Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 07.21.05

[David Shove (shove001]

             P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R    07.21.05

1. Counter recruitment   7.22 11am
2. Voting rights act     7.22 11am
3. Palestine vigil       7.22 4:15pm
4. Poetry discussion     7.22 6pm
5. Intl day v Coca Cola  7.22 6pm
6. Bolivia/film/panel    7.22 7pm
7. Fringe GLBT cabaret   7.22 8pm

8. CO counseling         7.23 9am
9. Cam/kids/families     7.23 10:30am
10. Natalie Johnson Lee  7.23 12noon
11. Top story/950AM      7.23 1pm
12. Chiapas caravan bene 7.23 9pm

13. Stephen Fortunato Jr - The soul of socialism: people's values
14. Lewis Carroll        - You are old, father William  (poem)

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From: sarah standefer <scsrn [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Counter recruitment 7.22 11am

"Our Children Are Not Cannon Fodder"
CounterRecruitment Demonstration
Fridays   11-12 noon
Recruitment Office in Stadium Village at the U of M.
1/2 block east of Oak St on Washington Ave.
for info call Barbara Mishler 612-871-7871


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From: Nancy Groves <skichamp2000 [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Voting rights act 7.22 11am

A national conference for the Secretaries of State is scheduled this week
at the Radisson Riverfront in St. Paul, MN

http://www.nass.org/conference/conf_main.htm
http://www.sos.state.mn.us/nass2005.html
http://www.sos.state.mn.us/2005NASSAgenda.pdf
http://www.sos.state.mn.us/MinnesotaSponsors.html

And there is a free public event this Friday about Voting Rights:
Friday July 22 - Midwest Regional Hearing, on the Voting Rights Act
11am-7pm.
To exam the degree of racial discrimination in voting and the impact of
the voting rights act. Dorsey & Whitney, 50 South 6th St, Suite 1500,
Mpls. See www.votingrightsact.org.

Other websites of interest on Voting Rights are: www.fairvotemn.org

www.rainbowpush.org SUPPORT REAUTHORIZATION OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF
1965 www.electionintegritymn.org


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From: peace 2u <tkanous [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Palestine vigil 7.22 4:15pm

Every Friday
Vigil to End the Occupation of Palestine

4:15-5:15pm
Summit & Snelling, St. Paul

There are now millions of Palestinians who are refugees due to Israel's
refusal to recognize their right under international law to return to
their own homes since 1948.


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From: Coreopsis Poetry Collective <coreopsispoetry [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Poetry discussion 7.22 6pm

Just a reminder that our first poetry discussion group will be held this
Friday, July 22, at 6pm at Black Dog Cafe (308 Prince Street, St. Paul),
(651) 228-9274.

This month we will discuss Fanny Howe's newest book, "On the Ground",
published by Graywolf Press.

We look forward to seeing you there!

If you have any questions please call Erin at (612)
501-9427 or email us at coreopsispoetry [at] yahoo.com.

*Coreopsis Poetry Collective*
We exist to cultivate a community of diverse local artists and poets which
integrates all art forms centered around poetry.
Erin Lynn Marsh
Barbara Tarrant


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From: "Cleary, Merideth" <mcleary [at] steelworkers-usw.org>
Subject: Intl day v Coca Cola 7.22 6pm

On July 22, in different countries around the world actions will be
carried out, in any city you can organize or participate in the events and
actions already organized.

In the Twin Cities we will be at Macalester College in the Chapel ( 1600
Grand Ave, St. Paul, MN 55105 )  from 6-8pm.

YOU CAN PARTICIPATE AS WELL DURING THE DAY AND HELP US TO DISTRIBUTE
INFORMATION ABOUT THE DAY. COME AND LEARN THE TRUE PRACTICES OF COCA COLA
AND WHAT TO DO TO HOLD THE CORPORATION ACCOUNTABLE.

Documentary, Global Campaign Against Coca Cola

Report (written letter) on the International Case against Coca Cola by
Steelworkers lead attorney Dan Kovalik

Report (written letter) by the United Students Against Sweatshops

Presentation by human rights defender and SINALTRAINAL and United
Steelworkers unionist Gerardo Cajamarca

TAKE ACTION

 During the day we will be at the University of Minnesota outside of
Kauffman Hall from 8 till 11am.
 From 1-3pm we will be at St. Kates in the Student Center ( Coeur de
Catherine).
 After we will be at Macalester in front of the Chapel from 4-6pm.
 We will begin the presentation at 6pm

For more information please call Gerardo Cajamarca or Merideth Cleary at
612-623-8003 or e-mail - gentelatinauswa [at] yahoo.com


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From: Ty <tymoore77 [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Bolivia/film/panel 7.22 7pm

Documentary film screening:
BOLIVIA NEW DAYS OF REVOLUTION

Exclusive footage from the front lines of the June 2005 Bolivian uprising.
A Contra Imagen Production

