Yes, I think Meretz is the most enlightened of the Zionist parties, but I am not a Zionist. With the Communist Party of Israel and Hadash, I believe the project of 'creating a Jewish State' in Palestine in the school of Ben Gurion the nice and M. Begin the nasty, turned out to involve Collective Punishment, Systemic Racism, Dispersion of the native population, Refugee Camps like Jenin or Gaza, Detention without habeas corpus, War Crimes... (Read: Simha Flapan's, Zionism and the Palestinians)
What can be done now? With the UN, and the political consensus of the broad Left, I have hoped that a Two State Solution would be possible and I have supported it - but its practicality is radically undermined by Israeli behaviour, Israeli mortar and walls and Israeli segmentation of the West Bank, Israeli racism, and Greater-Israel imperialism. As Tariq Ali wrote in a recent Guardian op-ed piece:
"The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike,
in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired. There is no other way."
Further, the Palestinians are having babies and Israelis are not, and what will Israel do then in terms of Zionist anti-democratic Measures to preserve the allegedly 'non-racist yet racial' character of their Zionism?
Please think of one more point: you live in and have been bombarded with USA imperialist ideology and extremely restricted, filtered,sound-byte non-analytical coverage of the World in US Mass Media. I watch both USA'nian and Canadian, French and UK News. These are two different ways of seeing the world. You said it was curious that I seemed more up in my knowledge of the situation. It is not odd when you think of the state of the USA media.
On the International Press: Based on living in Canada 40 years and the US for 10 years I have some experience of both realms of media over long periods of time. And I have been an activist since age 30 so I have been an avid, reflective student of issues. The principle that seems to hold true with the TV and Newspaper Press is that the USA as the centre of world imperialism offers a much more incoherent, compressed, fragmented News that is self-censored according to the very narrow American ideological spectrum. CBC, BBC, and Agence France are Establishment centre-left organs -- hardly revolutionary, but they offer extensive interviews from both sides, they are pro-United Nations and have frequent interviews from their envoy to the Palestinians etc. When I lived in Ohio I was unable to find such global coverage anywhere including PBS. As for NPR, its coverage during the Invasion of Iraq was blatantly on page with the Bush-Cheney-Israeli State Line.
Do you really want to get into the arithmetic of Palestinian VS Israeli dead and injured? I can -- and have the data. Let me only say that the civilians killed by Israel since (just picking a point) the Jenin Refugee Camp atrocities are widely disproportionate in comparison to the Israeli civilian dead.
Meeretz is a Zionist reformist party of the Jews. I endorse Meretz as a matter of tactics. It is the most progressive of the other side's political formations. But I am not a Zionist. I agree with the older UN position that Zionism (much of the founding theory and most of the practice) is a form of racism and racial discrimination.
Jews become more important/human than Palestinians in Israeli culture. Is this Israeli racism not the fruit of Zionism ?
Is the Revolution in sight?
looks like the barge may be lifting off a sand bar...
December 30, 2008
December 27, 2008
the god that failed: an exploration of images of the imagination by: Andrew R Taylor
I view some kinds of atheism as a cleansing of the mind far preferable to worshipping idols of the imagination. You know the famous Reformed theologian Karl Barth wrote strongly on false belief and false worship,- he said "religion is a place to hide from God".
And just as religion can become a totalistic, limiting philosophy closed to the variety and immensity of mystery / reality, in the same way political movements can propose a totalistic limiting philosophy that rejects openness and pluralism. Everything I write on politics & religion has this problem of dimished vision in mind .
And when your religion or your party fails to fill your ontological incompleteness -- then you are in crisis: it turns out you have served "The God That Failed" whether it was a political or religious idol, and the panic is on.
It is that then a terrible darkness can come over the Mind and will and imagination: John of the Cross, the Carmelite Mystic, talks about "the Dark Night of the soul" when all sensible apprehension of the divine vanishes. It is difficult to accept the instruction to stay still when one's deity has dissapeared.
En passant I have just mentioned a book title by former-Communists edited by Arthur Koestler: "The God That Failed". There are in-good-faith and bad-faith reasons for leaving a cadre party I suppose, and I do not judge any of the contributors to this important anthology. The diverse group of contributors to the book shared one act in common -- they had handed over their liberty and conscience to a less-than-ultimate structure, and discovering that the Party was not ultimate and all-knowing, they lost their way. The authors describe their entrance into the darkness of unknowing; their depression, their rage and griefs.
So I propose that no matter how good a Communist we might be, however good a Catholic or Conservative, a Buddhist, Jew or Muslim, or any other sect, we regularly make the exercise of remembering that the visible fellowship is an imperfect band of brothers and sisters reaching outward for the common good, following a great historically mediated tradition that can help open our eyes to truth and bless the world or blinker them and create living hells.
I do not believe we humans are strong enough or wise enough to entrust ourselves absolutely to anything but the absolute -- however we conceive that. We suffer if we forget that lesson.
'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'
-W.H. Auden,
excerpt from "As I Walked Out One Evening"
And the world has already staged enough political/theological trials, burned enough witches.
And just as religion can become a totalistic, limiting philosophy closed to the variety and immensity of mystery / reality, in the same way political movements can propose a totalistic limiting philosophy that rejects openness and pluralism. Everything I write on politics & religion has this problem of dimished vision in mind .
And when your religion or your party fails to fill your ontological incompleteness -- then you are in crisis: it turns out you have served "The God That Failed" whether it was a political or religious idol, and the panic is on.
It is that then a terrible darkness can come over the Mind and will and imagination: John of the Cross, the Carmelite Mystic, talks about "the Dark Night of the soul" when all sensible apprehension of the divine vanishes. It is difficult to accept the instruction to stay still when one's deity has dissapeared.
En passant I have just mentioned a book title by former-Communists edited by Arthur Koestler: "The God That Failed". There are in-good-faith and bad-faith reasons for leaving a cadre party I suppose, and I do not judge any of the contributors to this important anthology. The diverse group of contributors to the book shared one act in common -- they had handed over their liberty and conscience to a less-than-ultimate structure, and discovering that the Party was not ultimate and all-knowing, they lost their way. The authors describe their entrance into the darkness of unknowing; their depression, their rage and griefs.
So I propose that no matter how good a Communist we might be, however good a Catholic or Conservative, a Buddhist, Jew or Muslim, or any other sect, we regularly make the exercise of remembering that the visible fellowship is an imperfect band of brothers and sisters reaching outward for the common good, following a great historically mediated tradition that can help open our eyes to truth and bless the world or blinker them and create living hells.
I do not believe we humans are strong enough or wise enough to entrust ourselves absolutely to anything but the absolute -- however we conceive that. We suffer if we forget that lesson.
'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'
-W.H. Auden,
excerpt from "As I Walked Out One Evening"
And the world has already staged enough political/theological trials, burned enough witches.
December 24, 2008
On Religion (Again), by Andrew W Taylor
Many Marxists continue to hold the older classical Marxist idea of all Religion invariably being a fantastic refraction of Class Society. But some of us learned from Liberation Theology that while Religion is lived by some as a principle of bourgeois Order,other kinds of relgious believing inspires people to rebel from unjust conditions and " seek the Kingdom of God" not just after the grave, but as the future promise of this Earth. After all, Jesus said in the gospel of Luke: "Blessed are the Poor, They will inherit the Earth". (NOT 'they will inherit "pie in the sky when they die")
During the 1980s I met CP militants from Central America who said their national parties had had to come to terms with unnuanced anti-religious elements in older cadre teaching because the "Base Ecclesial Communities" were obviously producing mature, disciplined, militant layers of workers and farmers.
I think this Religion(s) questions looms large for Marxist/Socialist approach to the Aboriginal peoples. Are we really going to arrive at the door of Traditional or Christian Native people, and lecture them based on Eurocentric Enlightenment Thought on their 'superstitious belief in spirits, gods'? Will we bring our Eurocentric intellectual hatchets to chop down 'totems of belief' in a new ideologically imperial Marxist project?
So there is much work to be done by Marxists in developing a nuanced appreciation of Religion as a multi-layered dimension of man irreducible to a simple formula. Unfortunately many Marxists rejected an altar-boy level Religion in their adolescence and have an uninformed dogmatism on the Question.
But of course, one finds people who are angry at Religion in any demographic. I think a lot of ant-religious feeling comes out of western european bourgeois secularism of the post-Enlightenment. My own Scottish grandparents had pure contempt for religion. It was as if they thought "that nonsense has alll been cleared up by science. Only idiots bother with it." What more was there to talk about?
But my grandparents were also educated in the UK under a triumphalistic scientific paragigm, in which they had been taught to view African, North American and Asian Traditional religions as a pack of superstitious garbage which progressive white Europeans would de-mystify for the ignorant brown, black, tellow and red races! The triumphalism of The British Empire, the triumphalism of "scientific socialism", and the triumphalism of "The March of Science" made a heady mixture. All these ideological forces also mightily contributed to the parcelling up and poisoning of the Earth by an imperious scientism impervious to traditional religious reverence for "our Mother, the Earth".
The danger, in my view, for modern (or post-modern) Socialism is to keep alive this unexamined Eurocentric bourgeois bias. The socialist and communist movements will attract only the flotsam and jetsam of European radical relativism unless it re-evaluates its stance on the spiritual dimension of "homo religious".
December 23, 2008
YCL SUPPORTS ABORIGINAL ACTIONS Self-determination & justice now!, (reprint from 2007)
YCL SUPPORTS ABORIGINAL ACTIONS
Self-determination & justice now!
Across the land today, Aboriginal peoples together with their allies, are sounding a warning to the trans-national corporations and the government of Canada, a government that is foreign and has no rightful control over the indigenous peoples!
Warning bell: action needed now!
Canada has a long, shady and brutal history of con artists stealing the land, resources, and very way of life from the Aboriginal peoples who have been the protectors of this land. As time goes on the theft of resources continues as oil, gas, hydroelectric power, and raw materials are given away to the new powers, the corporate states (trans-national corporations).
Youth are not taught this history in school. Talking about land claims and acknowledging the rights of First Nations (and all Aboriginal peoples), which should have happened all along, has never been acted upon in good faith. So after waiting for so long, Aboriginals will be the first ones to step in the right direction and act.
Time for Solidarity
The actions of June 29th are for self-determination and justice for Aboriginal peoples first and foremost but ultimately, justice for all that live on this land. Why? Because the capitalists sell our resources south to the USA and all the people are being robbed.
The Young Communist League of Canada is out joining actions today because we know that Aboriginal peoples are on the front lines against the evils of big corporate greed that we call imperialism. We stand in solidarity.
Aboriginal peoples have been the target of genocidal and systemic racist policies causing unemployment and difficulty in finding a job, police harassment, colonial in-justice, and health problems.
In the cities, Aboriginal people have to make ends meet to pay rent to slumlords who profit from the situation. Paying rent on what was once their own land? Being watched and "looked after" by an imposed police force? Kept on small "reserves" that are more like refugee camps? Kept at third world conditions?
These are all the results of an archaic government system, and the policies of that system that perpetuate oppressive conditions.
Young people are bombarded with misinformation. The perceptions that First Nations "have everything at the expense of the taxpayer" is a divide and conquer tactic. No, Aboriginals do not get anything free, for they have paid the highest price: their freedom.
Time to pay the bills
First Nations have made treaties that agreed to "share the land," not sign it over. They agreed to move to new homes on reserves. However, they were then locked there, and what reserves they had were relocated, and reduced in size.
They do not own their land (held in a government "trust") and have no jobs on reserves. Spending for First Nations is close to $8,000 per year per person. Who really gets it free? The trans-national corporations and the billionaires.
The colonizing business interests have capitalized on the loss of Aboriginal land and resource wealth. Aboriginals "gave an inch" while capitalists and racists "took a mile". The time has come for the return of what was stolen. Fair is fair. Time to pay the bill.
If there is to be any justice and a peaceful and healthy co-operation between nations, self-determination must prevail, and above all, honour in DEED by all concerned.
If the Harper Conservative government does not do what it promised, then it is just another lie (and we know how governments lie no matter who you are!). Lying is the language of thieves, and certainly does not lead to peace and justice.
Please read the statements given out by the Assembly of First Nations, and other Aboriginals groups, because one's best voice is one's own. The Young Communist League adds its voice to those taking a stand today, June 29th, because justice must prevail. In unity is strength. With the Communist Party, the YCL demands action to further this aim:
- Recognize the Métis as an Aboriginal people.
- Support prompt land claims settlements, including Aboriginal rights over resources.
- Campaign for a new, equal and voluntary partnership of nations in Canada in a democratically made constitution.
Every Canadian citizen who is not a member of the ruling class, who does not have a vested interest in exploitation and robbery, should take a good look in the mirror. Looking back are the First Nations allies with the same needs: access to education, jobs, housing, public ownership of resources and wealth, the dignity to live as proud human beings in peace and friendship.
This is the bottom line and the practical reality of solidarity, unity and social justice. We call upon all the youth and students to stand in solidarity with Aboriginal peoples!
Copyright © 2007 Young Communist League
December 21, 2008
Our goal is Socialism, by Andrew R Taylor
I believe there is only one way to overcome the chronic economic crises, the narcissistic "me-firstism" inculcated by capitalist mass-psychology, and the coming ecological degradation that will otherwise destroy the Earth, and it is through the establishment of a socialist state with a socialist economy by the workers, accompanied by an educational system which would educate its citizens in socially aware, cooperative aspirations, methods and goals. In this type of economy, the means of production are owned by the people themselves and it functions in a rational fashion through planning. Try as I might, I cannot think of a reformist path that will actually do what must be done.
While it may in certain conditions be an ameliorative measure, I do not see the partial or full nationalisation of capitalist assets as necessarily a step toward radical democracy never-mind socialism. Keynesianism consists of a counter-revolutionary series of measures to save capitalism from its inherent self-destroying profit function. I reject reformism as an ideology that holds that the most the working class can hope for is the adoption of progressive reforms (however good and helpful). Social democrats usually confine "Politics" to election campaigns and trade unions; both are necessary areas of struggle and education, but at some point when conditions are ripe the organised working people will have to take away the means of production from the capitalists.
However socialism comes about, it will have to be very carefully and deliberately carried out by an organised working class and its allies. Because of the immense opposition to social ownership on the part of the possessing capitalist class, at all stages of the revolutionary struggle for power as well as in the challenges of the revolutionary process, the working people have to be readied to defend their gains from police surveillance, agents provocateur, and the violence of police and soldiers. We must look at the experience of interferences in nations becoming socialist, or nationalist, or merely deemed to be contrary to US "national interests". But Canada has its own police surveillance as well that works hand to glove with FBI and CIA covert action.
All of these unhappy realities raise the question of the need for a disciplined Socialist party that has learned wisdom and unflinching commitment from many decades of internal and international struggles with imperialism and capitalism.
It is true "Society" can be conceived in a variety of different ways, depending on the operative (or unformulated) sociological theory.
Let me speak more clearly, and as a Marxist, of the State, including among its different arms, first, the courts, police, prisons; second, the government, the civil service, parliament, city council; third, govt sponsored bodies like the public school system. Under capitalism the Ruling Class requires police to guard property and break strikes as well as arresting the criminal elements. Parliament or Congress with the Courts maintain corporate class rule while superbly keeping alive the fiction that anyone has the "right" to rise to the corridors of power and "serve the nation". A legal, formal right does not magically permit the worker to transcend class barriers.
My examples are meant to illustrate that the State is not neutral; "Society" as its constituted in our several countries is partisan on the side of the antagonistic owning Class.
Under socialism, the chief means of production are socially owned and controlled by means of a revolutionary socialist state. And the base of the socialist party and the socialist state is the working-class – the majority within society. The government of the socialist state is composed of the leading, politically educated delegates of the working-class and its Movement. The citizens send their deputies to regional and central legislative bodies through free vote. This State is also partisan, but in favor of the majority. It will defend itself from internal and external attempts at the overthrow of the Revolution. It will not tolerate the operation of parties advocating fascism, war,or hate crimes; it will not permit public political agitation intended to overthrow socialism and restore capitalism.
If the capitalist state is as I have characterized it in the foregoing discussion, a partisan possessing class stunting and distorting our creativity, our values, expropriating all in its path -- from our parliaments and judiciary to our factories and labour,-- then we must stop sabotaging our class and survival interests, and prepare for the perhaps near, perhaps distant day, when the working-class and its allies takes power.
December 19, 2008
"Re-Missioning" and Advance Betrayal: Notes on Iraq, "Expectation Management," and the Imperial Transition, By Paul Street
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=17801&printsafe=1
Paul Street's ZSpace Page
"RE-MISSIONING" AHEAD?
Recently The New York Times reported an alleged evolution in President-Elect Obama's position on the invasion of Iraq. Having run for the president partly on a vow to "end the war" in Iraq, Obama, Times reporter Thom Shanker wrote, "is making clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat troops out within sixteen months." As Shanker notes, Obama's "withdrawal" could well "see the number of American [troops remaining in Iraq] hovering between 30,000 and 50,000 - and some [Pentagon planners] say as high as 70,000 - for a substantial time even beyond 2011"
Obama's claim to end the invasion without ending it may, some "defense" authorities report, include "re-labeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be ‘re-missioned,' their efforts redefined as training and support for Iraqis" (NYT, December 4, 2008, A31).
Orwell, Kafka, and Vonnegut would be impressed.
The Times gave an interesting title to Shanker's report: "Campaign Promise on Ending the War in Iraq Now Muted By Reality." Here is a useful translation for the Times' meaning of "reality": whatever the Pentagon and incoming administration say about life and policy, the serious questioning of which from beyond centrist frameworks is left to dangerous and dysfunctional "ideologues."
NO CHANGE IN OBAMA'S IRAQ POSITION
The Times was wrong to suggest a significant change in Obama's concept of "reality" in regard to Iraq. Those willing to look seriously beneath the "antiwar" campaign imagery his marketers crafted for liberal and progressive voters can easily determine that there is no fundamental discontinuity. Obama voted to fund the illegal occupation without conditions in 2005 and 2006. He worked to support pro-war over antiwar Democrats in the 2006 congressional primaries. He distanced himself from U.S. Congressman Jack Murtha's (D-PA) early and courageous call for withdrawal from Iraq in 2005. He lectured progressives on the alleged need to not be seen as "working against the president" on Iraq (after the Democrats' 2006 congressional victories) and on how Democrats shouldn't "play chicken with the troops" (a preposterous conservative smear) by calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. He voted against a troop withdrawal proposal by Senators John Kerry and Russ Feingold in June 2006, arguing that setting a firm date for retreat would "hamstring" diplomats and military commanders. .
In the fall of 2006, Obama told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that "The American people have been extraordinarily resolved [in support of the Iraq occupation]...They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah." This was a remarkable comment in light of the two massive assaults (notorious across the Middle East and Muslim world) the Pentagon launched (indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in large numbers) on that Iraqi city in April and November of 2004.
Obama's heralded "antiwar speech" of October 2002 (given when he was still a state senator) opposed the planned invasion of Iraq on pragmatic, not principled grounds. It criticized the imminent invasion as a strategic mistake (a "dumb war"), neglecting to mention its criminal and immoral nature, its petro-imperial motivations, and the large number of Iraqis it would kill and maim.
Consistent with those omissions, Obama has never criticized the ethics or legality of Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.). He has always refused to significantly note Iraqi casualties (including more than 1 million civilian dead) and he denies the broader Holocaust the U.S, has imposed on Iraq. He told CNN's Candy Crowely last July that the United States should not apologize to anyone for any of its foreign policies under Bush and he has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. invaded the Iraq with "the best of intentions" (democracy- and freedom-promotion). He even told Wisconsin autoworkers last February that that the U.S. must "stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together."
Obama's 2002 "antiwar speech" came down from his Web site in 2003 because he decided to run for the U.S. Senate that year. He was nowhere to be seen around downtown Chicago when two nights of massive demonstrations took place there against Bush's invasion in March of 2003. And during the 2004 Democratic Convention, where he made the Keynote Address that made him an overnight celebrity (a "BaRockstar"), Obama told the New York Times that he might have voted (like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards) to authorize Bush to invade Iraq if he had been in the U.S Senate and had access to the same "intelligence" as other U.S. Senators in the fall of 2002.
