New Blog: RadicalProgress.Info

Friends,

I have a new blog that will eventually hold most of my writings. I may continue to update this blog from time to time when a posting doesn't yet fit into the more systematic orientation of radicalprogress.info .

You welcome to view that blog.

Peace! Charley

The Progressive Turn

As I've been considering the passage of the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" this past week, it strikes me how this is the latest in a series of mobilizations of progressive movement energy. That trend seemed to me to first emerge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That event showed just how bankrupt the Bush administration was on domestic issues. By the mid-term election of 2006, a mass discontent had developed that won both houses of Congress for the Democrats, an historic upset.

A Democratic party victory is not in itself a progressive victory. The Democrats are tightly wedded to corporate money and the powers that be. A progressive movement that is worthy of the name will always have to work primarily outside the two-party system on behalf of working people and the poor. However, the Democratic Party has been, for better and usually for worse, the party of "the left" in the USA since FDR. Social movement energy is the key, not electoral politics.

The specific provisions of PP&AC legislation could turn out to be either good or bad or really bad. Really good seems unlikely. However, what really seems good is that the ideological trend begun by Ronald Reagan of government slashing of social services has been dealt a serious blow. For the first time since maybe the ill-fated "windfall profits tax" of Jimmy Carter, a social program expansion has been legislated that swims against the tide of "free market" dogma.

Skepticism still seems in order. This thing is so multi-valent that its actual impact will be complex and seems unlikely to be primarily positive. For those of us on the left who favor a universal healthcare system that provides solid support for everyone, this bill is a far cry from even the weakest of existing universal programs.

But, taking a longer view offers real evidence to be hopeful. The winners in this legislative victory are the forces of the working majority and the poor of this country. We now have the wind at our backs at a level not seen since the early 1960s. I won't be so foolish to predict that the coming era will surpass that era for social innovation. However, as a congenital malcontent, I've never been as glad to be an American as I have been the past year.

If Christians Were More Quaker: An Open Letter to Christian Friends by a Post-Christian Quaker

(This post is something of a response to Theo Hobson's Guardian article, "If Quakers were more Christian".)

Theo Hobson's article is a very direct personal testimony of one Christian's first reaction to the experience of waiting worship, as practiced by liberal Quakers. He emphasizes the absence of any Christian messages, "It strikes me that Quakerism has over-reacted against the dangers of institutional Christianity. It has got rid of priests, dogmas, rules – and whoops! – there goes a rather important baby along with all that bathwater. If Quakerism could somehow be re-rooted in reference to Jesus Christ, and be the minimalist, anti-authoritarian form of this particular religion, I think it might be for me."

A lengthy comment page has developed since the original publication on March 18. In typical intelligent and witty British fashion, Quakerism is alternately pilloried and admired. It is quite impressive to me that Quakerism in Britian has moved to such a prominent place in the cultural scene, with a national "Quaker Day" and a successful outreach program entitled "Quaker Quest" (which is in the early stages of an American debut).

I hope Theo Hobson finds his way to a Quaker Christian faith. I know that resources for such a faith are even more scarce in Britain than in the U.S.A. Here in the colonies we have four major divisions of Quakers, three of which are explicitly Christian, and the fourth not so much. In Britain, the main body of Quakerism is substantially unorthodox, and at best, only culturally Christian. Not that this is a bad thing, except for Christians like Hobson. As a post-Christian Quaker, I do hope he finds what he's seeking.

And, just to state my priorities here, I desire a vocal, impassioned, inspired revival of Christian Quakerism across the entire world. In a world wracked by warfare, domination, and oppressive banality, a vibrant Christian Quakerism is sorely needed as an alternative to Right-Wing establishment Christianity. That was what George Fox, the most influential early Quaker preacher, fought for his entire adult life.

As you may expect, there is more to my story. While I avidly support and encourage the advancement of the ministry of Christian Friends, I just as avidly disapprove of attempts by Christian Friends to undermine the theological diversity that has become normative within both Britain Yearly Meeting and the U.S.A.'s Friends General Conference. I firmly hold that there are multiple valid ways of being a Quaker and it is a waste of resources and source of disharmony to urge any sort of definitively Christian faith stance upon Britain YM and FGC.

In the U.S.A. our four traditions of Quakerism - Liberal, Evangelical, Pastoral, and Conservative - each have their unique charism. Each stream deserves unmitigated support in their distinctive missions in the wider world and their distinctive internal integrity. This is not to say that a Quaker of one sort may not criticize a Quaker of another sort. In fact, I expect that it will be impossible to prevent such inter-Quaker disagreement. In a wider perspective, Quakerism's diversity mirrors and reflects back the diversity and divisions of Western civilization, despite some naive illusions each tradition harbors about being "set apart" from the system of the world.

For example, I do try to influence Evangelical Friends to become more tolerant toward same-sex relationships. What I don't try to do is to convince Evangelical Friends to stop being Evangelicals. There is a growing movement within Evangelicalism, going back to the '70s, that promotes an lgbtq-affirmative reading of Scripture. While I personally disagree with Evangelicals' view of scripture, I don't believe it is a worthwhile endeavor to focus much energy on debunking inerrancy. As a leftist Quaker, I got bigger fish to fry than biblical literalism. I'd much rather try and get Evangelicals, Friends and otherwise, to take seriously the traditions of Christian pacifism and get onboard with anti-war activism. Keep your inerrancy, just lose your militarism and heterosexism.

