Marxism Revisited & Poems for November

1.
The Forbidden

When the Inquirer mascot, Guyito, in his speech balloon quips, “Parang ayaw ko pa rin,” in reference to reportedly the excitement in the American Communist camp over the financial meltdown in New York, you know that Marxism is the most maligned discourse in the global psyche. This specter of “socialism” haunting the American Dream (& Filipino trauma) is traceable to the Gulag complex of the fallen Soviet empire – an event not properly placed in historical context because of the overwhelming capitalist agit-prop of its system being the foundation of history & linear progress.

Why the marginalization of the so-called subversive idea, when even neo-liberals would allow its open airing (so as to hold it in contempt, anyway?). [A fictionist once said, if committed writing as espoused by proletcult would plot a “driver killing his boss,” then he’s out of it – demonstrating how the term “class struggle” has assumed an orthodox interpretation among the intelligentsia. & this is the very heart of the Red Scare that allows dictators to keep power.]

Stephen Resnick & Richard Wolff, writing in 1993 Polygraph 6/7, attribute it “to the hegemonic culture of repressing class [the kernel of anti-Marxist diatribe] that reigns, one supported by a myriad of explicit and implicit social norms, presumptions, and rules of polite and legitimate discourse.” [In effect, class analysis is the repressed in the Freudian political unconscious in public engagements.]

In this regard, the market fluctuation does not factor this very notion of class, given the practice of “the hegemonic presence of non-Marxian discourse on economics in… culture. The academe, the media and the state cooperate to produce and disseminate… the existence of class exploitation in society not only by persuading individuals of is non-existence, but also by offering a radically different explanation for the cause of gross profits [underscoring mine].”

It goes without saying that Obama, a hybrid cognizant of imperial vales, is mistaken by lay people as leaning towards socialism with his regulatory market policies, while McCain triggers a positive response in the heartland of American conservatism which is the very unconscious of its expansionist ideals. This confusion is an orchestrated one since the turn of the century, when the world was perceived to be a dark place in need of the guiding light of Pax Americana that incorporated Asian & Latin colonies.

But the recession is creating a negative effect with respect to American invincibility: after all, “as the social contradictions build within contemporary capitalism, a consciousness may form which at least finds that the repeated conventional solutions yield diminishing returns.” The blue-collar class is, in fact, puzzled over the zigs & zags of the stock market, & everyone is holding out for a definitive statement. Their faith in the system has been shaken: but where will they turn to for salvation?

[In this crisis, some will thrive because allegedly smarter than others: for instance, trader Simon Cawkwell “expects to make three million pound profit this year,” because he engages in short-selling, “the typical term by which investors, often hedge funds, pay a fee to borrow but not by shares, and then bet on them falling.” The practice has been prohibited, but he’s still at it because he’s “intellectually superior to 99 people out of 100 and I’d give the other man a good run for his money.” Getting rich isn’t an ethical problematic; it is an amoral game only the elect could play.]

Historically, the “demise of the USSR” has traumatized the colonial world, but invigorated the West. It “marks the exhaustion of one kind of experiment using among many alternative interpretations of Marxist theory.” Lenin’s “honest interpretation of ‘state capitalism’… was not emulated by the subsequent leaders or followers, supporters or critics. Instead the USSR’s class structure – precisely an exploitative one since its laborers did not appropriate collectively their own surplus labor – came to stand for socialism or communism. State officials appointed to Industrial Ministries functioned much like their private capitalist counterparts, corporate boards of directors.”

& what is exactly this notion of class that has been vulgarized in public mind?

For Resnick & Wolff, Marx understood class in “a radically new way.” It “did not refer to property or power [underscoring mine]” but a “process, both unique and yet completely interwoven with its other… whereby some members of any society labor and produce not only the goods and service necessary for their own consumption, but also more goods and services than that amount. This extra, or surplus, labor that they perform is then appropriated and distributed in ways that differ from one kind of society to another. The particular social organization of the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor comprise a society’s class structure (something quite different from, although of course related to, social distribution of property and power).” In this sense, “this periodization of history… depends upon each period arranged for who would produce how much surplus labor, who would appropriate that surplus, to whom would they distribute it, and what were the particular consequences of each particular class structure?”

In other words, Marx clarifies the notion of “social theft” – an act that for them defines a capitalism that is otherwise celebrated by its defenders for its supposed freedom of economistic activity and efficiency of resource allocation.”

What is implied here is not the statism or essentialist construct of class, but the shifting trajectory of relations overdertermined not by filiation or lineage, but the subject’s position in the grid of production, appropriation & distribution. The fixity of categories has resulted in dogmatic hierarchy & rigidity that has found its resonance in bureaucratic, & worse, historical purging.

Filipino neo-liberal faction has, of late, allegedly sought audience with their militant counterparts, hoping to settle the issue of the “democratic struggle” in view of the global recession that has shaken their faith in the free market itself. On the whole, capitalism as an ambiguous “end of history” does not wash.

But the search for an indigenous Filipino ideology – as envisioned by Pantayong Pananaw theorists & bourgeois nationalists – could only fall back on multiculturalism that harps on tradition & cognitive behaviorism. Eschewing class analysis could only make for a restoration of capitalist/colonial structures – i.e., the First World route, diagrammed in epochal stages, must serve as model. Never can a country, it is cautioned by moderate planners, leapfrog to heavy industrialization or class restructuration without actualizing the historical phases of modernization as realized in the First World. The Western paradigm should be duplicated at all costs.

Without a radicalized class redefinition in appropriation of surplus-labor, how could equity be achieved?

Via non-Marxian principles that allow a certain section to manage the surplus in accordance with its narrow interests? The Makati skyline is not iconic of progress repudiative of the pyramid, but of the visible in inequality & marginalization: the suburban sprawl that surrounds the business enclave does not argue for the efficacy of nationalistic provenance that allows for competition with multinationals without factoring the social costs. The Jollibee phenomenon may take pride in Filipino entrepreneurial spirit [it’s a take-off from MacDonald’s stratagem] but it only benefits an aristocratic family, which recovers labor surplus for itself.

Bourgeois nationalism, after all, is the handiwork of ilustrado revolutionaries – in the manner that Constantino’s “miseducation of the Filipino” failed to arrive at the possibility of a socialist solution [socialism being the Mephistophelian word for what is evil & immoral].

