Politics is about movement.  Conservative (in the generic sense of the term)  politics are politics of the present.  Their aim is to keep people in  place.  Radical politics are politics of the future.  Their aim is to move people to where they could or should be.

But as Aristotle argued:  all things move in response to desire.  In politics, inertia is a function of lack of desire.  Mechanical force can be applied to keep people in place, but it is of no use in moving people towards a future they do not desire (even if it is, or even if there are arguments which prove it to be, desirable).

Since the financial crisis erupted in 2008,  new socialist programs articulating new sets of social values have become legion.  The most recent to come to my attention is from Slovenia: “Our goal is a social and economic system based on direct democracy in politics and economy and on democratically planned production. We want a system of production and distribution that is in accordance with the needs of each individual and of society as a whole, and which takes into account the regenerative capacities of the natural environment.  For us democratic socialism is not a utopian vision of a distant future, but the process of overcoming capitalism by democratic means. A process guided by century-long traditions of emancipatory struggles of workers, peasants, women and indigenous peoples.”(Manifesto of the Initiative for Democratic Socialism, Slovenia).

But where is the desire that would move people in the direction of “overcoming capitalism by democratic means?”

In the twentieth century  Marxists used to speak of scientific theories of revolution.  This science claimed to be able to determine objective class interests, specify the precise structural impediments capitalism put in the way of their realization, the political organizations required for the marshalling of sufficient force to overcome those structures, and the immediate steps needed to put society upon what was called ‘the road to socialism.’

The fragment quoted above dispenses with the rhetoric of “science,”  but shares the underlying structure of argument:  there are social facts, there are moral truths about human beings, the two can be in contradiction, socialism is the political means by which social facts are made adequate to moral truths. One should not laugh at the epithet “scientific,” if we understand it to mean “objective,” i.e., grounded in demonstrable truths rather than naïve wishful thinking.  It is clear that there are such things as objective interests and moral truths are anchored in these objective interests.  All human  beings have an objective interest in there being oxygen in the atmosphere sufficient for the purpose of maintaining life.   It is wrong, a real harm to human beings, to deprive them of oxygen.  By like reasoning, it is wrong for any social system to deprive whole populations of that which they require from the natural environment.

The existence of classes does not complicate the metaphysics of objectivity.  If classes can be identified they must have a definite social function.  The interests of the members of the class would coincide with being able to access that which they need in order to continue their function. The problem arises when one attributes to classes interests that cannot be satisfied within the existing structure of society.  The problem here is not that such interests might not be real or impossible to establish.  If objective human interests are present in all classes, but cannot be satisfied by one class given its structural position in capitalist society, then it is straightforward to specify the structures that must be overcome in order to realize those human interests.  The problem is not theoretical specification of objectives, but absence of desire.

What happens when there are sound theoretical arguments that not only purport to demonstrate but do in fact demonstrate with as much certainty as the subject matter admits of that people, because of their class position, are systematically impeded from realizing their human interests, but these arguments, though true, do not produce any political movement amongst the class (or subaltern groups more generally) whose interests are not satisfied?  Not only are basic human interests not being satisfied, those who are deprived know they are being deprived, articulate the pain of that deprivation publically in their own words (they cannot be accused of being dupes of Marxist ideologues) and yet do not move.

There is acknowledged need for fundamental social change, but no desire to bring that change about.

If we look at the recent history of Arab revolutions, including Libya and Syria, if we look at the great revolutions of the seventeenth (England)  eighteenth (the United States and France), the nineteenth (the wave of complex liberal-democratic, national-popular, and socialist revolutions that swept Europe in 1848), and the twentieth (the Russian and Chinese Revolutions and the immense wave of anti-colonial nationalist revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America)  what all share in common is that the target of the revolution was a ruling class whose power and legitimacy in no way depended upon the consent (howsoever contrived and superficial such consent might be) of the majority of people.  In other words, it was the absence of any formal mechanism of accountability of rulers to the ruled that turned opposition into revolutionary force.  Absolute monarchs felt morally superior to their subjects, they were beheaded.  Colonial authorities felt racially superior to their subjects; they were driven back to the home country by armed force.

The inability to bear the absolute disrespect for, contempt or denial of, the humanity of the subaltern in situations of unaccountable authoritarian rule drives people at a cellular level to any sacrifice.  Increasingly, we inhabit just such structures of unaccountable authoritarian rule in what used to be called but no longer should be referred to as “liberal democracies,” for they are neither liberal ( governed by constitutional limitations of the exercise of state power) nor democratic (governed by the people in their shared life-interests). Nevertheless, these societies retain the appearance of liberal-democracy, because the formal institutions of accountability have not been eliminated.  Their persistence has real political implications.

The  experience of radical oppositional politics in the global North in the twentieth and now twenty-first century has followed this script:  Every serious political crisis since the Russian Revolution (and especially the wave of worker-student uprisings in the late 1960′s) has been defused, because the ruling classes acknowledge– even if not sincerely– the democratic legitimacy of the demands for radical change.  The point is not that ruling classes ever agree to changes that are in reality radical; the point is that oppositional forces, employing the language of democracy and demanding accountability on those terms, find it impossible not to agree to dialogue, elections, and so forth when offered. The way in which the Quebec student strike of 2012 was ended is the most recent case in point.  Once agreed to, the movement splits into small bands of outliers who warn that the ruling class is not sincere.  True as these warnings are, they always go unheeded. Why?  Because  as totalitarian and paranoid and unjust and spiritually bankrupt as modern capitalist society has become, it has not yet lost legitimacy.

Over the course of the winter I was a member of my union’s Motivating the Membership Committee.  We visited all the  departments and schools of the university, engaging the membership in frank discussion about the state of the union and the future they want for it, and arguing with them that the best union is a democratic union and a democratic union relies upon the energies of its members. A colleague in law did us the courtesy of expressing bluntly what other colleagues were too polite to say:  “We elect you guys to do this work.  We don’t have time for it.  So you do the job that you were elected to do and keep us informed.”

Is this not the way in which the wider working classes relate to the social problems that affect them?  In response to calls to build “democratic socialism”  they seem to respond:  “Though we are suffering and though we want a solution, we do not want to disrupt our lives in order to build that future.”

But:  the demonstrations, the manifestos, the books, the articles, the projects, the programs…

But:  look at the size of the demonstrations, and then compare them to the size of crowds at a soccer game, or a hockey game, or a concert, or an overnight line-up for the latest gadget.

About a month ago I was at a retirement dinner for Ron Aronson, a legendary Detroit radical educator and activist who was stepping down after forty years at Wayne State University.  He gave a moving farewell address under the title, “Whatever happened to progress?”  In the front of the room his granddaughter fidgeted with her iphone while her grandfather spoke.  He asked whether smartphones were really elements of the sort of social progress people actually require.

Most of the people in the room were older leftists for whom the answer was no–  the gadgets are useful, but we have lived without them, and could do so again, and happily.  Theirs (and mine) is/was a socialism of a cultivated humanist ethos–a different way of living and relating,  a different scale of valuing nature, society, self, and others, a welcoming of a different set of demands upon the self and its capacities to contribute to others’ well-being.

But their fight is almost over; my generation struggles only to hang on to the achievements of the previous generation.  And for the new generation, new modes of relationship are evolving.  Although these modes often seem one-dimensional and unsatisfying to those who grew up when there was no alternative to the material sociality of live bodies co-present in physical space, for those who have never lived without the internet and the virtual social networks it enables, material co-presence is reduced to one option in a  drop-down menu of seemingly infinite possibilities for relation and sharing.

But are the virtues and values of virtual reality– the ever unfolding, playful and inchoate churning together of the high and low, the erudite and the idiotic, the sublime and the cute, the irreverent and the conformist, the public and the private, the engaged and the frivolous, the sacred and the profane– the  virtues and values of  ”a social and economic system based on direct democracy in politics and economy and on democratically planned production?”

