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