Coming close to the end of David Graeber’s marvellous Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) I encountered the following:
How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world—in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union? One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and the rebuilding of the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around. This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, the apparatus is just a drag on the system; all those guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and don’t really produce anything, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down—along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with. Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.
In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, [Graeber seems to be referring to the 2008 financial meltdown here] we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.
But what has brought this situation about? Let me assert that in the West at least, the two great systems of hope, as we may call them, have been Christianity and socialism—perhaps most specifically, Marxism. Socialism has been betrayed by many of its so-called friends and alleged proponents in the form of party dictatorships, while being ruthlessly stamped out in hearts, minds, and the world by its enemy, capital. Christianity has been co-opted by worldly power largely into two camps: an ostensibly apolitical religion concerned solely with private faith and individual salvation on the one hand, and on the other hand a grotesque corruption of the Word of God into an aggressively and absurdly pro-capitalist, even fascist direction. This perverse politics is not even a parody of Christianity, but an outright contradiction. American Christian fundamentalism is as much a contradiction of Christianity as the Soviet Union was of Socialism (see Noam Chomsky, “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism”).
We are accustomed to looking at politics in terms of “Right” and “Left.” This is useful. (Of course, these useful labels are also routinely abused out of dishonesty or ignorance, as when the corporate media and those who use it as their only source of information refer to Democrats or liberals as “the Left”—cavalierly waiving socialism, communism, anarchism and anyone who actually is a leftist out of existence, or perhaps pretending that Hilary Clinton’s views are but a hairsbreadth to the right of Karl Marx’s). However, we might also look at politics in terms of hope versus despair.
For it is only the Left, whether secular or religious, that has offered us any hope. The Right is another matter. Whereas the Left says that we can change things fundamentally, and for the better, such hopes tend to bring sneers of contempt to the faces of the Right, which proudly invokes “realism,” or perhaps “human nature,” or “the will of God” as in Luther’s conviction that the Almighty had given power and authority to the princes and so on. On a theological level, the religious wing of the Left sees God as working not only in some otherworldly heaven, but has plans for this world, that may well include upheaval and revolution, but do not include writing the world off.
On the specifically religious plane, Left and Right are literally worlds apart. The religious Left takes seriously the Biblical claim that “God so loved the world…” but the religious Right can’t wait to see him turn it into a fire pit. Paradoxically, while the Right is therefor very otherworldly (in a most unhealthy sense) it preaches what is in fact a worldly gospel that absolutely loses sight of the poor and oppressed, handing over power and authority to the rich: the very people scripture most often castigates.
Despair is a choice, and it is political.
For what “liberals,” the “woke” or “politically correct,” for all their faults–real, imagined or exaggerated–have in common is a belief that we can and therefor should improve things in major ways, that merely tinkering with the status quo is not enough. The endless tirades since the late 80s or early 90s about “PC” and how everyone, apparently, is held in holy terror of its hysterical dictates mask what is in fact a deeper fear: that we can and therefor must change the world.
Hope can be frightening.
What really pains the Right is the possibility that that liberal/leftist realm is actually pointing out our real responsibilities, and our real powers, if we but use them. And this call to action, if correct, alleviates us all from our excuses to do nothing.
That is the real terror: responsibility.
But in fact, the problem runs deeper, and is more interesting than that. A politics of mere responsibility, though it would be an immense improvement over the slash and burn mentality of capital, has the same weakness as religion does when it loses its heart and degenerates into phariseeism. “Thou shalt not,” in the long run, or “thou shalt” does not have the staying power in public or personal life that is needed for real change. A genuine sense of ethical responsibility easily degenerates into a prim and censorious temperament, and lacks the power needed to overcome the darker elements of individuals or systems.
And what the Left and Right have often had in common is this phariseeism.
What is the answer? Perhaps I should leave that discussion for a later post.