Alan Watts, beatnik-style enlightenment and liberation today

On FaceBook a video by Alan Watts ("What If Money Was No Object?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=siu6JYqOZ0g ) was recommended. This was the second time I'd seen this happen in a few weeks, so I wrote something caustic about it. This prompted a defence or two, and the following sensible question:

So what do the politicoes have to offer, Choppa? True, it is an illusion fostered by people who have found exactly what they want to do in life that 'you can do anything if you really want to' - an illusion which provides a very convenient explanation for any kind of social deprivation. But the central message of the importance of disregarding society's expectations if we are to get off this pathway to hell on earth - that still rings as true now as when I first heard Watts and others say it. I'm still very glad I got off the treadmill.

Since this illustrated the liberating effect of positions like Watts's back in the 60s, as far as rejecting the demands of established oppressive imperialist bourgeois values and imperatives is concerned, I made the following comment:

The freer you are, the better the choices you make. Feeling trapped is a good start - without it you won't want to be free or care about freedom. Back after ww2 a lot of us kids in the imperialist West felt very trapped and looked for ways out. This became the youth revolution. It started off quite some distance from the search for freedom the working class had been engaged in since the early nineteenth century. In the fifties and early sixties the individual aspects were paramount and the main thing was shaking off the leaden blanket of repression and hypocrisy in relation to social hierarchy and sex - a lot of it was cultural, music, books, poetry. The military religious oppression was combated with pacifism and non-Christian beliefs. Black priests were reviled, unquestioned authority was rejected. The easy solutions were the first big ones -  playful celebrations of individual self-expression. Peace and Love, flower power. Buddhism and the East.

In 1968 the two great lines - negative (reactive) youth revolt and positive (demanding a clear alternative) class revolt converged in the explosions of the Tet offensive in Vietnam and the May rebellions in Europe. Tet bloodied the nose of the US imperialist government, and May 68 severely shook European governments, both imperialist and stalinist.

The explosion was too formless to lead to much constructive change - imperialists and stalinists alike regrouped and a period of immense reactionary pressure began. The 1970s were full of conflicts during the regrouping and working out of the forces unleashed - the US was ejected from Vietnam, the Iranian revolution spat out the imperialist lickspittle Shah, Nicaragua arose against the US, but at the same time ABBA glam and disco sidelined rocknroll, the petty-bourgeois individualist rebels found their own little utopias or succumbed, and after a bumpy ride (winters of discontent, Nixon's impeachment) Thatcher and Reagan came to power and initiated the era of neo-liberal brutality whose fanfare was the Pinoshit coup against Allende's braindead utopian reformism in Chile in 1973.

Since then both the workers movement and the cultural rebellion have been burgeoning but formless - too powerful and too free to stuff back in the bottle, but too dispersed and disorganized (as well as too caged and reined in by false leadership) to create a strong explicit social alternative able to inspire the world.

We're still in a situation of stalemate in a lot of ways. In Lenin's words: "for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the "lower classes" do not want to live in the old way and the "upper classes" cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph." The unstable equilibrium between the unwillingness of the oppressed to continue being oppressed, and the capacity of the oppressors to continue oppressing them, is becoming more and more unstable. There is less and less equilibrium.

There is no symmetry between the efforts of the oppressors and the efforts of the oppressed, though. The "upper classes" are organized and very focused in their repression. Wikileaks reveals the truth about their activities and they deploy thousands of functionaries and millions of dollars to smash Wikileaks as an organization and break its operations, with total disregard for laws and rights enshrined in their own constitutions and legislation. For instance. The "lower classes" are disorganized, split into a thousand different tendencies and focused on a thousand different issues in a thousand different ways.

However, the incapacity of the oppressors is more and more obvious, and the focus of the oppressed is slowly improving, as we have recently seen in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The rage at being trapped is overcoming the fear of the whip. Sufficient organization is present to create an alternative that can run things when the immediate target of the rebellion is brought down. The incoherence of the process makes it a bit like peeling an onion - one layer of oppression is removed to reveal a new, softer one beneath it.