In “An Immodest Proposal”  I claimed that “everyone must practice philosophy to this extent:   they must meditate on the finitude of their lives and accept it, if for no other reason (although it is a very good reason)  that they do nothing intolerable and unconscionable to others for the sake of preserving themselves a few moments longer.”  This claim, which I directed to everyone in the living of our everyday lives,  applies a fortiori to politicians, revolutionaries and reactionaries alike, in so far as they have the power of command over the  lives of others.  If a system can only be maintained, or a new one brought into being, by doing that which is unconscionable and intolerable, then the old system must go or the new one await a more propitious opportunity for its creation.  But I can think of no important instance in history when those vying for political power have heeded this claim.  Philosophy has thus proven itself quite useless in the heat of political battle, and history contains a monstrous pile of corpses killed before their time as a result.

No one need school philosophers in their political irrelevance.  We know best of all that politics does not heed philosophical council.  Hence, a consistent theme across the history of philosophy West and East is disdain for the world as an irrational nightmare of violence and ambition above which the philosopher must rise.

“The wise man … will not let himself be dazzled by the felicitations of the multitude and pile up the mass of his wealth without measure, involving himself in measureless ills … he will … keep his eyes fixed on the constitution in his soul, and taking care and watching lest he disturb anything there either by excess or defect …” (Plato, Republic, Book IX, 591c-e).

“The purest security is that which comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the many.”  (Epicurus, Hellenistic Philosophy, p. 27).

“The person who has lain down violence toward sentient beings, … who neither kills nor causes to kill, that one I call superior.  The person who is harmonious amid the hostile, peaceful amid the violent, free from grasping amid the greedy, that one I call superior.” (Buddha, The Dhammapada, Chapter 26, Verses 23, 24).

Would politics heed reason and truth,  philosophy would have something to contribute.  But it does not.  So, understanding the ephemeral nature of life philosophy shirks from the fight when the gloves come off.  When one sees clearly the transitoriness of things, there is nothing so valuable as to be worth fighting for by any means necessary.

“Can despots compass aught that hails their sway?  Or call with truth one span of earth their own, save that wherein at last they crumble bone by bone? (Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto The First, Verse XLII).

Rather than read philosophy or poetry, the Syrian regime and the rebel factions opposed to it trade accusations that one or the other has used chemical weapons.  If true, I ask whichever side resorted to the measure:  “What is the prize so valuable that you have convinced yourselves that it is acceptable to poison the other side in one of the most gruesome ways imaginable?” Really, what is political power historically other than the ability to boss other people around more of less brutally for a laughably short period of time (taking a cosmic time-scale)?

The small person thinks himself big by pushing the other around.  But to what end?  Power does not confer immortality, and once consciousness ceases, so too the memory of one’s former ability to lord power over others.  One takes nothing with one to the grave.  Staving off a rebellion extends your life a few years more, tyrant.  But it will end soon enough.  Why not go in peace, without destroying the lives of those who oppose you?

“And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:  Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’  Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (Shelly, “Ozymandias”).

But you too, rebels, need to ask yourselves:  what will be the effect of all that blood on you when you come to rule?  What happens when the ghosts of the old regime haunt your happy new world, or when your version of justice grows tiresome to a newer generation?  If you are a real alternative to the brutality you oppose, must you not find alternatives to brutal  means of struggle?  The necessity with which you justify struggle by any means necessary (the regime will not give up any other way)  will, history seems to teach, harden you in ways you do not expect, but which have never proven conducive to real social and political progress–  more comprehensive and universal life-requirement satisfaction, inclusiveness of opposed perspectives and deliberative resolution of conflicting demands, mutuality, toleration of differences, an ethos that rejects destruction, waste, and violence, and which affirms creation, beauty, and  peace.

The philosophical disdain for politics is not disdain for the conditions of good human lives.  It is rooted not in rejection of concern for the quality of human life, but recognition that revolution is necessary, but on time scales no individual will find politically acceptable.  The very idea of revolution, Hans Jonas argues, combines radicality of transformation with compressed duration:  “Is not the difference between slow and fast, between evolution and revolution, entirely relative, and therefore arbitrary?  Relative  it is, but not arbitrary.  For it is relative to something absolute, to a natural limit of measurement:  the individual human life span.”(Philosophical Essays, p. 47).   The reactionary clinging to power wants to preserve his life forever; the revolutionary struggling for power wants to see her dreams of justice realized.  Neither can have what they want, neither will relent.

The longer philosophical view sees the necessity of the calamity that always has and will always follow such a collision. 

The problem, nevertheless remains:  how to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable time-scales-  the brevity of individual life and the imaptience it understandbly breeds, with the  more measured pace of real social development?  How to reconcile the oppressed’s legitimate demands for satisfaction now, with the philosophical-historical knowledge  that this demand cannot always be met in the present?   

Solving this problem would be philosophy’s real contribution to practice. 

In A Modest Proposal Jonathan Swift famously suggested  that the problem of hunger be solved by the poor eating their children.  Since the rich are not hungry, and look only to their own interests, they have not lobbied to change the laws regarding cannibalism.  But there are organ shortages, and many who are able to pay are happy to have the poor butchered, not for food eaten but for their organs, which will be still be consumed, but whole, not digested, as life-extension commodities, rather than nourishment.  If anything reduces human beings to the status of mere means, contrary to Kant’s categorical imperative to always treat rational beings as ends and never as mere means, on-demand organ harvesting would seem to be it.

But why turn to philosophy for moral insight when there is documentary film?   ”I expected it to be a very black and white story when I started out,” said Ric Bienstock, director of a new documentary on organ markets.  “Then I realized there was a lot of moral ambiguity.”  (Barbara Turnbull, “Organ Trade Cuts Both Ways,” The Toronto Star, Saturday, April 27th, 2013, p. L1).

Where is the ambiguity?  There are brutally impoverished people on the planet for whom the prospect of selling an organ to a wealthy white client appears a route out of poverty.  Liberal-moralistic opinion might find the practice abhorrent, but then again, liberal-moralistic opinion is not giving up any of the comforts that afford it the time to reflect upon moral problems.   Aghast at the practice but acquiescent in the system that produces the poverty that drives people to sell their organs in the first place, the liberal-moralist rebels from the thought that she or he might be part of the problem, rather than a beautiful soul passing judgement from above the fray.

“Moral ambiguity” is what the conscientious moralist feels when she confronts a practical moral problem (the poor being forced to sell their organs)  generated by a social system she regards as, in other contexts, legitimate and just.  She feels something is wrong with a person having to sell a vital organ to survive, but she also sees that for those with no assets or high-money value skills, the income they derive from the sale can “improve”  their lives.” Hence the ambiguity-  if the person is not allowed to sell, they continue in poverty.  If they are allowed to sell, they are reduced to slabs of organ-meat for First World luxury consumption.  Condemnation of the practice from on high does not solve the very problem that drives the poor to consider selling their organs in the first place.

No one who is not conscientious feels moral ambiguity.  The free market fundamentalist feels no moral ambiguity:  let the poor sell!

Indeed, emerging organ-markets seem to confirm the free market fundamentalist view of the origin of markets.  Where there are relative scarcities (someone lacks and demands that which someone else possesses and will sell) there are motivated buyers and sellers, and where there are motivated buyers and sellers markets develop.  In the case of organ sales, poverty creates motivated organ sellers, affluence creates motivated organ buyers.  And so a market for organs has emerged, just as one would expect.  And yet, despite the perfectly “natural”  way in which this market has emerged, organ trading remains illegal.  For the fundamentalist, this restriction on trade is a textbook demonstration of paternalistic interference in natural market relationships, interference which prevents the poor from monetizing their assets and pulling themselves out of poverty with their own renal systems.

Rather than solve the ambiguity, the market fundamentalist, like all religious zealots, abolishes the problem by abstracting it from social and historical reality, presenting it as a matter of “rational” choice between the only two alternatives that compute in the market-fundamentalist program:  make money, or not.  Any policy which constrains this choice by considerations of morality external to the market metric of monetary gain generates soft-headed public policy.  The liberal-moralist’s sentimental attachment to bodily integrity as a basic condition of human dignity  keeps the poor impoverished, all the while driving the practice underground.  The moralist, according to the fundamentalist, creates the worst of both worlds:  the poor still sell their organs because that choice is economically “rational”, but in conditions which are ripe for corruption and malpractice because clandestine.

