[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

[E. Wayne Johnson]

The Philadelphia Liberty Bell bears a peculiar inscription:

/Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof 
Lev XXV, v. X

/It should be noted that this is a fragment of "Leviticus 25.10", not 
the entire "verse".
Although it is a complete thought and the use of this verse fragment by 
the Quakers who commissioned the
Liberty Bell is appropriate and legitimate, it is useful to consider the 
whole verse in the context
of that American Republic which venerates the fractured toquassen and 
shuns its message.

  Leviticus 25. 10: "And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim 
liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof:
  it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his 
possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.

Leviticus 25.10 is part of a larger section (Lev. 23 through Lev. 25) 
which deals with rules of economics, production, distribution of 
property and wealth,
finance, and ethics, and it is punctuated with strong admonitions about 
the divine inspiration and the practical spiritual implications.

Implicit is Leviticus 23-25 is the importance of social and economic 
equality, and the recognition that left to itself,
the game of economics and the outrageous fortunes of the business cycle 
proceed to a endpoint of masters and slaves.
This section of the Levitical law creates an enforced resetting of 
property, slavery, and debt to the original default state
every 50 years, it forbids usury and exploitation, and it blows against 
the creation of empires, economic classes and cumulative inequality of 
opportunity.

The underlying spiritual concepts of Lev 23-25 are demonstrated under 
the new covenant, every man in the Kingdom of God acting as led by the 
Spirit (Jer 31.33),
those with two coats willingly giving to those with only one (Lu 3:11), 
willingly trusting in Providence for their needs (Lu 9.3), sharing 
freely all things
in common (Acts 2.44, Acts 4.32), and egalitarianism without coercion or 
taking by force (2 Cor 8.1-15).

But what we have is the stupid and immoral party (the Dems) versus the 
self-righteous and evil party both making
merchandise of us all and perverting progress to petty contentions.  
It's easy to see that both sides
are wrong.



