Out with the old, in with the new.
Hello folks. So I’ve finally gotten around to setting up a new blog.
This blog is closed to business. Please update your links!
Monday, March 30, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Thoughts on the current situation
First, I would like to note that due to my own sloth and lack of a computer (the latter situation being now rectified; the former, probably not so much) I haven’t blogged at all lately. Sorry about that. Furthermore, I have arrived at the conclusion that the general ‘theme’ of this blog suits me no more. I originally set this up so I would have a place to post my writings and findings as I attempted to discern God’s vocation for me as I kibbitzed about the country. Hence ‘Outward Journey, Inward Journey.’
However I have arrived at a point both inwardly and physically (wonderful dichotomy, that) where I feel that I have by God’s grace am better able to discern and live into what I feel He is calling me to over the next significant portion of my life. I am no longer moving around the country, and my living situation now is such that I am able to start laying the groundwork for a new church development. In short, I am now living in a radical community in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, and the ways in which a church plant will materialize are quickly being revealed to me. This new life situation has prompted me to reconsider whether this blog now suits my needs, and my answer is ‘no.’ Soon, I will be launching another blog, probably entitled ‘Bushwick Street Theologian.’ I will post a link thereto when the time comes.
Secondly, I want to write about capitalism’s present crisis. Clearly, it is possible to surmise that capitalist interests are the beneficiaries of economic precarity. High unemployment causes lower labor costs and higher margins for the parasitic class of bosses, who, producing nothing, command and control the means of production. Furthermore the current crisis has been transparently a means through which capital has been redistributed upwards — while the banksters cut jobs and foreclose, they pay themselves billions of dollars in executive bonuses from federal monies. The claims that Obama is promoting ’socialism’ are farcical, if by socialism we mean the redistribution of wealth to the working class.
Even though the Recession itself is being manipulated by capital to suit its own ends, nevertheless I am hopeful. In fact with each new twist in the downturn, with each bank loss totaling billions of dollars, every time the stock market takes yet another significant plunge, I react with some glee. Why? Because it opens up the opportunity to the anti-capitalist movement to significantly escalate our tactics. Indeed, I believe that measured escalation must be the principal goal at the moment. Specifically I think that eviction and foreclosure resistance would be a particularly fruitful tactic right now. Falling city and state budgets will lead to decreases in police budgets, leaving them less able to enforce the will of banks and landlords, and rising public anger will make them less inclined to do so. We should be developing ad hoc direct action networks of people to turn up at a home slated for eviction, occupying the house, thereby protecting the family who would otherwise lose their home. The worse the economic crisis becomes, the more people will be subject to this fate, and the more angry and radicalized the public will become.
It is only a small step from eviction-resistance and widespread squatting to the occupation of workplaces in the same manner as the occupations of 1968 France (although we should not fall into the trap of making reformist demands that they did), in which 10 million workers, from students to astronomers, occupied their workplaces in solidarity with the student revolt in Paris. Eviction-resistance also, if widespread, could lead to the organization of armed neighborhood defense committees. The former would be a giant leap forward in seizing the means of production from the bosses for the producing workers. The latter would establish at least semi-permanent autonomous zones from which the power of the capitalism-propagating State would be excluded.
As I stated, I believe the Recession poses an opportunity which we may not see again in our lifetimes. The longer it lasts, the better, for it allows for us to purposefully organize, and the more prone to radicalization people will become. Likewise, the deeper the Recession gets, the more opportunity to radicalize entire sectors of the public.
There are also signs that the anti-capitalist movement may actually, contrary to all past expectations (!) be rising to meet the challenge. For instance the Left Forum here in New York actually seems successful in bringing together communists of various varieties, democratic socialists, and anarchists together to the same event. This is an accomplishment.
Further, I believe that a sustained attack on capitalism will be tremendously powerful if the Christian Church is able to come to terms with the fact that capitalism’s ills are the direct result of its flawed and inherently sinful foundation: ones of greed, pride, idolatry, oppression of the poor, and the failure to recognize the inherent dignity of every human person. It is irreformable because these dreadful vices are inherent to it: without them the entire intellectual and economic system tumbles. The Church has been held in bondage by the ideology that a humane capitalism is possible: the idea is contradictory because the moment the economic system begins to be truly humane (rather than making pantomimes of humanity), it ceases to be capitalism.
Let us strive on, demanding that our political and economic system strive toward the model of the eschatological Kingdom of God, which although we are unable to achieve and which will be the work of God, we can use as our example and inspiration. Organize, agitate, escalate. Organize, agitate, escalate.
It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.
