Reflections on "capitalist realism" (Part 1)

        Slavoj Zizek has declared that for those of us living at the centers of capitalism: "it is easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism." Our art reflects this fact, much of it is governed by what Mark Fischer has called: "capitalist realism" a firm ideological conception that not only is there no possible alternative, but that it isn't even imaginable. The abbreviation TINA litters texts of critical accounts of "neoliberalism". However dogmatically and slavishly this statement by Thatcher has been taken as lens to interpret current events in the capitalist system, we can see there is a certain truth to the notion as it shows up in art. For instance, a video game series like Dead Space shows the absurdity of the continuation of the capitalist system, with its deleterious social and environmental effects, into an age of high technology and interstellar travel but conceives of no alternative solution. The examples can be easily multiplied but one wonders how far technology, history, and society must progress in the future (dating from anywhere from 5 years from now to thousands of years) until humanity realizes that the capitalist system that arose in the British Empire during the 17th century is outdated and obsolete. No simplistic ideological factor can explain this attitude, such as the anti-communists control the media or the right-wing neoliberal capitalists have prevailed over center-left Keynesian capitalists. In capitalist countries, anti-communists have always controlled the media.

        But to illustrate the difference, I'm reminded of the story of a McCarthyite I came across while wiki-surfing who had been a communist prior to the end of WWII and became an anti-communist afterwards. He maintained the communist conviction in the imminent and inevitable victory of communism simultaneously with the position that the victory of communism would be a horrid thing. This isn't so strange, many fascists and anti-communists of the past portrayed communism as an imminent threat, one that could only be overcome with the most vigorous action or in more pessimistic moments, actually in the end could not be overcome at all. I'm reminded of the post-war Neo-Nazi position that Germany took a brave stand against Judeo-Bolshevism but in the end it was a lost cause, like the neo-confederate lost cause, the deck was stacked against her from start. This attitude also emerges from America's anti-communist wars in Asia, while they were ongoing the entirety of Asia (even including occupied Japan) was in danger of being consumed by communism. The enemy constantly vacillated between being too weak to overcome US power to being too powerful for the poor tiny US to oppose alone. In the immediate aftermath of those wars, US defeat became inevitable and the wounds of those wars was softened by the balm of truisms and non-sequiturs like: "Never fight a land war in Asia". The official conspiracy theory actually reaches monumental proportions with the rise of America's own "stabbed-in-the-back" myth with the war in Vietnam being defeated from the inside by privileged students who spit on working class American soldiers. This idea is actually implicitly accepted by many, including hippies who believe that they deserve responsibility for the ending the war. The absurdity of the narrative is obvious from any critical perspective, the Vietcong hardened by 20 years of war were no challenge for the mighty American army; we were actually on the verge of victory! What really defeated America were white pot-smoking students who had read one too many left-wing books in the college library and listened to too many beatles records. Living breathing revolutionary communists in Vietnam are reduced to an issue of no concern, while the influence left-leaning liberals whose identities are bound up in decadent capitalist commodity culture grow to an influential force of enormous proportions. Absurdly, it only takes a few protestors infused with crypto-marxist ideas to bring the world's greatest super-power to its knees. If any internal force was responsible for the collapse of America's Indochina wars, it was actually the soldiers themselves as well as the revolutionary energy of America's long-mistreated oppressed nations. But even taking this line gives Americans too much undue credit.