The abstract cogency of this argument and its apparent concern for improving the lives of the poor gives the moralist pause.  Its conclusion feels wrong, but its commitment to practical realities forces the moralist from her perch to consider matters on the ground.  Genuine thinking is thus engendered which disrupts the happy certainty of pre-reflective belief.  If moral principles just sound right, but leave material harms in place, perhaps the unsentimental economist is correct.  But if the unsentimental economist is correct, then it is not wrong for those with money to demand the organs of those with no other option but to sell.  And that seems wrong if anything is, because no rational person would choose to sell their kidney if they had alternative means of survival.  But then the other side demands voice again:  in the moment, there appears to be no alternative for the poor person but to sell the organ, so could it not be the case that prohibition does more harm?

Moral ambiguity is the result of serious thinking about troubling practices.  Rather than default to pat answers or preferred conclusions, the thinking person risks unsettling her certainties even at the cost of losing all easy sense of what to do.  At the same time as moral ambiguity is the product of genuine reflection, resting content with it in regard to practices that both presuppose and cause the extreme debasement of human being, its total objectification and instrumentalization, is a failure to persist in the thinking that lead to the ambiguity in the first place.  It was concern with life and well-being that caused the moralist to question her initial assumption, and it is concern with life and well-being that can resolve the ambiguity into which conscientious reflection falls before it succumbs to the danger  of degenerating into lazy moral perspectivism.

Lazy moral perspectivism is the opposite of self-satisfied moralism:  everyone is right from his or her own perspective.  We have to structure things so that everyone can feel good about the choices they make.  But everyone cannot be right from his or her own perspective all the time, because sometimes the moral grounds of those different choices are not just different, but opposed, such that both choices cannot be morally correct.  If everyone were right from his or her own perspective, then no one would ever feel moral ambiguity.  The sense of ambiguity is of being torn between opposed perspectives both of which cannot be right but which each have compelling reasons in their favour.  Perspectivism is lazy because it gives up just at the point where hard intellectual work becomes necessary.  How can concern for the well-bring of the poor be reconciled with respect for their dignity and bodily integrity without condemning the person who needs a kidney to death?

There is no solution that can reconcile the interest of the buyer in purchasing bodily organs with the dignity and bodily integrity of the poor person.  One must decide:  either the power of money is allowed to reach through the skins of the poor to extract their organs, or the dignity and bodily integrity of human beings is of paramount importance, and immediate steps taken to redress the pressing material necessity that forces poor people to consider their bodies as objects for sale (the pittance that poor organ sellers actually receive could be covered by the richest nations and corporations of the world without any real effect on their balance sheets), while long term projects of social, political, economic, and moral transformation develop.

Philosophy cannot keep everyone happy.  It must lead thinking to decisions that oppose some courses of action as intolerable and unconscionable.  I would not eat my cats to stay alive.  Nor would I purchase the organs of another human being.

Plato argued in the Phaedo that philosophy is preparation for death– contemplation in life of the necessity of death allows us to conquer our fear of it, even if death is oblivion.  Everyone must practice philosophy to this extent:  they must meditate on the finitude of their lives and accept it, if for no other reason (although it is a very good reason)  that they do nothing intolerable and unconscionable to others for the sake of preserving themselves a few moments longer.   Once one anchors one’s understanding of the value of one’s own life in the relationships it has with other equally valuable lives, one will conclude that there are things one simply cannot do to preserve one’s own life.  Rather than delude oneself into believing that buying the organs of a fellow human being is good for the seller, one might use what days one has left to fight for alternatives so that no one must choose between being able to eat and being eaten.

The previous post ended with the claim that “Americans like their justice swift.”  Swift, apparently, justice has been-  within three days of the attack, the Boston Marathon bombers had been identified, tracked, one killed, and the other in custody.

“The hunt is over, said a tweet from the Boston Police Department.  ”The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody.”

The victory of justice follows a now familiar script.  First:  the killing.  Second: the warning:  no one escapes American justice .  Third:  the hunt.  Fourth: “success,” the capture or killing of the suspects.  Fifth: the melodramatic demonization of the perpetrators– “A direct confrontation with evil” (not “two evil people, but evil itself) said Secretary of State John Kerry.  Sixth: the declamation of the victory of justice.

But:  the victims corpses are still cold in the ground.  The social conditions that breed violence remain unaddressed.  The next embodiment of “evil” is growing up somewhere  right now, devolving steadily in anger or frustration or delusion or fanaticism towards the fateful decision to:  shoot up a primary school or movie theatre with a machine gun, explode a truck bomb in front of a federal office building, murder a room full of women engineering students, fly hijacked planes into office towers, gun down teenagers at a day camp, gang rape a young woman and post it on the internet, rain Hellfire missiles on a wedding party, shoot up a village with a 50 calibre machine gun, let hunger strikers die rather than put them on trial …_n

But:  after every atrocity, the perpetrators are apprehended or killed, and  everyone is assured that justice has won.  A pyrrhic justice it is, no, that requires endless murder and mayhem over which to triumph?

This is not a freedom enabling but an enslaving justice.  It is a justice of self-subordination to the police, a justice of acquiescence to armed over-reaction, a justice of concession to irrational fear.

That which is most alarming about the response to the bombings is not that “Police ordered businesses in the suburb of Watertown and nearby communities to stay closed and told residents to stay inside and answer the door for no one but authorities” and that Boston followed suit by shuttering its “subway, bus, Amtrak train systems and Greyhound and Bolt Bus … taxi service and every … area school,” but that these demands were acceded to with no public dissent whatsoever .

The city was transformed into a stage for the latest performance of the theatre of compliance.  Citizens of the land of the free shelve their critical faculties and civil rights and sit back and watch the show:  hundreds, perhaps thousands of assault-weaponed armed police spilled out of armoured personnel carriers, some with fixed machine guns; National Guard  helicopters ferried police across the city.  A no-fly zone was imposed.  But this drama is too important to be confined to a single stage; it reaches out across the nation to its borders.  I was in Detroit last night and on the way home US Border agents were stopping every car and truck on the approach to the bridge and briefly searching it.  Behind the mandatory macho posturing one could sense that the officers knew the entire operation was not about finding the suspect in someone’s trunk next to some smuggled beer, but a political spectacle whose message was:  we are watching everything, we see everything, we control everything, we are the actors, your role is to comply.

It is not difficult to find people willing to play the role.  All one has to do is invoke “public safety,” as the Boston police commissioner did: “For public safety … we are asking everyone to shelter in place for the time being.”

One might respond at this point:  “It is all well and good for you to pontificate from your study, but in the real world there are real dangers.  Those bombs were real and they killed real people, and, regardless of whatever abstract philosophical principles and naïve hopes for the future you might entertain– at taxpayers’ expense no less!– the perpetrators had to be apprehended before they killed even more people, and in order to apprehend them, extraordinary police measures were required.  So– put your own ass on the line, or shut up.”

There is much in this sort of response with which I cannot completely disagree.  There is a paradox in which every social critic is trapped:  he or she looks to the future for the solution to the problems of the present, but those problems have harmful effects right now.  The critic says:  “deal with the causes, not the effects,” but dealing with the causes takes time (years, decades, centuries?)  while people suffer or are in danger right now.  There are mechanisms for dealing with the effects, and the prevention of (further) harm justifies the use of those mechanisms, even though they treat effects and not causes.  I agree that sometimes there is no good alternative to using available mechanisms to treat effects.

At the same time, making concessions to reality does not require that anyone, regardless of their politics, suspend all critical faculties just because the police demand it.  With the suspect’s face everywhere, with thousands of police scouring Boston, surely trained experts knew that the suspect lacked freedom of movement and that therefore, like a lost cat, he would not be far from the scene of the initial confrontation.

And of course, that turned out to be the case, and it was actually the lifting of the lockdown that led to his capture.

