By Laura Simpson
Written by Stephen West

Zoey in her new digs.

Being the head volunteer at a local animal rescue, I received a phone call from a woman in Montreal, Canada who was communicating with her friend on Facebook about an abandoned dog on the Mexican border. After receiving an approximate location and after investigation, I found that Zoey (a name I gave her), a female American Boxer mix, wasn’t actually abandoned — she was chained up in front of a trailer. Animal Control was monitoring the situation to see if the dog was being fed. After seeing the dog, it was ridiculous to me that Animal Control would be monitoring this situation. The dog was skin and bones, was covered with open sores, and appeared to be deaf and obviously being neglected. The neighbors said she had never been off that chain, ever.

Even her shadow was painful to see.

She’ll never be chained again.

I chose not to wait for Animal Control. They have to go by the law, I don’t. In my point of view, it seems like the laws in abuse cases are there more to protect the pet owner than to protect the animal (and to allow for Animal Control inaction, if desired). Not to mention they would probably euthanize anyway. So whenever I see a situation, I rarely rely on the law to do the right thing.

A Time to Take Action

That night, I decided it was time. However, I got worried at the last minute because I didn’t know how Zoey would react to a stranger approaching her with a flashlight at night. It could be bad. So I didn’t do it.

The next night I went back and didn’t see any lights on in the owner’s trailer so I just walked right up and Zoey was in the doghouse. It was like she had no fight or life in her at all. I had to pull her out by the chain. She was very cooperative. I unhooked the chain and put her on a leash. She walked right away with me. I was worried about her barking but she was completely quiet. It was like she knew she was going to a better place.

Safe at Last and Beginning to Experience Life as a Dog Should

I took her to the vet. Her ear infection was so bad she couldn’t hear. The open sores were the result of being eaten by ants and flies. The whole area where she lived was covered with ants — ants that are big and bite hard.

I kept her for three months until she healed. Someone donated the money to have her chipped, fixed and vaccinated. Everyone at the vet clinic knew her story. While she was there, I got a call from the clinic that someone would like to adopt her. I delivered her the next day. They kept her name. They are a nice family with children and two other dogs, a Chihuahua and a Corgi mix. She has put on a few pounds. I called on Zoey about month after she was in her new home. She’s doing fine with her new family and their two other dogs. The things I miss most about not having her are watching her experience simple things like grass, trees, running in a river and just experiencing normal dog things, knowing she was doing this for the first time.

The neighbors and the woman from Montreal that initiated Zoey’s rescue still thank me today. The neighbors said it was like living next to a concentration camp.

Is There Ever a Time to Break the Law to Save an Animal?

Animal rescuers regularly wrestle with inadequate laws. Most live with the chronic frustration and try to stay within the bounds of their legal rights. Others take matters into their own hands. Is this a black and white issue? Do we have a higher moral responsibility than the law provides? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below and if you have saved an animal in need, and please share your story and photos on The Great Animal Rescue Chase website. Many of the heroes who share on our website are featured right here on Care2.com

Read more: great animal rescue chase, man saves neglected chained dog, vigilante dog rescue

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/man-ignores-the-law-to-save-chained-dog.html#ixzz208VFmYUn

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

By Phil Rockstroh

One of the Candler mansions, built 1916) on Druid Hills (Atlanta)

My parents modest, single-level, brick home stands on property that was once part of a sprawling estate owned by the Candler family, Atlanta’s Coca-Cola patricians. Built during the post-war, 1950s building boom, the small house is situated in a deep ravine that once served as the grounds of the Candler’s private zoo. On the hilltop above, the point of highest elevation in the Atlanta metro area, the Candler family, in the tradition of the powerful and elite, laid claim to the highest ground.

In the 1960s, and apropos to the era, in an odd twist of historical circumstance, the grounds of the estate — earlier endowed to the state of Georgia by the heirs of the Candler fortune — were appropriated for development as a state mental health institution, a sprawling complex of modernist structures, housing those committed for treatment for issues related to psychological disorders.
Emblematic of the decade of the 1960s, the highest ground in the city became the site of a madhouse. Aptly, as opposed to emanating from its traditional source i.e., insular precincts of privilege and power, in the 1960s, spontaneous upwellings of cultural madness were more egalitarian in nature…seemingly, a development that the corporate and governmental elite found so troubling that they swore that they would never again abide similar types of cultural phenomenon–instigated by underling upstarts who (apparently) forgot their social station–to rise unfettered. Consequently, the swift and brutal repression the Occupy Wall Street movement has endured in its struggle against the present structures of calcified psychopathology known as the corporate state.

