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“There will no longer be nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only places of birth. Man, of whatever race or colour he may be, is an inhabitant of the universe; citizenship is everywhere an acquired right.”
- Proudhon (General Idea of the Revolution, p. 283)

Spinoza wrote on religion, "... since they find within themselves and outside themselves a considerable number of means very convenient for the pursuit of their own advantage - as for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, cereals and living creatures for food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish - the result is that they look on all the things of Nature as means to their own advantage. And realizing that these were found, not produced by them, they come to believe that there is someone else who produced these means for their use." This is the capitalist/monotheist interpretation of Nature. It is something to be exploited. Genesis 1 says, "28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." 29 And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." " So in this paradigm we see everything as a gift for us, and thus we see ourselves as outside Nature, when in reality we are just as much a part of nature as anyone or anything else. We depend on things outside our bodies for sustenance and shelter, but these things are not given to us to exploit in any way we see fit. I don't subscribe to Spinoza's Pantheism. Rather, I believe in animism, the belief that there are spirits in everything and that we should worship and have reverence for all things. I agree that things in Nature are gifts, but they're not gifts given exclusively to us. We need to share these gifts with other species who need them. Hell, we can't even share within our own species!

I am a vegetarian, but I don't begrudge those who eat meat. I just wish people would have respect for the animals they are killing. Bow hunting or having your own organic farm are two ways to get meat that are both respectful and ecologically sound. When you kill the animal yourself, you see the suffering it goes through and it makes you revere the animal more. You can say a prayer to the animal thanking it for the sustenance you are about to receive. When you alienate the death aspect of meat from the eating aspect you have dishonored the animal. Factory farms are extremely disrespectful as they make animals into products, commodities to be bought and sold and ultimately to die long before their time. Forty million cows and calves are killed annually. Cows have a life span of 20-25 years, but a factory-farmed cow is used up by the time it is 3 to 4 years old and sent to the slaughterhouse.

The canines of Ardipithecus ramidus indicate that there was a significantly decreased level of dimorphism when compared with that of our closest relative, the chimpanzee. Chimpanzees have what is called a honing-complex, which means that their canines are used to rip apart tough meats. Homo sapiens and Ar. ramidus do not have a honing complex. Also, the canines of Ar. ramidus are significantly "feminized," meaning they are not sexually dimorphic. This could possibly indicate a decreased level of male-male aggression, when compared with primates we know like chimpanzees. It could also mean a greater amount of equality between the sexes. Suwa et al write, "The dental evidence leads to the hypothesis that the last common ancestors of African apes and hominids were characterized by relatively low levels of canine, postcanine, and body size dimorphism. These were probably the anatomical correlates of comparatively weak amounts of male-male competition, perhaps associated with male philopatry and a tendency for male-female codominance as seen in P. paniscus and ateline species." I believe this says something about human nature. We are not aggressive creatures and domination of one over another is not in our genes. I could be wrong here. If yr reading this and you're an anthropologist feel free to make a comment. I'm still doing my research and there is more to come!

Is Man an “Aggressive Ape”?

Source: International Socialist Review, November 1970, Vol. 31, No. 8, pp. 27-31, 40-42;
Transcribed: by Daniel Gaido;
Proofed: and corrected by Chris Clayton;
Public Domain: this text is free of copyright.

NB. Ever since written history began a few thousand years ago male historians and other scholars have used the term “man” or “mankind” as equivalent to “human” or “humankind,"’ which left “woman” or “womankind” entirely out of the picture. Other women in the liberation movement besides myself recognize the impossibility of eradicating the sexist terminology all at once and particularly under our capitalist system. Consequently the term “man” in this article is used in the generic sense following the general usage of this term throughout the history of class society.— Note by Evelyn Reed

A currently fashionable school of writers claims that the study of animals proves that humans are innately aggressive, and that war is a biological necessity. This pseudoscientific theory attempts to legitimize war, and disorient the opponents of war.

Since the early 1960s the United States, the most powerfully-armed nation on earth, has been conducting an onslaught against Vietnam, a tiny nation far from its shores. This long drawn-out, genocidal war has produced wave upon wave of revulsion among the American people.

Massive, unprecedented antiwar demonstrations have been accompanied by an intense interest in the root causes of military conflict. Many Americans who once trusted the word of the capitalist Establishment that it waged wars only to “safeguard democracy” rightly suspect that they have been hoodwinked. They are coming to see that the only gainers from such conflicts are the monopolists who seek to safeguard their empire and expand their power, profits and privileges through them. Under the impact of the most hated war in our nation’s history, a political awakening is taking place with regard to the real causes of imperialist aggression which are embedded in the drives and decline of the capitalist system.

In the same time period a set of writers has come to the fore whose books present a wholly different view of the causes of organized warfare. They claim that man’s biological heritage and his “killer” instincts are responsible for wars, absolving the predatory capitalist system of all responsibility. Their paperbacks are bought by the hundreds of thousands and have been high on the best-seller lists. They obviously influence the thinking of many readers who are anxiously searching for answers to the problems of war and other social evils.

The principal figures among these apologists for the crimes of capitalism have produced six such books in the decade. The pacesetter is Robert Ardrey who brought out African Genesis in 1961 and its sequel, The Territorial Imperative, five years later. A third, The Social Contract, has just been published. Konrad Lorenz published On Aggression in 1963 which was translated into English in 1966. In 1967 The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris appeared, followed two years later by its companion, The Human Zoo.

The authors come from different countries and have dissimilar backgrounds. Ardrey was an unsuccessful playwright who became a dabbler in anthropology. Lorenz is an Austrian naturalist, sometimes called the “father of ethology” — the science of animal behavior in the wild - who specializes in the study of the greylag goose and certain other bird and fish species. The Englishman Morris was formerly curator of mammals in the London zoo.

However much these writers differ in background, training and temperament, they agree that modern wars are not brought about for economic and social reasons but stem from the biological aggressiveness of human nature.

Their method consists in obliterating the essential distinctions that separate humans from animals and identifying the behavior of both through gross exaggerations and misrepresentations of the part played by instincts in human life. They argue that since mankind came out of the animal world, people are at bottom no better than animals; they are inescapably creatures of their biological impulses. Thus modern warfare is explained by man’s “innate” aggression.

This extension of animal aggressiveness to account for imperialism and its military interventions is absurd on the face of it. No animal has ever manufactured an atom bomb and there are no apes standing ready to hurl them and blow up the planet. The small group of aggressive men who control the nuclear warheads are not in the zoos or the forests but in the White House and Pentagon.

To equate animal behavior with imperialist war-making is to slander not only animals but the vast majority of humans who wish only to live in peace. The Vietnamese have not threatened or invaded the territory of the United States; the opposite is the case. And the average GI has so little warlike spirit against these distant “enemies” that it requires heavy pressure and unremitting patriotic indoctrination to convince him that he must be come aggressive against them.

To the new school of writers, however, wars are not made by big business and its agents in Washington; the real culprit is the ape nature of man. With this biological fig leaf, they attempt to cover up the criminal course of the imperialists, and dump responsibility for their aggressions upon “man” in general.

These writers refuse to recognize that, while mankind has grown out of the animal world, we are a unique species which has outgrown animality. A whole series of distinctive attributes divides us from all lower species. Humans alone have the capacity to produce the necessities and comforts of life, humans alone possess speech and cultures; humans, therefore, have their own history. The laws of social evolution, applicable to mankind alone, are fundamentally distinct from the laws of organic evolution applicable in nature.

This point is made by the eminent paleontologist, George Gaylord Simpson, as follows:

“The establishment of the fact that man is a primate with all its evolutionary implications, early gave rise to fallacies for which there is no longer any excuse (and never was much) ... These fallacies arise from what Julian Huxley calls the “nothing but” school. It was felt or said that because man is an animal, a primate, and so on he is nothing but an animal, or nothing but an ape with a few extra tricks. It is a fact that man is an animal, but it is not a fact that he is nothing but an animal ... Such statements are not only untrue but also vicious for they deliberately lead astray enquiry as to what man really is and so distort our whole comprehension of ourselves and our proper values.

“To say that man is nothing but an animal is to deny, by implication, that he has essential attributes other than those of all animals ... His unique nature lies precisely in those characteristics that are not shared with any other animal. His place in nature and its supreme significance to man are not defined by his animality but by his humanity.[1]

According to Dr. Simpson, man represents “an absolute difference in kind and not only a relative difference in degree” from all animals. Ardrey, Lorenz and Morris are clearly at odds with these statements on the qualitative distinctions between humans and animals.

The crudest of the three is Robert Ardrey who reduces science to fiction writing. An adroit name-dropper, he sprinkles his books with references to prestigious scientists, to endow his work with their unction. He does this, for example, with Simpson, who is far from sharing Ardrey’s views about mankind.

Man is only a “fraction of the animal world,” says Ardrey, and human history no more than an “afterthought” of natural history. We are not, therefore, “so unique as we should like to believe.”[2] This is exactly the opposite of the views expressed by Simpson on the subject.
Killers and capitalists

Ardrey’s books are designed to demonstrate not only that man is a born killer, a “legacy” bequeathed by our killer-ape ancestors, but that animal nature is also at the bottom of the capitalist nature and the lust for private property. He takes exception to Darwin’s observation that male animals compete and fight for sexual access to females in the mating season. According to Ardrey, animals, like people, compete and fight for the private ownership of property which begins with one’s own territory. This is the central theme behind his “territorial imperative.”

To substantiate his thesis he cites a bird specialist who “observed throughout a lifetime of bird watching, that male birds quarrel seldom over females; what they quarrel over is real-estate.” The females, for their part, are sexually attracted only to males possessing property. “In most but not all territorial species,” we are told, “the female is sexually unresponsive to an unpropertied male.” [3] A mockingbird, it seems, can only get a mate after having fought for and won sufficient holdings in property.