Friday July 22
7pm
University of Minnesota
West Bank Auditorium
(basement of Willey Hall)
225 19 Av S Minneapolis
http://onestop.umn.edu/Maps/willeyH/

Followed by a panel discussion and open forum

Speakers:
 Prof. August Nimtz Dept. of Political Science, University of Minnesota
 Prof. Connie Well Dept. of Geography, University of Minnesota
 Alec Johnson Socialist Alternative, delegate to the 2005 World Social
Forum, Brazil
 Jacob Perasso St. Paul mayoral candidate, Socialist Workers Party,
delegate to World Youth Festival in Venezuela
 Leo A. Garcia Partido de Trabajadores Socialista, Argentina

For more information 612-760-1980 mn [at] socialistalternative.org
www.socialistalternative.org/mn


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From: pr_cabaret <pr_cabaret [at] yahoo.com>
Subject: Fringe GLBT cabaret 7.22 8pm

Fringe Festival GLBT Showcase
Hosted by Max Gries
July 22 & 23@ 8pm
FREE!
http://www.fringefestival.org/showcases.cfm
For more information, call the Minnesota Fringe at
612-872-1212

Featuring:

Batting Eyelashes, "Trip Open"
Quick Question Productions, "Strapped"
La La Enterprises, "At Least One Shoe"
(performers are Lane Mckiernan both nights, Eli Jean Weintraub
Friday only,Hortense MacLeod Saturday only)
Out of the Story Box Productions, "/sek-set-ur-ra/"  (Friday only)
Allegra Lingo, "Hubcap Frisbee"
Elijah Rose, "9/11 Tranny"
Empere, "A Fairy's Tale"
Tenth Muse Theater, "Why We Have a Body"  (Saturday only)

So that everyone can participate, please do not wear perfume or other
scented products.  This event is wheelchair accessible.


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From: wamm <wamm [at] mtn.org>
Subject: CO counseling 7.23 9am

Refusing to Fight: A Workshop for Conscientious Objector Counseling
with a Special Focus for Educators

Saturday July 23, 9am-4:30pm. Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, 28th Avenue
(between Lake St and 31 St), Minneapolis.

The workshop to train Conscientious Objector counselors will cover the
following topics: claiming Conscientious Objector status, the possibility
of a draft, the Delayed Entry Program, the current Selective Service Act,
the proposed Universal Service Act, and much more. $25.00 includes all
materials, plus morning coffee and an afternoon snack. Bring your own
brown bag lunch. Sponsored by Every Church a Peace Church, Veterans for
Peace, and WAMM. FFI: 612-721-6908 or 952-473-7839.


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From: Cam Gordon <CamGordon333 [at] msn.com>
Subject: Cam/kids/families 7.23 10:30am

You are invited to a Roundtable Discussion
with Cam Gordon, Candidate for Minneapolis City Council Ward 2,
Denny Schapiro, former Minneapolis School Board Member and
John Erwin, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board Member

Working Together
Supporting Children and Families
Saturday, July 23
10:30am-12:30pm at
Joe's Market and Deli
1828 Como Ave SE

We all share responsibility for ensuring that all Minneapolis children
grow into healthy, successful adults.

It's time to increase cooperation between the City Council and the County,
Park, Library and School Boards.  What more can we do to foster
collaboration between these arms of government and businesses,
neighborhood associations, churches, foundations and community groups to
support children, youth and families?

Can we do a better job of measuring and tracking the health of our
children and youth? Can we use those measures to guide our future
decisions and target resources where they will make the most difference?

Let's examine where we are now and the effectiveness of past initiatives
such as the Youth Coordinating Board and Way to Grow. What new ideas are
on the horizon?

Let's find more ways to work together for our families and children, so
that every child has what they need to thrive.

---
This the fifth in a series of roundtable discussions hosted by Cam Gordon,
candidate for Minneapolis City Council Member for Ward 2.  The first
roundtable in March explored how Minneapolis can better support our
independent, home-grown businesses. In April we discussed better land use
and transit options. In May we focused on good jobs and good housing.  In
June we looked at civic participation and the future of the Neighborhood
Revitalization Program.  In August (27th at el Norteno) we will be looking
at Public Safety.

Cam Gordon for City Council Ward 2 Prepared and paid for by Neighbors for
Cam Gordon   630 Cedar Avenue #1106, Minneapolis, MN 55454, Arthur LaRue
Treasurer


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From: TLeeOCG [at] aol.com [mailto:TLeeOCG [at] aol.com]
Subject: Natalie Johnson Lee 7.23 12noon

Any Green who can make a 3 to 5 hr a week commitment to the Natalie
Johnson Lee Campaign for 5th Ward should attend the next campaign meeting,
this Saturday July 23rd at 12pm at Cafe Tatta Bunna on the corner of Penn
and Plymouth Ave in MPLS. It is located in the Urban League Building.
Buses from downtown will be the #19 on Nicollet and 7th.