        So its apparent, that there was a time even among anti-communists when the future of capitalism and bourgeois rule even in their own propaganda seemed far from secure. But now its quite the opposite, communism was doomed to fail from the beginning because Marxism is a flawed ideology, so the liberal anti-com line goes. The idea that the victory of communism in Vietnam would lead to communist victory all over Indochina is dismissed as a crackpot theory that caused the loss of many American and Indochinese lives. The victories of Communist Peoples Armies which performed deeds (often against superior forces) that would've awed the Caesars are dismissed as inconsequential and such victories would've been even far more spectacular if those armies had been led by bourgeois officers instead of communist cadres. Sustained rates of growth of 10-14% in Stalin's Russia and Mao's China are depicted as communist mismanagement of the economy and the failure of Marxism, despite economic achievements that had never been seen in history; or it is more frequently seen as fudged communist numbers. Such numbers can be denied when it comes to total economic growth but cannot be denied when it comes to industrial growth. So the rapid growth of heavy industry is reduced to a communist economic fetish which failed to really improve the lives of people. Funnily enough, China's Vice-Premier admitted that modern China's GDP figures were "man-made" and "for reference only" and recommended steel & cement production as well as electricity and oil usage as a proxy for China's growth. Recalculating on this basis makes Chinese growth lower and far more volatile than the Mao period, but I have argued in any case that high rates of industrial growth on the one hand; as well as excepting the single anomaly in world bank data (even still  the growth rate is quite high at 6.4% per year) leads to the conclusion that at the very least the Mao period was no slower than the Deng period. Now there are received ideas that the rise of Deng Xaoping or the fall of the USSR were inevitable. It's also quite interesting that a widely recognized fact at the time that the USSR had become capitalist or was moving in a capitalist direction after Stalin's death and the institution of Kruschev's "reforms" was magically discarded in favor of the idea that at the time it was still a socialist nation.  The cynical liberal realism of the cold war was magically replaced with triumphalist liberal idealism. In that narrative, blue jeans and cassette players ensured that the triumph of capitalism was inevitable. In truth, America's anti-communist offensive was hardly ideologically coherent and it's a miracle that it won at all, as America's propagandists seemed unsure whether to appropriate Maoism and say that the USSR was more capitalist than the capitalist nations or to argue that it was a pure communist gulag-hell with communal toothbrushes. Was democracy in the Third World a great bulwark against communism? Or did it open the pathway to communism that needed to be opposed with the cynical cooperation with hard-right Third World strongmen?

Anything that would stick seemed to be the attitude. It's doubtful America would've won "the Cold War" which had become more an inter-imperialist contention then an actual conflict of ideology, if it had not been for Nixon's realism in opening relations with China. In the next post we will explore the history of threats to the system, why they occur, some reasons why things have "stabilized" and what new threats have materialized in the period since 1973. We will also discuss the theme of a potential return to fascism or "authoritarian democracy" in popular science fiction and other art, especially in light of capitalist realism. We will also extrapolate on what it could tell us about the global rise of the far-right at this moment.

 

The Impossibility of Southern Gothic/Romance

   

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.."-Opening Credits "Gone With the Wind"

     Ah, the Old South, America's own medieval "merrie ole England" a great bastion of faith harkening to the bygone days of European feudalism. In the images painted by her ideologues (many of them Northerners, surprisingly) it was a land of Cavaliers, romantic rebels against Yankee puritanical roundheads. Everyone knows slavery was bad,  and it is an undisputed fact that American slavery was based on racism,  numerous examples of American racism from Jim Crow, to the KKK, to arguably even the Atomic Bombs are enough to caution against its glorification. Indeed, few critics today would openly praise gone with the wind or say it was anything other than racist. However, a great fiction still informs our view of slavery, mainly the one that Northern and Southern ideologues concocted together, the literary conceit that the South was America's premodern, irritable sector prone to irrationality. Walter Johnson and Edward Baptist have done an effective job busting the myth of the "pre-capitalist" or "premodern" South against the feudal system thesis  promoted by eve certain "Marxists" like Eugene Genovese. They have established that not only did the South possess a booming capitalist economy but that it was actually avant-garde for its time and age in key features of modernity. Baptist has also raised the point, how could the Old South be old if it only existed 80 years? He has pointed out that it is a mythological conceit that makes us believe that the social structure of older states like Virginia was effortlessly and neatly imposed on the Deep South, or that plantation life never changed.