Highlighting this absurdity, Ardrey further assures us in The Territorial Imperative that “many animals,” such as lions, eagles and wolves, “form land-owning groups.” He makes no distinction between the use of land, sea or air by creatures in nature for their habitats, and the exclusive private ownership of land and other resources by rent-collectors. Thus he concludes, “Ownership of land is scarcely a human invention, as our territorial propensity is something less than a human distinction.”

According to Ardrey, man has inherited his capitalistic proclivities from his ape ancestors and this legacy explains human “killer” instincts in defense of possessions and territory. This justifies not only the capitalist way of life but also the imperialist aggressions that are waged by the U.S. to maintain its system. Ardrey thereupon appeals for a less negative attitude on the part of Americans today toward war, urging them not to imitate those who despise wars and war-makers.

“Generals in the time of growing up were something to be hidden under history’s bed, along with the chamber pots,” he complains. “Anyone who chose the army for a career was a fool or a failure.” Indeed, after the First World War, “certain words almost vanished from the American vocabulary, among them such fine patriotic words as “honor” and “glory.” And he sorrowfully adds, “Patriotism, naturally, was the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

Bent on changing this attitude, Ardrey warns that the same “territorial imperative” that is embedded in our instincts likewise motivates the “enemy.” So if we are to save ourselves and our property we must fight, fight, fight. He writes:

“The territorial imperative is as blind as a cave fish, as consuming as a furnace and it commands beyond logic, opposes all reason, suborns all moralities, strives for no goal more sublime than survival ... But today’s American must also bear in mind that the territorial principle motivates all of the human species. It is not some thing that Americans thought up, like the skyscraper or the Chevrolet. Whether we approve or we disapprove, whether we like it or we do not, it is a power as much an ally of our enemies as it is of ourselves and our friends. [4]

What are we to say to this most unnatural history? It is obvious that living creatures congregate in specific habitats on the land or in the sea which provide them with food and mating grounds. But these habitats are not “territories” in the sense of landed estates that they permanently own. It is also true that animals may be come aggressive in the struggle to satisfy their basic needs. But they are just as capable of tolerating one another’s presence in a common habitat as they are of squabbling over any given spot at any particular time.

Aggressiveness in defense of a habitat is imposed upon animals because for survival each species is adapted to the particular food and climate of specific areas. Thus trooping animals may defend the region occupied by the group; solitary animals defend only the particular spot each occupies at any given time. In all cases, the “imperative” is not for “territory” but for satisfying the moat basic needs of the animal within the restricted framework of its particular living space.

Conditions of life are entirely different in the human world, however, where mankind is not chained to any special food or climate and can produce what is needed anywhere on the globe. Unlike the polar bear which cannot live in tropical Africa or the tropical ape that cannot survive in icy Newfoundland, human beings can roam and inhabit the whole planet, together producing and sharing the necessities of life. Humans can act consciously and collectively to eradicate war once they become aware of its causes.

More to the point, the capitalists are not so much interested in protecting “their” territory, as such, from alleged enemies; what they want to maintain at all costs is “their” system of exploitation. That is why the United States, whose current war is against the “enemy” in Southeast Asia, also has military bases on other peoples’ territories all around the globe. A capitalist ruling class will even temporarily yield sovereignty over its territory, if need be, as the French moneyed men did to Hitler during the Second World War, to preserve their properties from the insurgent masses.

The American people do not decide who their enemies are; they are singled out for them by the shifting needs of the capitalists. During the Second World War the Germans and Japanese were the enemies whereas the Soviet and Chinese allies were friends. Since then these respective nations have been switched as friend and foe. What has changed is not the territorial relations but the diplomatic and strategic aims of American imperialism. Its propaganda machine tells the country who is to be hated and who is to be liked at any given time. Contrary to Ardrey, there is nothing instinctual in these attitudes; all of it is learned behavior, instilled by the capitalist ruling class.

Lorenz and Morris, who, unlike Ardrey, have some claim to the title of scientists, go as completely wrong when they try to biologize history. This is as great an error as it would be to reduce biology and botany to chemistry and physics, even though animal and vegetable life have a physico-chemical origin and basis. In the case of human life it produces grotesque distortions of the truth.

Desmond Morris, who has less of a scientific reputation than Lorenz, is particularly crude in this respect. “I am a zoologist and the naked ape is an animal. He is therefore fair game for my pen,” he declares in his first book, The Naked Ape. To this zoo-keeper, man differs from the ape by virtue of two amplified biological organs, a bigger penis and a bigger brain, and because our species is “naked” while apes are hairy. Nothing essential has been altered by humans either in themselves or their society; they were and still remain the creature of their ape instincts: “So there he stands, our vertical, hunting weapon-toting, territorial, neotenous, brainy, Naked Ape, a primate by ancestry, and a carnivore by adoption, ready to conquer the world ... for all his environment-moulding achievements, he is still at heart a very naked ape.” [5]

These writers who see no qualitative distinction between man and ape ignore the extent to which man himself has changed in the course of his million-year history. People today, who are only now becoming aware of the social jungle that has been foisted upon them by the capitalists, are not the same as the people of pre-civilized society who conquered their animal heritage and conditions of life, reconstituting themselves into the tribal brotherhood of men. Indeed, the very existence of that primitive system of collectivism and their cooperative relations testify to how profoundly men were emancipated from their earlier brute instincts.
Instincts or learned behavior

The proposition upon which Ardrey, Lorenz and Morris build their case for the innate aggressiveness of mankind, i.e., that humans are governed by irrepressible, unmodified, inherited instincts, is today rejected by most authoritative scientists. Let us examine this aspect of the matter.

The degree to which humans have shed their original instincts is so great that most of them have already vanished. A child, for example, must today be taught the dangers of fire which animals flee from by instinct. According to anthropologist Ralph Linton, instincts or “unlearned reactions” have been reduced to “such things as the digestive processes, adaptation of the eye to light intensity and similar involuntary responses.” He adds:

“The fewer instincts a species possesses, the greater the range of behaviors it can develop, and this fact, coupled with the enormous capacity for learning which characterizes humans, has resulted in a richness and variety of learned behavior which is completely without parallel in other species.” [6]

Except for reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and sudden loud noises, Ashley Montagu likewise denies that any significant aspect of human behavior is purely instinctive; all of it is conditioned by life experiences. Furthermore, as animal experiments and domestication disclose, many of the reactions of living creatures below the level of mankind, which have been conventionally classified as instinctive, can be considerably modeled by mankind and environmental conditioning.

Lorenz, who is far more prudent and scholarly than Morris, is embarrassed by his colleague’s crudity. Although he upholds the thesis that man is subject to his animal instincts, he acknowledges that people are set apart from the animals by their possession of culture and language. “That’s why,” he commented in an interview in the July 5, 1970, New York Times Magazine, “I don’t like my friend Desmond Morris’ title, The Naked Ape.” Morris, he says, disregards the fact that man is “an ape with a cumulative tradition.” But the mere existence and weight of such a tradition in social development proves that mankind is human, not ape!

Unable to grasp the full import of this fact, Lorenz sides with Morris in the matter of the innate aggressiveness of humans. To him there is no essential difference between a cockfight and a nuclear war; the one follows in a continuous evolutionary sequence from the other. There is, he says,

“the alarming progression of aggressive actions ranging from cocks fighting in the barnyard to dogs biting each other, boys thrashing each other, young men throwing beer mugs at each other’s heads, and so on to barroom brawls about politics, and finally to wars and atom bombs.” [7]

Note how Lorenz leaps from animal fights to human quarrels, disregarding the decisive differences between them. Then, on the human level, he refuses to distinguish between the petty personal encounters of people and the massive military operations conducted by governments in which men are ordered to kill in cold blood other men they have never even seen before, much less had any personal quarrel with.

Animal fights, personal squabbles and imperialist wars are all dumped into the same sack to substantiate the falsification that humans are nothing but animals and have never passed beyond that stage of development. This theme is only a variation of the tiresome old argument that “you can’t change human nature” - another piece of capitalist propaganda designed to avert revolutionary change in our social system. Their special twist is that “you can’t change animal nature” since in their view humans are nothing but animals. History, however, demonstrates that just as the ape became man, so did man radically transform his ape nature and convert it into human nature.

Furthermore even this human nature has changed drastically in the course of social history, and will continue to acquire new and different traits as humanity begins to emancipate itself from capitalist thralldom. What man needs to throw off today is not animal nature - which he shed a million years ago - rather, he must throw off the capitalist nature which has been imprinted into his a conduct and psychology by this society.

This is precisely the point that the “instinctual” school of theoreticians seeks to gloss over or cover up. They fear that an acknowledgement of a changing human nature logically clears the way for a radical change in our social system. Thus Lorenz, who is most forthright in this respect, is careful to dissociate himself from the position of Marx and Engels.

In the Times interview he said,

“Marx was very aware of the need to conserve the whole heritage of culture. Everything he said in Capital is right, but he always made the error of forgetting the instincts. For Marx the territorial instinct was only a cultural phenomenon.”