So, what has really got me up on this soap-box? What's really bugging me, you may ask? Well, here it is. Embedded in the comment pages of Hobson's article is an all-too typical attitude among Christian Friends that violates all of the inter-Quaker respect that I am trying to champion. I am going to post it in full, but if you want to know who said it, you'll have to go to back to the Hobson article's comment pages.

One Quaker there, A.L., writes, "I think Theo, you intuitively identified the malaise that is essentially liberal Quakerism. Over the last 30 years in order to appear to appear "reasonable" to wider society, Britain Yearly Meeting's (BYM) central bodies have connived to whittle away the core elements of the Quaker faith in order to make itself more attractive to the general public. The justification for the de-Christianisation was 'we will put people off if we're too dogmatic...'. The end result is that liberal Quakerism has ended up with very little spiritual content, standing for actually very little, and you seemed to picked that up yourself. Ah yes, the truth is a last out... The liberal swing has just gone too far."

This is an seriously wrong-headed comment on liberal Quakerism. It betrays all sorts of ignorance about liberal Quakerism's pedigree and trajectory within the modern world. First of all, it implies that "de-Christianisation" is a recent phenomena going back a mere 30 years. To the contrary, various studies of the last two centuries of FGC and BYM have unearthed a much lengthier process of internal debate and liberalization going back to before the Hicksite schism of 1827. The Hicksite Quakers – forerunners of today's Liberals - were largely Christian, but a subset of them were in fact heading towards Unitarian ideas, most notably Lucretia Mott. Just as today's Quakerism isn't uniform, even among Evangelicals, Hicksite Quakers were diverse, and the seeds of today's developments are discernible within the schism itself. Lucretia Mott was so controversial that attempts were made to disown her, but failed. Reading her correspondence, many of which were published in 2002's Selected Letters volume, leaves no doubt that she was wholly within the liberal tradition.

As a passionate partisan of the liberal tradition, I take offense at the notion that liberal Quakerism “malaise” has “very little spiritual content” and “gone too far.” Friend A.L., you ain't seen nothin' yet! Liberal Quakers have a solid basis in history and a bright and sunny future. We may never be as big as Evangelical or Pastoral Quakerism, but we ain't going away either.

Here's a suggestion to my disgruntled Christian Quaker Friends (If you ain't disgruntled, I ain't talking to you). Start your own revival. Start moving in on other Christians, like George Fox did. We liberal Quakers aren't interested (OK, some liberal Quakers are actually interested!), most of us are committed to a pluralistic, open form of Quakerism.

Why would you want to win over some fraction of liberal Quakerism to the true faith once delivered? There ain't enough of us for that to be any sort of victory for Christian Quakerism. A real victory for Christian Quakerism would be for you to have a real impact on wider Christian churches. Imagine that, rather than trying to take apart liberal Quakerism, why not try building a truly authentic independent Christian Quaker movement?

(Afterthought: I held this post up for half a day to see if the anger that drove it settled, doing what Quakers call "seasoning." I still agree with what I wrote, so I'm letting it stand mostly unedited. I know that I have left out a lot of complexities, but, hey, this is just one little blog post, you can read some of my others here if you'd like more of how I approach this topic.)

A Philosophical Fragment

While I often write about activism and social change, I tend to approach the topics as a philosopher. The philosophical temperament that I seem to have no doubt finds it genesis in my unusual childhood. I was raised Pentecostal by a father who was incredibly intelligent, but also emotionally damaged. He visited his own emotional wounds upon his children in various ways, cementing our allegiance to a dogmatic religious enthusiasm that was at odds with even his own intellectual tendencies. He rejected those tendencies as some sort of thorn in the flesh that fought against his true desire to be a perfectly obedient follower of Jesus.

I turned first to philosophy when I was around 18 years old, though I had a keen interest in theology and comparative religion from an earlier age, which doubtless set the stage for my later departure from Pentecostalism. At 18, I read a book entitled The God Who is There by Frances Schaeffer. I remember its serious engagement with modern society without the simplistic condemnation so typical of most Christian writings. I was hooked on the idea that philosophy had a crucial role to play in life.

Fast forward about 7 years and I am married, a college drop-out, and father of a precious little girl. I am still fighting those inner demons from my abusive childhood, and struggling with the latest in a series of episodic unemployments. I decide to return to college and immediately enroll in philosophy courses, in part because they are the only courses that engage religion at all at the state-run University of Illinois of Chicago.

It was in those two fabulous life-changing years at UIC that I encountered the amazing ideas that would catapult me beyond the limits of my Christian upbringing. I read feminist, anarchist, Marxist, and postmodern books that expanded my horizons and nourished my starving intellect. While I was forced to drop out again after the birth of my son, I would never be the same.

Philosophy has held me spell-bound ever since. I still dream of becoming that professor of philosophy that I aspired to in those years at UIC. I might still return to that path, though I cannot say for certain as I approach my fifth decade how much I can invest in such a major change of direction.

Peace! Charley

Politics (and Love?)

In 1984, I got involved with a Mennonite Church in Dallas, TX., at the age of 22. I had been raised a Pentecostal, but became a pacifist at an early age due to the Sermon on the Mount. Mennonites were one of a handful of denominations that took pacifism seriously. While involved with the Dallas Mennonite Fellowship, I moved into an east Dallas neighborhood to be close to a couple of families and we started a small group with the intent of becoming a house church. My experiences with this group set the stage for my eventual relocation and involvement with Reba Place Fellowship, an intentional community that was part of the Mennonites. Tim Rapson was one of the 3 men in the Dallas group, including myself. This blog is a response to his blog about his political ideas and how they've changed in the years since we lived in the same neighborhood.

