The Intellectual Roots of America-Bashing - Lee Harris, Wall Street Journal
Edward Holman
The intellectual roots of America-bashing.
BY LEE HARRIS
Wednesday, January 15, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
A specter haunts the world, and that specter is America. This is not the
America discoverable in the pages of a world atlas, but a mythical America
that is the target of the new form of anti-Americanism that Salman Rushdie,
writing in the Guardian (Feb. 6, 2002), says "is presently taking the world
by storm" and that forms the subject of a Washington Post essay by Martin
Kettle significantly entitled "U.S. Bashing: It's All the Rage in Europe"
(Jan. 7, 2002). It is an America that Anatol Lieven assures us, in a recent
article in the London Review of Books, is nothing less than "a menace to
itself and to mankind," and that Noam Chomsky has repeatedly characterized
as the world's major terrorist state.
But above all it is the America that is responsible for the evils of the
rest of the world. As Dario Fo, the winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for
Literature, put it in a notorious post-September 11 e-mail subsequently
quoted in the New York Times (Sept. 22, 2001): "The great speculators [of
American capitalism] wallow in an economy that every years kills tens of
millions of people with poverty [in the Third World]--so what is 20,000 dead
in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre [of Sept. 11], this
violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and
inhumane exploitation."
It is this sort of America that is at the hub of Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt's revision of Marxism in their intellectually influential book
"Empire" (Harvard University Press, 2000)--a reinterpretation of historical
materialism in which the global capitalist system will be overthrown not by
those who have helped to create it, namely, the working class, but rather by
a polyglot global social force vaguely referred to as "the multitude"--the
alleged victims of this system.
America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its
goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It
repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no
difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views
every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate
oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here
or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the
heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is an
unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity.
This is the specter that is haunting the world today. Indeed, one may even
go so far as to argue that this America is the fundamental organizing
principle of the left as it exists today: To be against America is to be on
the right side of history; to be for it is to be on the wrong side.
But let's pause to ask a question whose answer the America-bashers appear to
assume they know: What is the right side of history at this point in
history?
The concept of a right side of history is derived from Marxism, and it is
founded on the belief that there is a forward advance toward a socialist
future that can be resisted, but not ultimately defeated. But does anyone
believe this anymore? Does anyone take seriously the claim that the present
state of affairs will be set aside and a wholly new order of things
implemented in its place, and that such a transformation of the world will
happen as a matter of course?
And, finally, if in fact there are those who believe such a thing, what is
the status of this belief? Is it a realistic assessment of the objective
conditions of the present world order, or is it merely wishful thinking?
The importance of these questions should be obvious to anyone familiar with
the thought of Marx. Marx's uniqueness as a thinker of the left is his
absolute commitment to the principles of political realism. This is the view
that any political energy that is put into what is clearly a hopeless cause
is a waste. Utopianism is not only impractical; it is an obstacle to
obtaining socialism's true objective, since it diverts badly needed
resources away from the pursuit of viable goals, wasting them instead on the
pursuit of political fantasies.
The concept of fantasy as a political category assumed its central place in
Marxist thought in "The Communist Manifesto," in which Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels used it as the distinguishing mark of their own brand of
socialism. It was this that condemned all previous forms of socialism to the
realm of vague dreams and good intentions, and that gave Marxism the claim
to be a "scientific" form of socialism.
Marx's use of the term scientific in this text has often been criticized.
But in his defense, it should be remembered that the German Wissenschaft
describes a far wider category than the English science. It means what we
know as opposed to what we merely opine, or feel, or imagine; the objective
as opposed to the subjective; realistic thinking as opposed to impractical
daydreaming. And it is in this last sense that Marx and Engels use it: For
the opposite of the scientific is none other than the utopian.
This is the basis of Marx's condemnation of all forms of utopian socialism,
the essence of which is the enormous gap between the "fantastic pictures of
future society" the utopian socialist dreams of achieving, on one hand, and
any realistic assessment of the objective conditions of the actual social
order on the other.
This concept of fantasy as "fantastic pictures" inside the head of
impractical daydreamers is a classic theme of German Romantic literature and
is perhaps most closely identified with the characters of E.T.A. Hoffman's
stories, such as Kapellmeister Kreisler. The fantasist, in this literature,
is a character type: He lives in his own dream world and can manage only the
most tenuous relationship to the real world around him. But unlike the
character type of the absent-minded professor, the Romantic fantasist is not
content to putter around in his own world. Instead, he is forever insisting
that his world is the real one, and in the process of doing this, he reduces
the real world around him, and the people in it, to an elaborate stage
setting for the enactment of his own private fantasies.
