From the Vault

Value, not Values...

"Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but at the same time as an end" (Kant 'Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals')


I am a leftist. I make no bones about it. I believe that Marx correctly identified the problem, if not offering a workable solution. The solution in the form of Communism in praxis resulted in horror and carnage. You see, the left and the right do not exist in a continuum. They exist in a circle, and in both, at their most extreme, end in dictatorship.

Having said that, the left has been derided by many for awhile for pointing out that our Republic, the Land of the Free, is sliding into a Fascism of our own invention, and the substance of this derision has been the equation that the left=Stalinism. The leftists of the sixties, in their "do your own thing" credo failed to set a logical boundary to this, the essential responsibility Sartre and De Beauvoir elucidated; You have a responsibility in your freedom to liberate others. Moreover, all that talk of the student left being the "intelligensia" was and is tantamount to Politburo-ism: A dictatorship of the masses, of course, controlled by the party leadership. The liberation of the "do your own thing"in the 60's morphed into Jerry Rubins hocking motivational tapes in the "me" 80's, and David Horowitz becoming a mouth piece for the extreme right in this century, and the intelligensia of the student movement sixties are revealed for what they were and are; Careering demogogues and bourgois white kids playing revolutionary left. Antithetically though not suprising given the insistence on "do your own thing", they became as they are. Remember: Mussolini started out a Communist. Now, the 80's, a horrifying decade, returns as a crueler simulacra.

People exist in a fin de siecle malaise: The country gets attacked, our government's Machiavellian hypocrisy exposed. People lament that their "things" no longer fullfill them; They turn to snake-oil preachers, and crass nationalism. The media becomes the singular personification of corporatism; No longer pretending at report facts, or serving the public good, they become another Ideological State Apparatus, another brick in the wall of the American Panopticon, if you like. Reinforcing values antithetical to the interests of the people, they replace value with values; God, Country, Money, Democracy as shallow and soulless as the choice between Budweiser and Miller. Ideas replaced with Ideology.

I see this everyday: The Young are without hope. They gave up, alienated by the sheer magnitude of empty ostensible choices. They only want to survive, get by, and this is the real tragedy; They either submit, and mouth the slogans, or shut up, and get what they can, as they watch the degrees they work for become useless dues paying into the machine the "Do your own Thing" created...The Thing.

The Thing, which Allen Ginsberg, in his call to arms "Howl" called Moloch, the Babylonian monster which eats the young. Moloch sings the song of Fascism, which Terry Eagleton, in his discussion of Heidegger (a brilliant but problematic thinker to say the least) cites as "[...] a desperate, last ditch attempt on the part of monopoly capitalism to abolish contradictions which have become intolerable; and does so in part by offering a whole alternative history, a narrative of blood, soil, the 'authentic' race, the sublimity of death and self-abnegation, the Reich will endure for a thousand years."

Now we sit on a precipice, and our Reich will not be called as such; It will be Brand America, or the hege-demonically named New American Century. Can anybody wonder about the deliberate use of the word "heartland" in reference to the so-called red states, full of red blooded Americans as opposed to the blue states, full of blue blooded decandents pushing their decadence on the good and godly Red Blooded-States. Our Reich will not be of an 'authentic' race in the strict sense, but certainly of an 'authentic' people, who are tied to the soil in farms and small towns, the soil they buried their family in, the soil they will die on themselves, the soil by proxy their fathers died on in foreign wars, perhaps even fighting Fascism. The other symbolic details of this, exemplified eruditely in the 14 points of fascism in the US, are as evident as anyone would care to look, eyes and mind open.

But this gambit on the part of the forces of NeoConservatism, the former Cryptofascists that are getting less "crypto" by the day, is tautological, for in their attacks on the far left, which, in their estimation, I am proudly part of, both professional and as a matter of political thinking, they reveal themselves as Moloch.

Augustine died, famously enough, during the last sack of Rome, and he believed that the world was ending. The question is: Do we as a nation recognize this bloodbeast as Imperial, as a Reich, and turn it back? Do we recognize that, in fact, to borrow F.A. Hayek's title, the road to serfdom is Corporatist Domination, a New American Hegenomy? Do we finally recognize that the Free Market and Monopoly Capitalism are antithetical,.with the latter creating value in debt for a yoked consumer class who neither control fiscal nor cultural capital, life, death, humanity in easy monthly payments, pay your way to become "free". The culture of life, as defined by the NeoCons, is an a priori negation of the conception of life; People are means, and not ends unto themselves. The culture of life negates the possibility of justice, reducing everything to a rochambeau of semi constitutional shell games.

Or does the New American Century end in further blood shed, the Old World vs The New World. Does the hubris of empire end in a devastated whimper? Is this our fate? Suicide before we can become an old country, before we can have accumulated wisdom?

What becomes of the future?

originally posted at Covington 17 May 2005