Tim writes that he finds it "painful" to see the "good intentions" of his "far left" friends so "misplaced." He says his views are based solely on love for people.

I will cop to being a far leftist, unapologetically. As a pacifist, I would never sanction the use of violence to achieve leftist goals, though I disagree with Libertarians like Tim who view taxation as violence.

It's interesting to me that while Tim makes a great deal out of pacifism keeping him aligned with Democrats, as I have never seen them as a "peace party." I support a few select Democrats, like Kucinich, but have voted Green since 2000. I boycotted the elections of '92 and '96. Before that, I held my nose to vote Democratic.

As a libertarian socialist, the meager under-funded efforts of the Democrats to address social needs are simply inadequate. Even the current health-care reform legislation is just Big Government caving in to Big Business yet again.

In essence I agree with Tim that Big Government will never really oppose Big Business, but I can't see why Tim thinks that Libertarianism is any cure for that problem. He lauds Ronald Reagan, the master of Big Government market intervention, also known as deficit-driven defense spending. That's right, the Gipper never balanced a single federal budget. Clinton did.

I am not as strict a pacifist nowadays as I once was, but from my Christian faith I gleaned a radical view of the economy. The Bible rails from one end to the other against the evils of wealth and in defence of the poor. I can't see how anyone can claim to take the Bible literally and not be a socialist, maybe even advocate central planning on behalf of the poor. I don't exactly advocate that, but it seems to me indisputable to me that the Bible is anti-capitalist.

Tim cites some things that the "free market" supposedly has given us like the "automobile, the plane, the suburban house, clothes, and more food." All of these things depended on government grants and state education, not one of them was purely a creation of a private entrepreneur.

I see several huge staggering problems. First, humankind is divided into haves and have-nots. I have always been closer to poverty than not, so I find it hard to care when some millionaire whines about higher taxes. Second, I believe that we are fast out-stripping the planet's capacity to support us. We have to redesign our cities, towns, transportation, agriculture, and other systems to leave a lighter footprint on the earth. Capitalism wants us to consume until we drop dead, how is that even remotely a Christian value? We also have to slow down our population explosion. Third, we have decided that war is some kind of solution to political conflict, which is insane.

Yeah, I am leftist because I love people, too, Tim, but that means I want everyone on the earth to have enough to eat, a creative education, healthcare, and rich natural environment. Is that too much to ask?

Peace! Charley

Dynamics of Radical Progress 2: Capitalism and The State, Re-Considered

In the first post of this series (ever notice that I've promised more than one series? Story of my life...), I proposed that eight social movements are candidates for a new reformulation of radical left politics, in the aftermath of the 60s and the New Left. Of course, this isn't an entirely new idea.

I first came up with a version of this idea around 1989. At that time, I had begun to incorporate the core agendas of pacifism, feminism, environmentalism, progressive religion, and socialism. There were hybrid social movement theories in play as well, such as socialist-feminism. I discovered somewhat later one of the more stable attempts at the synthesis I desired in the book Liberating Theory, (hereafter referenced as 'LT') published by South End Press (from which would come Z Magazine, a leading publication of the the left, in the lineage of Noam Chomsky's libertarian socialism, yet another hybrid, but from the Old Left).

This book formulated a fairly rudimentary proposal of combining feminism (which it broadened to call kinship), anarchism (broadened to politics), Marxism (broadened to economy), and Black nationalism (broadened to community) into a single new theory, thus taking Libertarian Socialism (or Anarcho-Syndicalism, a synonym), in a new direction.

My own modification of this model was to "split off" four additional social movements from the four proposed by LT. From Marxism's economic theory, I distinguished two domains of economy, the ecological and industrial; Two domains of kinship, gender and sexuality; two domains of community, race/ethnicity and religion/irreligion; and two domains of politics, legal/governance and martial.

This elaboration raised the question of whether LT's four "spheres" were adequate. I had concluded that ecology could not be subsumed under economy, and came to see that Murray Bookchin's proposal that radical theory be renamed "social ecology" was in many ways an advance over all previous theories. However, I couldn't simply dilute economic struggle into a subset of ecological realities.

From Marxism I had gleaned the principle that social struggles are always concrete, not abstract and require a collective mass base. In other words, a movement capable of changing the world needed to have the interests of a substantial percentage of that world at its core. While ecology ideally was "everybody's" interest, it seemed to me that subordinating economic struggles - as well as all the other domains I'd distinguished - to an overarching ecological paradigm left something to be desired. That 'something' was a unifying radicalizing potential within the mass of humanity. My eight-fold revolution - and even LT's four-fold agenda - seemed to lack a coherent social base.

It was the coherent social base of Marxism in the early 1900s that propelled it into national and international power. Focusing its principled militancy on the working masses of the industrialized world, Marxism began to advance beyond the more modest gains of its chief rivals on the left, namely, liberalism and anarchism. Liberalism was committed to the interests of the educated middle-classes, while anarchism was committed to interests of a variety of sectors of society, especially workers, peasants, and artisans.

Marxism was committed to creating a revolutionary force exclusively devoted to industrial workers. Since industry of this sort controlled a major portion of the wealth of society, Marxism succeeded where Anarchism failed because it understood how capitalism really worked. Of course, Marxists then proceeded to create societies that were more authoritarian and class-exploiting than liberal Democracies. It is not an accident that the Cold War was won by liberal Democracy against Stalinism and Marxism.

Can a class-based mass struggle perspective as championed by Marxism be combined with Anarchism? This has been tried repeatedly in history with mixed results. The Industrial Workers of the World are explicitly committed to Anarcho-Syndicalism to this day after almost 100 years. However, it seems to me that just as the mass of humanity hates economic exploitation and authoritarian government, they nevertheless embrace the ideals of a democratic state and an economy that upholds individual freedom, as well as cooperation and justice.