But the founders of socialism were completely right in rejecting the “instinctual” approach to social history. As they pointed out, the main motor forces in human progress are not biological but social. Humans possess that crucial characteristic which no other species possesses: the capacity to labor and develop the forces of production. Laboring humanity has the ability to anticipate, imagine, reason, pursue goals and advance the whole sphere of culture. All this not only gives humans increasing control over their own lives and destinies, but also constantly modifies their own human nature. The renowned archaeologist V. Gordon Childe wrote on this point:

“In human history, clothing, tools, weapons, and traditions take the place of fur, claws, tusks, and instincts in the quest for food and shelter. Customs and prohibitions, embodying centuries of accumulated experience and handed on by social tradition, take the place of inherited instincts in facilitating the survival of our species ... it is essential not to lose sight of the significant distinctions between historical program and organic evolution, between human culture and the animal’s bodily equipment, between the social heritage and the biological inheritances.” [8]

The irreconcilable differences between the two schools of thought on the nature of aggression in history have more than an academic or literary interest. To say that man is governed by its ape nature and that humans are born mass murderers has important political consequences. It diverts attention from the real instigators of war, the capitalist magnates, and leads people to blame themselves for their “evil” instincts. This self-blame feeds a despairing, apathetic attitude and produces a fatalistic outlook. It tends to dissipate the social anger of masses of people who can band together in revolutionary action against those who are really to blame - the dangerous war-makers.

This mood is explicit in both Morris and Lorenz, who, seeing no revolutionary solution to capitalist-made problems, present prophecies of doom. Morris believes “there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century.” Lorenz is equally pessimistic and says in On Aggression:

“An unprejudiced observer from another planet, looking upon man as he is today, in his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the aggression drive inherited from his anthropoid ancestors, which this same intelligence cannot control, would not prophesy long life for the species.”

Marxists do not deny that all humanity is threatened with extermination by the nuclear arsenal and other death devices controlled by the over-killers in Washington. But we believe that working men and women and their allies can be aroused and organized to take economic, military and political power away from the capitalist atom-maniacs and thereby eradicate the causes of war. This conviction that a socialist revolution can and will put a permanent end to imperialist slaughters is the basis for Marxist optimism - as against the prophets of doom of the “instinctual” school.

There has been no lack of competent critics to challenge Ardrey, Lorenz and Morris for drawing sweeping and reactionary conclusions about humans on the basis of limited, specialized, specious and erroneous data about animal life. These scholars reject the premise that mankind is the blind creature of instincts. Most of them agree that instincts have long been supplanted by learned behavior as the dominant factor in social and cultural life. For those who may be unaware of the broad scope of the criticisms, here is a brief summary of the views of many well-known naturalists, anthropologists and sociologists who have taken issue with these writers.

The pacesetter was Marshall Sahlins, University of Michigan anthropologist who reviewed African Genesis in the July 1962 Scientific American. “Ignoring the million years in historical development of cultural forms,” he wrote, “Ardrey typically takes as human the conditions he finds at hand, reads them into vertebrate sociology and so accounts biologically for human behavior.”

Indeed, Ardrey makes a double error in methodology without knowing that he is doing so: First he takes the behavior of human beings in capitalist society as natural and falsely applies it to animal behavior. Then he illegitimately projects this invalid interpretation of animal behavior back on to “man” in general. This enables him to obliterate the crucial distinctions between the natural animal and social mankind.
The critics speak out

Following Sahlins, many other criticisms were published in The New York Times Magazine, scientific journals and other media, bearing down heavily on the falsification that wars are virtually implanted in man’s genes. In 1968 Columbia professor M. F. Ashley Montagu compiled fifteen articles specifically directed against Lorenz and Ardrey in the anthology Man and Aggression. [9]

These critics conduct their polemics along two lines. First they assail and expose the dubious and misleading data offered in the name of science by Lorenz and Ardrey which they regard as more fictional than factual. Second, they are incensed by the thesis that wars are unavoidable because of the innate depravity of man as an instinctual killer. They point out that animals which kill for food act simply to satisfy their hunger; they are not war-makers. Nor were primitive peoples war-makers.

“Organized warfare between states is, of course, a very modern human invention,” says the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer. The raids and skirmishes of pre-civilized peoples cannot be compared either in quantity or quality with the massive wars between nation-states in our times. Gorer summarizes Ardrey’s “oversimplifications, questionable statements, omissions and plain inaccuracies” in stinging terms:

“Ardrey shows only the most superficial knowledge of contemporary events, practically no knowledge of the history of the old world or of contemporary sociology and social anthropology. His categories and preferences are bound to give comfort and provide ammunition for the radical Right, for the Birchites and the Empire Loyalists, and their analogues elsewhere... The Territorial Imperative demands a wrapper: “Handle carefully; Read with critical skepticism.” [10]

Some of the critics are gentler with Lorenz, who has made certain contributions to natural science. But they do not exculpate him for resorting to pseudoscientific arguments to buttress the myth that war-making is innate. Further, they question his qualifications as an authority on either primate or human behavior.

Lorenz is not a student of anthropoids that stand in the direct line of human ascent, nor even of the mammalian species. He has studied only birds and some fish-creatures which are far removed from mankind in the sequence of evolution. J. P. Scott, of Bowling Green (Ohio) University, says that Lorenz knows little outside his limited field; that he is “a very narrow specialist who primarily knows the behavior of birds and particularly that of ducks and geese on which his book has an excellent chapter.” [11]

Similar criticisms were made at an international meeting held in Paris in May 1970 under the auspices of UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) where a score of scientists discussed the problem of aggression and war for a week. According to a report in the May 23, 1970, New York Times, they unanimously opposed the views of Lorenz and Morris that aggression is innate, inevitable and even beneficial. They state that aggressive behavior is learned. People act violently because they have been taught to do so or are made to do so, not because they are born or ordained to be aggressive toward their fellow men.

Dr. Adeoye Lambo, director of the Behavior Science Research Institute at Ibadan, Nigeria, gave several examples of societies where aggressiveness in young children is consistently rewarded, to illustrate how aggressiveness is learned rather than instinctive. Several other participants pointed out that a murder or some other act of violence takes place on American television screens every eight seconds. Television also shows daily news reels of the violence committed by the colossal United States military machine in Southeast Asia.

Professor Robert A. Hinde, Director of Animal Behavior Studies at the University of Cambridge, said that both Lorenz and Morris are “very ignorant of the major chunk of literature about both animals and man.” He said Lorenz reads nothing outside his specialty, and “his emphasis upon the inevitability of aggression is a gross exaggeration.” He branded Morris’ two books as a “dangerous intertwining of fact and fiction.”

These scholars and scientists are especially concerned about the damaging effect such ignorant and irresponsible assertions can have upon the millions of people who accept them as scientific gospel. As Sally Carrighar, the British naturalist, says in Man and Aggression, a social evil can only be eradicated if its true causes are recognized. But “the incentive to do it is lacking while people believe that aggression is innate and instinctive with us.” [12] And the economist Kenneth E. Boulding correctly stresses that “human aggression and human territoriality are products of social systems, not of biological systems. They must be treated as such.” [13]

A number of these critics recall that there is nothing new in this “tooth and claw” approach to human history. The ideas propounded by Ardrey, Lorenz and Morris are a re-edition in modern dress of the Social Darwinism that was propagated in conservative circles in the last part of the nineteenth century and up to the end of the first world war, when it faded away.

Ralph Holloway notes that the phrase “Social Darwinism” never appears in The Territorial Imperative. “Too bad,” he remarks, “for that is essentially the message of the book. Ardrey is uninformed if he thinks that there have never been attempts to reduce human group behavior to a few animal instincts.” [14]
Neo Social Darwinism

Every epoch-making discovery can be perverted by the masters of class society and their spokesmen servants. The capitalists, for instance, misuse machinery which is designed to lighten man’s work by making humans into sweating appendages of the machine. Darwin’s findings on the origin of species and the theory of evolution, which revolutionized the study of biology and threw light on the genesis of mankind, have been similarly perverted. Conservative ideologues misapplied them to the nineteenth-century social scene as a rationale for capitalist competitiveness, greed and inequalities.

The catchwords of “struggle for existence,” “natural selection,” and “survival of the fittest” were invoked to uphold the practices of laissez-faire - let things run their course as they are, and the fittest will survive. This gave the sanctity of natural law to the social jungle created by capitalism at home and to its wars and territorial conquests in foreign lands.

T. K. Penniman, the British historian of anthropology, described this gospel as follows:

“Imperial developments appeared to show that ‘the lesser breeds without the law’ were bound to go to the wall, and that such events were but the working of the law of nature... . The idea that one nation subdues another or annexes territory because it is superior, or that a man who gains more ease and money for less work than another, is therefore the fitter to survive and progress are ideas begotten not of Darwin but of the competition for mechanical efficiency ... people reduced to fighting for a living wage or those who contemplated the struggle must give the palm not to those who could take pride in what they made, or did, but to those who most successfully exploited their fellows.” [15]

The new Social Darwinists have refurbished these discredited doctrines to again eternalize bourgeois relationships and justify imperialist violence. Montagu says, “There is nothing new in all this. We have heard it before... . As General von Bernhardi put it in 1912, ‘War is a biological necessity ...’” [16]

One example from Lorenz should suffice to show how they revive Social Darwinism. He equates the intra-species competition among animals for food and mates with the socioeconomic competition of men today. Competition is indeed the hallmark of capitalism. The big aggregations of capital push the weaker to the wall and workers are forced to bid against one another for the available jobs. But Lorenz views this capitalist-made competition as the remit of inborn animal attributes.

“All social animals are ‘status seekers,’” he informs us in On Aggression. Birds, like men, compete with one another for status and possessions and the “stronger” or fittest wins out over the “weaker” or less fit. Thus there are “high-ranking” jackdaws who have more status and wield “authority” over the lowly jackdaws who lack both status and authority.

To Lorenz there is great “survival value” in this “pecking order” of man, bird and beast, providing the weaker submit to the stronger. “Under this rule every individual in the society knows which one is stronger and which weaker than itself, so that everyone can retreat from the stronger and expect submission from the weaker, if they should get in each other’s way.” Every boss today would certainly like to establish this rule with regard to the workers. Unfortunately for him, they are not birds or beasts - but men who can organize and fight back.