Marx and Engels's wholesale condemnation of all previous socialism as
utopian fantasy is the fundamental innovation of their own work. It is the
basis of their claim to be taken seriously, not merely by Hoffmanesque
daydreamers, but by men of practical judgment and shrewd common sense. To
fail to make this distinction, or to fail to stay on the right side of this
distinction once it has been made, is to cease to be a Marxist and to fall
back into mere Träumerei.
This demarcation line arose because Marx believed that he had grasped
something that no previous utopian socialist had even suspected. He believed
that he had shown that socialism was inevitable and that it would come about
through certain ironclad laws of history--laws that Marx believed were
revealed through the study of the very nature of capitalism. Socialism, in
short, would come about not because a handful of daydreamers had wished for
it, or because pious moralists had urged it, but because the unavoidable
breakdown of the capitalist system would force the turn to socialism upon
those societies that, prior to this breakdown, had been organized along
capitalist lines.
Schematically the scenario went something like this:
• The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.
• The workers would therefore be "immiserized"; they would become poorer as
the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.
• The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the capitalist
system--their poverty, not their ideals.
What is interesting here is that, once you accept the initial premise about
the falling rate of profit, the rest does indeed follow realistically. Now,
this does not mean that it follows necessarily or according to an ironclad
scientific law; but it certainly conveys what any reasonable person would
take as the most probable outcome of a hypothetical failure of capitalism.
For Marx it is absolutely essential that revolutionary activities be
justifiable on realistic premises. If they cannot be, then they are actions
that cannot possibly have a real political objective--and therefore, their
only value can be the private emotional or spiritual satisfaction of the
people carrying out this pseudopolitical action.
So in order for revolutionary activity to have a chance of succeeding, there
is an unavoidable precondition: The workers must have become much poorer
over time. Furthermore, there had to be not merely an increase of poverty,
but a conviction on the part of the workers that their material
circumstances would only get worse, and not better--and this would require
genuine misery.
This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to
revolutionary Marxism, since if capitalism produces no widespread misery,
then it also produces no fatal internal contradiction: If everyone is
getting better off through capitalism, who will dream of struggling to
overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the workers would be
sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the capitalist state, simply
because, as Marx insisted, the capitalist class could not be realistically
expected to relinquish control of the state apparatus and, with it, the
monopoly of force.
In this, Marx was absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever
willingly liquidated itself, and it is utopian to think that any ever will.
Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of socialism, nothing short of a
complete revolution would do; and this means, in point of fact, a
full-fledged civil war not just within one society, but across the globe.
Without this catastrophic upheaval, capitalism would remain completely in
control of the social order and all socialist schemes would be reduced to
pipe dreams.
The immiserization thesis, therefore, is critical to Marx, for without it
there would be no objective conditions in response to which workers might be
driven to overthrow the capitalist system. If the workers were becoming
better off with time, then why jump into an utterly untested and highly
speculative economic scheme? Especially when even socialists themselves were
bitterly divided over what such a scheme would be like in actual practice.
Indeed, Marx never committed himself to offering a single suggestion about
how socialism would actually function in the real world.
By the 20th century the immiserization thesis was already beginning to look
shaky. Empirical evidence, drawn either by impressionistic observation or
systematic statistical studies, began to suggest that there was something
wrong with the classical version of the thesis, and an attempt was made to
save it by redefining immiserization to mean not an absolute increase in
misery, but merely a relative one. This gloss allowed a vast increase in
empirical plausibility, since it accepted the fact that the workers were
indeed getting better off under the capitalist system but went on to argue
that they were not getting better off at the same rate as the capitalists.
The problem with this revision lay not in its economic premises, but in its
political ones. Could one realistically believe that workers would overthrow
an economic system that was continually improving their own lot, simply
because that of the capitalist class was improving at a marginally better
rate? Certainly, the workers might envy the capitalists; but such emotions
simply could not supply the gigantic impetus required to overthrow a
structure as massive as the capitalist system. Before the workers of a
capitalist society could unite, they had to feel that they had literally
nothing to lose--nothing to lose but their proverbial chains. For if they
had homes and cars and boats and RVs to lose as well, then it became quite
another matter.
In short, the relative immiserization thesis was simply not the stuff that
drives people to the barricades. At most it could fuel the gradualist
reforms of the evolutionary ideal of socialism--a position identified with
Eduard Bernstein.
The post-World War II period demolished the last traces of the classical
immiserization thesis. Workers in the most advanced capitalist countries
were prosperous by any standard imaginable, either absolute or relative; and
what is even more important, they felt themselves to be well off, and
believed that the future would only make them and their children even better
off than they had been in the past. This was a deadly blow to the
immiserization thesis and hence to Marxism. For the failure of the
immiserization thesis is in fact the failure of classical Marxism. If there
is no misery, there is no revolution; and if there is no revolution, there
is no socialism. Q.E.D. Socialism goes back once more to being merely a
utopian fantasy.
Yet those who still claim to derive their heritage from Marx are mostly
unwilling to acknowledge that their political aims are merely utopian, not
scientific. How is that possible?
There might be several reasons advanced for this, but certainly one of them
is Paul Baran. A Polish-born American economist and a Marxist, Baran was the
author of "The Political Economy of Growth" (Monthly Review Press, 1957). In
it, for the first time in Marxist literature, Baran propounded a causal
connection between the prosperity of the advanced capitalist countries and
the impoverishment of the Third World. It was no longer the case, as it was
for Marx, that poverty--as well as idiocy--was the natural condition of man
living in an agricultural mode of production. Rather, poverty had been
introduced into the Third World by the capitalist system. The colonies no
longer served the purpose of consuming overstocked inventories, but were now
the positive victims of capitalism.
What needs to be stressed here is that prior to Baran, no Marxist had ever
suspected that capitalism was the cause of the poverty of the rest of the
world. Not only had Marx and Engels failed to notice this momentous fact,
but so had all of their followers. Yet this omission was certainly not due
to Marx's lack of knowledge about, or interest in, the question of European
colonies. In his writing on India, Marx shows himself under no illusions
concerning the brutal and mercenary nature of British rule. He is also aware
of the "misery and degradation" effected by the impact of British industry's
"devastating effects" on India. Yet all of this is considered by Marx to be
a dialectical necessity; that is to say, these effects were the unavoidable
precondition of India's progress and advance--an example of the "creative
destruction" that Schumpeter spoke of as the essence of capitalist dynamics.
Or, as Marx put it in "On Colonialism": "The English bourgeoisie . . . will
neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of
the [Indian] people . . . but . . . what they will not fail to do is to lay
down the material premises for both" the emancipation and the mending of
this social condition.
The radical nature of Baran's reformulation of Marxist doctrine is obscured
by an understandable tendency to confuse Baran's theory with Lenin's earlier
theory of imperialism. In fact, the two have nothing in common. Lenin's
theory had evolved in order to explain the continuing survival of capitalism
into the early 20th century, and hence the delay of the coming of socialism.
In Lenin's view, imperialism is not the cause of Third World immiserization,
but rather a stopgap means of postponing immiserization in the capitalist
countries themselves. It is the capitalist countries' way of keeping their
own work force relatively prosperous--and hence politically placid--by
selling surplus goods into captive colonial markets. It is not a way of
exploiting, much less impoverishing, these colonies. It was rather a way "to
bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and . . . to . . . strengthen
opportunism," as Lenin put it in "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of
Capitalism" (International Publishers, 1933).
This gives us the proper perspective from which to judge the revolutionary
quality of Baran's reformulation. For, in essence, what Baran has done is to
globalize the traditional doctrine of immiserization so that, instead of
applying to the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, it now came to
apply to the entire population of those countries that have not achieved
advanced capitalism. It was the rest of the world that was being
impoverished by capitalism, not the workers of the advanced countries.
Baran's global immiserization thesis, after its initial launch, was taken up
by other Marxists, but it was nowhere given a more elaborate intellectual
foundation than in Immanuel Wallerstein's monumental study "The Modern
World-System" (Academic Press, 1974), which was essentially a fleshing out
in greater historical and statistical detail of Baran's thesis. Hence, for
the sake of convenience, I will call the global immiserization thesis the
Baran-Wallerstein revision.
