Established artists and academics are members of the coordinator class. And coordinators tend not to like to give up their privileges, or even acknowledge them.

"Too often I assume that other artists have 'escaped the dominant authoritarian habits and constructs' and they haven't and they're usually not interested. For me issues of social justice, environmental sanity etc are bound up with nurturing my creativity. I have difficulty understanding how other artists can be totally unconcerned with addressing and dealing with the 'interesting' times in which we live."

This was my original illusion with academics when I used to be in and around academia. With rare exceptions, I found them astonishingly indifferent to anything that mattered and shockingly dedicated to using their privileged and strategic position to pursue innocuous and incestuous research and teaching agendas. There were exceptions, but not very many.

I was amazed at how trivial the lunchtime conversation was and at the degree of condescension directed at anybody who cared about substantively interesting and engaged subjects. 

I developed a passionate loathing for most academicians and their mock sense of mandarin-like detachment.

 I occasionally apply for teaching jobs purely for amusement. I've got a number of books out, academic publications, project studies, a history of successful grantwriting, years' worth of strong teaching evaluations (except for one terrible year) and so forth... and not the slightest chance of ever being hired by an acadedmic department. All they have to do is google me up and they get wise to my officially dysfunctional record of engaged and radical and public writing against Empire and Inequality Inc. and the hiring process grinds to a cease. I'm going to sell my collection of rejection letters on E-Bay - along with my doctorate.   

 

There's a tradition in Western thinking that says humans differ from other species in their ability to reflect on their behavior and therefore to alter their behavior. (Chomsky may be classed in this school.) Many of us in our darker moments wonder if there are in fact two (or more!) varieties of human, those who fit this definition and those who don't. Apparently, we can't go down this road without getting in big trouble, so we (particularly us caring leftists) prefer to not go there. We blame the media, bad education, bad parenting, etc., for the moral and (dare I say) cognitive misfires that surround us always and everywhere. Yet we all know two cases, neither of them uncommon: the fortunate child of loving parents who turns into a paragon of selfish greed, and the deprived child of oppressed parents who becomes the soul of wisdom and moral courage. So I submit this whole area is mysterious beyond the realms of society and politics, and we should just count our blessings as they come our way in the form of human commitment. It is an area where perhaps the much-maligned field of religion (in a pure form) perhaps has more to offer us by way of study. (A.J. Muste, Bonhoeffer, the Berrigans, the Dalai Lama . .?) This whole issue also is fraught with classism, as inevitably it involves discussion of complex concepts and name-drops from the syllabus all over the place. There are very few of our friendly acquaintances who are likely to be interested in pursuing the discussion. . .

Great thread here. EB I want to echo Terence's appreciation: I always find your absolutely unflinching rejection of classism helpful. One thing, though, on the subject of hope...Derrick Jensen: Beyond Hope. Very meaningful writer, for me. Paul: I'm interested in the dynamics of how and why some people escape the dominant authoritarian habits and constructs. We on the left often seem to underestimate how different we are; we talk like others would just naturally come along with the revolution as the obvious normative conclusion - the real human nature ---if they just had their eyes opened to what we know and see. That's partly true, I suppose but how true I wonder. This has been a major problem for me. Too often I assume that other artists have "escaped the dominant authoritarian habits and constructs" and they haven't and they're usually not interested. For me issues of social justice, environmental sanity etc are bound up with nurturing my creativity. I have difficulty understanding how other artists can be totally unconcerned with addressing and dealing with the "interesting" times in which we live. My own concerns definitely don't come from my childhood either at home or school but are a conscious reaction to and departure from standard deceptions and cultural infections. Keir The Hague