Obama's spokespersons have been consistently mushy and deceptive about his Iraq withdrawal plans, making it clear to serious investigators that Obama will continue the occupation indefinitely. He told FOX News thug Bill O'Reilly this summer that "the Surge" had "succeeded beyond our wildest imaginations" and he has refused to sign on to legislation seeking to ban private "security" contractors like Blackwater from Iraq and Afghanistan.
A remarkable record, indeed, for someone who, in Times reporter David Sanger's words, excited "the left wing of his party" with "vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq"(NYT, November 22, 2008).
"EXPECTATION CALIBRATION"
Noting that President Bush had been swamped by cries of "O-ba-ma" during a state visit to Africa, "Public" Broadcasting System talk show host Charlie Rose asked then Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power last February if she was concerned about the "sky-high expectations" much of the world seemed to have for peaceful change under an Obama presidency. There was "some danger" in popular hopes, Rose worried.
"Right," Power said, noting that Obama is "acutely aware of this." And "that," Power said, "is why expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally." (The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, February 21, 2008: www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/02/21/2/a-conversation-with-samantha-power)
Earlier in the interview Power told Rose that a president Obama would not be bound by mere "campaign rhetoric" when it came to Iraq once he entered the White House. Upon the assumption of power, Power knew, Obama would take much of his cure from those all-knowing "commanders on the ground."
Behind Power's disturbing application of elitist and technocratic language to the managerial coordination of domestic and global hopes and dreams there lurked an obvious (for those willing to detect it) admission: Obama was as attached to the U.S. imperial project as Bush and this could dangerously disappoint expectant masses at home and abroad in the event of an Obama ascendancy. Unenlightened humanity's naïve faith in "change we can believe in" would have to be downwardly "calibrated" as we made an imperial transition into the post-Bush era of U.S. global rule.
Power was later removed from the Obama team because of her excessive public candor.
A REASON TO FORGIVE PROGRESSIVE OBAMA SUPPORTERS
Carried away with the false notion of Obama as "an antiwar candidate," many left and liberal Americans should have paid closer attention to Obama's longstanding centrist and imperial commitments and world view. Obama has said as much himself, admonishing his more progressive supporters for projecting excessively leftward expectations on to his record and trajectory.
Still, it is hard not to agree with Shanker that "supporters who keyed [Obama's] language of ending the war might be forgiven if they thought that would mean bringing home all the troops." Among other things, the Obama campaign has been a brilliant sales operation. It's not for nothing that Obama was hailed as "Marketer of the Year" by the leading advertising and public relations trade journal Advertising Age ("Obama Wins Ad Age's Marketer of the Year," Advertising Age [October 17, 2008], read at http://adage.com/print?article_id=131810 ).
A critical part of "Brand Obama's" marketing genius has included telling a diverse and often contradictory amalgam of groups and interests that he is one of them. The liberal and progressive community was smartly targeted for seduction by Obama's skilled and remarkably well-funded - largely by the privileged and corporate Few - small donors accounted for just a quarter of his record-setting campaign finance war chest (the same percentage as George W. Bush in 2004!) - image makers. And a critical hook in that powerful bit of electoral "micro-targeting" was of course the claim that Obama would honor majority U.S., Iraqi, and world opinion by bringing a rapid end to the Iraq War.
Eager to put a "new," hopeful, and cooptive face on the American System after the long national and global Cheney-Bush nightmare, dominant U.S. media played along pricelessly with the fake-progressive sales job. It eagerly and powerfully transmitted the liberal-left and related antiwar Obama illusions.
BETRAYAL IN ADVANCE
Now, nearly a year after I watched hundreds of excited liberal and progressive voters flood the Democratic presidential Caucus for Obama at Iowa City High School, the New York Times' relatively elite readership is told candidly that Obama and his militantly corporate-imperial cabinet picks epitomize what former Clinton administration official and Kissinger Associates Managing Director David J. Rothkopf calls "the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right" (NYT, November 22, 2008, A1). Wall Street Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminski notes that "the Obama camp says the future president, who won running from the left, intends to govern from the center" (WSJ, December 6/7, 2008, A8). The Washington Post's Web site links to a Morgan Stanley research report issued the day after Obama's election. "As we understand it," the report said, "Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend...In addition, we believe, based on discussions with industry sources, that Obama has agreed not to cut the defense budget at least until the first 18 months of his term as the national security situation becomes better understood...The Democrats," Morgan Stanley's researchers note, "are sensitive about appearing weak on defense, and we don't expect strong cuts" (see www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/governmentinc/documents/ObamaDefense.pdf)
Reading that report the other day, I thought back to a brief conversation I had with a progressive young woman in City High right after Obama scored his historic triumph in Iowa. Like me, she had caucused for the semi-progressive and remarkably pro-labor John Edwards candidacy. "But he [Obama] can't win," she said when I asked her what she thought about the Obamaist tsunami that had just unfolded before our eyes. "Sure he can," I said. "The problem is what's going to get lost along the way. He's probably going to the White House but he's going to do in it in a way that might not strike us as all that much of a ‘democratic' victory."
Eleven months later as Obama continues to win praise and publicity from the likes of William Kristol and Rupert Murdoch, I am reminded also of the once-left Christopher Hitchens' description of "the essence of American politics" as "the manipulation of populism by elitism." I am further struck by the relevance of Edward S. Herman's observation last year that the Democrats' "populist and peace-stressing promises and gestures...are [always] betrayed instantly on the assumption of power" (Edward S. Herman, "Democratic Betrayal," Z Magazine, January 2007). In Obama's case, the predictable betrayal seems well underway even before the formal taking of office.
Paul Street's latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)Paul can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com
Paul Street's ZSpace Page
"RE-MISSIONING" AHEAD?
Recently The New York Times reported an alleged evolution in President-Elect Obama's position on the invasion of Iraq. Having run for the president partly on a vow to "end the war" in Iraq, Obama, Times reporter Thom Shanker wrote, "is making clearer than ever that tens of thousands of American troops will be left behind in Iraq, even if he can make good on his campaign promise to pull all combat troops out within sixteen months." As Shanker notes, Obama's "withdrawal" could well "see the number of American [troops remaining in Iraq] hovering between 30,000 and 50,000 - and some [Pentagon planners] say as high as 70,000 - for a substantial time even beyond 2011"
Obama's claim to end the invasion without ending it may, some "defense" authorities report, include "re-labeling some units, so that those currently counted as combat troops could be ‘re-missioned,' their efforts redefined as training and support for Iraqis" (NYT, December 4, 2008, A31).
Orwell, Kafka, and Vonnegut would be impressed.
The Times gave an interesting title to Shanker's report: "Campaign Promise on Ending the War in Iraq Now Muted By Reality." Here is a useful translation for the Times' meaning of "reality": whatever the Pentagon and incoming administration say about life and policy, the serious questioning of which from beyond centrist frameworks is left to dangerous and dysfunctional "ideologues."
NO CHANGE IN OBAMA'S IRAQ POSITION
The Times was wrong to suggest a significant change in Obama's concept of "reality" in regard to Iraq. Those willing to look seriously beneath the "antiwar" campaign imagery his marketers crafted for liberal and progressive voters can easily determine that there is no fundamental discontinuity. Obama voted to fund the illegal occupation without conditions in 2005 and 2006. He worked to support pro-war over antiwar Democrats in the 2006 congressional primaries. He distanced himself from U.S. Congressman Jack Murtha's (D-PA) early and courageous call for withdrawal from Iraq in 2005. He lectured progressives on the alleged need to not be seen as "working against the president" on Iraq (after the Democrats' 2006 congressional victories) and on how Democrats shouldn't "play chicken with the troops" (a preposterous conservative smear) by calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. He voted against a troop withdrawal proposal by Senators John Kerry and Russ Feingold in June 2006, arguing that setting a firm date for retreat would "hamstring" diplomats and military commanders. .
In the fall of 2006, Obama told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that "The American people have been extraordinarily resolved [in support of the Iraq occupation]...They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah." This was a remarkable comment in light of the two massive assaults (notorious across the Middle East and Muslim world) the Pentagon launched (indiscriminately slaughtering civilians in large numbers) on that Iraqi city in April and November of 2004.
Obama's heralded "antiwar speech" of October 2002 (given when he was still a state senator) opposed the planned invasion of Iraq on pragmatic, not principled grounds. It criticized the imminent invasion as a strategic mistake (a "dumb war"), neglecting to mention its criminal and immoral nature, its petro-imperial motivations, and the large number of Iraqis it would kill and maim.
Consistent with those omissions, Obama has never criticized the ethics or legality of Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.). He has always refused to significantly note Iraqi casualties (including more than 1 million civilian dead) and he denies the broader Holocaust the U.S, has imposed on Iraq. He told CNN's Candy Crowely last July that the United States should not apologize to anyone for any of its foreign policies under Bush and he has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. invaded the Iraq with "the best of intentions" (democracy- and freedom-promotion). He even told Wisconsin autoworkers last February that that the U.S. must "stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together."
Obama's 2002 "antiwar speech" came down from his Web site in 2003 because he decided to run for the U.S. Senate that year. He was nowhere to be seen around downtown Chicago when two nights of massive demonstrations took place there against Bush's invasion in March of 2003. And during the 2004 Democratic Convention, where he made the Keynote Address that made him an overnight celebrity (a "BaRockstar"), Obama told the New York Times that he might have voted (like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards) to authorize Bush to invade Iraq if he had been in the U.S Senate and had access to the same "intelligence" as other U.S. Senators in the fall of 2002.
Obama's spokespersons have been consistently mushy and deceptive about his Iraq withdrawal plans, making it clear to serious investigators that Obama will continue the occupation indefinitely. He told FOX News thug Bill O'Reilly this summer that "the Surge" had "succeeded beyond our wildest imaginations" and he has refused to sign on to legislation seeking to ban private "security" contractors like Blackwater from Iraq and Afghanistan.
A remarkable record, indeed, for someone who, in Times reporter David Sanger's words, excited "the left wing of his party" with "vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq"(NYT, November 22, 2008).
"EXPECTATION CALIBRATION"
Noting that President Bush had been swamped by cries of "O-ba-ma" during a state visit to Africa, "Public" Broadcasting System talk show host Charlie Rose asked then Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power last February if she was concerned about the "sky-high expectations" much of the world seemed to have for peaceful change under an Obama presidency. There was "some danger" in popular hopes, Rose worried.
"Right," Power said, noting that Obama is "acutely aware of this." And "that," Power said, "is why expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally." (The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, February 21, 2008: www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/02/21/2/a-conversation-with-samantha-power)
Earlier in the interview Power told Rose that a president Obama would not be bound by mere "campaign rhetoric" when it came to Iraq once he entered the White House. Upon the assumption of power, Power knew, Obama would take much of his cure from those all-knowing "commanders on the ground."
Behind Power's disturbing application of elitist and technocratic language to the managerial coordination of domestic and global hopes and dreams there lurked an obvious (for those willing to detect it) admission: Obama was as attached to the U.S. imperial project as Bush and this could dangerously disappoint expectant masses at home and abroad in the event of an Obama ascendancy. Unenlightened humanity's naïve faith in "change we can believe in" would have to be downwardly "calibrated" as we made an imperial transition into the post-Bush era of U.S. global rule.
Power was later removed from the Obama team because of her excessive public candor.
A REASON TO FORGIVE PROGRESSIVE OBAMA SUPPORTERS
Carried away with the false notion of Obama as "an antiwar candidate," many left and liberal Americans should have paid closer attention to Obama's longstanding centrist and imperial commitments and world view. Obama has said as much himself, admonishing his more progressive supporters for projecting excessively leftward expectations on to his record and trajectory.
Still, it is hard not to agree with Shanker that "supporters who keyed [Obama's] language of ending the war might be forgiven if they thought that would mean bringing home all the troops." Among other things, the Obama campaign has been a brilliant sales operation. It's not for nothing that Obama was hailed as "Marketer of the Year" by the leading advertising and public relations trade journal Advertising Age ("Obama Wins Ad Age's Marketer of the Year," Advertising Age [October 17, 2008], read at http://adage.com/print?article_id=131810 ).
A critical part of "Brand Obama's" marketing genius has included telling a diverse and often contradictory amalgam of groups and interests that he is one of them. The liberal and progressive community was smartly targeted for seduction by Obama's skilled and remarkably well-funded - largely by the privileged and corporate Few - small donors accounted for just a quarter of his record-setting campaign finance war chest (the same percentage as George W. Bush in 2004!) - image makers. And a critical hook in that powerful bit of electoral "micro-targeting" was of course the claim that Obama would honor majority U.S., Iraqi, and world opinion by bringing a rapid end to the Iraq War.
Eager to put a "new," hopeful, and cooptive face on the American System after the long national and global Cheney-Bush nightmare, dominant U.S. media played along pricelessly with the fake-progressive sales job. It eagerly and powerfully transmitted the liberal-left and related antiwar Obama illusions.
BETRAYAL IN ADVANCE
Now, nearly a year after I watched hundreds of excited liberal and progressive voters flood the Democratic presidential Caucus for Obama at Iowa City High School, the New York Times' relatively elite readership is told candidly that Obama and his militantly corporate-imperial cabinet picks epitomize what former Clinton administration official and Kissinger Associates Managing Director David J. Rothkopf calls "the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right" (NYT, November 22, 2008, A1). Wall Street Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminski notes that "the Obama camp says the future president, who won running from the left, intends to govern from the center" (WSJ, December 6/7, 2008, A8). The Washington Post's Web site links to a Morgan Stanley research report issued the day after Obama's election. "As we understand it," the report said, "Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend...In addition, we believe, based on discussions with industry sources, that Obama has agreed not to cut the defense budget at least until the first 18 months of his term as the national security situation becomes better understood...The Democrats," Morgan Stanley's researchers note, "are sensitive about appearing weak on defense, and we don't expect strong cuts" (see www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/governmentinc/documents/ObamaDefense.pdf)
Reading that report the other day, I thought back to a brief conversation I had with a progressive young woman in City High right after Obama scored his historic triumph in Iowa. Like me, she had caucused for the semi-progressive and remarkably pro-labor John Edwards candidacy. "But he [Obama] can't win," she said when I asked her what she thought about the Obamaist tsunami that had just unfolded before our eyes. "Sure he can," I said. "The problem is what's going to get lost along the way. He's probably going to the White House but he's going to do in it in a way that might not strike us as all that much of a ‘democratic' victory."
Eleven months later as Obama continues to win praise and publicity from the likes of William Kristol and Rupert Murdoch, I am reminded also of the once-left Christopher Hitchens' description of "the essence of American politics" as "the manipulation of populism by elitism." I am further struck by the relevance of Edward S. Herman's observation last year that the Democrats' "populist and peace-stressing promises and gestures...are [always] betrayed instantly on the assumption of power" (Edward S. Herman, "Democratic Betrayal," Z Magazine, January 2007). In Obama's case, the predictable betrayal seems well underway even before the formal taking of office.
Paul Street's latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)Paul can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com
The “Wait ‘Til He Gets In” Delusion: The President Elect is Not a Latent Lefty, by Paul L. Street
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/the-%E2%80%9Cwait-%E2%80%98til-he-gets-in%E2%80%9D-delusion/
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there are still those who think that Barack Obama "is a ‘true progressive' whose left and democratic orientation has been ‘squandered' or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers." In reality, "Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power." Obama is tricky. "He posed for the liberal base as an ‘antiwar candidate' even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period."
The "Wait ‘Til He Gets In" Delusion: The President Elect is Not a Latent Lefty
by Paul Street
"It is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes."
One of the more recurrent refrains I heard from many of Barack Obama's progressive supporters in late 2007 and through the recent election went like this: "Oh, he has to say and do that stuff to get elected. The corporate and military powers that be will sink him if he acts as left as he really is. Just wait until he gets in: then you'll see the real progressive deal."
"That stuff" included Obama declaring his readiness to bomb Iran, saying that black Americans had come "90 percent" of the way to equality, treating Jeremiah Wright's anger over American racism as inappropriate for the current era, proclaiming that the U.S. invaded Iraq with noble intentions, and saying that "the Surge" was "succeeding beyond our wildest imagination." Other parts of the Obama campaign package: advancing nuclear power and Ethanol, claiming that leading Wall Street firms and other large corporations were as interested as anyone else in "American renewal" (they "just hadn't been asked" to help the country, Obama said last year), supporting the unilateral use of military power even in "situations beyond self-defense" (in a 2007 Foreign Affairs essay), and calling for an expansion of U.S.-imperial armed forces.
Neoliberal from the Start
There were four key problems with this alternatively naïve and cynical defense of candidate Obama's centrism. First, it neglected Obama's history as a deeply conciliatory and conservative, privilege-friendly politician. From his Harvard Law School days through his state legislative career and his brief stint in the U.S. Senate, Obama has exhibited what liberal journalist Ryan Lizza rightly calls "an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions."
Those who think Obama is a "true progressive" whose left and democratic orientation has been "squandered" or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers might want to consider an interesting description of the young phenomenon penned by the veteran black political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. just as Obama's political career began. By Reed's account, Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power. Alternately praised (by moderates) as "pragmatism" and "realism" and reviled (by left progressives and radicals) as "selling out" and "cooptation," his finely honed centrism was a habit of thought that flowed naturally from his elite socialization in a corporate-neoliberal post-Civil Rights era at privileged private institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and the metropolitan foundations (including the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Joyce Foundation) on whose boards he sat and in whose circles he moved (a rarely noted aspect of Obama's biography) while he worked as a Chicago lawyer.
"Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power."
This is how Reed described the 30-something Obama in early 1996, shortly after the latter won his first election to the Illinois legislature and more than eight years before the world beyond Springfield and the Chicago and Washington money-politics elite discovered the "Obama phenomenon":
"In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program - the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway." [1]
There's little basis for many progressives' desire to share some right-wingers' picture of Obama as a closeted true-progressive waiting for the White House ascendancy to unveil his left agenda.
Path Confusion
Second, to quote a Buddhist maxim, "the path is the goal." The point can be exaggerated, but it is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes. It is difficult (thought not impossible) to rally the troops for progressive change while steering again and again - however stealthily (see my next point) - to the corporate and imperial right.
Third, the bigger truth is that candidate Obama tended to run to the rhetorical left of his actual policy agenda. Especially during the primary campaign, he sounded far more progressive than he actually was. He posed for the liberal base as an "antiwar candidate" even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period. He ran as an advocate of universal heath insurance even while he advanced a plan that left critical cost-driving power in the hands of the big insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.
Things He Didn't "Have" to Say and Do
Last but not least, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Obama repeatedly said and did things more reactionary than actually required to make a viable presidential run and still pass muster with concentrated power. The imperial plutocracy didn't require Obama to vote for the expansion of federal domestic wiretapping powers with retroactive immunity to the big telecommunications corporations last spring.
Harsh political power realities did not mean that Obama "had" to tell CNN's Candy Crowley last summer that the U.S. should never apologize for any of its actions abroad. A supposedly great and benevolent empire can and probably should occasionally apologize for such "occasional" "mistakes" as the recurrent indiscriminate bombing of Afghan wedding parties.
Obama did not "have" (to stay viable in the presidential race) to tell the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that the American people were "resolved" in support of the Iraq War since "they have seen their sons and daughters killed in the streets of Fallujah" (a city that suffered massive U.S. imperial assaults, with a giant civilian death toll, in April and November of 2004).
Obama didn't "have" to blow up the public presidential election financing system once and for all, though he would have been crazy (from an "in it to win it" perspective) not to given his remarkable private funding advantage over John McCain.
"Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors."
In the process of torpedoing federal election funding, moreover, Obama didn't "have "to create the dark deception that his fundraising operation constituted "a parallel system of public financing." The truth of the matter, reported on ABC's evening news last week, is that Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors. That was the same share small donors contributed to George W. Bush's funding take in 2004 - a telling little detail that gets lost in Obama' recurrent trumpeting of the fact that he received 91 percent of his contributions from small givers. Too bad those small givers comprised just a fourth of his total money.