     So what am I griping about? What is the point of this article? It's really not a moralist one. Throughout my time as an English student, I've had many teachers, good teachers in many respects who have tried to share with me their own love of Modern Southern fiction. Undisputed greats like Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor as well as many short-stories from somewhat lesser lights. I even had one teacher teach a section from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, but by and large such crass assignments are considered bad taste. Even she taught the work almost as if dissecting a corpse and not a living, breathing text, in the same sense that a film teacher may show Birth of a Nation to students,  simply because no matter how uncomfortable, it is an essential artifact in American cultural history. I did, however, start to notice a pattern in Southern writing, mainly the reproduction of romantic literary conceits in Southern writing. It's obvious in a story like Faulkner's "Barn Burning" with Major de Spain filling the role of Southern gentlemen in the chaos of the post-emancipation world, and Abner acting in much the same way as a ruined kulak who had the misfortune of falling into the proletariat. Many analysis have focused on the decaying Southern social world, the unleashing of capitalist forces etc, etc. Only problem is that the slaveowners of the South were not aristocrats, they were bourgeois land-owners, and they ran their estates with a rapacity and ruthlessness that  surpassed even large capitalist farms in England and Ireland. Tennessee William's "The Glass Menagerie" reproduces the same fundamental error by positioning Amanda Wingfield as the fallen heiress/debutant, a noble lady in a vicious bourgeois world, whose exalted origins do not match with the quasi-proletarian drudgery of her life, the worldliness, ambitions, and mainstream socialization of her son, as well as the needs of her unique/disabled (there is frequent debate here) daughter Laura. The story seems to mine similar veins as Chekov's "The Cherry Orchard" in that the response of the characters to a decaying/dying social world is that they must let go of the past, and in turn their illusions. Arguably this is only the case for Amanda, but it doesn't necessarily matter as she is the overbearing force hanging over the other characters. I will say, so as to avoid being unfair to Williams, the problems of identity and existence in that play and others is more self-consciously modern than other works of Southern literature.

    The theme of the decaying feudal world, the dying aristocratic ethos, decaying/degraded noble characters/families struggling to adapt to the frenzied pace and strange customs of the new bourgeois Europe is a key-element of European Romantic/Gothic fiction. As Englishmen began to reckon with the rise of Industrial capitalism and Europeans with the changes brought about by the French Revolution, European writers began developing literary concepts and tropes to better explain their present world. In part, the result was the preaching of what Marx called "Feudal Socialism" or the advocation to a return to the feudal past. Part reactionary, part progressive, this cultural-historical criticism of capitalism drew attention to the increased exploitation of common people due to the rise of capital, the increased tyranny and lack of freedom exercised by the enlightened state and its "rationality" as opposed to the openness and liveliness of the feudal countryside. The supposed universal freedom of the enlightened state, and freedom of the individual promised by capital, all of which in the final instance is largely abstract, is contrasted with the numerous everyday freedoms fixed by the complex and 'irrational' customs of medieval life. In many ways, it was a cultural counter-blast, a response to the trauma inflected by the Enlightenment, which culminated in world war under Napoleon. To be sure there are many contradictions, many of these writers supported the French Revolution, and heatedly debated amongst themselves where it went wrong. Some of them, also took up Burkean traditionalism (Burke's treatise on the sublime is probably an underlooked influence on romantic literature.) and other reactionary figures of the age, which has been loosely termed "Counter-Enlightenment". It is interesting that these literary figures used the tentative rights of the bourgeois state, and the individualist ethos of the Enlightenment, as a weapon against it, supporting workers, along with many other common miscreants against the great. To get back on track,  these works reflect a recognition of the fall and decay of the feudal world, whose remnants existed throughout Europe and horror, shock (and a gauntlet of other emotions) experienced by Europeans at the seemingly sudden dominance of modern capitalism. I believe this trope and conceit of the dying medieval world, a weakening aristocratic class, and a terrifying yet exhilarating new world of capital and the bourgeoisie, is also found in the organic theory of English history that emerges from a close reading of Shakespeare's works. Which no doubt, is the reason for his popularity among romantics, as well as Karl Marx.

