Ancestral Gates

Open the Gates

Within the city of the burning cloud,

Dragging my life behind me in a sack,

Naked I prowl, scourged by the black

Temptation of the blood grown proud.

Here at the monumental door,

Carved with the curious legend of my youth,

I brandish the great bone of my death,

Beat once therewith and beat no more.

The hinges groan: a rush of forms

Shivers my name, wrenched out of me.

I stand on the terrible threshold, and I see

The end and the beginning in each other’s arms.

-Stanley Kunitz

from The Collected Poems
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Get serious. Get political. Orient yourself toward the masses. Extend yourself beyond the middle-classes. Establish bonds within the working-classes. Forget ambition as it's played out. Forget 'achievement' as it's been defined to you. Forget all perfections of the status quo. Forget about the 'inevitability of change'. Forget all these that remove you from the class struggle. "By hook or by crook." Forgetting. And Remembering.

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"Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to... Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?"  -George Orwell, 1984

Our Original Sin Was to be Born

For the unemployed, what to do with oneself is a daily dilemma. For those who have no safety net, no family to turn to, no spare bed to count on, it's easily an upset to the balance (even in the wealthiest country in the world!) between having and not having decent shelter and living conditions, adequate food and water sources, a means to feed one's family, and so on, delineating unto the extreme of the socio-economic spectrum, one of daily terror and survival. For those of us who have those things, some security, we bide our time, but with no study vision. Does action require vision? Perhaps for the poet. But this is not a landscape for poetry, the job market. We're each of us born with an outstanding debt--just like the Christian dogma of Original Sin--to the established system, order and caste of cold hard cash. That is to say, Capital. Our original sin was to be born. (In a capitalist order, at that!)


Genuine humanism pre-supposes providing for the needs of human beings in a structural way--a way that cannot be rolled back or undone, anymore than can be the historical abdication of divine rule by monarchs, or the felling of absolutism, in its previous manifestations. Times seem to bare witness to the pretext of revolution, whether peaceful (as in Madison or Cairo) or armed (as in Libya; as in Nepal, lest we forget); the striving toward social and economic justice, in sway to the momentum that old revolutionaries and hard-line leftists referrenced as "a living history."*
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*"It was precisely Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law .... has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science..."  -Friedrich Engels,
from Preface to the Third German Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Struck for the Morning World

This curious riddled dream I dreamed last night,--

Six years ago I dreamed it just as now;

The same man stooped to me; we rose from bondage,

And broke the accustomed order of our days,

And struck for the morning world, and light, and freedom.

What does it mean? Why is this hint repeated?

What anguish does it spring from, seek to end?

-Conrad Aiken 

from poem "Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait"
in Selected Poems

"No War but Class War"

Noam, 1993

Technocracy, Profoundly Ambiguous

I posted the following excerpt from new left thinker, André Gorz's Strategy for Labor, because it strikes me as highly relevant, in spite of what many are calling the next big wave of the labor movement in America, convulsing throughout the mid-west and elsewhere. 

Within the period that followed the post-war epoch, and especially following Reagan's historically unprecedented assault on worker's rights and trade-union activity (firing the air-traffic controllers in the early 80's), technocracy has come in league with union structure and in vogue within union ideology. To a degree, this is inevitable within a capitalist society, as elucidated famously by Lenin and of course before that by Marx.  The worker will not realize his potential so long as his trade-union makes sure he is not taken advantage of and assures him a decent wage, and so on. Lulled and bribed into veritable inactivity.  

Marx, in The Holy Family, says, "The slavery of civil society is ostensibly the greatest freedom, because it appears to leave the individual perfectly independent. The individual considers as his own freedom the movement (no longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man) of his alienated life-elements, like property, industry, religion; in reality, this movement is the perfection of his slavery...." Let us find this difference which amounts to "slavery", where it lies between freedom and independence.

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"The decadence of political democracy, which technocracy likes to attribute to the senility of the parties and to the backwardness of political ideologies relative to economic realities, has therefore in fact some deeper reasons: it derives from the incapacity--which is in turn due to cultural and educational backwardness--of individuals, organized or not (the owners, political "elites," the bourgeoisie as a class, organized workers), to perform for themselves the management of social production and of society, on whatever level--local, regional, national; the industrial branch, the sector, the city.


Technocratic power, therefore, arises much less as a new form of the direct domination of monopoly capital and more as a contradictory and mediated form of this power. While its members are most often of bourgeois origin, technocracy is not generally the errand boy of the monopolies and does not necessarily wield power as their representative. It is rather the mediator between the particular and contradictory interests of the capitalists on the one hand, the general interest of capitalism on the other, and finally the general interests of society.