A general meeting will be held at 1:30 Call Travis for any further info
612-859-8394


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From: Larry Johnson <elent7 [at] comcast.net>
Subject: Top story/950AM 7.23 1pm

Elaine and Larry here with our TOP STORY show coming again July 23.  This
month before and after the show promises to be a MACROMEDIA experience.
Here's how to think and act about it.

1.  Tune us in Saturday, July 23, 1-2 p.m. on AM950 Air America Minnesota
for stories of peace (at least one that you could retell to children and
grandchildren) and the story of the origins of the Peace Garden at Lake
Harriet in Minneapolis.  Check out Air America Radio
www.airamericaminnesota.com

2.  If you haven't already been there, take someone you love and stroll
peacefully through the Peace Garden.  Its across the street from the Rose
Garden on the east side of Lake Harriet.  Find out why this amazing place
has become one of the most popular parks in the city and has been featured
in National Geographic.

3.  Consider making a donation, large or small, to the further value of
this Garden of Peace.  Top Story is sponsored in July by Friends of the
Lake Harriet Peace Garden, and our intent is to add to the ongoing funding
to replace the crumbling bridge in the park, and to add the beautiful
SPIRIT OF PEACE sculpture already in process.  You needn't wait for the
show.  You can send a check made out to MPRB Peace Garden Project right
now to EL ENTERPRISES, Box 27314, Golden Valley, Minnesota, 55427.  Any
donation of $35 or more will receive one of Walter Enloe's books, OASIS OF
PEACE, ENCOUNTERS WITH HIROSHIMA, LESSONS FROM GROUND ZERO, OR NAGASAKI
SPIRITS HIROSHIMA VOICES.

You can even call us at 1-866-893-2637 and discuss which one you'd like.
You can also go to www.minneapolisparks.org and follow the links to the
Peace Garden for more info on the garden itself.

4.  Finally, seriously consider coming to the annual Hiroshima-Nagasaki
Remembrance at the garden at 7:30 a.m. on August 6. Its a moving
meditation on the importance of working to preserve peaceful relations in
the world, and we will, of course, be telling THE LEGEND OF SADAKO shortly
after 8:l5.  Then there will be events and activities in the garden all
day, leading up to a PEACE CONCERT in the Lake Harriet Bandshell that
evening.  Don't miss it

Larry Johnson and Elaine Wynne KEY OF SEE STORYTELLERS 1-866-893-2637 or
612-747-3904 topstory7 [at] comcast.net


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From: Daniel Kinney <danielkinney [at] babylonarts.org>
Subject: Chiapas caravan bene 7.23 9pm

Benefit of Chiapas Caravan this Saturday, 7/23 9pm-2am at Mala
Hosted by Truth Maze of Minnesota Spoken Word

Propagandja featuring A-Ball Muse
Pee Wee Dread of Dread-I-Dread
w/ DJ's Brigadier Woodro and Kulcha Human

$5 for cup and entrance

Mala is located in the alley behind the Hub bikeshop at Lake/Minnehaha

NO PARKING IN REAR
enter the alley near Hub mid-block
Director of Visual Arts
Babylon Art & Cultural Center


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The Soul of Socialism: Connecting with the People's Values
by Stephen J. Fortunato Jr.
Monthly Review

"Theory becomes a material force," wrote Karl Marx, "once it seizes the
masses."1 The obverse is also true: if theory does not "seize the masses,"
it becomes impotent and irrelevant. Today, in the United States and many
other countries, a socialist critique has been excluded from political and
popular debate regarding critical economic and social problems. One reason
for this is the domination of the mainstream media by corporations, but
the existence of a capitalist propaganda mill does not absolve socialists
for failing to translate their trenchant and sound observations about the
existing social and political order into language that will resonate with
the values of the readers or listeners who are the putative beneficiaries
of any socialist transformation.

This era of capitalist triumphalism is a difficult one for socialists,
with corporations, backed by national armies and freelance mercenaries,
swaggering across the planet raising everywhere the flags of globalization
and empire. Our times are marked by the overlapping and exponentially
expanding calamities of unemployment, squalor, and hunger. For many, the
imperium delivers the ultimate tragedy of imprisonment, maiming, or death,
leaving the socialist who has been spared life in a bombed-out city or a
polluted third-world outpost, and who can marshal the energy and hope to
speak, asking the questions socialists have always put to themselves: What
must be done? and, What must I do?

But before any answers can be submitted, the left must candidly
acknowledge that its multifaceted message to bring about social justice
and a radical transformation of the economic arrangements now favoring 10
percent of the world's population while battering the other 90 percent has
failed to reach the masses of people who stand to benefit from a
reordering of the existing world economic system. In the industrialized
nations, nothing remotely approaching a substantial minority, let alone a
majority, has been convinced by socialist critique to move toward
fundamental change. Socialism suffers from a malaise often marked by
abstruse language and parochial essentialisms, not to mention estrangement
from the masses. The left has failed to inspire the majority of people,
for whom life is a losing economic struggle, to turn against the laws and
institutions that make their penurious lives inevitable.