It is true that a wasteful method of species survival and development prevails in nature where, under conditions of limited food and space, competition prevails and the less fit are eliminated to the benefit of the fittest. But such wasteful methods are unnecessary in human society today where people can plan their lives and control their own destiny - once they get rid of the exploitation and anarchy of capitalism. As Engels commented, “Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom.” [17]
Racist and sexist

Prejudices of a feather flock together. So it should come as no surprise that those who degrade humanity to the animal level are also racist and sexist in their outlook. Whereas Ardrey denies that male birds or animals fight over anything unimportant as females but rather fight over real-estate, Lorenz takes a different tack. He says that females are “no less aggressive than the males,” and in particular display hostility toward members of their own sex - presumably just as women do in competitive capitalist society.

This generalization is based on observations of certain rare fish, such as the East Indian yellow cichlids and Brazilian mother-of-pearl fish, where not only are males hostile to males, but females are apparently unfriendly to females.

It is well known that in many species, above all the mammals, females will fight in defense of their offspring. Males, on the other hand, fight one another for sexual access to females. This trait is not duplicated in the female sex. A female fighting another female for access to males is conspicuous by its absence in the animal world. In herding species, one bull is quite sufficient for a herd of females, and a “pride of lions” is composed of a pack of lionesses to which usually only a solitary adult male is attached. Lorenz does not make clear the considerable differences involved in these types of aggression on the part of the animal sexes.

What is worse, he uses certain exceptional phenomena in nature as the basis for drawing sweeping conclusions about women in our society. Because certain female cichlids eat the male at their “marriage feast” and some show unfriendliness to other females, Lorenz draws from this a pattern of human behavior. He offers the following illustration:

While there was still a Hapsburg monarchy and well-to-do women had servants, his widowed aunt never kept a maid longer than ten months. To be sure, his aunt did not attack or eat the maids; she merely fired one and hired another. Her conduct, however, presumably testifies to the everlasting, innate aggressiveness of females toward other females.

Lorenz mistakes the class-conditioned temper and capriciousness of a woman with her servants in capitalist society for female aggression in nature, which is exceedingly rare. Desmond Morris displays a much more profound animosity toward women than does the paternalistic Lorenz. He informs us that the beauty aids purchased by women are only modern adaptations of the “sexual signaling” of our animal ancestresses. By implication all females, both animal and human, are unattractive and ugly to males and therefore must resort to sexual lures.

As a zoo-man, Morris must know that while humans can mate all year round, animal mating is restricted to the oestrous or sexual seasons. Both males and females are quiescent in the non-oestrous seasons. It is only when the next sexual season opens that males are again reactivated sexually, and this occurs in response to the “sexual signaling” of the females. For it is the females who determine the opening of the sexual season. But Morris equates this natural phenomenon with the multibillion dollar cosmetic and fashion industries in capitalist society by which the human female is assisted in the competitive struggle to snag her man.

He spells this out in considerable detail. From the “padded brassiere” to improve “sagging breasts” and the “bottom-falsies” for “skinny females” to the lipstick, rouge and perfume - these and other devices enable women to entice the men they are after. And he pumps sex into his sexist book by devoting many pages to spicy accounts of the private parts and private lives of primate females and the kind of erotic stimuli that move naked apes into their body-to-body contacts, with added tidbits on voyeurism and prostitution.

Ardrey, the outspoken jingo, is likewise the least disguised racist and sexist. In the title of his first book, African Genesis, he popularizes the fact established by scientists that mankind had its origin a million years ago not in Asia as previously thought but in Africa. This highly significant fact could be used to help shatter the myth of African inferiority which has been peddled by white supremacists. If mankind had a single point of origin in Africa, it follows that, regardless of race or nation, we are all ultimately descendants of the Africans, who were the creators of the first social organization of mankind.

But this is not Ardrey’s interpretation of our African genesis. According to him, it is precisely this heritage which taints us with the “killer-ape” instincts from which “man” has never recovered. This is the same old racist slander in a somewhat different form. It is reinforced when he refers to “a troop of brown lemurs in a Madagascar forest” in the same context as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, implying that non-Caucasians are not quite human.

Ardrey loves white South Africa where, despite a tiny “degree of tyranny,” the country has attained “peaks of affluence, order, security and internal solidarity rivaled by few long-established nations.” By contrast, he states in The Territorial Imperative, the Black African states “stagger along on one side or the other of the narrow line between order and chaos, solvency and bankruptcy, peace and blood.”

Ardrey’s male supremacist matches his white supremacist. He wants women to stay in their place which, for him, is the middle-class white home and family. He cannot understand why these favored house wives are discontented. Why, he complains querulously, does she have a “rowdy approach to the boudoir which will bring her nothing but rein”; why does she “downgrade the care of children as insufficient focus for feminine activity,” and why does she desire “masculine expression” in social life for which she possesses no “instinctual equipment?”

His answer to these questions is most revealing:

“According to every American ideal ... she lives in a feminine Utopia. She is educated. She has been freed of the dust-mop cage. No social privilege is denied her. She has the vote, the bank account and her entire family’s destiny gripped in her beautifully manicured hands. Yet she is the unhappiest female that the primate world has ever seen and the most treasured objective in her heart of hearts is the psychological castration of husbands and sons.” [18]

There it is, spread out for everyone to see. Man is a killer-ape and woman is a sneaky, nasty primate that castrates men.

These neo-Social Darwinians are pushing the most pernicious prejudices of class society under the label of biological and anthropological “science.” The enterprise is highly lucrative for them and their publishers. But unwary readers should be warned that they are receiving large doses of poison in the same package with few facts.
Footnotes

1. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven, Con.: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 282-83.

2. Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (New York: Dell Publishers, 1963), p. 9.

3. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Dell Publishers, 1966), p. 3.

4. Ibid., p. 236.

5. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 48.

6. Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1955), p. 8.

7. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. 29.

8. Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (New York: New American Library, 1951), p. 16.

9. M. F. Ashley Montagu, ed., Man and Aggression (Oxford: Oxford University press, 1969).

10. Geoffrey Corer, “Ardrey on Human Nature: Animals, Nations, Imperatives,” in Man and Aggression, p. 82.

11. J.P. Scott, “That Old-Time Aggression,” in Man and Aggression, p. 52.

12. Sally Carrighar, “War Is Not in Our Genes,” in Man and Aggression, p. 50.

13. Kenneth E. Boulding, “Am I A Man or A Mouse - Or Both?” in Man and Aggression, p. 88.

14. Ralph Holloway, “Territory and Aggression in Man: A Look at Ardrey’s Territorial Imperative,” in Man and Aggression, pp. 97-98.

15. T. K. Penniman, A Hundred Years of Anthropology (New York: Humanities Press), pp. 94-95.

16. Ashley Montagu, “The New Litany of “Innate Depravity,” in Man and Aggression, p. 10.

17. Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (New York: International Publishers, 1940), p. 19.

18. On Aggression, p. 165.

One of them songs. One of them songs is a gonna be sung.

The sun burns at 5,778 K (5,505 °C). Hottern’ hell. When the sun rises the birds start chirping. Then light slowly seeps through the trees. I’m awake!

Panic! Panic! Panic grips the steel! Panic makes the day! Panic goes on by! Panic is my name! Panic is the wind! Panic is the sky! Panic is the day, I gently go to die. Panic is the seed. Panic is the root. Panic is the pajamas. Panic is the fruit. Panic is glorious and wondrous. Panic just walks on by. Panic is in a whirlpool. Panic is having fun. I believe in Panic!

The Panic Movement was a performance art collective in Paris in 1962. They did various things such as a dressing in motorcyclist leather, slitting the throats of two geese, taping two snakes to their chest and having themselves stripped and whipped. Other scenes included a staged murder of a rabbi, a crucified chicken, a giant vagina giving birth to a grown man, naked women covered in honey and the throwing of live turtles into the audience.
The Ya̧nomamö of Brazil are a very warlike people. They believe that through ingestion of a substance known as ebene (also known as yopo) they can activate and embody the spirits that live in their chests. When a shaman is under mystical intoxication he is able to travel as a spirit does: swiftly and without being seen. He may travel to an enemy village where he will eat the souls of the enemy villagers. This is called magical death. Just about every death that happens in Ya̧nomamö culture is a magical death. What happens is that the soul is eaten by the enemy shaman and soon after the flesh dies too.

The Kwakwaka'wakw participate in the potlatch described by Marcel Mauss in his book The Gift, which is about gift-based economy amongst indigenous peoples. The potlatch is a ceremony by which the host gives many of his goods up for the guests. The guests are in turn expected to hold a follow up potlatch, which presumably would be even bigger than the last one. And the attendee’s of that potlatch would be obliged to hold a potlatch that is even bigger, until the potlatch gets so big that the whole world is in the potlatch and everything is free. At least, that’s an idealistic interpretation. The Kwakwaka'wakw are also a warlike people, but not to the same extent as the Ya̧nomamö. The Kwakwaka'wakw get most of their violence out through what is called the cannibal dance. The dance may or may not have involved the actual eating of human flesh in the past. It’s hard to know. But now it is a healthy way to channel feelings of anger and hostility into dancing. There is also evidence that the Kwakwaka’wakw actually did practice cannibalism.