But why is socialism so execrable & forbidding a subject?

As we have argued earlier, institutional discourses – in academe, media, et cetera – fence off Marxism, declaring it a field of virtual “no discussion zone.” The prohibition in the Philippines works back to the Commonwealth occupation that redirected nationalist republicanism from Sakdal revolt.

Yet, in a sense, Marxism – as a general rubric – “maybe able to transcend,” according to Arif Dirlik, “the abolition of theory as theory, or at best, theory as we have known it.”

He adds, “It should be abundantly clear from this formulation of the problem of Marxism that I do not subscribe to the currently fashionable view that the end of existing socialist societies implies the end of Marxism; not because I do not think there is a connection between Marxism and ‘actually existing socialism,’ but because I think Marxism is coeval with capitalism, not with existing socialist societies [underscoring mine].”

Quoting Jameson, he accentuates the point: “…Marxism is first and foremost the study of capitalism and its specificities and contradictions: if capitalism is now universal (as Marx it had to be before socialism – which he considered to be structurally latent with capitalism – was conceivable), then surely Marxism is ever more relevant than it was before.”

This is the crux of ignorance/misinformation which bureaucrats & clerico-fascists have ventilated time & again, as if in the repetition the lie becomes a truth, in columns, classrooms… where Marxism is constituted as the Manichean counterpoise to the state of normalcy, like a child that was born of an alien womb. Never realizing it is the repressed of capitalism come to surface like its real conscience.

Yet Marxism itself has undergone constant self-interrogation, given that the legacy of history, of capitalism as a dominant force, is a testament of barbarity. It interpellates “that Marxism must continue the process of self-criticism already underway for some decades now. [A theory, after all, that implicates sociality of relationships in every historical epoch, is always, as it were, in transit, hoping to arrive at a more humane truth.] Basic presumptions of the Marxist tradition – its determinisms and teleology, its multiple and incompatible definition of class, and its epistemological realism – are now irrepressibly in contention among Marxists.”

But there is a limit to reinterpretation in the light of previous orthodoxy. It is warned that “Marxism’s largely uncritical acceptance of a modernist epistemology will now not survive. On the one hand, new postmodern tendencies (premised, for example, on the breakthroughs of Louis Althusser) will proliferate. On the one hand, strange coalitions of modernist and postmodern tendencies will emerge…”

[To wit, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of Tiannanmen is based on modernist notion of the state & its representation. He says “the violence of the state reaction seems all the more inexplicable” inasmuch as the “state found itself facing something that could not and did not want to be represented.” Nothing concrete was demanded; the students were at a loss to pinpoint their discontent?]

This shifting scenario brought about by the blow of fresh wind, as it were, should have been noted by red-baiting critics, who are wont to skewer every Marxist act at every turn, keeping them at bay when in fact the very wolves of capitalism are already gnawing at the entrails of Wall Street itself.

So now, we segue to America where an electoral exercise is primed to solve the crisis, as if Obama or McCain are up to the task of solving something that has been in the works for decades. Randy David is in fact overwhelmed by the positive speeches of Obama, who “symbolizes an American nation that is conscious of its most basic strengths [as an imperial power?] – the faith in time of strength [faith in what? resolving the havoc of its interventionist wars?], audacity in a time of uncertainty [how do you check capitalist overproduction & appropriation of surplus labor?]. America is lucky to have him as its next president [how will it recoup its lost mercantile power?].”

Such rhetoric that passes for evangelical wisdom is oblivious of a historical precedent: It is reported that “President Clinton, in his famous economic summit in Little Rock before his inauguration [underscoring mine], listened and responded to a range of perspectives on the problems and solutions for the economic ills of US today [circa the ’90s]. Yet despite the many criticisms directed there against the uneven Bush-Reagan years – the social problems created by a worsening income distribution, soaring federal deficit contracted growth in productivity, runaway health costs, et cetera [it’s déjà vu, the problematics of Obama & McCain promise to troubleshoot with their motherhood economics] all the perspectives offered had in common a systematic refusal to ask or explore any questions about the connection between economic performance and class structure [underscoring mine; on the other hand, every candidate steers clear of the word class, instead they would refer to Wall Street versus Main Street]. All policy proposals shared a wholly unacknowledged and hence unquestionable commitment to maintain the current class structure of the US [to tax or not to tax? To regulate or deregulate? Are these the questions?].”

Given the class system, “from a Marxist perspective… the legacy of the Carter-Reagan-Bush years is, to use Marx’s terms, a higher rate of class expectation in US society.”

But does the dire condition obtaining today warrant an upheaval in the continent? Is a “revolutionary upsurge” up in the air, as reported by the AFP in its coverage of left-wing front. But haven’t we heard that before?

Ever hopeful & optimistic of the future, it is better for underground watchers to scale down the rhetorics. After all, can academic experts be trusted? Can their prognosis sum up the sentiment for the men on the streets?

E. San Juan, Jr. says that “the moment of Yenan may be over, but those of Marx and Lenin are still on the horizon… [But] it remains for revolutionary thinkers to materialize [Hegel’s] Reason and identify the agents of humanity’s liberation from Capital and historical necessity…” It would seem that San Juan is not sold on the CPP as that very agency, averring the cadres’ lack of acquaintance with Gramsci, Luxemburg, & the like. The masses, he intimates, are yet “to be educated, disciplined, and impelled to action by a revolutionary theory ‘as critique of the present and a design for the future’.”

Alas, we who live in the present may never see the dawning of the future.

But can we trust academics?

“In reality,” says Andrew Nether, “Marxism in the United States and most other places is dead in the water. The intellectual output of American academic Marxists – whether more theoretical, as in literary criticism and philosophy, or more empirical, as in history and sociology, has little or no impact on American society.” [In the Philippines, the terrain may have been altered a bit, but the ideological blindness follows the same trajectory.]

After all, “academic Marxism is almost completely disconnected from the working class, from mass culture, and from political activity. [Of course, the party-list is an innovation, but its presence is just a mode of tokenism, & prey to the numbers game in Congress.]

Libero Della Diana, regional chairman of US Communist Party with headquarters on 23rd Street in Manhattan, is even “excited [over the recent development], we feel that we are… at a turning point. We can afford to be less on the defensive for the first time since Ronald Reagan… We receive more and more phone calls, we have more inquiries from people, we see an increase in interest…”

A swallow does not make a summer.

