Cutting Analysis

I highly recomment this brilliant and biting analysis by Gore Vidal, but more importantly and to the point is a comment made by Malcom Martin:

"Now as capitalism enters its final stages politically, a nearly seamless transition to fascism is taking place. Or as Gore Vidal puts it, from republic to empire. The trappings of bourgeois democracy are a brake on the gas-oil junta’s profits and so they are being shredded. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights are being rendered meaningless by presidential signing statements and the theory of the unitary executive, extraordinary rendition, government surveillance programs and the like. Programs based on democratic principles like the public schools, Social Security, Medicare, affirmative action and welfare are being starved to death. The mass media and electoral machinery and both major political parties are now fully under the control of those in power. Bloodless coups in 2000 and 2004 installed George W. Bush in the White House and no future election will remove the candidate of the ruling class from power.

It would take a team of psychoanalysts to catalogue the many and varied mental pathologies of George W. Bush and his henchmen in the U.S. government. The point to keep in mind is that in this time and in this place the capitalist system needed people in power capable of carrying out insane and grotesquely inhumane policies, up to and including the coming nuclear attack on Iran. Capitalism, like the HAL 9000 computer onboard the spaceship Discovery in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, is out of the control of its makers. The system now has only human sentinels, best represented by the so-called Neo-Conservatives in ruling circles.

American bourgeois democracy is drowning. It will not be resuscitated. The liberal intelligentsia of the petty bourgeois spins its wheels in the mud of this reality. Now repentent patricians like Al Gore even see what lays ahead. Gore knows what is being done to the planets ecosystem and tries to sound the alarm with a film like An Inconvenient Truth. Lay out the incontrovertible facts of global warming, organize and agitate, and a tipping point will come that changes governmental policy. A younger Al Gore saw Dr. Martin Luther King do just that in his confrontation with racial injustice and clings to the memory along with the idea that rationality still has influence in American ruling circles. The real inconvenient truth is that even the great Dr. King could not generate an effective civil rights movement in 2006 and that the assault on the environment will not end until a stake is driven into the heart of capitalism.

The sad truth is that the petty bourgeois, for all its brilliant writers, and none is more so than Gore Vidal, cannot defeat the capitalist ruling class! They are a timid and passive group who, in this time for warriors, gather at the gates of the palace to nag and complain essentially to each other. There are scores of Internet websites, magazines, newspapers, radio programs and networks like AirAmerica Radio, and some small television networks where liberal, left, progressive, and other commentators show up to whine out loud. They rail against the outrages and inhumanity of the U.S. government and the Bush Administration. They point out the duplicity, the corruption, the hypocrisy, the inhumanity, and the utter criminality loosed in the world today but to no useful end since capitalism will not be reformed nor shamed to death. Pointing out the defects of capitalism has become as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. The ruling class brushes its liberal democratic critics off like gnats as long as they stay away from the third rail. But let one of these voices dare mention unity based on working class-consciousness and a mobilization to strike at profits and great danger would shortly thereafter visit.

No matter the danger, it must begin to be spoken by our warrior-poets: socialism is the only way humankind will live into the distant future on this planet. Only a working class in power will see to the end of this madness and willingly share our available resources to insure our survival on this planet. How to get to socialism is the only discussion left worth having."

Martin hits the nail squarely on the head. While we need many more warrior-poets, the best can be found in the the Blue Collar Review and in the online journal Pemmican.