And Obama hasn't "had" to go to the remarkable lengths he has gone to deny the depth and degree of U.S. racial disparities and continuing relevance of racism in explaining those inequalities.
I could go on.
"Honeymoans" and Violins
Five weeks away from Obama's inauguration, some progressives are disturbed to learn that his corporate-imperial cabinet picks epitomize what former Clinton administration official and Kissinger Associates Managing Director David J. Rothkopf calls "the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right" (NYT, November 22, 2008, A1). It bothers a growing number of Obama's liberal backers to learn that, as Wall Street Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminski notes, "the Obama camp says the future president, who won running from the left, intends to govern from the center" (WSJ, December 6/7, 2008, A8).
"This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," whines the title of a recent Washington Post editorial by leading left-liberal writer David Corn [2].
It's long past time for Corn and other "concerned" and "disappointed" Obama liberals to trade in their rose-colored campaign glasses for the demystifying shades donned by the ideology-decoding rebels in John Carpenter's classic left science fiction movie "They Live." The balmy feel-good people's rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance.
A little more due diligence research on their candidate's longstanding centrist history and how well it matches the narrow parameters imposed by the American political tradition and party system might have prevented some of the current left and liberal "honeymoaning" (Alexander Cockburn's useful term [3]) about Obama. For all his claims to be a noble and "pragmatic" reformer "above the fray" of America's imperial plutocracy and "ideological" politics, Obama is no special exception to - and is in many ways an epitome of - what Christopher Hitchens called (in his 1999 study of the Bill and Hillary Clinton phenomenon) "the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled," Hitchens explained, "consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism." [4]
"The balmy feel-good people's rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance."
It's nothing new. Relying heavily on candidates' repeated promise to restore "hope" to a populace disillusioned by corporate control, corruption, and inequality - a standard claim of non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidates - this dark essence of United States political culture goes back further than the corporate-neoliberal era into which Obama came of political age. It is arguably as old the Republic itself, always torn by the rift between democratic promise and authoritarian realities of concentrated wealth and power.
Underlying systemic contradictions related to the deepening economic crisis may well drive Obama to introduce measures that will seem comparatively progressive in relation to the last thirty-five years of U.S. economic policy. For real and genuinely progressive recovery to occur, however, popular agency on the model of the recent factory occupation at Chicago's Republic Door and Window plant [5] will be required, as in previous periods of reform. Today as in the 1930s and 1960s, rank and file citizens' agency will be a critical element forcing progressive change that can be reasonably believed in [6]. Obama may be left-handed but its' time to stop waiting for a mythical White House lefty and to get to the work of actual left organizing and vision from the bottom up.
Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 ( Boulder , CO : Paradigm, 2004) and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis ( New York : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Hid latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
NOTES
1. Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Curse of Community," Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene ( New York , 2000). For an (I hope) useful summary of Obama's relatively tepid and centrist career as a state legislator, please see Paul Street , "Statehouse Days: The Myth of Barack Obama's ‘True Progressive' Past," ZNet (July 20, 2008), read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18224
2. David Corn, "This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," Washington Post (December 5, 2008), read at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/05/AR2008120502602.html
3. Alexander Cockburn, "Honeymoans From the Left," CounterPunch (December 5/7, 2008), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12052008.html
4. Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (New York : Verso, 2000), pp. 17-18.
5. Lee Sustar, "Chicago Factory Occupied," Socialist Worker (December 6, 2008), read at http://socialistworker.org/2008/12/06/republic-window-occupation
6. Howard Zinn, "Election Madness," The Progressive (March 2008).
Wednesday, 17 December 2008
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there are still those who think that Barack Obama "is a ‘true progressive' whose left and democratic orientation has been ‘squandered' or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers." In reality, "Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power." Obama is tricky. "He posed for the liberal base as an ‘antiwar candidate' even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period."
The "Wait ‘Til He Gets In" Delusion: The President Elect is Not a Latent Lefty
by Paul Street
"It is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes."
One of the more recurrent refrains I heard from many of Barack Obama's progressive supporters in late 2007 and through the recent election went like this: "Oh, he has to say and do that stuff to get elected. The corporate and military powers that be will sink him if he acts as left as he really is. Just wait until he gets in: then you'll see the real progressive deal."
"That stuff" included Obama declaring his readiness to bomb Iran, saying that black Americans had come "90 percent" of the way to equality, treating Jeremiah Wright's anger over American racism as inappropriate for the current era, proclaiming that the U.S. invaded Iraq with noble intentions, and saying that "the Surge" was "succeeding beyond our wildest imagination." Other parts of the Obama campaign package: advancing nuclear power and Ethanol, claiming that leading Wall Street firms and other large corporations were as interested as anyone else in "American renewal" (they "just hadn't been asked" to help the country, Obama said last year), supporting the unilateral use of military power even in "situations beyond self-defense" (in a 2007 Foreign Affairs essay), and calling for an expansion of U.S.-imperial armed forces.
Neoliberal from the Start
There were four key problems with this alternatively naïve and cynical defense of candidate Obama's centrism. First, it neglected Obama's history as a deeply conciliatory and conservative, privilege-friendly politician. From his Harvard Law School days through his state legislative career and his brief stint in the U.S. Senate, Obama has exhibited what liberal journalist Ryan Lizza rightly calls "an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions."
Those who think Obama is a "true progressive" whose left and democratic orientation has been "squandered" or carefully hidden thanks to his national political ambitions and/or the influence of his political handlers might want to consider an interesting description of the young phenomenon penned by the veteran black political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. just as Obama's political career began. By Reed's account, Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power. Alternately praised (by moderates) as "pragmatism" and "realism" and reviled (by left progressives and radicals) as "selling out" and "cooptation," his finely honed centrism was a habit of thought that flowed naturally from his elite socialization in a corporate-neoliberal post-Civil Rights era at privileged private institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and the metropolitan foundations (including the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Joyce Foundation) on whose boards he sat and in whose circles he moved (a rarely noted aspect of Obama's biography) while he worked as a Chicago lawyer.
"Obama came to the political game with an already advanced and highly cultivated bourgeois taste for incremental change and compromise with concentrated power."
This is how Reed described the 30-something Obama in early 1996, shortly after the latter won his first election to the Illinois legislature and more than eight years before the world beyond Springfield and the Chicago and Washington money-politics elite discovered the "Obama phenomenon":
"In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program - the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway." [1]
There's little basis for many progressives' desire to share some right-wingers' picture of Obama as a closeted true-progressive waiting for the White House ascendancy to unveil his left agenda.
Path Confusion
Second, to quote a Buddhist maxim, "the path is the goal." The point can be exaggerated, but it is hard to end up on the left turn ramp while driving in the center and right lanes. It is difficult (thought not impossible) to rally the troops for progressive change while steering again and again - however stealthily (see my next point) - to the corporate and imperial right.
Third, the bigger truth is that candidate Obama tended to run to the rhetorical left of his actual policy agenda. Especially during the primary campaign, he sounded far more progressive than he actually was. He posed for the liberal base as an "antiwar candidate" even while he signaled clearly to the foreign policy establishment that he would continue the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period. He ran as an advocate of universal heath insurance even while he advanced a plan that left critical cost-driving power in the hands of the big insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.
Things He Didn't "Have" to Say and Do
Last but not least, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Obama repeatedly said and did things more reactionary than actually required to make a viable presidential run and still pass muster with concentrated power. The imperial plutocracy didn't require Obama to vote for the expansion of federal domestic wiretapping powers with retroactive immunity to the big telecommunications corporations last spring.
Harsh political power realities did not mean that Obama "had" to tell CNN's Candy Crowley last summer that the U.S. should never apologize for any of its actions abroad. A supposedly great and benevolent empire can and probably should occasionally apologize for such "occasional" "mistakes" as the recurrent indiscriminate bombing of Afghan wedding parties.
Obama did not "have" (to stay viable in the presidential race) to tell the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that the American people were "resolved" in support of the Iraq War since "they have seen their sons and daughters killed in the streets of Fallujah" (a city that suffered massive U.S. imperial assaults, with a giant civilian death toll, in April and November of 2004).
Obama didn't "have" to blow up the public presidential election financing system once and for all, though he would have been crazy (from an "in it to win it" perspective) not to given his remarkable private funding advantage over John McCain.
"Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors."
In the process of torpedoing federal election funding, moreover, Obama didn't "have "to create the dark deception that his fundraising operation constituted "a parallel system of public financing." The truth of the matter, reported on ABC's evening news last week, is that Obama got just a quarter off his campaign finance haul from small donors. That was the same share small donors contributed to George W. Bush's funding take in 2004 - a telling little detail that gets lost in Obama' recurrent trumpeting of the fact that he received 91 percent of his contributions from small givers. Too bad those small givers comprised just a fourth of his total money.
And Obama hasn't "had" to go to the remarkable lengths he has gone to deny the depth and degree of U.S. racial disparities and continuing relevance of racism in explaining those inequalities.
I could go on.
"Honeymoans" and Violins
Five weeks away from Obama's inauguration, some progressives are disturbed to learn that his corporate-imperial cabinet picks epitomize what former Clinton administration official and Kissinger Associates Managing Director David J. Rothkopf calls "the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right" (NYT, November 22, 2008, A1). It bothers a growing number of Obama's liberal backers to learn that, as Wall Street Journal editorial board member Matthew Kaminski notes, "the Obama camp says the future president, who won running from the left, intends to govern from the center" (WSJ, December 6/7, 2008, A8).
"This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," whines the title of a recent Washington Post editorial by leading left-liberal writer David Corn [2].
It's long past time for Corn and other "concerned" and "disappointed" Obama liberals to trade in their rose-colored campaign glasses for the demystifying shades donned by the ideology-decoding rebels in John Carpenter's classic left science fiction movie "They Live." The balmy feel-good people's rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance.
A little more due diligence research on their candidate's longstanding centrist history and how well it matches the narrow parameters imposed by the American political tradition and party system might have prevented some of the current left and liberal "honeymoaning" (Alexander Cockburn's useful term [3]) about Obama. For all his claims to be a noble and "pragmatic" reformer "above the fray" of America's imperial plutocracy and "ideological" politics, Obama is no special exception to - and is in many ways an epitome of - what Christopher Hitchens called (in his 1999 study of the Bill and Hillary Clinton phenomenon) "the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled," Hitchens explained, "consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism." [4]
"The balmy feel-good people's rhetoric of the electoral contest has faded as always before the big chill of corporate-imperial governance."
It's nothing new. Relying heavily on candidates' repeated promise to restore "hope" to a populace disillusioned by corporate control, corruption, and inequality - a standard claim of non-incumbent Democratic presidential candidates - this dark essence of United States political culture goes back further than the corporate-neoliberal era into which Obama came of political age. It is arguably as old the Republic itself, always torn by the rift between democratic promise and authoritarian realities of concentrated wealth and power.
Underlying systemic contradictions related to the deepening economic crisis may well drive Obama to introduce measures that will seem comparatively progressive in relation to the last thirty-five years of U.S. economic policy. For real and genuinely progressive recovery to occur, however, popular agency on the model of the recent factory occupation at Chicago's Republic Door and Window plant [5] will be required, as in previous periods of reform. Today as in the 1930s and 1960s, rank and file citizens' agency will be a critical element forcing progressive change that can be reasonably believed in [6]. Obama may be left-handed but its' time to stop waiting for a mythical White House lefty and to get to the work of actual left organizing and vision from the bottom up.
Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 ( Boulder , CO : Paradigm, 2004) and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis ( New York : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). Hid latest book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
NOTES
1. Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Curse of Community," Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene ( New York , 2000). For an (I hope) useful summary of Obama's relatively tepid and centrist career as a state legislator, please see Paul Street , "Statehouse Days: The Myth of Barack Obama's ‘True Progressive' Past," ZNet (July 20, 2008), read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18224
2. David Corn, "This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," Washington Post (December 5, 2008), read at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/05/AR2008120502602.html
3. Alexander Cockburn, "Honeymoans From the Left," CounterPunch (December 5/7, 2008), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12052008.html
4. Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (New York : Verso, 2000), pp. 17-18.
5. Lee Sustar, "Chicago Factory Occupied," Socialist Worker (December 6, 2008), read at http://socialistworker.org/2008/12/06/republic-window-occupation
6. Howard Zinn, "Election Madness," The Progressive (March 2008).
December 17, 2008
"Comparing pro-life struggle to slavery may be 'high risk, high reward' move for Catholic Church" John L Allen Jr.
Posted on Dec 12, 2008 08:11am CST.
By John L Allen Jr., New Catholic Review
http://ncrcafe.org/node/2328
In a stroke of pro-life rhetoric that may have particular resonance in the United States, senior church officials are increasingly comparing the defense of unborn life today, including opposition to abortion and the destruction of human embryos, to the struggle against slavery and racism in earlier historical periods.
That argument comes at a moment when the United States is celebrating the election of the first African American to the presidency, and thus the country’s progress in race relations since the era of slavery.
Yet in making that comparison, officials may also have to come terms with the church’s own checkered past, since prior to the late 19th century official Catholic teaching did not generally regard slavery as an “intrinsic evil.”
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, linked the struggle against slavery to the church’s opposition to abortion during his presidential address at the Nov. 10-13 fall meeting of the U.S. bishops in Baltimore.
“Symbolically, it is a moment that touches more than our history when a country that once enshrined race slavery in its very constitutional order should come to elect an African American to the presidency,” George said. “In this, I believe, we must all rejoice.”
“We can rejoice today with those who, following heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, were part of a movement to bring our country’s civil rights into better accord with universal human rights. Among so many people of good will, dutiful priests and loving religious women, bishops and lay people of the Catholic church who took our social doctrine to heart then can feel vindicated now.”
George then explicitly made the parallel between racism and abortion.
“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” he said. “If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people’s property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be President of the United States. Today, as was the case a hundred and fifty years ago, common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”
Also during the Baltimore meeting, Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pennsylvania, called for a more muscular posture from the conference on denying communion to pro-choice politicians. He explicitly compared doing so to “canonical measures” taken by bishops in earlier periods against Catholic politicians who espoused racism.
(Church historians say that Martino may have had in mind, at least in part, the actions of the late Archbishop Joseph Rummel in New Orleans, who publicly excommunicated three local Catholic politicians and activists who opposed the desegregation of Catholic schools in the archdiocese in 1962.)
The parallel between opposition to slavery and the protection of unborn life was also raised on Dec. 12 by Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, in the presentation of a new Vatican document on biotechnology opposing human cloning, the freezing of embryos, animal/human genetic hybrids, and a number of other procedures seen as affronts to human dignity.
“The church has been committed throughout the centuries in defense of certain fundamental principles which are today the common heritage of humanity,” Fisichella said.
“Certainly, at the time the church was challenged by a fringe of forward-thinkers who, in the name of progress and the laws of the market, preferred to trample upon the fundamental rights of persons. How can we forget, for example, the commitment of missionaries against slavery in countries that had been colonized, or the defense of workers at the beginning of the 19th century? Today, the issue that will mark the coming decades and the life of society is determined by the defense of the dignity of the person from conception to natural death.”
Many analysts applaud this way of making the pro-life argument.
Theologian Charles Camosy of Fordham University, for example, said the church is too often hobbled by “unfortunate and artificial” division in the church between what he called “moral status conservatives” and “social justice liberals,” which means that both camps often fail to take “a comprehensive approach to the church’s moral resources.”
Making the case for unborn life by drawing upon the Catholic tradition of social teaching, Camosy said, could do a better job of getting social justice Catholics on board, and perhaps making the pro-life argument more persuasive to the broader world.
Yet analysts also caution that the church, if it pursues this line of argument, may face pressure to be candid about its own history. Throughout the centuries, historians note, both the Vatican and the American bishops generally upheld the morality of slavery in principle, even if they also vigorously denounced abuses in practice.
As late as 1866, in the middle of the Civil War in the United States and at a time when the abolitionist movement was fully formed, the Vatican’s doctrinal office issued an instruction stating, “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.” As is well known, ecclesiastical institutions in the United States and elsewhere often owned slaves.
To be sure, popes, bishops and theologians also frequently denounced slavery as it was actually conducted, especially racial slavery; in 1435, for example, Pope Eugene IV demanded that European colonizers stop enslaving native peoples in the Canary Islands. Those judgments were repeated in 1537 for what was then known as the “Indies,” and in 1686 for Africa.
Most theologians say the emphasis in Catholic teaching on a common human nature always pointed toward the conclusion reached by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) in its document Gaudium et Spes, which denounced “imprisonment, deportation, slavery … the selling of women and children.”
Nonetheless, historians say, the Catholic church traveled something of a “learning curve” through the centuries on issues of slavery and racism. A clear acknowledgment of that reality, some suggest, might actually help the church push the broader society along a similar “learning curve” today with regard to new threats to human life and dignity.
By John L Allen Jr., New Catholic Review
http://ncrcafe.org/node/2328
In a stroke of pro-life rhetoric that may have particular resonance in the United States, senior church officials are increasingly comparing the defense of unborn life today, including opposition to abortion and the destruction of human embryos, to the struggle against slavery and racism in earlier historical periods.
That argument comes at a moment when the United States is celebrating the election of the first African American to the presidency, and thus the country’s progress in race relations since the era of slavery.
Yet in making that comparison, officials may also have to come terms with the church’s own checkered past, since prior to the late 19th century official Catholic teaching did not generally regard slavery as an “intrinsic evil.”
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, linked the struggle against slavery to the church’s opposition to abortion during his presidential address at the Nov. 10-13 fall meeting of the U.S. bishops in Baltimore.
“Symbolically, it is a moment that touches more than our history when a country that once enshrined race slavery in its very constitutional order should come to elect an African American to the presidency,” George said. “In this, I believe, we must all rejoice.”
“We can rejoice today with those who, following heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, were part of a movement to bring our country’s civil rights into better accord with universal human rights. Among so many people of good will, dutiful priests and loving religious women, bishops and lay people of the Catholic church who took our social doctrine to heart then can feel vindicated now.”
George then explicitly made the parallel between racism and abortion.
“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” he said. “If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people’s property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be President of the United States. Today, as was the case a hundred and fifty years ago, common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”
Also during the Baltimore meeting, Bishop Joseph Martino of Scranton, Pennsylvania, called for a more muscular posture from the conference on denying communion to pro-choice politicians. He explicitly compared doing so to “canonical measures” taken by bishops in earlier periods against Catholic politicians who espoused racism.
(Church historians say that Martino may have had in mind, at least in part, the actions of the late Archbishop Joseph Rummel in New Orleans, who publicly excommunicated three local Catholic politicians and activists who opposed the desegregation of Catholic schools in the archdiocese in 1962.)
The parallel between opposition to slavery and the protection of unborn life was also raised on Dec. 12 by Italian Archbishop Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, in the presentation of a new Vatican document on biotechnology opposing human cloning, the freezing of embryos, animal/human genetic hybrids, and a number of other procedures seen as affronts to human dignity.
“The church has been committed throughout the centuries in defense of certain fundamental principles which are today the common heritage of humanity,” Fisichella said.
“Certainly, at the time the church was challenged by a fringe of forward-thinkers who, in the name of progress and the laws of the market, preferred to trample upon the fundamental rights of persons. How can we forget, for example, the commitment of missionaries against slavery in countries that had been colonized, or the defense of workers at the beginning of the 19th century? Today, the issue that will mark the coming decades and the life of society is determined by the defense of the dignity of the person from conception to natural death.”
Many analysts applaud this way of making the pro-life argument.
Theologian Charles Camosy of Fordham University, for example, said the church is too often hobbled by “unfortunate and artificial” division in the church between what he called “moral status conservatives” and “social justice liberals,” which means that both camps often fail to take “a comprehensive approach to the church’s moral resources.”
Making the case for unborn life by drawing upon the Catholic tradition of social teaching, Camosy said, could do a better job of getting social justice Catholics on board, and perhaps making the pro-life argument more persuasive to the broader world.