But there is no outcry this morning over a city basically placed under authoritarian police command.  Instead, people did exactly what they were told to do, and for no other reason than that they were told to do it.  People are killed everyday in every American city and the police do not issue commands that no one leave their house or only answer their door to uniformed authorities.  The perpetrators of  the bombing were clearly not Dr. Moriarty-like criminal geniuses.  They were no greater threat to public safety than any of the many thousands of armed Americans walking around any city right now– as I write, someone is being murdered somewhere in the US– and yet people in the land of the free immediately stopped what they were doing in order to do what they were told to do by the police.

But to many people freedom is identical to doing what one is told by the police.  For those whose only interest is social reproduction, freedom and security coincide, and the police are the embodiment of this coincidence:  “Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property.”(Marx, On the Jewish Question,” Collected Works, Vol., 3, p. 163).  If preservation of that which exists is the highest value, and the police are the institution that preserves that which exists, then police force and freedom coincide, at least for those whose driving emotion is fear.

But fear and rational public policy cannot go together.  So that after the arrest has been made and the triumph of justice proclaimed, reason wants to say:  “But it will happen again just like the last time and nothing really has been won.”

But reason is most often too afraid to speak out.

A few days after 9/11 a student group asked me to participate in a panel discussion about the attacks.  I began my presentation by stating that, regardless of how I felt about the loss of life as a human being, my role as a philosopher required me to try to understand the events.  I was immediately denounced by a colleague from the Political Science department for trying to “understand”  people who were clearly “evil.”  I found it alarming, a)  that a person who considers himself a political scientist was not interested in the causes of an event of momentous geo-political significance, and b) that he had such a weak grasp of the English language as to not know that the verb “understand”  has two very distinct meanings:  “to empathetically grasp a situation from the perspective of another,” and “to grasp the causes of events.”  I was not saying that I “understood”  the attackers (i.e., put myself sympathetically into their shoes)  but rather that I wanted to understand the causes of the attacks -i.e., why the hijackers felt that the social, political, and historical relationships between America and the Arab world justified them in attacking it.  To understand the justifications they gave does not entail that the one understanding accepts those justifications as themselves justified.

Alas, my colleague is not alone in abhorring understanding when it comes to terrorism.  Alan Dershowitz, in his influential Why Terrorism Works, insists that one must never investigate the causes of terrorism, because to do so is tantamount to legitimizing it.  “We must commit ourselves,” he says, “never to try to understand or eliminate its alleged root causes.”(p.24)  Does understanding the aetiology of a disease increase its incidence?  Does the study of the causes of an airplane crashe encourage more pilots to crash their planes so that they can get their names in the TSB report?  For everything in the physical and social universe we look to structured, systematic investigation precisely for the sake of isolating causes.  Once we know the cause of a problem, we can address it.  When we do not know the causes, we are helpless and must suffer the consequences of the effects.

When it comes to terrorism, in contrast, we turn to superstition.  We are enjoined to pray  for the victims, even though it is clear that terrorism is a very human, political problem.  We do not pray when the power grid goes out; we turn to technicians who fix the problem.  Some people do pray when they fall ill, but they also seek out medical attention.   The point is:  we know that the solution to human problems requires understanding of the causes, but in the case of terrorism, there are systematic blocks to inquiry into the causes.  Since the causes, general and specific, are never addressed, the problem recurs.

And so it happens again, this time, in Boston.  And so it happens again, officials angrily deny that any rational explanation is possible:  “Make no mistake: An act of cowardice and of this severity cannot be justified or explained,” Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said. “It can only be answered.”

The  angry man does not care about reasons, only the superior violence of his response.

I happened to be driving home from Toronto the day after the Boston bombing.  Once I got west of London I could pick up American  talk radio, so I started listening.  The tone was one of disappointment:  that the FBI had not yet hung the crime on a foreign terrorist group; defiance:   America’s enemies will never prevail, and delusion:   one Christian station was offering free Constitutions (The Foundations of Freedom kit)  so that its listeners could remind themselves of the unique greatness of the USA.

It never occurred to them that the person who planted the bombs might be a Tea Party  psychopath protesting recent attempts to tighten gun laws.

The problem with trying to understand events is that one must go where the evidence leads.  Speaking to the nation in the aftermath of the blasts  Obama classified the killings as a terrorist act because civilians had been killed by bombs.  “Any time bombs are used to target civilians, it is an act of terrorism.”  On the same day as the Boston bombings– as almost everyday– there was an American drone strike in North Waziristan.  The majority of those killed in those strikes are civilians, killed by bombs.

Therefore, the drone strikes are ….

Well, President Obama, what are they?

If we follow the evidence, we arrive at conclusions that are extremely discomforting to those who trade in platitudes about the moral innocence of the United States and its allies, including Canada.  That the West is not morally innocent does not imply the conclusion that therefore all means of resisting it are legitimate.  A liberation movement scars itself permanently and undermines its capacity for democratic life-valuable social re-organization if it adopts secretive, substitutionist, paramilitary or terroristic organization.  At the same time, in a world where violent destruction of ‘the enemy’  is the default tactic of the world’s richest and powerful nation(s), where increasing numbers of people in those nations feel completely shut out, not only from power, but from any sort of dignified human existence, the probability of terrorist activity increases.

It is of course possible that understanding alone will not solve the problem, and there can be attacks which are more or less random, and in countries whose culture and social organization would seem to make them immune to violent attack (Norway, for example). There are many diseases whose causes we understand but which at present we cannot cure.  That said, one can be certain that not even trying to understand the causes of terrorism  will ensure that the violence will continue.

I do not generally like political art, because it tends to be didactic and obvious.  But there are exceptions, and one of the best is Ousman Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, which I have cited many times before.  At the end of a long and brutal strike against the French colonialists, the young men of the village want to hunt down and kill the French prison guards who had tortured them.  A village elder, who had also been the victim of torture, warns against giving into the desire for revenge:

“If you want to kill him you should also kill the blacks who obey him, and the whites whom he obeys …  If a man like that is killed, there is always another to take his place.  That is not the important thing.  But to act so that no man dares strike you because he knows you speak the truth, to act so that you can no longer be arrested because you are asking for the right to live, to act so that all of this will end, both here and elsewhere; this is what should be in your thoughts.  This is what you must tell the others, so that you will never be forced to bow down before anyone, but also so that no one shall be forced to bow down before you … hatred must not dwell with you.”(p.350).

Unlike District Attorney Conley, the elder does try to understand and explain.  His reason for so doing is not to justify, but to find a political way out of the cycle of violence that has consumed his community.  He realises that political problems require structural changes– simply revenging oneself on individuals will not work, because, unless the structure is changed, new individuals will replace the old ones, and the same patterns will be repeated.  Structures need changing, most importantly, the structures and ruling value system of the Western world, in the eyes of which the majority of people are but indentured servants.  But it takes a long time to understand and solve complex problems, and Americans prefer swift justice.

On March 3oth, 2013 Peter Kormos, as close to a socialist as the NDP had left in its ranks of former elected members, died.  His death was perhaps an omen foretelling the extinction of the NDP as a party defined by principled commitment to building an alternative to a failed capitalist society.  One week after Kormos’ death Thomas Walkom reported that the NDP is debating a constitutional amendment to replace the party’s historic goal of creating a society in which “the production and distribution of goods and services shall be directed to meeting the social and individual needs of people”  with a new aim:  championing  ”a rules-based economy … in which governments have the power to address the limitations of the market.” (Thomas Walkom, “NDP on yet another mission quest.  Stay tuned.” (Toronto Star, Saturday, April 6th, 2013, p. A8).

What is the value of principles?  The hard headed political response is:  principles have value only to the extent that they inform practice.  Since the practice of the NDP has been to manage Canadian capitalism and not address the structural causes of widespread need-deprivation, the vestigial traces of socialist principles in the NDP constitution are worthless, and might as well be removed, for the sake of honest expression of what the party really is.

The hopeful (naieve?) philosophical response is:  principles have value independent of immediate or short term practice, because they can function as bases of criticism against which the limitations and inadequacies of practice can be measured. The vestigial traces of socialist principles in the constitution of the Official Opposition lend legitimacy to the socialist critique of capitalism.  Their presence demonstrates that ‘socialism’  is not exotic, utopian philosophy with no organic basis in Canadian political history.  Instead, it is rooted in a set of principles that people already endorse when they support public institutions (health care, education, meaningful work) and which underlie the history of a party which could conceivably form the next federal government.