While I am a passionate champion of workers, I find that the Marxist idea of abolishing capitalism using the State and the Anarchist idea of abolishing the State in order to abolish capitalism both fail. The State isn't going away and, for a long time to come, neither will capitalism. Radical politics today has to build itself on the real potential of the broad mass of humanity.

The path of abolishing capitalism and authoritarianism that seems most hopeful to me involves primarily a renewed struggle at the level of the State for a new program of economic and political reforms and programs. I do not know if these will succeed, and if they fail in my lifetime, a later generation will have to rethink this strategy from the ground up.

My basic economic and political agenda are very similar to those of classical social democracy. I support massive public funding for healthcare, education, childcare, and workers' organizations. Unions are at a crisis point and have been for decades. Whether we can rebuild the existing unions to previous levels of influence, and moreover to surpass previous achievements is an open question, but I can see no alternative to attempting such a rebuilding of organized labor.

In terms of the State, we must also continue to press for electoral and political reform. The unbridled control of political offices and legislative priorities by the wealthy classes must be confronted by principled and militant opposition. In fact, from Anarchism and the advance in our society of greater independence of thought, we can propose that the time has come for profound changes in the nature of our political institutions. Public funding of all elections and multi-party proportional representation seem absolutely critical to advancing beyond the stale two-party system.

As I look back over the previous half-century of struggles since 1955, I am struck by two overwhelming developments, 1) the continued rise of a militant, rapacious capitalism and 2) the parallel rise of a new authoritarianism that closes off public space for political reform and advance in authentic democracy while waging wars abroad, preaching dogmatism domestically, and without any genuine love for either freedom or human community. In the face of dogmatism, militarism, authoritarianism, and capitalism, a new radical politics must call for freedom, economic justice, constructive international relations, and a libertarian socialism.

"Climate Gate" Gets a Re-Tread: Daily Mail Distorts

I tend to post articles about human-caused climate change by experts, because I am not one. I am scientifically literate, but not expert enough to feel confident trying to explain the complexity of the earth's climate balance.

However, today's Daily Mail, a London-based yellow journalism rag, has a headline claiming that a scientist at the center of the Climatic Research Unit's controversy “admitted” there has been no global warming since 1995. The CRU has been doing sound research for decades into the issues of human-caused climate change.

CRU recently became a cause celebre among climate change deniers when emails and other electronic documents were stolen from them and subsequently anonymously posted on the internet. The emails in question have led to variety of inquiries into possible data falsification by CRU.

Today the Daily Mail claimed that former CRU director Phil Jones, whose emails and other documents are at the center of the controversy, had admitted that "1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming."

However, that one line is ripped out of context. The Daily Mail says that Jones "sounds much less ebullient about the basic theory." Compared to what?

Here's the exact quote from a recent BBC interview, which is the basis of the Mail's misreading:

"BBC – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods."

Notice, "only just" meaning that he considers the apparently "flat" trend to not be statistically significant, nor would he consider a trend that showed a sharper rise to be significant.

The term "statistically significant" is standard science talk when discussing complex data. What he is saying is that if we were to decide if climate change were occurring based on the data since 1995, we couldn't decide either for or against. Climate change is a complex phenomenon, and does not rise or fall sharply, but the overall trend is what matters.

All the reports that I have read continue to say that the "flat" data is actually not that flat. It falls just below the "statistically significant" line but not by much, meaning that when combined with the previous century's data it is consistent with continued - wait for it -

GLOBAL WARMING.

Last year was one of the warmest years on record, and I quote at length below.

"A report by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) confirmed that the present decade has been the warmest ever observed in the southern hemisphere.

"The NASA report released Jan. 21, said that new analysis of global surface temperatures found that 2009 was the second warmest since 1880. "In the southern hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record," it said.

"The report explained that 2008 was the coolest year of the decade in the southern hemisphere due to a strong La Nina phenomenon, which cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean below average temperatures. La Niña (the little girl) is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon similar to El Niño.

"During La Niña, sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean is lower than normal by 0.5 degrees Celsius. In the United States, an episode of La Niña is defined as a period of at least five months of La Niña conditions.

"In its report, the NASA said that "2009 saw a return to near-record [high] global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York."

"The document also confirmed the trend seen elsewhere, that this decade has been the warmest ever. In the paper, NASA points out that the 2009 average temperatures were a small fraction of a degree lower than 2005, the warmest on record.

"That puts 2009 in a tie with a cluster of other recent years - 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 - as the second warmest on record."

Source: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50287

Peace! Charley

Dynamics of Radical Progress: Envisioning Revolutionary Global Change

By Charley Earp

Preliminary: This essay rethinks some earlier attempts at a comprehensive understanding of social change, most notably in a 2005 essay, In Search of Religious Radicalism, and my former blog Utopian Longings. This is the first of an intended series.

Introduction:

The period from 1955-1975, broadly called the “60s,” marks the most recent era of rapid sociopolitical change in modern societies, including the U.S.A. and Europe. Although it may not have been revolutionary by strict definition, future progressive change will be defined to a substantial degree by that era.

Prior to the 1960s, radical politics were dominated by two competing theories, anarchism and Marxism. Anarchism reached its zenith in the Spanish Revolution of 1936, with significant anarchist movements in many countries in that era. Marxism's most famous victory was the Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, eventually forming the world's second most powerful political force in the aftermath of World War 2.