Yet analysts also caution that the church, if it pursues this line of argument, may face pressure to be candid about its own history. Throughout the centuries, historians note, both the Vatican and the American bishops generally upheld the morality of slavery in principle, even if they also vigorously denounced abuses in practice.
As late as 1866, in the middle of the Civil War in the United States and at a time when the abolitionist movement was fully formed, the Vatican’s doctrinal office issued an instruction stating, “Slavery itself, considered as such in its essential nature, is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law.” As is well known, ecclesiastical institutions in the United States and elsewhere often owned slaves.
To be sure, popes, bishops and theologians also frequently denounced slavery as it was actually conducted, especially racial slavery; in 1435, for example, Pope Eugene IV demanded that European colonizers stop enslaving native peoples in the Canary Islands. Those judgments were repeated in 1537 for what was then known as the “Indies,” and in 1686 for Africa.
Most theologians say the emphasis in Catholic teaching on a common human nature always pointed toward the conclusion reached by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) in its document Gaudium et Spes, which denounced “imprisonment, deportation, slavery … the selling of women and children.”
Nonetheless, historians say, the Catholic church traveled something of a “learning curve” through the centuries on issues of slavery and racism. A clear acknowledgment of that reality, some suggest, might actually help the church push the broader society along a similar “learning curve” today with regard to new threats to human life and dignity.
December 16, 2008
“Memo to President Obama" by Joseph Schwartz, DSA Vice-Chair
For their January-February Tikkun magazine asked a number of liberal and left academics and activists to draft a “memo to President Obamma. Talking Union is proud to present this memo drafted by Democratic Socialist of America Vice-Chair Joseph Schwartz.
The impressive depth and breadth of your electoral victory, combined with Democratic gains in both the House and the Senate, provides the possibility of reversing three decades of growing inequality that is the primary cause of an impending depression. But to do so you will have to act boldly and quickly. As a constitutional law scholar, you realize that the system of checks and balances and separation of powers established by our founders consciously aimed to forestall rapid change. Thus, almost all the reforms we identify with the twentieth-century Democratic Party—Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Acts, and Medicare—occurred in the periods 1935-1938 and 1964-1966, the only times when the Democrats controlled the presidency and had strong majorities in both chambers of Congress.
If upon taking office you lead with boldness, your administration could pass major legislation in regard to universal health care, massive investment in green technology, and labor law reform that would transform United States social relations for generations to come. But as a former community organizer you know that such reforms did not come from the top down; they arose because moderate elites made concessions to the movements of the unemployed and the CIO in the 1930s and to the Civil Rights, anti-war, women’s, and welfare rights movements of the 1960s. While your office cannot conjure up mass social movements, you can call your supporters to ongoing grassroots activism.
Even before taking office, you confront the most serious breakdown in the global economy since the Great Depression. Hopefully well before you take office, you and your Treasury Secretary nominee will push the lame-duck Congress to pass a massive stimulus package of at least $500 billion or $600 billion. Remind the American public that Ronald Reagan ran deficits equal to 7 percent of the GDP in 1981 and 1982 (or the equivalent of $680 billion today), in the face of a much less severe recession. In addition, press Congress to implement a major anti-foreclosure program (similar to FDR’s Home Loan Corporation), as the income stream from homeowner payments on refinanced, affordable mortgages should significantly increase the value of the “toxic assets” of “securitized mortgages.”
The stimulus package should include major government funding of job training in the inner cities (in green technologies, for example) and of opportunities for both GIs and displaced workers to return to university as full-time students (and for women on TANF to fulfill their “workfare” requirements through secondary and higher education pursuits). While affluent suburbs provide their residents superb public education and public services, federal cutbacks in aid to states and municipalities has worsened the life opportunities of inner city residents. Your election as the first African American president is of inestimable symbolic import; but its promise will be soured if your administration does nothing to address inner city poverty and the massive rise in the incarceration of young youth of color. Only federal funding of pre-K education and of after-school programs for vulnerable youth can begin to redress rampant educational inequalities.
We are in the midst of a global “liquidity crisis” in which banks will not lend capital out of fear that borrowers will not be able to pay them back. The mainstream media has not yet to comprehend that this crisis has everything to do with the massive growth in inequality of the past three decades. The policies of deregulation, privatization, and de-unionization (supported by both Democratic and Republican administration) led working and middle-class Americans to try to maintain their living standards by taking on massive consumer debt and borrowing against their home equity. Once the housing bubble collapsed, so did the purchasing power of American households. For three decades corporate America told our workforce that to be competitive they must compete with workers from Brazil to China. But as any Keynesian economist could have told the American public, eventually lower wages must lead to lower living standards.
The inefficient and inequitable United States health care system cries out for replacement by a universal and cost-efficient alternative. If private insurance administrative and advertising costs of 25 percent on the health care dollar could be reduced to Medicaid and Medicare’s 3 percent administrative overhead, we could achieve both universal and affordable coverage. While the power of the insurance lobby may preclude your backing a national single-payer bill, you must back progressive Democratic amendments for opt-out provisions from your “pay or play” system of private insurance. Such opt-outs would allow states to create their own single-payer systems, and allow Medicare or the federal employees health plan to market to employers as a lower-cost alternative to private group plans. But how to pay for all this? You should attempt to reverse not only the Bush tax cuts, but also the Reagan-era cuts in marginal rates on high-income earners (approximately $300 billion in revenues, each). In addition, abolishing the 15 percent tax rate on hedge fund and private equity managers’ earnings could garner another $100 billion in annual revenues. Ending the war in Iraq should save $100 billion per annum; a one-third cutback in United States military bases abroad and an end to Cold War era plans to build a next generation of fighters and an anti-ballistic missile defense could save $216 billion in federal revenue per year.
The military budget is hideously oversized for a nation that claims armaments are necessary for defense, and not defense of empire. One fights terrorism by intelligence and espionage cooperation among states and via a multilateral diplomatic strategy that provides hope for the billions who still live under authoritarian governments and in extreme poverty. Your call to send more United States troops to Afghanistan ignores the lessons of the Soviet experience. Foreign military presence only transforms the forces of Islamic fundamentalism into national resistance fighters.
When the Ponzi scheme of “securitized mortgages” collapsed with the end of the irrational run-up in housing prices, the federal government had to bail out Bear Stearns, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then AIG. American capitalism has privatized gain, but socialized risk. Yet if risk is to be socialized, then so should investments. Your administration should not only demand equity shares in the banks and corporations that are bailed out by the public treasury, but should also require that consumer, worker, and government representatives be added to the board of directors of corporations receiving government aid. And you must stick to your goal of re-regulating the finance industry so that it serves the interest of the productive economy and not those of unrestrained speculators.
A “new New Deal” would have to restructure international economic institutions so that they raise up international labor, living, human rights, and environmental standards. In large part you owe your victory in the key battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to the efforts of one of the few integrated institutions in the United States—the American labor movement. Restoring the right to organize unions (which de facto no longer exists in the United States) is a key policy component in the battle against economic inequality. Given the already massive corporate and media offensive already launched against the Employee Free Choice Act, you will have to place the entire prestige of your office behind the legislation. You must explain to the American public that NLRB elections are not “free”—not when management requires workers to attend anti-union meetings and when management fires pro-union workers with impunity.
Your victory by no means guarantees the bold policy initiatives necessary to restoring equity with growth to the United States economy. Your campaign did not advocate major defense cuts, progressive tax reform, and significant expansion of public provision. But FDR did not campaign on bold solutions in 1932. It was pressure from below that forced FDR’s hand. Similarly your victory may provide space for social movements to agitate in favor of economic justice and a democratic foreign policy. But as a president who understands the process of social change, I trust that you will understand that those demanding the most from your administration are those who can best help you succeed in office.
Joseph M. Schwartz teaches politics at Temple University and is the author, most recently, of The Future of Democratic Equality. He is a national vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The impressive depth and breadth of your electoral victory, combined with Democratic gains in both the House and the Senate, provides the possibility of reversing three decades of growing inequality that is the primary cause of an impending depression. But to do so you will have to act boldly and quickly. As a constitutional law scholar, you realize that the system of checks and balances and separation of powers established by our founders consciously aimed to forestall rapid change. Thus, almost all the reforms we identify with the twentieth-century Democratic Party—Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Acts, and Medicare—occurred in the periods 1935-1938 and 1964-1966, the only times when the Democrats controlled the presidency and had strong majorities in both chambers of Congress.
If upon taking office you lead with boldness, your administration could pass major legislation in regard to universal health care, massive investment in green technology, and labor law reform that would transform United States social relations for generations to come. But as a former community organizer you know that such reforms did not come from the top down; they arose because moderate elites made concessions to the movements of the unemployed and the CIO in the 1930s and to the Civil Rights, anti-war, women’s, and welfare rights movements of the 1960s. While your office cannot conjure up mass social movements, you can call your supporters to ongoing grassroots activism.
Even before taking office, you confront the most serious breakdown in the global economy since the Great Depression. Hopefully well before you take office, you and your Treasury Secretary nominee will push the lame-duck Congress to pass a massive stimulus package of at least $500 billion or $600 billion. Remind the American public that Ronald Reagan ran deficits equal to 7 percent of the GDP in 1981 and 1982 (or the equivalent of $680 billion today), in the face of a much less severe recession. In addition, press Congress to implement a major anti-foreclosure program (similar to FDR’s Home Loan Corporation), as the income stream from homeowner payments on refinanced, affordable mortgages should significantly increase the value of the “toxic assets” of “securitized mortgages.”
The stimulus package should include major government funding of job training in the inner cities (in green technologies, for example) and of opportunities for both GIs and displaced workers to return to university as full-time students (and for women on TANF to fulfill their “workfare” requirements through secondary and higher education pursuits). While affluent suburbs provide their residents superb public education and public services, federal cutbacks in aid to states and municipalities has worsened the life opportunities of inner city residents. Your election as the first African American president is of inestimable symbolic import; but its promise will be soured if your administration does nothing to address inner city poverty and the massive rise in the incarceration of young youth of color. Only federal funding of pre-K education and of after-school programs for vulnerable youth can begin to redress rampant educational inequalities.
We are in the midst of a global “liquidity crisis” in which banks will not lend capital out of fear that borrowers will not be able to pay them back. The mainstream media has not yet to comprehend that this crisis has everything to do with the massive growth in inequality of the past three decades. The policies of deregulation, privatization, and de-unionization (supported by both Democratic and Republican administration) led working and middle-class Americans to try to maintain their living standards by taking on massive consumer debt and borrowing against their home equity. Once the housing bubble collapsed, so did the purchasing power of American households. For three decades corporate America told our workforce that to be competitive they must compete with workers from Brazil to China. But as any Keynesian economist could have told the American public, eventually lower wages must lead to lower living standards.
The inefficient and inequitable United States health care system cries out for replacement by a universal and cost-efficient alternative. If private insurance administrative and advertising costs of 25 percent on the health care dollar could be reduced to Medicaid and Medicare’s 3 percent administrative overhead, we could achieve both universal and affordable coverage. While the power of the insurance lobby may preclude your backing a national single-payer bill, you must back progressive Democratic amendments for opt-out provisions from your “pay or play” system of private insurance. Such opt-outs would allow states to create their own single-payer systems, and allow Medicare or the federal employees health plan to market to employers as a lower-cost alternative to private group plans. But how to pay for all this? You should attempt to reverse not only the Bush tax cuts, but also the Reagan-era cuts in marginal rates on high-income earners (approximately $300 billion in revenues, each). In addition, abolishing the 15 percent tax rate on hedge fund and private equity managers’ earnings could garner another $100 billion in annual revenues. Ending the war in Iraq should save $100 billion per annum; a one-third cutback in United States military bases abroad and an end to Cold War era plans to build a next generation of fighters and an anti-ballistic missile defense could save $216 billion in federal revenue per year.
The military budget is hideously oversized for a nation that claims armaments are necessary for defense, and not defense of empire. One fights terrorism by intelligence and espionage cooperation among states and via a multilateral diplomatic strategy that provides hope for the billions who still live under authoritarian governments and in extreme poverty. Your call to send more United States troops to Afghanistan ignores the lessons of the Soviet experience. Foreign military presence only transforms the forces of Islamic fundamentalism into national resistance fighters.
When the Ponzi scheme of “securitized mortgages” collapsed with the end of the irrational run-up in housing prices, the federal government had to bail out Bear Stearns, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then AIG. American capitalism has privatized gain, but socialized risk. Yet if risk is to be socialized, then so should investments. Your administration should not only demand equity shares in the banks and corporations that are bailed out by the public treasury, but should also require that consumer, worker, and government representatives be added to the board of directors of corporations receiving government aid. And you must stick to your goal of re-regulating the finance industry so that it serves the interest of the productive economy and not those of unrestrained speculators.
A “new New Deal” would have to restructure international economic institutions so that they raise up international labor, living, human rights, and environmental standards. In large part you owe your victory in the key battleground states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to the efforts of one of the few integrated institutions in the United States—the American labor movement. Restoring the right to organize unions (which de facto no longer exists in the United States) is a key policy component in the battle against economic inequality. Given the already massive corporate and media offensive already launched against the Employee Free Choice Act, you will have to place the entire prestige of your office behind the legislation. You must explain to the American public that NLRB elections are not “free”—not when management requires workers to attend anti-union meetings and when management fires pro-union workers with impunity.
Your victory by no means guarantees the bold policy initiatives necessary to restoring equity with growth to the United States economy. Your campaign did not advocate major defense cuts, progressive tax reform, and significant expansion of public provision. But FDR did not campaign on bold solutions in 1932. It was pressure from below that forced FDR’s hand. Similarly your victory may provide space for social movements to agitate in favor of economic justice and a democratic foreign policy. But as a president who understands the process of social change, I trust that you will understand that those demanding the most from your administration are those who can best help you succeed in office.
Joseph M. Schwartz teaches politics at Temple University and is the author, most recently, of The Future of Democratic Equality. He is a national vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
A Letter to a Comrade:Religion for the Mature, by Andrew W Taylor
Dear S.,
There is no doubt much religion is at the fetishistic and infantile level, but some religion penetrates to the deepest inward level of self-purification and a call to action,-- for example, Winstanley The Digger's communist 'Reason Mysticism' which unfolded in the English Revolution. This type of "experimental" [experiential] religion, included a detailed theoretical illumination, and caused Gerrard Winstanley to believe that private property was exploitative, was "the curse of Adam".
A problem I encounter in teaching Religion and Cultural Topics is that I often have a room full of students who having dispensed with/or retained their Sunday School/Catechism religiosity lack a passionate curiousity about the field of study.
With both the irreligious and religious student it is very tempting to "smash the religious idols" and suggest that a period of atheism might cleanse the kids minds and permit them to truly accept or reject religion for ever! I understand the "away with all gods" call: In Buddhism, there is the saying "if you meet the Buddha kill him" and St. Benedict the Founder of Western Monasticism commanded his monks to destroy their images(because no one and no thing is the Ultimate).
Are not socialism and communism themselves a kind of horizon that are currently a "thing unseen", a dialectical breakthrough which we glimpse? The world we see and suffer under is not good enough: we must make it better! The pathetic human imaginings and certainties we won't let go are our Golden Calf!
Thanks for writing,
Andrew W Taylor
There is no doubt much religion is at the fetishistic and infantile level, but some religion penetrates to the deepest inward level of self-purification and a call to action,-- for example, Winstanley The Digger's communist 'Reason Mysticism' which unfolded in the English Revolution. This type of "experimental" [experiential] religion, included a detailed theoretical illumination, and caused Gerrard Winstanley to believe that private property was exploitative, was "the curse of Adam".
A problem I encounter in teaching Religion and Cultural Topics is that I often have a room full of students who having dispensed with/or retained their Sunday School/Catechism religiosity lack a passionate curiousity about the field of study.
With both the irreligious and religious student it is very tempting to "smash the religious idols" and suggest that a period of atheism might cleanse the kids minds and permit them to truly accept or reject religion for ever! I understand the "away with all gods" call: In Buddhism, there is the saying "if you meet the Buddha kill him" and St. Benedict the Founder of Western Monasticism commanded his monks to destroy their images(because no one and no thing is the Ultimate).
Are not socialism and communism themselves a kind of horizon that are currently a "thing unseen", a dialectical breakthrough which we glimpse? The world we see and suffer under is not good enough: we must make it better! The pathetic human imaginings and certainties we won't let go are our Golden Calf!
Thanks for writing,
Andrew W Taylor
Old Man's Song (Ian Campbell)
At the turning of the century I was a boy of five
My father went to fight the Boers and never came back alive
My mother left to bring us up no charity would seek
So she washed and scrubbed and brought us up on 7/6 a week
When I was twelve I left the school and went to find a job
With growin' kids my ma was glad of the extra couple of bob
I know that better schooling would have stood me in good stead
But you can't afford refinements when you're struggling for your bread
And when the Great War came along I didn't hesitate
I took the royal shilling and went off to do my bit
I fought in mud and tears and blood three years or thereabout
Then I copped some gas in Flanders and was invalided out
And when the war was over and we'd finished with the guns
I got back into civvies and I thought the fighting done
I'd won the right to live in peace but I didn't have no luck
For soon I found I had to fight for the right to go to work
In 'twenty-six the General Strike found me out on the street
For I'd a wife and kids by then and their needs I couldn't meet
But a brave new world was coming and the brotherhood of man
But when the strike was over we were back where we began
I struggled through the 'Thirties out of work now and again
I saw the Black Shirts marching and the things they did in Spain
But I raised my children decent and I taught them wrong from right
Then Hitler was the lad that came and showed them how to fight
My daughter was a land girl, she got married tae a Yank
They gave my son a gong for stopping one of Rommel's tanks
He was wounded just before the end and convalesced in Rome
Married an Eyetye nurse and never bothered to come home
My daughter writes me once a month a cheerful little note
About their colour telly and the other things they've got
She has a son, a likely lad, he's nearly twenty-one
Now she says they've called him up to fight in Vietnam
We're living on the Pension now and it doesn't go too far
Not much to show for a life that seems like one long bloody war
When you think of all the wasted lives it makes you want to cry
I don't know how to change things but by Christ we'll have tae try
(as sung by Iain MacKintosh)
Tune: Nicky Tams
My father went to fight the Boers and never came back alive
My mother left to bring us up no charity would seek
So she washed and scrubbed and brought us up on 7/6 a week
When I was twelve I left the school and went to find a job
With growin' kids my ma was glad of the extra couple of bob
I know that better schooling would have stood me in good stead
But you can't afford refinements when you're struggling for your bread
And when the Great War came along I didn't hesitate
I took the royal shilling and went off to do my bit
I fought in mud and tears and blood three years or thereabout
Then I copped some gas in Flanders and was invalided out
And when the war was over and we'd finished with the guns
I got back into civvies and I thought the fighting done
I'd won the right to live in peace but I didn't have no luck
For soon I found I had to fight for the right to go to work
In 'twenty-six the General Strike found me out on the street
For I'd a wife and kids by then and their needs I couldn't meet
But a brave new world was coming and the brotherhood of man
But when the strike was over we were back where we began
I struggled through the 'Thirties out of work now and again
I saw the Black Shirts marching and the things they did in Spain
But I raised my children decent and I taught them wrong from right
Then Hitler was the lad that came and showed them how to fight
My daughter was a land girl, she got married tae a Yank
They gave my son a gong for stopping one of Rommel's tanks
He was wounded just before the end and convalesced in Rome
Married an Eyetye nurse and never bothered to come home
My daughter writes me once a month a cheerful little note
About their colour telly and the other things they've got
She has a son, a likely lad, he's nearly twenty-one
Now she says they've called him up to fight in Vietnam
We're living on the Pension now and it doesn't go too far
Not much to show for a life that seems like one long bloody war
When you think of all the wasted lives it makes you want to cry
I don't know how to change things but by Christ we'll have tae try
(as sung by Iain MacKintosh)
Tune: Nicky Tams
December 15, 2008
"Middle-Man - 1400 A.D". By Peter Maurin
1. Around 1400 A.D.
appears the middle-man.