The problem with this romantic trope is that while it works, and is in a certain sense very profound in a European context, it makes absolutely no sense when applied to the Old South, which bourgeois to the core, and radically modern. There was never a Southern aristocracy, and its doubtful that America has any true aristocracy of its own, being originally settled by non-conformists religious types from the English bourgeoisie. It's impossible to start the story post-bellum as Faulkner does with "Barn Burning" because it bypasses when the South truly hit its modernist nadir in the 19th century when slavery ruled the land. It also leaves us with a false aesthetic, of a land that seems more like post-revolutionary Britain and France, with the individual caught between a decaying social system, the lost hopes of the revolution, and the bittersweet advance of a new world. Instead the Civil War was much more akin to post-WWI Europe in its historical legacy, and psychic devastation. The land a nightmarish hell, society brutalized, and the legacy of the war and its outcome deeply contested. And while the end of slavery was certainly a revolution, it did not lead to the rise of a new economic system or even the promise of one, the system was, and remained capitalist after abolition.

If Southern Modernist writers had been more deeply in-tune with the deep psychic damage of the war after the collapse of the Old South, they might have looked at bitterness, cold and ambiguous aesthetic, and fits of promise that typified Weimar Germany or even post-war Japan. As I think the Union occupation of the defeated South's closest political analogue is really the post-war occupation of Nazi Germany and Japan, I think it would be unreasonable to try to hold southern modernist writers to that standard, many of whom wrote their best work before the war.The fight against Slavery in the 19th century, like the fight against fascism in the 20th, largely didn't end in the overturn of the capitalist system (except perhaps in China and Albania), just the collapse of a particularly awful brand of capitalism. Likewise,  the Union government as many historians have shown, left and right-wing, responded to the challenge of the slave-holding south, with a  similar sluggishness that it confronted fascism in the 20th. It is not for nothing that the Civil War is described as a reluctant revolution or a revolution from above. The idea that it was a revolution is not infrequently challenged.

The person who perhaps did the most to introduce the decaying aristocrat theme into the American literary landscape, was the son of slaveholders, Edgar Allen Poe, his "The Fall of the House of Usher" comes to mind. Whatever good reasons there are for Poe's writing, the waning of a feudal system and great feudal families is not one. Poe's writing is imitated elsewhere in the writing of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. The latter's work "A Worn Path" is considered a classic work of Southern gothic, and certainly unique in that it is primarily about the odyssey of a mentally-ill elderly black woman through the Southern countryside and white supremacist society. It has redeeming qualities like Flannery's work, but from my perspective the Gothic theme isn't justified unless its portraying a decaying bourgeois society, unless its trying to uncover not a perverted feminine aesthetic of feudal gallantry defiled by encroaching capitalism, but to uncover the terror of capital itself. In that sense, the harsh staccato rhythm of Hemingway or the cracked crystalline prose of Fitzgerald, reflecting the perverted beauty and the brutal death-impulse,  and decay of the haute-bourgeoisie, would have been more suited to the job. I'm simply raising the issue of whether the pseudo-romantic aesthetic that informs modern southern fiction really deserved a place.

In that sense, Southern gothic and perhaps Southern fiction in general is not justified. The notion that a separate modernist movement for white southern writers was necessary is questionable from many points of view.Aside from local dialect and the consequences of the confederate uprising, what does make the South different? At this point, nothing, except that the North had more large cities. The South's other special institution, Jim Crow, means nothing, because ALL of America was an apartheid state. That it was a national and not a sectional sin, is something Melville and other cutting edge antebellum writers were trying to understand. There was a time when the KKK was as ubiquitous in the North, along with other fascist groups, as it was in the South. Malcolm X, it should be remembered, contested the popular idea that the North was more enlightened in race relations than the South. To be frank, many of the works of Southern modernist writers did not have the same quality as their contemporary American modernist writers, white or black. I think, if Southern literature had to be rewritten in light of a more accurate consideration of facts, it may not exist at all, or if it did it would be far different.

America, A Conspiracy Theory...

"And it is significant of the specifically bourgeois character of these human rights that the American constitution, the first to recognise the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the coloured races existing in America: class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctified."-  Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring

    If in 1930, you were to arrive in Weimar Germany, and to proclaim that the Nazi party would seize control of Europe's most liberal democracy by burning the Reichstag, would embark on disastrous wars of aggression that would lead to a new world war, and during this war they would annihilate 6 million Jews, along with at least 6 million others, while being materially supported by American corporations like Ford and IBM, you would have been defamed as a conspiracy theorist. It would have seemed like an impossible tale to many, barely worthy of any credence. And yet it is the factually documented truth.