Yet, cultures must allow for creative chaos. Otherwise, stultifying social structures tend to engender a sense of powerlessness among the populace, creating a pervasive sense of nebulous unease. Repression creates outbreaks of hysteria, because the source of demeaning power cannot be confronted directly without prohibitive consequences. From witch burnings, to public lynching, to xenophobic fears of immigrants, to the bullying of homosexuals and social outcasts — depression-mitigating misapplication of misdirected, public rage has been inflicted on unpopular groups and social outcasts. The larger the degree of social stratification and economic inequality in a given society the more noxious the displaced anger becomes, as economic-engendered resentments and group rivalries provide the fuel for flames of pent-up aggression.

Often, the animus is internalized within the psyches of the official operatives of the state (e.g., police and soldiers) who are given carte blanche to harass and oppress minority groups, political dissidents, and enemies of the state, real and imagined. Thus the state, acting through its anonymous operatives, becomes a force of lawlessness…abducting, torturing, and killing sans sound reasoning and remorse…for all intents and purposes evincing the modus operandi of the criminally insane.

A lone, psychopathic killer views himself as a self-contained society of one; therefore, he feels accountable to no one outside of himself…He is a freelancer (a mirror image of the lawless state itself) who has assumed the murderous agency of state power. No wonder, we, as a people, so greatly exaggerate the danger these extreme cases pose to us on a collective basis — no wonder we insist that the most punitive forms of punishment be inflicted upon individuals afflicted with these rare afflictions…that they be locked away in the most secure prisons and executed with utmost expediency…for if we gazed upon them for any length of time, we would notice affinities of mind and action — their violent, reprehensible deeds are microcosmic representations of official state policy and cultural norms. Therefore, we clear these overt monsters from sight, lest we awaken to ourselves — to the casual and mundane monstrosities required to adapt to this prison of the criminally insane we know as daily existence within late capitalist empire.

Here howls the chasm: Between the apparatus of the privileged and powerful, in place, to create false fears and those things that should be rightly feared. For example: being in possession a healthy fear of the damage wrought by the corporate media by their incessant promulgation of manufactured fears. Conversely, one should fear the harm resultant from the contrived fears perpetrated by ruthless political leaders and mercenary media figures…committed in the name of protecting the public at large from imaginary enemies.

This is not so much a problem of: fearing fear itself; rather, it is a matter of gaining a healthy fear of the overkill exacted when self-serving institutions use counterfeit fear as a means of preserving their power — standard modus operandi when institutions, public and private, have lost legitimacy.

The overreactions and overkill of the national security police state are similar to that of a germaphobe (a sufferer of mysophobia) e.g., the forces of state power marshal overwhelming numbers of militarized riot police and recruit entrapment-happy undercover provocateurs against peaceful political dissenters. Yet: Obsessive hand washing deployed against imagined microscopic invaders will not serve to sooth the tormented mind of an individual seized with mysophobia, because, in reality, the problem is rooted in the psyche of the sufferer. The further one afflicted withdraws from the world…the larger his fears will loom. Isolation causes the mind to become a self-resonating feedback loop of self-referential fear (e.g., an encampment of peace resisters must be met with violent force to preserve the health of the state’s social order).

Providentially, the most propitious treatment for OCD (of both the personal or institutional variety) is exposure to the very things the suffer fears most i.e., being induced to touch the surfaces that he imagines seethe with vile contagion. Conversely, an army of riot police and billions upon billions of dollar squandered on military hardware and state surveillance can never quell the terror within the isolated elite of a decaying culture.

The neoliberal state resembles Howard Hughes in his final days…shuffling the penthouse floors of a succession of resort area hotels …muttering about microbes…his vast riches and security details offering no balm; his fear of human touch served as a self-issued death warrant. In a nondenominational Pentecost of redemptive paradox, the very thing that evoked such overwhelming fear in him…might have served as the very agency of his salvation.

My family’s death vigil has come to an end. My father passed from this world early in morning of May 21…In the last few days of his life, he drifted between unconsciousness and excruciating pain. When he would rise to awareness, he would quake in agony, his bone-thin arms raised, grasping into empty air, imploring, “Help! Help”… futile pleas that proved to be the last words he uttered in this life.

