THE MAROWITZ-STEPPLING BOUT // Round 2

BY CHARLES MAROWITZ

Let me desist from scoring easy debating-points on Steppling’s response about corporate domination and media manipulation. These have become standardized left-wing rants and like all reiterated rhetoric, are destructive to the nuances that actually illuminate large, overworked issues. Yes, we can all agree to support the radical agenda’s preoccupation with combating capitalism’s grosser evils and attacking the media monopolists who distort the facts to bring them in line with their own political agendas. But let us cut to meatier issues.

Steppling wonders where “this liberating rationalism is to come from” and suggests “….. access to education is a starting place.” But what kind of education and under whose auspices? Pat Robertson’s University is also spreading ‘education’; so are the Muslim study-groups which inculcate hatred of the West and self-sacrifice as a way of gaining heavenly bliss. Just recently in the NY Times, it was reported that business schools throughout the USA were tutoring would-be captains-of- industry on how to ‘cheat’ their way towards commercial success. Education is also an abstraction - an amorphous generality – until one breaks down the philosophy behind what is being taught. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that a warped kind of insidious tutelage is turning out a generation of wheeler-dealers who are learning how to manipulate the stock market to their advantage and ‘negotiate’ their adversaries out of existence. Until educators themselves can become unbrainwashed and half-decent, they will continue to pass on distorted information and false values.

“Will Americans get to vote on bringing the troops home?” asks Steppling and then answers: “Of course not.” But the last round of elections which saw the Democrats take over both houses of congress was fought on precisely that issue and a few hardy souls in that party are trying their damndest to pass legislation to do just that. Their failure is due to a certain cowardice which is inculcated in the swamp of non-partisanship that virtually every partisan cites as an obstacle to progress. But the preference for pull-out from almost 70% of the American people is an impressive bargaining tool.

Steppling wonders where my “liberating rationalism is to come from…if the lumpen masses…don’t have it, how do they get it?” - They get it from grass-roots organizations like “Move On” which’ rise up to counter the prevailing mendacities of the Washington Press Corps; from blogs like Swans and this one; but mainly from those few courageous individuals who feel strongly enough about the issues to incite a demonstration, or a march on the Capitol, or a barricade of the offices of their dozy congressional delegates. In short, from people whose blinkers have been ripped from their eyes and now feel obliged to ignite the brainpans of others. In other words, from ‘people power’ - where it has always come from. But in order for such protests not to be half-baked or merely symbolic, the minds of protesters need to have sorted out the lies from the truth; the wheat from the chaff; the facts from the obfuscation.

Protest has always been a job for a few sainted individuals who become symbols (sometimes martyrs) for what is fancifully called “unpopular causes”. What makes them ’unpopular’ of course, is that they pose a threat to the dominion of the ruling class. But when a ‘truth whose time has come’ actually arrives, it sweeps away everything that had formerly impeded it - as it did in South Africa and the Civil Rights era in America. The driving power behind all social change is the gradual realization that a great wrong has allowed itself to ferment in the minds of the masses, and the time has come to confront it. The greater the grievance, the greater the need to filter the dialectic that inspires it. All of that begins as a thought process. Analyzing changes in the economy without challenging the ideas that underlie them is a time-consuming wank.

In regard to doctrinal Stepplingeque asides such as “As for voting, Marx said….” and “ it’s time to read Gramsci”, I would say time would be better spent re-running “Duck Soup” or “Flying Down To Rio”.

—Charles Marowitz
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JOHN STEPPLING REPLIES

Sometimes its easier to let people hang themselves, and Mr Marowitz does a good job of it in his latest response. However, never one not to engage in overkill…..I will add a few additional notes.

Marowtiz thinks opposition to media consolidation and corporate domination are *standardized left wing rants*. Let’s pause here, and reflect on that comment. FOX -News probably couldn’t have said it better.