Jean Paul Sartre once said that Marx (or was it most Marxists?) seemed to think that nobody existed until they took their first paid job. Childhood matters a great deal, of course, and I think an enormous amount of broad political damage, authoritarianism and just plain pain is inflicted on youth and entrenched in peoples' lives by crazy parents. Teaching at Northern Illinois University in 2005-06, I was just astonished at some of the parenting practices I learned about. One smart but troubled student had been placed on a massive dose psychotropic drug regime by her heavily depressed psychiatrist father since first grade. She had an excessive attraction to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Another student with an advanced learning disorder was being regularly threatened with the withdrawl of tuition support from wealthy parents who insisited that she get straight As and repeatedly called me for progress reports. I had a community college gig in Moline once where students' parents couldn't understand why their kids needed anything more than a high school degree. "Listen junior, we graduated high school and went straignt into the farm equipment plants and made big union money. Now we've got two cars, a nice house and a Mississippi River pontoon boat. What's your problem?" A little technicality: the Quad Cities' big farm equipment plants had largely shut down in recent decades. The profoundly damaging plague of religion is imposed on small and defenseless children who confront impossible cognitive dissonance when later told by rational people that God doesn't exist. I visited a family once who had a six year old son who looked up at me and said "hey Paul did you know if you do something bad and then you die you go to a really really hot place and you burn foreover?" I told him that was one of the craziest things I'd ever heard and he started to cry. I asked him who told him something like that. "My Mommy," he said and then he went to watch the same shoot-em-up video game he'd been watching 12 times a day for the last two years of his cognitive devolution. So many people are conditioned for class/race/gender/ political/imperial hiearchy and God addiction and passivity and obedience and authoritarian rule from birth. I'm interested in the dynamics of how and why some people escape the dominant authoritarian habits and constructs. We on the left often seem to underestimate how different we are; we talk like others would just naturally come along with the revolution as the obvious normative conclusion - the real human nature ---if they just had their eyes opened to what we know and see. That's partly true, I suppose but how true I wonder.

who knows .. with all the alcool and substance regulation how our pseudo democratic rulers keep maintaining the majority in a poverty state. also it is amazing the current staes of fines one has to endure when having late payments, it is as if the incentive to pay was maintaining the poor at staying poor. the 26% per annum late fee on a $2.00 toll free road...add administration fees of 30$.. and over the years , you have a ticket to highway robbery..

I'm no expert on Freud (that would be the British feminist psychologist Lynne Segal, who is completely brilliant and someone I wish the left had paid more attention to), but I do think that, his mistakes aside, Freud did manage to get more than a few things right. But, as I said, I'm no expert, and I've never bothered to read any of his stuff (unless it was stuff quoted by Segal).

But in my own case, I have problems that go beyond simple sensitivity to oppression (though I do have plenty of that). My formative years didn't do me any favors. There's an analogy I remember hearing while watching a gymnastics competition on TV maybe 15 or 20 years ago. (I'm pretty sure Bela Karolyi was on-screen while the color commentator was talking about this.) As a coach, you have to always be taking your big pitcher and filling your pupil's little pitcher. But you can never ever empty your pupil's little pitcher to fill your own big pitcher, no matter how empty your pitcher might be.

Well, the same is true of parenting. (I have no children -- a fact for which my unborn progeny should be grateful -- and I didn't make this connection between coaching and parenting until years later.) Good parents are ones who fill their children's pitchers. But when people are damaged by their own childhoods, their pitchers are empty, and since we live in a society where there's no institutional interest in anyone's happiness and well-being (save the rich, of course, but even there really only on terms of power and privilege), people don't know their pitchers are empty -- not consciously. So they have children of their own, and proceed to empty their children's pitchers, never even being cognizant of what they are doing. And the cycle repeats. It's why, as the U.N. (I believe it was) reported within the past year or so, child abuse is endemic all over the planet, every economic class, every culture. It's poorly understood, but even worse, the institutional structures necessary to deal with it -- structures that are concerned with people's happiness first and foremost -- are largely absent from the planet. (Yet another reason for my parecon fanaticism.)

In my case, I have this thing -- I don't know if it's anxiety, low self esteem, narcissism, or if it's just largely a political problem which I feel personally -- that seems to prevent me from ever being able to do anything. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it entirely. But I understand its effects. I have a very difficult time sustaining seemingly everything. Maybe it's not as bad I make it out to be, but there's some demon or demons out there that lie in wait for me, ready to strike seemingly whenever they damn well feel like it. I've tried more prospective solutions than you can shake a stick at, but those fuckers are still there, waiting to jerk with me whenever they get bored, I think.

Perhaps I should apologize for turning your blog into Dr. Phil (honestly, if my TV's on, I'm probably watching sports anyway), but maybe some lurker out there will benefit from reading about my neuroses. Hey, I don't mind taking one for the team.