What I now would like to consider is not the thesis itself, but the role
that this thesis played in bolstering and revitalizing late-20th-century
Marxism. For it is here that we find the intellectual origins of the
international phenomenon of America-bashing. If there is any element of
genuine seriousness in this movement--if, indeed, it aspires to be an
objective and realistic assessment of the relationship of America to the
rest of the world--then that element of seriousness is to be found in the
global immiserization thesis: America has gotten rich by making other
countries poor.
Furthermore, this is no less true of those who, like Mr. Chomsky, have
focused on what is seen as American military aggression against the rest of
the world, for this aggression is understood as having its "root cause" in
America's systematic exploitation of the remainder of the human race. If
American exploitation did not create misery, it would not need to use
military force. It is the global immiserization thesis that makes the use of
force an indispensable tool of American foreign policy and that is
responsible, according to this view, for turning America into a terrorist
state. This explains the absolute centrality of the global immiserization
thesis in the creation of the specter of America now haunting so much of our
world.
The Baran-Wallerstein revision of the classical immiserization thesis into
its global context was far better adapted to fix what was wrong in Marxist
theory than the revisionist notion of relative immiserization discussed
above. For, as we have seen, what was needed was real misery, and not merely
comparative misery, since without such misery there would be no breakdown of
capitalism: no civil war, no revolution, no socialism. And who can doubt
that great real misery exists in the Third World?
In addition to providing a new and previously untapped source of misery, the
Baran-Wallerstein revision provided several other benefits. For example,
there was no longer any difficulty in accepting the astonishingly high level
of prosperity achieved by the work force of the advanced capitalist
countries--indeed, it was now even possible to arraign the workers of these
countries alongside of the capitalists for whom they labored--or rather,
more precisely, with whom they collaborated in order to exploit both the
material resources and the cheap labor of the Third World. In the new
configuration, both the workers and the capitalists of the advanced
countries became the oppressor class, while it was the general population of
the less advanced countries that became the oppressed--including, curiously
enough, even the rulers of these countries, who often, to the untutored eye,
seemed remarkably like oppressors themselves.
With this demystification of the capitalist working class came an end to
even a feigned enthusiasm among Marxists for solidarity with the hopelessly
middle-class aspirations of the American blue-collar work force. The
Baran-Wallerstein revision offered an exotic new object of sympathy--namely,
the comfortably distant and abstract Third World victims of the capitalist
world system.
Perhaps most important, the Baran-Wallerstein revision also neatly solved
the most pressing dilemma that worker prosperity in advanced capitalist
countries bequeathed to classical Marxism: the absolute lack of
revolutionary spirit among these workers--the very workers, it must be
remembered, who were originally cast in the critical role of world
revolutionaries. In the new theoretical configuration, this problem no
longer mattered simply because the workers of the capitalist countries no
longer mattered.
Hence the appeal of the global immiserization thesis: The Baran-Wallerstein
revision neatly obviates all the most outstanding objections to the
classical Marxist theory. This leaves two questions unanswered: Is it true?
And even if it is true, does it save Marxism?
Whether the immiserization thesis is true or not is simply too complex a
topic to deal with here. Indeed, for the sake of the present argument, I am
willing to assume that it is absolutely true--truer than anything has ever
been true before. For what I want to concentrate on is the question of
whether the Baran-Wallerstein revision is consistent with Marxism's claim to
represent a realistic political agenda as opposed to a mere utopian fantasy.
And the short answer is that, no matter how true the global immiserization
thesis might be, it does not save the Baran-Wallerstein revision of Marxism
from being condemned as utopian fantasy--and condemned not by my standards
or yours, but by those of Marx and Engels.
This is because the original immiserization thesis was set within the
context of a class war within a society--an actual civil war between
different classes of one and the same society, and not between different
nations on different continents. This makes an enormous difference, for it
is not at all unreasonable to think that a revolutionary movement could
succeed, by means of a violent and bloody civil war, in gaining the monopoly
of force within a capitalist society, and thus be able to dictate terms to
the routed capitalists, if any survived.
But this is an utterly different scenario from one in which the most
advanced capitalist societies have a monopoly of force--and brutally
effective force--at their disposal. For in this case it is absurd to think
that the exploited Third World countries could possibly be able to alter the
world order by even a hair, provided the advanced capitalist societies were
intent on not being altered.
What could they do to us?