Despite the exigencies of the times, socialists, though armed with all the
damning information and statistics available, have not found an effective
way to cast the plutocrats, their suppliants, and their satraps, as
criminal masterminds who engage daily in the exploitation of labor and the
plundering of resources to support their profligate lifestyles of million
dollar salaries, overpriced watches and SUVs, and second and third homes,
while blissfully heedless that their behavior sinks the majority of people
into debt and compels them to endure mediocre or desperate wages, if they
can find a job at all. Socialists have failed to ignite the consciousness
of the people with an awareness that the dominant class of capitalists -
that class that commands exorbitant salaries, stock options, golden
parachutes, and access to governors, senators, and presidents - are far
more immoral and infinitely more destructive of the social fabric than
those members of the underclass who survive through petty larceny and drug
sales.

Recognizing this, the questions persist: Why, in the face of pervasive
inequality and injustice, is there not broad support for the socialist
agenda? Why are not thousands of people, even hundreds of thousands,
mobilizing for a sustained struggle against the selfish and bellicose
class now controlling the planet? Yes, at least ten million people surged
into the streets worldwide when Bush unleashed his unlawful bombardment on
Iraq; and yes, the Socialist Party in Spain ousted from office the party
that supported Bush in the fraudulently named "coalition of the willing."
And Hugo Chavez, the populist-socialist president of Venezuela, defies
Bush as he seeks to improve the lot of the poor in his country and region.

From my vantage point as a trial judge, I am a daily witness to the
consequences of the failures of liberals, progressives, and democratic
socialists clearly and emphatically to brand the greed and prosperity of
the oligarchy as the primary cause and precondition for the economic,
social, educational, and medical burdens of the dispossessed, the working
poor, and that amorphous group defined as the "middle class." As a trial
judge, I am necessarily a part-time referee in the class struggle. For the
past ten years as a judge, and before that for two decades as a civil
rights and criminal defense attorney, I have seen the unemployed and the
underemployed paraded into court to defend themselves for expropriating
cash necessary to purchase life's necessities as well as a ticket to the
trappings of the American dream, cash unavailable to them through their
third- and fourth-rate jobs. I have seen the sick and the hopeless
prosecuted for obtaining drugs from the neighborhood pusher because the
painkillers and mood-lifters dispensed to the affluent by suburban
physicians and psychiatrists never come closer to them than the TV ads of
pharmaceutical companies urging the consumption of pills to escape to a
world marketed as nirvana by other advertisers. I see the marginalized -
black, brown, yellow, and white - pursued by usurious and unscrupulous
debt collectors seeking to repossess cars and furniture sold with
deceptive, high pressure tactics in the first place. Misery and collateral
damage are the regular byproducts of the unjust and immoral (to use a term
socialists wrongly abjure) economic arrangements that undergird the legal
system. What the English poet, Oliver Goldsmith, lamented in 1764 is still
true: "Law grinds the poor, and rich men rule the law."2

Why has the left been unable to expose in a way that encourages political
upheaval the nexus between the excessive concentration of wealth among the
few and the pervasive privation of the many? Why is it not a matter of
common sense and conventional wisdom that the system that allows the
former simultaneously also demands the latter? Reams of data are displayed
in the cold numbers of United Nations' Human Development Reports,
government studies, and scholarly and journalistic essays, while the
excesses of the oligarchy are depicted in the hotter milieu of newspaper
society pages, celebrity TV magazines, and advertisements in Vogue, Vanity
Fair, and similar vehicles designed to encourage consumption through
emulation. It is no secret, for example, that the wealthiest 5 percent of
the people control nearly 60 percent of this nation's wealth or that with
average annual compensation of $11,000,000, CEO's of major corporations
earn more than four hundred times the yearly pay of their workers; and all
this churns onward as the number of people in the United States living
beneath the ludicrously low poverty level of $18,660 (for a family of four
no less) has increased to thirty-five million people.

So why then do the mass of people, unable or hard-pressed to obtain
necessities, whether safe and sound housing, medical insurance, or tuition
at a community college, accept the current economic and political
arrangements as results of immutable forces of nature? One short answer is
that the bread-and-circus culture of sports, sitcoms, and squawking heads
masquerading as journalists has numbed analytical powers and persuaded
people that their political options have shriveled to the exercise of an
essentially pointless vote every few years, a vote thrown away on the
candidate who most adroitly manipulates perceptions by spending huge sums
of money on campaign advertisements.

More than three decades ago, Stanley Aronowitz in False Promises: The
Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness,3 brilliantly dissected
the workplace, popular culture, schools, and other institutions to
demonstrate how capitalism succeeds through programming the consciousness
of the factory worker, the mechanic, and the sales clerk to mimic that of
a chieftain of industry. Since then, Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky,4 Robert
McChesney,5 and others have chronicled the "manufacture of consent" by a
mass media structurally and strategically entwined with the corporate and
political elites.