   Today, I'm going to put forth an alternative theory of American history. One, that in my view, fits the historical evidence much closer than the typical theory of reluctant slavers, of the accidental slave republic. This theory, unlike the standard theory, explains a great deal more, and it is my opinion that it can change our understanding of 19th century politics forever. I must admit I am in debt, to the great African-American historian Gerald Horne, much more so than I am even indebted to Sakai's underground classic Settlers. The thesis of his latest book The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America has convinced me that slavery is the lynchpin, the key to understanding American history up till 1865.

     
   The conventional account goes like this, in 1776 a group of enlightened oligarchs met behind closed doors to rebel against England for legitimate grievances, such as taxes. If taxes is sufficient grounds for rebellion, I suggest taking up arms next tax season and see what the response is. To be sure, there are enough deluded white idiots who seem to believe this is a legitimate cause for revolt every tax season. The Brits never figured out what the rebellion was really about, indeed, they had just busted their asses and bank accounts protecting the colonies from the French, it seemed only right that the colonies share some tax burden. The tax burden was exceedingly light, just ask any libertarian (caution, you may hear more than you care to know…). So, it was that the founders, who were majority slave-holders, happened to create a democracy without bothering to think about their poor slaves, surely they had no interest in perpetuating slavery, right? At the time of the American Revolution approximate 1/6th of the population was enslaved. A ratio, I'm sure rivals ancient slave societies like Greece and Rome. So, these modern romans, had no interest in perpetuating slavery and hoped it would die out. That is precisely why, instead of writing a democratic constitution, they consciously chose to model their constitution on those of Ancient Slave societies like Rome and Sparta, they rejected the model of "democratic" Athens out of hand. As we're told so many times by conventional historians, slavery was dying out, this hope they allegedly held, had a real basis.  In the 1750s tobacco prices began to drop internationally, ruining the fortunes of many slaveholders. As well, policing the slaves took up a great deal of time, and American slaves were settling down deep communal roots which made them hard to handle. Around the time of the "revolution" an important case was ruled in Britain that made any slave that reached UK soil, legally free. Abolitionism it seemed would follow, and this panicked American slaveholders, but we are assured this is no reason  to believe that the American "Revolution" was fought over slavery.

  Horne has demonstrated in a most brilliant way, that slave rebellion sent a great many slaveowners crawling from the Caribbean  carrying their slaves in toe, due to real and perceived threats. Once on the continental mainland, they tried out new methods of slave management, always conscious to keep a white majority or a sizable white minority that could combat a potential slave rebellion. The great Imperial Monarchies that ruled the New World all had condoned and participated in slavery, this is true, and England the most enlightened monarchy of all, was the worst enslaver nation. But a change did begin to occur, Britain needed African sailors and soldiers to police the vast empire it acquired in India and in the continental US. The reason for this is local politics in Britain, the Irish especially, but also the Scots and Welsh, felt oppressed by the English monarchy and its anglican church, so the British monarchy viewed these "whites" as even less reliable than Caribbean blacks.
That, combined with the difficult of policing her archipelago of Caribbean slave labor camps, was making some in the English government lean towards abolition.

   Let's deal with a typical myth of American historiography that the expansion of slavery in the American republic was unpredictable. Adam Smith wrote in his economic treatise in 1776 that it was easier to end slavery in despotic regime (i.e. an absolute monarchy) than it was in a  free government (a republic, or constitutional monarchy). The reason for this is obvious and actually written into the American constitution, no citizen maybe deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Translation: it's against the law for the government to attack "property" and not coincidentally this also applies to slave property. Since the slave is the absolute property of a Citizen and not a subject of a King, the government takes no interest in his eventual manumission, simply put he and his descendants become chattel slaves of "free citizens" for all eternity. This follows the most extreme interpretation of Roman property law, that they themselves did not strictly apply. So, slaves are property, property is an inviolable right of citizens, therefore the government can't do anything about slavery, so how was it a surprise that slavery expanded? Let's consider another factor, in 1776 the US was confined to 13 coastal colonies, there was no more psychological distance between New York and Jamaica then there was between New York and Georgia. Let us also consider that most travel was done by ship, it actually would take longer to go from New York to North Carolina overland then from New York to the Bahamas. At this time settlers were running afoul of Westminister by crossing the Appalachians and fighting the Indians in contravention of English law. So, it was completely unpredictable, that slavery would expand, once the settlers and the slaveholder elites crossed the Appalachians    into the lush farming territory, which was greedily coveted it had actually been a rallying cry AGAINST the UK government during the "Revolution". The issue came up frequently, that the Monarchy prevented settlers from stealing lands behind the Appalachians.