2. He offers to buy the goods
and to find a market.
3. The guild's man
thinks about the money
offered for his goods
and forgets the Common Good.
4. And the middle-man
is not interested
in selling useful goods
but in making money
on any kind of goods.
5. And the consumer
never meets the producer
and the producer
ceases to think
in terms of service
and begins to think
in terms of profits.
appears the middle-man.
2. He offers to buy the goods
and to find a market.
3. The guild's man
thinks about the money
offered for his goods
and forgets the Common Good.
4. And the middle-man
is not interested
in selling useful goods
but in making money
on any kind of goods.
5. And the consumer
never meets the producer
and the producer
ceases to think
in terms of service
and begins to think
in terms of profits.
The Logic of Keynes in Today's World, by Robert Reich
Monday, December 15, 2008
Not long ago I was talking to someone who once had been a deficit hawk but the current recession had turned into a full-blooded Keynesian. He wanted a stimulus package in the range of $500 to $700 billion. "Consumers are dead in the water," he said, fervently, "so government has to step in." I agreed. But I didn’t tell him his traditional Keynesianism is based on two highly-questionable assumptions in today’s world, and the underlying logic of Keyenes leads us toward something bigger and more permanent than he has in mind.
The first assumption is that American consumers will eventually regain the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going full tilt. That seems doubtful. Median incomes dropped during the last recovery, adjusted for inflation, and even at the start weren’t much higher than they were in the 1970s. Middle-class families continued to spend at a healthy clip over the last thirty years despite this because women went into paid work, everyone started working longer hours, and then, when these tactics gave out, went deeper and deeper into debt. This indebtedness, in turn, depended on rising home values, which generated hundreds of billions of dollars in home equity loans and refinanced mortgages. But now that the housing bubble has burst, the spending has ended. Families cannot work more hours than they did before, and won’t be able to borrow as much, either.
The second assumption is that, even if Americans had the money to keep spending as before, they could do so forever. Yet only the most myopic adherent of free-market capitalism could believe this to be true. The social and environmental costs would soon overwhelm us. Even if climate change were not an imminent threat to the planet, the rest of the world will not allow American consumers to continue to use up a quarter of the planet’s natural resources and generate an even larger share of its toxic wastes and pollutants.
This would be a problem if most of what we consumed during our big-spending years were bare necessities. But much was just stuff. And surely there are limits to how many furnishings and appliances can be crammed into a home, how many hours can be filled manipulating digital devices, and how much happiness can be wrung out of commercial entertainment.
The current recession is a nightmare for people who have lost their jobs, homes, and savings; and it’s part of a continuing nightmare for the poor. That’s why we have to do all we can to get the economy back on track. But most other Americans are now discovering they can exist surprisingly well buying fewer of the things they never really needed to begin with.
What we most lack, or are in danger of losing, are the things we use in common – clean air, clean water, public parks, good schools, and public transportation, as well as social safety nets to catch those of us who fall. Common goods like these don’t necessarily use up scarce resources; often, they conserve and protect them.
Yet they have been declining for many years. Some have been broken up and sold as more expensive private goods, especially for the well-to do – bottled water, private schools, security guards, and health clubs, for example. Others, like clean air, have fallen prey to deregulation. Others have been wacked by budget axes; the current recession is forcing states and locales to axe even more. Still others, such as universal health care and pre-schools, never fully emerged to begin with.
Where does this logic lead? Given the implausibility of consumers being able to return to the same level of personal spending as before, along with the undesirability of our doing so even if we could, and the growing scarcity of common goods, there would seem only one sensible way to restore and maintain aggregate demand. That would be through government expenditure on the commons. Rather than a temporary stimulus, government would permanently fill the gap left by consumers who cannot and should not be expected to resume their old spending ways. This wouldn’t require permanent deficits as long as, once economic growth returns, revenues from a progressive income tax refill the coffers.
My friend the born-again Keynesian might not like where the logic of Keynesianism leads in today’s world, but the rest of us might take heart.
Not long ago I was talking to someone who once had been a deficit hawk but the current recession had turned into a full-blooded Keynesian. He wanted a stimulus package in the range of $500 to $700 billion. "Consumers are dead in the water," he said, fervently, "so government has to step in." I agreed. But I didn’t tell him his traditional Keynesianism is based on two highly-questionable assumptions in today’s world, and the underlying logic of Keyenes leads us toward something bigger and more permanent than he has in mind.
The first assumption is that American consumers will eventually regain the purchasing power needed to keep the economy going full tilt. That seems doubtful. Median incomes dropped during the last recovery, adjusted for inflation, and even at the start weren’t much higher than they were in the 1970s. Middle-class families continued to spend at a healthy clip over the last thirty years despite this because women went into paid work, everyone started working longer hours, and then, when these tactics gave out, went deeper and deeper into debt. This indebtedness, in turn, depended on rising home values, which generated hundreds of billions of dollars in home equity loans and refinanced mortgages. But now that the housing bubble has burst, the spending has ended. Families cannot work more hours than they did before, and won’t be able to borrow as much, either.
The second assumption is that, even if Americans had the money to keep spending as before, they could do so forever. Yet only the most myopic adherent of free-market capitalism could believe this to be true. The social and environmental costs would soon overwhelm us. Even if climate change were not an imminent threat to the planet, the rest of the world will not allow American consumers to continue to use up a quarter of the planet’s natural resources and generate an even larger share of its toxic wastes and pollutants.
This would be a problem if most of what we consumed during our big-spending years were bare necessities. But much was just stuff. And surely there are limits to how many furnishings and appliances can be crammed into a home, how many hours can be filled manipulating digital devices, and how much happiness can be wrung out of commercial entertainment.
The current recession is a nightmare for people who have lost their jobs, homes, and savings; and it’s part of a continuing nightmare for the poor. That’s why we have to do all we can to get the economy back on track. But most other Americans are now discovering they can exist surprisingly well buying fewer of the things they never really needed to begin with.
What we most lack, or are in danger of losing, are the things we use in common – clean air, clean water, public parks, good schools, and public transportation, as well as social safety nets to catch those of us who fall. Common goods like these don’t necessarily use up scarce resources; often, they conserve and protect them.
Yet they have been declining for many years. Some have been broken up and sold as more expensive private goods, especially for the well-to do – bottled water, private schools, security guards, and health clubs, for example. Others, like clean air, have fallen prey to deregulation. Others have been wacked by budget axes; the current recession is forcing states and locales to axe even more. Still others, such as universal health care and pre-schools, never fully emerged to begin with.
Where does this logic lead? Given the implausibility of consumers being able to return to the same level of personal spending as before, along with the undesirability of our doing so even if we could, and the growing scarcity of common goods, there would seem only one sensible way to restore and maintain aggregate demand. That would be through government expenditure on the commons. Rather than a temporary stimulus, government would permanently fill the gap left by consumers who cannot and should not be expected to resume their old spending ways. This wouldn’t require permanent deficits as long as, once economic growth returns, revenues from a progressive income tax refill the coffers.
My friend the born-again Keynesian might not like where the logic of Keynesianism leads in today’s world, but the rest of us might take heart.
December 12, 2008
Letter to a Friend: On the contradictions in the evolution of the Former USSR
My take on the contradictions in the structure of the USSR : the industrial proletariat and the rest of the working-class in attempting to build a socialist society are required by Marxism to manage their government on their own steam. They had this task right after the Civil War's decimation of the nation,an Olympian task to build a participatory Society, to include more and more of the masses of the population into the task of governance. Given the shape of events in the genesis and unfolding of the first 20 years of Soviet government, the Soviet state carried on with war-communism (1), - in consequence, step by step, an centralizing tendency overshadowed the democratic forms present in the relation of the Factory Committees and the Soviets to the Centre.
The almost impossible hindrances that presented themselves in socialist construction in a newly-liberated serf state (and an industrially and politically under-developed scarcity-state) aided the development of the centralizing movement and a partial displacement of the power of the proletariat by the bureaucracy. Combined with these objective deleterious material and spiritual conditions in the USSR, went authoritarian policies of the over-worked leadership around Stalin – which also is a mirror-image of Russia's backwardness and isolation surrounded by a hostile entente.
I conclude by stating that under the above conditions the Communist Party's growing bureaucracy and the CCCP government displaced some of the participatory decision-making that was to be invested in the proletariat. I am not a Trotskyist, but I see that there was a partial effacement of the political power of the workers by the bureaucracy, people motivated by a determined, struggle to build up and defend the Revolution. The USSR remained a Socialist State, but one shaped by the extremely adverse events in its inception and development.
____________________________________________________
1.Under "War-Communism" of the Civil War an extreme centralisation was put into place by Lenin. The economy of the areas controlled by the C.P. was put into the hands of a small number of organisations. (the Supreme Economic Council being most powerful). This Council had the right to confiscate and requisition supplies, -- the speciality of the Council was the management of industry. The Commissariat of Transport ran the railways. The Commissariat of Agriculture controlled what the peasants work-activity.
Posted by Andrew W. Taylor
The almost impossible hindrances that presented themselves in socialist construction in a newly-liberated serf state (and an industrially and politically under-developed scarcity-state) aided the development of the centralizing movement and a partial displacement of the power of the proletariat by the bureaucracy. Combined with these objective deleterious material and spiritual conditions in the USSR, went authoritarian policies of the over-worked leadership around Stalin – which also is a mirror-image of Russia's backwardness and isolation surrounded by a hostile entente.
I conclude by stating that under the above conditions the Communist Party's growing bureaucracy and the CCCP government displaced some of the participatory decision-making that was to be invested in the proletariat. I am not a Trotskyist, but I see that there was a partial effacement of the political power of the workers by the bureaucracy, people motivated by a determined, struggle to build up and defend the Revolution. The USSR remained a Socialist State, but one shaped by the extremely adverse events in its inception and development.
____________________________________________________
1.Under "War-Communism" of the Civil War an extreme centralisation was put into place by Lenin. The economy of the areas controlled by the C.P. was put into the hands of a small number of organisations. (the Supreme Economic Council being most powerful). This Council had the right to confiscate and requisition supplies, -- the speciality of the Council was the management of industry. The Commissariat of Transport ran the railways. The Commissariat of Agriculture controlled what the peasants work-activity.
Posted by Andrew W. Taylor
Bailing out the Boys like the little boats of Dunkirk
Bailing out the Boys like the little boats of Dunkirk
a poem by Andrew Taylor
Thank God, the System's sound
Our cornerstone firmly laid,
and our State neutral,
when it comes to
Bernard Madoff's Pyramid,
and me and my pussy
at Housing Unit #7, Paradise Row.
Thank God the road ahead is lit,
We'll all muck in
and do our bit for
the Corporations
and H.M.
The Queen.
I'm sure The Firm
observes our pep
bailing out the Boys
Like the little boats of Dunkirk
No, we are not yet round the corner
of this Dreadful Mess!
But we mustn't grumble,
Everything will come right
in the End,
and we'll laugh
as we remember
all the gangsters and good guys
Goodness! Will we ever
keep them straight?
a poem by Andrew Taylor
Thank God, the System's sound
Our cornerstone firmly laid,
and our State neutral,
when it comes to
Bernard Madoff's Pyramid,
and me and my pussy
at Housing Unit #7, Paradise Row.
Thank God the road ahead is lit,
We'll all muck in
and do our bit for
the Corporations
and H.M.
The Queen.
I'm sure The Firm
observes our pep
bailing out the Boys
Like the little boats of Dunkirk
No, we are not yet round the corner
of this Dreadful Mess!
But we mustn't grumble,
Everything will come right
in the End,
and we'll laugh
as we remember
all the gangsters and good guys
Goodness! Will we ever
keep them straight?
The Men Behind the Wire,
The Men Behind the wire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AEsOfL2dvA
* (Pat McGuigan)
Armoured cars and tanks and guns
Came to take away our sons
Every man must stand behind
The men behind the wire
Through the little streets of Belfast
In the dark of early morn
British soldiers came marauding
Wrecking little homes with scorn
Heedless of the crying children
Dragging fathers from their beds
Beating sons while helpless mothers
Watched the blood flow from their heads
Not for them a judge or jury
Nor indeed a crime at all
Being Irish means they're guilty
So we're guilty one and all
All around the truth will echo
Cromwell's men are here again
England's name again is sullied
In the eyes of honest men
Proudly march behind their banner
Firmly stand behind their men
We will have them free to help us
Build the nation once again
Onward people, step together
Proudly, firmly on your way
Never fail or never falter
Till the boys come home to stay
Foreign workers decry harsh dismissals from farms, Globe and Mail
by AMANDA TRUSCOTT
December 12, 2008 at 5:18 AM EST
Migrant farm workers are being pushed into cramped housing and fired without cause because of flaws in the government's temporary foreign worker program, labour activists say.
Some of the 70 workers dismissed last week by a Canadian-owned mushroom-farming company spoke out yesterday about what it was like to be fired without notice, two weeks before Christmas.
"It's pretty harsh. We have families in our countries," said Carlos, a worker from Guadalajara hired by Rol-Land Farms as a Spanish translator.
Carlos - the workers asked that their last names not be used - said his bosses called on his day off to say his employment had been terminated, and that in two days a bus would take him to the airport so he could return to Mexico.
It felt like a deportation, said Gorge, also from Guadalajara. "They didn't give us time to think, to choose. They just said, you have to leave the apartment, because they provide the apartment." He and three other men each paid the company $320 a month to stay in the small two-bedroom suite, he said.
Both men said they plan to stay in Canada and look for other jobs, but union officials said many of their co-workers had returned to their home countries before anyone could tell them their two-year work visas allowed them to stay.
Rol-Land Farms, a multimillion-dollar company based in Blenheim, Ont., 100 kilometres southwest of London, is owned by the Vander Pol family. They declined comment yesterday.
Given the current economic situation, it shouldn't be surprising the workers were let go, said Mark Wales, who deals with labour issues for the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
"Every day, there are thousands of people losing their jobs all around the world," he said. "Why would a farm in Ontario be any different?"
In the past, the company has been accused of firing workers who tried to unionize. At the news conference held yesterday by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, Carlos and Gorge said none of the Mexicans, Jamaicans or Guatemalans fired last week had been trying to join the union.
It is illegal for agricultural workers in Ontario to unionize, but a decision last month by the Ontario Court of Appeal gave the province 12 months to rewrite the Agricultural Employees Protection Act to allow collective bargaining.
What happened to the Rol-Land farm workers exemplifies everything that's wrong with Ottawa's temporary foreign worker program, according to Dr. Jenna Hennebry, who heads the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University.
"There's a great fear of replacement, of reprimand, of forced repatriation, a loss of pay, a loss of deposits to unregulated recruitment agencies, in particular cases. There's also problems in some cases of immediate eviction, as we've seen in this case."
The program is jointly managed by several agencies in both the federal and provincial governments. That's part of the problem, said Derry McKeever, an advocate with Friends of Farmworkers, a Chatham community activist group. He said migrant workers in Chatham live in houses without proper heat, water or electricity.
"Yesterday, we received a letter from the Minister of Labour saying that it's not a provincial responsibility. The municipality says it's not a municipal responsibility. The federal government says it's not a federal responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to take care of workers like this?" he asked.
Jason Bouzanis, a spokesman for Human Resources and Social Development Canada, said in an e-mail that foreign workers should report any abuse to provincial authorities, because they are supposed to have the same labour rights as Canadians.
December 12, 2008 at 5:18 AM EST
Migrant farm workers are being pushed into cramped housing and fired without cause because of flaws in the government's temporary foreign worker program, labour activists say.
Some of the 70 workers dismissed last week by a Canadian-owned mushroom-farming company spoke out yesterday about what it was like to be fired without notice, two weeks before Christmas.
"It's pretty harsh. We have families in our countries," said Carlos, a worker from Guadalajara hired by Rol-Land Farms as a Spanish translator.
Carlos - the workers asked that their last names not be used - said his bosses called on his day off to say his employment had been terminated, and that in two days a bus would take him to the airport so he could return to Mexico.
It felt like a deportation, said Gorge, also from Guadalajara. "They didn't give us time to think, to choose. They just said, you have to leave the apartment, because they provide the apartment." He and three other men each paid the company $320 a month to stay in the small two-bedroom suite, he said.
Both men said they plan to stay in Canada and look for other jobs, but union officials said many of their co-workers had returned to their home countries before anyone could tell them their two-year work visas allowed them to stay.
Rol-Land Farms, a multimillion-dollar company based in Blenheim, Ont., 100 kilometres southwest of London, is owned by the Vander Pol family. They declined comment yesterday.
Given the current economic situation, it shouldn't be surprising the workers were let go, said Mark Wales, who deals with labour issues for the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
"Every day, there are thousands of people losing their jobs all around the world," he said. "Why would a farm in Ontario be any different?"
In the past, the company has been accused of firing workers who tried to unionize. At the news conference held yesterday by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, Carlos and Gorge said none of the Mexicans, Jamaicans or Guatemalans fired last week had been trying to join the union.
It is illegal for agricultural workers in Ontario to unionize, but a decision last month by the Ontario Court of Appeal gave the province 12 months to rewrite the Agricultural Employees Protection Act to allow collective bargaining.
What happened to the Rol-Land farm workers exemplifies everything that's wrong with Ottawa's temporary foreign worker program, according to Dr. Jenna Hennebry, who heads the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University.
"There's a great fear of replacement, of reprimand, of forced repatriation, a loss of pay, a loss of deposits to unregulated recruitment agencies, in particular cases. There's also problems in some cases of immediate eviction, as we've seen in this case."
The program is jointly managed by several agencies in both the federal and provincial governments. That's part of the problem, said Derry McKeever, an advocate with Friends of Farmworkers, a Chatham community activist group. He said migrant workers in Chatham live in houses without proper heat, water or electricity.
"Yesterday, we received a letter from the Minister of Labour saying that it's not a provincial responsibility. The municipality says it's not a municipal responsibility. The federal government says it's not a federal responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to take care of workers like this?" he asked.
Jason Bouzanis, a spokesman for Human Resources and Social Development Canada, said in an e-mail that foreign workers should report any abuse to provincial authorities, because they are supposed to have the same labour rights as Canadians.
December 11, 2008
Karl Rahner on Nature and Grace (A Journey through his Early Articles) by Wandinger Nikolaus
http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/leseraum/texte/341.html
Abstrakt: In the first half of the 20th century K. Rahner gave very important impulses for a new understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. By taking up different approaches and trying to bring them into harmony, Rahner advanced theology. Looking anew at these texts provides us with a better understanding of Rahner's thought, but also of ourselves as human persons and of God's way to relate to us. And it might even serve to guide us into a new understanding of the human person in view of the challenges of the 21st century.
Publiziert in: Guest-Lecture at Heythrop College, University of London, Feb. 2003
Datum: 2003-03-05
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1. Christological Preface
2. God's Universal Salvific Will
3. Grace as God's Self-Communication
3.1 Uncreated Grace
3.2 The Experience of Grace
3.2.1 The Significance of the Experience of Grace
3.2.2 Transcendental Experience of Grace
3.3 Grace and Nature
3.4 The Supernatural Existential
4. For Further Thought
Endnotes
Before I get into Karl Rahner's theology of grace and his adjustment of the relationship between nature and grace, I have to make a confession: Actually one cannot talk about Rahner's theology of grace without his christology. Rahner could not have talked about grace the way he did, hadn't he had his christology in the back of his head at the same time. But - there is not enough to fit all of it into one lecture, and thus we will have to do in somehow. Fortunately for me, Rahner did the same thing. Most of his articles that directly deal with grace do not emphasize how necessary christology is for them, so we can do it too. However, we have to keep in mind that, although Rahner doesn't say so every time, for him grace is always Christ's grace, meaning that 1) it is the grace that comes from Christ's cross and resurrection, so Christ is really the source and mediator of that grace;1 2) that Jesus Christ himself is the ideal incorporation of grace, he is the model of a completely graced human being2: Christ's humanity can be understood as "that which comes to be and is constituted in its essence and existence, if and insofar as the [divine] Logos empties Himself"3, while from the human perspective the incarnation can be seen as "the unique and highest instance of the actualization of the essence of human reality"4. 3) that the effect of that grace is to make us Christ-like guiding us to follow him.5 Christ as a human being therefore is the model for us and our relation to God in manifold ways. What is really most relevant for any theology of grace is, how Rahner conceives the co-operation between the divine and the human element, in other words grace and nature, using christology as a model. Christ's divinity and his humanity do not co-operate as opposites or as rivals, but on the contrary it was one of the results of the great christological controversies that they form a complete unity while at the same time upholding their distinctness.6 This model, Rahner insists, also applies to the unity of God and a human person in grace, actually even to the relationship between Creator and creatures. Rahner states: "Radical dependence on … [God] increases in direct, and not in inverse proportion with genuine self-coherence before him."7 This may be viewed as a fundamental axiom of Rahner's theology, without which it is inconceivable.