But human beings have a curious habit of drawing the exactly wrong inference from empirical evidence.  Rather than seeing popular support for the NDP as a sign that people are searching for some political vehicle to solve the fundamental problems that the Conservatives and Liberals have not solved, and then seeing this search in turn as a search for some credible alternative to capitalism, and then risking their future on articulating such an alternative (a risk that might be rewarded), the NDP moves further in the direction of becoming just like the failures it aims to oppose.  It thus repeats the practice of the British Labour Party, indeed, the whole of European Social Democracy:  instead of reading this moment as one to grow by leading the fight against the austerity agenda, it continues “to adapt itself to forces to its right.” 

If the NDP does not judge the on-going crisis of capitalism as its best opportunity to build on its recent electoral success by: a)  exposing to public view the systemic reasons why capitalism cannot ”meet individual and social needs,” b)  building a fighting movement against austerity, and c) putting the considerable material and intellectual resources of the party to work to formulate concrete policy alternatives, which d) an NDP government would implement, what good is it? 

The problem here is not that the NDP is seeking to win elections.  If a genuinely socialist party were to win an election, that would be a tremendous victory, because the power of the state could then be used to impose policies that better serve our shared life-interests.  Given that the party would have come to power through legal means,  the imposition of those policies would be legitimate according to existing democratic procedures.  Opponents would have to openly expose themselves as the anti-democratis they (actually) are.  Thus, the problem is not “electoralism”  in the abstract.

Rather, the problem is that the NDP is seeking power on the basis of abandoning any principle which is offensive– not to the majority of the Canadian people (who support, at least as regards health care and education, the principle of distribution according to need)– but to capital.  The party is not trying to convince people that they are a real alternative to the parties of capital, they are trying to convince capital that they are not a real threat to it.

Hence the utter vacuity of support for a “rules based economy … in which governments have the power to address the limitations of the market.”  To call this timid would be too strong.  It says nothing at all.  What economy is not rules-based? The core problem of capitalism is not that it is not rules-based, it is that the rules according to which investment decisions are made are blind to shared our life-interests.  Thus, to affirm as the party’s goal “a rules-based economy”  is to demand that which we already have, and which continues to harm ecological integrity, democratic social institutions, and individual life-horizons.  Furthermore, no government lacks the power to address the limitations of the market.  In 2008 the United States government addressed the limitations of the market by transferring over 700 billion dollars of public wealth to private banks.  Tax-credits, tax-reductions, regulatory changes, investment incentives, these are all ways by which governments can and do address the limitations of the market, without in any way addressing the fundamental problem of capitalist markets:  they depend upon private and exclusive control over resources everyone needs to survive, develop, and realize their creative capacities to contribute to social life.

But why should anyone on the left care about NDP constitutional changes, given the fact that the NDP in practice has long ago abandoned even a mildly reformist agenda?  The most important reaosn is that there is no alternative left political organization with the national reach, the number of activists, and the institutional resources to mobilise right now in a politically effective way, against the Harper offensive.  Yet, it continually refuses to assume any serious leadership role of a new left opposition to capitalism.

Whatever individual activists might feel locally, no one who is allowed anywhere near a microphone on the national stage is allowed to utter anything more than the usual platitudes of parliamentary opposition.   Government corruption and ineptitude? Yes.  Structural analysis and critique of the global capitalist economy? No, not even thinkable. 

Do we conclude, therefore, that, as in Greece and Germany it is time for anyone in the NDP  who in anyway understands or instictively feels that the problem is not the Tories and the solution is not less draconian adaptation to the demands of capital to leave; that the time has come for a new party of the left in Canada?  Chris Nineham, reflecting on an analogous problem in the UK, makes an important point in this regard.   

The need for a left electoral project … is an important aim. It is obvious that some kind of left formation is needed to challenge a Labour Party that has signally failed to challenge the politics of austerity. But experience, both here and in Europe, shows that the successful launch of such a venture normally depends on favourable wider developments. Die Linke in Germany and the Front de Gauche in France both came out of the fusion of radical organizations and important splits from social democratic organizations like the Labour Party. Both involved high profile figures as part of that process.”(Chris Nineham, Its Time to Decide:  The Left, Austerity, and the People’s Assembly,”  The Bullet #794, April 1st, 2013).

The problem in Canada is that there is no one left in the NDP who could split and take sufficient numbers of people with her or him.  Without significant numbers of people,  the movement would not be able to generate the sort of political dynamic political credibility would require.  Without political credibility, it would not be able to attract  large numbers of social movement activists, rank and file trade unionists, and “normally” apolitical citizens alarmed at the intensifying attacks on life-conditions.  Without those numbers, it would not be able to mount a credible threat to any of the established parties.   The (small but real) success of Quebec Solidaire shows that it is possible for left parties to be elected on a principled left platform, but that success also occured in Quebec, in historical-political circumstances quite different from the rest of Canada.    If there is someone outside of and to the left of the NDP who could pay this role, I do not know who he or she is. 

Hence, a new, cohesive, sustainable, and effective democratic socialist party will have to originate some other way.  

If Peter Kormos’ death signaled the end of the NDP as a socially oppositional force, does the death of Margaret Thatcher foreshadow the birth of a new one?

In 2009, Obama went to Cairo and announced that he desired to reset the relationship between the United States and the Arab world. This past week saw Obama in the other great capital of the Middle East, Jerusalem, in what was presented by the American and Israeli media as an attempt to reset the purportedly strained relationship between the US and Israel.  But the speech in Jerusalem more or less repeated the same geo-political platitudes that have always characterised this “special relationship.”

The foundation of that “special relationship” is security-  Israeli security, US oil security, but dressed up as deep care for human life:

“When I consider Israel’s security, I think about children like Osher Twito, who I met in Sderot. (Applause.) Children, the same age as my own daughters, who went to bed at night fearful that a rocket would land in their bedroom simply because of who they are and where they live. (Applause.) That reality is why we’ve invested in the Iron Dome system, to save countless lives, because those children deserve to sleep better at night. (Cheers, applause.)  That’s why we’ve made it clear time and again that Israel cannot accept rocket attacks from Gaza, and we have stood up for Israel’s right to defend itself. (Cheers, applause.) And that’s why Israel has a right to expect Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist. (Cheers, applause.)

Defense = the “qualitative military superiority” of Israel against homemade rockets.  Defense=  100-1 kill ratio.

But peace cannot come through this type of “defence.”  Peace  demands a refusal to retaliate, from both sides, no matter how impossible such restraint seems.

“One can make war  only against a face, one can kill, or give oneself the prohibition not to kill, only where the epiphany of the face has already taken place … for Levinas, the prohibition against killing, the “Thou shalt not kill,” in which, as he says, “the entire Torah is gathered,” and which, “the face of the other signifies” is the origin of ethics.” (Jacques Derrida, Adieu:  To Emmanuel Levinas, p. 90).

The reality of ethics is not the rules or commandments through which its precepts are expressed.  The reality of ethics is concrete encounters between human beings that preserve peace.  At one point in his speech, Obama seemed to understand this profound truth.

“But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, their right to justice must also be recognized. (Cheers, applause.) And put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes.  It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own — (cheers, applause) — living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements, not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. (Applause.) It’s not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands or restricting a student’s ability to move around the West Bank — (applause) — or displace Palestinian families from their homes. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. (Cheers, applause.) Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land. (Applause.)

A certain reciprocity is acknowledged, but not the full face of Palestinian humanity.  The Palestinians have a right to self-determination and to justice, but their children have no names.  Their rights are asserted as legal abstractions but all means of acting on those rights as flesh and blood human beings-  demanding membership in international institutions, fighting back against occupation and settlement, are denounced.

The Palestinian children have no names?  So what?  What is in a name?

One’s humanity.  Human beings could just as well be classified as the “naming” animal as the “rational” animal.  In every human culture new parents look their child in the face and name her or him.  To recognise a human being as a definite individual is to “put a name to the face.”  Saying, “hey you”  is rude-  it denies one’s reality as a person with a specific identity, a concrete history, and unique interests worth getting to know.  The child in Sderot has a name, the child in Gaza does not.  The interests of the first are concrete:  safety in a definite home and a definite bed for a definite purpose, the interests of the second are abstract: self-determination as a generic right.