   Supposedly, it was impossible to know if slavery could have been expanded, even though the United States had acquired half a continent by 1812. It couldn't have been known that slave-grown cotton could be so productive, despite the fact that a great deal of the world's cotton was grown by slaves in the Caribbean and Brazil. The former place was hardly an ideal location for growing cotton. Seeing as slave-owners had managed to grow cotton under adverse circumstances, it couldn't have gone through the Founders heads, that in what is now the Southern US, with its extraordinary soil fertility, its plentiful water supply, and its warm temperate climate, that this region may have been the best place to grow cotton in the world. With all that prime land, they never even thought about cotton, despite its sky-high prices during and post-Napoleonic war. Lastly, there is the myth of the cotton gin breathing new life into slavery,  I am not saying the gin did not lift a bottleneck on cotton production, but it did not come from nowhere. Southern courts actually would not enforce Whitney's patents because the device was based on similar devices made in China and India, so if the gin wasn't a singular invention without precedence, it can be wondered whether it was truly a limiting factor, whether it wasn't predictable that this technical device would be widely adopted.

  Nor did the founders think that the Mississippi delta and Southern Florida could be prime real estate for sugar cane, apparently. Follow me here, because it is important, after the Haitian and French Revolutions, a wave of revolutions swept Latin America, making nearly all of the New World with the exceptions of Brazil and Cuba free. So the Founders ended up, leaders of a slave nation, in a region of the world that had moved dramatically towards abolition. Odd.  There's no need to go over how they betrayed both the abolitionist Jacobins in France and the Haitian Revolutionaries as that is well-known. Being enlightened men, you might think they cheered on the liberation of the enslaved and the French peasantry, you might think but their reaction to both events was pure horror. There is an interesting caveat that Baptist pointed out in his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, the Haitian revolution killed Napoleon's chances of building a North American Empire. Without Haitian slave-labor, the whole of Louisiana wasn't worth the cost it took to defend it. We can speculate there was no other labor source to develop it, so his plan may have been to transport slaves there, or Haiti, the jewel of the Caribbean was necessary to the formation of a French North American system. What did Napoleon do, this traitor to the Revolution, who had rescinded the laws abolishing slavery in the French Empire? He passed it off to another slaveholding power, the United States, who also began waging a war on Spanish Florida around the same time, a region long-known to be a sanctuary for runaway British slaves. 

      The relationship between France and the US was rocky before then, in fact according to Baptist, the US was considering waging war against France before the Louisiana purchase. The United States knew what Napoleon had done for them, and why they did it. That's why in 1812, a crucial moment for Napoleon, they declared a Second War against Great Britain. Allegedly this was a war for the freedom of American shipping, allegedly. However, American politicians knew that half of American sailors were British and that most of the men who were impressed by the HMS were British Citizens (http://www.pbs.org/wned/war-of-1812/essays/british-perspective/). Furthermore, the British Monarchy agreed to stop impressment, however, the US had already declared war by the time the message arrived. Which leads one to wonder, whether the war wasn't set upon from the start.  In the beginning the US attacked Canada, which was a refuge for runaway slaves, being part of the British commonwealth it had no obligation to return slaves. In a rather brilliant move the British Empire outlawed the slave-trade in 1807 and put a great deal of pressure on other nations to follow suit. The move must've been calculated to undermine the political legitimacy of Napoleon and his regime. The US outlawed it technically in the same year, it was under pressure from abolitionist fever emanating from France, Haiti, and now even Britain. However, the US continued to participate illegally in slave-trafficking up to the Civil War and according to Gerald Horne even after.  According to Horne the slave trade of pacific islanders, also known as "blackbirding", to Australia and various plantations in the South Pacific. According to Horne as well, it was also a prime reason why the monarchy of Hawaii was overthrown, Japan also saw it as a moment to assert its claim to the title of guardian of the pacific. Whatever the case, the US did not take its obligations to proscribe the trade very seriously, a great many illegal clippers found a home port in NYC, where they rested after running the gauntlet from Africa to Brazil, the world's foremost destination of slaves in violation of international law.