So tired. So long. So so. Welcome to the longest day. The last day. The judgment day. The day of reckoning. Where you will be fed the longest poison meal. Until you vomit blood. You will cry and put tears in your libations. Whine all you want, the pain is not over. Then you will be stuck with needles all over. Then you will be strung together with other lost souls on a string like Christmas decorations made from popcorn. Ultimately you will die, but not for a long time. This is existence. A classic staged play of pain and suffering. A tragedy. Where everyone dies at the end. I am not sad, though. I live each day to the fullest, as the cliché goes. I take on the day. I fill my lungs with air. I break wind and begin. Society for the greater part carries on its own organization. Each man pursues his proper occupation, and there are few individuals that feel the propensity to interrupt the pursuits of their neighbours by personal violence. When we observe the quiet manner in which the inhabitants of a great city, and, in the country, the frequenters of the fields, the high roads, and the heaths, pass along, each engrossed by his private contemplations, feeling no disposition to molest the strangers he encounters, but on the contrary prepared to afford them every courteous assistance, we cannot in equity do less than admire the innocence of our species, and fancy that, like the patriarchs of old, we have fallen in with "angels unawares."
– William Godwin

The Christian Children of Oblivion. Follow the leader. Why do we feel the need to follow? Hitler, Manson, Jesus, Koresh, Jones? No Gods, No Masters! God is dead as Nietzsche said. And we killed Him. Nihilistic Catholics. Is it worth it to care anymore? Nothing is true! Everything is permitted! Some philosophers are just skeptical of everything, but for someone who’s supposedly agnostic about anything, they sure seem to think they know everything. Even Buddha is worshipped. Jesus said he didn’t want to be king. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he said. And they labeled him “King of the Jews” anyway. Rasputin, the mad Russian, was a puppet master. He controlled the Czar with his magic powers. Is magic behind every door? Some say the Illuminati controls things, and they’re an esoteric cult that practices witchcraft. I’m ambivalent toward this view. Some will tell you that lizard aliens are the rulers. Still others will tell you it’s demiurges, or Yaldabaoth. “Now the archon (ruler) who is weak has three names. The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas (“fool”), and the third is Samael. And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him. For he said, ‘I am God and there is no other God beside me,’ for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.” - Apocryphon of John
Yaldabaoth is the half-maker of the corporeal, or tangible, or material universe. He is a deceiver, much like the evil genius talked about by Descartes. This Gnostic account refutes Descartes’ belief in a perfect God, and instead speaks of an imperfect archon who fucked up the world with his clumsiness. We are all clowns of the underworld. We are all waterboarders. We are guilty, we are sinners. Repent and you shall be forgiven. The dollar is a sin. The bible says you must not be a usurer or commit usury. “If he has exacted usury Or taken increase -- Shall he then live? He shall not live! If he has done any of these abominations, He shall surely die; His blood shall be upon him.” (Ezekiel 18:13) Landlords and bankers, you will die. Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers and drove them out with a whip. Read what he told the rich: Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25 The Jerome Biblical Commentary is a standard reference work found in many libraries, written by Catholic scholars. Its commentary on Matthew 19:24 states bluntly, "the figure of the camel and the eye of the needle means exactly what is said; it does not refer to a cable or a small gate of Jerusalem." Dada hurts. Dada does not jest, for the reason that it was experienced by revolutionary men and not by philistines who demand that art be a decoration for the mendacity of their own emotions. … I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation. - Richard Huelsenbeck

Cognitive Dissonance (examples): Anti-abortion/pro-war. Skepticism/believing in science as absolute truth. Ben Franklin said of a political opponent, “I did not ... aim at gaining his favour by paying any servile respect to him but, after some time, took this other method. Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book I wrote a note to him expressing my desire of perusing that book and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately and I returned it in about a week with another note expressing strongly my sense of the favour. When we next met in the House he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends and our friendship continued to his death. This is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says, ‘He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.’” Many religious people experience cognitive dissonance as well. They believe in the Universality of God’s love, yet believe in eternal torture in hell. They also condemn people when Jesus said to love your enemy. Ben Franklin was a deist, NOT a Puritan or a fundamentalist as some who insist that the US was built on Christian principles may think. Deism holds that the existence of God can be proved by reason, but that God does not intervene in human affairs. There is also a belief that organized religion is unnecessary, and that no particular religion is any more desirable that another. Franklin himself seemed to have a bit of cognitive dissonance regarding slavery. The Declaration of Independence held that all men are created equal, but the Constitution of the United States, on the other hand the original Constitution contained four provisions tacitly allowing slavery to continue for the next 20 years. Section 9 of Article I allowed the continued "importation" of such persons, Section 2 of Article IV prohibited the provision of assistance to escaping persons and required their return if successful and Section 2 of Article I defined other persons as "three-fifths" of a person for calculations of each state's official population for representation and federal taxation. Article V prohibited any amendments or legislation changing the provision regarding slave importation until 1808, thereby giving the States then existing 20 years to resolve this issue. The failure to do so contributed to the Civil War. Ben Franklin's views on slavery changed over time. When he was a young man he bought and sold slaves in his shop. Later on he became a staunch opponent of the practice and founded an early anti-slavery society known as The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.

http://zeroanthropology.net/about/

In the esoteric ectoplasm the ghost wades. That lonely spirit. Waiting for god. Time to meet yr maker sinner. The truth cannot be known. That is, there is no truth. It’s a subjective thing, a vibrant thing and above all an esoteric thing. The ghost waits at the door wanting love objects. The object of affection. The ghost is patient, and good things come to those who wait. The zephyr blows in from the west. With the tempests the ghost does play. With the playthings of time. Under the weeping willow tree I shot him. I shot him down and the ghost still haunts me. I wish I was someone. I wish I was famous. I wish I wasn’t a ghost.Or else I wish I wasn’t the last man alive. In my private struggle I quietly sit. This is the war inside my brain. I cannot achieve in death what I want to in life. Therefore I must live as though I am alive. As though I am being born for the first time. That way I will remember the things I forgot. I can advance to the next phase.

In Greek mythology, Lethe (λήθη; Classical Greek [ˈlεːt̪ʰεː], modern Greek: [ˈliθi]) was one of the five rivers of Hades. Also known as the Ameles potamos (river of unmindfulness), the Lethe flowed around the cave of Hypnos and through the Underworld, where all those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness. Lethe was also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion, with whom the river was often identified.
In Classical Greek, the word Lethe literally means "oblivion," "forgetfulness," or "concealment". It is related to the Greek word for "truth", aletheia (αλήθεια), meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment".
Was I bound in chains by a demiurge? Did I walk too close to the ebb and flow of Lethe? Did I deface the bust of Goethe? Did I turn lead to gold? Did I find the philosopher’s stone? Did I fart too loud? Was my fart too pungent? Oh my god why did you break the mold? Was my face torn by the steel tongs? Were my knees weak and did I need them for long?

One of them songs. One of them songs is a gonna be sung.

Georges Sorel was once an anarchist who turned to the darkside, supporting monarchist and right-wing fascist politics later in his life. However, his contributions on the virtue of revolutionary violence and his remarks on the power of the “energizing myth” remain important concepts in anarchist thought. Contrast this to the anarcho-Christian pacifism of Leo Tolstoy who felt that violence was an inevitable result of the dialectical relationship between the state and the oppressed. So what is the anarchist discourse on violence all about? Well, it’s a slippery slope. The man who shot McKinley claimed he was inspired by Emma Goldman, a onetime Rochester resident. What were Goldman’s reactions to this action? Well, she didn’t want to advocate such outright acts of violence, but she also didn’t want to condemn them. The classic slogan “Propaganda by the deed” had become synonymous with anarchism at the time, giving anarchism a bad name. This lead to the scapegoating of many anarchists during the first red scare. Sacco and Vanzetti are examples of this. Goldman herself was deported to the icy tundra of what then became known as the USSR. Individualist anarchists deplored violence by their anarcho-communist cousins and used the bad name that anarcho-terrorists had given anarcho-communism to denounce it. 27 February 1933, the Reichstag building in the German capital was set on fire. Hitler blamed this on communists and used it to further persecuted communists and anarchists. Later anarchists would make an assassination attempt on Hitler. Many pacifists are foiled when the subject of WWII comes up. Militant self-defense, of course, is very different from “propaganda by the deed.” The Black Panther Party in the United States advocated violent self-defense in the spirit of Rob Williams, author of “Negros with Guns.” Martin Luther King denounced these tactics, taking the more masochistic stance of Ghandian non-violence. Today the debate over violence is odd. There are those who advocate violent revolution, however assassination and terrorism are no longer part of the discourse, especially post-9/11. “Diversity of tactics” and “Direct Action” are the slogans of anarchists today. Direct action can include breaking store windows, as they did in Seattle in 1999, or it can include confrontations with the police. The purpose of these actions is never to hurt anybody, just to express the anger that the system has created. Despite the fact that many pacifists see these tactics as violence, they appear to me to be no less masochistic than Ghandian tactics. Playing cat and mouse with the police may be a good way to get out some anger, but it results in injury to activists, and almost never to cops. Self-defense appears to be the only legitimate use of violence. However, the definition of self defense is also a slippery slope. Is the violence inherent in the system enough to warrant acts of terrorism? The Weather Underground had the slogan “Bring the war home,” referring to the Vietnam war. They engaged in property destruction, but were very careful to make sure no individuals got hurt. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the ELF and ALF used similar tactics. These are symbolic acts, “propaganda by the deed” and many dedicated activists have gone to jail as a result of the “Green Scare.” When considering the use of militant tactics it is important to do a cost-benefit analysis.

In fresh blood I did walk.

We tried to get to Heaven but ended up in Space from Sarah Ellissa Marquee on Vimeo.

some poems by people other than me:

A Boy in Church

“Gabble-gabble,… brethren,… gabble-gabble!”
My window frames forest and heather.
I hardly hear the tuneful babble,
Not knowing nor much caring whether
The text is praise or exhortation,
Prayer or thanksgiving, or damnation.

Outside it blows wetter and wetter,
The tossing trees never stay still.
I shift my elbows to catch better
The full round sweep of heathered hill.
The tortured copse bends to and fro
In silence like a shadow-show.

The parson’s voice runs like a river
Over smooth rocks. I like this church:
The pews are staid, they never shiver,
They never bend or sway or lurch.
“Prayer,” says the kind voice, “is a chain
That draws down Grace from Heaven again.”