Articulate African-Americans have had a much easier time of it in, say, Paris, than the merely African--even the lighter skinned ones--because of entrenched class markers in French society.

There's a very smart left writer/academic on class and race named Stephen Steinberg. Here's part of his argument about why we shouldn't take the expansion of the black bourgeoisie (ie Oprah and the black bourgeois funders Harvard Law graduate and $26 milion man Obama thanks in his campaign book The Audacity of Hope) and the related increased socioeconomic bifurcation of black America since the 1960s to mean that racism is no longer a big problem  faced by African-Americans:

"The success of the black middle-class [is not] proof of...a more favorable opportunity structure for blacks. After all, racism has never been indifferent to class distinctions, and it may well be that blacks who have acquired the 'right' status characteristics are exempted from stereotypes and behaviors that continue to be directed at less privileged blacks. [But] there is nothing new in this phenomenon. Even in the worst days of Jim Crow, there were blacks who owned land, received favored treatment from whites and were held forth as “success stories” to prove that lower-class blacks had only themselves to blame for their destitution. . . . The existence of this black elite did not prove that racism was abating (though illusions to this effect were common even among blacks). On the contrary, the black elite itself was a vital part of the system of [racial] oppression, serving as a buffer between the [ruling white] oppressor and [most truly black] oppressed and furthering the illusion that blacks could surmount their difficulties if only they had the exemplary qualities of the black elite."

Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 149.

The mostly white ruling class uses race to divide the more polyglot working classes but white supremacy (which likely owes its origins largely to to its divide-and-conquer functions for the white capitalists but then has this nasty way of taking on a life of its own) uses class to practice some divide and conquer within the black community.

Freud (problematic bourgeois patriarch that he may may have been) always struck me as having seen something well when he said the depression was anger turned inward. The anger that class, imperial, gender, race and other hiearchies impose elicit in those of us who retain the capacity to identify and loathe oppression can be overwhelming. Dominant owning and coordinating classes are very good at making sure that we direct that anger inward, on ourselves. It's a big challenge to harness the anger without being devoured by it and then to direct it at those who deserve it.  I think that challenge is at the heart of the radical burnout syndrome.

I think classism is part of why Zmag/ZNet elicits contempt from left liberals and even marxists.  But I also think that part of the left-liberal response at least is defensive shame.  Left-anarchish/radical- democratic Z folks call them on their money- status- and power-and control-worshipping and priivilege-addicted bullshit and on their refusal to go to the root of things...truth is, we regularly knock the moral and intellectual shit out of them.  They don't like that. It makes them depressed.  They prefer to marginalize us than to deal with the shame.  We are said to be "unrealistic" 'extremists," and "carpers" without "alternatives" and when we come up with alternatives they are unworthy of serious attention. 

Most of the left and liberal professors and journalists and commentators I know could use at least 20 hours a week doing some good manual labor for the collective.  They are just too fucking privileged when you get down to it. Their intellectual work would improve with more time cleaning toilets and picking up garbage and hauling compost to the neighborhood organic garden.

Thank you, though I usually feel like what I'm best at providing is anger. I think that's why I'm such a parecon fanatic. It's one of the few things that consistently makes me feel hope. I literally just thought of this within the past two hours while I was making a pizza, but I think a pretty good definition of depression is the absence of hope. I don't think I know any hopeful people who are depressed.

I've noticed in my history reading that race or religion doesn't matter at all once you reach a certain level of wealth and power. I think prejudice is a concept that was invented and developed, long ago--so long ago that it's become a human characteristic (viz. the election of Sarkozy in France)--as a divide-and-conquer tactic. In the US context, the late Theodore Allen's Invention of the White Race is informative about this. The hard part for me is that I am an educated intellectual, and as such privileged. I tell my kids that, and we all try to do the best we can. EB, I appreciate the enlightenment you provide in this endeavor. T

I sometimes feel that way too, that perhaps, in some sense, class is the "master thread." I try to be careful, because I have black friends who tell me horror stories. But at the same time, I look at a simple example: I'm a white, working-class male. Oprah is a black, billionaire female. Which one of us outranks the other in this society? Yes, Paul Allen (or some such) outranks her, but they're both billionaires and of course he's a white male. But my white maleness doesn't help me vis a vis Oprah, since she has a billion dollars and I think I'm starting another job next week.