Piana & David may occupy diametrically opposite [ideological] positions, but both are enamored with “change.” Yet history is replete with cock-eyed lessons: the inaugural speech of President Kennedy sent liberals swooning, but it never stopped him, the Prince of Imperialism, from launching the Bay of Pigs invasion.

If Obama is the darling of the press now, will he pull the Marines out of Mindanao? That will never happen: the Presidency is always captive of business, military-industrial complex – & most, the belief that America’s destiny is to oversee the world.

But will salvaging the system work? First World leaders call it “democratic capitalism,” a contradiction in terms, & they “agree to hold a series of global summits on the financial crisis.” The main idea is for the state to inject capital & shore up banks, thereby calming down the market with the use of national reserves – actually, stabilizing the bankers who allowed “high-risk or subprime US home in 2007,” which “loans repackaged as complex investment instruments loosely known as derivatives were resold to investors and bankers around the world.” The American default however “left the banks short of cash and hesitant to make the interbank loans essential to the system’s smooth functioning.”

Precisely because of the spider-like financial linkages of banks the world over, the contraction in investible funds created a terror in the market – something that Bin Laden failed to do with his bombing of the World Trade. It is in the money trail where capitalism is most vulnerable. This is rearguard action by European & American ideologues hoping that a collective action on capital infusion will avoid the catastrophe of the ’30s.

Will it be a reprise? Or will capitalism still hold the ace up its sleeve? Will the people see through the charade?

One thing is sure, though. No longer will brokers put up smug faces on Wall Street. [Something bizarre is actually happening: the wretched of the earth are being made to bail the rich out of their folly.]

2.
Eyeball

There’s blood on the street
& nobody sees it.
There’s blood on whose hands
& nobody sees it.
There’s blood on whose lips
& nobody sees it.
There’s blood on whose eyes
& nobody sees it.
There’s blood everywhere
& nobody sees it.
Suddenly,
a child screams
& everybody
stops in his tracks
Is it hungry?
Is it tired?
No,
it’s simply terrified
by the blood-soaked scene
it has seen.

3.
A.
Orphan

She’s too tough to handle:
flits from one job to another,
can’t stay put
as if she’s on the run,
a marathoner on the road
to nowhere.
Mornings, she has to be
pulled out of bed,
as if she wants
to hide under the sheets.
The day, she moans,
doesn’t offer any reprieve
from the loss & grief
that stare her gently
in the face.
Loving is ever incomplete.
But her resources are down,
she’s got to find permanence,
some arms to cling on,
some voices to shake her out
of childhood drowsiness.
But fear grips orphans
like a tightening rope.
She moves in circles,
everyone is a blur
on the speed route.

B.
A Happy Tune

“That’s all
there is to it” –
it rang
like Balangiga bell
in her ears.
It’s all so draconian,
she says
to no-one in particular,
as she goes about
her chores
like a zombie
on wayward course.
Is there something else
to be said?
People come,
people go.
But if a smile
breaks out
on a stranger’s face,
it’s bonus enough
to plod on
for tomorrow.
People come,
people go –
that’s all
there is to it
on the path to the infinite.

C.
Once Upon a Time

When they grabbed him
like a dog
at the house
it flashed –
the courier had been
intercepted:
The rest of the story
his loved ones
could only wish
to have ended swiftly.
Snuffed by his torturers
who had gone
scot-free,
marking on their gunbutts
another fallen enemy.
[Thank God,
he was a communist
who didn’t trust
God’s merciful love.]
But Jack
wasn’t nimble nor armed,
couldn’t handle a gun
but a pen
to send a message
of collective deliverance.
He probably
hated the sight of blood.

D.

The bereaved
could only utter
a useless prayer
that in the universal
shuffle of cards,
may the winning ace
fall by their side.
O Where are
the barbarians
of yesteryears?
Counting
their medals
sitting in ambassadorial
chairs…
O If only God
would wake up
from deep slumber
& unveil the whys
& wherefores
of the suffering of Job.

4.
At the Gallery

Their canvases
are junkyards:
they cannot sort out
which goes with what
to render something
brilliant or odd
for outsiders
to reconstruct.
If they pile colors
pell-mell,
we mortals may
get lost, or tired,
like a walker
woozy on a tightrope…
It takes time
to send words or hues
on a free fall –
only a handful
can, in one fell swoop,
catch all the stars & fairies
of maddened imagination.
Slow, then quick
the passes like a pitcher’s:
be sure of your footing
as you hurl a curveball.

5.
Persistence of Memory
(for Lola Guya)

She tells the doctor,
“to tell it as it is:”
Yes, her lungs are too late
for the cure –
& that is all there is to it.
She gathers
all of us kids
& troop to the waiting jeep
for the trip back home.
It is too brief for her,
too long for us
who are shaken by the dust
& bump on the road.
She just smiles
through it all –
like when she’d giggle
whenever rural kids
with bulging muscles
would scrap with us,
town brats,
then scurry off, cursing
because it’s our own turf:
When half her body
is burned by a gas lamp
she topples over
while reaching for her
cigarette,
she never complains,
accustomed is she
to the pain
of a century of tuberculosis cough.
O how I wished
I didn’t have to observe
like a loyal grandson
the ritual of gazing
at her fair face
inside the coffin –
she’d still be
alive & gently laughing
in my imagining!

6.
Confession

The guy pressed
the door chime twice,
slipped his card
through the gate,
as if he was privileged
to disturb the peace:
he was only begging
for alms…
Vexed, his temper rising,
the resident
stupidly found himself
fishing a 5-peso coin
from the purse,
scowling at the beggar’s eyes
that didn’t look
burdened
by his mendicancy:
was he arrogantly humble
for being forthright
with his ID
from some dubious agency
that clears him
he’s no scumbag?
But the family man
felt hostaged
by his deceptive poverty –
in the pecking order of things
he felt set up
by the false morality
of Christian charity.
O Why can’t the bum
grab a gun
& blast away
at those
smugly pontificating
at the Palace?

