and so it is it really possible to effectuate a meaningful change in the organization of society? A fulfillment of the Isiah prophecy of relations between the spirit without the intermediary of material considerations.Can we as infants, at least aspire to becoming children? In the short term. Not likely. The quagmire, the big muddy of revolution, evolution and rebellion in a sonata of contrapuntal music progression. co-existence is tenuous. The social narrative of the contre-temps.The mainstream media has created the myth that communities of citizens people are waiting for superman,external white knight forces coming down a ladder from above, the White House, or state-appointed talking experts that will magically, conjure up an elixir that will resolve the escalating and rotating crises that afflict body and soul.
grosz. People in the Street. 1923.---Barglow:What is it that causes a child’s initial love affair with the world to shut down? Does this occur because the formation of defensive barriers between self and other is the inevitable culmination of “normal” child development? One alternative explanation is this: as children become acquainted with suffering and injustice, in their families and in the wider world, they learn to respond by narrowing their awareness, shutting out others’ misery in order not to be made miserable themselves. Benjamin’s comment in One Way Street about the nature of love describes an escape from unhappiness that he himself was unable to accomplish: “In a love affair most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholics, for whom contact with mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep from them the homeland’s sadness.”Read More:http://www.barglow.com/angel_of_history.htm
The truth is that paradigm shift in our concept of education and economics are long overdue. Time to dredge up John Dewey, perhaps America’s most significant social philosopher,and at least seal the deal that should have been effectuated a century ago. Or, the conservative revolution of Whitman. It may begin with Dewey’s vision of a democratic educational system that ended up as war surplus scrap goods after WWII. Evidently, as long as industry is satisfied and sated, his ideas were marginalized. But, today the cow is looking a little lean. Even the bovine is getting runner’s face. Education, as Dewey asserted, is top-down. And undemocratic.It reflects and reinforces the militarism, consumerism and racism-MLK’s unholy trinity- It disempowers children, stifles explorations, and importantly denies the incentive to construct and create.After all, a creative society is a non-violent one. Its impossible to be aggressive in the act of creation. As Grace Lee Boggs has claimed, modern education is a sorting mechanism with standards, goals, tests, and sordid comparisons, rooted in an attitude of acquisitiveness or the capitalist ethos. quantify and commodify.
Cornel West:We’re talking about raising political consciousness, so it spills over; all parts of the country so people can begin to see what’s going on through a different set of lens. And then you begin to highlight what the more detailed demands would be, because in the end we’re really talking about what Martin King would call a revolution; a transfer of power from oligarchs to every day people of all colors, and that is a step-by-step process. It’s a democratic process, it’s a non-violent process, but it is a revolution, because these oligarchs have been transferring wealth from poor and working people at a very intense rate in the last 30 years, and getting away with it, and then still smiling in our faces and telling us it’s our fault. That’s a lie, and this beautiful group is a testimony to that being a lie….
---President Obama’s African-American supporters are in turmoil after one of their most prominent members, Princeton University professor Cornel West unleashed a powerful, race-tinged attack against his former friend. West ripped Obama, calling him a “white man with black skin” and “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and . . . corporate plutocrats,” reports The Washington Post. In the interviews, which have roiled progressives, West also described the president as “head of the American killing machine and proud of it.” He told MSNBC’s Ed Schultz that Obama’s upbringing inevitably means he “has a predilection much more towards upper and middle class white brothers and Jewish brothers and a certain distance from free black men who will tell him the truth. “The system is rigged against poor and working people and Obama is the head of it.” Read More:http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/BarackObamaCornelWestrace/2011/05/19/id/396976 image:http://brookstonbeerbulletin.com/beer-in-ads-231-leo-durocher-for-rheingold/
Gustav Landauer felt, correctly, that the socialist movement would be coopted by capitalism and the State and that socialist revolution, was a trap that would not arise because of the issue of adaptability. He criticized Marx as being complicit with this vision, with the view that cooperation and socialization automatically growing out of capitalism, was in the realm of fairy tales. Landauer and even Thorstein, could see that capitalist society, with the seduction of status, distinction and invidious comparison could adapts seamlessly to the changing conditions, absorbing authentic concerns and using the state to enact social legislation causing it to atrophy, instead of moving to a socialist society.It absorbs socialists, melding their ideology to modernism, pop culture, Marcel Duchamp and the Readymades, and other worthless baubles and trinkets to amuse and pontificate over.
So, for Landauer, capitalism could not be evolved into socialism. The unique answer to build socialism and to not get run over and recycled was to work outside state structures through local, voluntary style organizations. Small is beautiful. though not too sexy. The basis was that workers, the laborer, had more influence as consumers than as wage earners. The conclusion was a favoring of consumer co-ops as a means to organize some first baby steps toward socialism, which would, importantly create a need for non-profit credit unions,free money, local currencies; though perhaps a little far-fetched to believe that consumer-producer associations would wield and exercise control over piles of money. I doubt he foresaw the size of the multinational.