The answer to this question, according to many of those who accept the
global immiserization thesis, came on September 11. Noam Chomsky, perhaps
America's most celebrated proponent of the Baran-Wallerstein thesis,
expressed this idea in the immediate aftermath. Here, for the first time,
the world had witnessed the oppressed finally striking a blow against the
oppressor--a politically immature blow, perhaps, comparable to the taking of
the Bastille by the Parisian mob in its furious disregard of all laws of
humanity, but still an act equally world-historical in its significance: the
dawn of a new revolutionary era.
This judgment can make sense only in the context of the Baran-Wallerstein
thesis. For if 9/11 was in fact a realistic blow against the advanced
capitalist countries--or even just the most advanced--then here was an
escape from the utopian deadlock of the global immiserization thesis. Here
was a way that the overthrow of world capitalism could be made a viable
historical outcome once again, and not merely the fantastic delusions of a
sect. This explains the otherwise baffling valorization of 9/11 on the part
of the left--by which I mean the enormous world-historical significance that
they have been prepared to attribute to al Qaeda's act of terror.
But was 9/11 truly world-historical in the precise sense required to sustain
the Baran-Wallerstein revision? For 9/11 to be world-historical in this
sense, it would have to contain within it the seeds of a gigantic shift in
the order of things: something on the scale of the decline and collapse of
capitalist America and with it the final realization of the socialist realm.
But this investment of world-historical significance to 9/11 is simply
wishful thinking on the part of the left. It is an effort to transform the
demented acts of a group of fantasists into the vanguard of the world
revolution. Because if there is to be a world revolution at all there has to
be a vanguard of that revolution, an agent whose actions are such as to
represent a threat to the capacity of the capitalist system simply to
survive. This means that it is not enough to injure it; it is not enough to
wound or madden it; it is not enough to rouse it to rage--the agent must
kill it, too. He must be capable of overthrowing the hegemonic power at the
center of the capitalist world system.
But this is absolutely implausible. Any realistic assessment of any possible
scenario will inevitably conclude that nothing that al Qaeda can do can
cause the collapse of America and the capitalist system. The worse
eventuality in the long run would be that America would be forced to break
its hallowed ideal of universal tolerance, in order to make an exception of
those who fit the racial profile of an al Qaeda terrorist. It is ridiculous
to think that if al Qaeda continued to attack us such measures would not be
taken. They would be forced upon the government by the people (and anyone
who thinks that the supposed cultural hegemony of the left might stop this
populist fury is deluded).
In other words, the only effect on America of a continuation of September
11-style attacks would be an increasingly repressive state apparatus
domestically and a populist home-front demand for increasingly severe
retaliation against those nations supporting or hiding terrorists. But
neither one of these reactions would seriously undermine the strength of the
United States--indeed, it is quite evident that further attacks would
continue to unite the overwhelming majority of the American population,
creating an irresistible "general will" to eradicate terrorism by any means
necessary, including the most brutal and ruthless.
But this condition, let us recall, is precisely the opposite of the
objective political conditions that, according to Marx, must be present in
order for capitalism to be overthrown. For classical Marxism demands, quite
realistically, a state that is literally being torn apart by internal
dissension. Revolution, in short, requires a full-fledged civil war within
the capitalist social order itself, since nothing short of this can possibly
achieve the goal that the revolution is seeking. Hence, 9/11-style attacks
that serve only to strengthen the already considerable solidarity between
classes in the United States are, from the perspective of classical Marxism,
fatally flawed. For such attacks not only fail to further any revolutionary
aims; they actually make the revolution less probable. A society of 300
million individuals whose bumper stickers say "United We Stand" is not a
breeding ground for revolutionary activity. Nor is it a society that can be
easily intimidated into mending its ways, even if we make the assumption
that its ways need mending.
But if the result of 9/11 was to strengthen the political unity of the
United States, then 9/11 was definitely not world-historical. The
unspeakable human horror of 9/11 should not blind us to the ghastly
triviality of the motive and the inevitable nullity of the aftermath.
The Baran-Wallerstein revision of Marxism does provide a new global
reformulation of the immiserization thesis. But the locus of this misery,
the Third World, does not and cannot provide an adequate objective
foundation for a revolutionary struggle against the capitalist system.
Rather, this foundation can be provided only by a majority of the workers in
the advanced capitalist countries themselves; but, as we have seen, the
effect of 9/11 on the working class of the United States was not one
conducive to the overthrow and demise of capitalism. On the contrary,
nowhere was the desire to retaliate against the terrorists more powerfully
visceral than among the working class of the United States. The overwhelming
majority of its members instantly responded with collective and spontaneous
expression of solidarity with other Americans and expressions of outrage
against those who had planned and carried out the attack, as well as those
who attempted to palliate it.