Some constants can be seen between the rebellion of the postwar period and now - the longing for peace, freedom of expression and freedom from sexual and emotional slavery, but more and more politically and economically oriented, and less and less "timeless", ivory tower, and individually isolated. As long as the ruling classes are organized politically and economically the masses of young and working people longing for freedom will get nowhere without stronger organization based on their own economic and social interests. And people like Alan Watts offer nothing in this respect. And that benefits the ruling class, not us.

US-backed piracy and murder - Israel rapes the Gaza peace convoy

In response to a long and toothless thread on a discussion group I wrote:


Israel's arguments remind me of nothing so much as the justifications given by the Argentine junta and the South African apartheid racists for their brutal and inhuman actions. And however "sincere" individual South African whites might have been in their support for these arguments that doesn't make the slightest difference to their responsibility for these actions. I don't consider Argentine supporters of the junta to have been sincere in the least. And I think that any sincere Israeli supporters of the Israeli military and those giving them their orders in this murderous act of piracy on the high seas are either wilfully ignorant and indifferent ("they're only Arabs, and anyway they bring it on themselves" - I've heard it first hand) or completely numbed to any sense of proportionality in political interaction including acts of war.

Israel exceeds the vileness of both the apartheid regime, the Argentine junta and (for what it's worth, the old East German regime) for several reasons. The first is the total support in words and actions and arms supplies by the most powerful nation on earth, the US. US support for the junta was less open, and the SA racists were only supported openly by a second-rate imperialist power - Britain. Every brazen Big Lie by Israel is swallowed whole (camels against gnats) by the States, and not a cent is withheld, not a carbine or bulldozer or bomb or helicopter or "adviser". Legions of university-trained, highly experienced, smooth-talking lawyers fill the newspapers and airwaves with sophistical gunk - brains targeting humanity like those of the American war industry, instead of working on solving problems of disease and poverty that kill thousands of people daily. The wall being erected (much of it already in place) between privileged Israeli areas and discriminated Palestinian areas is larger and more jealously guarded than the infamous Berlin Wall, and even than the much bigger wall the British occupying forces erected for similar reasons in Belfast. Oh, and Israel has the Bomb, which neither Argentina, nor racist South Africa (not quite), nor the GDR had.

All this makes me sympathize with those who refer to the rulers of Israel and their supporters as Zionazis. This is not the case, politically or historically - Israel is a very different kettle of rotten fish from Nazi Germany, as Aristotle would be able to tell us if he were around today. But the symptoms of callous degeneracy are there for all to see and ignore at their peril. Israel is the child of imperialism and is allowed to act out its bad boy tantrums by its indulgent parents (and by god I've seen Tantrums on the boardwalk at Coney Island). And all because it's an invaluable fortress for imperialism - locking the Eastern Mediterranean, keeping a lid on popular sentiment in its neighbouring Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan), and constituting a gigantic military base for the US that allows it to threaten the whole of the Middle East by proxy - most recently by howling for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against a US bogeyman de jour, Iran, which the US can distance itself from (plausible deniability) on the basis that it's "just a tantrum". Not to mention the cataracts of pus pumped out by its propaganda machinery. Or the (unmentionable even by Israeli standards, and that's saying something!) deeds of the Israeli secret service Moshad - KGB, Stasi and Securitate eat your hearts out...

And the rot won't stop with a Two-State solution. We need a single, united Palestine, independent, secular, and democratic. But it won't happen given the current balance of power in the world. Divide and rule coupled with military intimidation and a lack of alternatives - too bad Iraq and Saudi don't do the job as well as Israel - will see to that.

And in the meantime, as Pete wrote: 

Voltaire had a word for it:

Cet animal est très méchant,

Quand on l'attaque il se défend.

(This animal is very evil -

Attacked, it fights back like the devil.)

Chops