The 1960s saw the emergence of what have been called the “new social movements” which redefined radical politics. Whereas Marxism focused on opposing capitalism, and anarchism focused its opposition on the State, the new social movements identified different systems of social domination and oppression such as male domination, racism, militarism, and ecological exploitation.

Anarchism and Marxism each claimed that their distinct radical struggle was the central and universal struggle that defined human emancipation. Similarly, the new social movements would elevate their own struggles to central position. The result in the long run was the collapse of any organizational coherence and longevity, as well as a largely unrealized revolutionary potential. In other words, without a unifying social vision, no true revolution was achieved by the 1960s, despite the powerful forces that were mobilized during this era.

Several attempts have been made since the 60s to unify, theoretically, the diverse social movements, with the hope that this will aid the aborted fulfillment of the radical promise of the 1960s. The approach taken here to this quest for unification will be two-fold. First, to identify the primary social movements which should be unified within a new radical paradigm. Second, to explore the foundational coherence of the primary social movements, that is, to identify what it is, if anything, that unites them.

From the list given so far it can be suggested that at least six social movements are candidates for the new radical paradigm, namely, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, anti-racism, pacifism, and environmentalism. Since Marxism and anarchism are defined as exclusive theories that have unifying claims that will be evaluated during the second part of this essay, it is their more generic definitions - anti-capitalism and radical democracy, respectively - that will be considered.

Although six social movement candidates seems more than adequate, arguments can be made that the list is still incomplete. Especially prominent since the 60s have been the sexual identity movements, such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, polyamory, and queer movements. A further candidate to consider is usually identified with the Right, namely religious social movements. Including religious movements in this exploration seems justified from the history of anti-racist and anti-war movements which both have strong ties to organized religion. The specific form of religious movement to be examined here can be termed “progressive religion.”

The next step will be to consider these candidates for primary social movements – anti-capitalism, radical democracy, feminism, anti-racism, pacifism, environmentalism, sexual identity, and progressive religion – and propose their unification by either merging them into larger wholes or even a single unified whole.

Notes on Religious Socialism - 01

My socialism arose originally from two biblical texts:

First: Matthew 25:31ff: "When the son of man starts his revolution with all his band around him, then he will assume authority. And all the nations will be assembled before him, and he will sort them out, like a farmer separating his cows from his hogs, penning the cows on the right and the hogs on the left. Then the Leader of the Movement will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you pride of my Father, share in the Movement that was set up for you since creation; for I was hungry and you shared your food with me; I was thirsty and you shared your water with me; I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ragged and you clothed me, sick and you nursed me; I was in jail, and you stood by me." (Cotton Patch Version)

Second, Acts 32-35: "Now a single heart and soul was in the body of believers. Not one of them considered his property to be private, but all things were shared by them. With mighty power the apostles were giving the evidence of Jesus' aliveness, and upon them all was a spirit of abounding goodwill. You know, there wasn't a person in the group in need. For owners of land or houses were selling them and bringing the proceeds and placing them at the disposal of the apostles. Distribution was then made to everyone on the basis of his need." (CPV)

I haven't figured out why most Christians don't read these texts and immediately see that capitalism has nothing in common with the economic principles of Jesus and the first Christians.

Of course, one could call this something other than socialism. It took me years to personally feel comfortable with the word. At times, I called it communism or communalism. I never saw this as something centered in the State like the bureaucracies of Communist nations. One idea that made a lot of sense to me was a global network of church-based communes, forming a counter-economy that would grow in time to displace capitalism. I still think something like that would be very cool, even if it couldn't be socialism for everyone. After all, socialism can be diverse, with several different forms of implementation, just like capitalism.

(Note: I intend to do a series of these, tracing the evolution of my socialist thought.)

Peace! Charley

Critical Integrative Theory #1: Pathological Social Evolution

I apologize up-front for the character of this posting. It is jargon-laden and opaque. However, it has come to represent for me something of a break-through, so I want to "save" it by posting it as a blog. You may disregard entirely.

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Ken Wilber has repeatedly said that most of the world is at the level of Nazis in their development, most notably in his recent book, Integral Spirituality. This statement has troubling prejudices within it, as it seems to not ask why this might be so. Even further, is it even really true?

I will propose here that the under-used concept of "pathology" proposed in Wilber's Integral Psychology has the potential to re-shape and advance a critical understanding of social evolution. I am calling this project of rethinking, "Critical Integrative Theory." It is integrative, rather than integral, as that term is becoming a trademark of the Wilberian movement, and I wish to cast a wider net. It is called 'critical' after the Frankfurt School's tradition of "critical theory," of whom Jurgen Habermas is one of the leading thinkers.

Critical Theory is a "social theory oriented toward critiquing and changing society as a whole, in contrast to traditional theory oriented only to understanding or explaining it." I know that Wilber does wish to change and critique society, but in these blogs I will pursue a line of social analysis that Wilber seems to neglect, though I do not charge him with intentional neglect.

Frankfurt School critical theory began as an attempt to address the political crises of pre-war Europe. Frankfurt school theorists were troubled by the implications of burgeoning fascism for Marxist (and Liberal) theories of social change and revolution. Many Marxists expected that the working masses in Europe would align themselves with Russia against German and Italian Fascism and overthrow those regimes. However, in both nations the working masses substantially supported Fascism. It is clear that working-class fascism was utterly against the objective interests of the working masses, and yet, millions of workers seem to have swallowed it whole. How do Marxists and progressives account for such a self-defeating situation?