The power of the technocracy cannot simply be identified with the direct, totalitarian power of monopoly capital, even though it also is a totalitarian power and even though this power is exercised in fact for the benefit of monopoly capital. Technocrats are much more than the trustees or the representatives of the power of the bourgeoisie as a class; they are rather a "caste": because they alone are specialized in the tasks of coordination and synthesis, they cannot accomplish these tasks without having--and without demanding, by virtue of their work, as an inherent requirement of their work--autonomy with regards to all interests, including the various interests of capitalist groups.


By its very function, technocracy tends therefore to locate itself "above the classes," to deny the necessity for class struggle, to set itself up as mediator and referee and in so doing to enter into contradiction with the classes. The famous "depoliticization" of the masses which technocracy pretends to take note of is not a fact it observes; it is rather the end it pursues, the result it wants to obtain--and does obtain in a very limited degree.  "Depoliticization" is the ideology of technocracy itself. The so-called "neutrality" of the State is the ideology which justifies the power and the domination which technocracy is led to claim for itself by the logic of its situation.


The conflict of technocracy with the working classes as well as with the bourgeoisie is always profoundly ambiguous: this caste refuses from the outset to make decisions on the political terrain. Objectively progressive (or "on the Left") in its conflicts with the monopolies, technocracy is subjectively conservative ("on the Right") in its conflicts with the working class.


Attempting to eliminate in advance the question of power, which it thinks can be held only by professional managers, it tries to keep a clear conscience in the midst of the contradictory criticisms to which it is exposed. Toward the monopolies it internalizes the conservatism of which the Left accuses it by showing that the rationalization measures which it proposes consolidate and protect the capitalist system. Toward the labor movement it boasts of its conflicts with the monopolies in order to underscore its objectively progressive role.


This double game is obviously a mystification: to pretend to keep a balance between a bourgeoisie which is in power and a working class which is not is necessarily to play into the hands of the former. Technocracy is conservative ideologically (subjectively) to the very degree that its objective progressivism serves it as an alibi in its efforts to consolidate the existing System, to arbitrate its conflicts, and to absorb the anti-capitalist forces.


It shares this conservatism with all technicians insofar as they are empiricists. Conductor of an apparatus which interests him only for its smooth and efficient functioning, the technician cares a great deal more for the instrument than for the ends it serves. He lives from the beginning in a ready-made rationality with predetermined purposes which his work and his education do not lead him to question. The only truth, for him, is smooth functioning; and he sees value only in immediately applicable propositions. The rest is utopia."


-André Gorz
from Strategy for Labor (in The New Left Reader, p. 45-47)

Parting Happily With the Past (Here's to...)

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."

-Karl Marx

from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

"It is instructive for [the modern nations] to see the ancien regime, which in their countries has experienced its tragedy, play its comic role as a German phantom. Its history was tragic as long as it was the pre-existing power in the world and freedom a personal whim--in a word, as long as it believed, and had to believe, in its own privileges. As long as the ancien regime, as an established world order, was struggling against a world that was only just emerging, there was a world-historical error on its side but not a personal one. Its downfall was therefore tragic. 


The present German regime, on the other hand--an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of universally accepted axioms, the futility of the ancien regime displayed for all the world to see--only imagines that it still believes in itself and asks the world to share in its fantasy. If it believed in its own nature, would it try to hide that nature under the appearance of an alien nature and seek its salvation in hypocrisy and sophism? The modern ancien regime is rather merely the clown of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thorough and passes through many stages while bearing an ancient form to its grave. The last phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. The Greek gods, who already died once for their wounds in Aeschylus's tragedy Prometheus Bound, were forced to die a second death--this time a comic one--in Lucian's Diologues. Why does history take this course? So that mankind may part happily with its past. We lay claim to this happy historical destiny for the political powers of Germany."

-Karl Marx
from "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"

From Intro to Slavoj Zizek's First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Wordsworth's Vantage

Over 200 years ago: French Revolution ~ Haitian Revolution

(First World > Third World > First World)

Today: Tunisia ~ Egypt ~ Libya ~ Yemen ~ Bahrain ~ Oman ~ Syria ~ Iran... ~ Madison, etc.  (Third World > First World > still to come?)

TO TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE*

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy of men!

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

Pillowed in some deep dungeon's earless den; -

O miserable Chieftain! where and when

Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou

Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

There's not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

-William Wordsworth

(Sing Freedom!; an Amnesty International 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, p. 86)

*Toussaint l'Ouverture led the Negro slaves in Haiti against their French masters at the time of the French Revolution. He drove out the French, but they later seized him after asking  him to a meeting to discuss peace; he died in a dungeon in France.