A generic right always outweighed and overridden by security:

“That’s why the security of the Jewish people in Israel is so important [is the security of Arab citizens of Israel of lesser or no importance?]; it cannot be taken for granted. But make no mistake: Those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist — they might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel’s not going anywhere.”

“And that’s why security must be at the center of any agreement. (Scattered applause.) And there is no question that the only path to peace is through negotiations, which is why, despite the criticism we’ve received, the United States will oppose unilateral — unilateral efforts to bypass negotiations through the United Nations. (Applause.) It has to be done by the parties.”

In other words:  if you fight back, you will be destroyed.  If you try through international legal institutions-  the very ones the United States uses, when convenient, to secure legitimacy for its wars, to create the conditions for peace,  you will be accused of “unilateralism.” Once so accused, you will further be discredited as obstructionist, punished via more unilateral land theft, more illegal/immoral settlements, intensified squeezing of your life-space, forcing you, for the sake of your humanity, to fight back, which leads to accusations of terrorism, which justifies your further destruction.

This is “defence,” as defined by a Noble Peace Prize winner.

But still, Palestinians, have the “right”  to self-determination.  There are problems only when they act on it.

Perhaps I am being unfair.  Obama goes on to praise  the “many Palestinians, including young people, [who] have rejected violence as a means of achieving their aspirations.”

Like those who went to the United Nations to demand their right to self-determination be recognised by having Palestine declared a sovereign nation?  I do not recall any coercive violence being employed to twist the arms of the 138 countries who voted in favour of recognizing the Palestinian state.  And what happened?  Joining UNESCO was treated as if it were a war crime.

Like the young Palestinian student I met two years ago at a conference at the Law School of the University of Windsor, a brilliant, hopeful, peaceful young man, who had travelled to Cairo and camped out in Tahrir Square and learned the political lessons of mass, non-violent, democratic action, who took those lessons back to Ramallah, and was subsequently imprisoned by the Israeli Army?  Is he one of those Palestinians to whom Obama refers?

He has a name too, but Obama forgot to mention it.

Again, let me be fair, for it is true that Obama did not mention all Israeli’s by name either.  Good taste prevented him from mentioning anyone by name who defends “Eretz Israel” and the expulsion of the Palestinians to achieve it.  No, they are referred to obliquely, as friends with whom Obama democratically disagrees.

“I recognize that there are those who are not simply skeptical about peace, but question its underlying premise, have a different vision for Israel’s future. And that’s part of a democracy. That’s part of the discourse between our two countries. I recognize that. But I also believe it’s important to be open and honest, especially with your friends. (Applause.)”

Would he similarly treat the difference between his tolerant pluralism and the Ku Klux Klan’s racist White America policy as just “part of a democracy?”  The days are getting longer and warmer.  Perhaps it is time for another “beer summit”  on the patio at the White House.  Obama could invite David Duke this time.

The problem is, that despite everything, all the  harming, destroying, and killing; despite all the routinization, instrumentalization, exploitation, alienation, poverty, violence, and war, it is possible to love, laugh, look forward to things, and enjoy being alive.  How is that possible?  How can it be right?

The possibility of enjoyment amidst a world of suffering requires the means to procure space and time apart from the victims and the social forces that create them.

“That evening, a little tired, you wanted to sit down in front of a new cafe forming the corner of a new boulevard still littered with rubbish but that already displayed proudly its unfinished splendors.  The cafe was  dazzling … the gas burned with all the ardor of a debut.” (Charles Baudelaire, “The Eyes of the Poor,” Paris Spleen, p. 51)

One hides away, as is necessary, because one only has one life, the value of which includes, demands, enjoyment of as much of that finite span of time as possible.  Happiness is a conscious state.  As social self-conscious beings, our conscious states are affected by the object of consciousness.  If the other who is the object of one’s consciousness is suffering, so one will suffer through being conscious of the state of the other, to the extent that one pays attention.  Hence the need for shelter.

“One should always be drunk.  That’s the greatest thing:  the only question.  Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.”  (Baudelaire, “Get Drunk,” Paris Spleen, p. 74).

Intoxication is not a chemical state of the organism.  It is a suspension of time-consciousness achieved through compressing the subjective universe to the moment of pure enjoyment. ”You’re kidding! It’s that late?”  the friends say to each other after an evening of food, drink, and conversation.  Drunkenness is the alleviation of the pressure of having to do something, to execute some routine, to be present somewhere else.

It is this momentary escape from time-pressure to which moralists object.  For the moralist, one must always be busy somewhere else, engaged in some world-related project.

But is the moralist not correct?  If it is true that enjoyment depends upon closing oneself off from the suffering that one knows is still out there, does it not also involve a refusal to live up to one’s responsibility to work to alleviate the causes of  suffering?   The same social forces that cause suffering for some also create the sheltering space of enjoyment for others.  One cannot help but be implicated in the suffering of others because one cannot escape membership in society. One’s delight in the intoxicating co-presence of things and friends thus seems an immoral refusal to acknowledge the same demand for enjoyment of those excluded.

“On the street, directly in front of us, a worthy man of about forty, with tired face and greying beard, was standing holding a small boy by the hand and carrying on his arm another little thing, still too weak to walk … They were in rags.  The three faces  were extraordinarily serious, and those six eyes stared fixedly at the new cafe with admiration…” (“The Eyes of the Poor,” pp. 51-52)

In the face of the suffering other one’s responsibilities become clear.  The good fortune one enjoys in having the time to withdraw from caring is a social product; one remains, therefore, a member of society even in the most blissful moments of withdrawal from it.  To be human is to be social, to be social is to be bound in responsibility to others, and to be bound in responsibility to others demands that one live, primarily, outside the walls within which the possibility of happiness is actualized.

But that means the constant risk of unhappiness, because of the unavoidable encounter with hungry eyes demanding, legitimately, a seat at our table.

Responsibility: to invite all who need food to share our table?

Happiness:  to eat our fill with those whose company we enjoy and who enjoy our company?

How can one be happy if responsibility demands that we allow anyone who asks to sit down?

“Not only was I touched by this family of eyes, but I was even a little ashamed of our glasses and decanters, too big for our thirst. I turned my eyes to look into yours, my love, to read my thoughts in them, and as I plunged my eyes into your eyes … you said:  “Those  people are insufferable with their great saucer eyes.  Can’t you tell the proprietor to send them away?”(“The Eyes of the Poor,” p.52)

Who can honestly say that they have not felt that they deserve a respite from the world, and resent as unjust the penetration of external demands into the space and time they regard as theirs to enjoy?

But why does one think that one deserves to enjoy one’s life?  Because one works, and because there is no other-world beyond in which loss of present enjoyment will be repaid.

“..if sometime you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished … ask the wind and the wave … the time; and … all will reply: It is Time to get drunk!  If you are not to be the martyred slaves of time, be perpetually drunk!  With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”(“Get Drunk,” p.74)

The question is, therefore, at what task must one work, and for how long, and how hard, to actually deserve the  space and time free of external demands to which one feels entitled?

“David Lopez, a business man who was walking his dogs through the Plaza de Los Palos Grandes, said:  ‘It’s the end of socialism in Venezuela.  It’s that simple.  Without Chavez, there is no socialism.” (Alasdair Baverstock, “Chavez may be dead, but we are still strong,” Globe and Mail, Wednesday, March 6th, 2013, p. A10).

