I just read yet another gloomy article on Truthout called "Welcome to the Tipping Point," by Quincy Saul, about the multiple, converging tipping points on our planet that make catastrophic global collapse all but inevitable. As is often the case with Marxists, his diagnosis was sound, but his treatment, a wearisome rehashing of Marxist cliches about the absolute necessity of (somehow) organizing the impoverished masses to storm the Castle on the Hill--"Capitalism" and replace it with "Ecosocialism." As the hulking, lovable idiot Lennie keeps saying to his protector George in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, "Tell me about the Rabbits, George." In other words, Fat Chance.
Here is the response I posted:
Most of what Quincy Saul says here about our current tipping points is only too true, but his "revolutionary" language is that of the 19th-early 20th Century: "capitalism" as the enemy, mobilizing the masses for revolution etc. etc. Musty, outworn Marxist rhetoric of impoverished "good guys" somehow organizing worldwide to overthrow a handful of super-rich "bad guys." Been there, done that. Failed utterly.
To confront our current, apocalyptic circumstances, we need to dig much deeper than that. We need not only new ideas, but a new language to express them. Let's drop the "isms and schisms" altogether and begin with the simple, luminous recognition that we ARE Gaia's body, and vice versa: Gaia is us. If she has terminal cancer, so do we. By "we" I mean ALL of us, from the poorest, destitute refugee fleeing Syria or Yemen to the corrupt and self-deluded zombies in Congress and their smug, willfully ignorant, but impeccably well-organized billionaire buddies at Monsanto and Exxon and Goldman Sachs.
Cancer has only two possible outcomes: Death, or Spontaneous Remission. The first is, by long odds, the most likely. Deal with it. We are all going to die soon, in all likelihood--sooner than we think. And it is not going to be pretty.
But there is another, less likely, but still medically attested alternative to extinction: Spontaneous Remission, whereby, for reasons unknown, the cancerous, poison-spewing cells that are feeding on our body all wake up at once, and realize that they are actually part of the body they are consuming--and act accordingly, shrinking back into their matrix and assuming adaptive roles yet again in the body they now acknowledge as their own.
Is spontaneous remission on a planetary scale even possible? We don't know. But whether or not it happens, it can happen within each of us--by breathing, observing, and letting go--and then, in expanding circles, reclaiming our bodies and neighborhoods from corporate agriculture by growing gardens; our communities from corporate domination by forming local cooperatives; and as such awareness becomes viral, healing our planet--or at least adapting to the new, dangerous world that will be left after we have passed these irrevocable "tipping points."
May it be so.
3 comments:
Moving beyond the destructive mentality and reality of capitalism is vital to any remission. Ecosocialism(s) are the only real answer but that does indeed require a change in consciousness and in who we relate to one another and to the larger We (Gaia).
As for Marxist rhetoric, it is truer than it ever was. The idea of the working class majority realizing our shared condition and collective power in confronting this monstrous system of planetary death is far more possible and has a far better chance of actually saving us than a massive adoption of Buddhist practice which all too often looks inward but fails to make the outward connection to activism with a realistic understanding of what we are up against.
All "isms" are not bad. Without a class conscious Marxist approach, consciousness, much less needed change will not happen. Without the change of spiritual consciousness, that Marxist approach only recreates the diseased model (as we have seen). It takes the New Person to create the new System -- the political and the spiritual revolution are inextricably linked.
As often happens, Al, we agree on everything except terminology. I agree that the political and spiritual revolution are inextricably linked; my problem is with the outdated terminology of "capitalism" and "socialism" and the whole trope of "class struggle" so close to the heart of Marxists. To wit:
RE "capitalism"--there is no such thing--as a coherent, conscious ideology. What we call "capitalism" is actually an epiphenomenon of the zero-sum logic of money: more is better and what's mine is not yours. But money itself is an abstraction--it is nothing more than an arbitrary transform of information about the marginal value of commodities. "Marginal" means the value to you, minus the value to me. If I own a lot of commodities, they are of little or no intrinsic value to me, but often much needed by all those who do not have, or can be deluded (by advertising) into believing, that they need, that commodity, and are willing to pay me for it. As a direct and inevitable consequence of this, those with money get steadily richer, and thus more capable of cornering the market on commodities needed (or desired) by everyone else, thus increasing their share of the pie even more. This is the intrinsic, inner logic of the money system, or what you call "capitalism." But it is not an "ism" at all--it is simply a logical consequence of zero-sum arithmetic. To be sure, governments can regulate this system of commerce in the public interest, but then, as the corporations get richer and richer, they can (as they have) simply buy out the governments that are supposed to regulate them.
Trying to instruct and organize the vast impoverished masses to embrace a counter-ideology of class solidarity, and then rise up in an organized way against the owner and merchant class as one, is a huge waste of time and energy, and most likely futile since, having all the money, Glomart also has all the weapons, all the television propaganda, and as many mercenary enforcers as they can hire from a labor pool desperate for jobs to put down any organized resistance from the "peasantry." The Peasant's Revolt approach worked well in France, Russia, and China (before it backfired into oppression, factionalism, and state terror) precisely because the owner class--the landed aristocracy and rich bourgeoisie--was tiny and isolated compared to the vast swarm of enraged peasants surrounding their castles. But in our modern, televised Glomart world, there is no clear distinction between "the masses" and "the capitalists." In fact, most of the "masses" would be loath to give up their television addiction--their bread and circuses, their cellphones, their malls--in order to go to political meetings or angry rallies...
The Gaian approach I am proposing is fundamentally different. Rather than attempting to organize the masses and "overthrow" the super-rich elite, our effort is to undercut it by cutting off its life support system--the money we spend, that they need, in order to sustain their power over us. It is a bottom-up, not top-down, approach to social and cultural transformation, and with our current internet connectivity, it could, with strategic and imaginative marketing of core ideas, go viral.
Best wishes,
Tom
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