Howard Zinn said something interesting in his book Terrorism and War, ed. Anthony Arnove (New York: Seven Stories/Open Media, 2003, p. 37): "The left is in a position of continually opposing war after war, without getting to the root of the problem - which is the economic system under which we live, which needs war and makes war inevitable." He recommended "concentrating on the class issue." I agree that climate change will not be solved under capitalism. Zinn is saying and I agree that we will have war as long as we live under capitalism. Democracy is impossible under capitalism, of course. I don't think racism is being addressed much if at all at its deeper, institutional and societal level and I tend to think all the hiearchies are tied up with eachother and with imperial/world systemic hiearchies in relations of (to lapse into Marxian jargon) "dialectical inseperability." Class is perhaps the master thread but I don't know that one hundred percent.

Mike's right. And actually, I think it's crystal clear: That contempt you feel is classism. Just like elites fear and loathe democracy, or the New York Times fears and loathes Noam Chomsky, most of the coordinatorist left fears and loathes the idea of balanced job complexes.

Honestly, I think it's pretty simple. If Victor, Brad, or Carl show back up, you can ask them about it. They're all classists. That's why working people don't give a shit about the left. Until the left's classism is addressed, the troops will be in Iraq, global warming won't be stopped, and single-payer health care will be nowhere in sight. How are you going to mobilize the millions upon millions upon millions of people required to win any of these things, when you say (essentially) to those people, "Look, we still want you to do the shit work. We just promise to treat you better than the boss you currently have." Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

Marxism hasn't died. It just goes by a different name, namely no name. But that same Marxist anti-working-class coordinatorism is still quite healthy, alive, and well. Until that changes, nothing else really will. Maybe a minimum wage increase here or there. But stopping global warming? Forget it.

In Ted Glick's 4/23/07 ZNet article, "Climate: Time Is Short," he doesn't mention capitalism even one time. How do you address global warming without addressing capitalism? Glick says that to stop global warming, he is "prepared for a long fast," and "ready to get arrested, again." Okay, but what I'd really like to know is if he's prepared to work a BJC in order to stop global warming. Because if he's not, global warming isn't going anywhere.

Amy Goodman recently had Mike on to discuss Remembering Tomorrow -- not parecon. Yes, parecon came up in the discussion, but that's not why Mike was there. Parecon has never been the topic on "Democracy Now." What's that tell you? I mean, what does "democracy" look like in Goodman's world, anyway? I'd really like to know, since it apparently doesn't include BJCs.

The world works a certain way, and it's really not all that complicated to understand: People have privileges, and they don't want to give them up. Maybe those privileges are class privileges, maybe they are racial privileges, maybe they are gender privileges, or something else. But very few privileged people ever are willing to even look at their privileges, much less give them up voluntarily. Like Einstein said, most people have an exceedingly difficult time looking at anything with any equanimity.

The left isn't all that different. Chomsky's blacklisted at the Times. Parecon is blacklisted on the left. They're just two sides of the same coin. The difference is, we have little to no control over what goes on at the Times.

And people like Tom Englehardt, whose stuff is nearly always must-read, wonder what happened to the anti-war movement from March 2003 to the present. The answer is, back then, elite liberals were trying to stop the invasion. They had money, they knew what they wanted, and boom, you had a movement. Then the invasion happened, it became reality, and the state-power-worshipping liberals said, okay, we're there, now how do we preserve and enhance state power given this unfortunate turn of events. Why do you think the left still isn't calling for Bush et. al. to be tried as war criminals? It's the elite liberals who still bankroll the left.

Why should working people care? Work fucks you over. You're tired. You see the writing on the wall. Why fight? What's the point? Better to keep your head down and just get through it.

You're either for ending oppression or you're not. If you're not for ending classism, then you're not. Ditto for racism, sexism, etc., of course. But the big one right now that's not being addressed at all, as far as I can tell, is classism. Maybe I'm just too jaded to see it. But looking up from the bottom, that's the way it looks to me.

