Category: Uncategorized

Posted on

ON THE NECESSITY OF A GENERAL RESURRECTION OF THE WORLD

In these grim and dangerous times the forces of darkness conspire to make us despair and write ourselves off.

The problem with a conservative, or should we even say mainstream Christian eschatology, is that it implies that whereas resurrection is understood as overcoming death, as the person coming back from the dead with new life and new existence, thereby defeating death, there is no such equivalent for the world as such. (By “world” here I mean the world God made, and which has been transformed or built upon by us in history for better or worse.)  That is, the commonly held eschatological attitudes seem to imply not that the world will die and be resurrected, but that it will die permanently, and be replaced by a new world.  Though this new Earth may be immortal, the one it replaced will be dead forever.  But in that sense and problematically, death’s victory over the world will be sealed as permanent.  The individual my rise from the grave triumphant, but the world he or she had lived in will have been condemned forever.

Religion thus often exhorts us to be better people, to give over this sin or that one, to be more loving, or faithful, or truthful, or whatever.  It does not claim that moral perfection is possible this side of the grave, but does say improvement is possible, and commanded by God.  But at the same time, any real improvement in the politics of the world, its economic or social structures, is usually rejected by religion as either being in vain, or even outright blasphemous: an attempt to force the coming of God’s kingdom before God’s own good time.

But are our deeds, great and small, in the course of human history of any consequence in the long run, or are they not?  Do we have ultimately no place in the creation as actual creators, or as J.R.R. Tolkien might have put it, sub-creators?  Or must we as a species be stripped clean of all history and reformatted with entirely new programs, rendering the previous ones not only forgotten but vanished without a trace?

I am not talking about “salvation by works,” but the salvation of works.  Do our works, our lives, our history as a species, have meaning or not?  Nor can this question be escaped by asserting our works have nothing to do with our salvation.  Might not works be important in the eyes of God without saving anybody?

If there is not some form of continuity between the dead person or world on the one hand, and the resurrected person or world on the other, there is no resurrection.  Parents having another child after the first one dies is no victory over death, and no salvation of the dead child.  Nor will it undo their grief, no matter how much they may be rejuvenated or rejoice in their new offspring.  The idea of healing the deep family wound simply by replacing the beloved is obscene.

Likewise, there is something profoundly nihilistic in believing in resurrection of the individual, but not of the world.  Individuals do not exist as such, detached from the world, any more than we find healthy rosebushes floating about in outer space.  What makes the rose what it is, is in part its connection to its world via soil, light, water and air, all the surrounding insects and microorganism that are a part of its life.  Likewise, if we are, as St. Paul says, organs in Christ’s body, then it is true as Donne says that “no man is an island, entire of itself.”  For the full salvation of the individual, the salvation or redemption—not mere replacement–of the world is needed.

If there is no new Earth, a resurrected Earth that is, a reborn Earth, then what we have is fertile ground for frustrated and vengeful fantasies of annihilation.  The Christian eschatologist writes for himself permission to look upon the destruction of the world with glee, as if he will be standing aside with hands on hips, nodding in approval as an ancient enemy gets its comeuppance.  (Christian eschatology is far too often a way of allowing a sickening misanthropy hide out in the open.)  We give ourselves permission to shit on the creation, even to destroy it, because, after all, it is doomed to eternal nonexistence in any case.

It is deeply revolting and an offense to reason to assert that while charity to the poor is smiled upon by the Lord, the improvement of economic systems such that such charity is not so much needed is seen as some kind of impiety.

God’s creation was and is good.  And it is to be saved.  And if we as individuals are to be saved, what we have made in this world, however much may have to be cast into the flames either for destruction or purification, was not given into our power to make only for us to make it in vain.

But in effect, with this mainstream eschatology, it is implied that we are to be like transplanted rosebushes.  In so far as we thought we saw God in the world around us, even though we were also conscious of its terrible corruption, we were apparently deluded.

If history is to be wiped out, then it was always and already meaningless.  Everything we have ever done is of no significance.  But if that is so, why the relentless nagging of scripture and conscience to do this thing and not do that thing?

A priority of being over doing I can understand and tend to agree with.  But the annihilation of the deed is nihilism.

