Sharon Who?

I'd heard of the famous Port Huron Statement made by Students for a Democratic Society, but not, until very recently, of the Sharon Statement made by its antagonist, Young Americans for Freedom.

Sharon Tate? Sharon Stone? No, the Sharon Statement was a political position paper arrived at by a small group of YAF members who met for a couple of days at the Buckley family home in Sharon, Connecticut. Written up by M. Stanton Evans, the statement was issued on September 11, 1960.

The Port Huron Statement, named for the town in Michigan and written largely by Tom Hayden, appeared about two years later, in mid-June 1962. It was the product of months of rancorous wrangling within SDS -- although nowhere near at the level such infighting rose to toward that organization's disintegration a mere seven years later.

Clearly the New Left was aware of "Sharon" at the time and were determined to counter it. Not that the mainstream media was giving YAF the time of day. As a high school student I was actually able to read the Port Huron Statement, but heard very little about YAF.

The two statements make an interesting and still useful contrast. For one thing, Hayden rattled on 12 times as long as Evans. But compare for yourselves:

http://www2.fiu.edu/~yaf/sharon.html

http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/huron.html

Paradoxes of the Marxian Belief System

There are several. Here are four; please feel free to add more.


1. "The People must rule" - and because we know what the People want better than they know themselves (i.e., because they're stupid), we are justified in taking power in Their name and governing against Them whenever necessary.

2. "The People are innately good" - and this is why the People must be tricked and coerced and forced into Doing the Right Thing and never allowed to have Their own selfish petty-bourgeois way.

3. "We love the People" - as an abstraction, that is, not as individuals; in fact socialists are notorious for their antisocial, unmannerly, boorish behavior toward flesh-and-blood human beings.

4. "The capitalist system is inherently doomed to collapse" - but because it never quite seems to do so fast or furiously enough, we need to help it along with Cloward and Piven strategies, designed to overwhelm and crash the system with impossible demands.

The Parasite

I came upon a book called The Parasite (1982) by Michel Serres, a French philosopher. He examines parasitism of all kinds, from natural to existential, using language, fables and everthing else he can think of. One chapter in particular reminded me of the famous "healthcare debate":

Serres recounts the fable of the man who picks up an apparently freezing snake and takes it home to warm it by his own hearth. The snake wakes up, is startled and angered, and bites the man. Serres continues:

"The serpent was not a lessee; he was not looking for a haven; he was answered without having called. He was given an uncalled-for opinion. Someone made himself the serpent's benefactor, savior, and father. You are sleeping quite peacefully, and when you wake you find yourself in debt. You live with no other need, and suddenly someone claims to have saved your country, protected your class, your interests, your family, and your table. And you have to pay him for that, vote for him, and other such grimaces. ... Who has to pay? The litigation is serious. Who is the host and who is the guest? Where is the gift and where is the debt? Who is hospitable, who is hostile? ...

"Who among you allows himself to be displaced, carried from his home territory, permits himself to be the passive object of another's whim? ... Who would thank, moreover, the one who decides for you? That would be the same as giving recognition to professional politicians. To those who see and consider others as if they were rocks, cold stones. To those who force others to be only objects, which then can be carried. To those who are astonished when the passive object suddenly wakes up and lashes out in anger. The one who did not lash out against his benefactors, saviors, and fathers would be forgetting all his duties, as would he who did not pass from cold passivity to the heat of battle. Ready to die."

2012

It's only 3 years and one month away. As Neil Cavuto pointed out on his show the other day, one of the lures of the 2012 scenario is that it functions as a massive reset button - we've got more than a few "fine messes" on our hands, and wouldn't it be handy to be able to dump them over the side and watch them vanish forever into a huge fiery gape in the earth ...

Spoilsports keep repeating that the Mayan calendar does not end in 2012, but merely begins a new cycle. Ah, but the advent of a new cycle may well be an occasion for turbulence, dislocation, realignment - "the end, when God untunes the sky" - if only temporarily.

Belief that the world we know it is about to end, or has to end because it is unsustainable, is at a very high point. There is a longing, not yet overwhelming but tangible and growing, for radical simplicity and renewal. And if we have to look at images of California sliding into the Pacific in overbuilt chunks to stir up our juices, so be it, I guess.

The film itself manages to turn people from just about every continent into stock figures: the earth mother, the waffling pol, the clandestine-murderous pol, the selfless scientist, the blonde bimbo with toy dog, the obnoxious overweight rich kid, the absentee father, and so on. Millions of tiny computerized human figures die terrible deaths by fire, earthquake, volcano and tsunami as our heroes escape by airplane. Then their sneaky breach of one of the "arks" intended to save the elite of the earth and man's cultural treasures nearly gets everyone aboard killed. Then the selfless scientist risks all the arks by suddenly deciding to let in the thousand or so folks about to be abandoned at the ark site. Everyone feels better about himself (forget the other billions) and of course the rescue succeeds without a second to spare and miraculously there are no ill effects from having taken on extra hundreds of people.

The director reportedly just laughed when asked if he were going to include scenes of Muslim holy sites undergoing destruction; he commented, "My co-writer Harald [Kloser] said, 'I'm not writing this to get a fatwa on my head.' We have Jesus falling apart in all kinds of forms. The Vatican falls on people's heads, and we can do that because we're a free, Western society, but if there would be, like, Mecca destroyed, there would be an outrage. And so you don't do it." Yes, the film shows the Pope, all the cardinals, the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's basilica and the whole square full of praying believers being crushed and buried in mid-prayer. One thing you can say about modern Christians, they sure can take a joke.

