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can socialism save us?

Socialism v. capitalism - ultimately it's just a squabble over who owns the means of production. Socialism purports to organise wealth and power more democratically but, if the violence inherent in that wealth and power are the real problem - all you end up with after a (violent) revolution is another elite. Both socialism and capitalism rely upon economic growth to drive forward their visions of society. Unfortunately the planet's resources are close to exhausted after 200 years of this macho nonsense so the claims and counterclaims of conservative/Marxist philosophy are pretty much redundant. Marx was a genius, of course, but his thinking was confined to the 19th century paradigm of progress and development which after (for example) the images from Abu Gahraib prison seem a bit quaint. I reject socialism and capitalism because they are both creeds based on power, and violence against nature.

I think the word squabble is appropriate when the class struggle is viewed in the context of ecological crisis. I can accept entirely that class struggle has been the prime motor of history hitherto. But if the proletariat are now fighting for control of a wrecked planet - then it starts to look a bit futile. In any event, I think capitalism has effectively defused the socialist bomb by two means: firstly consumerism - whereby everyone is addicted to what they can buy; secondly it has exported all the truly filthy labour conditions to distant lands. Out of sight, out of mind for most pampered Western workers, unfortunately...

I think we also need to look at the mindset of people who wish to lead us. Why do they feel able to determine the future of others? Have they achieved a personal moral perfection from which they can gain the confidence to prescribe solutions for others? Or maybe they have certain psycho-sexual difficulties which are alleviated by the approval of others? Put it this way - I'm very suspicious of anyone who thinks they know what's best for any other adult human being. (Or animal for that matter).

The 'welfare' of people doesn't fall out of the sky. It's built by burning resources. More welfare, more resources, more economic growth...now it may be that Marxists have developed a hidden manifesto of completely sustainable subsistence for everyone. If they have they're keeping it pretty quiet. I suspect they still favour car-jacking Bill Gates's limousine and driving it themselves, if you know what I mean. 'The environment' isn't a bourgeois adjunct to political ideology. It should be the starting point of everything. Evidently the genuine desire to help others and save the planet is nice. But it's all about means. I'd suggest that any remedy that identifies people as 'workers' and prescribes 'overthrowing' the present system is actually part of that system - locked in by a reductionist and violent philosophy.

I reckon that vagueness is a necessary part of political religions like Marxism. In this instance, revolution is cited as the means to an end (communism) with no historical precedent or satisfactory explanation as to why such a social pheomenon would have a lasting transformative effect on society. Sure workers may feel better for a revolution but communism requires an alchemy of the human condition to work. I've noticed that Marxists state with confidence that a mass following of their creed will make good stuff happen, conflating all sorts of struggles into their own (including, bizarrely, that of radical Islam). But the central proposition of Marxism - that humanity can be liberated through social revolution - is untested and untestable, about as much use as claiming Jesus Saves.

In my opinion, the liberation theology of revolutionary socialism is founded on faith, not science (or even common sense).

Perhaps it's about how to respond effectively to violence? Joining an anti-war march is portrayed as an effective, non-violent response to the state's aggression. And yet, the huge march in London before Iraq War 2 was a failure - the war happened regardless. Compare the net effect on suffering in the world if the million people on that march that day had decided to, say, stop eating meat instead. Or given up using their car....I understand the anger the war in Iraq invokes. When I saw the pictures from Abu Gahraib I couldn't sleep for a week. The urge to meet fire with fire is very strong. But the fire - that cycle of violence - is the problem. The cycle has to be broken somewhere and I think that will always be an individual decision. Engaging with capitalist bullies merely exacerbates the problem.

I think you can only change the world non-violently (and therefore effectively) by changing yourself. Politics, by its nature, is prescriptive and adversarial - both forms of violence against others in my opinion. If political projects were abandonned and the energies they squander were diverted to peaceful personal change, I'd suggest you'd have a real evolution in human kind...almost overnight.In the meantime, I suspect that the real powers-that-be tolerate 'democracy' and party politics simply because they are a great big dumping ground for aspiration and energy of the masses...

nature cure?

I remember the first night our pet dog stayed in our house. I can still hear the plaintive wails of the puppy prematurely parted from its mother. She has never made any such noise since that first night and now resides comfortably and completely within the bounds of her own vitality.

It strikes me that, for human beings, the time after birth is, in many respects, the after life. And our lives are merely the continuum between the warm, aquatic connectedness of the womb and the cold, earthy integration of burial. The (uterine) heaven is behind us, not in front of us.

A psychic river flows from the birth canal away from integrity and inexorably towards an increasing separation from the source. Thanks to the curse of self-consciousness we feel this dis-integration as a primordial pain of loss. The resultant, incessant scream of the ego – the human condition – is merely exacerbated by shoddy parenting and the alienation from others intrinsic to industrial society.

There are a number of nostrums on offer for this condition: not least culture, self-gratification and god. All three are typified by a feckless search for the sublime, which is a disingenuous way of characterising the narcissistic hunt for our own reflection in ‘reality’.