Posted on

I DON’T GIVE A DAMN IF PEOPLE ARE TIRED OF HITLER/TRUMP COMPARSONS: WHY TRUMP MUST BE PROSECUTED

Go into any well stocked bookstore or library and you are certain to find books about Nazis.  Consider the subject of how these Nazis got into power in Germany, and you will see these books deal with it in varying degrees of competence.  Indeed, the issue of how such terrible people could attain power, apparently with the approval or at least acquiescence of millions of Germans, is one of the topics that fascinates Western culture endlessly.

The reasons usually cited in popular public discourse for the rise of Nazism include such things as Germany’s history of authoritarianism and anti-Semitism, bitterness over defeat in WWI and over the terms of the treaty of Versailles, and despair and rage over the economic consequences of the great post-war inflation and the later Great Depression.

But of all the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power, there are some that are commonly overlooked.  And the reason they are overlooked is that these reasons threaten our society’s conception of capitalist, so-called “democracy” as the unquestionable apex of what is fair, or at least, of what is possible in the world.  These overlooked reasons are also neglected because they threaten to shine a positive light on the political Left: those people whom we are supposed to assume are at best well-intentioned idiots, or at worst Stalinist monsters–that is, when they are not ignored entirely, which they often are in discussions of how the Nazis gained power.

But let me be more specific about one of these reasons for Hitler’s success: essentially, the radical Right, even before the Nazi party had gained a large following, murdered hundreds of leaders of the Left and got away with it in every case.  The relatively few political murders committed by the Left were punished by heavy sentences, including death.

In 1922 one Emil Julius Gumbel published a book called Vier Jahre politischer Mord (Four Years of Political Murder).  In this book he analyzes the political assassinations committed by the Right and the Left since November 9, 1918, the beginning of the German Revolution.  Keep in mind that at this time the Nazi party was nowhere near as large and powerful as it would become eventually.  However, many of those right-wing people whose essential beliefs and attitudes were those of the Nazis, and who would eventually willingly join them, were already active and violent in other organizations such as the various Freikorps militias.

I can do no better at this point than present some very illuminating quotations from Gumbel himself.

Correspondingly, the right is inclined to hope that it could annihilate the left opposition, which is carried by hopes for a radically different economic order, by defeating its leaders.  And the right has done it: all of the leaders of the left who openly opposed the war and whom the workers trusted–Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Eisner, [Gustav] Landauer, [Leo] Jogisches, et al–are dead.

The effectiveness of this technique is for the moment indisputable.  The left no longer has any significant leaders, no more people toward whom the masses have the feeling: he has suffered so much for us, dared so much for us that we can trust him blindly.  The working-class movement has thereby doubtlessly been set back by years.  This success is all the greater since in no case has punishment occurred.

The unbelievable leniency of the court is also quite well known to the perpetrators. . . . Today the [right wing] perpetrator risks nothing at all.  Powerful organizations with an extensive network of confidantes over the whole country provide him with shelter, protection, and material sustenance.  “Right-minded” bureaucrats and police chiefs supply falsified papers for potentially necessary trips abroad. . . .  The beneficiaries live magnificently and happily in the best hotels.

Here is a summary of some of the statistics Gumbel collected on these events:

Political Killings Committed

                                                        Political killings                Political killings

.                                                              by the Left                   by the Right

Total number of murders                         22                                354

Number of convictions                             38                                  24

Duration of incarceration per murder    15 years                           4 months

Number of executions                              10                                   0

Gumbel also states,

Virtually all of the relatively small number of assassinations of reactionaries have been atoned for through severe penalties; of the very numerous assassinations of men of the left, on the other hand, not one has been atoned.  Credulousness, wrongly understood orders, or actual or purported insanity were always the bases of the defense to the extent that trials even took place.  Most of the proceedings were quashed either by the prosecutor’s office or the criminal court.

Gumbel also discusses how newspapers could call for the murder of specific individuals and be punished only by small fines.

Gumbel also relates how his earlier work, Two Years of Political Murder, which analyzed the earlier years of these same incidents, was received by the establishment.  He had thought that either this work would be believed by the judicial system, which would then punish the murderers, or that he would be accused of slander and be punished himself.  But neither happened.

Although the brochure in no way went without notice, there has not been a single effort on the part of the authorities to dispute the correctness of my contentions.  On the contrary, the highest responsible authority, the Reich minister of justice, expressly confirmed my contentions on more than one occasion.  Nevertheless, not a single [right wing] murderer has been punished.

