Sunday, January 25, 2009, 8:23 AM

Today is January 25; the first anniversay of Lilys birth. Of course it was January 26 here in Australia when she was born in Virginia. I am still very much cognizant of Richard Rortys The Decline Of Redemptive Truth & The Rise Of A Literary Culture. I could say Im still unexpectedly cognizant of it. Theres more to it than that. Its presented as if it is a story about the whole world and all conscious beings. I am seeing it now as a story about Richard Rortyabout his journey of exploration of reality. These are three ways of seeing the origin of my awareness of Rortys proposition about three stages he observes according to his exploration of literature. He uses the term artifacts to refer to literary products like the books of Plato and Hegel. If there is to be a release from self incurred tutelage then surely its preferable to be able to become established in something like self-tutelage. This is just another name for what many aspiring philosophers (following in the footsteps of Platoemancipation from self incurred tutelage) call reason. Richard has written of his own path in his Trotsky and the Wild Orchids. I saw a similar emancipation when I looked at the graphic autobiography of Pablo Picasso when he suddenly departed from mimicry and launched into cubism.
First Communion, 1895-96 oil on canvas Museo Picasso Barcelona

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon 1907 Giraudon Paris

These are the sorts of things that happen when I engage in writing. Flowing. My mind flows on floating like Saichis gourd on water. There are no immediately obvious necessary causally deterministic connections although some can be identified after reflection and the reflecting is called murdering by D.T. Suzuki. He was revered by both Alan Watts and Gary Snyder who both hung out in the Muir Woods.

It looks nice here inside the Muir woods where Gary Snyder Japhied around and Alan Watts got drunk as a skunk and pretended to be wholier than sows and boring selfindulgent dominaters. A bridge to gates of gold were boldy crossed by the likes of them and all kinds of human beings. The bridge was open to all.

Coming back to Richard Rorty seems almost irrational now. What has Rorty to do with the Golden Gate Bridge and Muir Woods? Like Pablo Picasso, Rorty reveals his integrated story of his cognitive evolution in Trotsky and the Wild Orchids then he elaborates on the development in greater detail in The Decline Of Redemptive Truth & The Rise Of A Literary Culture. The Decline Of Redemptive Truth & The Rise Of A Literary Culture is written in a more academic objective style although it is not entirely devoid of subjective references. I am building a bridge to Rorty. When I get to his side I feel a need to go home to myself. What does he mean when he tells us this story about his own experience of a decline in his awareness of the reality of redemptive truth? Thats what is hidden in his projection of his subjective experience. He projects his own experience onto the combined experiences of all humans travelling through this singular reality which Rorty describes as following a progression from a relgious culture to a philosophical culture and then to a literary culture. The literary culture he then described as a permanent final state which is inherently inevitable much as exraM leraK, the dialectical materialist master propagandist,

described the workers paradise in which there was zero private ownership and all humans are equal. Rorty projects his own experience onto the whole human collective in a typically twentieth century integrative manner in what Comte reviled as the anthropomorphic simplification he saw in religious mentalities (psyches). What Rorty has called cultures (religious, philosophic and literary) is the integral collectivist equivalent of stages of his own cognitive evolution which is whole and yet has been artificially dismembered to better comprehend its dynamic shifts. The shifting is sufficient to infer that magical transformation is evident in Rortys psyche although he avoids description of the details of trans-formational change and yet the reality of the change itself is sufficient evidence for me of the magical nature of the real self of Rorty. That comes out in his repetition of the development of his capability to imagine the variety of ways of being human which comes to him because he has evolved away from philosophic cognition to the literary cognition by abandonning the search for redemptive truth and then finding the redemptive truth in his magical experiences of self transformation via the instrumentality of the literary artifacts of many literary artists of many genres and other artistic media. I am still puzzled about why it is that when I read Rorty, even late in his life, I find no evidence of his having understood the most important of all of the passages that are the most beautiful of all in Platos literary artifacts. Since Rorty is very thorough, Im left with propaganda as the only explanationmeaning that Rorty has intentionally dropped any acknowledgement of the authentic realities experienced by Plato as a magical being undergoing radical transformations. Rorty has convinced me with his one brief attempt at auto-biography that he grew up among Marxist dupes in New York and was recruited at a young age to be an agent of those megalomaniacal control freaks who are interested only in excercising power over other people. The control freak personality type can be disguised as religious control freaks, academic control freaks, industrial, bureaucratic. Military, professional control freaks and the run of the mill neighbourhood bullies. The control freaks are much more like one another than they are like people of the authentic philosophic dispositionthose of the philosophic dispositionof the authentic philosophic dispositionare not at all like the control freaks who are all alike in their manic obsession with excercising power over other humans. People of the authentic philosophic disposition are devoted to autonomy for themselves and for all. The megalomaniacs are diametrically opposed to autonomy both for their prey and themselves. They themselves are quite dependent on their prey. Their prey must obey. Obedience is the opposite of autonomy. The autonomy of philosophers is seen by control freaks as dangerous and subversive since the example of the philosophers if mimicked by the obedient prey threatens the control freaks way of life. In Rortys biography I see no religious phase of cognitive evolution and no philosophic phase. I see a control freak phase of ideological indoctrination into the dogmatic beliefs of dialectical materialist propaganda which resembles the religious indoctrination that is accomplished by control freaks disguised as priests and clergymen. Rather than the three stages of cognitive evolution that Rorty proposes, or the optional systems offerred by Jean Gebser, by Comte and before that by Vico, my own view is to emphasize the integral nature of cognitive integration although I am really becoming more interested these days in cognitive revolution as social activism than in objectivist descriptions of psychology. Mega-satori is more interesting to me that writing books about universal laws of psychic evolution in the tradition of Freud, Jung, Fromm and Gebser. There was a time when I fantasized about writing a book about the psychic unified field as a sort of bridge beyond Einstein to authentic enlightenment on a par with the Dau De Jing and the poem of Parmenides in its power to change the world and fulfill the potential of the cultural revolution initiated by Max Planck and pushed off the edge by Albert Einstein.

Einstein has inspired the idea of unification of all branches of the tree of knowledge with his concept of unified field. Todays theories of everything are mimicries of Einstein and products of self-incurred tutelage. If artifact creation in the most general sense can be established as a purpose for artists whore not committed to any one medium but to artistic communication then the autonomous artists will be committed to emancipation from all varieties of replication of earlier artists in the same way that is so evident in the evolution of the paintings of Picasso and many other painters too. Ken Wilber is a very conspicuous example of an artist who has remained a captive of megalomaniacal mimicry.
In all of this, we see the increasing importance of finding a postliberal spirituality, a postgreen spirituality, which builds upon and honors the richness of pluralistic relativism and network sensitivity, and then transcends and includes that in an even more holistic embrace. For it is finally spirit, the eye of spirit, through which we all might see more clearly the tender role of each and all in the manifestation of our own highest natures. Through the eye of spirit, the Kosmos shines forth brightly, a thing of beauty and wonder in its every gesture, ornaments of one's own deepest being, testaments to one's own primordial purity. And in the eye of spirit, we all will meet, in the simple endless outflowing of this and every moment, where history as that horrible nightmare uncoils in the vast expanse of all space and the radical freedom of what is, and all waves and all streams become finally irrelevant in the radiance of just this. Introduction to Volume 7 of the Collected Works The Integral Vision at the Millennium

At least Rorty communicates his own awareness of the literary nature of literary artifacts. For me this is equivalent to becoming aware that all books are book including Platos and the Hebrew and Greek books of the Christian cannon. One of the traditions in literature and readingof literate peoplethe literatihas been to pretend that there is an objective system of measurement by which to establish the relative value of books and that by applying this system of measurement it is possible to calculate values and to prove that there is one book and one only which has infinite value and that all others books have zero value. This was the tradition among Christian literati who assigned infinite value to their chosen version of the bible. The bible is interesting. Its not written by a single author. It was originally written in two languages. The Koran is a much later book that as far as I can tell was written by one author and was intended as a guide for spoken transmission to illiterate people. Printed books have features and benefits that are not available in virtual electronic versions.

Kandinky convinced me that he is quite unique and yet I am more attracted to collaborative artcollective communicationsspeaking as One. This is the theme I found last night in the Obama pre-Inaugural Concert at the Lincoln Memorial. I am as convinced as I was by Kandinsky, that Obama will continue to work to speak as if his is the voice of the unified one who are many and some of whom turned up to perform and many others to participate by receiving. Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Bon Jovi. Three white

musician poets of three eras and many African American artists too. Obama himself is a bridge between his own Golden Gate Park in white Kansas and his own Marin in a goat herder village in Kenya. How amazing that he is in his genetic make up a human reflection of the unity he is cultivating. The unity of purpose will attract control freaks. Like flies on shit they will buzz in to take control of the voice of Obama. He will have many advisors. Meero Broz showed me Long Point long before it became Port Kennedy and host to the man eating shark who took the man with crabs on Christmas Day.

Miro and his ass have sprayed the pigments in this way. World Perspectives is an interesting book (collection).
World Perspectives What This Series Means It is the thesis of World Perspectives that man is in the process of developing a new consciousness which, in spite of his apparent spiritual and moral captivity, can eventually lift the human race above and beyond the fear, ignorance, and isolation which beset it today. It is to this nascent consciousness, to this concept of man born out of a universe perceived through a fresh vision of reality, that World Perspectives is dedicated. Ruth Nanda Anshen New York, 1960

Now the version Dr. Ruth wrote in 1956 when starting out on this new bible book idea.
World Perspectives WORLD PERSPECTIVES is dedicated to the concept of man born out of a universe perceived through a fresh vision of reality. Its aim is to present short books written by the most conscious and responsible minds of today. Each volume represents the thought and belief of each author and sets forth the interrelation of the changing religious, scientific, artistic, political, economic and social influences upon man's total experience. Ruth Nanda Anshen New York, 1960

The second version in 1960 came at a time when the hopes expressed by Dr. Ruth had already been dashed by the unpleasant reality of the subterranean existence of a global criminal network that survived the defeat of the satanic global gang whos tip of the ice berg was the visible portion of the Third Reich and its most visible allies in Japan, Italy, France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia and the invisible network of global criminal terrorist agents in all nations especially the most powerful English speaking nations. The cold war had rolled on and global ideological struggle had displaced the dream of a permanent peace which wa the inspiration for both the League of Nations and the United Nationsa planetary society in which the rule of law was universally recognized and enforced. By 1960 it was clear that the criminals responsible for the convulsions of mass psychosis episodes of mass murder of 1939-1945, had survived and were still actively engaged in

infiltration and corruption of the United States of America, the United Kingdom of Great Brittain and their primary allies, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
apparent spiritual and moral captivity fear, ignorance, and isolation which beset it today nascent consciousness

This is new in the 1960 version. It concludes: In spite of the infinite obligation of men and in spite of their finite power, in spite of the intransigence of nationalisms, and in spite of the homelessness of moral passions rendered ineffectual by the technological outlook, beneath the apparent turmoil and upheaval of the present, and out of the transformations of this dynamic period with the unfolding of a world-consciousness, the purpose of World Perspectives is to help quicken the "unshaken heart of well-rounded truth" and interpret the significant elements of the World Age now taking shape out of the core of that undimmed continuity of the creative process which restores man to mankind while deepening and enhancing his communion with the universe. Ruth Nanda Anshen unshaken heart of well-rounded truth This appears in Diels translation of the poem of Parmenides as revealled in Essays on Ancient Greek Philosophy by John Burnet
Welcome, O youth, that comest to my abode on the car that bears thee tended by immortal charioteers! It is no ill chance, but right and justice that has sent thee forth to travel on this way. Far, indeed, does it lie from the beaten track of men! Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth, as the opinions of mortals in which is no true belief at all. Yet nonetheless shalt thou learn these things also, how passing right through all things one should judge the things that seem to be.

Also interesting is another collaborative book edited by Denis Diderot, whom I presume to be the creator of that artifact: Encyclopdie ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences et des arts Rorty and his imagination have not transcended redemption only the idea that there is an objective independent set of truths which redeem. Rorty is still interested in redemption. His is imaginative.
For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. That is why a literary culture is always in search of novelty, always hoping to spot what Shelley called the shadows that futurity casts upon the present, rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal. It is a premise of this culture that though the imagination has present limits, these limits are capable of being extended forever. The imagination endlessly consumes its own artifacts. It is an ever-living, ever-expanding, fire. It is as subject to time and chance as are the flies and the worms, but while it endures and preserves the memory of its past, it will continue to transcend its previous limits. Though the fear of belatedness is ever present within the literary culture, this very fear makes for an intenser blaze.

The more I read Rorty the more I realize how much distortion is imposed in literary communication by mimicry of that objectivist third person style of writing that is mandatory in universities. To experience redemption from this distortion one possible option is the alternative of emancipation from the self incurred tutelage which results in obedient conformity with the objectivist style in which the self must be erased as completely as possible. Redemption might be possible by exploring and recording experiences of reality as they occur with no interventionist censorship of any kind in obedience to any instruction from any control freaks. Nargis killed 180,000 give or take few humans when it drowned the Irawaddy delta a year or so ago. Since then the criminals junta there has been left alone with assistance from

the Clough family, to torture and murder the dissident Buddhists. Aung Su Chee has continued under close surveillance and house arrest. Not so long ago a man born in Burma was Secretary General of the United Nations replacing Dag Hammarskjld who was murdered in September, 1961 because he interfered in John F. Kennedys mass murder of enemy people in the Congo where the cobalt was undergoing the tugowar that Eisenhower moved to check mate the Soviet enemy in August of 1960 when he approved the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
I do not wish to seem overdramatic but I can only conclude from the information that is available to me as Secretary-General that the Members of the United Nations have perhaps ten years left in which to subordinate their ancient quarrels and launch a global partnership to curb the arms race, to improve the human environment, to defuse the population explosion, and to supply the required momentum to development efforts. If such a global partnership is not forged within the next decade, then I very much fear that the problems I have mentioned will have reached such staggering proportions that they will be beyond our capacity to control. U Thant, 1969

1/25/2009 1:32 PM This is an exploration of reality and not a search for objective alienated dismembered redemptive truth. Earlier I was inspired by a new idea for creating a cultural artifact. It was a novel idea. Not only a literary artifact but also graphic. Not only printed but also electronic. Hybridity is one of its features. Pastiche is one of the possibilities made possible by the novelty of the design. Perhaps the most novel design principle which has awakened in my awareness today for the first time is concerned with a hybrid of unique design involving texts and images (perhaps even sounds) chosen based on my experiences of these six decades now. Something that combines the intentions of the creators of the artifacts I mentioned earlier today.
King James English Bible Encyclopdie ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences et des arts Great Books World Perspectives Series

Ive not included any books of obviously singular origin written by one author although there are many I consider deserving in whole or in part, to be included in the collection which I would prefer to begin calling The Voice of Planet Earth. This title revives an earlier title which I imagined in 1983. Today it would seem to me to be in a position of being able to benefit from an enhancement which arouses a more organic, human tone since the Earth carries strong over-tones of inorganicity even though it is strictly speaking a hybrid of both the inorganic and organic, of human and non human life forms, of animate and vegetavie organisms. Gaian might do the trick or Demeter or Isis although the appeal of the hybridity which emerged as I catalogued the inventory of configurational options was sufficiently integral that I felt a new attraction to The Voice of Gaia. The Voice of Er What is in a name. A rose is a rose by any other name. The literality of a word is interesting but not necessary in a name.

1/25/2009 3:05 PM Were I ever to go beyond the fantasy stage and assemble such a new biblean introduction to prajna-sofia (wisdom)a book of gold and gemsthere is a selection which has such little probability of any mention anywhere in it that I will dump it now here but only because it is an example of a distortion of the reality of the peaking of the integral cultural revolution in 1968 which had its origins in 1900 with Max Planks courageous step to release himself from self incurred tutelage. DeeNiall Ferguson treats the history of the nineteen sixties in the superficial way Id expect of a propagandist academic whore

housed in the bowels of the swakniest of all academic bordellos in Cambridge, Massachussetts. There is no mention of the majority of the young people who lived through 1968. De-Niall recognized only the traitors like himself who took the money from criminals and betrayed the enlightenment by their criminal behaviour.
Rebellion without a cause Niall Ferguson, 17/05/2008 I have been trying to explain 1968 to 2008. It has not been easy - and not just because I was barely four years old in May 1968. Students today seem, to put it mildly, bemused by the 40th anniversary of les evenements de soixante-huit. "I was here in '68," enthused a parent who sat in on my lecture on the subject at Harvard a couple of weeks ago. "I remember the occupation of University Hall." His daughter gave him the look my teenage daughter gives me when I try to explain the impact the Sex Pistols had on me when I was her age. Harvard was not, of course, one of the epicentres of the higher-education earthquake of 1968, such as Berkeley, Columbia, Nanterre or Berlin's Free University. But it was not without its seismic tremors. As at many universities, there was a branch of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and in 1968, having already organised successful demonstrations against campus visits by the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, and a recruiter for the napalm manufacturer Dow Chemical, the group turned its fire against the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, then an integral part of the university (ROTC instructors had the status of faculty members). The culmination came in April 1969, when members of the Worker-Student Alliance occupied the university's main administrative building, evicted the deans working there and renamed it "Che Guevara Hall". With The Beatles' "Revolution" blaring from their own headquarters, the university's administration saw no alternative but to call in the police. But the violence of the "bust" had the unintended effect of triggering a strike by a much larger number of students. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, already a distinctly liberal body, urged a more conciliatory line. Punishments for the protesters were reduced. The ROTC was effectively kicked out of Harvard. New courses sprang up with titles such as "Radical Perspectives on Social Change", to which students flocked in their hundreds. And, in what one disgusted professor called "an academic Munich", the Faculty agreed to give black students a say in the hiring and tenure decisions of the new department of Afro-American Studies. Harvard was thus a microcosm of 1968 as it is conventionally understood by historians, not to mention the many journalists, filmmakers and others who are currently commemorating the baby boomers' annus mirabilis. At its heart was the student New Left, a minority of agitators who delighted in forming revolutionary associations (at Berkeley, for example, these included the Free Speech Movement, the Congress on Racial Equality, the Vietnam Day Committee, the Black Panther Party and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). There was, unquestionably, a strain of Marxism in the movement. Particularly in Germany, student leaders such as Rudi Dutschke had read their Herbert Marcuse and talked of opening "the third front" in the war against capitalism by causing "upheaval in the centres of imperialism". Yet their specific demands were for changes within the system of higher education, not least the rules governing dormitory visits by members of the opposite sex. Today's students can see that there was a certain glamour to all this, hard though it may be to take seriously those old photographs of Dad with giant sideburns and a clenched fist. Yet - partly because they take for granted the changes to campus life that came about because of 1968 - the present generation struggles to see what exactly it was all for. Weren't their predecessors worried about their grade-point averages when they went on strike? At a recent visit to Boston University, the former firebrand of Nanterre, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (now a 63-year-old Green Euro MP), was almost apologetic. "You have always to keep in mind that in the 1960s we were students," he said. "We weren't afraid of unemployment. We didn't know Aids. Climate change, we didn't know it. The social and ecological disasters of globalisation, we didn't know them." So if they weren't trying to save the planet, what were the 68ers aiming to achieve? One part of the answer is readily intelligible today. They were protesting against an unpopular overseas war. It is worth reminding today's students, however, that this was a much bigger conflict than the Iraq war (to which the majority of them are strongly opposed). By the end of 1968, 30,844 US service personnel had been killed in action in Vietnam, 180,730 had been wounded and 368 were missing - almost 10 times more American fatalities than have occurred in Iraq. It is also worth noting that popular support for the war had already dropped below 40 per cent in 1968, so that by opposing the war, students were not wholly out of step with public opinion. On the other hand, the Vietnam war wasn't the worst conflict that the cold war could have produced. To my mind, the puzzling thing is that Vietnam managed to arouse so much more student outrage than the nuclear conflict that had come so close to happening just six years before over Cuba. At that time President John F. Kennedy had been forced to imagine death tolls in the hundreds of millions, not tens of thousands. Yet the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was at a low ebb in the later 1960s. Looked at more closely, then, 1968 was about much more than opposition to Vietnam. For one thing, the upheavals of that year were by no means confined to a few American and west European

campuses. As the historian Jeremi Suri has shown in his excellent book, Power and Protest, there were also revolutionary events in eastern Europe and in China that clearly had nothing to do with Vietnam. In Prague, dissident intellectuals such as Ludvik Vaculik and Vaclav Havel had a brief taste of free speech as Alexander Dubcek replaced the Stalinist Antonin Novotn and ushered in the Prague Spring. In China, meanwhile, the cultural revolution reached its crisis point as Mao suddenly took fright at the anarchic generational war he had unleashed. In both cases, military force had to be used to bring youthful protest under control. As the Red Army tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and as the People's Army fought a mini civil war with the Red Guards, the student Left in the west was confronted with a horrible reality: the regimes that espoused Marxist ideology were far more brutally repressive than the governments of the capitalist world. That would have been a fatal blow if 1968 had been primarily about Marx or, for that matter, Mao. But it clearly was not. Far more important than Suri's disjointed and doomed "global revolution" was the cultural "great disruption" of the late 1960s. This disruption involved fundamental shifts in the roles of, and attitudes towards, three groups: youths, black people and women. The soixante-huitards really were "talkin' 'bout their generation": the postwar baby-boom generation, more numerous and more prosperous than the young had been for many years. The change was especially pronounced in the US, where the proportion of the population aged between 16 and 24 surged from 11.5 per cent in 1957 to a peak of 17.2 per cent in 1978. Elsewhere, the increase was smaller, but the peak share of the young in population was even higher. In South America by the end of the 1970s, more than a fifth of the population was aged 15-24. The effects of the postwar baby boom were amplified by the expansion of higher education. Before the second world war, only a tiny elite of young people had attended university, even in the US, where students in higher education accounted for just under one per cent of the entire population. In Europe, the shares ranged downwards from 0.29 per cent in Austria to 0.07 per cent in Portugal. By 1968 these proportions had increased by factors of between 2.5 and 12.8. In the US there were now nearly 6.7 million students, equivalent to 3.3 per cent of the population. The expansion of higher education significantly increased the presence at universities of two groups who had previously been discriminated against: African-Americans and women (whose share in the US student population had been significantly reduced by the 1944 GI Bill, which guaranteed veterans a college or vocational education). This helps explain why the "great disruption" ended up being as much about black civil rights and about women's liberation as it was about Vietnam. Of course, the conditions that produced race riots in Watts, Memphis and Washington could scarcely have been less like those on Ivy League campuses. Yet it was typical of the way genuinely popular protest influenced elite protest that the promotion of Afro-American studies became a key item of the Harvard radicals' agenda. Women's rights mattered even more, considering that already by 1968 the female proportion of the student body had risen back to 40 per cent (compared with 29 per cent 20 years before). And perhaps, on reflection, that was the most important component of the great disruption. For surely nothing changed more radically in the lifetimes of the baby boomers than the role of women. Economic discrimination was reduced, divorce made more equitable, contraception and abortion made (in most countries) legal. Published two years after 1968, Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch still strikes me as the indispensable document of that era, not least for its memorably fierce denunciation of the "enemies" of "the revolutionary woman": "the doctors, psychiatrists, health visitors, priests, marriage counsellors, policemen, magistrates and genteel reformers". Women, Greer urged, must "stop loving the victors in violent encounters ... Women must not marry ... Women must reject their role as the principal consumers in the capitalist state ... They should use cosmetics strictly for fun ... and form household co-operatives." Characteristically for the times, Greer also held out the hope that feminism would make it possible to skip the less appealing coercive phases in the Marxist model of revolutionary progress. "Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family," she argued, "will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and once that withers away Marx will have come true willy-nilly." Greer's "fantasy" was that "it may be possible to leap the steps of revolution and arrive somehow at liberty and communism without strategy or revolutionary discipline." That one sentence says it all about 1968. They wanted a revolution. But they wanted a mixed-sex party - a really big one - even more. And that reminds us that the quintessence of the late 1960s was not the barricades in Paris, effective though those were in hastening the downfall of General de Gaulle. Barricades were old hat, a tired reenactment of 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1871. A far more original historical contribution was the open-air rock festival, epitomised by Woodstock. Though it was held a year later, in August 1969, Woodstock was the defining moment for the 68ers. And the climax of it all was, without question, Jimi Hendrix's searing, distorted solo version of "The Star-Spangled Banner". There he was, 26 years old, black, the son of divorced parents, the only one of five siblings not taken into care, a high-school dropout, a convicted car thief, a failed soldier, the father of at least one illegitimate child, a musical genius doomed to die a year later, drowned in his own vomit. As Hendrix tortured the American national anthem with all the feedback and tremolo his Fender could produce, the frustrations of a generation were made deafeningly audible.

This was protest, not revolution. To see the distinction, take a closer look at the lyrics of the two most overtly political songs produced in 1968 by the era's two most important pop groups, the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" and The Beatles' "Revolution": Well then what can a poor boy do / Except to sing for a rock'n'roll band? / Cause in sleepy London town, / There's just no place for a street fighting man. But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao / You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow / Don't you know it's gonna be all right Hardly clarion calls to arm the proletariat. On the contrary, Jagger and Lennon were spelling out their own deep ambivalence towards both street protest and Leftist politics. And that, we can now see, was wise of them. For if the generation of 1968 had an Achilles heel it was precisely the implausibility of their claim to be in some way aligned with the working class. "Why aren't you millionaires' kids in Vietnam?" shouted hecklers at some of the early anti-war demonstrations in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a good question. Unlike in the second world war, the educated elite was under-represented, if not quite wholly absent, from the officer class in Vietnam. For most working-class Americans, it was staringly obvious who was doing the more noble work. And that, surely, explains what seems to me to be the key to 1968 - the principal reason why the revolutionary energies of the student radicals were so easily contained. The recently released film Chicago 10 brilliantly re-edits archive footage of the battles between protesters and police that raged in Chicago's Lincoln Park during the Democratic party's 1968 National Convention. The most impressive thing is the obvious relish of the riot police and National Guardsmen as they whack the hippies into submission. Everywhere, from Berkeley to Berlin, from Prague to Peking (as we then called it), the story was the same: the plebeian police always sided with authority against the students, their despised social superiors. To be further reminded of the loathing felt by blue-collar and redneck Americans for the hippie heroes of 1968, replay the final scene of Easy Rider (1969), when Louisiana rednecks gratuitously shoot Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. It's easy to forget, as the soixante-huitards exploit their still dominant place in the western media to romanticise their youthful antics, that the year 1968 ended with Richard Nixon's election as president a victory that owed much to the segregationist George Wallace's candidacy, which took nearly 10 million votes and five southern states from the Democrats. To be sure, Nixon duly embarked on "Vietnamisation" of the war, drawing down US troops and pursuing a negotiated peace with Hanoi. Yet his methods were anathema to the college baby boomers. Far from ushering in a new era of "liberty and communism", as Germaine Greer had hoped, 1968 was the prelude to a profound political shift, most noticeable in the English-speaking world, which saw conservatism gradually reconstitute itself as a political ideology and the rise to power of conservative leaders who took positive pleasure in denouncing the excesses of the 1960s. Just one symptom of the backlash in the US was the upsurge in arrests and imprisonments (especially of young black men) in the late 1960s and 1970s - a trend that has yet to be reversed. The great disruption had not been to everybody's taste, it turned out. And there is a moral there for own time, too. Today's American students are disproportionately Democrats. They strongly incline towards Barack Obama, a candidate who proudly boasts that he was "too young for the formative period of the 1960s - civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam war". That has led some commentators to predict a "youthquake" in November's US elections. If 1968 has a lesson for 2008, however, it should be to treat such predictions with caution. Considering the deep unpopularity of his own party at the moment, the man who spent 1968 in a North Vietnamese prison is polling very strongly indeed.

What a pig Ferguson is. My interpretation of his interpretation is impossible to separate from my awareness of my magical self nature. I give birth to an infinity of worlds which are all one. I intend any world I want to intend. I was intending to imagine being Niall Ferguson a glamorous bordello whore. I had to stop. It hurt too much. Niall is, I know, because I just got through being him; buried in self-incurred tutelage due to his status as a larval conscious being who has not grow sufficient courage to dare to perceiveto dare to see through surface appearances. I see reflected in dee-Niall the same view that is reflecting in so many places arranged by the propagandists who arranged the murders of Patrice Lumumba 1960 (Eisenhower), Diem+Dag Hammarskjld 1961 (Kennedy), JF Kennedy (1963) + Malcolm Little 1965 + Che Guevara 1967 +Martin Luther King (1968) + RF Kennedy (1968) (Johnson). Niall goes on sucking murderer dix and taking it in the ass one after the other from the same crew as he heaps praise on the criminals who attempted to destroy the American enlightenment project by denial of lawful leadership from 1963-1974.

He describes the second half of this criminal infiltration of American political institutions as
...a profound political shift, most noticeable in the English-speaking world, which saw conservatism gradually reconstitute itself as a political ideology and the rise to power of conservative leaders who took positive pleasure in denouncing the excesses of the 1960s

He has nothing to say about the close affinity if these conservative leaders with the fascist war criminals who are most responsible for the unprecedented terrorist atrocoties of 1939-1945. To Niall they are conservative leaders. To anyone who has the courage to sapere (beneath the surface) these criminals are recruits and trainees of the same WWII fascist criminalstheir agentsembedded in the English speaking worldin the political and other public & private institutions of the societies with the strongest relationship to the enlightenment and the autonomy of quantized enlightenment. 1/25/2009 4:22 PM Lest we wack-off and remember waking up the psychically mutilated materialists are zomboidally sleep-waling through the crowded cities of the turd world tonight. Exram Lerak is King they proclaim. Long live Exram Lerak. Agenbt of mass murderers. Terrorist. Propagandist. Anti enlightenment recruiter and trainer of spies and infiltrators. Today they are frantically working night and day to wake up the Frankesteiner .
The bourgeoisie has not died. But nor has Marx: his errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones, he wrote in The Communist Manifesto.

Why Marx is man of the moment, He had globalization pegged 150 years ago Francis Wheen, Observer, Sunday July 17, 2005

Satanic Exram Lerak, murderer and terrorist extraordinaire. Dialectal materialist. Anti-American megamomaniac. His clones follow in the same footsteps like a fifth column of whores taking their thirty pieces of silver to betray their neightbours, relatives and friends.

Karl Marx voted most revered philosopher on BBC web site

Fred Weston, Labor Standard, July 14, 2005 Our readers will recall that The Economist called on its readers to vote Marx off the top of the list of the most revered philosophers. We appealed to our readers to vote for Marx and keep him at the top. In spite of The Economists best attempts Marx won! This comes as no surprise to us. We await The Economist's explanation with interest. Week after week Karl Marx was at the top of the poll. Melvyn Bragg organised the poll for his Radio 4 series, In Our Time, and every week he would express surprise that Marx was still ahead of all the others. The Economist magazine then intervened appealing to its readers to vote and knock Marx off the top of the list and called for a vote for David Hume. But Marx received 28% of the votes cast, coming first and beating David Hume, hands down.

No doubt The Economist editorial board will be disappointed. They tell us that Marxism is outdated, that capitalism works, etc., etc. Unfortunately for them, people have brains and they can work things out for themselves. What is happening today all over the world does not negate Marx but confirms what he wrote. As Eric Hobsbawm has explained, trying to find a reason why Marx won, The Communist Manifesto contains a stunning prediction of the nature and effects of globalization. In fact, Marx is as relevant today if not more relevant as when he published the Communist Manifesto 150 years ago. Marxs studies of capitalism and how it works led him to predict such phenomena as globalization, monopolization, the growing divide between rich and poor and the strengthening of the proletariat, and so on. His philosophical outlook, dialectical materialism, has stood the test of time, and is a precious instrument in our hands to unravel all the complex mechanisms of economy, politics, and even science. It allows us to have a global view of all processes and thus be able to develop a perspective for the future development of society. The problem the bourgeois philosophers have with Marx is that he not only analyzed all the contradictions of the capitalist system; he also pointed to an alternative. As Marx said, The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. Marx explained that capitalism had to be overthrown and a more rational system put in its place, socialism. So although, the media would like to portray Britain as a sleepy, phlegmatic place where the class struggle belongs to the past, reality is somewhat different. In spite of all the attempts to fill peoples heads with incomprehensible language, the real world is still out there and people live in it. That explains why so many people voted for Marx the revolutionary. They believe that this society is not the best that history provides. Far from it, they believe a new society is possible. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown may have a few surprises coming their way in the years ahead!

I see through the superficial appearances. Lies. Propaganda. Is the point really to change the world? What about changing your self, by yourself? What about having the courage to see through the surface appearances? What about having the audacity to shit on the terrorist murderer Marx and reject his superficial materialism and his psychic self mutilation. Changing the world really means changing somebody who is not you. This is the counter-enlightement anti-philosophy of a megalomaniac. 1/25/2009 4:50 PM The anti-globalization movement begins to become transparent. It looks like yet another instrument of the criminal fascist terrorists recruited and trained as agents by the Nazis who survived WWII. Here is some more the same sort of transparent terrorist criminal propaganda paid for by fascists with stolen loot.

The Next Thinker

THE RETURN OF KARL MARX

by John Cassidy October 20, 1997

THE NEXT THINKER about Karl Marx's influence as an economist... Writer was talking with a college friend who now worked at a big Wall Street investment bank... To my surprise, he brought up Karl Marx. "The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right," he said. I assumed he was joking. "There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the economist who resurrects Marx and puts it all together in a coherent model," he continued, quite seriously. "I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism." I didn't hide my astonishment. We had both studied economics during the early eighties at Oxford, where most of our teachers agreed with Keynes that Marx's economic theories were "complicated hocus-pocus" and Communism was "an insult to our intelligence." The prevailing attitude among bright students of our generation was that Marx's arguments were fit only for polytechnic lecturers and aspiring Labour Party politicians... More than fifty years ago, Edmund Wilson noted that much of Marx's prose "hypnotizes the reader with its paradoxes and eventually puts him to sleep." The passing decades have not made the going any easier. Marx was ludicrously prolix...

The writer gradually began to understand what his friend meant. In many ways, Marx's legacy has been obscured by the failure of Communism, which wasn't his primary interest. In fact, he had little to say about how a socialist society should operate, and what he did write, about the withering away of the state and so on, wasn't very helpful--something Lenin and his comrades quickly discovered after seizing power... When Marx wasn't driving the reader to distraction, he wrote riveting passages about globalization, inequality, political corruption, monopolization, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence--issues that economists are now confronting anew... Marx was born in 1818, and died in 1883... Marx wasn't a crude reductionist, but he did believe that the way in which society organized production ultimately shaped people's attitudes and beliefs. Capitalism, for example, made human beings subjugate themselves to base avarice... "Globalization" is the buzzword of the late twentieth century, on the lips of everybody from Jiang Zemin to Tony Blair, but Marx predicted most of its ramifications a hundred and fifty years ago... Globalization is set to become the biggest political issue of the next century... In one way, Marx's efforts were a failure. His mathematical model of the economy, which depended on the idea that labor is the source of all value, was riven with internal inconsistencies and is rarely studied these days.... One important lesson Marx taught is that capitalism tends toward monopoly--an observation that was far from obvious in his day--giving rise to a need for strong regulation.... Likewise endogenous-growth theory models are undoubtedly Marxist in spirit, since their main aim is to demonstrate how technical progress emerges from the competitive process, and not from Heaven, as in the neoclassical model. Describes Marx's "theory of immiseration" which says that profits would increase faster than wages, so that workers would become poorer relative to capitalists over time, and this is what happened during the last two decades. Inflation-adjusted wages are still below their 1973 levels, but profits have soared. ... A key question for the future, the answer to which will determine the fate of the soaring slock market and much else, is whether capital can hold on to its recent gains. Writer visits Highgate Cemetery, where he visited Marx's grave... Perhaps the most enduring element of Marx's work is his discussion of where power lies in a capitalist society. This is a subject that economists, with their fixation on consumer choice, have neglected for decades, but recently a few of them have returned to Marx's idea that the circumstances in which people are forced to make choices are often just as important as the choices... Marx, of course, delighted in declaring that politicians merely carry water for their corporate paymasters... The sight of a President granting shady businessmen access to the White House in return for campaign contributions would have shocked him not at all. Despite his errors, he was a man for whom our economic system held few surprises. His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures.

This terrorist shit was written and published in major criminal media channels two years before the so called battle for Seattle. At the time, in 1999, as the millenium approached, the anti-globalization protect movement in Seattle seemed to me devoid of the real spirit of the enlightenmentof love of libertyof love of peace love and freedom. It was more like the Weathermenthe criminalization by infiltration of a united community. Here it comes again. Not since the inauguration of JF Kennedy in 1961, some forty eight years ago has there been anything resembling the comm-UNITY of purpose and this time it is much stronger. In 1960 the people who were united were those too young to fight in WWII or Korea, born mostly since 1935the contemporaries of the beatsthe social activiststhe Trotskyitesanti-Stalinsists. It was not baby boomers. We were too young. These older young adults were the ones recruited and trained by the fascist criminal terrorists who survived WWII. It was thru them that the post war generation was infiltrated, recruited and trained to become criminals.

The World Social Forum and the World Economic Forum pretend to be opposed but they are one. Like Johnson and Nixon. Heap the shit on. Have another helping.

Karl Marx Never Goes Away, Does He?

Michael Taube The Economic Freedom Network, 1998 On the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, I think it is fair to say that a university or community college student would be hard pressed to avoid either a course or healthy discussion on the principles of Karl Marx. Likewise, it seems that even as adults, we cannot avoid his utopian chants! A recent issue of The New Yorker entitled "The Next Issue" discussed subjects such as who the next President of the United States might be, where the next space odyssey might go, and so forth. In that issue, writer John Cassidy argued that the next thinker might actually be Marx, who was wrong about the rise of communism, but could be right about the problems with capitalism. Marx and capitalism: a brief overview In the Communist Manifesto, Marx outlined his view that the existence of different social classes was based solely on "the formation and augmentation of capital" by the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class. This system of industrialization enhanced the need for individualism, and the most important component of this was private property. The only way to "stop the madness" (so to speak) was for the proletarians, or working class, to bring down the system by changing it from within. This would be done by creating a communist society, which would eliminate the need to obtain capital by "abolishing private property." The relationship between Marx and capitalism has been discussed and debated by numerous political scientists, economists, and academics. As the noted political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset stated, the system that Marx wanted the world to adopt "was not institutionalized democracy, but anarchy." While he was opposed to mass revolt, Marx wanted to see an upheaval of societal values, and be able to prevent a type of laissez-faire capitalism from emerging. Simply, while Marx believed that society would naturally want to follow communism, he forgot an important fact: people are individualists by nature, and want the opportunityand the right to accumulate wealth and status. What's wrong with capitalism? In the last few months, many articles and books have been written, mostly negative, about capitalism. However, John Cassidy's recent article "The Return of Karl Marx" may turn out to be one of the most creativealbeit implausibleof all the recent works. After a recent conversation with a former schoolmate at Oxford University, where both had studied economics, Cassidy began to reconsider the ideas of Marx and capitalism. Most of his professors had ridiculed Marx's economic theories and communism as a whole in the 1980s. However, more than a decade later, Marxian issues like globalization, political process, and corruption, and the monopolization of industries were being debated once more. As Cassidy pointed out, economists are talking about these issues "without realizing that they are walking in Marx's footsteps." Cassidy's article reviewed many of Marx's popular works, proving, at the same time, how many highprofile people had taken up Marx's cause in modern times. One of his interesting comparisons is how Marx's insight from The German Ideology, "the materialist conception of history," was actually adopted by James Carville with a new label, "It's the economy, stupid." In other words, no matter how you try to ignore it, materialism and the nature of the free market economy drives our ambitions and desires. Although the Communist Manifesto failed in its prophecies, Cassidy states that it did succeed in explaining how capitalism works. How? Marx never simplified the powerful entity of a free market. This is why he and Friedrich Engels wrote, "Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power." He knew that capitalism had the power to transcend countries and empires, and felt it was more than a worthy adversary. Cassidy also looked at a number of fundamentals of modern economic thought in which Marx left his indelible mark. First, Marx stated that capitalism inherently leads toward the monopolization of industry. While Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt may have been able to control monopolies, they resurfaced in the '80s. Second, Marx articulated the concept of the entrepreneur and the need for profit as being of primary importance for the "accumulation" of wealth. This theory of economic growth was later adapted in many economic models. Third, many of the social services designed to help workers, such as welfare legislation, health benefits, and labour laws, were brought to the forefront by Marx. These early socialist concepts have existed for over 100 years in many capitalist systems. Fourth, some modern-day economists are taking note of Marx's economic conclusion that the circumstances that force people to make choices are often as important as the actual choices. In other words, the focus of power in a capitalist society is based on who is in control of the situation governments, legislators, or even lobby groups.

Conclusion To prove the importance of Marx in our society, consider an ingenious commentary by Merrill Matthews Jr. and Morgan O. Reynolds of the National Center for Policy Analysis. Taking their cue from the Communist Manifesto, the two authors wrote their own "Capitalist Manifesto." Included was the allimportant goal of the capitalist (protection of private property), the need for such items as a flat tax, abolition of inheritance taxes, and elimination of direct school funding, which was followed by a catchy slogan: "Capitalists of the world, compete!" Of course Cassidy is right when he refers to Marx as an influential economist and political voice. But do we not think the same of other economists such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, Paul Krugman and Lester Thurow? In the end, it doesn't much matter whether we agree with Marx or not. The fact remains that he laid the groundwork for the growth of the communist movement, and tried to explain in a jaded manner, of course how the capitalist movement, and the bourgeoisie, operated in society. But Cassidy is wrong about Marx becoming the next big thinker. There will always be nay-sayers in discussions on the motives of capitalism. However, by giving the general public freedom of choice, a free market economy with limited boundaries, and the unlimited ability to succeed in terms of wealth and success, is still the best economic theory we have ever had, bar none. Free marketers of the world, unite!

Cunning way for a disseminator of second hand ideas to disguise his real purpose of spreading the satanic demon sseed of the terrorist Marx while pretending to favor the liberal society created by enlightenment designers based not on materialist slaves but autonomous spiritual entities. Whats most amazing to me is how these various articles mirror one another. Its really one story replicated in typical smoke and mirrors magic style.

The New Yorker discovers Marx

Richard Donnelly The Socialist Standard - January '98 One hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the New Yorker has discovered that "Marx's version of free enterprise also chimes with the views of many contemporary businessmen, who would rather be flogged than labelled Marxist". John Cassidy's 5,000-word essay "The Return of Karl Marx" in the October 27 issue of this magazine from the bastion of American capitalism does not include Marx's view of a future world based on common ownership. Nor does it support his labour theory of value. It is however amazingly laudatory when dealing with Marx's analysis of how capitalist accumulation operates. Cassidy quotes one Wall Street organiser of stock issues as saying: "The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right . . . I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism." At first Cassidy was astonished at that claim and recalled that he had studied economics with his financial friend at Oxford in the early eighties when their teacher had taught them to agree with Keynes that Marx's economic theories were "complicated hocus pocus". He decided to re-examine Marx's writings and found himself agreeing with his Wall Street friend. After sneering at Marx's writing style he goes on to heap praise on his analysis of capitalism: "When he wasn't driving the reader to distraction, he wrote rivetting passages about globalizaion, inequality, political corruption, monopolization, technical progress, the decline of high culture, and the enervating nature of modern existence--issues that economists are now confronting anew, sometimes without realising that they are walking in Marx's footsteps." Cassidy is unstinting in his praise for Marx's materialist conception of history: "Indeed, as Sir John Hicks, a Nobel Prize-winning British economist, noted in 1969, when it comes to theories of history Karl Marx still has the field pretty much to himself. It is, Hicks wrote; 'extraordinary that one hundred years after Das Kapital . . . so little else should have emerged'." Globalisation On the growth of global markets Cassidy again praises Marx. "Globalization is the buzzword of the late twentieth century, on the lips of everybody from Jiang Zemin to Tony Blair, but Marx predicted most of its ramifications a hundred and fifty years ago. Capitalism is now well on its way to transforming the world into a single market, with the nations of Europe, Asia, and the Americas evolving into three rival trading blocs within that market." While criticising Marx's view of the struggle between worker and capitalist as "too rigid", Cassidy provides some startling figures about ownership in the USA in modern times. "Between 1980 and 1996, the share of total household income going to the richest five percent of the families in the country increased from 15.3 percent to 20.3 percent, while the share of the income going to the poorest sixty

percent of families fell from 34.2 percent to 30 percent." Even more to the point he writes: "According to Edward Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University, half of all financial assets in the country are owned by the richest one percent of the population, and more than three-quarters of them are owned by the richest ten percent." In discussing the role of the unemployed in keeping down wages, Cassidy is in no doubt that Marx got that right too. "Marx believed that wages were held down by the presence of a 'reserve army' of unemployed workers who attempt to underbid the employed. Reduce the ranks of this army, he said, and wages would rise--just as they have started to do in the last year." The role of the state This remarkable essay ends with the writer discussing the relationship of politics to ownership. "Perhaps the most enduring elements of Marx's work is his discussion of where power lies in a capitalist society . . . Marx, of course delighted in declaring that politicians merely carry water for their corporate paymasters. 'The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie,' he wrote in the 'Manifesto', and he later singled out American politicians saying they had been 'subordinated' to 'bourgeois production' since the days of George Washington. The sight of a President granting shady businessmen access to the White House in return for campaign contributions would have shocked him not at all." For socialists reading any praise for the works of Karl Marx in such a supporter of American capitalism as the New Yorker magazine is astonishing. It shows that once an enquirer frees himself of the prejudices of orthodox thinking the only way to understand how world capitalism is developing is from the standpoint of Marx's materialist conception of history. With a little more application Cassidy may even rid himself of the orthodox nonsense that he at present embraces; namely "supply and demand curves, production functions and game theory", and realise that Marx's labour theory of value is the view that best explains production, exploitation and surplus value. But let's not look for too much. We still relish his conclusion that "despite his errors, he was a man for whom our economic system held few surprises. His books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures".

The only reason any of this matters is because I am able to experience awakening of awareness of my magical transformative nature as I allow myself to become each of these vile depraved pigs. I wish I could become someone I like more than these scum.

The Editors, Monthly Review, Volume 49, Number 7, December 1997

The New Yorker dated October 20-27 carries, along with a generous menu of futurology, a sensational article on the past and present. It is entitled "The Return of Karl Marx," by John Cassidy, who is selfidentified as an Oxford-educated friend of "a highly intelligent and levelheaded Englishman whose career has taken him ... to a big Wall Street investment bank." Visiting with his friend at the latter's Long Island summer home during the early summer, the two discussed the economy and speculated on how long the current financial boom would last. "To my surprise, he brought up Karl Marx. `The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more convinced I am that Marx was right,' he said. "I assumed he was joking. "`There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the economist who resurrects Marx and puts it all together,' he continued, quite seriously. `I am absolutely convinced that Marx's approach is the best way to look at capitalism.' "I didn't hide my astonishment. We had both studied economics during the early eighties at Oxford, where most of our teachers agreed with Keynes that Marx's economic theories were `complicated hocus-pocus' and Communism was an `insult to our intelligence.' ... Nonetheless I decided that if my host, with all his experience of global finance, reckoned Marx had something worthwhile to say, perhaps it was time to take a look." So he did the rounds of second-hand bookstores and picked up what seems to have been a reasonably representative collection of Marx's writing and took them along with him as reading matter on his August vacation. The result is the New Yorker article mentioned above. Why do we call it "sensational"? There are two reasons, both necessary to an explanation. First, because the author comes to his subject with an open mind and makes no effort to slide over or qualify the favorable opinion his inquiries led him to. The final sentence of the article makes his position clear: "His [Marx's] books will be worth reading as long as capitalism endures." Of how many authors can that honestly be said today? Second, the New Yorker had the courage to publish the article despite the obvious fact that it contradicts the all but unanimous conventional wisdom of the bourgeois media that Marx and Marxism died an ignominious

death with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90. Announcing the "return of Marx" so soon after that even required courage. If you doubt it, just try to imagine the editors of, say, the New York Times Sunday magazine having to decide whether or not to publish Cassidy's article. With respect to content, there is, not surprisingly, little in "The Return of Karl Marx" that is new or original. Cassidy speaks of the "failure of Communism" being a part of Marx's legacy, but immediately adds that "this was not his primary interest ... Marx was a student of capitalism, and that is how he should be judged." Quite so. Compared to most latter-day commentators on Marx's work, Cassidy is generally fair and accurate, a remarkable achievement in this day and age of debased and all too often shamefully dishonest ideological welfare. Obviously we disagree with some of what he says, but any one interested in improving, or just refreshing, his or her knowledge of what Marx and Marxism are all about could find a lot worse places to start then this New Yorker article. And if the implication of the titlethat Marx is back and will be with us as long as we live in a capitalist societyis borne out by the course of history, the knowledge gained will be well worth having and adding to as opportunity offers and experience unfolds.

It could easily be much worse. Sticking eith the Monthly Review, the dimmer peddlars of second hand ideas and now shoved unceremoniously off stage so the brith light of Immanuel Wallertsein may shine alone in the dark.

The Human Costs of Economic Growth

Immanuel Wallerstein, Monthly Review, December 2008 Review of Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital The great debate of social science for the last two centuries at least has been how to account for the extraordinary economic growth of the modern world. We all know the basic picture. The overwhelming majority of authors have argued that the story is that of the rise of the West. There have been, however, two opposing versions of this narrative. One is the Whig interpretation of history, which argues that it has been a story of steady social, intellectual, and moral progress whose explanation lies in some particular characteristic of the West (often just of England). In this version, the world is reaching its summit of progress today. The second version is Marxism, which has argued that the rise of the West is part of a larger story of steady dialectical and conflictual historical development. In this version, the present West-dominated world order will inevitably be superseded by another phase of historical development, in which capitalism will be replaced by communism. In the last twenty years or so, there has been an important counter-theorization to the rise of the West, which is centered around a discussion of Chinese history. It argues that China had been the center of some kind of world system for a very long time, that it was temporarily eclipsed in the last two centuries by the so-called rise of the West, and that the pendulum is now (inevitably) swinging back to a Chinese-centered world. Amiya Bagchi does not agree at all with the Whig interpretation of history nor does he really buy the Chinese-centric narrative. Instead, he offers us a seriously modified version of the Marxist model. Or to put it in his own words, this book brings together the insights of the historians of war, and those of Marxist and world-system theorists to characterize the emergence and operation of actually existing capitalism as a system that engages in unlimited combat, backed when necessary by arms, for the conquest of labor power, nonlabor resources, and markets. (xi) While Bagchi is surely not the first to argue against the idea that markets and free trade are the key elements of capitalist development, he wants to do more than attack this view as an analytical description of the modern world. He wishes to center his attention on the degree to which economic growth under capitalism is very poorly correlated with human development, even in the West. His book is an attempt to analyze in detail the human suffering that has been at the basis of the advantages reaped by the European ruling classes (xiv). And while he agrees with the Chinese-centric school that the West had no significant economic advantage over the Chinese and the Indians before the nineteenth century, he takes issue with them on two main questions. One is the significance of what happened in the early nineteenth century in the industrializing countries led by Great Britain. He says that there is a crucial distinction between a state (such as Qing China) that reins in the drive for unlimited accumulation and a social and political order (as in Hanoverian England) that promotes the unchecked centralization of economic power and thus facilitates the growth of factory-based industry. (xv) The second dissent is a sort of so-what argument. Suppose, Bagchi says, that China would have emerged in the nineteenth century as the supreme economic and military power rather than the West. It would have led to the same marginalization and immiseration of vast numbers of people around the world (xvi), to the benefit of Chinese rather than of Western elites. To what he considers the undialectical view of Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz based on neoclassical and monetarist economics, Bagchi asserts that

we cannot regard human history as that of a tournament between different countries vying for the global market nor can we confine our attention to the working of passive market forces. (11) For Bagchi, capitalism is the culprit, not the West. And the damage it has wreaked has not merely been one of material spoliation. For Bagchi insists on the damage wreaked by the two dominant ideologies that accompanied capitalismthat of racism and the civilizing mission (in unbroken continuity from the Iberian conquistadores to the Bush administration) and that of Malthusianism and social Darwinism, which translated into a view that the worlds resources are limited and therefore should/will only be shared by the fittest. As for the largely Marxist theories of imperialismhe cites specifically Hobson, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Bukharin, and LeninBagchi sums up his disagreements clearly: I have one major difference from most of the theories I have sketched so briefly. Building partly on the work of Ragnar Nurkse and Matthew Simon, I have shown that the nonwhite colonies were primarily sources of surplus extracted by the capitalist powers and were not destinations of their net investment, except perhaps in certain brief phases. In short, the colonies were not merely objects of conquest; they also provided a significant surplus to their colonizers. (271) Basically, Bagchis whole case is made in a brief preface. The rest of the book gives the supporting evidence for the arguments. Part one lays out his theoretical position and seeks as well to explain the construction of the concept of the European miracle. Part two reconstructs European history between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in order to explain the breakthrough of the West. Part three elaborates the kinds of human damage caused in the non-Western world as a result of the triumph of capitalism throughout the world. Much of the celebration of the European miracle is based on the art of forgetting (81). Part four addresses the dangers facing humankind at the present time as a result of capitalist growth. The strengths of this magisterial work are numerous. Bagchi treats the modern world as a capitalist world, one that found its origins in Europe in the sixteenth century. In this he is faithful to the vision of Marx. As he says: I find the notion of capitalism as a mode of production still useful for distinguishing, say, China or India of the eighteenth century from England or the Netherlands of the same period. This use is fully consistent with my occasional use of the idea of hierarchies in the circuits of exchange that Braudel so fruitfully employed. (177) Furthermore, Bagchi analyzes this capitalist world not in terms of how much growth it made possible but how much human development it made possible, and in this regard he finds it very wanting. One of his principal services to readers is his pulling together of the demographic literature on life expectancy, the public health literature on disease prevention and cure, data on nutrition, income levels, and the various forms of labor coercion to give us a nuanced picture of human development over time and throughout the world, one that is differentiated by geography, age cohorts, and gender. He also presents a comprehensive comparative picture of the historical economic development of China, India, and Japan, and their relation to what happened in Europe and North America. It is hard to suggest another work that does this in as small a space, so clearly, and based on such extensive acquaintance with the empirical literature. My one reservation is that, for someone so devoted to dissecting academic myths, Bagchi has paid no attention to the now quite extensive literature that raises into considerable doubt the industrial revolution as something that occurred primarily in England and primarily at a given moment in time (from the end of the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries). Actually, he himself throws some cold water on the idea by talking of two, possibly three axial agesthe first being that of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, the second occurring in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries (and in some places he says only after 1945), and a possible third one occurring now. He does say that the improvement in the European standard of living occurs only in his second axial age. He doesnt really spell out what is supposed to be happening in the third. But Schumpeter already showed in his book on business cycles that similar axial agesSchumpeter does not call them thatcould be found at a number of moments in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. It is not that machine production is unimportant. It is rather that it has been produced by a series of bursts forward that have been going on continually for four centuries. Just as the West invented the concept of the European miracle because it was ideologically useful, there is good reason to believe that the West (more specifically Arnold Toynbee) invented the concept of the single industrial revolution for similar ideological purposes. But, having laid out my one major reserve, I must say it is refreshing to have Bagchis voice added to the rather small list of important works on the origins and development of the modern world. The fact that he is an Indian well grounded in Indias own economic history gives him a vantage point on the overall process that allows him to insert elements into our collective efforts that might otherwise have escaped us. One can only hope that the book will have a wide international reading public.

I do spend many words acknowledging the genius of Plato and yet behind my adoration of the literery artifacts is my personal private individual experiences which Plato assists me in

recollecting. I see no such reinforcement going on with the whore Wallerstein. I see a fat bordello whore who is paid to provide pleasure to his criminal patrons so he writes what pleases them and what pleases them is apparently to peddle the second ideas he is peddling here just last month. He is a very old bedraggled whore now. It goes on. Mirrors and smoke. Smoke and mirrors. Daggers and cloaks.

Marx in the Mirror of Globalization

Peter Hudis, Britannica.com One interestingsome would say surprisingaspect of the ongoing discussions and debates about globalization is the renewed interest being shown in the ideas of Karl Marx, which only recently seemed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. In the journalistic and academic worlds alike, a number of reappraisals of Marx's work are appearing that identify the 19th-century thinker as "the prophet of globalization" because of his focus on capital's inherent drive for self- expansion and technological innovation on the one hand and its tendency to exacerbate social inequality and instability on the other. Even some of globalization's most fervent supporters note the importance of Marx's work for anticipating the imbalances and disturbances associated with the unfettered expansion of global capital. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, writers for the passionately pro-capitalist magazine The Economist, put it in their new book A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization, "As a prophet of socialism, Marx may be kaput; but as a prophet of 'the universal interdependence of nations,' as he called globalization, he can still seem startlingly relevant...his description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago." Some may find such talk of Marx a bit odd, given the abject failure of the communist regimes that claimed to rule in his name. Yet as Marx scholars have long pointed out, the communist regimes had little in common with Marx's actual ideas. Marx opposed centralized state control of the economy (he called those who advocated it "crude and unthinking communists"); he passionately defended freedom of the press (he made his debut as a radical journalist espousing it); and he ridiculed the notion that a small "vanguard" of revolutionaries could successfully restructure society without the democratic consent of its citizens. If anything, the collapse of communism seems to have spurred new interest in Marx, since it makes his predictions concerning the global reach of capitalism seem even timelier. Micklethwait and Wooldridge contend that "one of the things that Marx would recognize immediately about this particular global era is a paradox that he spotted in the last one: The more successful globalization becomes, the more it seems to whip up its own backlash.... The undoing of globalization, in Marx's view, would come not just from losers resenting the success of the winners but also from the winners themselves losing their appetite for the battle." "There is even a suspicion," they go on, "that globalization's psychic energythe uncertainly that it creates which forces companies, governments, and people to perform bettermay have a natural stall point, a movement when people can take no more." The tone of much of the current discussion of Marx on the part of both supporters and critics of globalization (for a forceful example of the latter, see William Greider's One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism) was established by John Cassidy's 1997 New Yorker article "The Return of Karl Marx," in which he called Marx "the next big thinker." Cassidy cited a highplaced Wall Street investment banker who told him, "The longer I spend time on Wall Street, and the more convinced I am that Marx was right." What is it about Marx's work that produces such comments? First, though Marx was a severe critic of capitalism, few captured better its inherent drive for technological and social innovation. As Marx saw it, capitalism is not only about the production of material goods and services but also about the production of value. Labor, in Marx's view, is the source of value. And the magnitude of value, he argued, is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time it takes to produce a given commodity. Marx held that there is a continual contradiction between these two purposes: producing for material wealth and producing for value. As productivity rises, more goods are produced in the same unit of time, so the value of each commodity falls. The increase in material wealth corresponds with a decline in the magnitude of valuethat is, production costs fall and prices tend to fall as a result. This presents the capitalist with a knotty problem: the relative decline in the value of each commodity risks leaving him short of the funds needed to maintain his level of productive output. He responds by trying to further boost productivity, since the greater the quantity of goods produced, the better the opportunity to realize the value of his initial investment. The best way to increase productivity is to invest in labor-saving devices. The resulting growth in productivity, however, reproduces the initial

problem, since the increase in material wealth leads to a further decrease in the relative value of each commodity. Capitalism is thus based on a kind of treadmill effect, in which the system is constantly driven toward technological innovation regardless of its human or environmental cost. The restlessness and drive for innovation that characterize contemporary high-tech capitalism was long ago anticipated by Marx. Second, Marx held that this process of constant innovation and productive expansion.... Second, Marx held that this process of constant innovation and productive expansion ultimately proceeds with disregard of national borders. The logic of capital, he held, was to create a world market. National restrictions on the movement of capital would eventually have to be lifted, he argued, because capital must constantly find new markets to absorb its ever-growing productive output. Third, Marx held that this process inevitably leads to a concentration and centralization of capital at one pole and a relative immiseration of the majorit y of the population at the other. Since capital is driven to increase productivity through labor-saving devices, "dead labor"machines, technology expands at a faster rate than the need for labor power. Since workers do not own capital, but only their labor power, social wealth gets increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Many consider this confirmed by the growing inequities that follow from the globalization process, as indicated by the fact that 225 individuals now control more wealth than half of the world's population. Marx the Man The importance of such issues is also addressed in Francis Wheen's Karl Marx: A Life, the first English- language Marx biography to appear in almost two decades. In Wheen's portrait Marx the man comes across as embodying in many respects the dialectic, a concept Marx drew from Hegel, that every unit contains its opposite within itself. Marx came from a family of renowned rabbis, yet showed not the slightest inclination toward religion. He was a loving husband and father whose daughters became important spokeswomen for socialism in their own right, yet he once sighed "blessed be he that hath no family." He preached the virtues of communalism and railed against egotism, yet he was such an individualist himself that when a friend said that she couldn't imagine him living happily in an egalitarian society, he responded: "Neither can I. These times will come, but we must be away by then." He spent more time thinking over the origins, nature, and function of money than perhaps anyone, yet he was continuously unable to earn any himself. What is most striking from Wheen's portrayal is Marx's gargantuan intellectual appetite. From his earliest writings there appears no subject that was not of interest to himhistory, ancient and modern philosophy, economics, art, literature, geology, natural science, ethnology, and mathematics. This surely makes any effort to sum up his contribution far from easy. So formidable was Marx's output that although he published only a handful of books in his lifetime (including one volume of his planned multivolume magnum opus Das Kapital), his collected works come to more than 100 volumes, and the work of transcribing and publishing all his writings remains to be completed even today. Wheen approaches his subject with considerable skepticism, especially concerning Marx's goal of a classless society. A columnist for The Guardian, Wheen has never considered himself sympathetic to Marxism. Yet, he writes, "The more I studied Marx, the more astound ingly topical he seemed to be. Today's pundits and politicians who fancy themselves as modern thinkers like to mention the buzzword 'globalization' at every opportunitywithout realizing that Marx was already on the case in 1848." Two issues make Marx especially relevant in his view: one, Marx's notion that even in the most propitious economic conditions, the laborer under capitalism is compelled to endure overwork and "the reduction to a machine, the enslavement to capital"; and two, Marx's insistence that once capital becomes the predominant formation in any society, "what is truly human becomes congealed or crystallized into a material force, while dead objects acquire meaning, life and vigor." None of these recent discussions of Marx can be considered wholesale appropriations of his legacy. The consensus on the part of most commentators is that while Marx may have been right about the nature of capitalism, he was less correct about the practicality of the alternative he envisioned. Yet in light of the way Marx is gaining increased attention from many who only a short time ago thought that history had pronounced his ideas dead, his work may continue to illuminate the quest to understand life under the "manic logic" of global capitalism. As Marx once put it, "We are firmly convinced that the real danger lies not in practical attempts, but in the theoretical elaboration of communist ideas, for practical attempts, even mass attempts, can be answered by cannon as soon as they become dangerous, whereas ideas, which have conquered our intellect and taken possession of our minds...are demons which human beings can vanquish only by submitting to them." Peter Hudis is a freelance writer living in Chicago.

Chicago. Seven and four square jars ago the Kunstler defended the paid agents who infiltrated the community of young people to try to organize them.

1/25/2009 9:29 PM The pig Marx makes me sick. What is it today. I received a message from Hunter regarding his being disturbed by a response to a message Jodi sent about scoring one hundred percent on a test she took. On top of that I felt disturbed by Jeanmaries story dated 15 January 2009 about the black and blue control freak she described as a Beverly Hill billy artist with lots of money. Then I read Jeanmaries 24 January 2009 blog entry about domestic violence. Only now am I putting those two together. In her 31 December blog she made mention of post traumatic stress and of her having beenm a victim of violence. There was no indication of when or who. Now there is. Black and Blue. In the midst of all of this I am goi9ng beyond me revulsion in response to anything which exposes me to the Satanic Marx. I really do regard his influences as more Satanic than any other persons. I regard him as anti philosophy, anti-enlightenment, anti-American, anti-spiritual. I regard him as very evil and am not sure why he is so evil but I know he is. Hitler and Goebbels and their gand of arch criminals are about as bad as humans got in the last hundred years unless we can add Stalin and Mao. Marx having come before them seems to me to be the inspiration of their evils satanic behaviour. I am now going to excercise my option to take refuge in the Buddhaby which I meanin the waythe taoof silent knowledgethe way of shunyata tao psychethe way of intending emptying of my mind but not a loss of consciousness of my minda consciousness of the magicality of my mindemptycapable of giving birth to an infinite variety of worldsI am now going to intend receptiveness so that I may be so disposed to be properly prepared for awakening of divine intelligence.