Here is the opinion of a ZNet handler when told about Site Kiosk thing: "it is of consequence, but I don't know how much….probably not too much. Much more consequential is the extent to which typical progressive places ignore us or even pretty much exclude us…that does have big effects." I think that's exactly right. I've been pretty amazed at the contempt I've felt for ZNet/ZMag at other ostensibly left places...not all but at many others..It makes you wonder.  

 

The media are going to use any excuses for their omissions on the reason folr war on Iraq. It's sad to see znet being blocked, I believ so, a few years AGO I, indymedia computers were seized by the "authorities".. Th prince harry shootin a few Iraqis does not surprise me..

Yes and reporters have become more educated/indoctrinated and therefore more ignorant over the decades. There's almost no more working-class reporters left in the 1 or 2 papers that dominate every urban market nowadays. I used to deal with a lot of "mainstream" (dominant) media reporters (Tribune and Sun Times) in Chicago and they tended to have elite degrees (Northwestern and even University of Chicago) and this made it fairly difficult to get them to respond seriously or intelligently to serious and intelligent research on class and race inequality in and around Chicago. You couldn't get them to read more than a short Executive Summary in most cases (not all) and they thought they already understood the issues anyway because they had taken some ridiculous sociology or urban politics classes from some tenured know it all bullshitters at elite schools where they learned that radicals are nuts and that there is no alternative to existing class and race and imperial hiearchy. Their high-priced educations also taught them that they were too inherently smart and superior to have to do any serious moral and intellectual work. Their educations pretty much made it unnecessary for editors to ideologically supervise them all that much; they were already self-censoring under the influence of "higher education." They need some time working at a meatpacking plant or something like that.

All those reporters are well-educated; like Chomsky says, "Education is a system of imposed ignorance."

Maybe its a misfire -- a technical foible --- at some level. Or maybe some human agent at SiteKiosk actually looked at the ZNet site, saw serious criticism of US policy/society associated with a rare celebrity name on the hard Left, and put it on politically problematic list along with the Nazis. I don't know. I confess I've never I've never run into it to before. I've pulled up ZNet in major hotels from coast to coast in the last 5 years. That would fit the foible hypothesis. WSWS is not blocked so no they don't seem to be very good ideological censors if that's what they're trying to be. In any event, SiteKiosk is filtering out ZNet and I'm curious to know how many hotels, libraries etc. use their program. If it's a significant number, then I guess ZNet should contact SiteKiosk and see what the deal is and try to get it corrected. I hope "sk" isn't short for "SiteKiosk;" that's a joke. On the deliberate censorship,sure. I sent well-crafted 650 word op-eds to the Chicago Tribune saying that the White House WMD case on Iraq was total nonsense in late 2002 and early 2003; they all got shot down despite the fact that I had a good publication record there. Meanwhile inferior prowar op-eds went up. That's just standard at the Tribune and elsewnere. Bill Moyers just did this big PBS expose on media's deep complicity in selling the fradulent case for invading Iraq. All these "mainstream" reporters interviewed by Moyers made it sound like you would have had to be clairvoyant to have known Cheney and Bush et al. were lying. Many (probably most) of us on the left knew the truth at the time without being clairvoyant; we were just censored out of the public square. Same today on the role of oil in the occupation or on the absurdity of the claim the U.S. is trying to export democracy to Iraq/ME or the absurdity of the notion that Congress just sent Bush an "antiwar" bill....and on countless other issues. If that's for real about what Madison's Ruth Coniff said, it's a disgrace that would seem hard to live down. She owes Finkelstein a humble apology. "Progressive" Madison is crawling with pretentious yuppies, narcissistic children of privilege and sneering academicians. Madison is a Caucasian coordinator class playground. Still, there are some good semi-Trotskyist ISO antiwar people at various street-corners, the Rainbow bookstore is still a treasure house of left literature and a couple of great old used bookstores still survive on the margins of the big party. Whatever the explanation on ZNet's SiteKiosk status, confronting the simple technical capacity that exists to make a leading left web site invisible is sort of chilling

Filtering software works on trial and error basis and will occasionally misfire. If pattern matching and drawing meaningful conclusions from it were an exact science, spam would have been taken care of long ago. But, more interestingly, while we worry over such technical foibles, ugly acts of censorship and name calling remain hidden in plain sight, e.g. this and this (the latter in "progressive" Madison).

