Bruce Lerro

BRUCE LERRO—The ruling powers try to rationalize and legitimize their power by inventing ideologies that paint them as more capable and harder working than they really are. One part of their ideology is that there is no ruling class as a social formation. Class is simply the position that separate individuals occupy as a result of their individual competencies and effort. The “free market” is infinitely flexible, open to all comers. In this capitalist ideology there is no relationship between social classes. Capitalists appear to acquire their wealth as a completely separate process from what workers do or don’t do. What is really going on is that upper-class wealth is dependent on their exploitation of the working class in the form of surplus value.

BRUCE LERRO—One of the stereotypes is that artists’ models must be beautiful. This is not true, in fact, many artists have old me they prefer models who have “character” rather than just a pretty face, or as some say, “skinny little white girls”. As an artist myself I agreed. In fact, at the auditions if you were anything but a skinny white girl you had an advantage. The second stereotype is that artists’ models and artists have sexual relations. This may have been true historically but not likely once artists’ models formed unions or a “guild”.

BRUCE LERRO—At a very young age of 20 Elizabeth had her second son, Fred, a year after the death of her first son. By this time Elizabeth was a committed national organizer. She did not let her identity as an organizer be compromised by the difficulty of raising a child under these conditions. So she handed off Fred to her mother. Unlike conventional grandmothers, her mother did not chastise Elizabeth or dutifully or resentfully raise Fred, complaining all the way. Her mother understood the importance of Elizabeth’s work as an organizer and what she meant to the socialist movement. Both mother and daughter understood that socialist organizing was more important than simply being a mother.

BRUCE LERRO—In patriarchal religion God is the creator and humanity is relatively passive. But in process philosophy everything is moving at the beginning as in the early cosmos as  matter and anti-matter clash. Later in cosmic evolution higher forms of matter emerge from the lower, but lower creates the higher. In process philosophy the lower forms of life are active, not passive.

BRUCE LERRO—Often the rise of China and the Middle East appears to many Westerners as something recent, maybe 30 years old. Before that? Is Western dominance beginning with the Greeks and Romans – right? Wrong, not even close! The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history of dominance from 500 CE to 1800 CE. What is happening in the East today is no “Eurasian Miracle”. With the wind of 1,300 years at its back, it is returning to its long historical prominence today.

In two my recent articles, Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival and The Myopia of Anglo Saxons Rulers I attempted to show how narrow International Relations Theory is in its systematic exclusion of the Eastern and Southern parts of the world from its theoretical history. In his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, John Hobson rightfully accuses the West of Eurocentrism, paternalism, and imperialism. But in an earlier book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, he methodically shows how the West first depended on and then denied that Eastern and Southern civilizations were a source of most of their technological, scientific and cultural breakthroughs. This article is based on The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization