“This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology.  Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race.  Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past.  Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.  The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential.  Never mind!  Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins.  And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labor, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work.  Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defense of property [...] In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder in short, force, play the greatest part. In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.  Right and ‘labor’ were from the beginning of time the sole means of enrichment, ‘this year’ of course always excepted.  As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.”

I think it is quite clear what Marx is talking about in this passage, so eloquently rendered.  The working class today were not the historic losers of a bygone era, descendants of ancestors that squandered their wealth and therefore lost in the lottery of life.  What Marx begins to describe in later passages of the chapter is how the process, as he highlighted above, was above all one of violence and deceit, of theft and force, and so on.  That is what Marx calls “primitive accumulation” and it still goes on today albeit on a much smaller scale.

As cottage industries and traditional medieval occupations were beginning to be swept asunder by the emergence of industrialization in the urban centers of the world, men and women both had to give up their previous occupations in order to survive in this harsh new environment.  The countryside underwent rapid depopulation and the urbanization of the medieval city grew exponentially.  Former blacksmiths, weavers, carpenters, etc. were now reduced by in terms of their skill, their wealth, their livelihoods–in short, their way of life, as they took up residence in the big cities such as Manchester in northern England and underwent the process of what one could call “proletarianization.”  Wage-labor, or the sale of their labor power to a capitalist in exchange for a salary which was never equivalent to the amount of labor they had given, was the new norm.

Bourgeois conservatives everywhere like to imagine that this process was a morally necessary adjustment, and not just that, but on in which the working class today still had to “atone” for their sins as Marx suggested in reference passage.  While today they may not be as explicit in saying quite bluntly that the working class “deserves” to be where they are today, the residue of this thought still lingers on as presuppositions.  Why?  For one, in the democratic West, people attempt to overcome the immediate paradox which confronts them:  how is it possible that in such an egalitarian society where the rights of all are ensured, can poverty still exist?  This line of questioning is precisely how the ideology of original accumulation operates, the reality never quite matches up to our own indoctrinated worldview, and therefore must seek mystified explanations in order to surmount them, or keep the illusion intact.

In the United States most of what the average follower of the news understands of Turkey apart from its various “Ethnic Questions” is it’s apparently militant secular ideology, namely Kemalism.  Seen as a left-wing deterrent against populist Islamist parties (one of which is currently in power today, the AKP or Justice and Development Party), I was perhaps one of the many American students studying in Turkey who became enamored by its founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who seemed to have manifested himself in the early half of the 20^th century as a staunch leftist vanguard.  Western biographers of the man, or perhaps more accurately, hagiographers such as Lord Kinross and Andrew Mango both understand Atatürk and his eponymous ideology in a favorable light.  Both authors are held in high-esteem in Turkey, and only to the ideological hardcore would you find a Kemalist who would consider it profane.  Other authors, particularly the linguist Jefferey Lewis wildly praised Atatürk’s Alphabet Reform of 1928, in which he breathed new life into the Turkish language by relieving it from its vowel-poor Arabic alphabet and switching it to the vowel-rich Latin.  Historians, such as Bernard Lewis and Erik J. Zürcher also offer a barebones critique of the man and his ideas, preferring to tote the usual line of disavowal reserved for so many esteemed bourgeois leaders:  “He may have made some mistakes, but after all…”  Indeed to many in the west, particularly those warriors of the War on Terror, Atatürk and Kemalism are agreeable insomuch as that it doesn’t promote blowing up busloads of Israelis or sniping American soldiers.  For the liberal historical observer, Kemalism appears as a true democratic strongman on the left.  As for the latter view, this is sadly not the case, for Kemalism offers little more than a homegrown version of nationalism more akin to fascism than socialism.  If this is so, then why the do so many consider him as a hero of the left?

Before answering this question, it is important to understand each of the core doctrinal stances of Kemalism, which are called the “Six Arrows”:  1) statism; 2) revolutionism; 3) nationalism; 4) populism; 5) laicism; and lastly 6) republicanism.  Let’s start with the first, statism.  Statism, or etatism in French, is state control of economic and social life.  While many might consider this to be inherently socialistic, it bears more similarities with fascism’s corporatism, where it is in fact the state, not the workers, who own the means of production.  It is the ideology of the modernizer, which was Atatürk’s intentions from the start—to guide the newly formed Republic of Turkey from a top-down Jacobin manner.  The second, revolutionism, bears an almost a Trotskyite resemblance to his concept of “permanent revolution” or Thomas Jefferson’s famed passage of ensuring rebellion every generation or so in the maintance of liberty.  It was meant to ensure that only a pure form of Kemalism should remain as the guiding doctrine of the Turkish republic.  Yet its very definition conflicts with the first and fourth arrows listed:  statism and populism.  How can, in keeping in line with statism, a republic declare a revolution on itself, shaking off the Islamist dust from its hallowed chambers, if only to turn into a more menacing monster the second time around?  This was in fact what precisely happened in May of 1960, when the center-right Prime Minister Adnan Menderes was the victim of a military coup d’etat and summarily hung after a brief show-trial on an island off the coast of Istanbul.  He had been duly elected, enjoying a solid majority of support from the electorate, only to have his party banned after his execution, causing a power vacuum of smaller, right-wing parties, each trying to claim itself as the true successor of Menderes’s Democrat Party.  Revolutionism in this case was somewhat applied in the Kemalist sense, but the military acted hardly out of concern for Atatürk’s principles, but out of anger and frustration of a lagging economy and significant cuts to their salaries.  The third, nationalism, cannot be seriousuly defending by any leftist and is not worth elaborating on.  Populism, as with revolutionism, is also a somewhat harder arrow to nail down logically when considering Kemalism to be part of the left.  For one thing, populism has historically been a movement by the people, often led by a charismatic leader who appears to be outside of the normal circle of bureaucrats, hence a reformer.  Yet in the history of the Turkish republic, never has their been a Kemalist politician elected as the prime minister who has asserted an orthodox Kemalist stance.  It is also a contradiction.  Thus far the the majority of the populists in Turkey have been the right-wing Islamists.  As for laicism, a French term for secularism, this appears as the strongest of the arrows as a legitimate position on the left.  Not so, as work done by political scientist and historian Taha Parla has pointed out, laicism in Turkey is more of a modernized sect of Islam, a competitor with Sunni Islam which is oftened heralded by the right in Turkey.  Hence the government-sanctioned İmam Hatip schools in Turkey took over the role of the Ottoman medrese.  Hardly a secular stance if anything, which is why is laicism, does not directly to secularism as leftists understand it in English, connotes state control of religion, rather than an atheistic state.  Lastly republicanism only denotes a government administered in the style of a constitutional republic; not necessarily a point of leftist doctrinaire.

Not only in doctrine, but also the actions the early Kemalist republic took to quell the left in the name of stability and prosperity are often sore issues for those who consider themselves part of a Kemalist left.  For one, Atatürk and his successor İsmet İnönü were vicious at clamping down on trade unions and turned on many of the very people who had helped them launch the Turkish War of Independence.  It was well remembered that socialist poet Nazim Hikmet, arguably one of Turkey’s greatest literary treasures, was expelled from Turkey and lived and died in Moscow in 1963.  One of the greatest betrayals to the left was the assassination of the original founding members of the Communist Party of Turkey by Atatürk, in conjunction with the Bolsheviks.  Politicians and individuals who wished to register a political party were not permitted until some relaxation under İnönü in the 1940s, but with the caveat that all must uphold the principles of Kemalism.  Problems of ethnicity, while not exclusive to Kemalist Turkey, were nonetheless declared as non-existent, as all who lived within the confines of the republic were considered to be Turks.  The alleged hoşguru, which can be translated as “tolerance” of the Ottoman times had been long over, and expression of anything but state-sanctioned religious behavior, the Turkish language, the new-found Turkish nationality was and still is today with some exceptions, considered to be illegal.

There are three definitive events which marked the decline of the left in Turkey.  The first was the establishment of the republic and the betrayal of those leftists, notably communists, who had helped establish it by the Kemalists.  The second was Turkey’s alignment with the United States during the administration of Adnan Menderes, which is really where the CHP became known as a “left-wing” party.  While the collapse of the Cold War was yet another added blow to the movement, for Turkey it came almost a decade earlier.  A CIA-backed coup d’etat of 1980, which effectively destroyed the militant left, led to effective collapse of the left.  Many, if they didn’t avow their leftist beliefs, were imprisoned, tortured or even killed.  Some had even sought refuge abroad.

That today, when Kemalists being to claim themselves as being part of the leftist heritage of Turkey, should be ignored.  This ideology has been just that–a false consciousness which seeks to preserve the bourgeois dreams of one man, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and not those of the poor Anatolian farmer or increasingly proletarianized urban masses.  One must look to the general exist poll numbers of the past election for prime minister in 2007 to see in what areas of the country the CHP captured:  mostly from affluent areas of the Aegean and Thracian region.  Incidentally, the east, which has always had a strong leftist turn-out, has seen many of its parties either outlawed, such as the recently court decision to ban the DTP, or Demoratic Society Party, for alleged links to the PKK.  And the gap it has left there makes it easy for the populist Islamist right-wing to exploit the deep sense of betrayal with which many in those regions feel towards the Kemalists.

Kemalism was, is and always will be a nationalist ideology which is more or less an amalgam of bourgeois Jacobinism and fascism.  I fail to see this as a legitimate leftist tendency in any sense.

In A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Ottomanist Taner Akçam warns his readers that much of controversy surrounding the Armenian Genocide in the mainstream discourse in Turkey barely runs counter to the ruling ideology’s interpretation of history. [2]  There is not a single political party or politician in Turkey today who has attempted to shed any critical light on the issue.  Assassinations, such as that of the prominent Armenian journalist Hrank Dink, to high-profile lawsuits against writers Orhan Pamuk and Elif Şafak, have all been the result of attempting to engage in public discourse about the Armenian Genocide alternative to the state-sanctioned version.  This very debate is a confrontation with the ugly realities of how ideology operates and governs our own thinking and conceptualization of the society in which we live.  In considering the highly emotional reaction the debate elicits, does this not lend credence to Karl Marx’s observation in the opening of the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, where he states that in bourgeois societies, the present is governed by the past, just as a nightmare does on the brains of the living? [3]  Without this recognition of how this battle is one fought on ideological grounds, it will be hard for many in the west to truly understand the gravity of calling genocide,”genocide.”

Yet while myself and others like me can rise in indignation over the legal repercussions of admitting to genocide in Turkey, an equally disturbing phenomenon is occurring in the so-called bastion of the free world.  In France and Switzerland, most people would not blink by the use of the term and would accept it just as they accept the Holocaust of the Jews.  Yet while I do believe that there was a systematic attempt at removing the Armenian Christian subjects from Ottoman lands in the midst of World War I, I still cringe when I hear news reports from western governments criminalizing those who choose not to understand April 1915 as genocide.  Thus in both in the west and in Turkey, the criminalization of asserting or denying the Armenian Genocide has given way to a reality that nowhere is one safe from the state’s power to punish an interpretation of history.  This reality is none too far from the consciousness of many left/liberal Turks, who believe that the issue should be wrestled within the confines of one’s moral being, and not in a court of law.  States, which are often the sole actors in carrying out genocides, lose any moral high ground they appear to have when they accuse others of organized violence against a target population.  For a state to act moral on an issue such as genocide, would only result in the denigration of the victims’ memory by reducing their suffering to nothing more than a foreign policy issue. [4]  Or worse, another polemic used in the strategy of the Islamphobic reactionaries of the west in order to justify the mass slaughter and invasions in the Middle East and in other Islamic-majority nations.

If then the debate has more to do with national ideology than history, then the responsibility to recognize what happened in April 1915 as a genocide or not does in fact no lie with those external to the debate, but with the survivors, their descendants, and each and every Turkish citizen, to grapple with the issue on their own, without the harassment of their own government—or a foreign one.  As Noam Chomsky once put it, each of us is responsible only for what we can do to change our relative circumstances, not those of others.  Our responsibility therefore lies in critiquing ourselves.  At best we can hold academic conferences—or write articles—but in no way should we accept a state’s power to degrade and criminalize the debate, especially when it comes to discussing the historical crimes of others. [5]

The author is a visiting academician at a university in Istanbul.

REFERENCES

(1)  US Ottomanist Donald Quataert’s 2006 review of British historian Donald Bloxham’s The Great Game of Genocide, which argued for calling the forced deportations of the Armenians from Anatolia to the Syrian Desert as genocide, led him to write a small pamphlet calling the lack of serious scholarly debate around the Armenian “issue” entitled “The Massacre of Ottoman Armenians and the Writing of Ottoman History.”  Quataert, who was at the time serving as a chairman for the state-funded Institute of Turkish Studies, was asked to retract his statements or step down.  Quataert chose to leave the ITS, along with several other of his colleagues in support for his stance against the muzzling of free expression.  For more information, please visit Washington Post journalist Susan Kinzie’s article, “Board Members Resign to Protest Chair’s Outing”:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/04/AR2008070402408.html.

(2)  Taner Akçam, a Turkish Ottomanist who is currently living in exile in the United States, states in clear terms that the debate surrounding the Armenian Genocide in Turkey is deeply connected with the origins of the Republic of Turkey.  Certain member within the Young Turk movement of the Committee of Union and Progress, which was a nationalist political organization which came to power at the turn of the 20^th century.  More information can be found in Akçam’s scholarly work on the Armenian Genocide entitled A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York:  Holt Paperbacks, 2006).

(3)  Karl Marx, “The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.”  The Marxist Internet Archive:  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm.  Retrieved on 17 April 2010.

(4)  In reference to the standing US House of Foreign Affairs Committee’s recent affirmation of the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H. Res. 252).  An electronic copy of this bill can be found at:  http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hr111-252.  While the bill it does not penalize those who would otherwise not label it genocide, other governments in the west such as those of France and Switzerland have made it punishable under their respective laws.

(5)  From a lecture given by Noam Chomsky found on YouTube at 5:02:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV7UYj-4mTE.  Retrieved on 17 April 2010.

Most of Lotta’s talk was spent on making long-winded rants about a few questionable footnotes made about the Cultural Revolution by current liberal scholarship. There was very little Marxist analysis, and apart from a few cheap shots at liberal historians, Lotta brought up few serious points himself. His biggest claim, which took up a total of 15 minutes, was ridiculing liberal China historian Roderick MacFarquhar’s Mao’s Last Revolution in which he falsely accredits a quote by Mao without any proper citation. Another self-congratulatory moment for Lotta was his correction of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao:  The Unknown Story, where the authors had misused a quote by Chairman Mao. That was, as far as I could tell, the “meat” of the lecture. What followed was some hysterical call to arms against the US government and a slavish extolling of the virtues of the RCP chairman, Bob Avakian. Much of the theory was a caricature of the Communist Manifesto and not really worth mentioning.

When it came time for the Q&A session, I asked to the affect how, with Mao’s death in 1976, the successes of the Cultural Revolution were so easily derailed without violent protestation from its direct beneficiaries, the workers and peasants? Lotta responded by saying that there were already crypto-capitalists operating within various institutions such as the Party, the military, the educational system, etc. that were undermining Mao’s every move in order to spring for the attack when the time was right. He also mentioned of the massive Soviet build-up of men and arms around Harbin, a fairly large city in northern China, that were poised to strike at the fledgling People’s Republic. Lotta did mention that there were some attempts by the peasantry and working class to restore the Cultural Revolution, but apparently they were suppressed by the new armies of the state capitalists, led by Deng Xiaoping. I thanked him, but I was not completely satisfied with the answer I was given.

The problem I have with Lotta’s answer is not his wholesale condemnation of Xiaopeng as a leader of some internal Thermidorian coup, nor even his spotless praise of Mao. The problem is that revolutions, according to Marx, require a certain degree and level of consciousness among those who participate in it and who are trying to agitate for it. This includes a synthesis of revolutionaries and the workers, or whomever, both of which agree upon the ideals expressed and being fought for. Moreover, it should not take just one man to deliver “consciousness” and have the entire success of the revolution rely on his or her shoulders. Paul Mattick, a prominent member within the left communist tendency, spoke of Lenin in a similar tone, stating that a party or organization which simply acts as the conduits of revolutionary appeal function just as priests do, commanding the party faithful from the pulpit of enlightenment. It was no wonder, then that at the end of the lecture, an appeal was made by Lotta’s mediator to donate funds to the RCP as wicker baskets were being passed around. Much of the lecture resembled church in that sense.

It was clear that, in spite of the event’s poster to expect a scholarly defense of Mao (in addition to warning us that he will “answer the toughest questions”), it was anything but that, and instead became more like a rant from junior trial lawyer who, without much intellectual rigor, broke-down to straight-up party rhetoric. Any pretenses I may have had about giving Maoism a chance as a serious theoretical and practical branch of Marxism gradually disappeared as the evening grew later.  If anything, what Raymond Lotta is doing by attempting to give communism a respectable name is having quite the opposite effect. By defending Mao, and, in some instances alluding to Stalin’s apparent achievements, he is taking the worst excesses of opportunistic leftism and turning it around to make the point that they were somehow in line with Marxist analysis. Perhaps I shouldn’t put too much faith in someone like Lotta, but I can never be sure that other people in the audience didn’t.

There is no doubt that there are some lasting human qualities that survive from archaic times to today, but we seem to be paying attention more to individual behaviors rather than how our very environment forces us to adapt and behave accordingly. Yet why is it that we only scratch the surface to questions like greed, violence, envy, etc? We enter into the discussion as simply taking these for granted, understanding human emotions are mediated by ourselves and ourselves alone. What about the block you grow up on? The government you live under? The economic system which influences and rationalizes your decision-making in more ways than we think? Capitalism is tremendous, so huge that we can’t even begin to adjust our lenses to see it because we’re not given any framework of analysis by our teachers, parents, clergy, or government officials. Instead we are just made to accept it, to tolerate it, and perhaps criticize it–but not enough to really change it.

This system, capitalism, causes enormous suffering for all. In the West, where it has become virtually ingrained in our psyche (though some may disagree with this statement) we are given ways of coping with it. The poor react one way, they tend to become more patriotic, more religious, seeing parts of their childhood values fall to pieces. For the rich, they become more liberal, more multi-culturalist and often fall into some type of filtered, urban adapted Eastern spirituality. This is usually accompanied by a whole range of commodities which help to accent your belief, like carved Buddha figurines and over-priced scented candles, thereby making you more convinced of the spiritual necessities of the free market. In short, we’ve been given plenty of abstract, idealistic ways of transcending reality, with the desired result of keeping your head and feet firmly planted in the clouds, not providing any tools to change actual realistic, material reality. We go to bed dreaming, we go to work dreaming, the different being that the latter usually entails more consciousness, and therefore, more harsh realities.

So in some ways, while it is completely understandable to me that we need to provide answers to change the very reality we live in, thereby making all of life’s abstractions like religion or ideology obsolete, it is also same to note just how dependent we are on these abstractions in order to make life even remotely bearable. Without these abstractions, which are articulated from the nature of capital itself–greedy, power-hungry–that seemingly rough edifice of human nature would drift away, revealing a more fluid, dynamic aspect, one that I would like to think would make us truly question how we ever made human nature a fixed notion anyway.

Religion is supposed to seen as a universal. Which is why I dislike this “God-through-science” methodology of so-called fundamentalists; in their search for revealing truth, they are really trying to prove that religion is just as valid as science is a field of inquiry. Scientists, by their nature, have to be in more or less a constant state of skepticism and always need verify what they are doing (hence “hypothesis” and “thesis” are words that do not denote certainty). On the other hand, in the realm of spiritual inquiry, skepticism in religion is more about which moral path one chooses to follow, with the idea being that you will eventually shed that skepticism once you believe for certain that what you have found is the truth.

Therefore, when a person of Religion X says that their holy book or scriptures predates modern conceptions of the embryo, or theories of how the brain works, they want you to believe that before the evolution of the scientific method and empiricism, the truth was already unveiled; it was just a matter of humans, through their skepticism, reaffirming something they knew long-ago was true. This is a dangerous position for the person of faith to argue, not because of how we can manipulate language or take a certain exegetical approach to make the text appear as if that were the case, but because then they run into the problem of having to always prove their holy book/scripture is correct through science. Religion would thus have to act as a sort of “spiritual appendage” to whatever science has taken on as a theory. It also reifies science as something that should be truth, and thus when a person uses scientific data as evidence to support religion, one then has to ask him/herself which is their true belief–science or religion? Again, such a method is entirely inappropriate.

The appropriate method is to keep them apart as separate disciplines of knowledge.  Science will never be able to dictate what is or isn’t moral (scientists tried it with eugenics and the results were horrifying) just as religion will never be able to determine exactly how old the earth is (fundamentalists are trying to do that with evolution and it has also failed).  People’s needs are often paradoxical, we want a certain amount of stability but we are constantly calling into question the ideas around us.  In order to nourish these needs, we must consult the appropriate disciplines that address both.

I was eating with two of my friends in the school cafeteria when one nudged the other and pointed to a boy who was drinking from the water fountain.  They spoke too quickly for me to understand what they were saying, but concluded it with laughter and beckoned for the boy to come over to them, presumably to share whatever it was they were laughing about.  Instead, one of my friends said to him that he looked exactly like a Korean TV reporter in Turkey she had seen in the news recently, and wondered if they weren’t related.  The boy smiled, but it didn’t match their punctuated enthusiasm that sent them into another fit of laughter.  He respectively excused himself from the table and returned to his friends who were probably wondering what had just happened.

For background, most Turks appear to have some mix of Asian and European blood in them, and given that the Ottoman Empire was at one point the largest Islamic polity in the world, it took in Muslims from Bosnia as far as the Caucasus.  It would only make sense for some to look more Asian or European than others.  This boy, whose father was Turkish, but whose mother was a second-generation Kyrgyz.  This gave him the nick-name “Tibet” from his peers, and also some nameless Korean reporter with whom my friends found hysterical.  This fact hit me because while I might not always be very conscious of my behavior around my friends, I could feel my nerves tense and face flush red almost instantly when my friend likened this student of ours to that of an Asian reporter because he had similar physical features.

The question that immediately surfaced was how could an educated person make such a blatantly racist comment?

The thesis I proposed was that racist language does not have the same gravity as it does outside of the United States.  I caution to add Western Europe, because of my own experiences with a similar phenomenon.  While I would not be so naive or insensitive as to propose that racism has ended in the US, people on average are not as comfortable making such openly racist remarks in polite company (save some states).  Those that restrain themselves from making such comments or even thinking them, are usually liberals.  Liberals, in general, tend to go against the grain of average convention and norms.  Thus what perhaps makes up for the liberal’s lack of traditional manners or behaviors makes up for the most part, in a strong conditioning of how one uses language particularly the language of identity (sexual, racial, ethnic, etc.).

Just as one of my Turkish friends might scold me for accidentally violating a Turkish cultural norm, a liberal would be horrified with equal measure to hear someone laugh at another person’s physical features such as skin color, let alone use a racial epithet.  There is the exact same form of sensitivity, from the staunch awareness of customs for the traditional person to that of racial/”other” awareness of someone perhaps more liberal; in other words, the emphasis has shifted from one area of belief to another.

The truly pathetic individual is the one in which such energy does not exist in either form.  But I’m not quite sure if such a person has or will ever live.

The answers tend to take the typical liberal stance, agreeing with the analysis, yet not accepting Marx’s solution, namely struggling against the very system which has brought down the most powerful companies. And even more fascinating story is the smug, yet increasing hysterical warnings from the libertarian far-right, who, to paraphrase Brendan M. Cooney, claim that governmental regulation of the economy has in fact brought this crisis on, thus making it a failure of what they consider to be socialism, and not so-called laissez faire capitalism. The idealism in this line of thinking leaves one dumbfounded for both its breathtaking lack of historical understanding but even more revealing is the sort of underlying operation of belief.

The one word which came to my mind was superstition. In a brief scan of some articles posted on the libertarian thinktank website LewRockwell.com, I got the immediate sense of the degree to which these writers’ uncritical faith in capitalism have simply rendered it as a sort of mysticism. Say what you want about Marxists, there is easily found an entire corpus of works by Marxists critical of Marx, but nowhere can one find the same level of criticism by Libertarians regarding the free market. In one particular article I found linked me to another Libertarian website called Human Events which held an interview with futurologist Gerald Celente. Celente is president of the Trends Research Institute, which boasts of accurately forecasting zeitgeists since 1980. In the interview, it becoming glaringly clear that Celente’s style was an amalgamation of 21st century Max Nordau, preaching against a socio-economic fin de siecle mentality and 19th century Karl Marx, who was able to contexualize and himself provide a deeper analysis than just the symptoms.

The main enemy of course was the descent of American morals brought on by government. The government, which of course, has played the historical role of forcefully opening trade to the Third World and profiting off of unequal exchanges. Yet of the few services this interview does to its reader is essentially describe perfectly the condition of industrial civilization as if he had consulted Marx himself. Here are some that I could have sworn he plagiarized from some essay written by Frederic Jameson or Herbert Marcuse:

“‘We became enmeshed in foreign entanglements. We forgot the lesson of England – and how their global imperial overreach destroyed their empire.’

Of course, the average American doesn’t think that we’re an empire. We’re not like the classical empires of old – raping, pillaging and stealing the wealth of invaded peoples. What does Mr. Celente have to say about this?

‘What we’re doing is squandering our wealth, our resources, the genius of our scientists and the future of our children. We’re over-consuming in every way — but under consuming our education and focusing on the quantity, not the quality, of what we’ve built. So much of today’s culture is counter-productive to what American built it’s foundation on — a high-quality producing nation building things, not pushing paper.

‘And we’ve become not only a consumer society but a low-quality consumer, as well as the most obese society in the world, eating low-quality high-carb, high-fat processed foods.’

‘We’re now focused on the lowest cost, the lowest common denominator. Not the best and highest quality. We advertise buying cheapest as the most important thing.’

Mr. Celente argues that we’ve socially destroyed our productivity and have abandoned it to other countries.”

The above text makes palpable three key concepts that are ubiquitous in Marxist theory: 1) Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism; 2) The crisis of overproduction; 3) Historical materialism. Coupled with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, globalization can be added to this category to explain more thoroughly points #1-2. Perhaps Celente’s apocalyptic message isn’t so surprising after all, yet the fatal flaw of his analysis or forecasting, is the outlandish separation between the government and the economy. The economy, which Marx states throughout his works, is the foundation of civilization, politics act as the articulation of the existing economic order. If Wall Street and the federal government are the “sorcerers” in this case, then Celente is the observant fool, superstitious and wholly ignorant of the real causes behind this withering system of ours.