And this year, in What's the Matter with Kansas?,6 Thomas Frank has shown
how reactionary Republicans have cajoled the working class and farmers in
America's "heartland" to abandon their progressive traditions and vote
against their own economic interests by deluging them relentlessly with
cynical campaigns calling for the defense of down-home values of God and
hearth against the liberal onslaught of abortion, gay rights, and
Hollywood.

Liberal journals have entered the fray with the American Prospect in its
March 2004 issue running several essays under the rubric, "Campaign '04:
Liberals and Values," and the Nation in August 2004 featuring an article
titled "Closing the 'Religion Gap.'" Even the somnolent Democrats have
jumped aboard the values train and now tussle with Republicans over flag,
yeomen virtues, and apple pie while submerging, just as the Republicans
do, the nasty truths about their millionaire patrons, the rigged economy,
and the misery it causes the majority of the world's people.

Somewhere along the way to their stockbrokers, the oligarchy has convinced
the American people to invert the classic Greek ideal admired by the
nation's founders, that is, the notion that a person earns the esteem of
the community by advancing collective interests, and that the home is a
private sphere beyond the concern of the government. Currently, the
reactionary agenda holds that government is ordained to regulate intimate
sexual matters but is barred from scrutinizing and regulating that most
communal of human activities, the production and exchange of labor and
goods.

In the face of this dismal state of affairs, the questions persist: What
must be done? Put another way: What is the soul of socialism and where
should it direct its energies? The soul of socialism is heart, a passion
for social justice, yet all the passion - and compassion - we can muster
will be wasted if our critique is not stated with references to values the
majority of people live by - or at least revere.

The people I encounter in court know they have been given the short end of
a bitter stick, and the stick is inedible no matter how much peanut butter
they put on it. They know that even if they work hard at their grimy and
strenuous jobs, their reward, if they are lucky, will be a few extra
dollars in their paycheck, but surely no chance for boardroom income and
stock options. Their lot is to struggle and endure dilapidated housing,
shoddy schools, and uneven medical care. Joe Hill notwithstanding, few of
them have the time to either mourn or organize.

To recast Georges Clemenceau's famous remark that war is too important a
business to be left to the generals, the division and distribution of
community goods and benefits, both necessary and superfluous, are too
important to be left to corporate CEO's and boards of directors. The CEO's
and the boards, of course, could not dictate outcomes unless they enjoyed
a symbiotic entanglement with the elected and appointed officials who
create the legal framework in which corporations thrive. In return, the
politicians receive buckets of cash for their elections along with hours
of free airtime and streams of favorable ink in the mass media applauding
their reign.

The role of the socialist has always been to expose and challenge the
conditions that allow the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few,
and the concomitant hardscrabble existence of the many. Now, in the early
years of the twenty-first century, confrontation is as necessary as it was
in 1848, or 1968, but the challenge to awaken, let alone transform, a
consciousness shaped by the prevailing corporate, political, and media
propaganda apparatus is infinitely more difficult and complex than it was
150 years ago. The fundamental structural and legal changes necessary - be
they the criminalization of corporate predations, direct taxation of
wealth, the regulating of wages and profits and so on - have all been
studied carefully by progressives and socialists (and indeed implemented
in some countries); but as Daniel Singer pointed out in Whose Millennium?:
Theirs or Ours?7 no legislative or workplace reforms are possible without
the support of large numbers of radicalized workers, students, and others
drawn from the ranks of the disenfranchised.

What Marx called "the fetishism of commodities"8 is embedded more than
ever in the psyches of people of all social and economic backgrounds. The
"fetishism" that Marx wrote of was not the "need" for luxury products,
sleeker automobiles, and electronic gadgetry created by advertising
industry psychologists, though this will to possess, consume, and adorn
helps sustain capitalism as it diverts the attention of those mesmerized
by a multiplicity of shiny things from the desperate plight of others.
What concerned Marx was the assignment of a value to an inert object
created or at least shaped, improved, or harvested, by the labor of a
worker. The transfer of that object in commerce from one person or group
of persons to another makes it a commodity with a value that is both
represented and skewed by the universal form of exchange, money. Marx
emphasized that the use of money drapes a "mystical veil," to use his
words, over the "social character of labor."9 If we lived in
self-contained, extended family units or agrarian communes, with no money
mediating the exchange of products, the social character of labor would be
obvious and each type of labor would manifest its true nature as existing
in a rough parity with every other type of labor.

