Money Hunger - GZ

For the record, John, I endorse your call for acts of individual refusal and actually recommend acts of individual refusal (to the forces of greed, aggression, idiocy) on a moment-by-moment basis. The films of Robert Bresson, certainly, exemplify the rigor required by this approach to the perils of existence and also, perhaps, the rewards. The films of Bresson and Bergman (especially, for me, The Silence) and the fiction of Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Juan Rulfo, and the work of a multitude of other artists, justify their existence by fueling this on-going resistance to the pull of injustice and delusion and their roots in the nature of the mind. The three filmmakers you cite in your last post - Bresson, Melville and Paul Schrader - take issue with Marx in how they view human suffering as that which underlies, and gives expression to, social dysfunction rather than that which is created by social dysfunction. This is clearest with Bresson, much less so with Melville. Schrader seems to share Bresson’s religious frame of mind, though with an overlay of Jim Thompson Americana. As for Melville, I saw Army of Shadows last year and it was intriguing and haunting and has improved with distance.

But to take a step back for a moment into the more general…The project of the self is to seek (but never find) some solid ground, a fixed identity that is continuous in time, separate and apart from all others. The various depredations of human history can all be traced to this fundamental effort that is experienced as an urgent priority underlying all other human struggles. One can seek such an identity in resistance also, but this identity will equally betray, in the end, the cause of social justice. This is an unfortunate truth that all on the left have to confront and that, I continue to think, is crucial to understanding the legacy of Stalin and Mao et al.

Freud offers a way to link up the engines of social and economic history with the forces that generate individual selves, defined by desires (and their opposites - hatreds) and haunted by a covert knowledge of our own ultimate groundlessness (or, “lack”). The Frankfurt School thinkers and their progeny revamp Marxism with a sense of these psychodynamics, while post-Freudian thinkers like Lacan, I would say, make their political implications more clear (the Four Discourses, etc.), while also shedding light on their roots in language itself.

Money is the ultimate abstraction, the perfect symbol, the sign of lack or groundlessness. Humanity’s attempt to make workable this sense of lack is the great ontological challenge that underlies history and its material, economic conflicts. Capitalism is a complex socio-political expression of this lack dynamic, Marxism (and its offshoots) the most coherent, but still partial, critique of its repercussions in terms of social and political systems. Those thinkers, including the Frankfurt school writers such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, and also Lacan and Girard re-tuned this critique, but there are still gaps having to do with the patterned, reactive ways we relate to experience. This is where Buddhist theories of mind prove useful, providing access to the root of the problem, which is, again, the lack of fixed definition that underlies the human self, fueling behavior at all levels and thus providing the engine of history. The very real and immediate problems of environmental degradation now augment the still unanswered claims of social justice to make the status quo unsustainable.

Vietnam is perhaps the point at which nationalism proved itself to be too awkward a vehicle for American capital, which is increasingly global in its scope and focus. Money, again, should be viewed as the symbol of the underlying lack we are driven crazy by, and so it’s no surprise that America’s armed might, post Vietnam, has become increasingly mercenary in nature. When we abandoned the draft it was only a matter of time before the marketplace exerted its pressure. The deal struck between a soldier and his “nation” is exceedingly cumbersome and inefficient from the perspective of unfettered capitalism, bringing with it all sorts of oversight headaches and long-term care issues for those wounded in battle. All other things being equal, domestic sensitivities put national armies at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to armed aggression, and so it was only a matter of time before the modern, corporate form of the mercenary force rose to prominence.

This happened all through the 80s and 90s, but with Bush the shift is still major. Now the mercenaries are overtly partisan (i.e. Republican) and also they are now deployed domestically in violation of posse comitatus. During the Bush years the “soft” fascism of corporate plutocracy has moved two giant steps toward overt authoritarianism such that when one hears of the prison construction contracts for Blackwater one worries about one’s basic freedoms. Fear begins to take a toll on clarity and loquaciousness.

Intuiting the current disaster, those elements fully invested in accumulative capitalism are making every effort now to undercut the national sovereignty that has protected and sustained them. We saw this under Clinton, but now, under Bush, the threat to the domestic political arrangements of American democracy is overt. The stacking of the Supreme Court is one arm of this effort, the birth of private military forces such as Blackwater directly allied with the Republican party is another. We are entering a dangerous phase, and in supporting a Democrat (hopefully Edwards) over whatever “unitary executive” the GOP nominates I would only be expressing concern for my physical safety and that of my family.

In times like this one danger is to reify (and then demonize) one’s political opponents such that armed aggression becomes then the only answer. Aggression completes the process of reification, making boundaries permanent and fixed. Each man occupies his own private hell with death the only egress, and this, of course, does nothing to advance the cause of social justice. It becomes extremely challenging to feel compassion for the man with his boot on your neck but that compassion is, actually, the most effective way to rob him of power. Of course, one’s commitment to social justice can only extend so far, but at least when the issue is framed this way the underlying reality can be seen with some clarity. If one does not see the desperation fueling the aggression of the fascist, for example, one is not seeing the fascist with clarity. Not seeing the fascist with clarity, one will be less efficient in removing from his grip the levers of power.

Guy Zimmerman