Next; after dissmissng such left wing rants…..out of hand…..we arrive at the question of education. And here Marowitz makes my argument for me. OF COURSE we need *good* education. Marowitz asks under whose auspices this education will take place? Well, YES….that is the question, isn’t it, but for Marowitz this seems to not involve questions of class, and the fact that the poor are denied educational opportunites that are routinely provided for the rich. This is exactly why the government’s pulling the plug on education forty some years ago has created such a problem. Marowitz doesn’t ask those rather crucial structural questions; like WHERE DOES THIS GOOD EDUCATION COME FROM? He simply criticizes recent business school practices. Funny, complaining about business schools teaching students to cheat is a little like complaining about a fish being wet. (note: business IS cheating!). And this is priceless:

There is sufficient evidence to suggest that a warped kind of insidious tutelage is turning out a generation of wheeler-dealers who are learning how to manipulate the stock market to their advantage and ‘negotiate’ their adversaries out of existence.

My point was, and is, that the ruling class in the US has encouraged a destruction of public education…..and yes, Charles, the Universities are utterly corrupted and show little interest in the development of autonomously thinking individuals. But you must address the class nature of education if we are to get anywhere…..but alas, we will get to Mr Marowitz’s disdain for radical theory later. I’d be interested to know when it was that the stock market was not manipulated by *wheeler dealers*?? Or when it was not based on manipulation? When was that, Charles?

Next we come to Iraq. This is a bit hard to believe, but Marowitz actually thinks (no, really) that the recent Democratic takeover of the House of congress will help bring troops back from Iraq and save the few remaining people in that US-created wasteland. No, Charles, Move On.org isn’t interested in anything but a support for the Democratic establishment, and hence encouraged us all to vote for John Kerry.

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want and end to permanent bases in Iraq. With the exception, maybe, of Mike Gravel [or Dennis Kucinich], I haven’t noticed much Democratic interest in stopping the growing defense budget nor in halting the lurch toward a domestic police state. Before the run up to the invasion, millions of people protested, around the world. But the invasion went on anyway. Yes, 70% want an end to the war, but with two utterly compromised war parties, that isn’t going to happen. Which reinforces my original point. Marowitz waxes sentimental about the civil rights movement, and indeed men like Martin Luther King were amazing and courageous dissenters, but where exactly is the triumph of the civil rights movement now? One in six African American men will spend time in jail, and maybe Marowitz should crawl down from Malibu and visit an inner city high school in South Central to see the lack of opportunity there. Inequality is rife in America, a nation with no health care and whose infant mortality figures tie it at 75th place with Poland.

All this blather about *people power* is meaningless drivel. If one fails to understand the economic forces at work in a society, one isn’t going to get very far. Mr Marowitz and the folks at MoveOn are no threat to the ruling class. Ill informed actionism, said Adorno, was more counterproductive than not. I want to finally point to two things. Marowitz’ original incitement against *indiscriminate* killing of US troops in Iraq by Islamic reactionaries. This is colonial thinking, it would make Lord Kitchener proud. There is nothing indiscriminate about a resistance fighting the occupying army. Does Marowitz not think it’s an occupying army? One wonders. In any event, he again brings up Radical Islam, the favorite shibboleth of the brainwashed liberal elite. Why is this? Well, because Marowitz thinks Islamic terrorists are one of the two great enemies facing us. This is a manufactured knee jerk response from those addicted to, apparently, the NYTimes. It proves, yet again, how effective US State Department propaganda is.

I will submit, once more, that the state terror of the Imperialist powers (and their subcontractors) is a far greater threat to the survival of the planet. Second, Marowitz’ true colors are revealed in his final comments….which I will repeat here:

In regard to doctrinal Stepplingeque asides such as “As for voting, Marx said….” and “ it’s time to read Gramsci”, I would say time would be better spent re-running “Duck Soup” or “Flying Down To Rio”.

( I guess you meant Stepplingesque). Ah, well, what to say. I guess what is most obvious in these exchanges is that liberalism tends to a craven reformist apologetics. Throw out Marx and Gramsci, and join MoveOn.org. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Howard Dean, Joe Biden, Barack O-bomb-a. Create a nicer vibe on the colonial plantation.

Public education has always been mediated by state power. Today, such mediation is so profound that there are hardly words to describe it. The underclass have had all safety nets pulled away (and Clinton was the biggest abuser of the rights of the poor) — less welfare, less unemployment pay, and even less access to health care. And certainly less access to decent education. Bromides about people power change little, until the material forces behind issues like education, health care, and war profiteering are analysed clearly, without too much worry about big corporate-endowed business schools. Build fewer prisons and build more libraries.

I trust the wisdom of the lumpenproletariat, if only they are given a chance.

—John Steppling