I’ve been reading a lovely book called ‘Nature Cure’ recently which posits that the benevolence of nature can be healing to the broken mind. More narcissism of course – to believe that nature cares one way or another.

But maybe only proximity to nature, and silent, non-analytical acceptance of her flow, can quell the howling within.

the loop

If nature is a language then she talks in circles.

All her design is in the form of cycles within which everything unwittingly exists. Except one thing, us. Humanity has deliberately captured nature in boxes, or categories, dissected her and used the component parts without any heed to her essence: the whole.

I think gardening is one small means of regaining the truth, by becoming re-acquainted with nature's processes. The best gardening practices are also cyclical: composting being the obvious example. By way of contrast, any practice that ends up with 'garden waste' being burnt or dumped breaks the cycle and is clearly fallacious.

Abortion - a vegan response.

It is not unvegan to support a woman's right to choose.

If you believe that your compassion for other people should extend to other animals then you might be able to forgive the action of a woman who finds the prospect of her pregnancy unbearable. Not least because you don't despise your own human fallability either. If you have replaced your compassion for human beings with your compassion for other life-forms then this woman is a killer first and foremost and the suffering which may have brought her into her situation, or may arise from it, will appear negligible or non-existent. The second position, as an expression of psychosis, should never be confused with the reality of veganism in my opinion.

Truly, the meaning of non-violence is simple. It's applying principles to the messy complexity of reality which is the challenge...a challenge that being 'anti-abortion' singularly fails to rise to...I'm anti- cold Monday mornings - so what? Any fundamentalism is attractively straightforward because it shuns reality and that's why it cannot be taken seriously.

I'd merely suggest a 'deep reverence for life' should also enable a flawed human being to kill part of herself in order to survive mentally of physically in a deeply flawed world. I wish many opponents of abortion would focus their considerable angst on mitigating the conditions which lead to unwanted pregnancies rather than betraying their infantile morality by victimising one of the victims (the mother). When we have re-created the garden of Eden maybe we can sit down and agree that abortion is plain wrong.

Whose rights matter?

If they're honest, I think a fair number of vegans are indifferent to, or even despise, humanity. Hardly surprising given the treatment handed out by most of the human race to fellow animals.

I think there are certain problems with this position, though. All animals, all of nature, is contingent upon human activity. Taking human beings out of the ethical equation is, therefore, futile. In other words, if we are serious about animal rights we'd better prioritise the enlightenment of our fellow human beings.This enlightenment is merely postponed by some of the clumsy statements about fellow human beings that appear in vegan dialogue.

Non-violence isn't a kind of moral pick 'n' mix. Animals are easy to love. I think the sentimentality attached to the aborted foetus over the plight of the mother is a similarly facile basis for an opinion.

If you can't forgive flawed human beings don't shout about it. One day your conditions may change and you may do stupid stuff too.

death of the middle classes

Why are the intelligent people - at least among the white middle class - so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! (James Hillman)

I'm sure psychotherapy is a cul de sac - the doctrinal police ensuring that nothing relating to the psyche could overlap with the similarly falsely-demarcated stuff of sociology or politics or...heaven forbid, that the psyche should possess an indivisible union with nature...

But the middle class in the UK does not go in for wholesale therapy and they are undoubtedly, when their material wealth is taken into account, the most dismal and useless caste in the history of humanity. At least their Victorian forbears could claim dynamism whilst raping mother nature, but the twenty-first century bourgeois merely hibernates in a smug pit of consumerist toxicity.

But the death of the middle class charade will shortly be announced: the paltry vestiges of their ill-gotten gains, their dreary value-system will be wrecked in the natural catastrophe they have orchestrated. I find it unbelievable that all but the very cynical of their number (politicians mainly) still really believe in consumer society and the politics of choice and university education a decent pension and all the rest of it, as a long term proposition. If ever failure to adapt to a change in environment was a harbinger of extinction this is it...the intrinsic nature of the middle class is directly, and utterly, undermined by ecological crisis. If you remove the foundations the whole house collapses, obviously.

If their crimes weren't so horrendous it would be tragic, or at least ironic. Knowledge that knows nothing, just accumulates in the absence of any moral core. Niceness constructed upon ruthless violence against the 'othered'.

There can be no excuse for ignorance or complacency when you are teetering at the end of it all.

Remembrance...

I don't buy a poppy.

Why? Well, forget the fact that Tony Blair wears one despite committing British troops to a futile war for even more spurious reasons than many of those whose victims we commemorate today. Forget the insulting nature of of a paltry two minutes in a year to 'honour' those who 'defended a freedom' which is even more hypothetical today than it was fifty years ago, or that we should supplement the state's blood money through an 'appeal'.

Ignore the abject nature of commemoration itself - a prop for the powers-that-be and thus a substitute for real change to a status quo which requires war to invigorate itself from time to time.

The reason is simple: as a father I understand the magnitude of the loss of a child. Any child. The sanctity of life informs everything I do. I usually fail, but my effort to be non-violent is a constant one. That's why remembrance, then back to business as usual, disgusts me.