On 8/22/2009 10:21 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> John W. wrote:
>> ...The two truly lasting contributions made by the Sixties were the 
>> Civil
>> Rights Movement and the Women's Movement.  Where those class 
>> struggles? Only
>> in part, I submit.
>
> You omit the major movement that unites the two you mention, the 
> anti-war movement.
>
> Class struggle is rarely perspicuous -- i.e., it's usually expressed 
> through other conflicts. But it perhaps emerges more clearly over time:
>
>    "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, 
> and people are at last compelled to face with sober senses, their real 
> conditions of life, and their relations with their kind" (from the 
> aforementioned tract).
>
> Slavoj Zizek notes "a fundamental difference between the goals of 
> feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist struggles on the one hand, and 
> class struggle on the other. In the first case, the goal is to 
> translate antagonism into difference (the peaceful coexistence of 
> sexes, religions, ethnic groups), but the goal of class struggle is 
> precisely the opposite: to aggravate class difference into class 
> antagonism. To set up a series of equivalences between race, gender 
> and class is to obscure the peculiar logic of class struggle, which 
> aims at overcoming, subduing, even annihilating the other – if not its 
> physical being, then at least its socio-political role and function. 
> In the one case, we have a horizontal logic involving mutual 
> recognition among different identities; in the other, we have the 
> logic of struggle with an antagonist."  ("Over the Rainbow" 
> <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/zize01_.html> -- the article repays the 
> difficult of getting through it...)
>
> The goal is reconciliation on the basis of justice for races, genders, 
> etc.  But reconciliation is impossible between exploiter and exploited 
> without their giving up their roles.  --CGE
>
>
> John W. wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 3:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook 
>> <galliher at illinois.edu <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>
>> I'd say corporate capitalism managed to co-opt the counter-culture 
>> over the course of a generation, roughly the late 1960s to the 
>> mid-1990s, with the crucial change coming about half-way through, 
>> with the rise of neo-liberalism. (David Harvey's book with that title 
>> is the best general account I know.)
>>
>> Serious discussion of revolution as an historical phenomenon rather 
>> quickly became ads for "Revolutionary Jeans!," etc.
>>
>>
>> Yes.  And the factory workers, after calling hippies "faggots" in the 
>> 1960s for their long hair, started wearing their hair long themselves 
>> sometime in the 1970s.  And watched passively, dumbly, as private 
>> sector union membership
>>  declined, factories were shuttered, and their jobs moved offshore.
>>
>>
>>
>> But it's certainly true that the uncomfortable questions and 
>> challenges to the assumptions of American society that go under the 
>> collective name of "the
>>  sixties" had an unsettling effect.  That's why the sixties and its
>> "excesses" are generally excoriated by bien-pensant liberals and
>> conservatives alike. (For a not unimportant example, see the 
>> condemnation of
>> the sixties in "The Audacity of Hope.")
>>
>> American society suppressed but didn't answer the sixties' questions, 
>> because
>>  they were questions about human flourishing, which is necessarily 
>> retarded
>> to a greater or lesser degree by the exploitation necessary to 
>> capitalism.
>>
>> Nevertheless American society is a good bit more civilized today than 
>> it was in the 1960s, largely as a result of those questions. (As an 
>> example of the poets' -- in this case TV writers -- getting there 
>> first, see these questions
>>  posed however obscurely in the current series "Mad Men.")
>>
>> I think you could argue that all real revolutionary movements need to 
>> invent new media of communication, from the early Christian 
>> movement's invention of the codex on.
>>
>> The new media of the 1960s were the underground newspaper and 
>> alternative radio, now both sadly in almost complete decay.
>>
>>
>> Let us not forget Robert Crumb and Zap Comix.  :-)
>>
>>
>>
>> They've gone the way of an independent labor press (and radio) of an 
>> earlier American generation.  They've been supplanted by this box I'm 
>> typing on; it and parallel IT will probably soon destroy hard-copy 
>> newspapers, no bad thing.
>>
>> But where's the social revolution that should go with new media? 
>> Maybe we'll be surprised.
>>
>> You agree with the Old Man who wrote (when he was a young man), "The 
>> history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class 
>> struggles."
>>
>>
>> Yes and no.  The two truly lasting contributions made by the Sixties 
>> were the
>>  Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement.  Where those class
>> struggles? Only in part, I submit.
>>
>>
>>
>> (His tract etc. are worth re-reading.)  When you comin' back, red 
>> writer? --CGE
>>
>>
>> John W. wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook 
>> <galliher at illinois.edu <mailto:galliher at illinois.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>
>> "... the Counter-Culture hung up the Out of Business sign sometime in 
>> the Nineties, finished off by identity politics and general 
>> self-satisfaction..."
>>  --<http://www.counterpunch.org/>
>>
>> Commenting weekly in those days on "the news of the week and its 
>> coverage by
>>  the media" on News from Neptune as I was, I'd say that Alex Cockburn 
>> has
>> this about right.
>>
>>
>>
>> I haven't read Cockburn's article; his essays are invariably too long 
>> for my
>>  limited attention span.  But I submit that in the so-called
>> "counter-culture" essentially BECAME the culture.  In some ways our
>> generation, that of the 60s, was absorbed into the existing culture; in
>> certain ways it profoundly changed the culture; and in yet other ways 
>> the
>> culture recoiled in horror and moved in the opposite direction. But 
>> isn't
>> that simply the way of the world? Thesis ---> antithesis ---> 
>> synthesis , for
>> good or ill?
>>
>> What we need now, I guess, is a NEW counter-culture.  The closest 
>> thing I've
>>  seen to that in this country is the development of the independent 
>> media movement starting in the late 1990s.  Last I looked, the U-C 
>> Independent Media Center was still very much alive and well.  But of 
>> course the new counter-culture needs to affect more than just the 
>> media, important as that is.
>>
>> I further submit, though, that as long as human beings populate the 
>> planet and compete for finite resources, there will ALWAYS be war.  I 
>> dare to imagine that American culture could change to allow for 
>> universal health care
>>  if the political and public will was there.   We could inject a bit 
>> of "socialism" into our "free-market capitalism" without demonstrable 
>> ill effects.  But human nature does not change, and war will be with 
>> us always.
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