What Rahner takes from soteriology is the conviction that through Christ, his death and resurrection, we know that God's salvific will is universal and without bounds. That is the key to access Rahner's theology of grace.
God's Universal Salvific Will
So Rahner reads Christian revelation as saying that God wants all human beings to be saved and presupposes that in his theology of grace. For Rahner that means that God's salvific will is not dependent on any conditions that human persons would have to fulfill. This will has not even been shaken by humanity's fall into sin, it includes all human persons no matter where or when they live, and thus is independent of their religious affiliation as well. That does not mean that all humans are saved automatically, because they still can reject God's offer of salvation. It does mean that God offers salvation to each and any human person without any preconditions. If there are people in hell, it is only because they rejected God's grace and His offer of salvation, not because God chose to withhold grace and salvation from some, as Augustine had still taught. Rahner gives biblical and systematic reasons for this interpretations. I will skip these here and simply mention that the Second Vatican Council took up this understanding, when it officially taught that all human beings, independently of their religious affiliation could be saved by God's grace.8 That is exactly Rahner's position. So, let us now proceed to the way he understood that grace.
Grace as God's Self-Communication
Two elements will guide us here: One is Rahner's "re-discovery" of uncreated grace; the other his emphasis on the experience of grace. Both occasions a new conception of the relationship of grace and nature, which can be summarized as his theory of the supernatural existential.
Uncreated Grace
Rahner's staring point in each case is a particular historic situation in theology. He comes across a great tensions of two theological positions with respect to the theology of grace. One is found in patristic theology and is also very near to Pauline thinking, the other was scholastic and was the usual way theologians thought about grace in 1939, when Rahner for the first time published his article on uncreated grace.9 Rahner accepts that for St. Paul the inner sanctification of a human person "is first and foremost a communication of the personal Spirit of God, …; and he [Paul] sees every created grace, …, as a consequence and a manifestation of the possession of this uncreated grace."10 Church Fathers concurred with that theology. For them God communicated, or one could also say, donated Himself in the person of the Holy Spirit, and that self-gift is called uncreated grace: uncreated, because it is God Himself; grace because it is a free gift.Scholastic theology on the other hand focused on created grace, i. e. means, by which humans conform to God's will, e. g. certain virtues. They can be seen as gifts from God for human salvation, but they are not God Himself, therefore they are created. They are "an inner transformation of the justified person as such, hence an inner quality"11 of him or her.
From that Rahner sets himself the task as to "how the two ways of looking at things, …, may be brought into harmony".12
To get there Rahner takes what at first seems like a diversion and discusses St. Thomas Aquinas's theology of the visio beatifica, the way the redeemed in heaven view God. For Rahner this is not a diversion, for the visio beatifica is the end for which grace is given, thus it is the highest manifestation of grace; and all grace we receive during our lives - be it created or uncreated - is given in order to wake our desire for eternal life and make us able to experience that visio beatifica.
I will try a shortcut now and give you simply the result Rahner gains from these considerations. A very fundamental distinction for Rahner is that between two types of causality God exerts onto creatures: that of creation and what Rahner calls the really supernatural workings of God in the world. He does so in the language of Thomistic scholasticism. In creation God is the efficient cause, which brings forth something that is different from Himself. However, when God really acts supernaturally in the world (as in the hypostatic union, the visio beatifica and in bestowing grace on human persons), he exerts a different kind of causality, which Rahner calls quasi-formal.13
When you remember your philosophy - and I hope you do - you will know what a formal cause is: In Aristotelian thinking every material being consists of matter and form, one being the material cause, the other the formal cause. Aquinas generalized these ideas and taught that any being was, what it was, by its form, or its essence. So, e. g. the formal cause of the eye is the ability to see, the formal cause of a human person is the soul. Now when Rahner takes up that language, he says that in God's supernatural workings, He Himself becomes a formal cause in the human person. Put very simply that is the scholastic way of saying that the Holy Spirit dwells in us. Rahner emphasizes, however, that by expressing that with this philosophical vocabulary it becomes clear that this is not just metaphorical or figurative speech, it is real.
And Rahner accomplishes something else with that. As I said, the first version of this article appeared in 1939, scholastic and Thomistic terminology was a virtual must for Catholic theologians at the time. By using this terminology in order to show that the Holy Spirit really works in human beings, Rahner opens theology up for this new path of investigation. And he opens it up by way of evolution and not by way of revolution. My colleagues in Innsbruck who preside over the Karl-Rahner-Archive and are much better than I in historically situating Rahner's thinking emphasize that quite a lot: Rahner is not an innovator in the sense of leaving the material handed down through tradition behind, he became an innovator by working in the system and opening it up from within by showing that there were paths of inquiry not seen before or that when you applied the model in a very strict way, you had to move beyond what had become common-place into new ground. So the Rahner-scholar of today must be prepared to understand the tradition Rahner came out of and the terminology he used. Otherwise we will not be able to understand Rahner properly, or even worse, make him to say what we would like him to say.
Now let us return to the quasi-formal cause. We have stated so far that God as uncreated grace really becomes the formal cause of human supernatural acts. Rahner goes on now that we must ensure that in spite of God's becoming a formal cause in us, He still remains the completely transcendent and sovereign God and that His formal causality differs from all created formal causes we know. Therefore the prefix quasi-. Rahner stresses that from a systematic point of view this is nothing exceptional, because whenever we use a category formed from human experiences in the world and apply it to God, we have to modify it. We have to use it in an analogous way, or as Aquinas said, we have to transform it in the way of a triplex via. That means: What is said positively in it, has to be taken as really referring to God; but any finite concept has limitations: these have to be negáted with respect to God; that way the concept takes on a different, higher, meaning, which Thomas calls via eminentiae.
That has to be done with God's efficient causality in creation as well: God is efficient cause, but He differs from all other efficient causes in that He does not need a material cause for creation and He can create something that is at the same time ontologically dependent on Him and yet free and - in a certain sense - autonomous. The same now with God as a quasi-formal cause: God can become the inner principle of our supernatural acts, but can do that in such a way that His transcendence and infinity are not compromised in any way, while human supernatural acts still are our acts, and not God's. Therefore Rahner calls God a quasi-formal cause.
Now, what does that mean for the reformation discussions that had not been really solved: Catholics maintained that there was merit in good works; Protestants claimed that this was justification by works (Werkgerechtigkeit) that would make salvation a human accomplishment rather than a gift of God's grace. Seeing God as a quasi-formal cause for our supernatural acts in the way just mentioned, is nothing less but a solution to that problem by applying Rahner's axiom derived from Christology to it: dependence on God and autonomy in a certain sense are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually inclusive. Because God Himself is the quasi-formal cause of human supernatural acts, they are brought forth by grace, but they are nevertheless human acts; they are human accomplishments granted by God's grace. So merit from good works is not to be construed as excluding God's grace, while God's grace does not exclude human freedom. That is not to say that there was no thinking in terms of Werkgerechtigkeit in certain Catholic theologies; Luther's criticism did have a legitimate target. Yet, his criticism suffered from the same problematic presuppositions, namely that God's grace and human freedom are rivals. Rahner says they are not rivals, but sources of human salvation working in co-operation.
With all that in mind, Rahner also has a solution for the problem he started with: how do uncreated and created grace go together, how can biblical-patristic and scholastic thinking be brought into union. Rahner again uses the Aristotelian-Thomistic structure of formal cause and material cause: uncreated grace as quasi-formal cause of the supernatural acts of the graced human spirit and created graces as the material causes of these acts. Again philosophy teaches us that when we have a being composed of matter and form, neither of these principles can actually exist without the other; it is only the composite being that exists through the principles of form and matter. So form and matter presuppose one another or as Rahner says: "In this way the material and formal causes possess a reciprocal priority: … From this … there follows … the logical justification for inferring the presence of one reality from that of the other."14
Let us summarize, what we have so far: Rahner succeeds in construing a self-communication or self-giving of God in a scholastic terminology by revitalizing the patristic concept of uncreated grace and integrating that into a scholastic conceptual framework as a quasi-formal cause.
At the same time Rahner systematically distinguishes the order of creation and that of salvation, or we could say he distinguishes between nature and grace on a theoretical level. The differentia specifica is just the kind of causality God exerts in each case: "By His creative efficient causality (which is of course of a unique and divine nature) God constitutes the absolute other from Himself. By what we call incarnation, grace and glory, God does not create something other from Himself ex nihilo sui et subjecti, but He communicates Himself to the creature that already has been constituted."15 By the way, in defining the supernatural in this manner, Rahner also tells us that the theological concept of supernatural has nothing to do with any kind of superstition that seeks the supernatural in extraordinary, magical or esoteric powers. We will, however, see very soon that this distinction indeed is on a theoretical level only.
The Experience of Grace
The Significance of the Experience of Grace
I will now turn to Rahner's essay Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace16, which was first published in 1950 and again stands at a very interesting junction of two threads of theological thinking. The first thread is the so called Nouvelle Théologie17 and its conception of that relationship; the other thread is the prevalent Jesuit tradition on the subject and the more cautious and traditional approach of Pope Pius XIIth encyclical Humani Generis, which appeared in the same year. Rahner sympathizes with Nouvelle Théologie and shares its main concern, while at the same time he distances himself from their proposed solution in an attempt to take the Pope's reservations seriously.The prevalent Jesuit theology of grace at the time ruled out that human persons could actually experience grace, because it supposed we could only experience what pertains to our nature. Since grace is superadded to nature, it cannot be experienced. Rahner shared the Nouvelle Théologie's concern that such an approach had terrible consequences for theology, spirituality and living the faith in general. For, in that case, supernatural grace does not complement human nature, but comes to it as something alien and disturbing, and people cannot know about it unless by verbal revelation. If that revelation, however, finds no corresponding ground in human experience, there is not much difference between verbal revelation and verbal indoctrination: You have to accept what is said without any supporting evidential experience.18 The same applies to the theology of original sin: We cannot see it as a problem anymore in our lives, when we have gotten used to the idea that we are nothing else but natural creatures, nothing supernatural, nothing divine really convening to us.19
Against that conception Rahner wants to emphasize with the Nouvelle Théologie and with Aquinas that grace in principle can be experienced - however Rahner develops a concept of experience that differs somewhat from that of our everyday language.
Once again reaching back to Aquinas, Rahner stipulates that supernatural grace constitutes a formal object or a horizon for the human intellect and will, a horizon that is the precondition for the cognition of any particular object of human insight.20 This formal object is an a priori that conditions all human knowledge and freedom. So, it conditions every conscious human experience and in doing so it is conscious itself, Rahner says. However, it is not directly conscious: if I ask a person, if they experience that graced horizon, they may well truthfully answer no. But, Rahner argues, they still make this experience indirectly or unthematically, when they experience the world. This horizon is not in itself an object of experience, but it is experienced in that it shapes the experience of all objects. You may notice that what Rahner calls here indirectly or unthematically conscious would be called unconscious in our everyday language, which has, I suppose, been influenced quite a lot by Freudian terminology. In order to understand Rahner ourselves and to be able to communicate his thoughts to others, we have to take that into account, otherwise Rahnerian theology becomes unintelligible to most people. Rahner's distinction is more subtle than Freudian or everyday distinction: there we have only conscious or unconscious; here we have directly conscious, indirectly conscious and unconscious. And Rahner insists on grace's being at least indirectly conscious.
[I want to give a very simple example of what Rahner means by formal object and horizon:
The human eye is susceptible to electro-magnetic waves of a frequency between 0.38 m and 0.75 m. We call these light. There are waves with higher of lower frequencies and therefore we cannot see them, though for example bees can also see ultra-violet rays. Now in scholastic terminology we could say: The human eye's formal object is limited to the range between 0.38 and 0.75 m, while that of bees also includes the range between (0.28 and 0.39 m). Bees therefore can "see" more objects than us and they certainly see them in a different way from us, though we can hardly form an idea how that might be. The formal object therefore determines what entities can become direct or material objects.You can see from that example, what a formal object is, and you can also see that the formal object of the human eye is definitely finite. Aquinas and Rahner suppose that the formal object of the human spirit, of our intellect and will, is infinite. That means: Nothing exists that is principally outside the realm of human cognition.]Now Rahner goes a step further: It is supernatural grace that transforms the horizon of the human spirit, the infinite formal object of the human spirit really is shaped by grace. As a consequence, our intellect and will, the way we experience ourselves, the world and God, has been transformed by grace, and thus we can and do experience - though only indirectly - grace itself, or we could just as well say: God Himself. That way grace is the a priori horizon that shapes human experience, and can be experienced itself. It is, however experienced unthematically, and that is why someone might truthfully answer no, when asked about their experience of grace; why human persons may have an experience of God without reflexively knowing that they do; why the experience of God is not conditioned on any particular outward profession of faith; why, in the end, people may be saved by God independently of their religious affiliation, because they might be - as Rahner coined the term - "anonymous" Christians, that is: they nor only experience God's offer of grace unthematically, they also accepted it unthematically. Grace is therefore in the first place experienced unthematically and further effort has to be made to make that experience thematic. Rahner emphasizes "that the possibility of experiencing grace and the possibility of experiencing grace as grace are not the same thing"21. So, one might experience grace without realizing that it is grace.
I think this last point is very important. In the German-speaking countries a debate is currently going on, whether today's models of religious experience have not forgotten that God sometimes breaks into our world as alien and foreign and challenges humans to move out of our lazy and comfortable coziness. Many people who agree with that position criticize Rahner's theology of grace for bringing forth this unbiblical attitude. And it is true that Rahner wanted grace to be seen as something not alien to us. However, he distinguished very well between something being alien to us and something being perceived as alien by us. And Rahner challenges us that eventually anything that comes from the God, who created us, cannot be alien to us, but is complements our nature and that at a deeper, indirect, level of experience, we also perceive that. But on the direct and oftentimes superficial level of experience we might well have the impression that certain impulses are alien on us, while in fact they come from God in order to convert us, to turn us around. So, if the strangeness with which God's impulses sometimes enter our lives has been forgotten and suppressed in a lot of modern theology - be it as it may -, the blame for that should not be laid at Rahner's feet, but rather at too simplistic adaptations of his quite complicated and nuanced theology.
Transcendental Experience of Grace
If God offers grace to every human person because of His universal salvific will, and if grace forms an a priori horizon for the human spirit, this can also be called a transcendental horizon. Rahner uses the term "transcendental" very often and with a certain liberty, combining different meanings it has. Grace is a transcendental horizon because, 1) as a horizon, it transcends any particular realm of experience and permeates all of human experience; 2) as a finalization of the human spirit toward the divine, it transcends the world into the transcendent; and 3) as an a priori horizon, it can be analyzed by transcendental analysis, the philosophical method named by Immauel Kant, which Rahner uses in theology in the revised form of Joseph Maréchal, the Belgian Jesuit.Since such a horizon is indirectly experienced, and since it is transcendental, Rahner also says that it is perceived by a transcendental experience: this experience permeates all of human experience, it draws us toward the transcendent God, and, Rahner says, it can be analyzed and its existence proved by the transcendental method.
Grace and Nature
Unfortunately I do not have the time to explain transcendental method in detail. But you might know that it starts from a mental operation - like cognition or questioning - and looks for necessary preconditions in the human spirit for these operations. The preconditions it finds are proved to be real, because the operation whose necessary preconditions they are, was real. That way we can inquire into the nature of a human person: what has to belong to human nature, when humans are capable of mental acts like these? Now let us suppose a transcendental philosopher uses that method to analyze the human transcendental horizon, what will they get as a result?According to that theology which supposed that grace was beyond experience, our philosopher will gain insights into human nature and nothing else. Once we accept with Rahner that grace is indirectly experienced, this changes: The result will be, if the transcendental method has been adequately put to use, those properties of the human spirit that belong to it irrevocably, no matter whether their origin is pure human nature or the grace God offers irrevocably to humanity. The distinction between pure human nature and grace therefore cannot be drawn with certainty, because in concrete human nature, as we encounter it and analyze it transcendentally, they are already combined.22
So again Rahner proposes a more subtle distinction: not only between nature and grace, but between pure nature and concrete nature: the latter being human nature as it really exists as a consequence of God's acts of creating and gracing; the former being a theoretical concept that refers to what is minimally required for a creature to be human. But no human being exists that has only pure nature as its essence, because all human beings are already graced in their very essence.
So, what is the use of that new distinction? In accepting that concrete human persons are graced in their concrete nature, Rahner follows the Nouvelle Théologie. In holding fast to pure nature as a theoretical concept, Rahner tries to incorporate Humani Generis into his theology of grace. The encyclical had stated that in order to uphold the gratuity* of grace, in other words that God is free to give or withhold grace or that He does not owe23 us grace, we must accept that God could have created intelligent beings without calling them into communion with Him, i. e. without giving them any grace.24 In Rahner's terminology these would be creatures constituted by pure nature only, without any grace ordering them toward the visio beatifica. Rahner concurs with the pope that God could have created such intelligent creatures, but at the same time he stipulates that we know from revelation that He hasn't, because He has given grace to all people. Grace's gratuity does not entail its scarcity, Rahner insists.
However, compliance with church magisterium is not the only reason for Rahner's developing the concept of pure nature. It also ascertains that we whose concrete nature is co-constituted by grace can still experience this as a pure gift and should not fancy any obligation on God's side to grant it:25 "As a real partner of God's I must be capable of receiving His grace (unlike my existence) as the unexpected miracle of His love."26 Rahner thus stresses: Although a pious person will know that everything they are and have is God's gift, this is true about grace still on a second level. We could reasonably say: If and when God decides to create human beings, He by that act - though being His free choice - constitutes an obligation to Himself and a converse right of these creatures to everything necessary for them. This is a right granted by God, but still, once granted it constitutes a legitimate claim on God. Grace, however, is not some thing for Rahner, but - as we've seen - the communication of God Himself, a personal relationship with God, and for that reason there can be no claim or obligation for it. It is again - on a second level - God's free decision. Pure nature circumscribes exactly the boundaries of this human claim on God, concrete nature transcends them into the realm of free personal relationship. Grace, understood in that sense, exacts a two-fold characteristic in human persons: it kindles a longing for God's love in us and at the same time enables us to receive that love and love God in turn, and do that with the experience that it is "the ever astounding miracle, the unexpected gift, granted without any obligation"27.
From here one might speculate that this special kind of freedom from obligation derives from the nature of personal relationships as such: love is per se a free gift; one cannot owe love to anybody. Rahner relates that argument, but then says it is not valid with respect to God.28 It is certainly true for a fellow human being whom I give my love: I am not obligated to love them, because I have not produced their desire for my love. Yet with respect to God, the situation is different: If He has made us as longing for and dependent on His love, could He then withhold it from us without contravening the sense of his very creation? Rahner rejects that possibility. So, God would owe it to Himself to grant it and thus it would not be a pure gift anymore.29 For that reason Rahner argues, the concept of pure nature is necessary in order to ascertain grace's gratuity. It designates what remains as a remnant, when the most inner centerpiece of the human person, i. e. their orientation toward God is taken away from their concrete nature. "Nature" in the sense of being the opposite of grace therefore is a concept for a remnant not actually found in the world.30
In the further development of his theology of grace, Rahner speaks less and less about pure nature, in order to finally drop it in his later writings. I think, however, what Rahner dropped was the ontic way of distinguishing pure and concrete nature, it was not his insistence on the gift of grace being gratuitous in a second order sense, when compared to the gratuity of our being created. We might also say: Even though God has created us and through grace caused our desire for communion with Him, the fulfillment of this desire is still not owed to us (though He might owe it to Himself) , because God wants us to enter into a personal relationship with Him, which can best be modeled on human love, which is gratuitous and not obligated.