So people always ask, why is it everyone in Germany was apparantly a Nazi, or a least a person who did not care enough to oppose them?  The answer, in part, is this:  there were anti-fascists in Germany (especially in the working class) who were numerous, active, and brave, and their leaders were murdered with impunity when Hitler was still in his political infancy.  This was one of the ways in which the capitalist structure of Germany (which had been shaken but not overthrown by revolution) paved the way for Hitler’s rise to power.  To ignore this fact is to slander the better elements of German society by ignoring them, and even more significantly, to slander the Left and the realistic hope it has always offered.

Gumbel also adds sobering words on how much of the public was suckered into accepting this murderous situation:

Public opinion in general approves of this procedure.  For clever propaganda has taught it that every enemy of militarism is a Spartacist, therefore an enemy of humanity, therefore open game.

Keep in mind that such propaganda was well underway when Hitler was no more than a gleam in Hindenburg’s eye.

Please keep in mind also that Gumbel’s work discusses only cases of premeditated, illegal killing of a well-known German by another German for domestic political motives, whereby the incident is characterized not as mass action but as an individual deed.  Four Years of Political Murder is not about deaths due to armed battles in the streets.  In these conflicts as well, however, killing by the Right far exceeded killing by the Left, and the violence of the Left was far more often used in self-defence than was the violence of the Right.  In other words, the German revolution was far less violent than the counter-revolution.  One could actually make a very strong case that the Left should have used a great deal more violence than it did.

Germany’s population in Gumbel’s time was approximately twice what Canada’s is now.  Were we to transpose Gumbel’s work to a fictional scenario set in Canada at the present time, we would be faced with a situation where, in four years, left wingers killed 11 people and were heavily punished in each case, and wherein right wingers killed 177 prominent, left-wing Canadians without one individual doing any serious time for this.

For anyone with their eyes open, the implications for America are even more alarming.  The tepid response of the Democrats to Donald Trump’s violent insurrection attempt sends the same message to the American Right what the German judiciary sent to the Nazis: do whatever you want; we will never get in your way.

Donald Trump must be prosecuted: yes, even if it means violence from his supporters.  For if the threat of that violence succeeds, it will be followed by far greater violence, just as the violence in the four years after the German revolution, horrible as it was, was dwarfed by the violence that followed when it helped to put Hitler into power.

Posted on

KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL; FRANCOIS JULLIEN

“Knowledge of good and evil” in the book of Genesis may not mean realizing the truth that good and evil already exist.  Knowledge of good and evil is not a “fall from innocence” in the sense that one had not heard of or even imagined evil but then comes to know of it.  The knowledge of good and evil comes about in the context of a non-dualistic universe where there is only good, and it needs no evil to set it off, to be its foil.  But to know good and evil is to fracture good into both, to create evil, unnecessarily.

The “knowledge” of good and evil here is not only an abstract knowledge, but more like “cleaving unto,” a knowledge in the erotic sense.  One emerges in a fallen world where good seems to need evil (even in the imagination) to exist as good.  This may well be the greatest evil of the situation.  (See also Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a marvellous exploration of this idea of “necessary evil.”)  One is leaving behind the knowledge (in both senses of that word) of an entirely good world, to a world where this pure good cannot be imagined, cannot be made workable, even as a theory.  To the fallen world, the world where good and evil are known, a world of pure good seems an absurdity.

It is in this context then, that in order to save us from this situation, to restore us to a world without evil, Christianity offers the solution of belief in Christ.  At this point the words of Francois Jullien become illuminating:

“Because it involves ipseity—selfness in itself—believe takes on a whole other meaning.  ‘Believe in’ (pisteúein eis, πιστευειν είζ), John often writes.  And, in fact, everything rides on the shift from ‘believing that’ [croire à] to ‘believing in’ [croire en].  What we believe when we believe that is from the start limited, constrained, objectivized (even when the belief is that God exists).  But believing in—i.e., in a self, in an ipseity—is not undefined but infinite.  When I say ‘I believe in you’ I have no limit in view.  Moreover, believing that can be detailed and itemized: I can believe that X is and not that Y is, and thus make a selection.  But belief in is by necessity whole; it calls for an absolute.  When I say that I believe in you I no longer wonder “what” in you I believe in.  To put things differently, believing that entails a necessary measure of credulity, even if I have good reason to believe, because I might just as easily not believe what I believe.  I recognize its hypothetical character (e.g., belief that Santa Claus exists).  Whereas belief in is not credulous but trusting.  By the phrase ‘believe in yourself’—one that a parent might say to a child, or vice versa, or that one lover might tell another—I mean that I am counting on you, that I am expecting something of you, that I am placing my hopes in you, in you as yourself, in your ipseity, or that I am expecting everything of you.  Thus belief in entails a self, an ipseity, on both sides.  When I believe in someone I involve the entirety of myself.  What I believe in in the person in whom I believe is what he himself reveals of himself, but also what he conceals within.  Belief that might be open to convincing, but its truth will still rest on insufficient grounds; I would prefer knowledge that was certain.  But the truth of belief in, precisely because it entails an as-in-oneself, will not be measured by a truth subject to proof; it is its own guarantee and can claim no other.  You must believe in me, says Christ, and not believe what they say of me.  But hasn’t the Church, with its dogma, been compelled to shift from belief in (ipseity) to belief that (identity)—and made the latter into the ‘faith’ that tempers its armor?” 

(Francois Jullien, Resources of Christianity English edition, 2021, Polity Press, pp. 82-84)

Posted on

UNIVERSALISM AND A CHRISTIAN LEFT

In That All Shall be Saved (Yale UP, 2019) David Bentley Hart says,

“The truth is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned.” (78)

It is one thing to argue that a just and loving God might annihilate or even torture forever some of his children.  Infernalists and universalists clearly are on opposite sides of the fence here; the issue is usually argued on the basis of reason, scripture, or both.

But what does it mean spiritually or psychologically to believe in an infernalist God?

What does it mean politically?

I think that Christian infernalists are houses divided against themselves.  As Hart asserts, probably many Christians only think they believe in hell.

But might it be that infernalism has hamstrung the church?  Might it be that laying our arguments for infernalism aside, the infernalist position sets up a God who, even if he can be justified on logical or scriptural grounds simply cannot be loved?  I believe so.  The god infernalists love (or think they love) is not lovable.  This cannot be stressed enough.  It is all very well to take a hard line on divine sovereignty and say that since God is God there are no ethical constraints above him to which he must comply.  But if what God does with this infinite right and power strikes us as abomination, how are we to love him?  We cannot.  We may proclaim that it is ourselves who are totally depraved in objecting to hell and to such a God, but whatever one makes of that argument we still cannot love the God of hellfire we claim to believe in.

If a Nobel Prize winning mathematician told you that 2+2=5 you might choose to believe he is right, even if you cannot see how.  But you have disqualified yourself from ever doing mathematics again.

And if a cruel and monstrous god is supposed to be love itself, that makes it more difficult for us to truly love ourselves or each other.  This is true in both the personal and political spheres.

So what is going on?

Why this insistence on the divine bogey, the horrific Nobodaddy?

Once one has swallowed the balderdash of infernalism, one can believe almost anything.  If an omnipotent deity wants to save everyone, but cannot because his hands, supposedly, are tied by our free will, what other social, political, economic monstrosities can be rationalized and accepted?  Feudalism, patriarchy, capitalism—one can do a song and dance and accept their necessity or even goodness if one can believe the holy, just, and loving creator of the universe will roast certain of his children over an open flame forever.

In effect, the church has corrupted itself by holding a form of moral idiocy close to its heart.  It does not help that the idiocy of infernalism has been believed by many people who are by no means idiots.  It seems that most thoroughly respected and even brilliant theologians have believed it.  The idiocy has been believed by people with loving hearts and a true desire to know Christ.

It is also notable that it tends to be the more politically and socially conservative of the church who are most likely to believe in hell and to emphasize it.  Could this situation be one of the reasons why Christianity and the Left have so often been at odds and even outright enemies?  By this I mean not only that leftists object to infernalism, but that there is something in the beliefs and attitudes behind infernalism that are inimical to the entire leftist project.

(It seems to be a common phenomenon to find people who are theologically brilliant, but politically obtuse.  Likewise, some of the most acute and perceptive political thinkers are blind or ignorant when it comes to matters of religion.)

Not that there has not always been a Christian Left, of course, but in his 2017 Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Penguin) Alec Ryrie asserts, “The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left” (7).

It is time for this Christian Left to arise.  We must tell the world that infernalism is not fundamental to the faith.

Even if one makes the case that the secular left from the 19th century onwards owes its sense of justice to Christianity, this is no reason for religious triumphalism.  What it means is that while the Church largely fumbled the ball by siding with the powerful, opposition to oppressive systems and ideologies like capitalism has been left largely to a secular Left, thereby deprived of the greater strength and spirit it might have had.

At numerous times and places the secular Left has had a stronger and more Christian ethic than the church.  I am convinced the church’s frequent hostility to the secular left comes in part from an unacknowledged moral envy the church has sometimes had when it failed to help the poor the left was in solidarity with.  Could it be the church’s ethic and spirit has been crippled by infernalism?  Could it be that a more ethically sensible Left found itself unable to cleave to a religion that demanded eternal torture for some malefactors?  I by no means advocate that Christianity should give up infernalism in order to gain more converts.  One can only justify universalism in the name of truth: whether or not that gets you more or fewer converts is not relevant.  But perhaps the secular Left has been more morally intelligent on numerous occasions.

Posted on

That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (2019) Yale University Press – by David Bentley Hart

A Quick Review

Christianity has a long-lasting problem: apparently, a just, merciful, and loving God will consign some persons to eternal suffering, or at the very least, eternal annihilation.  There seems to be a deep psychological or even ideological aversion to universalism, which is the idea that all persons, sooner or later, will be saved and eternally united with God.  So deeply entrenched is this aversion, that on the live chat feed of a YouTube featuring David Bentley Hart discussing universalism with several theologians, someone actually said (apparently in all seriousness) “universalism is depressing.”

David Bentley Hart is a Christian of the Eastern Orthodox Church and a scholar of religion.  His book is a defense of Universalism.  I have read defenses of universal salvation before, but none so bold as David Bentley Hart’s.  In fact, the last chapter, “Final Remarks,” begins thus:

Custom dictates and prudence advises that here, in closing, I wax gracefully disingenuous and declare that I am uncertain in my conclusions, that I offer them only hesitantly, that I entirely understand the views of those that take the opposite side of the argument, and that I fully respect contrary opinions on these matters.  I find, however, whether on account of principle or of pride, that I am simply unable to do this. (199)

I laughed out loud for sheer delight when I read this, because it is time the infernalist position not only be rejected, but rejected without quarter.  Indeed, Hart is even critical of Hans Urs von Balthasar, sometimes referred to as a “hopeful universalist,” because he wants to hold the infernalist and universalist positions apparently found in scripture “in a sustained ‘tension,’ without attempting any sort of final resolution or synthesis between them…. I [Hart] cannot quite suppress my suspicion that here the word ‘tension’ is being used merely as an anodyne euphemism for ‘contradiction’” (102-03).  It is encouraging to hear a scholar of Hart’s repute take such a bold stand.

The book addresses and refutes on a rational basis the usual objections to universalism.  One of these is that for human life to be meaningful humans must be free, and that genuine free will requires that individuals be free even to choose eternal hell, and that therefor damnation for some is at least possible.  Part of Hart’s critique of this view involves assailing the conception of freedom implied here.  Another objection to universalism is that God, being God, can do what he wants and is outside our paltry understanding of what we might call just, good, or loving, etc., and therefor can torture certain persons forever without in the least diminishing any of these qualities in himself.  Hart deals with this objection handily too, as well as others, showing that we cannot defend infernalism by letting our conception of the divine retreat into some ineffable mystery as a cover for sheer cruelty.

One thing this book does not do is undertake a thoroughgoing scriptural analysis of what the Bible might be saying about hell, nor does it pretend to do this.  Hart restricts the book mostly to a rational refutation of the idea of eternal hell.  I don’t know what his stance is on Biblical inerrancy or infallibility, but he is not prepared to sacrifice reason to scripture, if scripture speaks nonsense.

I have been asked more than once I the last few years whether, if I were to become convinced that Christian adherence absolutely requires a belief in a hell of eternal torment, this would constitute in my mind proof that Christianity should be dismissed as a self- evidently morally obtuse and logically incoherent faith.  And, as it happens, it would.  (208)

But it is not Hart’s contention that scripture does speak nonsense on this score.  He presents around the middle of the book numerous Bible passages which state or strongly suggest universalism.