   Slaveships did come and go into the US even after official prohibition of the trade, but then again, America didn't need the supply of slaves from the trade so much. There were already a great deal of black slaves in Virginia and the Carolinas,  Jefferson fervently hoped they could all be transported to a more productive region of the country, whitening up their former home states in the process. In a word, the domestic slave trade filled a dual-role of profit reservoir and ethnic cleansing. According to Jefferson these slaves would be dispersed among the new Louisiana territory where they would labor for free in white majority states, and eventually die out, like the Indians had a habit of doing, leaving a free prosperous yeoman class in the wake. I guess  that abolition through genocide can be considered abolition nonetheless. But is it really true he believed this lie? The black population in Virginia certainly wasn't "dying out of its own accord", it wasn't even dying out. And who would do all the work in this glorious white republic of ideals? Wasn't a capitalist slave-society like what existed in the antebellum south pre-Civil War, a completely predictable outcome of the purchase?

    During this period America went from producing a few million pounds of cotton to almost 2 billion pounds by the start of the Civil War. The growth was incredible, America held a monopoly on the cotton market with 60% of the market share. Larger even then India with its 200 million people. Was this not also by design? Capitalist labor management principles were applied at ever-increasing rates to slaves, resulting in ever-increasing output and profit. As chattel slaves, the slave population, which grew (though not with the same speed as the white population) never quit providing labor and could always be limited to the bare essentials of life, if even that. Although the new slavery as it has been called, started comparatively small, with slave auctions happening in New Orleans cafes on behalf of small individual slave-dealers and cotton proprietors. The transformation of this somewhat paltry trade into a massive industry was predictable, especially with such big profits thanks to post-war prices.

    We also have the example of Texas. Which was a rebellion against the Mexican government by Southern settlers, financed by slave-dealing capitalists, in favor of slavery. The Mexican government had outlawed slavery, and through a series of legal tricks, the settlers had managed to disguise their slaves as "servants". But as soon as the Mexican slavery got serious about enforcing abolition, the settlers rebelled, just like they did in 1776. Then they joined the great slavers republic, on equal terms, their own republic being a pale copy. It was fortuitous for the United States government to pick up Texas, not only did it allow the US to get involved in another war that would allow it to expand to the sea, but it effectively wiped out another destination for runaway slaves. It was an effective blow against another abolitionist government, this time a revolutionary government and it sealed any chance that Mexico had of challenging Washington for rule of the North American continent. Nor could they. Slave profits were generating so much money, that in the period of 1830-37, the US economy grew 6.5% a year, not excepting economic depression in-between. This type of growth is only heard of in 20th and late 19th century miracle economies. Between 1800-1860 the US grew at 2.6% a year, a respectable long-term growth rate for nearly any nation. According to Calhoun and other leading Southern politicians, the UK was so anti-slavery, because it was jealous of America. American slavery was giving the US a serious edge, one that the UK couldn't make up even with its direct control of the world's second largest economy, India, and its 200 million lives. Only the Opium trade gave Britain comparable access to the same type of easy profit, which is why they went to war to defend it multiple times.