He died as he lived…a vivid presence, although inconsolable regarding what he deemed the implacably cruel nature of human life. At last, his pain has ceased. His flesh and bones will soon be rendered ash…almost weightless, his remains will be free to drift in air…released from his imprisoning pain.

I shuffle through memory; itself a dimension of imprisonment — its confines circumscribed by fate and limited apprehension. I festoon the walls of my individual cell with fragments of imperfect remembrance. What was once flesh has been transmuted by time into shards and vapor.

You are now free, my father…but for the solitary confinement of my memory.

Not too long ago, I had a dream wherein I stood gazing over the atrium of a large complex of multi-story structures. Inadvertently, I dropped my “special” writing pen…It glinted silver as it spiraled down into the lobby, below the atrium, where it came to rest on the carpeted floor. I searched for a down stairway or an elevator in order to retrieve it, but discovered the only means of descent would entail having to make my way down the floors of a public hospital adjoining my present location.

The dream communicated to me — as occurs, at times, in the lingua franca of the soul — the tacit understanding that in order to regain possession of my writing instrument I would be required to view and chronicle much suffering (as well as healing) in the wards of the hospital…that I would be shirking my duty as a writer (I would lose the instrument of my art) if I avoided the task of looking upon affliction, recovery, madness, birth, and death.

This spring, upon my journey south, I have gazed upon suffering and death, as my father made his agonized exit from this keening sphere. My father — who was a man of half Native America ancestry, brought by tragic circumstance to the Deep South of the U.S., to later marry a woman, my mother, a survivor of the blood-besotted madness of 20th Century Europe — carried the wounds and evinced much of the madness of his times.

He imparted his wounds to me. I carry them with my own wounds — those incurred by unavoidable circumstance and those that are self-inflicted.

As I trudge through the wards of the wounded and the restored, I will do my utmost to send out dispatches bearing my observations…From maternity ward to madhouse to morgue and all the precincts in between, I will attempt to chronicle what I witness…for to ignore the admonitions of one’s soul and its dialog and dance with the Anima Mundi of one’s time is to drift toward the tragic fate of…a life deferred.

I close this essay seated on an Amtrak train, trundling through the June night…Sleepless…A full moon skirts through ink-black clouds…the landscape visible in snatches of sheeted light and silhouette. Towns and cities drift past…Northward bound, Georgia recedes behind me…but memory holds fast.

At hospice, my father succumbed to death in a morphine-induced coma. Too heavily medicated to desire drink, he died of thirst…his face and body as gray as granite when the attendant from the mortuary service arrived to transport his corpse for rendering by the Cremation Society. When my father was seized with rage–a frequent occurrence throughout his life, and only diminished in the last stages of his protracted illness–his blood would rise, in an instant, from his chest to his face; his anger-contorted countenance would flush a deep, reddish brown…the color of steak gravy broiled out of raw beef when cooked at a high temperature.

Seemingly, the veritable thunder of an outraged god, his outbursts terrified me. Shortly after my fifth birthday, after being witness to a fit of my father’s temper, I have a memory of slipping out the back door and coming upon a bed of fire ants that had erected an outpost of their larger colony against the concrete foundation of our small, brick apartment building in Birmingham, Alabama.

The insects seemed to me to be a seething mass of coruscating rage–and I answered their animus by kicking at their ranks with the tips of my high top Keds. The sight of their crushed bodies, frozen in death, affixed to the side of the wall, held me enthralled. The illusion of control seized me…momentarily mitigating the terror that my father’s rage had instilled in me. Is this the mental architecture of sudden violence…murder…war?

In the seats around my own on this train, African American grandmothers are holding an impromptu confab on the subject of the sins of our age…The topic: A generation has been lost because the art of dispensing regular beatings for infractions, large and small, is in the process of being discarded by hapless parents. One proclaims, through a wizened grimace, “My father…took to hitting me all the time, and it never did me one bit of harm.”

Sure thing, Granny…each blow served to move you closer to God in his Heaven.

I, myself, in a fit of righteous fury, sent a troop of fire ants his way when I was five.