—

The full-text article can be found at:  http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32152

At a press conference in Sao Paulo, a week ahead of the G20 summit which will be held in the United Kingdom, President Lula expressed his own outrage at the failure of the advanced Western nations of their arrogant mismanaging of the global economy.  Yet rather than simply stating that, he instead dove into crude anti-gringo rhetoric by denouncing those held responsible as “white, blue-eyed people” explaining that “As I do not know any black or indigenous bankers [...] I can only say it is not possible for this part of mankind, which is victimised more than any other, to pay for the crisis.”  British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who, only a week ago suffered an  from a rather embarrassing scolding by a Conservative MEP from his own countryman, was apparently in attendance as well.

While this form of racism isn’t anything new from Latin American leaders, it does come at a time when much of the media–and apparently political leaders–all seem to be playing the race card.  Burris notes that we saw it before with CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, whose infamous televised rant last month against Americans who fell victim to the Subprime mortgage crisis became the target of Jon Stewart’s acidic comedy show, The Daily Show.  It appears as if these criticisms were like a matrioshka doll, all nestled in each other,  with Santelli’s bitter rant as the smallest, as he is criticizing a certain segment of a national population, covered by Lewis’s offensive commentary of a people, which in turn is swallowed by the biggest of them all–Lula’s condemnation of an entire race.

But how can we make sense of this layered disdain for what could only be called the “white middle classes”?  Slavoj Zizek in his book The Fragile Absolute–or is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? discusses British philosopher Anthony Gidden’s theory on global reflexivization vis-a-vis what is known in contemporary parlance as “reverse racism”.  In Zizek’s example of the shadow geography of the present-day Balkans, we understand that racism shown against white ethnic oppressors can be seen as legitimate if spoken by either latter-day victims or even the Western “whites”.  In terms of theory, Zizek states that “The Balkans constitute a place of exception with regard to which the tolerant multiculturalist is allowed to act out his/her repressed racism [...] racism itself is becoming reflexive.”  In applying this theory to our current situation, as economists, sociologists and historians are all trying to find their bearings in the midst of this great recession, and we are all hearing the same thing:  from the rhetoric of the massive failure of neo-liberalism, to the nail in the coffin of the Bretton-Woods Systems, capitalists in the Developing World are clamoring to have their voices heard.

Last week, Hurriyet, one of Turkey’s leading syndicated newspapers, covered a conference held in Istanbul with other neighboring Mediterranean countries, ranging from Italy to Lebanon.  Most were from the eastern and southern Mediterranean–the poorer part of the region–and led by the Turks, all cried in unison for a greater share of the free market pie which the north had been long denying them.  One Turkish minister bluntly called for economic sanctions against countries that would take protectionist measures to weather the storm.  While Kemal Dervis, head of the United Nations Development Program and former Turkish minister of the economy, also made it clear that unbridled free market capitalism is harmful, new definitions  “social security and risk” must be reconsidered.  It is no wonder that the cover of Time Magazine Europe in early February 2009 had on the picture a digital picture of Karl Marx; a specter revisited

It seems as though we are still unsure just how vast the problem of the current financial crisis is, and yet at every level demographically, we see virtually all classes of whites being condemned by both their own people as well as non-whites.  It isn’t enough that it was just the class of financiers or the more objective criminals such Bernard Madoff, or that because we’ve been thrown off-balance by such a disaster, we are wildly and prematurely pointing fingers left and right.  Rather, according to the three criticisms of Lula, Lewis and Santelli, members of the middle class are no longer the victims of the system, but are intrinsically-linked to its well-being, no matter how many channels and complexities that create what we consider the free market.  This is truly capitalist ideology at its highest, when we are told that an entire class, indeed an entire people, can be held responsible for an economic recession, when in fact it was only a very minute percentage of those people who are in fact the real culprits.

It wasn’t that there should have been a forth link–or the tiniest matrioshka doll–that yet another reporter or president should have condemned, but rather the way in which we hold the victims as the oppressors.  This disorientation of victimhood is part of how our whole capitalist system works, and indeed how it survives, in a sort of Hegelian way, of trying to engineer its own problems in order to have everyone find redemption within its own systemic coordinates.