I add the hymns up, over and over,
Until there’s not the least mistake.
Seven-seventy-one. (Look! there’s a plover!
It’s gone!) Who’s that Saint by the lake?
The red light from his mantle passes
Across the broad memorial brasses.

It’s pleasant here for dreams and thinking,
Lolling and letting reason nod,
With ugly serious people linking
Sad prayers to a forgiving God….
But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying
With furious zeal like madmen praying.

Robert Graves
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Haiku (Never Published)

Drinking my tea
Without sugar-
No difference.

The sparrow shits
upside down
--ah! my brain & eggs

Mayan head in a
Pacific driftwood bole
--Someday I'll live in N.Y.

Looking over my shoulder
my behind was covered
with cherry blossoms.

Winter Haiku
I didn't know the names
of the flowers--now
my garden is gone.

I slapped the mosquito
and missed.
What made me do that?

Reading haiku
I am unhappy,
longing for the Nameless.

A frog floating
in the drugstore jar:
summer rain on grey pavements.
(after Shiki)

On the porch
in my shorts;
auto lights in the rain.

Another year
has past-the world
is no different.

The first thing I looked for
in my old garden was
The Cherry Tree.

My old desk:
the first thing I looked for
in my house.

My early journal:
the first thing I found
in my old desk.

My mother's ghost:
the first thing I found
in the living room.

I quit shaving
but the eyes that glanced at me
remained in the mirror.

The madman
emerges from the movies:
the street
at lunchtime.

Cities of boys
are in their graves,
and in this town...

Lying on my side
in the void:
the breath in my nose.

On the fifteenth floor
the dog chews a bone-
Screech of taxicabs.

A hardon in New York,
a boy
in San Fransisco.

The moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.


[Haiku composed in the backyard cottage at 1624
Milvia Street, Berkeley 1955, while reading R.H.
Blyth's 4 volumes, "Haiku."]

Allen Ginsberg

Because I could not stop for Death (712) by Emily Dickinson
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

part II:
and I was biting my tongue
never did lose the soft grip
gold came from lead
and I basked in the glory of the kingdom of god
but the snakes were drinking the wine
but i felt fine
broken sunset obscured by clouds
the fish flapping at my feet
two fish and four loaves
the esoteric ectoplasm
a cryptic crypt
the death of memory
and going into the ground

There are snakes in my rain water
Evolving like children
Never thought it could be so strange
Going over it over and over in my head
Never forget and don't cry for it
Don't waste time and settle down
Be confident and be bold
Judge not for the kingdom of god is within you
Broken chairs on the children's work
Glassy dream
Foggy glass
Down and dirty
Flag the ship down
The silver challis awaits
To make the pain go away
Taking little pills with the water from the rain
A broken dream, an assassin of consciousness
Don't go down, stay with me
Remember a day before today
Never did lose the soft grip

I will swim in my confusion
And drink my own blood
Sangre de Christe

Get up, get down
Children are you ready?

I will walk with snakes
And I will break the mold

Oh my god!

*Rain Song #2*

The rain is little if not beautiful
It's raining on the inside
And everything is just coming down
Someone hits me in the skull with a hammer

There's a fire in my stomach
I can see everything clearly
Everything seems to blend together
Like painting in the shower

The past and future all look the same
And God is losing me again...

*Rain Song #1*

Gravity brings down the rain
Fiery droplets of mayhem
The sky is falling
Gravity is heavier today

It's like a rainforest
I can hear the clouds exploding
With a supernatural pop
And the flash of a camera

A prayer to banish the darkness
Cold is the absence of heat
In the city weather is so incidental

║╔╝╔╗╔╗╔═╗╔╦╗!
║╠╝║╚╝║║╠╣║═╣!
╚╝═╚══╝╚═╝╚╩╝!

*Pop Song*
I saw you in the club last night and you looked as good as I remembered.
It's been 6 long months since our little thing in mid December.
Girl you looked so fly that I hardly believed my eyes.
You were dancing with another guy and you gave me a look of sad surprise.

{Chorus:}
Let me know how you feel
Send a message on the cell phone
I want to know if love is real
I'm sick of spending my nights alone

So I approached her and she said, "hey how ya been?"
I said, "I'm doing fine. Do you think that we could go home tonight?"
She said, "Well I can't ever understand men."
I said, "That's fine, I'll just go home alone again."

{Chorus}

Look At Yr Game Girl

Faces of Recuperation
Situationist International #1 (June 1969)
THE IDEAS OF the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: the class which is the material force of society is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.
If we detach the ideas of the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, without bothering about the conditions of production and the porducers of these ideas, we can say, for instance, that the domination of the aristocracy was really the domination of the concepts honor, loyalty; the domination of the bourgeoisie was really that of the concepts freedom, equality. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the 18th century, necessarily comes up against the phenomenon that the more abstract the ideas (that is, the more universal their form), the more they hold sway.
Once the ruling ideas have been separated from the ruling individuals, and, above all, from the relationships which result from a given stage of the mode of production and in this way the conclusion has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas, "the idea," as the dominant force in history, and thus to understand all these separate ideas and concepts as "forms of self-determination" on the part of the concept developing in history. It follows then naturally, too, that all the relationships of men can be derived from the concept man, man as conceived, the essence of man, man. This has been done by the specualtive philosophers. Hegel himself confesses at the end of The Philosophy of History that he "has considered the progress of the concept only" and has represented in history "the true theodicy." Now one can go back again to the "producers of the concept," to the theoreticians, ideologists, and philosophers, and one comes to the conclusion that the philosophers, the thinkers as such, have at all times been dominant in history. History as dominated by ideas and those who "explain" or "produce" them.
This whole semblance, of the preeminence of thinkers, and of the rule of a certain class as only the rule of certain ideas, comes of course to a natural end as soon as society ceases at last to be organized in the form of class-rule, that is to say as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as general or "the general interest" as ruling.
The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class. The function of theory is to always renew the struggle against the perverting influence of bourgeois though on the thought of the proletariat.
The Comedy of the Re-appearance of Economic Tragedy
Leninist theory explains as always that the negation of capitalist society is of economic necessity. The historical negation amounts to the realization of planned economy, through the correction of Bolshevik practice. The Leninist theoretical exclusion of the question of who plans in the planned economy (assuming that the true realization of planning represents the adequate condition for the realization of the individual) signals the continuation of the impoverishment of the individual, deflected by the appearances of economic equality and rationalized productivity.
Baran and Sweezy emerge years after their writings to provide the theoretical economic base of the contemporary leftish movement in the United States. Throughout their material they implicitly reduce the spectrum of socialist ideologies to historical variations on an evolving socialist model, and in which these ideologies will recover their essential unity at a future point in time. Their unification of an appearance becomes thoroughly transparent as the socialist countries continuously reveal themselves as familiar regulators of social control. In this light, socialist theory justifies manipulation and coercion through scientific (quantitative) analysis. It is the illusory theoretical base of the illusory alternative.
In Monopoly Capital, Baran and Sweezy argue that the contradictions of capitalism are with us still, but that they have been modified since their original expression; that is, the capitalist epoch had proven capable of more productivity than anticipated; and yet, profit oriented production creates economic stagnation: limited market outlets cause underconsumption (waste of products) and unemployment (waste of labor) and underutilization of machinery. The essential modifications of capitalism manifest themselves in imperialist war, racism, domestic and foreign exploitation, bad housing, moral despair, sexual repression, poverty, poor education, and so on and so on. The means of the critique suggest its ends. Baran and Sweezy approach the problem of capitalism by dividing it into separate (separated) problems that are then arbitrarily linked to one another, an approach compatible with the solution they seek, which is a series of reforms. To say that the capitalist system has been kept alive by 'stimuli' is to imply that it can always be kept alive by 'stimuli.' They forget their own active historical role as 'stimuli.'

There is thus no mystery about the performance of the United States economy in the postwar period. With the aftermath boom triggering a great upheaval in the living patterns of tens of millions of people, and with arms spending growing nearly fivefold — from $11.4 billion in 1947 to $55.2 billion in 1963 — it is probably safe to say that never since the height of the railroad epoch has the American economy been subject in peacetime to such powerful stimuli! What is really remarkable is that despite the strength and persistence of these stimuli, that familiar symptoms of inadequate surplus absorption — unemployemt and underutilization of capacity — began to appear at an early stage, and apart from cyclical fluctuations, have been gradually growing more severe...
What needs to be added is that the unemployment situation... was considerably worse than the figures indicate...