Contrib Editor Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com . Visit Phil at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/phil.rockstroh

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

By Thomas Rogers, Salon
Crossposted with Alternet

For most people living in major American cities these days, the idea of an unmarried couple living together is as controversial as toasted bread. Since the 1990s, more than half of married couples in the United States live in sin before getting married. The percentage of people who disapproved of unmarried cohabitation has dropped from 86 percent in 1977 to 27 percent in 2007. In fact, for most of us, it seems far more suspicious to see a couple moving in together after they’ve gotten hitched than before. So how is it possible that living with your boyfriend or girlfriend is still against the law in Michigan and several Southern states?

As Elizabeth H. Pleck details in her fascinating new book,“Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation After the Sexual Revolution,” unmarried cohabitation has had a rocky path toward cultural acceptance — and, unbeknownst to many of us, is still held back by widespread retrograde legal policies. For much of the 20th century, couples were dragged to jail, had their social benefits revoked or lost custody of their children because they decided to live with the person they loved. And even as the civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements gradually won more rights for cohabitators, the law has continued to place an irrational importance on marriage, especially when it comes to Social Security. Pleck’s book focuses on a series of key legal cases from the past half-century, but manages to make a convincing argument about the misguidedness of our country’s continued, irrational love affair with the institution of marriage — and why it’s high time the law caught up with our hearts.

Salon spoke to Pleck over the phone about the importance of gay marriage, the New York Times’ bad science and why America is still so obsessed with matrimony.

For someone like me who lives in New York, the idea that there is still a stigma or a legal case against unmarried people living together is really surprising.

There’s the cultural stigma and the legal stigma, but it’s the legal stigma that is more interesting to me. How come the law and our policies haven’t caught up to the fact it’s no big deal anymore? Cohabitation is still a crime in five states — the four Southern states and Michigan. Yes, no one has been arrested for cohabitation in recent years but there are a few situations in which the fact that it’s criminal can be used against people. There’s the example of Michael Schiavo, Terri Schiavo’s husband, who was denied guardianship of his wife because her parents went to court saying he broke the law of Florida because he was living with his girlfriend.

Like many other aspects of the sexual revolution, [the rise of cohabitation] appeared first and had its greatest effects on the two coasts and while it has affected the entire country, there are holdouts. You find lower rates of cohabitation and more opposition in the non-coastal and rural areas of the country.

How does this current state of affairs compare to the early 1960s and before?

The numbers of cohabitators are estimates, but to the extent they are accurate, the increase is absolutely off the charts. This is one of the huge trends of family and sexual history where you just find the arrow going almost straight up at an incredibly rapid rate. In the early ’50s and ’60s it was confined to cosmopolitan areas, bohemians, student neighborhoods, interracial couples and poor people because of poor people’s flexible relationship status. What we’ve found since then is that it’s become more common, more frequent, more acceptable, and spread in terms of regions, age profiles of the people and so forth. The majority of people, in the 70 percent range, now live together before they marry — about 12-15 million people right now.

If these laws aren’t being enforced, why should we care?

The criminal laws are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s one of a variety of ways we don’t honor the idea that every person is the same or that everybody can be just left alone as an adult to do what they want. The law makes a symbolic stand in favor of legal marriage and promoting marriage, and major entitlement programs — both private and public — are based on this idea, and on the benefits side there are many important points of social insurance, personal insurance, that have to do with being married. Cohabitators, for example, are two or three times more likely not to have health insurance than married people. A lot of social insurance goes to people who are legally married and their dependents. You find many people on the Internet discussing how they only got married to get health coverage, and many who are engaged don’t understand their fiancés aren’t covered by this. Same with Social Security benefits, they are based on marriage. This is about something I call the right to not have to marry.

It’s funny, I’m Canadian and in a relationship with a man and I’m very conscious of the fact that, because of DOMA, I don’t have that option to marry my boyfriend if I want to stay in the United States. It’s something that I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about.

Yes, immigration policy favors legal marriage and punishes people who are not married. Cohabitation used to be thought of as immoral and one of the reasons for deportations was that people were engaged in immoral conduct.

Where does America’s extraordinary love of marriage come from?

I’m extremely interested in the exceptional nature of the American nation. The idea of promoting marriage and marriage policy goes way back. America is a very religious nation. Cohabitation [is seen by many as] a religious sin and a sin against God whereas marriage is not sinful. People think it has to do with 19thcentury and Victorian ideas, but the truth is that there has been an active fight going on in various states on cohabitation since the 1970s, in Florida and Wisconsin and different states. The growth of the New Right in the late ’60s and early ’70s added on new layers of emotional maneuvering.

So how did our attitudes change?