7.
November

The dead are dead.
This November
they will not hear
our secret prayer,
smell the flowers
watch the burning candles.
Their silence
will be infernal,
though we imagine
they keep watch
in the cosmos of heaven.
We tick off their names,
how the list
gets longer everyday:
& realize
how distant it has been…
As if they just
left for New York or LA,
transferred to a better job
overseas…
How is it
we can only sigh
& hold back the tears.
We’re shocked
we’ve allowed the wound
to heal:
& we cannot even believe
we’re so damn capable
of quick forgetting.

CAVEAT

1.
The Criminally Innocent

a.

Richard Fuld, Jr. used to be the “Big Boss” of Lehman Brothers Holdings until the US meltdown that sent corporate rats scampering into their holes. But he’s not taking the fall: he swears “all his decisions were both prudent and appropriate given the information he had at the time.”

With the dramatic flair of Camus’s judge-penitent in The Outsider, he adds, “I wake up every single night wondering what I could have done differently… This is the pain that will stay with me the rest of my life.”

The “rest of his life,” of course, wouldn’t be exactly a guilt trip down memory lane, but crying all the way to withdraw from the bank the “nearly $500 million in salary and bonus payments in the past eight years.”

But Fuld, Jr. would disagree with Sen. Henry Waxman: “The accurate figure was probably less than $250 million… with the majority of my compensation [coming] from stocks, and the vast majority of the stock I still got, I closed at the point of our filing.”

After all, the lesser employees are likewise implicated in the crime. “They owned about 30% of the company’s shares.”

Queried “why Lehman approved nearly $20 million in payment for two departing executives about a week before the bankruptcy filing,” he answers, “the payment of $2 million for Andrew Morton, head of fixed income, was deemed ‘appropriate’ for his years of service. Another $16 million, paid to Benoit Savaret, who was leaving as chief operating officer for Europe and the Middle East, was the result of a contractual obligation.”

[Meralco executives, who get humongous salaries for their alleged administrative expertise, as if they come from another planet, must be all smiles.]

This is simply the tip of the iceberg, as it were: the self-proclaimed corporate geniuses, masters of the Nietzschean herd, must be bragging that they are entitled to play with people’s money, & scoop up a bigger share of the pie.

How could Fuld [& his ilk] say it with straight face before a half-full room & a phalanx of Code Pink protesters who “pelted him with insults and called for him to be jailed.”

Yet he must be sneering at the gallery, feeling ethically vindicated: You can huff & puff, but I’m retiring from all that on some tropic isle, anyway.

Conscience is a complex moral proposition to establish. Some Christians of Ku Klux Klan variety may even find it divinely sanctioned to kill off heathens (now conveniently labeled terrorists) in the axis of evil. Priests administer rites of confession to prisoners, never mind if they’re innocent, about to be sent to the gas chamber, even sprinkle with holified water limousines to spare the rich blokes from unfortunate accidents. & thinking God will throw a protective mantle over the privileged while showering the bare-footed poor with promises of pie in the sky.

In a system where all modes of relations are reified – the abstract is transformed into material or concrete, i.e, passion is a diamond ring, justice is a handgun or a gavel by a partisan court – & actualized as commodities (the value of your humanity or naked life is measured in gold or bronze), the people are only worth a quarter & should grin & bear it if their hard-earned money, invested in risky instruments concocted by managers, falls short of profit expectation. There is no culprit to be put on the block for “having defrauded investors” or be “designated the villain of the day.”

Everyone shares the responsibility of loss but never of profit that is the domain of managers.

Of course, Fuld wouldn’t hang. The capitalist system, in its unwritten code, shields him from lynching, which it usually does on sub-humans in colonial turfs. [In South Korea, for instance, the head of the Samsung Group was found guilty of tax evation, but his sentence was suspended. The rich, even in Muntinlupa always prove to be different from the common rabble.]

Religion doesn’t make things easier for the street guy: temperance is the wisdom for the ages, so anyone who gambles deserves his fate. But what if the dice is loaded against him?

In the Philippines, corporate robbers don’t get it in the jugular. The interlocking interests will not allow finger-pointing [a judge is soft on business because he is not adverse to the philosophy of surplus-value, anyway], so much so that capitalists are deemed purveyors of good intentions & victims of market dysfunction. The Shylock paradigm is an emotional settlement: Shakespeare didn’t understand the mechanics & logic of capitalism, elevating the case to a moral & ethical imperative, never an indictment of the business of usury itself.

The Grepalife fiasco is too recent to be closed: the Yuchengco firm, according to its protestants, has failed to settle accounts with policy holders, yet it is poised to buy out Philamlife, as if it’s awash with moola.

This, in a symbolic level, is the very model of “systemic violence,” according to the Slovenian maverick Zizek, that is “often the catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our political and economic system… Something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics… which [helps make sense] of what otherwise is ‘irrational explosions of subjective violence’.”

That is to say, the American masses may witness up close the implosions of a system gone haywire (campus shoot-out, cocaine addiction, mortgage defaults, etc, as the very indicators of violence of their situated life) but they cannot altogether change it because they have ideologically shut down their eyes to alternatives the system itself has conditioned them however to consider as a cure worse than the disease.

The Christian dictum that “he who is not without sin, cast the first stone,” neutralizes the guilt of the oppressor & freezes the victim – isn’t it a wonder why the notion of parity works against the very position of the aggrieved, because things are theoretically equal?

The Law in capitalism, which is a byproduct of a developing bourgeoisie, is another Kafkan castle: you cannot enter it, much less return.

On the other hand, socialists in UK are up in arms: “Why should they pay” they scream, “for the banks’ crisis?”

b.

Why do moneybags not have enough of everything? Why does Fuld insist it’s only $250 million thereabouts, & not $500 million without batting an eyelash. A wad of pounds could be mindboggling to a pauper: a truckful could give him a heart attack.

Finance & psychology are truly blood brothers. In a rehab in the US, psychologists engage patients “afflicted with ‘money disorders,’ the slew of unhealthy and self-destructive behaviors that are not as extreme as pathological gambling, kleptomania or compulsive shopping, but nevertheless afflict large numbers of people.”

& the “problem financial behaviors identified by psychologists in recent years are: overspending, underspending, serial borrowing, financial infidelity (cheating on spouse by spending & lying about it), workaholism, financial incest (lending money over relatives to control them), financial enabling (throwing large sums at, say, adult children who are not motivated to support themselves), hoarding, and plenty of guilt and shame around poverty and wealth.”