The death of Hugo Chavez on 5 March, 2013, poses the sternest test yet faced by the Venezuelan experiment in ‘twenty-first century socialism.’  That Chavez himself was immensely popular with the poor and working class of Venezuela is beyond dispute.  He won re-election as President four times, successfully guided the amendment of the constitution, and survived the coup attempt of April 2002.  Those achievements-  accomplished without military violence, without outlawing opposition parties, without provoking civil war– are enough to put paid to the myth that he was a megalomaniacal authoritarian out to destroy democracy.  As I wrote in defence of the Venezuelan revolution last year, “where the state actually acts in the collective life-interest to use natural and social wealth to satisfy life-requirements and enable life-capacities, especially of those who have been historically deprived and oppressed, it is denounced as tyrannical.”(Materialist Ethics and Life-Value, p. 173).  Who always makes the charge of tyranny? The domestic and foreign capitalist class.  Why do they make the charge?  To distract attention from the actually tyrannical means by which they control the life-activity of workers, the poor, and oppressed.  What are those means?  Exclusive control over the natural and social wealth which the Bolivarian Revolution has challenged since 1999.

The democratic credentials of Chavez, his party, and the social movements that support him are not seriously in question.  The question that his death does pose, and which is crucial for the near term future, not only of the struggle for socialism in Venezuela, but globally, is:   to what extent was the popular support for Chavez support for the democratic socialist transformation of Venezuela, or support for the progressive use of state power to redistribute income and improve basic living conditions for the poor?  While often ‘socialism’ is confused with the later, it lies at the far end of the political-ethical-economic continuum  that begins with state support for life-requirement satisfaction and ends with democratic control over the means of life-support and life-development.  But socialism is not only the use of natural and social wealth for the satisfaction of human life-requirements, it is ultimately, a democratic life-economy in which the guiding values of social life are no longer monetary wealth accumulation and formal equality of rights.  The guiding values of a socialist society are:  a) democratic self-government in all spheres of collective life, b) for the sake of the universal and comprehensive satisfaction of life-requirements, c) so that all people may freely explore, develop, express, and enjoy their life-capacities, d) in all manners which contribute back to the ecosystemic and social bases of human life-support and development, e) are sustainable over the open ended time frame of human life, and f) which cohere with the preservation of the ecological conditions of animal and plant life as goods in themselves and as means for other life. (For a more detailed explication of the political-economic principles see Jeff Noonan, Democratic Society and Human Needs; Jeff Noonan, “Socialism as a Life-Coherent Society,” Alternate Routes, 35, 195-216, November, 2011 pp. 195-216, and for the philosophical foundations of this conception of socialism see John McMurtry, “Human Rights versus Corporate Rights: Life Value, the Civil Commons and Social Justice,” Studies in Social Justice, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2011, pp. 11-61).

These deeper life-values are the normative basis of the Venezuelan revolution.  The amended Constitution equates social development with “ensuring overall human development” (Quoted in Michael Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative:  Real Human Development, p. 14).  The conditions of human development, in turn, are identified with an economic system that prioritises life-requirement satisfaction, is rooted in democratic control over economic resources and institutions, and operates for the sake of enabling free expression and enjoyment of life-capacities.  These values have been repeatedly affirmed, most recently in the Second Socialist Plan (2013-2019).  This plan formed the basis of Chavez’s successful election run in 2012.   “This new phase [of socialist development]–continuing the construction of a just and egalitarian society– requires the development of a system of prevention, protection, and social security … with a new political equality … new relationships between the people with nature, the state, society, the workplace, and thought, guaranteeing physical, cognitive, and moral development at work and healthy work conditions (liberating work).”(quoted in Tamara Peterson, “Planning the Next Six Years of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, p. 7).   The entire project of social transformation is being undertaken with the ultimate foundation of human, social life in the wider natural life-support system fully in mind:  the emerging economic system is ”eco-socialist … based on a harmonic relationship between man and nature that guarantees the rational and optimal use … of natural resources [while] respecting nature’s processes and cycles.”(quoted in Peterson, p. 14).  These are goals that amount to deep-seated, truly revolutionary changes in the values, the culture, the socio-economic structure, and the political organization of society.

That which has been most inspiring about the Bolivarian revolution is that these goals are not platitudes but have formed the basis for real changes:  real increases in investment in basic physical life-requirement satisfaction (health, housing, food); new institutions of local direct democracy, real efforts at empowering women, recognition of the land claims of indigenous peoples, nationalization of key industries (oil, cement) and the use of revenues for universal life-requirement satisfaction, encouragement of a solidarity economy outside of capitalist market exchange organized for the sake of mutual need-satisfaction, small steps towards workers self-management and overall democratic planning of the development of the economy, and the first steps towards a Latin American financial system for life-value investment, a development which would finally sever the bonds of dependency between Latin America  and predatory, US-dominated global  financial institutions. (For details of the various achievements on the domestic front see Gregory Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power).

Wisely, the Venezuelan experiment has proceeded gradually, not trying to create socialism by political-military fiat but democratically, on the basis of regularly renewed mandates from the majority of Venezuelans.  “How else,”  asks Michael Lebowitz, “can the inherent contradictions among those who want the revolution to continue, e.g., contradictions between the formal and informal sector, between the exploited and the excluded, between workers and peasants, between cooperatives and state sectors– be resolved except through democratic discussion, persuasion, and education that begins from the desire for unity in the struggle?” (Michael Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative:  Real Human Development, p. 161).  The democratic development of the revolution has been complemented by what I have called elsewhere a process of organic political problem solving:  the realization of the goal of creating socialism is not subject to mechanical stages or violent, voluntaristic efforts to “liquidate” obstacles, but by meeting problems as they arise, trying out systemic solutions, allowing those solutions to stabilise, and then dealing with new, higher order problems that emerge fom the initial form of stabilization.(Noonan, “Socialism as a Life-Coherent Society”).    Democratization of the economy, to give the most important example, is emerging through the coalescence of various experiments in nationalization, worker`s self-management, cooperatives in the solidarity economy, and so on.  That the organic emergence of a democratic life-economy in Venezuela  will take time is not a failure of the revolution, but its triumph over dogmatism, ultraleftism, and an unhistorical theory of social transformation and stabilization which demands all or nothing success.

This triumph over dogmatism, etc., also means that the emergence of socialism has encountered set backs, problems, and contradictions.   Social spending depends upon oil revenues which ties the Venezuelan economy to global markets, making it dependent upon imperialist customers for its oil (Venezuela is the fourth largest supplier of oil to the United Sates)  even as it seeks a multi-polar world and democratic control over its economic life.  The petro-economy is difficult to square with the movement’s professed eco-socialist life-values.  Poverty rates remain high (although they have fallen from pre-1999 levels), street crime remains a serious issue, inflation has been a problem, and it has proven extremely difficult to generate a self-sustaining democratic socialist economic momentum.  Over all of these these problems loomed the question of Chavez himself:  was he the revolution, as business people like David Lopez believed, or was he, as he himself claimed, simply the voice of a real popular movement driving a real social dynamic which will, over time,  free Venezuela and Latin America (and hopefully inspire North America and European workers to start getting serious about fundamental social change) from the real tyranny of capitalist  money-value rule?

“Since the fair and honorable  is the opposite of the base and ugly, they are two.”

“Of course.”

“And since they are two, each is one.”

“That also.”

“And in respect of … all the ideas or forms, the same statement holds, that in itself each is one, but that by virtue of of their communion with actions and bodies and with one another they present themselves … as a multiplicity of aspects … he then that believes in beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it … his life is a dream … the mistaking of resemblance for identity.” (Plato, The Republic, Book 5, 475e-476c)

This argument is as elegant as you will find in the history of philosophy.  Take any pair of opposite concepts.  If considered together the concepts  are two, then considered separately they must each be one.  It is the metaphysical implication and not the logical inference that has proven controversial.  The metaphysical implication is that there is a realm of Forms, ideal, self-identical patterns, that function as the necessary ground for the truth of statements such as: “x is beautiful.”  For Plato, Being and truth are essentially correlated.  True statements correspond to real states of affairs.  Truths (as opposed to contextually relative descriptions) are eternally true and must therefore be grounded in realities which are eternally unchanging.   If it is true that “x and y are beautiful,” i.e., both manifest Beauty, but are, considered as empirical objects, different, then it must be the case that the Beauty they manifest transcends their physical differences.  If there were no Form of Beauty it would not be possible to truthfully ascribe the same universal property to manifestly different particular subjects.   We can truly judge a poem beautiful, a person beautiful, a song beautiful, and a natural landscape beautiful.  Considered as concrete material entities, all these things are distinct from each other.  Yet, “Beauty” can truly be predicated of poems, people, songs, and landscapes.  Plato concludes, therefore, that “Beauty” is an ideal of perfection towards which nature and human artists strive in their productions, but in itself it does not look or sound anything like the beautiful things in which it is (partially, imperfectly) expressed.