How was it in North Korea Paul? Nice weather down there? Err... you mean... this was in the US, right? Right. I'd be pissed as hell if something like that happened to me. This is what they are doing in China and North Korea (if anybody has internet access there at all). This is what 1984 is all about. Thought crimes. ZNet is harmful for elites, therefore we won't allow you to read it. You could learn something. That is bloody harmful! I hardly bother watching the news nowadays. Not even from the state broadcaster here. It's just so full of crap, and few actual news are mentioned. Forget about CNN, BBC and Fox. Now, that is harmful. Not only to children, but to anything with a pulse. Pangaea Oslo, Norway

The Obama thing is so depressing. And I think its only going to get worse.  B.O. applied for and got Secret Service protection today, which is a big PR coup for him.

Sure on war crimes. If its either impeachment or war crimes, I'll choose war crimes. I think the penalty for the war crimes involved is death, which is appropriate in this case. 

There are some transgressions where the death penalty makes sense as punishment...like killing 700,000 Iraqis to deepen imperial control of Middle Eastern oil and to advance a militantly classist agenda at home. 

I'd like us to impeach capitalism at the end of the day when we get down to what we really want.

Speaking of capitalism, I heard from the Madison Concourse Hotel. They buy a web filter program ("kiosk") from a company called SiteKiosk at http://www.sitekiosk.com/Default.aspx.

Here (hence the title change of this post) is the exact language SiteKiosk gives you when you try to pull up ZNet:

"Access Denied"

"Site Coach thinks this website contains content harmful to a young public."

"This page was blocked!"

"Reason:"

"Domain With Forbidden Content"

DOMAIN WITH FORBIDDEN CONTENT.

Counterpunch is not blocked.  Dissident Voice is not blocked.  Monthly Review is not blocked. In These Times is not blocked.  The Progressive is not blocked.  The Nation is not blocked.  The protofascist Republican Party is not blocked. Numerous sites with "anarchy" and "anarchist" are not blocked though one ("Anarchy Watch") is blocked. The Democratic Party is not blocked, despite its support for a criminal assault on Iraq that committed the supreme international crime under the Nuremberg judgements.

The Nazi Party is blocked.  I'm sure porn is blocked.  ZMag/ZNet is blocked as "harmful to a young public."  I didn't check the World Socialist Web Site (Fourth International-Trot); I wouldn't be surprised if it was blocked. 

It's scary like Diebold.

I'm curious to know how widespread this is.  If anyone has tried to pull up ZNet while traveling (or whatever) and gotten this sort of message ("access denied: forbidden content") let me know here. 

 

 

 

A lot of people are swallowing what Obama is selling. I don't just mean on the liberal left. I mean people who ordinarily ignore politics are reading his book and buying his crap.

On a semi-related note, in your most recent ZNet article, you talk about how liberals want us to vote Democrat instead of calling for Bush's impeachment. (Actually, I agree we shouldn't be calling for his impeachment. We should be calling for him to be tried for war crimes.) That's the same position NOW and NARAL took with regard to the recent Supreme Court decision chipping away a little more at women's rights.

Kim Gandy writes "We must elect a Congress that will repeal this ban and a president who will sign the repeal." And NARAL says, "We need to elect more pro-choice members of Congress and a president who will stand up for-not attack-our fundamental values of freedom and privacy." (Both those articles appeared on ZNet.)

Of course, neither statement explicitly says to elect Democrats, but of course that's what both groups are saying even if they don't say it. And it's totally predictable that liberals would do this. "Anti-war," "women's rights," "labor rights" (e.g., AFL-CIO or CTW), and so on. (I put all those in quotes for a reason.) It doesn't matter. They all always have the same response to any situation: elect more Democrats.

Why not? That's where their money comes from, and that doesn't threaten their coordinator-class privileges. A real bottom-up social movement would, however, definitely threaten their privileges. They're more afraid of that possibility than they are losing elections or abortion rights or whatever else. Everyone has a priority, whether they admit it (or are even conscious of it) or not. When you figure out someone's priority, you can predict their behavior fairly accurately. With liberals, it's always about protecting their class privileges -- their coordinator class privileges.