The first big turning point was when the Supreme Court struck down laws against interracial cohabitation in 1964. Florida had a law saying a black man and a white women or a black woman and white man could not legally cohabit at nighttime. It was a major victory for cohabitation but they still said it’s fine for states to have those laws; they just couldn’t use race as a classification in making punishments. You can’t punish black and white couples for cohabitation but it’s still a crime on the books for a couple to live together.

The No. 1 most important change was the domestic partnership movement. The gay liberation movement fought for it especially in the ’80s and ’90s and cohabitators — straight and gay — ended up being the major beneficiaries of it. It’s a huge shift because it took cohabitation from the shadowy world and made it be recognized. You can use it to receive benefits from private or public employers and you can register this status with a municipality and a state government to get favorable tax treatment and some benefits.

How important was pop culture’s role in making Americans more accepting of cohabitation?

Cohabitation is actually very visible in popular music, because popular music is music of young people and young people were doing it. There’s a Bon Jovi song about it and Joni Mitchell sang about it. It was on “Soul Train.” A few movies by liberal filmmakers in the early ’70s showed countercultural people living together. In the late ’70s there were movies like “Rocky” and “Annie Hall” where it was taken for granted. TV is another story because in the late ’60s or early ’70s series would show an age gap where the parents were offended and the parents’ values were eventually affirmed. It was only in the middle ’70s with this Norman Lear TV show “All’s Fair,” that we got a positive view of cohabitation.

People that you quote in the book talk about the “marriage cure,” the widespread belief among lawmakers that marriage is the solution to a variety of social ills. Does the marriage cure work?

So, for example, a judge will have a young couple coming to him. They’re living together and the guy is unemployed or on probation and he’ll say he won’t punish them in any way if they get married. The state is coercing couples to get married with the idea that then you have cured the problem. Some people want to cure poverty by doing this, others want to cure crime, some immorality. But it turns out you can’t cure these things in these ways. One major reason is you can’t make people stay put once you marry them off; they often don’t stay married.

The marriage promotion movement — which consists of conservative social scientists, especially in the ’90s, engaging in anti-poverty policy, welfare reform, abstinence education at schools — has a very strong belief in this. The idea is that marriage is the ultimate poverty program. I quote extensively from the research in the book to show there’s very little evidence that this works.

It’s very interesting that marriage is seen in the U.S., unlike in Western Europe, as the magic bullet that’s going to cure all kinds of ills. Why are their attitudes so different over there?

[In Western Europe, their ideas are] based on recognizing reality: “This is the way people are living, and we’re not going to be able to change it very much so we should be able to recognize this is what’s going on and treat people fairly given that.” In the U.S. it’s, “This is what’s going on, and this is something we don’t approve of, and maybe we can’t really stop it but we should use our law and our policy to make a broad statement that we believe in marriage and stand behind it even if we know in our hearts that it might not be able to work.”

It’s an expression of these very schizophrenic elements of American culture. On one hand the U.S. celebrates individualism and on the other hand it has these moral policies that are very paternalistic.

That’s a great way of putting it. I think there is a schizophrenia or a divide and some people tend to emphasize one and not the other but they’re both there and tugging at each other — I think that’s called the culture war. It’s a very important part of American history especially since the 1970s.

There was a recent, very popular New York Times articlethat argued that premarital cohabitation was bad news for marriages. What did you make of it?

I actually wrote a letter to the editor in response to this. First of all, that writer quoted social science as if it is the bible on this. The various statistics about cohabitation on the whole tend to show that engagement cohabitation is more likely to lead to a marriage that does not end in divorce. But all studies of cohabitation are studying a moving target; last year’s findings are not this year’s findings. But the reason the article is interesting to me is that it became a cultural phenomenon. It was the most emailed article of that week, I believe, as it seemed to be for all “what leads to divorce” articles.

Those kinds of articles actually go way back in American history, but they tap into tremendous anxiety and fear with the assumption that correlation is causation. I sense that isn’t just because we have lots of children of divorce but because when the country is unstable and the economy is still recovering and our country’s national greatness is not what it was, marriage and divorce become the symbol of the nation. They pick that anxiety and mirror it. My opinion is you’re pretty much going to have to do what is best for you and what accords with your beliefs. Dear Abby had to change her views on cohabitation; she was advising people not to do it until the ’90s, and then she capitulated and said it seems to be OK. I just don’t think that it’s very beneficial to engage in fear-mongering about cohabitation and fears of divorce.