Money, in effect, says Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist, is a “portal into unresolved family histories and generational history patterns.”

Acquisition of the legal tender isn’t simply an economico-ethical issue, but a psychological response to a “trauma”: however, to the common wisdom, intelligence & luck are the raison d’etre for “success,” which happens because one risks, never a drive to resolve certain Freudian dilemma. Of course, the capitalist system itself translates accumulation as the very logic of surplus-value, but there are variations to the triggers that cause the “madness”; after all, whether it is compulsive spending or Calvinistic penury, it remains a case for assessing psychoanalytic disorders.

Was Fuld enabled by his socio-political environment to acquire something beyond his managerial capability or was he the very symptom of an overrated system that has reached its limits of consumption & overproduction?

Businessmen, after all, are technocrats lionized daily in the conduct of community life: they are requested to grace occasions of gross solemnity (like cutting ribbons for a food branch, or attending visual exhibits which their philistine notion of art cannot comprehend), or given some media space for a comment or two that may not even be worth a slice of melamined tofu. Money, having pushed them into the top 500 of the oligarchic world, has mantled them with erudition & finesse.

& the cycle repeats itself – opinions clothed in technicalese are recycled like mantra to scare away the ghosts of inflation. Has it ever occurred to the public, dazzled by the honcho’s perfumed respectability, that it is heeding the counsel of psychotics whose message is an index of their secret dysfunction, or neurosis? That their “intellectualized” status is cause for the millions of suckers to linger like insects in the wings?

For every million raked in by a financial satrap, there’s a gang of guys left out holding an empty bag.

Recession may not even be a cure for Americans to reconsider their credit-card mania: after some time, when the tremblor has waned, for sure they’ll go back to their old habits & relive the good imperial times, & Darfur will just be memory of something that is crudely unique to Africa.

2.
Grief

When Vivian Hultman heard the news that the killer of her daughter was given executive clemency by GMA, the “knots in her stomach… came back,” as if she had never left the Philippines & decided to bear her grief in Sweden.

She would visit the grave of Maureen whenever she was “depressed” some blocks from her house & needed to be with her spirit – but the respite seems forever gone. The wound has never healed & the vision of the “unrepentant” executioner keeps haunting her sleepless days & nights. She has put on weight, as if her body had let go of all the anxieties of her motherhood…

She really hasn’t moved on. But how can anyone, especially a mother, accept the reality of a permanent loss of someone delivered out of her womb?

The DOJ secretary, a man, would let loose a mouthful, vexed as he was to the quick. The Hultmans “are hypocrites… they can go jump into the North Sea.” The spiel was terribly misplaced: people, after all, didn’t score his predicament when his kidney nearly cost him his life. They had observed the tedious, if unwarranted ceremony, of never kicking him when he was down. They didn’t even crack jokes about the organ being synonymous with the “temperament… of, say, a nice helpful guy,” different, from, say, the ubiquitous Secret Police.”

The observers of elementary protocol were off the mark: the Secretary’s penchant for one-liners showed his insensitivity to return the compliment. Is it a case of an infantile lust for Warhol’s 15-minute fame which, if historically annotated, would be an appendix of philistinism to this regime?

But, of course, most politicians live for the moment. & Gonzalez is basking in the temporal adulation of being at the center stage of public imagination.

[Some cynics point out he probably would dread the day when reporters would steer clear of him because he’s no longer good copy, already put out to pasture. Such fear of anonymity haunts faded screen idols, failed politicians, even notorious criminals who cherish the once-secret limelight in their psyche.]

b.
Fandome

Should we follow the travail of Sharon Cuneta & Francis Pangilinan, like it were a telenovela that ensures the profitability of media & also assures the state that nothing like serious conversation is happening to undermine the President’s speech?

The hypnotized masses, regaled to a point of idiocy by noontime shows with the usual narratives of rich-poor mise-en-scene, have been launched onto this very path of triviality precisely because the politics of the elite rules the airwaves.

The audience indeed must be steered from a notion of Agamben’s naked life or “life – human life – in which the single ways, acts and processes of living are never simply fact but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power.”

The poor live their lives in absentia.

Should they return to the crude reality of themselves, there may be hell to pay.

Meanwhile, the party goes on. Sharon & Francis have been stirring the hornet’s nest, as it were, like the very nation’s future depended on their marital strife. After all, the Pangilinans have invested heavily in Cuneta’s magical name – & we’re in the dark as to where private begins & public ends.

Who’ll gain from this split, anyway?

Ralph Recto without Vilma wouldn’t have made the former a political commodity.

Kiko without Sharon is virtually a lost presidential bid.

But should we care about the fates of Senator Noted & Senator VAT?

3.
Mentors

A.

Sunday it was when he saw bunched together at a jeepney stop in front of Vinzons Hall some freshmen out on a break & abuzz over where to take their lunch: the boys were chattering in their effeminate voices, the girls anxiously examining the charts & formulae in their test questions. Their faith in the book Paul Samuelson’s Economics seemed immense, rock-solid: on its pages are the keys eventually to the world of high finance they dream to enter & have a life.

But are they informed that First World technocrats are hemming & hawing as to how to fix the Wall Street meltdown?

If only they knew professors had confessed it’s such an unchartered sea that is the future, would they have taken the exam?

Academic knowledge doesn’t seem to matter when mentors are as lost as any street bum.

B.
Exam Week

The exam week is done, & the old professor who hasn’t made any visible impact in his profession & given to petty despair over the banality of the academe, peruses the blue books on the table with the insouciance of the world-weary.

The words on the page – misspelled at times – do not cohere, ideas are stacked like dirty plates yet the writers are cocksure they have pinned down the discourse. Remarkably, the student stuff is a notch higher than their elders’ who are still stuck in the morass of old philosophies which however have served them well: with the little knowledge of their era, they have made their pile, gained respectability, as if to say the new learning doesn’t really matter as long as you bring home the bacon.

& the young eventually will follow this well-traveled route: they will be the old guys they didn’t want to be. Today is a repetition of yesterday. & tomorrow is just another day.

Learning is another ceremony of termagant chatter.

The old are brimming with old dogma; the young with young illusions.

Frankly, no one is prepared for life: success or failure is an accident. The universe, after all, was born of chaos.