For those who are persuaded by the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, 9/11 represents
a classic temptation. It is the temptation that every fantasy ideology
offers to those who become caught up in it--the temptation to replace
serious thought and analysis, fidelity to the facts and scrupulous
objectivity, with the worst kind of wishful thinking. The attempt to cast
9/11 as a second taking of the Bastille simply overlooks what is most
critical about both of these events, namely, that the Bastille was a symbol
of oppression to the masses of French men and women who first overthrew it
and then tore it down, brick by brick. And while it is true that the
Bastille had become the stuff of fantasy, thanks to the pre-1789 "horrors of
the Bastille" literature, it was still a fantasy that worked potently on the
minds of the Parisian mob and hence provided the objective political
conditions necessary to undermine the Bourbon state.
But the fantasy embodied in 9/11, far from weakening the American political
order, strengthened it immeasurably, while the only mobs that were motivated
by the enactment of this fantasy were those inhabiting the Arab streets--a
population pathetically unable to control even the most elementary aspects
of its own political destiny, and hence scarcely the material out of which a
realistically minded revolutionary could hope to fashion an instrument of
world-historical transformation. These people are badly miscast in the role
of the vanguard of the world revolution. And what can we say about those in
the West, allegedly acting within the tradition of Marxist thought, who
encourage such spectacularly utopian flights of fantasy?
The Baran-Wallerstein thesis cannot save Marxism; and, in fact, it is a
betrayal of what is genuinely valid in Marx--namely, the insistence that any
realistic hope of a world-historical transformation from one stage of social
organization to a more humane one can come only if men and women do not
yield to the temptation of fantasy ideology, even--and, indeed,
especially--when it is a fantasy ideology dressed up to look like Marxism.
Instead, the Baran-Wallerstein thesis has sadly come to provide merely a
theoretical justification for the most irrational and infantile forms of
America-bashing. There is nothing Marxist about this. On the contrary,
according to Marx, it was the duty of the nonutopian socialist, prior to the
advent of genuine socialism, to support whatever state happened to represent
the most fully developed and consistently carried out form of capitalism;
and, indeed, it was his duty to defend it against the irrational onslaughts
of those reactionary and backward forces that tried to thwart its
development. In fact, this was a duty that Marx took upon himself, and
nowhere more clearly than in his defense of the United States against the
Confederacy in the Civil War. Only in this case he was defending capitalism
against a fantasy ideology that, unlike that of radical Islam, wished to
roll back the clock a mere handful of centuries, not several millennia.
Those who, speaking in Marx's name, try to defend the fantasy ideology
embodied in 9/11 are betraying everything that Marx represented. They are
replacing his hard-nosed insistence on realism with a self-indulgent flight
into sheer fantasy, just as they are abandoning his strenuous commitment to
pursuit of a higher stage of social organization in order to glorify the
feudal regimes that the world has long since condemned to Marx's own
celebrated trash bin of history.
America-bashing has sadly come to be "the opium of the intellectual," to use
the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Marx in order to characterize those
who followed the latter into the 20th century. And like opium it produces
vivid and fantastic dreams.
This is an intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one might
say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable perspective from which
even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned--including Schumpeter
and Thomas Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of its current penchant for
fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only will it be incapable of serving
this purpose; it will become worse than useless. It will become a
justification for a return to that state of barbarism mankind has spent
millennia struggling to transcend--a struggle that no one felt more keenly
than Marx himself. For the essence of utopianism, according to Marx, is the
refusal to acknowledge just how much suffering and pain every upward step of
man's ascent inflicts upon those who are taking it, and instead to dream
that there are easier ways of getting there. There are not, and it is
helpful to no party to pretend that there are. To argue that the great
inequalities of wealth now existing between the advanced capitalist
countries and the Third World can be cured by outbreaks of frenzied and
irrational America-bashing is not only utopian; it is immoral.
The left, if it is not to condemn itself to become a fantasy ideology, must
reconcile itself not only with the reality of America, but with its
dialectical necessity--America is the sine qua non of any future progress
that mankind can make, no matter what direction that progress may take.
The belief that mankind's progress, by any conceivable standard of
measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the
destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion.
Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical
process--whatever these laws may be--must dictate a proportionate respect
for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and
prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in
permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore
these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a
sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral
immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a
moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing
itself.
It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And
if it cannot find these, it will perish.
Mr. Harris is an Atlanta writer. This article appears in the
December/January issue of Policy Review, published by the Hoover
Institution.
Leo Schmit
Good books, good music, good movies, thank you America; must have been
produced by good people.
Keep it up.
Bashing America? That's what you are doing yourself; remember Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, Pusan, Tonkin, Pnomh Penh, Jakarta, Santiago, Grenada, Panama
City, the Kuwait highway....
Never mind, these are just the documented cases.
Don't keep it up. Or harvest what you are sowing.
Elten
"Edward Holman" <hol...@cybermesa.com> schreef in bericht
news:b06j7b$l3j$1...@reader.nmix.net...
> . The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.
>
> . The workers would therefore be "immiserized"; they would become poorer
as
> the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.
>
> . The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the capitalist
Robert Rice
manner, is this.
Surely beyond national particularism and the notion that laws of social
order are divisible into distinctions of class mired within a dynamic of
competition driven by self interest alone, there is also an overarching
dynamic at work, where cause and effect analysis breaks down ultimately to
the almost undifferentiated ground of being, in an acausally connected
synchronous realm, who's centre of the heart and soul of the individual; the
constitution of man being what his own conscience tells him is the
difference between right and wrong. If history is to do any justice to the
individual, then its primary ordering principal must surely ring a liberty
bell, who's vibrations resonate outwardly from the central core of human
goodness and dignity, and must include, in order to ease his troubled
conscience, an altruism and a compassion for the rest of humanity that is in
congruent allignment with what he knows to the core as being just and fair
to all involved including those who are disproportionately restricted and
left out of thier own individual participation in history. Until there is a
sincere effort on behalf of his government to work towards an end that is in
the best interest of humanity in general, then the incongruences inherent in
his own enjoyments of the realities of life will be tainted by a guilty
consience, manifesting itself on this new acausally connected plane as the
emergent phenomenon of selfishness, cloaked under the guise of a rational
self interest, and a competition for resources. When man seeks to support
and give of himself for the sake of what is simultaneously in his own best
interest AND that of his fellow man, the whole world over, then there is
fresh balm to sooth his aching spirit. If the organizing prinicpals which
give rise to and maintain civilization can be harnessed to this higher
purpose of service, without falling victim to servitude, then the full force
and might of a nation's will is finally being directed along lines that are
in congruent allignment with the goodness of man, and where such a will is
in fact the instrument by which mankind begins to operate out of his
capacity to have and to hold a dominion over nature motivated by service to
a righteous causality, then and only then can a happy marriage be had
between man and nature in a new acausally sinchronistic mutuality of
existence that is pleasing to both man and nature, and man and man, the
world over.
Until the wealth of nations and individuals can be willingly shared with the
poor for the sake of what is in everyone's mutual best interest, then the
splinter in the collective mind will continue to wreck havok in the world.
If the US is to provide such leadership, then it will be one of self
interest balanced by and tempered with a motive force to service in a spirit
of selfless giving, and any new world order will be, by the necessity of the
law of love at the heart of life, acted out and built upon an altruistic
plane, from which the law of increasing returns, or divine providence can
move, and by a new sinchronistic type of serendipity, the supreme will of
man will be harnessed to serve the almighty will of God, or in quantum
mechanical lingo, the sum over histories, and the whole story will begin to
lurch, one step at a time along that windy road up the pyramid of life
toward a common purpose, where the individual man and his conscience can at
long last live again in harmony with nature.
However, there is a fundamental problem with this vision, call it fantastic
if you will, it is still the motive force of history; the problem is that
history itself, and the very core of man is in direct contradiction, by the
old dynamic of survival of the fittest with such a noble pursuit. Man is
inherently, if Biblical and Christian thought is given any credence, by his
own nature, fundamentally character disordered, narcissistic and evil, at
the very core of his natural personality, like a child who will steal the
toy of another, or if he cannot take it, might preper to smash it to ruin
the other's enjoyment of it. Now if the ordering principal of nature herself
or the universal "field" which informs her is toward the construction and
maintenace of what I refer to as Civility, or consciously motivated
organizational behavior (overall) that is ethical in a willing submission to
a higher power or law of righteousness, where the will of man operates in
accord with this higher informative principal, in service to one and all,
and if man, by his very own nature is in diametric opposition to this
principal or force of nature, then by the law itself, consider the
possibility that the Bible, properly interpreted, points directly to the
motive force and supreme goal of history. From this political/historical
perspective viewed through the lense of modern quantum theory, what we are
looking at as incredible as it may sound, is the distinct possibility that
the Bible, amid some obvious faults and blunders born of cultural
conditioning, is fundamentally true, and an accurate depiction of man
struggle to grope towards and to find meaning in history, to rediscover the
eternal wellspring from which history has its origins and shapes its
destiny. Anything less points toward a meaningless existence in which the
right of might and the survival of the fittest will bring destruction to
mankind and the "sphere" in which he operates.
