What I write here will be opinion. I’m starting this blog because of the encouragement of certain members of my family, who, I think, hoped to deflect my opinions from them and onto the deaf keys of this computer. Well, I’ve taken the bait. ...Unfortunately, I don’t like typing on a computer, nor do I like the idea of blogs. Both are inducements to glibness and vulgarity. (Those who know me know I'm not immune.) Also I’m uncomfortable entering the internet, which, like t.v., films, and newspapers, is formally owned and controlled by personifications of finance monopoly capitalism, yet pretends to be “democratic” in content because (unlike t.v., etc.) all sorts of factual material and political opinion are allowed to circulate somewhat freely in its closely watched precincts--and will continue to circulate as long as the profits come in and the system of production for profit is not endangered. Obviously, the plug will be pulled--sooner, I hope, than later. Then my blog will be curtains. The keys of this computer will go from deaf to dead. And so will illusions about "democracy." That would be the first step to imagining a real one.
All forms of fictitious democracy (including the governmental kind), because they are based on money power and hierarchy, inculcate a suspension of belief in the real. For example, political opinion is characterized by neo-liberal apologists as “narratives” in “the market place of ideas”--neglecting to point out, of course, that this very notion is purveyed in the interests of those who own the stage and the production and distribution of “narratives.” The narratives of the owners are center stage 24 and 7. Views expressed by blogs like mine make the fiction, capitalism=freedom, "real". It's like voting.
Nevertheless, I’ve decided to take the bait. I’m too old to care about being hedgemonified, having ancient anti-bodies. Probably nobody is going to read this anyway. So I'll write to an imagined, virtual reader. Together we will free ourselves of dependence on corporate hospitality. --This will be the people's internet and we will begin by eschewing cute names for ugly things: no google, no apple, no utube, no facebook, and above all, no more blogs! This is not a blog.
Most of my opinions will be political (isn’t everything having to do with people political--or, rather, social?)--and, obviously, marxist. Capital's expanded wars against humans and nature at the center and especially at the peripheries of its imperial system have re-awakened an interest in marxism. It's ok now to call yourself (and let the all the agencies know you are) a marxist, and marxists are currently all over the internet. But “marxism” is not a school, it is a political tendency based on a few central ideas and a method of analysis. My object in the first couple of blogs is to explain what basic marxism is and which tendency I tend to take in my understanding of things. Most people who make the effort find marxist analysis liberating, because it explains human experience better than the Bible (or the Free Market). Before I begin, it seems to me I should place myself in a certain historical context.
I was born 76 years ago into a family of working class, thoroughly liberated (from Judaism) Jews. At that time, most of the American Jews from Eastern Europe had escaped both pogroms and rabbis. Almost all were “socialist” ( in the vaguest sense), but had missed the boat by getting on one to America before the Revolution in Russia.
By “working class” I don’t mean proletarians (wage earners). There were few proletarians in Eastern Europe, where most people were either peasants, artisans, or petty traders. Jews weren’t allowed (fortunately and tragically) by history to be peasants. But many were anxious to become “proletarians’. My mother’s father became a roofer/sheet metal worker/naval yard worker, and ultimately a butcher in a small shop. My father’s father got to the US via a caravan trip (that took years) across Central Asia, China, and eventually landing him in Yokahama, from where he shipped to Glasgow. He spoke a good brogue-inflected English. He picked up some Chinese, with which he conversed with the laundryman on 5th and Winton Street in South Philadelphia. He went from Scotland to Saskatcewan (where he met and married my grandmother), ventured to Atlantic City to make money and brought his his wife and three kids to South Philadelphia. He had picked up baking while caravanning as a youth, and worked in a bakery in Philadelphia he was proud not to own. Both grandfathers, finally, in America, became proletarians. (Ironically, marxists hope to free proletarians from wage slavery.)
The baker grandfather’s wife was a large woman that he called the “Soldat.” The Soldat taught herself to read and write. She was a secret romantic. A superb cook, but a disgruntled housewife, she had 6 children, and, in later years inherited the problems of two of her daughters, and the care of their children too. She would have understood very well the radical feminist notion of unpaid domestic labor for the production and reproduction of workers for capitalist exploitation. My maternal grandmother was illiterate, and remained so, like many poor Eastern European women. She was squat, not very attractive, with the varicose veins of the diabetic. She was the kindest, wisest, most humane and open-minded human being I have ever known. I learned egalitarianism and tolerance at her weary feet. I was a good student of half of what she taught.
That is context enough for the reader to know where I’m coming from. My next two blogs will concentrate on what I have come recently to believe are the core concepts of marxism: the diagnostic method of “historical materialism” and “primal” (originally mistranslated from the German as “primitive”) accumulation. I’’ ll try to keep things simple and clear.