4.
Essence

“With my films,
I get closer & closer
to reality,”
quips a filmmaker
whose whole life
has been premised
on images
seeking to get deeper
into the essence
of things…
But will he ever
reach that bottom
that keeps on
changing
like chameleon
& on a Kafkan mode
receding into the
heart of an abyss
like a wayward
satellite?
& when finally
he exclaims “Eureka”
like some old
philosopher
will he be sure
it’s not a changeling
of another
butterfly
his imagination
must preoccupy
because
it could have
flown
on the sly?
Is it really the One,
or another
nimbly dancing
at the edges of his eyes?

5.
Projection

The news head reads: “New Yorkers ask: Will the economic tailspin translate to a rise in crime? “

Says Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis: “Every recession since the late ’50s has been associated with an increase in crime and, in particular, property crime and robbery.”

But he adds, “Typically, there is a year lag between the economic charge and crime rates.”

It goes without saying the crunch will be in 2009 when ripples turn into waves that will virtually drown blue-collar workers: unemployment will go up, OFWs will return in droves, business will contract & the streets, given the proportionate conditions of Manila, will prove doubly dangerous. The poor in short will turn desperate – & to hell with the biblical injunction “Thou shall not kill.”

But the dire prognosis – despite the lies that the “fundamentals are strong” – will be a boon to the Palace. Nothing will be more assuring to its tenants than the possibility of charter change or even martial rule on the pretext that a strong state is antidote to the financial conflagration.

Already, we hear noises from its lackeys.

[& if we take into consideration Soros’s admonition “it’s a fallacy to believe that markets correct themselves, & the bubble is gone forever,” surely the reality of the emergency state is upon us.]

B.
Reprise

But is the world-wide recession – globalism is capitalism enforced upon mankind by force or seduction – the flashpoint for a paradigm shift?

& given the backwardness of the Philippines which has remained characteristically a field for “drawers of water & hewers of wood,” will a revolutionary upheaval come into fruition by virtue of the massive “universal” dislocation?

From my rocking chair, I dare gaze into my cloudy crystal ball: there will be one, never a repetition of EDSA which was never in the first place a revolution – to repeat it is to duplicate a duplication on the mode of Louie Bonaparte’s rendition of a farce.

The coping mechanism for the downtrodden seems to be limitless: they rewash, reheat, reflavor left-overs from garbage bins without feeling sorry for themselves; the demolished squatters pick up their lives in pushcarts to reconquer back alleys; the middleclass on fixed wages improvise & adjust their lifestyle to “make both ends meet,” without a traceable resentment that they do not deserve the current governance.

& organized religion, their refuge in times of distress, is no more than organized violence against themselves.

How can the obviously pacified, existing like disconnected monads, be rallied to “rage against the dying of the light?”

& suppose it does happen the divine should perforce visit upon this land inexplicable violence that may spark some sea-change – how would we define it?

The Jacobin revolution in France is usually degraded (notably in the columns of the late Max Soliven) into a dogmatized truism that “revolution devours its own children,” usually devolving into its original fascist state – an interpretation Zizek would contest: “With regard to the French Revolution,” he explains, “it was significantly Danton, not Robespierre, who provided the most concise formula of the imperceptible shift from ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to statist violence or in Benjamin’s terms, from divine to mythic violence: ‘let us be terrible so that the people will not have to be’.”

He adds, “For Danton, the Jacobin, revolutionary state terror was a kind of pre-emptive action whose true aim was not revenge on the enemies but to prevent the direct ‘divine’ violence of the sans-culottes, of the people themselves. In other words, let us do what the people demand of us so that they will not do it themselves.

Certainly, the Palace & other forces will interpret it according to their own inclination.

6.
Listener

The young girl,
mature beyond her years,
says,
“If you will only listen,
you’ll hear
what the grass
is saying…”
& willy-nilly
he empties his mouth
of words,
his eyes
of color,
his ears
of sound –
until suddenly
he begins to read
the leaves,
the wind,
the sky…
He has not slept since –
for the cries of animals
& the silent scream
of fallen trees
keep him tossing
in the night.
Even the earth
weeps.

b.
Rhythm

He needs
to be half-second late;
he must not
keep pace with the universe…
If he misses a beat,
credit it to his theory
of the counterflow:
he must not rush
with the centrifugal blow.
Take time,
like a gyroscope
heavy on its feet,
to examine
the complex symmetry
of a leaf,
the whorl of air
that slaps against
the trees,
the suction
of rubber shoes
on soft, black soil –
different strokes
that slip
wisdom’s habitude.
O He moves faster now
that he has slowed down.

The Worst of Times

1.
Idiot Nation

It’s not only a meltdown, it’s recession but no politician, even economists would dare use the term, lest the global fear becomes palpable, real: the financial whiz kids have been found out & Wall Street is Main Street.

Will this cause a social upheaval in America? Will a revolution – in the classic Leninist formulation – occur in the heartland of capitalism?

The people are screwed: their houses expropriated, their credit lines cut, their pension fund turned Mickey Mouse, & oldtimers expect to work beyond their retirement years. The word fun, the daily Hollywood mantra, suddenly turns toxic.

But no! The poor will not mount such wished-for offensive: North America is in the grip of the Hegelian master-slave dialectics; & they will loathe only the superrich who run off with their money on the sly, not the kind that creates – in their mind – jobs to sustain the middleclass. Far be it from them to scrutinize the complexity of labor-capital problematics: money in the pocket is the only sure thing they are comfortable with, the rest is Marxist abstraction & agitprop. That they are subliminally complicit to the exponential growth of capital isn’t a big deal.

How does exploitation become real & evident in their own eyes?

No such possibility, perhaps, as explained by Michael Moore’s Idiot Nation, where “there are forty-four million Americans who cannot read and write above a fourth-grade level – in other words, who are functional illiterates” & this makes things “scary… [for America that] goes out of its way to remain ignorant and stupid… [It] is a nation that should not be running the world – at least not until a majority of its citizens can locate Kosovo (or any other country it has bombed) on the map.”

& These dolts constitute the blue-collar class: how could they see clearly through the economistic fog of credit squeeze & the Janus-faces of Obama & McCain?

Surely, in the words of Brad Stones: “they can resent the enormous riches generated on Wall Street. At the same time, they can venerate other kinds of wealth – Silicon Valley’s, for example.”