---"Give me some scratching, diving, hungry ballplayers who come to kill you." Source: Nice Guys Finish Last (Leo Durocher, 06/09/1975) "God watches over drunks and third baseman." "How you play the game is for college ball. When you're playing for money, winning is the only thing that matters." ... "I come to win." ... "I don't care if the guy (Jackie Robinson) is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a god-damn zebra. I'm the manager of this team and I say he plays." "If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I'd trip her. Oh, I'd pick her up and brush her off and say, 'Sorry, Mom,' but nobody beats me." ... "If you don't win, you're going to be fired. If you do win, you've only put off the day you're going to be fired." "I made a game effort to argue but two things were against me: the umpires and the rules." "... "I never questioned the integrity of an umpire. Their eyesight, yes." ... "In the olden days, the umpire didn't have to take any courses in mind reading. The pitcher told you he was going to throw at you." "It was Brooklyn against the world. They were not only complete fanatics, but they knew baseball like the fans of no other city. It was exciting to play there. It was a treat. I walked into that crummy, flyblown park as Brooklyn manager for nine years, and every time I entered, my pulse quickened and my spirits soared." Read More:http://www.life.com/gallery/22984/image/50479493/spring-training-the-40s-and-50s#index/24
…I knew there would be some moral outrage as a two party system begins to decay, and the mean-spiritedness of the Republicans moving more toward reactionary and quasi-fascist politics and the relative spinelessness of the Democratic Party, tied to oligarchs as well, but centrists, trying to hold off against the viscous right-wing politics of the Republican Party, but refusing to, in any way be progressive. And you heard broth Barack’s speech to the Black Caucus the other day. March with me, condescending, insulting—-…( West)
…Outside the street’s on fire in a real death waltz
Between
what’s flesh and what’s fantasy
And the poets down here don’t write nothing
at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of a
knife, they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But
they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland ( Bruce Springsteen )
Leo Durocher.---Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney says he will offer a more assertive foreign policy than President Barack Obama, promising increased military spending, a strong deterrent against Iran and an investment in missile defense systems. Romney, 64, plans to outline his foreign and national security goals in a speech this morning at The Citadel, the military academy in Charleston, South Carolina. The early primary state has a traditionally pro-military Republican base. "America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world," --- Read More:http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-07/romney-promises-to-boost-defens
ending-deter-iran.html image:http://www.conelrad.com/mutatedtelevision/hermanmunster.phpCORNEL WEST: Disrespecting, stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. I tell my brother; he got to understand the genius about Marley. He called his group the Wailers, not the whiners. The Wailers were persons who cry for help but against the context of catastrophe. When Wall Street cried out for help, they got billions of dollars. Working people, poor people are crying for help. Whining is a cry of self pity, of a sentimental disposition. That’s not what’s happening in poor America. That’s not what’s happening in working class America and that’s, certainly, not what’s happening in black America. It’s high unemployment rates, two out of five black kids in poverty, that’s not whining, that’s not complaining, that’s legitimate critiques and legitimate grievances out of a genuine grief. So that I ask the president to apologize. He needs to ask for forgiveness. You don’t talk to people that way; I don’t care what color they are when they’re suffering, not at all, you see. But, most importantly, here, people are straightening their backs up.Read More:http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/9/29/cornel_west_on_occupy_wall_street_its_the_makings_of_a_us_autumn_responding_to_the_arab_springa
---Grace Lee Boggs:But see, what I hear in what you're saying is a separation of the anti-war speech of the peace trajectory, from the other things that Martin said. He was talking about a radical revolution of values. And that radical revolution of values has not been pursued in the last forty years. The consumerism, and materialism, has gotten worse. The militarism has continued, while people are going around, you know just using their credit cards. All that's been taking place. And so, would he have continued to challenge those? I think he would. But on the whole, our society has not been challenging those, except in small pockets. Read More:http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06152007/transcript3.html image:http://rickyday.net/blog/2009/01/urban_pop_icon_jeanmichel_baqu.html
ADDENDUM:
Earlier, West had told the liberal blog Truthdig that Obama lacks backbone.
“More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out.”
West, an African-American studies professor at Princeton, had a rift with the president soon after the 2008 election. He said he went to 65 campaign events but then was unhappy when he couldn’t get his mother and brother tickets to the inauguration.
He also claims Obama “cussed him out” last July for claiming that the president was not a progressive. The White House did not dispute West’s account of that meeting at the National Urban League’s annual conference.
But West denies his latest barrage of attacks is personal.
Read More:http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/BarackObamaCornelWestrace/2011/05/19/id/396976
———————————————-
King, Slavery and Commodification:The fundamental question to raise about such market-based economies has to do with their raison d’ˆetre: why separate production and consumption so that markets are needed at all? Why not strive toward the ideal of a society in which production is directly for consumption (usually called ‘production for needs’ or ‘production for use’) without any intervening market mechanism? The usual reply has been that planned economies are sluggish, inefficient, and incur significant costs in their need for planning and gathering information, whereas market economies efficiently produce an optimal allocation of goods without the associated costs. Now these claims, as noted at the start of this paper, are dubious at best. Yet even if we grant the reply, the reasons it provides through its (dubious) factual claims
are all narrowly economic reasons to prefer market socialism to command economies. The question raised above has a moral aspect this reply does not address. Market-based economies, by definition, give a commodity an exchange-value apart from any use-value it may have. Yet production for exchange rather than use treats people as no more than depositories of production goods regardless of whatever use-value these goods may possess.Read More:http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/unpublished/Slavery_and_Commodification.pdf
———————————–
Landauer was a virtual anti-Marx. He differed from the Marxists both in theory and in practice. He was not in favor of nationalization of industry, but rather its conversion into cooperatives. Exchange was to be freed from the restrictions of capitalism and not abolished as in the Marxist utopia. Farmers, artisans and small traders were not seen as the despised petty-bourgeoisie, but as a part of real, existing society. Hence, Landauer’s concept of democracy was populist and not Marxist. (By which the proletariat would rule over the other classes.) As we have seen, the class struggle and political action upon which Marx pinned his hopes, held no future for Landauer. It was a dead end. As for Leninism, Landauer was prophetic at a time when many of his radical contemporaries were wallowing in self-delusion. He saw it as a Robespierre principle and a new form of slavery. (Bolshevism) …by working for a military regime… will be more horrible than anything the world has ever seen. Read More:http://www.national-anarchist.net/2010/09/communitarian-anarchism-of-gustav.html
COMMENTS