I have a strong weakness for end-of-the-world scenarios, but usually prefer those with more realistic and achievable odds for survival. Of all the world's-end narratives I've heard, the "planetary alignment/solar flare/neutrinos mutating into microwaves/core boils/crust destabilizes" one is by far the least likely. I have to agree with Robin Cook that, barring a sizable asteroid that just blunders in out of nowhere, our most likely big die-off will come of a mutated influenza virus combining the high transmissibility of one strain with the high lethality of another.

There really are a lot of dooms to choose from, though. So many ends, so little time.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Eliot accused us of this back in the 1920s or 30s. How he'd writhe now! I haven't blogged in ages since "joining" Facebook and trying in vain to keep up ... Twitter is not in my future (but that's also what I said about blogging and Facebook, and earlier about CDs, email, DVDs, etc.). Love that too-true t-shirt that remarks "More people have read this t-shirt than read your blog" ... Am mainly writing (writhing?) this to get the previous stale title off the blog, where it greets me each time I log onto the internet. Visiting myself, automatically. Because I care.

Revolutionaries without Revolution

As a former student radical, I had always thought that The Revolution must be bred among and led by the masses - the poor, the disenfranchised, and most particularly the working classes alienated from the means of production - against the bosses, the elites, the "bourgeoisie." But we now have the daily unfolding spectacle of The Revolution being led and imposed from above, against the will (and interests) of the masses, which of course in the case of modern America are the working "middle" classes.

Why does this revolutionized concept of Revolution make us so uneasy? For one thing, it is too easy. It substitutes fiat money (inevitably to be "made good" by much higher taxes of all kinds) for class struggle and the valuable lessons of solidarity, self-organization and class consciousness that genuine political movements bring. And for another thing, it benefits the wrong people: bureaucrats at every level of government; "middlemen" of every sort; officials and functionaries; planners planning, managing and directing social and economic activities of which they are fundamentally ignorant; self-serving "service providers"; those dangerous souls who crave power over others and for that precise reason should never be allowed to acquire it.

When Andre Thirion wrote Revolutionnaires sans revolution in 1972, he was looking back in sorrow at the dashed dreams of Surrealists and Stalinists alike in the 20th century. Thirion at length became a Gaullist. He concluded that "The antagonism between capitalism and Socialism is merely the result of poverty."

This statement might be interpreted in many different ways. The way America's current government interprets it seems to be "We can buy Socialism with other people's money."

Why Statists Always Do the Wrong Thing

"Statists" are those who believe that society, economy and culture flow from the actions of the state, who believe that without the state to manage and organize and regulate and ration, human existence would not be possible. Statism is the viewpoint of the parasite: No parasite could ever conceive that its activity is inessential to the body as a whole, much less deleterious. That idea is simply beyond its ken, like asking someone to imagine the world that will exist when he is no longer in it. Of course there is no such world! The world began the day of my birth and will come screeching to a halt the moment I die! Which will be never!

Because the parasitic viewpoint is so skewed and blinkered, statists are constitutionally incapable of generating the right response when things start to go haywire. (This may also be due to parasitism having caused the breakdown to begin with.) Surely now we must do more!, cry the statists. More of what we do so well: tax and spend, tinker and "experiment" (as the Obama administration is doing, in explicit imitation of FDR's New Deal), forbid and compel, stipulate and decree - then tax and spend some more.

As with all human behavior, the bottom line is self-interest. For instance, statists cannot comprehend the need for individual or national self-defense, and - for obvious reasons - feel very threatened by it. Is a man's own home his castle? Does a man have a right to secure the borders of his own territory? Is a man's own property inalienable? Does a man have a right to the fruit of his own labor? What is this word "own?" wonder the statists, sincerely. What's yours is ours, and what's ours is ours. It's all just lying around here to be taken. What's the problem? Why would you want to keep anybody else out? After all, that's how WE got in ...

The idea that wealth can only be created by human labor is something no statist has ever grasped. For this reason, when wealth seems to be in too short supply, the statist idea of how to increase it is typically parasitic: Take more from the rich! Then print more money! The facts that wealthy societies mean increasing numbers of increasingly wealthy people, and that too much money paradoxically impoverishes all with inflation, are as foreign to statists as the Man in the Moon.

Taxation is literally sacred to statism. Even statists who have no personal intention whatsoever of paying the actual amount of tax they owe feel a shudder of sacrilege coming on when others complain about the tax code. Gloria Steinem famously said that if men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. Likewise the payment of taxes, those beautiful "voluntary contributions" that make statist life so deeply rewarding, is a "rite of Spring" for statists, their Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving all rolled into one.

Some people are born statists, and others become statists or are recruited to statism. Those who were statists at birth must surely include Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. Both of them just knew from an early age that they were going to grow up to be parasites.

Civil Servants in some cases do worthwhile things, and certainly don't think of themselves as parasites; but of course their good deeds are done coercively at the expense of others. Statist beneficence can only be conducted with funds extracted from the labor of persons and businesses by means of various taxes, backed up by the threat of dispossession, imprisonment or worse.

There are two main types of statist: politicians (who are usually lawyers) and financiers (who are often lawyers).

When the financiers screw up the economy too badly, they run to the Treasury Department and become politicians. As soon as profitability has been restored, they run back to the "private sector" and begin dreaming up still more "exotic instruments." Pure capitalism, which exists mostly in theory, does naturally generate cyclical profitability crises; as the system decays under parasitic pressure, these cycles become more frequent, ragged, unpredictable, irrational and extreme.

Can a parasitized state-capitalist economy be saved? "Victory," of course, for the parasite, is Pyrrhic at best. Victory for the parasite means death for the host. If the parasite could be a host, i.e., could be a self-sufficient productive organism, then it would not be a parasite. Predator, parasite and prey: all forms co-exist at all levels, high and low, of life, always have and always will.