From a methodological point of view we can say that again Rahner comes to a conclusion which he could have gained much easier by a personalistic metaphysics than by scholastic ontology; Rahner reaches it, however, through opening up scholastic thinking from within and thus made it possible that his conclusion could take hold in a theology dominated by that thinking and strictly supervised by the magisterium of the church.
The Supernatural Existential
What we have described and discussed so far, grace as a transcendental horizon that shapes all of human experience, has been called a supernatural existential. An existential is nothing less than an a priori that shapes all of human experience. When grace forms such an existential, it may be called supernatural in the sense already explained. So, what we were basically talking about all the time, is the supernatural existential, a transcendental, a priori horizon constituted by God's formal causality being an element in the concrete nature of the human spirit. The supernatural existential thus is an aspect of grace itself, it is the way grace is offered to every human person prior to all religious of Christian instruction or reflection.
For Further Thought
Let me add two considerations on some further uses of Rahner's elaborations:1) I think Rahner's systematic conclusion that we cannot draw a clear distinction between the purely natural aspects, the effects of grace and - in the same vein - the results of original sin in our concrete nature, has far-reaching consequences in any theological anthropology. We can distinguish three main traits of the interpretation of the human person in the history of thought: one that thinks very highly of humanity, deems it intrinsically good and expects it to be saved by merely overcoming all super-additions to this good human nature; another one that holds the opposite position and sees humanity as basically rotten and evil and therefore expects salvation from a harsh judgment; and a third that denies any in-depth structure of human nature, seeing humanity as just one type of animal among others. Now from Rahner's analysis, we can see that each of these positions has something to it: the first acknowledges humanity's orientation toward the good, but overlooks its volatility; the second recognizes the consequences of original sin, but overlooks that original sin never weakened God's salvific will for us and that therefore judgment might look quite different from what the prophets of doom would have it; the third treats human persons as if they were creatures of pure nature, without any trace of God's grace or human sin incorporated into their very essence. A Christian anthropology in Karl Rahner's footsteps can acknowledge that each of them is right to a certain degree, but can bring them into an integrated unity by overcoming their one-sidedness, and thus can see human nature more clearly.
2) Has anyone here seen Steven Spielberg's movie AI: Artificial Intelligence? Do you have an idea, what that might have to do with Rahner's theology of grace?
Well, for those who don't know the movie, the plot is told rather quickly: A couple has a son, who has fallen into a coma and in all probability will not recover. After a time the couple decide to adopt an android-son, a robot with the looks and character-traits of an 11-year-old boy that starts to love his adoptive parents and desires their love, once he has been really adopted by entering a certain code. After that, he calls his adoptive mother Mommy. However, unexpectedly the natural son recovers and awakens from coma and the couple has now two sons, one their own flesh and blood, and one of steel and silicon but with the same longing for their love. Now naturally the couple decide in favor of their human son. As a consequence the android becomes very desperate and seeks ways to be exactly like his human brother (the robot is not able to eat and drink). He wants to become fully human. By fulfilling that prerequisite, he hopes to win the love of his adoptive parents.
You may now realize that Spielberg conducts a thought-experiment in his movie that corresponds to Rahner's question: If someone creates a being as longing for and dependent on it creator's love, could that creator then withhold that love from his creature without contravening the sense of his very creation? The humans in AI do just that and it is true that they contravene the sense of their very creation. Correspondingly the android boy attempts to obtain his parents' love by works, by changing who he is; he wants to merit that love. In that he is not very different from many human children who think that they must merit their parents' love, or for that matter from many faithful believers who ever again commit the pharisaical fallacy of thinking that they have to earn God's grace.
Rahner's theology of grace tells us that grace is purely gratuitous, that by our efforts to become better human persons and better Christians we cannot earn God's love, for He has already given that love to us gratuitously and irrevocably; our efforts to become better human persons can merely enable us to accept that love as a free and gratuitous gift. In the same vein we could say: Although the creator contravenes the sense of his own creation by his behavior, still the creature has no right to his love, simply because love cannot be obligated. And here is the limitation of Spielberg's thought-experiment: either we would have to accept that one day robots could be produced that are capable of giving and receiving real love (as the movie certainly suggests) - then they would eventually also be capable of understanding its gratuitous nature; or they would only simulate an ability to give and receive love, then withholding it from them would not be a problem at all.
Now if it is true that our concrete nature receives its orientation from God's grace, and if that is the reason why we are able to enter into a gratuitous relationship to God, one might ask, whether that is not the reason for the ability to enter into gratuitous relationships of any kind, also with humans. In that case, the hypothetical intelligent creatures that God could create without a supernatural calling, according to Humani Generis, would be unable to enter into free and gratuitous relationships to anyone. Maybe one day artificial intelligence will be so advanced that computers and robots can replace humans intellectually. Then this ability might become the distinguishing mark between human persons and intelligent creatures without personality.
Endnotes:
1 Cf. Rahner, K.: Nature and Grace. In: Theological Investigations 4 (= ThI 4), 165-188, esp. 176f.
23
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2 Cf. Rahner, K.: Foundations of Christian Faith. An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Transl. by W. Dych. London: Darton, Longman & Todd 1978, 202.
24
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3 Ibid. 224.
25
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4 Ibid. 218.
26
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5 Cf. Rahner, K.: Current Problems in Christology. In: Theological Investigations 1 (= ThI 1), 149-200, esp. 199f.
27
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6 "In the incarnation … we can verify …, in the most radical and specifically unique way the axiom of all relationship between God and creature, namely that the closeness and the distance, the submissiveness and the independence of the creature do not grow in inverse but in like proportion. Thus Christ is most radically man, and his humanity is the freest and most independent, not in spite of, but because of its being taken up, by being constituted as the self-utterance of God." Rahner, K.: On the Theology of the Incarnation. In. ThI 4, 105-120, here 117.
28
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7 Rahner, K.: Current Problems in Christology. In: Theological Investigations 1 (= ThI 1), 149-200, here 162.
29
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8 Cf. AG 7; NA 1; LG 16; GS 22.
30
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9 Rahner, K.: Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace. In ThI 1, 319-346.
31
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10 ThI 1, 322 = S 1, 349f.
32
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11 ThI 1, 321 = S 1, 349.
33
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12 ThI 1, 325 = S 1, 353.
34
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13 Cf. ThI 1, 329 = S 1, 357f.
35
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14 ThI 1, 341 = S 1, 369f.
36
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15 Rahner, K.: Über den Begriff des Geheimnisses in der katholischen Theologie. In: S 4, 51-99, hier 90, own translation. Cf.: The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology. In: ThI 4, 36-76, here 65f.
37
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16 In: ThI 1, 297-318.
38
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17 For references on that see Rahner's footnote 1 on in ThI 1, 297.
39
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18 Cf. ThI 1, 299.
40
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19 Cf. ThI 1, 299f.
41
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20 Cf. Siebenrock, Gnade als Herz der Welt. Der Beitrag Karl Rahners zu einer zeitgemäßen Gnadentheologie. In: Theologie aus Erfahrung der Gnade. Annäherungen an Karl Rahner. Hg.: M. Delgado u. M. Lutz-Bachmann. Hildesheim 1994, 34-71, here 36, quoting Rahner, K.: Zur Rezeption des Thomas von Aquin. In: Imhof, P. / Biallowons, H. (Hg.): Glaube in winterlicher Zeit. Gespräche mit Karl Rahner aus den letzten Lebensjahren. Düsseldorf 1986, 49-71, hier 58. Siebenrock points out that Rahner used this terminology already in his first lecture series on grace: "Sed objectum formale est quasi ‚horizon' ‚ambitus' et ‚medium', in et sub quo positum objectum adventicium est cognoscibile". Rahner: De gratia Christi. Summa praelectionum in usum privatum auditorum ordinata. Innsbruck 11937/38, 299, quoted according to Siebenrock, ibid. 62, footnote 34.
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21 ThI 1, 300 = S 1, 326.
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22 Cf. S 1, 327 = ThI 1, 301.
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23 I quite disagree with the translator of ThI 1, 1, C. Ernst, when he translates "ungeschuldet" as "unexacted", saying that this is "not quite so important in the present context" (ThI 1, 304, note 2). I think it is very important, if one wants to follow the chain of thought in Rahner's argument, and I think the verbal paraphrase is not as complicated as Ernst seems to think.
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24 Cf. Humani Generis 26: "Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision."
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25 Cf. ThI 1, 304.
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26 S 1, 331 my own translation, cf. ThI 1, 305.
48
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27 S 1, 337 my own translation; cf. ThI 1, 310f.
49
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28 Cf. ThI 1, 305f.
50
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29 Cf. ThI 1, 307.
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30 Cf. S 1, 340 = ThI 1, 313.
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Author: Wandinger Nikolaus
© Universität Innsbruck - Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Abstrakt: In the first half of the 20th century K. Rahner gave very important impulses for a new understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. By taking up different approaches and trying to bring them into harmony, Rahner advanced theology. Looking anew at these texts provides us with a better understanding of Rahner's thought, but also of ourselves as human persons and of God's way to relate to us. And it might even serve to guide us into a new understanding of the human person in view of the challenges of the 21st century.
Publiziert in: Guest-Lecture at Heythrop College, University of London, Feb. 2003
Datum: 2003-03-05
Inhaltsverzeichnis
1. Christological Preface
2. God's Universal Salvific Will
3. Grace as God's Self-Communication
3.1 Uncreated Grace
3.2 The Experience of Grace
3.2.1 The Significance of the Experience of Grace
3.2.2 Transcendental Experience of Grace
3.3 Grace and Nature
3.4 The Supernatural Existential
4. For Further Thought
Endnotes
Before I get into Karl Rahner's theology of grace and his adjustment of the relationship between nature and grace, I have to make a confession: Actually one cannot talk about Rahner's theology of grace without his christology. Rahner could not have talked about grace the way he did, hadn't he had his christology in the back of his head at the same time. But - there is not enough to fit all of it into one lecture, and thus we will have to do in somehow. Fortunately for me, Rahner did the same thing. Most of his articles that directly deal with grace do not emphasize how necessary christology is for them, so we can do it too. However, we have to keep in mind that, although Rahner doesn't say so every time, for him grace is always Christ's grace, meaning that 1) it is the grace that comes from Christ's cross and resurrection, so Christ is really the source and mediator of that grace;1 2) that Jesus Christ himself is the ideal incorporation of grace, he is the model of a completely graced human being2: Christ's humanity can be understood as "that which comes to be and is constituted in its essence and existence, if and insofar as the [divine] Logos empties Himself"3, while from the human perspective the incarnation can be seen as "the unique and highest instance of the actualization of the essence of human reality"4. 3) that the effect of that grace is to make us Christ-like guiding us to follow him.5 Christ as a human being therefore is the model for us and our relation to God in manifold ways. What is really most relevant for any theology of grace is, how Rahner conceives the co-operation between the divine and the human element, in other words grace and nature, using christology as a model. Christ's divinity and his humanity do not co-operate as opposites or as rivals, but on the contrary it was one of the results of the great christological controversies that they form a complete unity while at the same time upholding their distinctness.6 This model, Rahner insists, also applies to the unity of God and a human person in grace, actually even to the relationship between Creator and creatures. Rahner states: "Radical dependence on … [God] increases in direct, and not in inverse proportion with genuine self-coherence before him."7 This may be viewed as a fundamental axiom of Rahner's theology, without which it is inconceivable.
What Rahner takes from soteriology is the conviction that through Christ, his death and resurrection, we know that God's salvific will is universal and without bounds. That is the key to access Rahner's theology of grace.
God's Universal Salvific Will
So Rahner reads Christian revelation as saying that God wants all human beings to be saved and presupposes that in his theology of grace. For Rahner that means that God's salvific will is not dependent on any conditions that human persons would have to fulfill. This will has not even been shaken by humanity's fall into sin, it includes all human persons no matter where or when they live, and thus is independent of their religious affiliation as well. That does not mean that all humans are saved automatically, because they still can reject God's offer of salvation. It does mean that God offers salvation to each and any human person without any preconditions. If there are people in hell, it is only because they rejected God's grace and His offer of salvation, not because God chose to withhold grace and salvation from some, as Augustine had still taught. Rahner gives biblical and systematic reasons for this interpretations. I will skip these here and simply mention that the Second Vatican Council took up this understanding, when it officially taught that all human beings, independently of their religious affiliation could be saved by God's grace.8 That is exactly Rahner's position. So, let us now proceed to the way he understood that grace.
Grace as God's Self-Communication
Two elements will guide us here: One is Rahner's "re-discovery" of uncreated grace; the other his emphasis on the experience of grace. Both occasions a new conception of the relationship of grace and nature, which can be summarized as his theory of the supernatural existential.
Uncreated Grace
Rahner's staring point in each case is a particular historic situation in theology. He comes across a great tensions of two theological positions with respect to the theology of grace. One is found in patristic theology and is also very near to Pauline thinking, the other was scholastic and was the usual way theologians thought about grace in 1939, when Rahner for the first time published his article on uncreated grace.9 Rahner accepts that for St. Paul the inner sanctification of a human person "is first and foremost a communication of the personal Spirit of God, …; and he [Paul] sees every created grace, …, as a consequence and a manifestation of the possession of this uncreated grace."10 Church Fathers concurred with that theology. For them God communicated, or one could also say, donated Himself in the person of the Holy Spirit, and that self-gift is called uncreated grace: uncreated, because it is God Himself; grace because it is a free gift.Scholastic theology on the other hand focused on created grace, i. e. means, by which humans conform to God's will, e. g. certain virtues. They can be seen as gifts from God for human salvation, but they are not God Himself, therefore they are created. They are "an inner transformation of the justified person as such, hence an inner quality"11 of him or her.
From that Rahner sets himself the task as to "how the two ways of looking at things, …, may be brought into harmony".12
To get there Rahner takes what at first seems like a diversion and discusses St. Thomas Aquinas's theology of the visio beatifica, the way the redeemed in heaven view God. For Rahner this is not a diversion, for the visio beatifica is the end for which grace is given, thus it is the highest manifestation of grace; and all grace we receive during our lives - be it created or uncreated - is given in order to wake our desire for eternal life and make us able to experience that visio beatifica.
I will try a shortcut now and give you simply the result Rahner gains from these considerations. A very fundamental distinction for Rahner is that between two types of causality God exerts onto creatures: that of creation and what Rahner calls the really supernatural workings of God in the world. He does so in the language of Thomistic scholasticism. In creation God is the efficient cause, which brings forth something that is different from Himself. However, when God really acts supernaturally in the world (as in the hypostatic union, the visio beatifica and in bestowing grace on human persons), he exerts a different kind of causality, which Rahner calls quasi-formal.13
When you remember your philosophy - and I hope you do - you will know what a formal cause is: In Aristotelian thinking every material being consists of matter and form, one being the material cause, the other the formal cause. Aquinas generalized these ideas and taught that any being was, what it was, by its form, or its essence. So, e. g. the formal cause of the eye is the ability to see, the formal cause of a human person is the soul. Now when Rahner takes up that language, he says that in God's supernatural workings, He Himself becomes a formal cause in the human person. Put very simply that is the scholastic way of saying that the Holy Spirit dwells in us. Rahner emphasizes, however, that by expressing that with this philosophical vocabulary it becomes clear that this is not just metaphorical or figurative speech, it is real.
And Rahner accomplishes something else with that. As I said, the first version of this article appeared in 1939, scholastic and Thomistic terminology was a virtual must for Catholic theologians at the time. By using this terminology in order to show that the Holy Spirit really works in human beings, Rahner opens theology up for this new path of investigation. And he opens it up by way of evolution and not by way of revolution. My colleagues in Innsbruck who preside over the Karl-Rahner-Archive and are much better than I in historically situating Rahner's thinking emphasize that quite a lot: Rahner is not an innovator in the sense of leaving the material handed down through tradition behind, he became an innovator by working in the system and opening it up from within by showing that there were paths of inquiry not seen before or that when you applied the model in a very strict way, you had to move beyond what had become common-place into new ground. So the Rahner-scholar of today must be prepared to understand the tradition Rahner came out of and the terminology he used. Otherwise we will not be able to understand Rahner properly, or even worse, make him to say what we would like him to say.
Now let us return to the quasi-formal cause. We have stated so far that God as uncreated grace really becomes the formal cause of human supernatural acts. Rahner goes on now that we must ensure that in spite of God's becoming a formal cause in us, He still remains the completely transcendent and sovereign God and that His formal causality differs from all created formal causes we know. Therefore the prefix quasi-. Rahner stresses that from a systematic point of view this is nothing exceptional, because whenever we use a category formed from human experiences in the world and apply it to God, we have to modify it. We have to use it in an analogous way, or as Aquinas said, we have to transform it in the way of a triplex via. That means: What is said positively in it, has to be taken as really referring to God; but any finite concept has limitations: these have to be negáted with respect to God; that way the concept takes on a different, higher, meaning, which Thomas calls via eminentiae.
That has to be done with God's efficient causality in creation as well: God is efficient cause, but He differs from all other efficient causes in that He does not need a material cause for creation and He can create something that is at the same time ontologically dependent on Him and yet free and - in a certain sense - autonomous. The same now with God as a quasi-formal cause: God can become the inner principle of our supernatural acts, but can do that in such a way that His transcendence and infinity are not compromised in any way, while human supernatural acts still are our acts, and not God's. Therefore Rahner calls God a quasi-formal cause.
Now, what does that mean for the reformation discussions that had not been really solved: Catholics maintained that there was merit in good works; Protestants claimed that this was justification by works (Werkgerechtigkeit) that would make salvation a human accomplishment rather than a gift of God's grace. Seeing God as a quasi-formal cause for our supernatural acts in the way just mentioned, is nothing less but a solution to that problem by applying Rahner's axiom derived from Christology to it: dependence on God and autonomy in a certain sense are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually inclusive. Because God Himself is the quasi-formal cause of human supernatural acts, they are brought forth by grace, but they are nevertheless human acts; they are human accomplishments granted by God's grace. So merit from good works is not to be construed as excluding God's grace, while God's grace does not exclude human freedom. That is not to say that there was no thinking in terms of Werkgerechtigkeit in certain Catholic theologies; Luther's criticism did have a legitimate target. Yet, his criticism suffered from the same problematic presuppositions, namely that God's grace and human freedom are rivals. Rahner says they are not rivals, but sources of human salvation working in co-operation.
With all that in mind, Rahner also has a solution for the problem he started with: how do uncreated and created grace go together, how can biblical-patristic and scholastic thinking be brought into union. Rahner again uses the Aristotelian-Thomistic structure of formal cause and material cause: uncreated grace as quasi-formal cause of the supernatural acts of the graced human spirit and created graces as the material causes of these acts. Again philosophy teaches us that when we have a being composed of matter and form, neither of these principles can actually exist without the other; it is only the composite being that exists through the principles of form and matter. So form and matter presuppose one another or as Rahner says: "In this way the material and formal causes possess a reciprocal priority: … From this … there follows … the logical justification for inferring the presence of one reality from that of the other."14
Let us summarize, what we have so far: Rahner succeeds in construing a self-communication or self-giving of God in a scholastic terminology by revitalizing the patristic concept of uncreated grace and integrating that into a scholastic conceptual framework as a quasi-formal cause.
