Nationalistic game

The message has been scrambled. Can you help the
Nationalist/Anti-Imperialist head of state put the pieces back into
their proper sequence so that he can get the message out to the people ?

"to be convened over the coming months"
"yes, mistakes have been made,"
"the next meeting of the State Council and the proposed legislative
changes"
"we accept our part of responsibility for the mistakes"
"within the framework of the constitution"
"they will be severely punished, to the full extent of the law"
"orders were not carried out as they should have"
"and we acknowledge the seriousness of the mistakes"
"Foreign states are working behind the scenes to divide us"
"will strive to correct these mistakes"
"some high-ranking officials are guilty of corruption"
"More freedom will be granted and the legitimate demans of the masses
will be addressed"
"I would like all citizens to be patient"
"the people must not fall for these ploys mastermined by foreign
imperialist media"
"we must trust in the strength of our people, united, and to the
valiance of our armed forces, to weather this storm"
"and to return to their work duties knowing that they are helping build
a new, greater country"

Social networks and "leaderless" revolutions

Leaderless Revolution sounds amazing. Sounds like Council Communism come
true : workers organize THEIR OWN revolution, self-manage their own
affairs, take over from the bosses and run the factories in the
interests of the Working Class. The dream of so many Revolutionary
Syndicalists (IWW, CGT, CNT, ...) come true.

However, "lederless" does mean "rudderless". I mean, workers
demonstrating for bread and an end to a promised lifetime of
humiliation, powerlessness and misery, are conscious of who their enemy
is : the bourgeoisie. But they also need to be aware of their own
strength, of their capacity to organize by themselves and of their
ability to REPLACE THE BOURGEOISIE. Such a degree of class consciousness
emerges from the class struggle, is primarily fostered by union activity
empowering people in the workplace to say f*** you to the boss, and
necessitates organizing from the bottom-up throughout a whole nation.
Workers assemble, debate, get info from other localities, debate, call
for regional assemblies, debate, draw up proposals, debate, send these
proposals to the regional assemblies, etc.
Twitter can immensely assist in this task, by making the flow of
information bi-directional. A clear picture of what is going on and the
contributions of each region can rapidly enable workers to form a
picture of the global situation and further their local debates. How
many tanks ? How many weapons ? Which local lackey has fled ? Which
factories are in revolt ? What are the international reactions ? Who is
trying to betray the revolution ?
So social networks are forging the demise of Capitalism (I'm not
kidding). They are the main force driving the increased social
inter-connectedness of workers as opposed to the Capitalist forces
striving to individualize, separate, monitor, transform each worker into
an interchangeable automaton. Marx knew that the social organization
necessary for Capitalism was at the same time the ultimate limit of that
mode of production. Capitalism brings together billions of individuals,
interconnects them through production, and yet limits their dealings
with each other by mediating them through market forces. That is a
contradiction. No man is an island anymore. By providing a means for
workers to communicate INSTANTLY the world over, Capitalism is extending
the process of bringing together disparate producers into a single
factory that meant that workers became suddenly aware of their potential
in the late 19th century. The whole world has been brought into a single
factory, with manufacturing in China, retail in California, accountancy
in Bangalore, advertising in London, ... But now, workers can
communicate with each other, something Marx would have found wonderful
in the extreme.
Soon twitting will be used for precisely that purpose : to galvanize a
revolution, to bring re-enforcements where they are needed, to relay
calls for workers' councils, to express the rage and frustration of
millions, to re-kindle hope, to help a factory restart production under
workers' management, to thwart secret dealings by the bosses and the
army, to indicate which army units are defecting, where weapons are to
be found, to organize the mass encirclement of Army barracks by hundreds
of thousands of civilians...
The only card THEY can play is always the same : Nationalism. Listen to
US, trust in US, obey US. OUR trump cards are of course CLASS and
INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY.

Marxism and Buddhism

Buddhism and Marxism have quite a good deal in common.

On Marxmail, Greg McDonald wrote :

Buddhists have lots of good ideas, if you can
separate the wheat from the chaff.