I’ve never been terribly fond of the idea of marriage, and it’s interesting to me that the gay community has increasingly moved from this idea of abolishing marriage to making marriage the central part of the movement. Why do you think that change occurred?

The No. 1 reason was the AIDS epidemic. It showed the fragility of life and the fragility of non-legally recognized relationships and the need for social benefits associated with legal marriage. On top of that, there was the lesbian baby boom and, in general, a new generation of gay liberationists who were not coming out of ’60s critique of the nuclear family.

Cohabitation is not a social movement, but it gets a huge amount of energy from gay civil rights. So when gay civil rights moved in the direction of legal marriage the issue of non-marriage benefits seemed to take a back seat. There was the potential at one point that there would be a both-and strategy — that people would be for the right to marry and the right to not have to marry — but it hasn’t been the case. Now it seems like all the energy goes into the right to marry.

For me the ideal future outcome is something close to the Scandinavian model in which many of our rights toward hospital visitation, inheritance, healthcare and so forth are disentangled from the institution of marriage. How realistic is this in the U.S.?

I don’t think it’s very realistic to expect that outcome. I have been absolutely surprised by the success of the legal same-sex marriage movement and that we are on the verge of declaring DOMA null and void. This is a positive movement in same-sex marriage but my calculation is same-sex marriage has to happen first then cohabitation after that, so it’s kind of at the end of the train. I see the train is picking up and moving faster but that end point doesn’t seem to be coming any time soon.

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end…”

By Stuart Jeffries, Guardian (UK)
Facebook Guardian

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it’s 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China’s) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. “The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation,” says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. “Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today’s.”

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx’s masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There’s even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital’s renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist’s fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn’t airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was “unsuitable” and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he’s alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You’d think.

Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers’ Party. It’s an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. “The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we’re in now,” Choonara says.

There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism’s relevance. English literature professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn’t this all a delusion?

Aren’t Marx’s venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple’s reputation for innovation? Isn’t the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: “The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today’s popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there’s a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people.”

That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. “The point is that younger people weren’t around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union,” she says. “We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we’re going through now. Think of what’s happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes – democracy wasn’t supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation.”

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism’s renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History – in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.

Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. “It’s going to be the first time I’ll have spoken on Marxism,” she says nervously. But what’s the point thinking about Guevara and Castro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers’ struggles today? “Not at all!” she replies. “What’s happening in Britain is quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them.” Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro’s 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year’s riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government’s cabinet, only a fool would rule it out.

For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He’s on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. “There isn’t going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but there is hope for a society by working people and for working people,” he counsels.

Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution. “He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it.”

Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. “I think that’s the model,” he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he’s not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a Labour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour’s February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to “Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Let a young man dream.

What’s striking about Jones’s literary success is that it’s premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels’s analysis of industrial society. “If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class,” says Jones. “But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that ‘We’re all in this together’ is offensive and ludicrous. It’s impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we’re all middle class. This government’s reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance.

“It’s an open class war,” he says. “Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you’re accused of being a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this way.”

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that “one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that’s to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?”

There’s another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we’re enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between “use value” and “exchange value”.

What’s the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. “It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people.”

In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on “the new communism” for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: “A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

“The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture,” wrote Johnson. “Tempting as it is, we can’t afford to just shake our heads and pass on by.”

That’s the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as Žižek, Badiou, Rancière and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels’s critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the “contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism”.

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? “It is extremely unlikely that such a ‘post-capitalist society’ would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the Soviet era,” argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. “What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about.”

This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the end of The Communist Manifesto: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Marxism 2012, University College and Friends Meeting House London, 5-9 July. Further information: marxismfestival.org.uk
________________________
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stuart Jeffries was born in Wolverhampton in 1962.  Stuart started his journalistic career as a cub reporter at the Birmingham Post and Mail in 1985. In 1987, he moved to the Hampstead and Highgate Express, where he had many duties, chief among which was interviewing Hampstead lady novelists, which he liked a lot. In 1990, he started work for the Guardian, where he has remained ever since, been very happy and never used a pseudonym. He has been a subeditor, TV critic, Friday Review editor, Paris correspondent and is now a feature writer and columnist. He lives in north London with his partner and five month old daughter.

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

Subscribe to Animal People (The HTML Edition) by Email

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.