‘ultra-hegemony’ of the US over the Venezuelan elite and middle class has a strong component of ideological-psychological self-delusion: a deep, almost pathological identification with the powerful, superior white producer-consumer society and state and a profound hostility and disparagement of ‘deep Venezuela ’ – its Afro-Indian-mestizo masses.

An extract from a very good article by James Petras on Venezuela. The only thing I have to add to this is that in virtually every advanced capitalist country in the world today the ruling class thinks of itself as junior partners of the Yankee capitalist class, not just Venezuela or Latin America. In those countries (as well as Canada) it's "biggest tough guy on the block". In most of Western Europe, it's attachment to "Big Brother who saved us from Hitler". In Eastern Europe, it's attachment to "Big Brother who saved us from Stalinism". In Australia and New Zealand, the previous colonial attachment to England was just shifted to the US sometime in the 1980s.

The only partial exceptions to this in the 'First World' I can think of are France and Japan, two countries with their own imperial histories whose gratitude at being "liberated" is tempered with contempt for the cultural mores of the liberators. In those countries, as in Russia and China, there are pro- and anti-American factions in the ruling classes. Elsewhere, a "nationalist" component to the local elite is so tiny as to be negligible - nationalism is left to the posturing of the middle class.

Petras suggests that this happens in Venezuela because the local elite aren't actually capitalists (in the sense that they actually live off the proceeds of productive enterprises), but rentier-bureaucrats who skim the top off oil revenue, and so their "heartland" is where they consume (i.e. Miami) rather than where they produce. I think this is increasingly the case everywhere, as actual capitalist production shifts out of the advanced First World, and the local economies are bound up increasingly with administration, media production and servicing the consumption needs of the elite - Marx's "Department IIb", for those who get the reference. Soon, virtually all "First World" countries will be controlled by rentiers, living off the profits of their investments in China, India, wherever.

Whatever the case - the ideology of the ruling classes becomes the ideology of all of society, and any resistance to the idea of American media culture as being the superior product is stigmatised as backwards and barbaric, just as in the 19th century resistance to Christianization was portrayed. Note the recent scoffing and outrage at the (actually lying) story that The Simpsons was being banned in Venezuela. (If they meant any episodes produced after 1999, I'd be 100% in favour of it.)

Popular media culture is the unifying and justifying narrative of world imperialism today, just like Christianity was in the 19th century. The TVs are the churches of the 21st century in the "opiate of the masses" sense, and idiots who think that harrassing Muslims is somehow "progressive" should realise that they're facing the wrong enemy.

A note to our American readers - you can possibly not understand what it's like living in a cultural colony, a country where 90% of the programmes on TV are about a foreign country, where people talk in your language but not in your accent. It encourages a feeling that nothing that happens in your actual world is really as "real" as what you see on the TV or the internet. You find, for example, in my country, people who have zero interest in the politics of our nation but will huddle around at each other's houses discussing how Clinton and Obama are doing in the primaries. This feeling is particularly strong among the middle classes, whose entire lives are bound up with media representations - for working people, I doubt it matters whether the people on TV talk in foreign or local intonations, they're smug elitists who look down on you in any case.