Marxism theorizes that the collectivization of industrial labor leads to the unification of working-class interests and culture, guided by the Communist movement into a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. What happened in Nazi Germany was the unification of the society by appeals to religion, patriotism, sexual repression, and scorn for intellectuals. To this day, working masses around the world are often easily drawn into alliances with the rich and powerful at the expense of their own emancipatory interests. Critical Theory sought to explain this and to do so, it sought resources that lay outside those typically considered politically acceptable to Marxists, namely, Freud, Kant, Weber, among others.

In the decades since the Frankfurt School first coalesced in the 1930s, critical theorists have continued to seek out and extend a critical understanding of political and social development. In the 1960s, Feminism came into the picture to challenge the gender biases of both Marx and Freud. Other challenges to critical thought have come from environmentalist, anarchist, anti-racist, and anti-heterosexist movements and thinkers. Addressing all of these critiques and their relevance to an integrative theory of social evolution is obviously a massive undertaking, but some beginning is vitally important.

One beginning point is class-consciousness. This is a fundamental component of Marxism, though it is not confined to Marxism. Class-consciousness is simply a recognition of the division of power in society that is perpetuated by our contemporary economic system. In all of the things I have read by Wilber, he nowhere acknowledges that the evolution of consciousness might be impacted by economic factors such as poverty, lack of education, or hierarchical workplace conditions. If Wilber has in fact considered this possibility, it's lack in his major works, such as Sex, Ecology, and Spiritualityor A Brief Theory of Everything suggests that at best he considers it only weakly relevant or at worst that he considers it has no relevance.

Another element of Critical Theory that addresses the prevalence of fascist mindsets is psychoanalysis. Freud's theory of the unconscious proposed that we do not always act rationally because we are emotionally deformed, often in our infantile development. Frankfurt theorist Theodor Adorno collaborated with American psychologists to produce the seminal work The Authoritarian Personality which proposed a model for measuring authoritarian tendencies in individuals, as well as a theory of how such authoritarian tendencies become part of the personality. The chief culprit in TAP is harsh parental discipline and abuse.

Here is where Wilber's concept of pathology in Integral Psychology becomes relevant. Ideally, the development of consciousness involves a wider and wider social world, beginning with infantile egoism and advancing through stages of transcending and including the lower stages in a higher awareness that takes in the interests of others in growing circles of affinity. When something obstructs the ideal stage progression, the personality clings to a lower stage of awareness in an attempt to save the self from a perceived threat. The result is a pathological - neurotic or psychotic - disconnection from healthy awareness and agency.

The combination of class-consciousness and psychoanalysis led critical theorists to the ingenious, though perhaps by now obvious, conclusion that the working masses' propensity for self-defeat and acquienscence to authoritarianism originated in developmental malformations in childhood, i.e. psychological trauma. Instead of seeing potential "Nazis" everywhere, critical theory offers a sympathetic account of human woundedness that underlies the fearsome threat of mass fascism.

The rise of fascism in Germany was explained by Critical theory as the result of harsh parental discipline that was widespread in the pre-War era. Mothers who had to work due to poverty, could not attend their infants with the sort of indulgent parenting that middle-class mothers could. Even if a working mother was inclined to indulgence, the conditions of poverty and stress would frustrate such aspirations. The conclusion is that poverty psychologically traumatizes infants, obstructing the ideal developmental sequence so prized by Ken Wilber and other integral thinkers. Much, much more could be said here, for example, taking in feminist accounts of how predominantly female mothering leads to sexist attitudes in boys and girls. For the time being, hopefully, what I have written persuades some in the integral/integrative development movement to consider constructive changes in their approach.

The project of a "Critical Integrative Theory" would pursue many of the worthy aims of Wilber's Integral theory, but subject them to a wide range of radical rethinking that draws on the continuing work of critical theorists. Wilber's concern about billions of potential Nazis is worrying, but understanding the psychoanalytic and class determinants on human agency reveals that Nazism is not a "natural" stage of development, but rather a pathological aberration. The challenge to integral activists is to use the evitability of pathology as an opening to rethink the project of changing the world. To this point, Wilber's mode has been to groom a middle-class cadre of enlightened mystics. The elitism of that approach seems self-evident, but also understandable from a critical theory perspective. The psychological development of middle-class infants has its own set of neurotic and pathological pitfalls.

Minarcho-Socialism?

Anarchism has always had an appeal for me. However, so has Marxism. This is a bit of a problem if one defines anarchism as the abolition of the State and Capitalism, and, Marxism as the abolition of Capitalism via the State.

What I really want to find is a middle-ground philosophy, one that rejects what is most dangerous and oppressive about the existing State, while saving the aspects of government and collective power that might actually create progress.

If you are strict Anarchist, you have probably already stopped listening. If you haven't stopped, hear me out.

In libertarian capitalist circles there are roughly speaking two approaches to the state, anarchist and minarchist. Anarcho-capitalists share with leftist anarchists a political commitment to abolishing the State. Minarcho-Capitalists share with other conservatives the view that the State is necessary for collective institutions like armies and police.

Minarchism is a funny little word. It was coined by a theorist, Samuel Konkin III from the "agorist" left-wing of the Libertarian capitalist movement. Konkin meant the term as a label with which to distance his more strictly anarchist views from those who defended voting, armies, and police.

Most socialists in theory seem to defend a massive State apparatus that manages the economy, guarantees full employment, and acts to redistribute wealth. In addition, most socialists consider armies, police, and other coercive functions of the State as continuing under a socialist administration.

While I've been anti-capitalist for most of my life, I have also been anti-war and advocated nonviolent policing. At one point, I did call my view anarchist, but as I have thought it through further, I think it might be better use that funny little word for my position. While I may not be original, I certainly may be one of the few minarcho-socialists on the planet.