It is when the commune or village sends it products elsewhere, in return
for a payment in money, that the mysterious problem of price and value
presents itself. Marx invites us to view a functioning and complex economy
as an integrated system of production and exchange. "Let us now picture to
ourselves...a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with
the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the
different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power
of the community. All the characteristics of...labour...are social,
instead of individual....The total product of our community is a social
product."10 So we can look at this pulsating community and see the trash
collector hauling away debris forty hours a week, the plumber installing
and repairing pipes forty hours a week, the physician dispensing
prescriptions and suturing cuts for forty hours, the baker making bread,
and so on. We know that under the prevailing order, these individuals will
receive radically disparate amounts of money to buy the necessities of
life, not to mention things that are unnecessary or even luxurious. For
Marx, this wage disparity is traceable to the arbitrary, and often
vicious, assignment of value by the owners of the productive apparatus to
the objects that become commodities in commerce.

The cruel charade to Marx was that the efforts of the worker are primarily
represented by the value the capitalist assigns to the product the worker
produces; but, scoffs Marx, the "formulae" for setting both wages and the
prices of commodities "appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a
self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labor itself."
Today's conservatives, without a whimper of protest from liberals, have
convinced the majority of people as well as most pundits that market
forces are beyond human control. These capitalist apologists will allow
the tweaking of interest rates, but whine that a federal minimum wage of
$5.15 an hour cannot be substantially increased, let alone doubled,
without incurring the wrath of Mother Nature.

Marx was a moralist, but his writings are devoid of moralizing and pleas
to the reader's sensibilities about justice and fairness. But one
socialist forebearer who relished condemning capitalist plutocrats on the
basis of their own moral principles (or pretensions) was the English
aesthete, painter, and critic, John Ruskin. Writing in 1862, five years
before Marx completed the first volume of Capital, Ruskin hurled four
essays collected under the title Unto this Last11 into the teeth of the
industrialists and economists who created - and then rationalized - the
abominable conditions of the English working class. Surprisingly, history
does not record any contact between Marx and Ruskin, and their writings do
not appear to contain any references to the other; but they were kindred
spirits in their criticisms of the existing order, with Ruskin more
aggressive than Marx in skewering sanctimonious capitalists for profiting
excessively from economic arrangements that belied their professed
Christian values.

Like Marx, Ruskin decried the iniquitous manner in which wages and prices
were set, but his greatest hostility was reserved for the economists who
proclaimed that there was no room in the marketplace for considerations of
justice and compassion. As a philosopher of art, Ruskin sought to define
the true and the beautiful, and he brought his quest for harmony and
balance to his study of the economic system. He concluded that a focus
dominated by production goals, with scant regard for what was being
produced and a chilly indifference to whether elementary and wholesome
needs were being satisfied, resulted in an unjust, even dangerous, state
of affairs. To produce with little purpose other than to serve the
frivolous desires and plans of the wealthy, while the basic needs of the
masses went unmet, was immoral.

For Ruskin, the unnecessary evil he saw everywhere was the imbalance
between the wealth of the few and the depredation of the majority. Like
Marx, Ruskin did not believe that these conditions were inevitable, but he
recognized that it was in the interests of the manufacturing and
commercial class to perpetuate the idea they were. Ruskin had no illusions
that a perfect justice could be achieved, but he believed that great
advances were possible if people recognized that it is not nature but the
economic and legal arrangements crafted by the powerful that lock people
in poverty: "It [is] the privilege of the fishes as it is of rats and
wolves to live by the laws of demand and supply; but the distinction of
humanity, to live by those of right."12

Money, the medium by which the few who possess it in great sums exercise
control over the many who do not, is always in finite supply. The
capitalist economic system makes the opportunity for access to fortunes by
a comparatively small number of people depend directly on the
impoverishment and impotence of the many. Forty hours as a foot press
operator means a shabby apartment, balky car, and inadequate diet; and
forty hours as a high school teacher means a better home and car than the
foot press operator, but a staggering debt for two children to go to
four-year colleges; but forty hours as an investment banker means second
houses, maids, yachts and other toys. Ruskin, like Marx, repudiates the
myth, prevailing in his time and also in ours, that the economy, and more
particularly, wages, cannot be regulated: "Perhaps one of the most curious
facts in the history of human error is the denial by the common political
economists of the possibility of thus regulating wages; while for all the
important and much of the unimportant, labour on the earth, wages are
already so regulated."13 Modern day plutocrats, like their Victorian
predecessors, use the institutions of government, politics, and the media,
to keep wages and benefits depressed, tax breaks for the wealthy
plentiful, and regulations minimal, all to maximize profits, and all while
hiding behind the shibboleths of "family values," "freedom," and "equal
opportunity."

And so we see that Marx and Ruskin, probably ignorant of each other's
work, reached the same conclusions, Marx with the more rigorous
scholarship, and Ruskin, despite his Tory roots, with the more fervid
denunciation of the immorality and sanctimony of the ruling class. Side by
side, these two geniuses present a paradigm for socialists today:
chronicle the statistics and obvious failings of the system, then
communicate this information, in terms of the values people live by, to
demonstrate that markets are not driven by forces of nature but are rather
the results of human actions that generate conditions profoundly offensive
to every extant religious and ethical system. People may not understand
the prose of Marx and Ruskin, but, in my experience, people know if they
have been wrongfully accused or if their paycheck is not a fair
compensation for the time and effort they expend; they know if medical and
dental care is beyond reach or third-rate; and they know if they are
breaking their backs or destroying their lungs because their inferior
education has left them no alternative but to take dangerous and
low-paying jobs. They also respond keenly to the language of right and
wrong.