He goes on to stress the pragmatism of the labor class which is blind to its enabling act on supercapital… “people can actually see and enjoy the fruits of their labors. Donald Trump builds office towers and puts his name on them. Steven Spielberg makes movies with nice special effects. Martha Stewart [who was imprisoned for insider trading] decorates our lives and homes. Tiger Woods, on course to be sports’ first billionaire, hits a golf ball really, really well.”

On the other hand, they would resent those perceived to be dysfunctional, a threat to their practical well-being: “Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, Alan Schwartz of Bear Stearns and Robert Willumstad of American International Group, three troubled companies that might have tremendous records of innovation” but are, to the public, beyond comprehension, like “option derivatives” is to “particle physics.”

& what did this crème de la crème inflict on the system?

New York Times is quick to defend it. It is “the people” that failed.

“The anti-regulation disciples of the Reagan Revolution have eliminated vital laws, blocked the enactment of much-needed new regulations, or simply refused to exercise their legal authority.”

The boys were allowed by Washington to play, ride the bubble on their actuarian ploys until it burst – & nobody would be left standing to explain the calamity: subprime losses? option derivatives? They may have been triggers but the real score is that market money was siphoned off helpless workers on funds & stocks that inflated expectations of individual growth.

The UP School of Economics may be able to explain the mechanics of the crisis, but they stonewall as to where the federal bail-out would lead. They chorus (Diokno, de Dios, Paderanga, et cetera) “we’re on an uncharted course,” thus exposing the vulnerability of their theories & credentials that have served them well in bureaucratic posting – much like the once-cultic Greenspan & Bernanke who are now moping in the doghouse.

In the US, the Republicans & Democrats are religiously into the blame game, but both houses should be cursed since Reagan, through Clinton, then eventually Bush were sucking up the market windfall, until loses turned up on charts.

Party is over, time to call it a day?

Obama & McCain are two faces of the same coin: both were caught flatfooted by the downturn, yet the labor class still pins hope on either of them for their systemic/ideological deliverance.

The two, of late, have been spouting desperate rhetorics… of change, but neither is up to the task. They will be true to their capitalist training & ideals, like the NY Times, & expect everything to play out eventually.

B.

How did this phenomenon of Yankee invisibility start to erode? How can they insist that “Pax Americana” would prevail in this century?

The September 11 attacks did send them a signal that war close to home is an omen of dark days coming? A preview of what’s in store for a nation that sees itself as above suspicion – despite the evidence of Guantanamo, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Kosovo, etc?

Joan Didion, in Fixed Ideas: America Since 9-11, traces this persistence of imperium to the “theory, or fixed idea, which not only predated September 11 but went back to the Reagan Administration and its heady dreams of rollback, had already been employed to provide a rationale for the President’s tendency to exhibit a certain truculence toward those who were not Americans.”

This is classic racism, but nobody dares call it that: Manifest Destiny is more like it, conflating it with the moral & divine.

She continues: “Within the theory, any such truculence could be inflated into ‘The Bush Doctrine’ or the ‘New American Unilateralism.’ The theory was this: the collapse of the Soviet Union had opened the door to the inevitability of American preeminence, a mantle of beneficent power that all nations except rogue nations – whatever that might say on the subject – were yearning for us to assume. ‘We run a uniquely benign imperium,’ Charles Krauthammer had written in celebration of this point in a June 2001 issue of The Weekly Standard. ‘This is not mere self-congratulation; it is a fact manifest in the way others welcome our power’.”

Relatedly, there was a CNN panel discussion titled “Are We [Americans] Still the Best Hope on Earth?” & its Americo-centered thematic has been engrained in the American psyche through decades of colonial expansion & bloody intervention which however they would innocuously term “benevolent assimilation.”

[A panelist from Yale University, of Jewish extraction, would aver US is a most moral country, as exemplified by the civil rights movement which in the first place was precipitated by lynchings & the like. He hasn’t heard about Samar this side of the world, turned into howling wilderness. & when, for instance, an “American Idol” contestant couldn’t distinguish Turkey, a nation, from turkey, a fowl, we no longer wonder why Third World educators are imported to man their high-school departments & teach American kids the sciences, math, et cetera.]

But does this worry your typical redneck?

They couldn’t care less, more so if it’s pointed out that Democrats & Republicans are interchangeable terms of filiation: both parties are protective of Israel in relation to Palestine. They would pull out of Iraq & redeploy however troops in Pakistan & Afghanistan, on the pretext of carrying the war against terrorism to its logical conclusion. Of course, Didion would sneer that Bush mistook terrorism for a state, not a skill – which explains the very widening terrain & its limitless possibility of war & intervention.

Yet for Jacob Heilbrunn, Bush is not the ultra-conservative he is projected to be, but also a part-time Democrat with “hist Patriot Act enacted after September 11 attacks, the No Child Left Behind education policy and, specially the costly Medicare prescription drug benefit for elderly Americans,” which Democrats also subscribe to, anyway, with qualified variation.

“Bill Clinton,” moreover, was not your liberal who would ruffle conservative feelings [in his watch he pried off Kosovo from Yugoslavia], but actually “was more of a conservative president than Bush” because Clinton “balanced the budget,” says Michael Tunner, “a senior fellow at Cato Institute, a non-partisan public policy research institution.”

The root cause of American conservatism however is traced to “Irving Kristol who as early as the 1970s identified a new question for conservatives – not to destroy government but rather to wrest control of it from a ‘new class’ composed of professors, educators, environmentalists, city planners, sociologists and others trying to steer the economy toward ‘a system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anti-capitalist aspirations of the left’.” [In reference to the Democrat’s base, which is anti-Marxist, leery of socialism, & celebratory of capitalism as the very end of history.]

Hence, the “mission to transform power to private enterprise by slashing taxes while also fostering a religiously based moral vision for society,” is sheer irony.

Religious fundamentalism & the Far Right, after all, may conflict with the Democrats’ liberal notion of them, but when Biden & Palin both said No! to gay marriage, the boundary between the two parties was erased.

McCain wants to cut taxes & allow the market [based on responsible laissez-faire] to stabilize itself; Obama prefers raising taxes to squeeze private enterprises to energize governance. The ploys are tactically contradictory but strategically unitary in salvaging the system whose source of aberration precisely is overconsumption & overproduction backstopped by international monies.

