…to win the battle of democracy

Back when it seemed a possibility that a coalition government would take over parliament, my dad and I started a short conversation about the meaning of our vote. He was angry that the party he’d helped vote into a minority government was about to be reduced to the opposition. “What about my vote?” he asked. I asked him the same question. I was joking. I’d voted for the communist party, so my ‘voice’ was useless. Really, voting has little more use to me than backing a hockey team. But my father asked, “no one wanted your party, why is that?” Yes. Why is it people are not voting communist? I know it wasn’t a real question, I mean, I know he wasn’t looking for a real exploration of the possible reasons why. But I saw it as a baited hook, and bit. I started writing an essay, but it’s way too long, meandering and not really much of a conversation starter.

Before this conversation started, just before the last election, I had written an open letter to my father explaining the reasons why I was voting communist. It wasn’t very persuasive. I sent the letter to every member of my family on facebook, and I am pretty sure it had no effect whatsoever on the votes my family cast. One of my cousins accused me of just fooling around. There’s something to this. Communication needs a hook. Talking about communism is talking about old news, an already decided subject, there’s nothing to connect the talk to. There’s no reason to talk about it. Bringing it up now has a bit of lunacy to it. My cousin knows I’m not crazy, so if I’m talking about communism, I must just be fooling around. Today there is a hook. The news of 1200 jobs lost in Windsor (again this year), gives us a reason to talk about capitalism (masters of industry and wage slaves), the violence of profits before people, and the socialist idea of worker control.

I’ve been thinking and reading about and writing down some of the reasons people aren’t voting communist, but I’ve also been aware of the madness associated with talking such nonsense. There are differences between capitalist values and communist values that require a complex conversation, rethinking how we live on the level of the day-to-day. It requires becoming aware of our condition. I’ve asked my network of friends and family into this conversation, so I should start with something.

Let’s talk about the word ‘communism’…

From the response to my last open letter, it’s clear that ‘communism’ is understood as a dirty word. I just recently read an article about ‘socialism’ being used as a slur. After you accept the fact that corporations produce our culture and meaning, it makes perfect sense that these powers would try to poison the words that will launch a revolution; democratize production; replace capitalist controlled corporate power with worker controlled corporate power. Revolutionaries understand ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ to mean ‘the creation of something which does not yet exist.’  The words signify new relationships to each other, where radical democratic associations of workers motivated by human development take control of production. The American and French Revolutions replaced monarchy with hierarchy. The coming revolution will replace hierarchy with anarchy. The coming revolution will be the end of profit-for-the-few and representation-by-the-few. The revolution will bring new values of human (species) development and radical democracy.

Freedom not power

[This was a facebook note]

Watching the Chicago 8 trial documentary I was struck by the forced conformity. There was a very large group of Americans who were expressing a different way of being. The point is that a social dialogue about social change was in play, and the state mobilized its armed forces to silence the peaceful movement for change. It became apparent that conformity is the only option. Sure we are free to live within the parameters of the system, and sure those parameters are quite broad and loose, but we are not free to change the system. We can try to change the system, but there is a power at work that will fight you all the way to your bedroom. (Ballistic evidence showed that most bullets during the raid were aimed at Hampton’s bedroom. ( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAhamptonF.htm ))

A distinction needs to be made between freedom and power. That I have health and nutrition, social and manual skills, and access to credit means I can exercise most of my charter rights and freedoms, but this is a “power to exercise” granted by the system. I am bound to this system or powerless. Now, begrudging this dependence is seen as selfish and ungrateful. I should be grateful for the power given me. And if I were a selfish individuated person with no desire to be social, maybe I would revel in the power that is mine, but I do desire to be social, so like the Chicago 8, I speak out against the hierarchal systems that condition the social. I speak out against, to name a few, the family, the state, colonialism, the military, capitalism.

I’m not content to live under a capitalist state system that grants more personal power to the individuated agents of its middle class than it allows in the colonies. I’m not fascist, I want freedom not power. This system, where we work beyond the necessary for a profit while others starve, needs to be considered.

When we fear human nature, we fear freedom, because freedom is social self-determination, freedom is the opposite of external controls. Restrictions impede freedom. Restrictions impede human development. That a material necessity exists, that there are material limits to freedom, shouldn’t be reason enough to accept these social limits to freedom. We can do better than this.

John Barth Beresford at 1:04pm January 27

Every damn day we’re changing the system but it’s gonna take years decades to notice. I’m not interested in too much change in one noticeable gulp. It would be perceived as a mass hallucination that would terrorize the happy, undermine the progressive, and make all the powers that be even more powerful. So go about your good deeds quietly and keep up the good work! Thanks for your support and cooperation Rodger X.

Rodger Levesque at 6:39pm February 1

Was it your plan to enrage me? Was it some flippant move, like aiming for the chest in air hockey? Or maybe putting on a Nashville hockey jersey? Were you trying to antagonize me?