At the same time Rahner systematically distinguishes the order of creation and that of salvation, or we could say he distinguishes between nature and grace on a theoretical level. The differentia specifica is just the kind of causality God exerts in each case: "By His creative efficient causality (which is of course of a unique and divine nature) God constitutes the absolute other from Himself. By what we call incarnation, grace and glory, God does not create something other from Himself ex nihilo sui et subjecti, but He communicates Himself to the creature that already has been constituted."15 By the way, in defining the supernatural in this manner, Rahner also tells us that the theological concept of supernatural has nothing to do with any kind of superstition that seeks the supernatural in extraordinary, magical or esoteric powers. We will, however, see very soon that this distinction indeed is on a theoretical level only.
The Experience of Grace
The Significance of the Experience of Grace
I will now turn to Rahner's essay Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace16, which was first published in 1950 and again stands at a very interesting junction of two threads of theological thinking. The first thread is the so called Nouvelle Théologie17 and its conception of that relationship; the other thread is the prevalent Jesuit tradition on the subject and the more cautious and traditional approach of Pope Pius XIIth encyclical Humani Generis, which appeared in the same year. Rahner sympathizes with Nouvelle Théologie and shares its main concern, while at the same time he distances himself from their proposed solution in an attempt to take the Pope's reservations seriously.The prevalent Jesuit theology of grace at the time ruled out that human persons could actually experience grace, because it supposed we could only experience what pertains to our nature. Since grace is superadded to nature, it cannot be experienced. Rahner shared the Nouvelle Théologie's concern that such an approach had terrible consequences for theology, spirituality and living the faith in general. For, in that case, supernatural grace does not complement human nature, but comes to it as something alien and disturbing, and people cannot know about it unless by verbal revelation. If that revelation, however, finds no corresponding ground in human experience, there is not much difference between verbal revelation and verbal indoctrination: You have to accept what is said without any supporting evidential experience.18 The same applies to the theology of original sin: We cannot see it as a problem anymore in our lives, when we have gotten used to the idea that we are nothing else but natural creatures, nothing supernatural, nothing divine really convening to us.19
Against that conception Rahner wants to emphasize with the Nouvelle Théologie and with Aquinas that grace in principle can be experienced - however Rahner develops a concept of experience that differs somewhat from that of our everyday language.
Once again reaching back to Aquinas, Rahner stipulates that supernatural grace constitutes a formal object or a horizon for the human intellect and will, a horizon that is the precondition for the cognition of any particular object of human insight.20 This formal object is an a priori that conditions all human knowledge and freedom. So, it conditions every conscious human experience and in doing so it is conscious itself, Rahner says. However, it is not directly conscious: if I ask a person, if they experience that graced horizon, they may well truthfully answer no. But, Rahner argues, they still make this experience indirectly or unthematically, when they experience the world. This horizon is not in itself an object of experience, but it is experienced in that it shapes the experience of all objects. You may notice that what Rahner calls here indirectly or unthematically conscious would be called unconscious in our everyday language, which has, I suppose, been influenced quite a lot by Freudian terminology. In order to understand Rahner ourselves and to be able to communicate his thoughts to others, we have to take that into account, otherwise Rahnerian theology becomes unintelligible to most people. Rahner's distinction is more subtle than Freudian or everyday distinction: there we have only conscious or unconscious; here we have directly conscious, indirectly conscious and unconscious. And Rahner insists on grace's being at least indirectly conscious.
[I want to give a very simple example of what Rahner means by formal object and horizon:
The human eye is susceptible to electro-magnetic waves of a frequency between 0.38 m and 0.75 m. We call these light. There are waves with higher of lower frequencies and therefore we cannot see them, though for example bees can also see ultra-violet rays. Now in scholastic terminology we could say: The human eye's formal object is limited to the range between 0.38 and 0.75 m, while that of bees also includes the range between (0.28 and 0.39 m). Bees therefore can "see" more objects than us and they certainly see them in a different way from us, though we can hardly form an idea how that might be. The formal object therefore determines what entities can become direct or material objects.You can see from that example, what a formal object is, and you can also see that the formal object of the human eye is definitely finite. Aquinas and Rahner suppose that the formal object of the human spirit, of our intellect and will, is infinite. That means: Nothing exists that is principally outside the realm of human cognition.]Now Rahner goes a step further: It is supernatural grace that transforms the horizon of the human spirit, the infinite formal object of the human spirit really is shaped by grace. As a consequence, our intellect and will, the way we experience ourselves, the world and God, has been transformed by grace, and thus we can and do experience - though only indirectly - grace itself, or we could just as well say: God Himself. That way grace is the a priori horizon that shapes human experience, and can be experienced itself. It is, however experienced unthematically, and that is why someone might truthfully answer no, when asked about their experience of grace; why human persons may have an experience of God without reflexively knowing that they do; why the experience of God is not conditioned on any particular outward profession of faith; why, in the end, people may be saved by God independently of their religious affiliation, because they might be - as Rahner coined the term - "anonymous" Christians, that is: they nor only experience God's offer of grace unthematically, they also accepted it unthematically. Grace is therefore in the first place experienced unthematically and further effort has to be made to make that experience thematic. Rahner emphasizes "that the possibility of experiencing grace and the possibility of experiencing grace as grace are not the same thing"21. So, one might experience grace without realizing that it is grace.
I think this last point is very important. In the German-speaking countries a debate is currently going on, whether today's models of religious experience have not forgotten that God sometimes breaks into our world as alien and foreign and challenges humans to move out of our lazy and comfortable coziness. Many people who agree with that position criticize Rahner's theology of grace for bringing forth this unbiblical attitude. And it is true that Rahner wanted grace to be seen as something not alien to us. However, he distinguished very well between something being alien to us and something being perceived as alien by us. And Rahner challenges us that eventually anything that comes from the God, who created us, cannot be alien to us, but is complements our nature and that at a deeper, indirect, level of experience, we also perceive that. But on the direct and oftentimes superficial level of experience we might well have the impression that certain impulses are alien on us, while in fact they come from God in order to convert us, to turn us around. So, if the strangeness with which God's impulses sometimes enter our lives has been forgotten and suppressed in a lot of modern theology - be it as it may -, the blame for that should not be laid at Rahner's feet, but rather at too simplistic adaptations of his quite complicated and nuanced theology.
Transcendental Experience of Grace
If God offers grace to every human person because of His universal salvific will, and if grace forms an a priori horizon for the human spirit, this can also be called a transcendental horizon. Rahner uses the term "transcendental" very often and with a certain liberty, combining different meanings it has. Grace is a transcendental horizon because, 1) as a horizon, it transcends any particular realm of experience and permeates all of human experience; 2) as a finalization of the human spirit toward the divine, it transcends the world into the transcendent; and 3) as an a priori horizon, it can be analyzed by transcendental analysis, the philosophical method named by Immauel Kant, which Rahner uses in theology in the revised form of Joseph Maréchal, the Belgian Jesuit.Since such a horizon is indirectly experienced, and since it is transcendental, Rahner also says that it is perceived by a transcendental experience: this experience permeates all of human experience, it draws us toward the transcendent God, and, Rahner says, it can be analyzed and its existence proved by the transcendental method.
Grace and Nature
Unfortunately I do not have the time to explain transcendental method in detail. But you might know that it starts from a mental operation - like cognition or questioning - and looks for necessary preconditions in the human spirit for these operations. The preconditions it finds are proved to be real, because the operation whose necessary preconditions they are, was real. That way we can inquire into the nature of a human person: what has to belong to human nature, when humans are capable of mental acts like these? Now let us suppose a transcendental philosopher uses that method to analyze the human transcendental horizon, what will they get as a result?According to that theology which supposed that grace was beyond experience, our philosopher will gain insights into human nature and nothing else. Once we accept with Rahner that grace is indirectly experienced, this changes: The result will be, if the transcendental method has been adequately put to use, those properties of the human spirit that belong to it irrevocably, no matter whether their origin is pure human nature or the grace God offers irrevocably to humanity. The distinction between pure human nature and grace therefore cannot be drawn with certainty, because in concrete human nature, as we encounter it and analyze it transcendentally, they are already combined.22
So again Rahner proposes a more subtle distinction: not only between nature and grace, but between pure nature and concrete nature: the latter being human nature as it really exists as a consequence of God's acts of creating and gracing; the former being a theoretical concept that refers to what is minimally required for a creature to be human. But no human being exists that has only pure nature as its essence, because all human beings are already graced in their very essence.
So, what is the use of that new distinction? In accepting that concrete human persons are graced in their concrete nature, Rahner follows the Nouvelle Théologie. In holding fast to pure nature as a theoretical concept, Rahner tries to incorporate Humani Generis into his theology of grace. The encyclical had stated that in order to uphold the gratuity* of grace, in other words that God is free to give or withhold grace or that He does not owe23 us grace, we must accept that God could have created intelligent beings without calling them into communion with Him, i. e. without giving them any grace.24 In Rahner's terminology these would be creatures constituted by pure nature only, without any grace ordering them toward the visio beatifica. Rahner concurs with the pope that God could have created such intelligent creatures, but at the same time he stipulates that we know from revelation that He hasn't, because He has given grace to all people. Grace's gratuity does not entail its scarcity, Rahner insists.
However, compliance with church magisterium is not the only reason for Rahner's developing the concept of pure nature. It also ascertains that we whose concrete nature is co-constituted by grace can still experience this as a pure gift and should not fancy any obligation on God's side to grant it:25 "As a real partner of God's I must be capable of receiving His grace (unlike my existence) as the unexpected miracle of His love."26 Rahner thus stresses: Although a pious person will know that everything they are and have is God's gift, this is true about grace still on a second level. We could reasonably say: If and when God decides to create human beings, He by that act - though being His free choice - constitutes an obligation to Himself and a converse right of these creatures to everything necessary for them. This is a right granted by God, but still, once granted it constitutes a legitimate claim on God. Grace, however, is not some thing for Rahner, but - as we've seen - the communication of God Himself, a personal relationship with God, and for that reason there can be no claim or obligation for it. It is again - on a second level - God's free decision. Pure nature circumscribes exactly the boundaries of this human claim on God, concrete nature transcends them into the realm of free personal relationship. Grace, understood in that sense, exacts a two-fold characteristic in human persons: it kindles a longing for God's love in us and at the same time enables us to receive that love and love God in turn, and do that with the experience that it is "the ever astounding miracle, the unexpected gift, granted without any obligation"27.
From here one might speculate that this special kind of freedom from obligation derives from the nature of personal relationships as such: love is per se a free gift; one cannot owe love to anybody. Rahner relates that argument, but then says it is not valid with respect to God.28 It is certainly true for a fellow human being whom I give my love: I am not obligated to love them, because I have not produced their desire for my love. Yet with respect to God, the situation is different: If He has made us as longing for and dependent on His love, could He then withhold it from us without contravening the sense of his very creation? Rahner rejects that possibility. So, God would owe it to Himself to grant it and thus it would not be a pure gift anymore.29 For that reason Rahner argues, the concept of pure nature is necessary in order to ascertain grace's gratuity. It designates what remains as a remnant, when the most inner centerpiece of the human person, i. e. their orientation toward God is taken away from their concrete nature. "Nature" in the sense of being the opposite of grace therefore is a concept for a remnant not actually found in the world.30
In the further development of his theology of grace, Rahner speaks less and less about pure nature, in order to finally drop it in his later writings. I think, however, what Rahner dropped was the ontic way of distinguishing pure and concrete nature, it was not his insistence on the gift of grace being gratuitous in a second order sense, when compared to the gratuity of our being created. We might also say: Even though God has created us and through grace caused our desire for communion with Him, the fulfillment of this desire is still not owed to us (though He might owe it to Himself) , because God wants us to enter into a personal relationship with Him, which can best be modeled on human love, which is gratuitous and not obligated.
From a methodological point of view we can say that again Rahner comes to a conclusion which he could have gained much easier by a personalistic metaphysics than by scholastic ontology; Rahner reaches it, however, through opening up scholastic thinking from within and thus made it possible that his conclusion could take hold in a theology dominated by that thinking and strictly supervised by the magisterium of the church.
The Supernatural Existential
What we have described and discussed so far, grace as a transcendental horizon that shapes all of human experience, has been called a supernatural existential. An existential is nothing less than an a priori that shapes all of human experience. When grace forms such an existential, it may be called supernatural in the sense already explained. So, what we were basically talking about all the time, is the supernatural existential, a transcendental, a priori horizon constituted by God's formal causality being an element in the concrete nature of the human spirit. The supernatural existential thus is an aspect of grace itself, it is the way grace is offered to every human person prior to all religious of Christian instruction or reflection.
For Further Thought
Let me add two considerations on some further uses of Rahner's elaborations:1) I think Rahner's systematic conclusion that we cannot draw a clear distinction between the purely natural aspects, the effects of grace and - in the same vein - the results of original sin in our concrete nature, has far-reaching consequences in any theological anthropology. We can distinguish three main traits of the interpretation of the human person in the history of thought: one that thinks very highly of humanity, deems it intrinsically good and expects it to be saved by merely overcoming all super-additions to this good human nature; another one that holds the opposite position and sees humanity as basically rotten and evil and therefore expects salvation from a harsh judgment; and a third that denies any in-depth structure of human nature, seeing humanity as just one type of animal among others. Now from Rahner's analysis, we can see that each of these positions has something to it: the first acknowledges humanity's orientation toward the good, but overlooks its volatility; the second recognizes the consequences of original sin, but overlooks that original sin never weakened God's salvific will for us and that therefore judgment might look quite different from what the prophets of doom would have it; the third treats human persons as if they were creatures of pure nature, without any trace of God's grace or human sin incorporated into their very essence. A Christian anthropology in Karl Rahner's footsteps can acknowledge that each of them is right to a certain degree, but can bring them into an integrated unity by overcoming their one-sidedness, and thus can see human nature more clearly.
2) Has anyone here seen Steven Spielberg's movie AI: Artificial Intelligence? Do you have an idea, what that might have to do with Rahner's theology of grace?
Well, for those who don't know the movie, the plot is told rather quickly: A couple has a son, who has fallen into a coma and in all probability will not recover. After a time the couple decide to adopt an android-son, a robot with the looks and character-traits of an 11-year-old boy that starts to love his adoptive parents and desires their love, once he has been really adopted by entering a certain code. After that, he calls his adoptive mother Mommy. However, unexpectedly the natural son recovers and awakens from coma and the couple has now two sons, one their own flesh and blood, and one of steel and silicon but with the same longing for their love. Now naturally the couple decide in favor of their human son. As a consequence the android becomes very desperate and seeks ways to be exactly like his human brother (the robot is not able to eat and drink). He wants to become fully human. By fulfilling that prerequisite, he hopes to win the love of his adoptive parents.
You may now realize that Spielberg conducts a thought-experiment in his movie that corresponds to Rahner's question: If someone creates a being as longing for and dependent on it creator's love, could that creator then withhold that love from his creature without contravening the sense of his very creation? The humans in AI do just that and it is true that they contravene the sense of their very creation. Correspondingly the android boy attempts to obtain his parents' love by works, by changing who he is; he wants to merit that love. In that he is not very different from many human children who think that they must merit their parents' love, or for that matter from many faithful believers who ever again commit the pharisaical fallacy of thinking that they have to earn God's grace.
Rahner's theology of grace tells us that grace is purely gratuitous, that by our efforts to become better human persons and better Christians we cannot earn God's love, for He has already given that love to us gratuitously and irrevocably; our efforts to become better human persons can merely enable us to accept that love as a free and gratuitous gift. In the same vein we could say: Although the creator contravenes the sense of his own creation by his behavior, still the creature has no right to his love, simply because love cannot be obligated. And here is the limitation of Spielberg's thought-experiment: either we would have to accept that one day robots could be produced that are capable of giving and receiving real love (as the movie certainly suggests) - then they would eventually also be capable of understanding its gratuitous nature; or they would only simulate an ability to give and receive love, then withholding it from them would not be a problem at all.
Now if it is true that our concrete nature receives its orientation from God's grace, and if that is the reason why we are able to enter into a gratuitous relationship to God, one might ask, whether that is not the reason for the ability to enter into gratuitous relationships of any kind, also with humans. In that case, the hypothetical intelligent creatures that God could create without a supernatural calling, according to Humani Generis, would be unable to enter into free and gratuitous relationships to anyone. Maybe one day artificial intelligence will be so advanced that computers and robots can replace humans intellectually. Then this ability might become the distinguishing mark between human persons and intelligent creatures without personality.
Endnotes:
1 Cf. Rahner, K.: Nature and Grace. In: Theological Investigations 4 (= ThI 4), 165-188, esp. 176f.
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2 Cf. Rahner, K.: Foundations of Christian Faith. An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Transl. by W. Dych. London: Darton, Longman & Todd 1978, 202.
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3 Ibid. 224.
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4 Ibid. 218.
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5 Cf. Rahner, K.: Current Problems in Christology. In: Theological Investigations 1 (= ThI 1), 149-200, esp. 199f.
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6 "In the incarnation … we can verify …, in the most radical and specifically unique way the axiom of all relationship between God and creature, namely that the closeness and the distance, the submissiveness and the independence of the creature do not grow in inverse but in like proportion. Thus Christ is most radically man, and his humanity is the freest and most independent, not in spite of, but because of its being taken up, by being constituted as the self-utterance of God." Rahner, K.: On the Theology of the Incarnation. In. ThI 4, 105-120, here 117.
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7 Rahner, K.: Current Problems in Christology. In: Theological Investigations 1 (= ThI 1), 149-200, here 162.
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8 Cf. AG 7; NA 1; LG 16; GS 22.
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9 Rahner, K.: Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace. In ThI 1, 319-346.
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10 ThI 1, 322 = S 1, 349f.
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11 ThI 1, 321 = S 1, 349.
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12 ThI 1, 325 = S 1, 353.
34
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13 Cf. ThI 1, 329 = S 1, 357f.
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14 ThI 1, 341 = S 1, 369f.
36
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15 Rahner, K.: Über den Begriff des Geheimnisses in der katholischen Theologie. In: S 4, 51-99, hier 90, own translation. Cf.: The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology. In: ThI 4, 36-76, here 65f.
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16 In: ThI 1, 297-318.
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17 For references on that see Rahner's footnote 1 on in ThI 1, 297.
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18 Cf. ThI 1, 299.
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19 Cf. ThI 1, 299f.
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20 Cf. Siebenrock, Gnade als Herz der Welt. Der Beitrag Karl Rahners zu einer zeitgemäßen Gnadentheologie. In: Theologie aus Erfahrung der Gnade. Annäherungen an Karl Rahner. Hg.: M. Delgado u. M. Lutz-Bachmann. Hildesheim 1994, 34-71, here 36, quoting Rahner, K.: Zur Rezeption des Thomas von Aquin. In: Imhof, P. / Biallowons, H. (Hg.): Glaube in winterlicher Zeit. Gespräche mit Karl Rahner aus den letzten Lebensjahren. Düsseldorf 1986, 49-71, hier 58. Siebenrock points out that Rahner used this terminology already in his first lecture series on grace: "Sed objectum formale est quasi ‚horizon' ‚ambitus' et ‚medium', in et sub quo positum objectum adventicium est cognoscibile". Rahner: De gratia Christi. Summa praelectionum in usum privatum auditorum ordinata. Innsbruck 11937/38, 299, quoted according to Siebenrock, ibid. 62, footnote 34.
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21 ThI 1, 300 = S 1, 326.
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22 Cf. S 1, 327 = ThI 1, 301.
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23 I quite disagree with the translator of ThI 1, 1, C. Ernst, when he translates "ungeschuldet" as "unexacted", saying that this is "not quite so important in the present context" (ThI 1, 304, note 2). I think it is very important, if one wants to follow the chain of thought in Rahner's argument, and I think the verbal paraphrase is not as complicated as Ernst seems to think.
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24 Cf. Humani Generis 26: "Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision."
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25 Cf. ThI 1, 304.
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26 S 1, 331 my own translation, cf. ThI 1, 305.
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27 S 1, 337 my own translation; cf. ThI 1, 310f.
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28 Cf. ThI 1, 305f.
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29 Cf. ThI 1, 307.
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30 Cf. S 1, 340 = ThI 1, 313.
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Author: Wandinger Nikolaus
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