The problem, as they put it, is that in advanced capitalism the forces of production — men, techniques and machines — are blocked from total utilization. They are constantly being unemployed. Baran and Sweezy reduce the problem of alienation of the practice of rationalization (which is the full use or the full absorption, of the social product).
Their critique of the quality of life emerges because they can demonstrate only dangerous times for the bourgeoisie on economic grounds. So they tell us that the "sexual excess," like the economic excess, can only be adequately absorbed (sublimated) on a rational basis in socialist society. Nowhere does the individual, or even the worker for that matter, enter the critique, for the very reason that he does not play a central role in their revolutionary model. So-called Marxian science sustains the notion that the negation of capitalism is a given one (the socialist model). By rendering the problem and the solution scientifically (quantitatively) they suggest the necessity and inevitability of expertise, that is, authority.
As Leninists, Baran and Sweezy can do nothing more than quantify, that is, mystify things. For they begin and end withthe position that the revolutionary project is merely to accelerate the evolving quantitative processes of history. Leninism is the separation of quantity and quality on a permanent basis, in which an endless stream of party specialists redistribute production on behalf of the producers. Qualitative change is exiled to a distant future.
Baran and Sweezy confine the proletariat to a condition of 'morla despair' that permits of clinical (quantifiable) solutions. Beyond what they (and the rest of the social scientists) cannot quantify is that which belongs to the human imagination and a future objective-subjective reality whose material foundations and mere beginnings will be the unmediated, autonomous production of all aspects of life by the producers.
Authentic proletarian autonomy is not simply the adequate negation of hierarchy (though even proletarian autonomy is a possibility which the Leninists refuse to consider essential) but the free play of the individual himself, whose only remaining relation to the necessity of his labor is that he devises th appropriate conditions for its elimination.
(Ernst Mandel, Belgian Marxian economist, soon to be published in three volumes by Sweezy's Monthly Review, argues the impossibility of workers' control, in view of the failure of the Yugoslavian experiment.
In order to absorb class tensions, the Yugoslavian experiment with workers councils was administered by the state bureaucracy and passively established within the local factories. This technique restricts the worker to the factory place and immediately parcellizes the concept of worker autonomy to one aspect of life, when in fact the council form is effectuated at the historic point where it determines all of its aspects. Bolshevik centralization or decentralization are anodynes for the proletariat playing the central, that is, unmediated role in decision, execution, and production. What the problem is for the proletariat — to become conscious of apparent solutions — is not the problem for Mandel at all.)
Above all, Monopoly Capital merely demonstrates the alienation of the industrial capitalist economy from itself. Baran's Political Economy of Growth strengthens this minimal argument by taking great pain and length to demonstrate U.S. domination of underdeveloped countries. The purely objective (so-called unbiased) character of this economics becomes explicit when Baran defends the oppressiveness of Bolshevik industrialization:

The 'revolution from above' that consolidated the socialist order in Russia and that marked the actual beginning of comprehensive socialist planning led to a sharp deterioration in the immediate economic situation, to a grevous disruption of the normal flow of agricultural (and consumer's goods) production, and caused a painful drop in the standard of living. In this it was very much like most revolutionary breaks in history. Yet while the illness that it provoked was acute and painful, it was manifestly an illness of growth: it reached its crisis with enormous speed and yielded to convalescence in a few years. By the end of the First Five Year Plan the worst 'squeezing' of the consumer was over, by 1935 rationing could be abolished. . .
What the experience of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries clearly demonstrates is that the actual economic surplus need not be maximized in order to secure tremendously high rates of investments and economic expansion. These are fully compatible with a consistent and sizable rise of people's standard of living. They are possible on the condition of a correct allocation and rational utilization of such economic surplus as is made available for productive investment. While the former has to be governed by the long-term requirements of economic growth rather than by the desire for immediate rapid increases of consumable output, the latter consists of maximal exploitation of all available capital...

When consumer trends, capital accumulation, heavy industrial equipment build-up, and size of GNP serve as central criteria, concomitant elements of social coercion can be excluded from the analysis of social progress, becoming in fact a separate problem, if a problem at all. Bourgeois and Marxian social science exclude the 'human variable' from a central position in the analysis at equal rate.
The individual continues to serve his life sentence in the realm of chance, again sacrificed to the realization of historical necessity.
It appears that History allows the individual a single choice: to be strangled to death in the hands of the bourgeoisie or in the hands of the Leninists. The Leninsit "negation" of bourgeois society is the instrument of its perpetuation.
Baran and Sweezy in effect merely elaborate the core of Leninist-Stalinist theory: revolutionary change in the advanced capitalist countries is not an immediate possibility; at the stage of monopoly capital, the underdeveloped countries suffer the former agonies and express the former antagonism of the proletariat in the advanced countries (this proletariat now shares in the tendencies of bourgeois consciousness, temporarily); the emergence of socialist competition on the market along with immanent third world revolt eventually closes outlets for profits; so the cataclysmic depression is stimulated through the explosion of the external contradictions; in the meantime, socialist development must be protected at all costs; this means that the Leninist movements in the capitalist countries must not aggravate the contradictions that could stimulate reaction, even invasion of the Soviet Union. Add Cuba, China, Korea, Vietnam to the list and you have Baran and Sweezy.
In addition, these movements must by necessity, form temporary progressive alliances with progressive elements of the bourgeoisie (united fronts), assuming the temporary postures of reform movements. From beginnings to present, the Leninist movements have sustained their reformist postures. Leninism is the permanent transition; the caustic style of reform.
As it has worked out historically, the restriction of the negation of capitalism to the transformation of a society based on exchange value into one based on use value prolongs the existence of man as commodity. The restricted negation prolongs the alienation of the individual, compelled to develop through the power of others. As the cadre of the Welfare State, Baran and Sweezy invert, at all costs, the irreducible essence of critical thought which is to seek the realization of the concrete situation in which the divisions of the old world cease to be.
In the meantime, house servants remain temporarily in left-over "state bourgeois" homes in Peking; Russian industry remains temporarily motivated by profit and wage incentives; professionals, bourgeois, and so on, temporarily consume rare dishes of pork in restaurants well concealed from the pork loving Cuban people.
Capitalist society is sustained by the emergence of the Leninist enterprise. Can we wait till Monthly Review dies its natural death?
A Doctor of Speculation
Who is Marcuse? What is he? that all opposition adores him?
He tells us in One Dimensional Man that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are still the basic classes in the capitalist world. But the former antagonists are now united in their interest to preserve and improve contemporary society. The proletariat has abdicated its historic role. Class struggle has come to an end in class society. Not only is the proletariat absorbed into bourgeois consciousness, but both classes, now practically one, no longer appear to be agents of historical transformation. The word appear as used by the doctor is curious: we are to assume the analysis of advanced industrial society to be based upon an appearance?
But havng disposed of the proletariat, he waxes sad, toward the end of the book, about even the most acute consciousness which is powerless when deprived of the material force for the transformation of life. Since revolutionary consciousness is impossible without a revolutionary class, we take the acute consciousness to be something other than revolutionary (bourgeois no doubt).
When he says that "the dialectical concept pronounces its own hopelessness," he crowns his mystifications. He has set from the start the condition for his own hopelessness, which is then transferred into the hopelessness of the dialectical conception, and, more largely, the hopelessness of the historical project of liberation. After that when he makes statements that tend to clarify the real relationships in 'advanced capitalist society,' the statements clarify not the necessity to supersede that society, but to reinforce the general hopelessness, and as such the statements become reasons for adjusting to the prevailing reality.
Deprived of a class to end class society, a 'demonstrable agent for historical change,' Marcuse seeks the realization (the emergence of the potential) of bourgeois society not through a supression of its conditions, but by an intensification of the prevailing process. It is not that the system should be other — but that it should be more what it already is. In this he joins Max Weber, who saw bureaucracy emerge to rationalize (Marcuse's word is: pacify) existence.
He delineates his alternative to bourgeois irrationality in One Dimensional Man:

Paradoxically, it seems that it is not the notion of the new societal institutions which presents the greatest difficulty in the attempt to answer this question. The established societies themselves are changing, or have already changed the basic institutions in the direction of increased planning. Since the development and utilization of all available resources for the universal satisfaction of vital needs is the prerequisite of pacification, it is incompatible with the prevalence of particular interests which stand in the way of attaining this goal. Qualitative change is conditional upon planning for the whole against these interests, and a free and rational society can emerge only on this basis.
The institutions within which pacification can be envisaged thus defy the traditional classification into authoritarian and democratic, centralized and liberal administration. Today the opposition to central planning in the name of a liberal democracy which is denied in reality serves as an ideological prop for repressive interests. The goal of authentic self-determination by the individuals depends on effective social control over the production and distribution of the necessities (in terms of the achieved level of culture, material and intellectual).
Here, technological rationality, stripped of its exploitative features, is the sole standard and guide in planning and developing the available resources for all. Self-determination in the production and distribution of vital goods and services would be wasteful. The job is a technical one, and as a truly technical job, it makes for the reduction of physical and mental toil. In this realm, centralized control is rational if it establishes the preconditions the preconditions for meaningful self-determination. The latter can then become effective in its own realm — in the decisions which involve the production and distribution of the economic surplus, and in the individual existence.
In any case, the combination of centralized authority and direct democracy is subject to infinite variations...

The individuals whose "authentic self-determination depends on effective social control" are the same individuals "whose particular interests are incompatible with qualitative change." It is the bourgeois order rationalized (pacified), by a centrally controlling technological rationality (why not like Max Weber use the word bureaucracy here?), leaving the individuals to toy "effectively" at the fringes with their individual lives and economic surplus...
Here then is a program for a social democracy, complete with planners at the top — technocrats or bureaucrats — who are good enough to allow the individual to decide over the secondary: his individual life as surplus.
He warns (elsewhere in his book) about technological fetishism — and then proceeds to advocate it in what he wants somebody to believe is the "chance of the alternatives." If he knows, he does not understand that every advance in technological knowledge is an advance in technological knowledge is an advance int he spectacularization of existence, in slavery: not because knowledge is slavery, but because the ruling strata — bourgeois or bureaucratic, and bureasucratic after bourgeois — can only use knowledge to that end. The liberatory potential of capitalism — removing men from the realm of their total submission to nature — turns into its opposite.
The technocrats are closer than he seems to think. "Every hour of every day the Sectretary is confronted by a conflict between the national interest and the parochial interest of perticular industries, individual services and local areas. He cannot avoid controversy in the whole range of issues which dominate the headlines if he is to place the interests of the many above the interests of the few, and yet it is the national interest, above all, which he has sworn to serve" (The Essence of Security, R.S. McNamara). (McNamara's own statement expresses a contradiction. The 'national interest' is the interest of the ruling class (the few, the parochial interest); but he identifies it here with the interests of the many, as best suits the ideology of a bureaucratically controlled state. This contradiction is the condition of existence of the bureaucracy: it is the foundation of its dilemma, in which it discovers all of its moral, idealistic or whatever, crises. While it carries on the struggle, with state power, for the pacification — rationalization — of existence.)
Beneath the cloak of a doctor of speculation hides a social democrat (one who desires to introduce such institutional modifications as will allow capitalism to sustain itself).
Earlier — in Eros and Civilization — Marcuse had pointed to the assumption in the Freudian theory of the immutability of the struggle against want. The practical possibility of eliminating want obviated the Freudian apparatus as reflected upon an ontological essence of man, and reintroduced it as a moment of thought connected to a moment of histroy. In the light of this discovery, the critical impact of Freudian theory bore heavily upon the repressive nature of bourgeois society. It was this which founded his attack on the revisionists of Freudian theory, in their need to demolish the critical content of the theory, for the benefit of the bourgeois order.
But Marcuse himself was on thin ice. In speaking of perversions, he noted that they "seem to be linked with the general perversion of the human existence in a repressive culture, but the perversions have an instinctual substance distinct from these forms; and this substance may well express itself in other forms compatible with normality in high civilization." The conditional hedging is more than the caution of a careful doctor of speculation: it suggests that Freud, after all, may have indeed uncovered something about the ontological essence of man.
It is questionable whether "timelessness is the ideal of pleasure," but he, affirming without the shade of seeming, employs the notion to reintroduce a "primary frustration" so that repression reenters to make "pleasure itself painful."
And he affirms that the elimination of alienated labor is impossible (forgetting for the nonce that alienated labor in bourgeois society reflects the 'struggle against want') so that he then recaptures the content of Freudian theory as ontological speculation. For the problem, really, is to minimize, attenuate, the more noxious traces of bourgeois domination — for a more rational, more pacified organization of survival, until death itself "like other necessities, can be made more rational — painless." So there it is.
On the level of the every day he is less circumlocuted:

I have never suggested or advocated or supported destroying the established universities and building new anti-institutions instead. I have always said that no matter how radical the demands of the students, and no matter how justified, they should be pressed within the existing universities and attained within the existing universities.

The university is the last bastion of freedom. It is not possible to do without an elite. The working-class needed for the social revolution he has in mind is the working-class needed to set up a new ruling strata. We can understand his desire for selective repressions — for he is not thinking of a revolution. He is thinking of the implementation of a social democratic program of reform within capitalism, and he is thinking of the retrograde opposition to that reform.
At the first skirmish in the streets he rediscovered intact his social democratic past, complete with "non-explosive evolution" and "progressive forms of repression."
The pessimism of his years of isolation permitted him to see that advanced industrial society, as he calls it, is of a piece, a unity founded on the parcellization of existence. But he didn't see it all that well. Rediscovering optimism (through no fault of his own) he rediscovered the fragmentary opposition of his past. Destroy the bourgeois university? Never! You dare, vandal! How can we participate in running it then?
The process of reification has not spared his imagination.
We note (from the same newspaper accounts) that he was impressed we wrote of inspired in France (May-June 1968) — All power to the imagination; Be realistic, demand the impossible. There was, among others, another which he never mentioned: Humanity will be happy the day the last bureaucrat is hanged with the guts of the last capitalist. As for doctors of speculation, they will also pass.
Meanwhile, a glib professor, but a social democrat also, is like a gold ring in a sow's nose.
This text, slightly abbreviated, under the title "The Recuperation of Marcuse,"
was distributed at an apparition of Marcuse on December 5, 1968, at a benefit
performance he gave for the Guardian (small melting-pot of ideology).
Con at Work
McLuhan emerged, and with a banality: man's techniques (technology) are extensions of himself.
He says: "The Gutenberg Galaxy develops a mosaic or field approach to its problems. Such a mosaic image of numerous data and quotations in evidence offers the only practical means of revealing casual operations in history." So we know from the start that as a good logician, McLuhan is going to show that the "numerous data and quotations in evidence" will be the effects.
"technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike." And so now we also know that the way men make their living penetrates all aspects of life; and that new methods for doing so "reshape" if not elimate older ways of doing so.
He knows this well enough to say that De Tocqueville knew "typographic literacy had not only produced the Cartesian outlook but also the special traits of American psychology and politics."
He also knows that money is the universal commodity, that all things are reducible to — and that money reduces and is the measure of all things — quantifiable relations. "Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and lobor and also translates one skill into another."
That all becomes commodity:
"Typography is not a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence." Or, "Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity."
His sloppy use of language aside, he runs into an unexamined difficulty here. In the beginning, he was going to show us the root cause (which the title already indicated was the Gutenberg galaxy): but now he is speaking of his galaxy (typography) as a raw material among others for the production of one commodity among others. He describes the capitalist mode of production, but locates it in typography, and nowhere is capitalism directly taken to task. It is only later that one discovers why.
He discovers the power of parcellization as the operational base of the bourgeoisie (parenthical clarifications added from here on):
"The Machiavellian mind and the merchant mind (both: bourgeois mind) are at one in their simple faith in the power of the segmental division to rule all — in the dichotomy of power and morals and of money and morals."
He discovers the universal extension of capitalism, which unifies space as its space: "If Lowenthal is right, we have spent much energy and fury in recent centuries in destroying oral culture by print technology (capitalism) so that the uniformly processed individuals of commercial (bourgeois) society can return to oral marginal spots as tourists and consumers, whether geographical or artistic."
He knows the assembly line quality of life: "All experience is segmental and must be processed sequentially."
". . . the twenthieth century has worked to free itself fromt he conditions of passivity, which is to say, from the Gutenberg (capitalist) heritage itself. . . . The new electric galaxy of events (basis for change in mode of production) has already moved deeply into the Gutenberg (capitalism). Even without collision, such co-existence of technologies (modes of production) and awareness brings trauma and tension to every living person. Our most ordinary and conventional attitudes seem suddenly twisted into gargoyles and grotesques. Familiar (bourgeois) institutions and associations seem at times menacing and malignant. These multiple transformations, which are the normal consequence of introducing new media (new productive means) into any society whatever, need special study and will be the subject of another volume on Understanding Media in the world of our time."
There is something in McLuhan for everybody: the vulgar Marxists and the political economists, the formal logicians of the mysteries of quantification and the con men. And the McLuhan con is well underway. After finding his cause in a 'raw material,' not in capitalism itself, what is at issue is to work out how the new technology (another 'raw material') can be incorporated in "the world of our time," into this society; that is, how can it be made to fit the bourgeois mold.
We discover how in Understanding Media.
The extension of man has become a category which finds its philosophical expression in the phrase: the medium is the message.
Men are displaced. The object is central. Their extensions preempt men. In the bourgeois project of the domination of nature, McLuhan merely discovers for himself that men are dominated by the instruments invented for establishing that domination.
The proletarian project of liberation signifies nothing: men are moved by the unfolding of forces over which they have no control. They are subject to the conditions of existence. To be a man is to perceive the prevailing direction and join it — become one with it.
The global village of McLuhan's dream is universal capitalism, with the new electronic galaxy allowing for a geographic deispersal which is regrouped in the computer. He carries on at length about decentralization, the sine qua non of the new technology. Under the prevailing organisation of life, the new technology, at the service of capitalism, dominates centrally, and imparts the illusion of decentralization. The truth of that illusion is dispersal, centrally controlled. Geographic dispersal is the continuation of the parcellization which he had seen as the source of rule by the bourgeois (Machiavellian and merchant) mind.
Each time he reflects upon general content and uses the term "media" or "extensions of man" or "new electronic technology" — all on need do to understand his message is substitute the word "capitalism." Each time he reflects upon the specific characteristics of the "new media" — all one need understand is that he shows them in relation to the universal extensions and maintenence of capitalism.
His idea of total passivity — which he calls, in his characteristic manner of inverting truth, "involvement in depth" — finds its privileged expression in the reporter who noted about the first manned flight to the moon that it was, through television, "a participatory experience for the individual everywhere — a development that may rank second only to the trip" (New York Times, 12/29/68). McLuhan is full of admonitions on the futility of resistance to the established order (which he would call admonitions on the futility of resistance to change). He himself joined the Catholic Church to point the way.
The Recuperation of Language
The definition of passivity is involvement in depth. The strike (winter 1968) in New York City by the teachers had something to do with a struggle over decentralization. Marcuse masks the dilemmas of the thought of the ruling strata behind the dialectical conception, itself hopeless. A corporation devoted to the control, exploitation and negation of change is called Human Development. . .
The energy for emancipation must be shackled to its prevention. Participation is recuperated from the description of the relation among equals in an activity to become what describes the running of thing as they are — schools, factories, life. The function of such participation of course is to channel energies toward changing existing institutions into more viable forms. These changed forms become powerful tools for the prevention of any real emancipation. What is important to note in the process is the disappearance of any other significant sense to participation.
Before decentralization can be recuperated, it must be weakended in its implications of autonomous power, and of the absence of central authority. Before revolution can be recuperated, it has to mean first simply change; change in fare, small change. After that, the words — having inverted truth, and their truth — man little else.
To recuperate words is really to recuperate what they represent; so that the only activity that words describe is the activity the recuperated words describe. It follows that the true meanings of the words merely bocome aspects of their false meanings, the true activity they describe merely aspects of their false activity.
The SI offers a few definitions. Society: protection racket. The State: the Enforcer. Politicians: gangsters. The sense of the first terms emerge clearly in the second, which is, in fact, the function of definition.
*
We have used the word recuperate, which means recover: the activity of society as it attempts to obtain possession of that which negates it. The word that seems to mean the same thing on the "New Left" is coopt. The word means "to elect into a body by the votes of its existing members": by extension, it would be the act, for example, of Hayden or Carmichael going to work for the Nixon administration. The would, in reverse, be "lost" to their "New Left" organizations (though hopefully they would bring their constituencies with them).
The different word also separates us for the redundant confusion of that luckless state, the "New Left."