In fact, a google search reveals usages of minarcho-socialist back as far as 2006. The most interesting page is here.

Peace! Charley

Schema of Radical Progress

An outline aimed at breadth and depth, but not exhaustive

1) Domains of reality :

Ecosystem

Institution

Social Movement

Society/Culture

Interpersonal

Experiential

Mind/Body

Biological

2) Developmental Stages (from narrow to broad):

Primal Self

Self-differentiation

Simple relations

Complex relations

Tribal Identification

Ethnocentric

Humanitarian

Universalist

3) Categorical Trajectories (in reverse alphabetical order):

Power

Nature

Martial

Labor

Gender

Culture

Community

Affective

My Love Affair With "Capitalism"

Tonight, I went to see "Capitalism: A Love Story" (hereafter CALS) by Michael Moore. I rarely go see movies on their opening night, but I had to see this one.

I call this movie a "four-star tear-jerker." Moore certainly knows how to dig deep into human pain and misery and make us ask ourselves why our world is so messed up. I was a fan of Faherenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine, and Sicko, too, but this one moves me at levels those others did not.

One of my conservative friends accused Moore of being a hypocrite because he has made millions from his movies. I find this charge disingenuous. Moore became rich by making movies that people want to see. If I could design the perfect economic system, it wouldn't be possible to get rich that way or any way, but he could still make the best movies possible.

It's not hypocrisy that his movies are popular. His movies are not nearly the highest-grossing ones ever made. The premise of CALS is that 1% of the US population owns over 90% of its wealth, an obscene disparity. Michael Moore is nowhere near that kind of wealth.

I won't give a movie review, just encourage everyone to see it. Moore's solution to capitalism isn't radical enough, but he is basically on the right track.

Now, about that radical solution to the problem of capitalism's obscence wealth disparities....

I consider myself a libertarian socialist, combining a radical critique of capitalism with a passionate commitment to freedom. One of the failings of classical socialism was that it was not committed to freedom. I don't believe we have to follow capitalism to defend and extend radical freedom. In fact, capitalism denies basic freedoms. We are told what to do almost every minute of every day. Sometimes it's work we hate, sometimes it's work we like or even love, but it is work that is making somebody else much richer than it is making us.

Once upon a time, unions were the best way to organize resistance to capitalism. We are a long way from those days, and CALS covers some of the story of how Reaganomics initiated a decades-long battle by capitalism to overthrow unions and social programs. It may be that our society can find the will to rebuild a new economic justice movement, but I suspect that it won't be carried out by unions.

Perhaps we could start something like an "Alliance for Economic Justice" that could attract millions of people to organized resistance to capitalism, outside of the weak labor unions.

Peace! Charley

What Kind of Revolution?

A local Marxist organization hosted a panel discussion on Marxism vs. Anarchism. As someone with sympathies with both philosophies, I wanted to see if I would learn anything new by listening to what each side had to say. The panelists were all younger folks than myself, so I thought maybe some newer ideas had come into the discussions since I studied these ideas in depth over a decade and half ago.

While each panelist was serious and worked at sharing their view without hostility (not always a given at these sort of things), I found myself unable to embrace either viewpoint. One of the anarchists spoke affirmatively about the anarchist militias of 1930s Spain. The Marxists spoke approvingly of Lenin's 1917 revolution. As a lifelong pacifist, one reason I have never bought into either viewpoint entirely is that I can't see any scenario where an armed revolution would have any positive role in the United States or other modern nation. I might allow for some small-scale revolution in a very repressive nation, but even in many of those situations, nonviolent rebellions have won important victories.

Each side in the panel could recount a history of armed revolutions that they considered important events in their respective traditions. Pacifist radicals can point to another stream of uprisings which showed unarmed nonviolent tactics could win victories with less onerous consequences. Gandhi's campaigns for Indian independence, Dr. King's civil rights campaigns, the Phillipine People Power Revolution, and several others. None of these uprisings resulted in an entirely new society as pacifist radicals, anarchists, and Marxists desire, but that is also true of all, repeat that, all anarchist and Marxist uprisings.

Of course, what makes a nonviolent uprising different is that it never creates a cadre of armed fighters who become a power to themselves should the revolution actually topple the government. For anarchists and Marxists who each claim to be abolishing either classes or hierarchies, armed cadres are both of these things. One of the panelists tried to describe the anarchist militias of Spain as non-hierarchical, but I remain unconvinced. Militias have guns while the majority do not. Militias are trained in deadly weaponry, the majority are not so trained. Unless we want to mimic the National Rifle Association and put a gun in every household, lethal weaponry, by its very character as a commodity, product of unjust social production, specialized training requirements, and moral ambiguity cannot be an integral component of a democratic, classless, egalitarian revolution.

That does not mean that a pacifist radical can't learn anything from the history of anarchist and Marxist revolutions. All of these uprisings had constructive aspects and did introduce into history important new possibilities. As I mentioned earlier, I don't rule out every single armed revolution. Some political regimes are so repressive and inhumane that there is almost zero chance of a nonviolent uprising doing much good. Cambodia's Khmer Rouge seems to have been one such regime, and they were ostensibly Marxist.

Politics ain't beanbag, and violence always accompanies social change. However, just as anarchists desire to put an end to the persistent presence of social hierarchies, and Marxists desire to put an end to the persistent presence of economic exploitation, so do radical pacifists seek to put an end to the persistent violence that underlies hierarchies and economic exploitation.