To me it is surpassingly strange that, down the centuries, most Christians have come to believe that one class of claims—all of which are allegorical, pictorial, vague, and metaphorical in form—must be regarded as providing the “literal” content of the New Testament’s teaching regarding the world to come, while another class—all of which are invariably straightforward doctrinal statements—must be regarded as mere hyperbole.  (94)

If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.  (95)

Nor does Hart back off and give annihilationism (the belief that the damned are not tormented forever, but at some point annihilated) any quarter.

Hart is unintimidated by authority (Augustine or Aquinas, for example) or some idea of what we are “supposed” to believe according to such persons.  He has a distinct attraction to certain of the early church fathers, such as Gregory of Nyssa.  Calvin, however, comes in for some very hard knocks here.  In a YouTube somewhere (I quote from memory) Hart has joked, “some people think I hate Calvin.  And that’s because I do.”

Posted on

We Must Put Anti-Capitalism on the Liberal Table

It is the achievement of progressive politics (i.e., liberals and leftists, broadly defined) that issues of race, sex, and gender, as they challenge an unjust status quo, remain paramount in the public eye.  But what of an actual alternative to capitalism?  A defining difference between leftists and liberals is that the former criticize capitalism as such, and advocate for a different way of running the world, whereas the unquestioned liberal assumption is that only capitalism is possible or desirable.  According to the liberal, capitalism may have very serious problems, but they can be fixed: capitalism is and must be here to stay.

The essence of capitalism is that a certain class—the bourgeoisie, or in particular the big bourgeoisie or large corporations—own and/or control most of the means of production: land, machinery, patents, natural resources, etc.  They do this through their use of capital.  Whether the capitalists work hard or are as lazy as a sack of oats, the real source of their wealth is the wealth they already own, wealth created mostly from other people’s labour.  Even those very few capitalists who started out poor, no matter how hard they work, rise to the top mostly on the backs of the working class.  Even the most well-intentioned capitalists pay this class less than its labour is worth; if they didn’t, they would perish as capitalists.  The lie capitalism spreads is that the capitalists’ phenomenal wealth is the just desserts owed to the hardest working members of the global community, and that somehow, the 1% that owns between 30% and 50% of the world’s assets really does 30% to 50% of the world’s work.

If you believe it is humanly possible to work anything close to that hard, I have wasted enough of your time already and you may as well go elsewhere.

Liberals need to question capitalism: not just its excesses or abuses, or its favouring of white males, but capitalism as such, where exploitation is built-in regardless of anybody’s intentions.  An international rainbow coalition of the exploiting class, where all racial, gender, and sexual groups were proportionately represented within the palaces of privilege, would only rearrange the various identities of who are the rich thieves and who are their poor victims.  The amount of robbery and injustice would not decrease significantly.

The critique of capitalism, however, should not be done in competition with the usual liberal concerns over sex, race, and gender.  Rather, a critique of and opposition to capitalism has a great deal to do with these other forms of oppression and is a tremendous boon to the understanding of them.  When you think about it, anti-capitalism has a great deal to say about these other issues of oppression.

Consider these examples, which only scratch the surface:

 Traditionally, women in many times and places have not been allowed to own land: the most fundamental means of production.  They have been forced to rely for sustenance on fathers or husbands.  They often have not been allowed to have the same jobs as men, and where they have made progress and acquired some access to the same jobs, they have often been paid less.

Indigenous people have been oppressed when their means of production–the land–was stolen from them.  Because they were pushed onto reserves, where the economic potential of that land tends to be minimal, the oppression continues.

Africans, in being turned into slaves and taken to foreign lands, not only lost their means of production, but became the means of production: the fruits of which belonged to others.

A perennial problem with LGBTQS people is on-the-job harassment, or even the loss of their jobs if they are open about who they are.

Also, the exploitation of all workers, regardless of dis/ability, race, gender, or sexual orientation is inherent in capitalism.  The Marxist labour theory of value shows clearly that capitalism is founded on the theft of labour.  And even without familiarity with the ins and outs of that theory, we can see the bourgeoisie does not get rich in proportion to its labour.

Posted on

FIRST POST

Let me say, first of all, that I hate the word “facilitate” with the fiery passion of ten thousand suns.