Agreed. Both are materialist philosophies, both hold inter-personal relationships as
the material basis for causality, both downplay the role of the individual ego and
ascribe it to a nexus of factors caused by external causality, both envision
change as a complex, dialectical process.
The main difference of course, is that Buddhism, while sympathetic to Marxism,
sees a change within the relationships of production as insufficient to achieve
true "enlightenment". Buddhism focuses on the recognition by an individual that
his/her "self" does not really exist but is the result of attachment to identity brought
about by external sensory stimuli. There is no "me", there is just constant
thought brought about by external stimuli.
Marxists, while regarding this emphasis on understanding the non-existence of the ego as
irrelevant, will have nothing to object to Buddhist psychology as such.
Stimuli-like/dislike-craving/hatred-idea of "self"-reaction-new inter-personal causality which
restarts the cycle. The only way to freedom is not through God, according to Buddhists, but through
recognizing that the "self" is not static, but a process of stimuli/reaction ."Letting go of attachments" is the way to happiness according to Buddhism.
This is a very, very long process (dozens of years of arduous self-reflection), before an individual can attain "nirvana".

God, Materialism and the Bible

First posted on Marxmail.

The old testament contains many, many strata, written at very different 
stages, in extremely varied circumstances. It is a complex document that 
cannot be easily resumed as "the triumph of private property and 
patriarchy".
In fact, at its core, there is a certain tilting of the Old Testament 
towards pastoralism, visible in the importance given to sheep and the 
fact that Jews had to pay "compensation" for the lives of their sons by 
sacrificing lambs (redemption through lamb sacrifice) "in exchange" for 
a son :

Exodus 13:2 "Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring 
of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether man or animal.

And every first male thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and if thou wilt not 
redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck: and all the firstborn of man 
among thy children shalt thou redeem.

and it came to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let us go, that the LORD 
slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man, 
and the firstborn of beast: therefore I sacrifice to the LORD all that 
openeth the matrix, being males; but all the firstborn of my children I 
redeem.
"

Hence the tradition of redeeming a male son with the sacrifice of a 
lamb, which in modern judaism is merely symbolical.

This equivalence between lamb and first male son is thus deeply present 
in Judaism and by extension Christianity ("Jesus is the lamb of God sent 
to reddeem through his blood the sins of mankind").. It goes back to 
very old practices among the pastoral tribes that would later be 
amalgamted within the so-called "Israelites".

Of course, the Old Testament then goes on to give a spurious 
"explanation" for such practices through the imaginary history of the 
flight from Egypt, a narrative that provides an explanation for daubing 
the door of the dwelling with lamb-blood (to ward of the spirit of the 
Lord who comes looking for the first-born child), celebrating PAssover 
(bitter herbs, lambs business, because of the great hast to escape the 
PAhroah's army) and quite a few other, otherwise "unexplainable" 
elements in Jewish folklore (ritual cleanliness for example).

The Old Testament thus contains a lot of evidence regarding the original 
nature of the various "Jewish" tribes that came to Palestine from the 
2nd millenium BC onward : they were pastoralists, whose mythology was 
overwhelmingly centered around sheep-rearing and for whom the 
lamb-conception season (easter) was of primordial importance. No triumph 
of agriculture, but a very slow, and begrudging transition from pastoral 
nomadism to settled cultivation.

The redeeming through a  lamb instead of the sacrifice of a  human babe, 
the symbolical equivalence of lamb and male chile, the notion of 
sacrifice (remember Isaac) is common to many pastoralist societies 
around the globe. That it left an imprint so profound (through the idea 
of "redemption" and eventually to that of Christ's "sacrifice") in later 
re-writings of the Old Testament myths (6th to 3rd century BC, when the 
inhabitants of Palestine were agriculturists and no longer nomads), is 
proof enough of the persistence of Pastoral and nomadic motives in the OT.

So I wouldn't say that the OT is the triumph of Private property over 
Pastoralism (which is quite Patriarchal by the way, the head of the 
family being in complete control !), but rather the re-interpretation, 
over several centuries, of Palestinian mythology and it's re-fitting 
into an agriculturist society. Two millenia of lamb/first-born son 
redemption (equivalence) symbolism still stubbornly refusing to adapt to 
new conditions. Right into the 1century BC (or 20th century AD for that 
matter). What more proof do you need that mythological/symbolical 
structures are incredibly resistant to change, and persist long after 
the mode of production that gave rise to them has ceesed to exist. The 
old concepts they contain are still operative, even though the actual 
content has long-ago vanished. And are still capable of being 
incorporated (even create) new beliefs.