Peace! Charley

A Radical Soul

For years, I have been somewhat obsessed with trying to understand social change. I was born in 1963 and in the 4 and a half decades since then, I have seen lots of changes, good and bad. Sometimes it seems more bad than good.

I'm a radical by nature. In kindergarten I remember some teacher scolding me for something I thought was dumb. I looked around the room, realized that there were more of us (students) than her, and fantasized briefly about trying to get the class to push her out of the room, so we could play the way we wanted to play.

Yes, that's pretty silly, or cute depending on how you look at it. Staging a rebellion of 5-year olds is quite a different matter than bringing about social revolution. Just how different is what has fueled this decades long obsession.

I started out on a more serious radical path in 1986, when I moved from Texas to Illinois, just to join a Christian commune. Who does that anymore? I gather it was quite popular in the 70s, but I was over a decade behind the times. That decision was the culmination of my disenchantment with our society and the churches I'd grown up with. I believed that Jesus was not just a sacrificial lamb who let the evil world kill him, but also a rebel who set in motion a radical impulse for freedom, justice, peace, and love that could make this world into heaven, if we just followed him.

This radical Christology began way back, maybe before the kindergarten incident. I remember a vivid conversation with my Pentecostal preacher father about war and wanting to become president to end all of them. This might have been 1968, when I was 5 or 1972, when I was 9. I'm pretty sure it was an election year. Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek and love our enemies, so that meant war was wrong, right?

In my teens, I learned that some Christians were so radical for Jesus that they had moved into communes, like in the book of Acts. This sounded exactly like what Jesus wanted me to do. It took a few years, but I did eventually act on this leading.

While living with this commune (for the record, I never actually gave all my money to them, they tended to require a long waiting period), I went back to college (after dropping out when I was 19, discontent with education, as much as church and society). This time, I took classes that explored radical ideas. Marxism, feminism, anarchism, anti-racism, environmentalism - just to name a few. My world expanded, and in a few years time, I was no longer confining my radical impulses to Christian pacifist communal values. I had begun to engage the problem of social change in wider terms, as a global problem.

I think a lot about how truly radical progressive change might happen, what it would look like, how to encourage it, and whether it is possible at all. As I've said, I've seen some changes in my short life that I consider good ones, but have probably seen many more that are pretty dark. Especially, the continuing scourge of war and poverty around the world. One reason I have resumed blogging seriously is to try yet again to envision and understand how the world might be changed for the better, more radically.

I hope some of you will care enough to read long.

Peace! Charley

Towards a Holistic Radicalism

The world is suffering and oppressed. This suffering and oppression seems so huge, so unmanageable, so saddening. Many people in our society turn away from the suffering and oppression of the world and put all their thought and effort into private security and comfort. For those who suffer, this is not an option. They resist where they can. It is their resistance that forms the hope for a better world. A better world does not come from governments, religions, or violence. It comes from the united efforts of the suffering and oppressed, and their allies, to change the world.

Much of the suffering and oppression in our world is systemic. There are structures, institutions, and ideologies that perpetuate suffering and frustrate liberation from suffering. As I have tried to understand the systemic nature of suffering, I have come to identify eight broad types of systemic suffering and struggle: economics, politics, gender, sexuality, ecology, race, violence, and religion. Economic suffering produces poverty and economic exploitation. Political tyranny, authoritarianism, and elitisms rob us of the power to make effective change. Gender repression prevents women's full participation in human life and traps men in destructive lives. Sexual repression traps us in shame, fear, and hopelessness. Racism degrades and exploits whole communities. Religious domination disempowers and alienates us from ourselves. Ecological exploitation threatens to wipe out our very existence. Underlying many of these systems of suffering and domination is the power of institutionalized violence, warfare, and death.

A unified vision of resistance and liberation will address all of these systems. While many successful struggles against systemic suffering and oppression have been waged throughout history, often only limited changes to the basic dynamics of oppression were ever won. While I am not proposing that I have found the exact perfect understanding of social struggle against suffering, nor that a holistic vision of radical progress is all that is needed, I do hope that this way of trying to look at social struggle comprehensively can contribute the future successs of the human struggle for peace, freedom, justice, and wholeness.

Each of these systemic arenas of suffering and struggle effect the others. Racism leads to economic exploitation, economic exploitation leads to ecological degradation, ecological degradation feeds the cycle of violence, violence leads to political domination, and so on. If we acheive a limited victory in one of these struggles, but fail to apply that success to other areas of struggle, the victory can be wiped out more easily. A comprehensive understanding of systemic interconnections could be a key to acheiving dramatic revolutionary change.

Launching My Leftist Quaker Blog

I have had other blogs before, and have years of internet discussion experience, going back to usenet and BITnet in 1989. Recently, I have become involved with the QuakerQuaker ning group and have begun blogging about Quakerism. Also, Yahoo canceled the "360" pages where I was blogging, and I can't get into the new blogging set-up due to a persistent problem with profiles on Yahoo. So, here I am at blogger.

As the title suggests, I am a political leftist, with involvements in peace, socialist, anarchist, feminist, anti-racist, and other activist concerns and organizations. Most Quakers are pacifists, and some are basically leftist, but many Quakers are quite comfortably middle-class. Although I was born into a preacher's family and my parents were college educated, we were always lower middle or working-class. I have always felt estranged from our society, whether on racism, capitalism, sexism, or militarism.

As a Quaker, I will also blog about religion in various forms. I am involved with FGC's Christian and Interfaith Relations Committee and want to see Quakerism become more aggressively universalist and interfaith. World peace requires that religions get along, so there is more than enough work there.

Peace! Charley