Assisted by the insights of Marx and Ruskin, the modern day socialist must
explain with logic and clarity, not to mention with rhetorical
persuasiveness, this state of circumstances to an audience wider than
subscribers to left-wing journals. We can begin with appeals to fairness
and justice, notions that are easily understood and felt by the members of
the working and middle classes.

Three examples from the recent past manifest the power, if not the
necessity, of an appeal to morality, virtue, and a craving for social
justice to achieve fundamental change. The first was the civil rights
struggle led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The language and content of his
actions were based on principles that he and his adherents claimed were
divinely revealed and which they adopted to the exigencies of contemporary
segregation and discrimination.

Following upon the heels of and coalescing with the civil rights struggle
was the sustained protest against the war in Vietnam. The antiwar movement
was not as overtly religious as the civil rights struggle, but it numbered
many religious individuals and groups among its leadership, notably
Fathers Daniel and Phil Berrigan, the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, the
Catholic Worker Movement, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the
American Friends Service Committee.

The most noteworthy example of a successful moral appeal to a majority of
non-activist, even apolitical, people is the Sandinista revolution in
Nicaragua, first in overthrowing the brutal U.S. puppet, Anastasio Somoza,
and then in resisting the illegal U.S.-sponsored war of aggression by the
Contras against the Sandinista government. I was in Nicaragua in 1983 and
1985 for short periods during the civil war and saw everywhere the easy
and graceful blending of a Marxist view of economics and class struggle
with the social teachings of the Christian gospels. This happy - and some
would say holy - alliance both befuddled and provoked Reagan and his
imperialist cohorts. The lie Reagan promoted was that Nicaragua was
becoming a Soviet outpost in the western hemisphere, yet there were few,
if any, Russian advisors or military personnel in Nicaragua. The country's
infrastructure, damaged by Contra and CIA attacks, remained in a state of
disrepair, the most salient example being the destruction of oil storage
tanks in the Pacific port of Corinto by rockets launched from high-powered
speedboats.

What Reagan really feared was an alliance between religious people and
Marxists or the blending of a Marxist critique with Christian social
teachings in the consciousness of one person. A Sandinista slogan was, in
fact, "there is no contradiction between faith and the revolution." These
approaches represented a significant potential for anticapitalist,
anti-imperialist change throughout Latin American. Reagan and his advisors
were astute enough to know that the Sandinistas had chosen a course
different from that of Castro, who had made the unfortunate mistake of
ostracizing people with religious affiliations from the party. Whatever
their successes or defeats, the civil rights struggle, the antiwar
movement, and the Sandinista revolution show that a program for social
justice, coupled with a call to others to join in the struggle, can - and
sometimes must - be stated in terms of morality and virtue.

Any call for justice and fairness will confront the big lie of the
mega-capitalists that the disparities of wealth and resources are caused
by market forces that are as inevitable as the tides. These forces may be
studied in the way that a chemist studies minerals, but they may not be
regulated or restrained, any more than winds can be controlled by a
meteorologist. The implication of this capitalist cosmology is that
notions of justice, fairness, and compassion play no role. Spring breezes
and hurricanes are neither just nor unjust, and, according to this view,
the same is true of the salaries of CEO's and hotel maids: they just are.

A clear appeal is needed now more than ever to the deepest values of the
middle and working classes, not to mention the destitute, as their
consciousness has been shaped by an educational bureaucracy that is
producing functional and political illiterates who are overwhelmed by a
culture blandishing unattainable glitter and celebrity. But even in the
face of this, the working class venerates ethnic and religious
traditions - undoubtedly to garner some inexpensive solace for their
exhausting and troubled lives - that have buried within them calls for
equality and social justice that are as poignant and relevant today as
when they were first made. A few examples: "a small number of very rich
men have been able to lay upon the teaming masses of the laboring poor a
yoke little better than that of slavery itself"; "[n]o one is justified in
keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need, when others lack
necessities"; many workers "simultaneously experience a situation of
dependence on inhuman economic systems and institutions: a situation
which, for many of them, borders on slavery, not only physical but also
professional, cultural, civic and spiritual." The first of these
statements is by Pope Leo XIII in the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum,
issued in 1891; the second is from Populorum Progressio, an encyclical
letter of Pope Paul VI promulgated in 1967; and the last is from a
declaration by Latin American bishops titled Justice issued at a
conference in Medellin, Columbia in 1968.

These cries for justice surface sporadically but rarely become the daily
fare of the people to whom they are addressed; and the mainstream media,
always an eager conduit of the plutocrats' line, ignores these messages
after the initial report. Even today, the chastising of wealthy nations
for their selfishness and the United States for its horrific aggression
against Iraq by Pope John Paul is buried under the continual reporting of
his reactionary opinions on abortion and homosexuality, topics favored by
both the mainstream media and right-wing talk show hosts to divert
attention from suffering communities.

To paraphrase Aristotle, whatever is received is received according to the
manner of the receiver; or to put it in earthier terms, a quart bottle
cannot receive a gallon of liquid. The compassion that infuses the soul of
socialism must embrace people where they are - and most people stand
mutely in a world that has stilted their analytical powers while giving
them perspectives that use the simple categories learned in church and
school for judging behavior: good and bad, moral and immoral, virtuous and
sinful. The capitalists have succeeded in twisting these meanings so that,
in popular culture, vast sums of money, jewels, and yachts are seen as
good, even as marks of virtue resulting from an efficient use of
"freedom," while poverty is considered immoral or even sinful, the
consequence of laziness and a dissolute lifestyle. What the capitalists
have not been able to eradicate are peoples' vestigial connections to
traditions, cultures, and the primary texts of their belief systems, which
universally condemn current economic arrangements.

No sage or savior has ever endorsed greed and gluttony as a path toward
social justice or personal fulfillment. These sane and enlightened people
come to us from all cultures and all eras, sometimes knowing of each other
but more often not. Socrates and Jesus, Lao Tzu and Tolstoi, Gandhi and
Martin Buber - no one can find in their lives and words a jot of support
for a political and economic regime that encourages the acquisition and
accumulation of wealth far beyond what is needed for the necessaries - or
even the restorative pleasures - of life, while consigning the masses to
live and work in squalor.

The prevailing business ethos rejects the core teachings of the world's
religions and literatures, as it establishes a contemporary priesthood of
profiteers composed of the politicians, economists, and corporate
chieftains who serve global capitalism. The scientific and rationalist
part of the socialist soul may recoil from putting radical theory into
moral terms, but this can be done easily and ethically without subscribing
to any theology. One can condemn the siphoning of money into the coffers
of the privileged while the majority scramble for crumbs as being obscene,
immoral, unjust, and even sinful without believing in the parting of the
Red Sea or the turning of water into wine.

There are proposed solutions as close at hand as history texts and
scholarly journals, not to mention tax, regulatory, and distribution plans
implemented with varying degrees of success in places as diverse as
Norway, Cuba, Venezuela, and Switzerland, but no fundamental and radical
change will occur until the majority of people feel with the passionate
soul of a socialist that the criminally unfair division of wealth across
this planet is not the result of impersonal forces of nature, but rather
is attributable to immoral and calculating schemes of the capitalist
oligarchs and the politicians they own. Daily struggles are needed in many
venues - the shop floor, the courtroom, schools, and legislative chambers.
Demonstrations, strikes, and the publication of books and journals are all
part of the socialist task, but without a message that speaks to the
people's values and redirects their energies, victories will be scarce
indeed.

Notes

1. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), 137.

2. Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller, in The Traveller and the Deserted
Village, W. Murison ed. (Cambridge: University Press, 1936).

3. Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working
Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1974).

4. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political
Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

5. See, e.g., Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication
Politics in Dubious Times (New York: New Press, 2000). See also, Edward
Herman and Robert McChesney, The Global Media: The New Missionaries of
Corporate Capitalism (London: Washington, D.C.: Cassel, 1997).

6. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives won the
Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

7. Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium?: Theirs or Ours? (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1999).

8. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publications House, 1954).

9. Marx, Capital, 80.

10. Marx, Capital, 78.

11. John Ruskin, Unto This Last and Other Writings (London: Penguin Group,
1997).

12. Ruskin, Unto This Last, 194.

13. Ruskin, Unto This Last, 173.


--------14 of 14--------

 Lewis Carroll
 You are old, father William

 "You are old, father William," the young man said,
 "And your hair has become very white;
 And yet you incessantly stand on your head
 Do you think, at your age, it is right?

 "In my youth," father William replied to his son,
 "I feared it might injure the brain;
 But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
 Why, I do it again and again."

 "You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
 And you have grown most uncommonly fat;
 Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door
 Pray what is the reason for that?"

 "In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
 "I kept all my limbs very supple
 By the use of this ointment one shilling a box
 Allow me to sell you a couple?"

 "You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
 For anything tougher than suet;
 Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak
 Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

 "In my youth," said his fater, "I took to the law,
 And argued each case with my wife;
 And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
 Has lasted the rest of my life."

 "You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
 That your eye was as steady as ever;
 Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose
 What made you so awfully clever?"

 "I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
 Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs!
 Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
 Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs."


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   - David Shove             shove001 [at] tc.umn.edu
   rhymes with clove         Progressive Calendar
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