Some may just dismiss Plato’s argument as extravagant, pre-scientific metaphysics, as indeed, in one sense it is.  At the same time, there is a real problem from which our aesthetic judgements have not escaped.  Dropping the predicate “beauty” from our evaluative lexicon would seem to be analogous to dropping freedom from the lexicon of political critique–  in both cases that which would be given up is just the idea that forces us to take an interest in the object of evaluation or criticism.  But if we want to a)  retain the idea of Beauty, and b) apply it to manifestly different things:  people, their bodies, their characters, natural environments, artistic creations of all sorts, then we seem logically obliged to provide a universal defintion that states precisely that which is shared by these materially different entities.  Even though it is hard to think of beauty as anything not sensuous, its universal definition could not refer to empirical features of objects, for, as material entitites, the subjects of which “Beauty” is predicated are different, requiring different concepts for their description.  Thus, “x is beautiful” is not a description of what x looks or sounds like.   It is a judgement that refers to a quality of the object as a whole, not a description if its parts.  “Monuments of art, the stimulants of aesthetic reproduction, are called beautiful things, or physical beauty, writes Croce.  “This combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, for the beautiful is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the activity of man, to spiritual energy.” (Aesthetic, p.97).  Physical facts are described (the painting is a composition that employs the colours brown, yellow, orange, and blue to represent a wheat field under an autumn sky); beauty is judged.  The facts that are described exist independently of the subject that describes them, but beauty requires both subject and object, that which is judged and the judgement.  The judgement is consumates the beauty the whole expresses.

It is not that the judgement “x is beautiful”  brings x’s beauty into being.  The judgement is elicited by its object, but not in the way that a conclusion necessarily follows from true premises.   All judgements of taste are equally necessary (compelled by the object) and free (may be withheld by a particular subject).  Logical inferences are necessary, but not similarly free.  It was Kant who first grapsed this paradoxical character of judgements of beauty: ”The beautiful is that which, apart from a concept, is cognized as object of a necessary delight … everything runs up into the concept of taste as a critical faculty by which an object is estimated in reference to the free conformity to law of the imagination.” (Critique of Judgement,  pp.85-86).   Although an experiencing subjects is compelled by the feeling aroused in him to judge an object beautiful, and to legitimately assume that all other subjects will concur, there is no rule equivalent to a rule of logical inference which in fact compels such universal agreement.  The delight that people experience in beautiful things is necessary (if x is beautiful, it will produce delight) but the necessity does not compel assent in the way that a logical proof does in one who understands its structure.

Kant helps move the discussion of Beauty beyond the idealism of Plato and Croce, by linking its definition to the sensuous experience it produces in us.   Yet, a materialist aesthetics does not seem able to easily resolve the paradox lying at the heart of judgements of beauty.  Reductive materialism would seem to fall victim to the argument Croce made above against confusing beauty with the empirical nature of physical things.   No reductionist materialist could admit that there exists some property of a whole –”Beauty”– which emerges from but is irreducible to a definite arrangement of elements.  For the reductionist materialist, only the physical elements exist, making the claim that some formal arrangement of parts freely compels the judgement that the whole so arranged is beautiful unscientific, and thus nonsensical.  Moving from a reductionist physicalism to a Darwinian naturalism does not help either.  An evolutionary account of beauty as appearance which confers  reproductive advantage might make some sense when it comes to the beauty of bodies, but has nothing of aesthetic interest to say about the beauty of natural environments or artistic creations.  Historical materialism is more helpful, in so as it allows us to develop a much more concrete understanding of the relationship between social organization and creative labour, but often the aesthetics associated with historical materialism have tended too much towards ideological critique of the content of art works.  Ideological critique of content is of course valuable (as are physics and an understanding of natural selection), but it does not help us understand the paradoxical universality of Beauty.  Nor can more specific forms of art-historical or cultural criticism help.  These tend to do away with generic categories like the beautiful in favour of nuanced readings of particular works in historical context.  Their focus is not the aesthetics of the beautiful, but the socio-cultural environments in which works are created, the cultural codes they reproduce or transgress, and the processes by which they were made.  Like ideology critique these de-codings can be immensely valuable guides to deeper understanding of the work as work. But just as geology does not grasp the beauty of the rock formation it studies, so too an understanding of the meaning and implications of the work is not the same as recognising its beauty.  In fact, artworks– perhaps most artworks– have meaning(s)  but are not beautiful just for having meaning.  Those works suffer for not being so, for it is only beauty that allows them to live on once the contexts that makes them meaningful have changed.

We seem necessarily thrown back on our own experience, but with the Kantian mystery unresolved:  Beauty is not the object of delight, it is the object of necessary delight.  Marcuse tries to resolve Kant’s paradox with what I would call the first steps towards a life-value understanding of materialist philosophy.  For Marcuse, good and bad, right and wrong, free and unfree, beautiful and ugly are to be understood in relationship to the complex needs of the human being, understood as an integral  bio-social unity.  From the life-value standpoint, the same need can be satisfied in multiple ways.  The need for protein can be satisfied with nuts and pulses or with meat.  So too the need for Beauty.  It can be satisfied with poetry or paintings or seascapes.  The foodstuffs are different material things allowing different people to satisfy the same need for protein in ways peculiar to them; so too different types of natural formation and created artifact allow different people to experience  Beauty in ways that speak most powerfully to them.  All experience the same necessary delight in relation to those objects they find most stimulating to their individual tastes.   “As desired object, the beautiful pertains to the domain of the primary instincts, Eros and Thanatos.  The mythos links the adversaries:  pleasure and terror.  Beauty has the power to check aggression: it forbids and mobilises the aggressor.”(An Essay on Liberation, p. 26).

As that which checks and immobilises the aggressor, beauty both depends upon and expands the space in which life-capacities grow beyond their survival function.  The experience of Beauty requires time and space–  the exquisite muscle-tone of the cheetah is beautiful to the observer, not to the antelope about to succumb to the cat’s claws.   Thus the delight that beauty arouses is not the same as relief from immediate physical necessity– “the care burdened man in need has no sense for the finest play,”  writes Marx. (Economic and Philosophical Manusripts of 1844, Collected Works Volume 3, p. 302).  Beauty is that which is revealed to focused attention, in nature, artifact, and human form and character, when survival is not– at least for the moment– at issue, and we can focus on sensuous appearances as such.  In order to experience the beauty in things, nature and people, “our thinking and activity [must be free] from calculating the ways in which things can be useful to us.” (Materialist Ethics and Life Value, p. 71).  In order to be free of calculations of use, we must be secure enough in the objects of material need that survival from moment to moment is not a matter of immediate concern.  Thus, the experience of beauty is a political problem:  how to ensure to each the basic life-requirement satisfiers they require so that they can open their own senses to the things of the world as potentially beautiful, and not just useful.    The capacity to recognise beauty is not a problem of individual cultivation, but a problem of social organization:  if the care burdened man in (physical) need has no sense for beauty, this is not because he is philistine, but because his life is constricted by poverty to the most narrow utilitarianism.  He does not need aesthetic education in the abstract, he needs a society in which his fundamental needs are satisfied so that he can widen his own capacities for aesthetic experience.

Survival demands attention to content (does this food contain the nutrient I need or not?); art criticism focuses on meaning, cultural context, and technique (is the given work derivative or avante-garde, does it reproduce dominant cultural codes or does it contest them?); aesthetic judgement focuses on the sensuous appearance (how does the object make me feel?).  Beauty begins where the struggle for existence and technical talk ends.  It is that which arrests talk and analysis as well as aggression in its demand to be looked at, heard, touched, felt.  Beauty is the delight in those appearances in which– were we able– we would tarry with forever.

“Ha!  A rush of bliss flows suddenly through all my senses!  I feel a glow, a holy joy of life which sets my veins and flesh afire.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,  Faust, First Part, p. 29).