Rodger Levesque at 6:42pm February 1

Luckily I thought it through before responding like Dan Ackroyd on SNL “John, you ignorant slut.”

Rodger Levesque at 7:00pm February 1

You know I’ve never been much of an activist. Have you seen “Into the Wild”? I recognize that rage and frustration. Activism drove me nuts, and then journalism wasn’t much better. Hey have you ever read my blog? (Don’t worry about it. No one reads it. Who could? It’s a ridiculous expression of complete confusion. But…) Something I’ve been writing about speaks to what you wrote. The blog is called “Not Left To Chance” and it gets its name from a line about education being socialization that isn’t left to chance. I liked that, not the cynicism of it, but the reality. When you write that “we’re changing the system” like by some sort of chance one day the system will be something other than it is. But the system is reproduced by command and control. Our socialization hasn’t been left to chance. We’re conditioned by the system to reproduce it. Have you ever seen A Clockwork Orange? After Alex has been reconditioned, the thought of violence incapacitates him.

Rodger Levesque at 7:01pm February 1

What thought incapacitates you? That’s the thought you need to put into action if you want to change the system.

John Barth Beresford at 10:33pm February 2

You express such optimism to began and then complete resignation to finish. If you can’t see a positve result, why pitch it happening at all? You’ve already decided you won’t make a difference. That’s alright, that way you won’t be disappointed by hope and perhaps might even be pleasantly surprised by a change you never expected to make.That’s some pretty serious resocialization you’re talking about and besides Alex at the end pulls off another fast one, it’s suggested with raised eyebrows. He’s all about ego-based will, anarchism. I’m saying the more anonymous your approach and the more random per-chance your focus, as opposed to your obessed ‘incapaciting thought,’ the more effective your result for a greater number of people in a freer self-empowering way.

Finally, yes, I was saying if you think more that way, if you observe and follow, ironically you’ll be defining yourself as an individual.

Probability of one

I’m well aware that there are some conversation stoppers. Mention God or the Bible in mixed company and prepare for the apocalypse. And then there’s the law that states, as an Internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. I read here, about Yann Martel’s site and for me, this discussion has gone on long enough. Really, when the Reform Party Government is handing out huge monetary amounts to Quebec, all that’s left is the charge of power for power’s sake.

In their introduction to First Drafts J.L.Granatstein and Norman Hillmer end the first paragraph with the words of journalist Matthew Halton, “Watch out for the first signs of fascism in your own country and operate on them quickly, because in spite of their seductive exterior virility, they are signs of decay, they are signs that we are despairing of reason, despairing of our fine dreams of a sane world.” Halton was writing in 1933 and the introduction was written in Canada July 1, 2002.

But what are the signs of fascism?

Also I just finished reading Critique of Cynical Reason, (Volume 40 of the University of Minnesota Press’ Theory and History of Literature series (I only mention this because, while this is completely political, it’s also pure literature!)) Sloterdijk writes in the conclusion,

Hence, if in modernity, worldly and self-experience converge in spite of all sundering, they do so under the condition that the struggles of self-preservation of privatized subjective reason inwardly as well as outwardly, psychologically as well as technologically, in the intimate domain as well as in political spheres, have generated the same iciness, the same polemical, strategic subjectivisms, and the same quick-footed denial of high-cultural ethical ideals.

On page 544, in the conclusion, this sentence is packed with meaning, but you can read the modernity in this sentence as the same that spawned Hitler’s rise to power.

So is Harper on the road to Hitler? Those are some pretty big boots to fill. If you are on Harper’s side, the absence of gas chambers is proof enough that your man isn’t evil incarnate. The charge borders on ridiculous. Have you seen Bush’s name written on walls with a swastika where the “s” should be? And if you were in Ontario during the 90s, Harris (another conservative leader) was often shouted down as “just like …”. Harris did a good job of messing things up. I’d blame his policy on welfare for the increase in homelessness across Canada. Harris will take Conservative policy further if he gets the chance. Harper does model himself on Bush, who has become a mass murderer. The military, law and order, and ethics are Harper’s trilogy. Maybe it’d be more fair to compare him to Mussolini?

Either way he’s propped up by voters who believe that the Bible is “the history of the world as we know it, and how we will know it.” These are people who want authority. They want to be led. In Escape From Freedom the character type is describe convincingly by Erich Fromm, who himself fled Nazi Germany. (Fromm also heavily influenced Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason.)

Any dog knows to get nervous when the master starts rolling up a newspaper. And when I see Harper calculating to consolidate power I get anxious. Fascism is a spectre haunting all the people of the world, and whenever power gets mean people start screaming. The Harper Reform/Conservative government is mean. Cutting money from women’s groups, while giving tax cuts to families is calculated meanness. Refusing to apologize for residential schools while spending money on Quebec is calculated meanness. If this government wins a majority, the calculation is gone. There will be meanness in broad daylight.

Please vote for anyone but the Conservatives in the next election. (That’s all I’ve got.)