Be that as it may, the American worker doesn’t know which road to take – although he is intuitively informed of the “disconnect between the government and the citizens.” For Didion, most people seemed catatonic: “seemed resigned that the prospect that we would nonetheless [in respect of the Iraq venture, which basically underlines the psychological strain among the majority of the underclass] go to war… many [even] mentioned a ‘sense of inevitability or dread’.” & this attitude of paralysis, of breaking the glass ceiling, Didion would note, “as waiting to see. At a remove.”

Stasis in an intellectual vacuum seems to characterize the hegemonic ideology on Main Street – in the absence of course of an alternative party to redirect loose energies.

Consequently, the meltdown would still witness people clinging on to the White House – whoever be its occupant – to lead them to the promised pie in the sky. If the crisis is squarely & successfully placed at the door of the Bush regime, Obama would still end up waiting for the golden parachute to bail out his administration.

The $10 billion grant in Iraq, rechanneled to Afghanistan & Pakistan in a new war front could only sink American treasury: & the question raised is, Can it still sustain its military missions without loans from international banking syndicates?

The Third World, suckered into espousing dependency economics, would suffer immensely for its puppetry & valorization of private entrepreneurship.

The Philippines is no exception. While Washington tinkers with regulations to recover its bearing, Malacañang dizzily parrots the orthodoxy of deregulation – & never has the oil monopolists had it so good, with the regime sharing in the petroleum loot.

[Screw the people, secure yourself.]

Thomas Friedman’s humorous twist is instructive for the anxious & depressed:

“Our government [the US] is so broken that it can only work in response to a huge crisis. But now we’ve had a huge crisis and the system still doesn’t seem to work.”

& the leaders “could not even agree on a rescue package [they eventually did but on a cautionary note that it is just a tourniquet to stop the bleeding] as if they lived on Mars and were just visiting for the week, with no stake in the outcome.”

“But the story cannot end here. If it does, assume the fetal position.”

In Giorgio Agamben’s text, quoting Walter Benjamin, this smacks of “the tradition of the oppressed [that] teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”

Is Hegel the reality, not Marx?

C.

Covering the stock market is like covering Iraq: “you never know what will happen.”

There is admittedly recession in “Japan, Germany and Italy” while the US & UK “are on their way” to the economic conflagration.

Despite the bailout, the credit market is still plunging, & investors are wary to stimulate the market – in the mode that capitalists are wont to analyze market fluctuations. Technocrats are slow to pronounce any certain positivity. The man on the street is a nervous wreck. & never has the system been wildly buffeted by a financial cyclone.

The First World is crashing down, pulling with it the Third. But the alternative package isn’t brought on the table. Conversations in high places run around in circles.

If society in capitalism is a spectacle, in which, says Agamben, “language no longer reveals anything at all,” images are intimations of a habitual nightmare, like the flooding in Asia where government has abandoned its role & people are left to fend for themselves. Their faces, however, betray no emotion: their eyes duly gazing as if at a blank wall, the horizon a door opening into the night.

It is a jungle of monkeys out there: hearing, seeing, speaking no evil. Anger, like hope, has dried up – & the banality of events seemed to “mark the impotence [even] of satire when faced by the becoming-reality of the indescribable.”

“World politics,” he notes, “is nothing more than a hasty and periodic mise-en-scene…”

O how you wish it were the ’60s all over again when resistance makes you feel alive.

2.
Advice
A.

The Master
grinned
when he glanced
at the apprentice’s
backpack
fully laden –
a boulder
on his back,
like Sysiphus
on Mount Halcon:
the brand-name
survival prescription
for scaling
the rocky slope.
The guide however
had only
a water canteen
& a wooden rod
to push himself up
or measure distances
between the ledges…
He would
now & then
sneak a look
at him
who now & then
would slip
stones or flowers
into his bag,
marveling
at the rich fauna
of the forbidden.
At the summit
the sun
ticked off
like water
dropping on stone…
& the novice
on the move,
would remember
painfully what
the elder had
earlier intoned,
as if forced out
of his tongue.
He would drop
what he had
all along dragged up
the perilous incline:
fossilized leaves,
chips of bones,
beer cans,
notebook,
& in his mind
merciless women
who would ooze
down
like drops of tears
on his arms.
“Travel light.
Don’t take anything
even memories.”

B.

But the endline
kept banging
like a drum
in his ears:
“Burn everything
you leave behind.”
As if he were counseled
to smash himself
blind
into a wall
of the future,
totaled like a car
that revved up
over the cliff.
But it was deemed
astute:
no memory
to remember
the pain,
the pleasure,
the nothing
that falls like a leaf –
unseen
unheard –
in the night.
& She finally
wouldn’t be there anymore
to plague him
with her absent presence.
It’s heaven
to hear strange bells
pealing
when nothing
is within hearing distance,
nor in sight.

3.
Finale

Conversations
are just noise,
people pantomime
in every corner of the street
as if something
real & significant
has happened:
O But they’re just
killing time
for another round
of apocalypse
when they can,
in tradition,
keel over
& be done with life.
Nothing in situations
is worth
the trouble of a tear.
Compassion
is a rare find
in junkyards,
& energy misspent
is the only crime
you can point out:
you die for no one.
& she,
who infested
his waking hours,
is as heavy
as a particle of dust
in memory’s
trash can.

4.
A.
The Commuted

He was middle age,
grew up spoiled
& couldn’t hack
the lively noise
of three partygoers
by the roadside
in the dread of night.
O They were
arrogantly festive,
oblivious of him
going solo
to untie his Gordian knot.
Three shots
ripped the air –
& predictable
was the aftermath:
damages,
reclusion perpetua…
But did the public
understand
he was the victim
of all that?
Their joie de vivre
had pulled his finger
to pull the trigger…
The young
must be circumspect,
dare not brag
about the possible
happiness in the world –
the old,
who contemplate
their death,
should not be ambushed
in their solitude.

B.

We were happy
that night.
Is there a law
against it?
We didn’t see him
seeing us
& if we did,
he’s not our business.
We didn’t know him
from Adam.
We were being ourselves.
When shots were fired
we thought
he was just kidding.
Now, we’re lost
forever.
He’s free & off
the hook.
O How do you balance
the equation?
From way up here,
God doesn’t tell us
why.