This leads to a great paradox for the causative formation of history; that
mankind is pursuing a righteous goal but is inherently, at the core of his
being, an unrighteous agent of evil as much as, if not less than the good,
and such a tree as this cannot bear good fruit.
Therefore, one must take a close look at the law of righteousness, which can
be so conveniently twisted or perverted in the name of righteousness by the
unrighteous and ask one simple question; what master do we serve, what
master does the United States serve? and undernieth it all, what master do I
myself serve. Perhaps, just maybe, it might be wise to consider the
possibility that 1) the fundamental causative formation of historical events
is not a top down phenomenon, but a bottom up emergent complexity arising
from a dynamic at the very heart of the individual and 2) that the only
salvation for the individual and by extension humanity, and even the earth
herself resides in a willing surrender by the unrighteous to a will and a
principal of righteousness that emenates from God or the highest truth from
beyond the mind of rationality and the "rational" mind of man, since self
driven by the will, cannot really and truly give of itself for the benefit
of the many.
If this is the case, then the view of the law, must be complemented by a
final note, or a final commandment, and the Biblical principals guiding and
shaping history as the cornerstone of civility, might illluminate the Cross
of Christ not in purely religious overtones, but as a political solution to
the paradox of man's role in shaping history, the only atidote to human evil
residing in a radical forgiveness that emanates from the very highest truth,
outpouring from the centre of existence. Perhaps the cosmological constant
at the centre of reality is the principal of eternal life signified through
the principal for which a lone innocent man died two centuries ago, and just
maybe, or I should say most likely, that it is through this gate alone that
the historical order in chaos must pass, if mankind is to get through the
turbulent water and reach for and find the eternal in the human spirit.
From a quantum perspective, historical causation either bubbles up as an
emergent phenomenon from the collective individualism, or comes down from
the top of the hiearchy, in terms of Civil or Uncivilized conduct on the
part of nation states, and since, by the law of human nature, we are not
capable of acting out of the field of omnipotent grace, then by necessity,
there will surely come another One, this time from on high, to preserve the
very principals on which the whole universe is founded, and to lead humanity
through the great paradox and into the promised land of freedom from death
and destruction.
Questioning the operative motives driving the United States given its
present role in shaping history is the most patriotic thing a person can do
right now, I believe. It's just being patriotic to another type of
constitution that is written on the human heart. If the United States acts
in direct voilation to these principals of justice, and of a Universal
Morality, then she will become either a heard hearted rationalist and will
move squarly into a position of moral absolutism, or she will become a
devouring beast roaming the world to pray upon the weak in pursuit of
resources to satisfy an insatiable hunger for more. Or, it can submit to a
higher moral authority than it's own highest power within the political
dynamic, and become a force of Grace in the world, slowly and gently weaving
a new world order in accordance with the law of life itself, which is, at
core, a vicarious love that is willing to suffer for the sake of the highest
ideal, and in the very best interest of the whole of humanity. In other
words to have the courage to become like God, yet in service to God of the
Highest.
Problem is, for the whole new dynamic to move, there needs to be a willing
submission, and a repentence, along with restitution, and guidance from the
highest source of wisdom, and worse still, this would have to be done on an
individual basis, and since the movement of thought is to reject the
Christian notion of the fundamental sinful quality at the core of self
requiring such repentence, the only optimism comes from a faith in a higher
power, who's will is sovereign over history, and who will see to it in His
almighty wisdom, that things work out in His loving favour.
"Edward Holman" <hol...@cybermesa.com> wrote in message
news:b06j7b$l3j$1...@reader.nmix.net...
> . The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.
>
> . The workers would therefore be "immiserized"; they would become poorer
as
> the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.
>
> . The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the capitalist