   According to figures produced by Baptist, the productivity of slave laborers in America was on par with that of Industrial workers in Britain.  Meaning that American slaves had evenly matched British workers (Irish mostly) working on advanced steam driven technology in productivity. This could've been done only with the most amazing brutality, and that was no small feat, considering life for many laborers in England was truly hellish. Southerners also it would seem went all out to discredit America's international reputation, constantly lobbying for annexation of Cuba from Spain and forming mercenary expeditions to Latin America to try to overthrow governments and reinstate slavery by force. The monster of capitalist slavery emanating from the US had grown beyond the bounds of rational policymaking, and many were starting to see that it would lead the nation into disaster. But it wasn't the kind of force any restraint could stop. This led to secession and disaster for slaveholders. However, the most damning piece of evidence of the slave-conspiracy is that Northern claims that slavery was inefficient was patently untrue. Southern farm workers picked 100 lbs of cotton a day in the 1930s, by contrast the slave ancestors of those workers had been able to pick 200 lbs of cotton a day. Free labor couldn't compensate, there were no technical inventions to make up for the disparity until the mechanical cotton picking machine in the 1930s.

     If slavery wasn't vital to American capitalism as Baptist points out, then why couldn't free labor produce the same results? All these things I have pointed out amount to disconnected incidents from the official point of view. They have no internal coherence. But if the real purpose of the founding of the American nation was to expand or at the very least preserve slavery and if the US was actively resisting the international forces of abolition in the 19th century, therefore impeding human progress rather than embodying it, then all the books need to be rewritten. The Great American experiment until 1865 was really a new experiment in slave management, and where other Empires had been forced to give up or reduce slavery precisely in order to maintain their Empires, the soul and drive of the American Empire was slavery itself.

On the Christian Revolution

  In the late 18th-Century,  Edward Gibbon, one of that century's greatest intellectuals published  The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Dramatically narrating Rome's history from its rise as a conservative, masculine, and idealistic power to its maturation, over-reach, decadence, and death, he was perhaps the first modern historians to describe the natural life-cycle of Empires. This in itself was not unique, the great 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khalud also argued that all great empires enjoyed a life-cycle that damned them to decline and death. Another great modern historian of the "declinist" position than Arnold Toynbee wrote of Ibn Khalud: "He conceived and created a philosophy of history that was undoubtedly the greatest work ever created by a man of intelligence….”  (https://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200605/ibn.khaldun.and.the.rise.and.fall.of.empires.htm)

 However, what was somewhat new about Gibbon's interpretation of Roman history was his emphasis on the role of revolt--and organized religion in bringing about its downfall. Besieged, by fanatical Christian radicals drawn from the urban mob and the slave masses, the Roman aristocracy, already fallen into decadence on account of its own hubris, saw its power and values slowly undermined, and the Empire hollowed out until it was a shadow of itself. The result was that the Roman political structure was unable to cope with the effects of the Barbarian invasions of the late Empire and collapsed ignominiously, bringing about a dark age from which Europe was only now recovering. For, one reason or another, historians of all different specialties and shades of the political spectrum have taken exception to this account of Roman history. Some historians have even suggested that Gibbon's visions of Christian radicals and Germanic barbarians undermining the great Empire was drawn more from contemporary threats, such as slave rebellions, and the American and French Revolutions (which broke out as Gibbon's last volumes were published) rather than the age itself. Critics before and since have opposed the notion that Christianity contributed to the fall of the Empire; contemporaries especially attacked his negative view of organized religion. But there were two gigantic figures from opposite ends of the political spectrum who never doubted this account: Frederich Engels and Frederich Nietzsche. For Engels, the Christian Revolution was: "one of the greatest revolutions of the mind in human history" it was the ultimate culmination of a cultural revolution made by Roman slaves that fundamentally changed human history, bringing the world's greatest empire to it's knees and sounding the death-knell of the slave system. Nietzsche thought similarly, which is why he denounced Christianity as a religion of revenge, even if Nietzsche's romanticization of pagan elites is excepted, what emerges clearly from his work is a vision of the Christian Revolution crippling and enslaving mankind. For Engels, this cultural/social revolution was necessity; for Nietzsche it was an aberration from a healthy sense of morality that allegedly emanated from the pagan master-class. In the final sense, it was the revenge of colonized Jewish zealots against pagan Rome and its collaborators, the visions of retribution and apocalypse spread across the Empire by these defeated and resentful zealots inflamed the slave class and the Roman mob bringing down the World Empire and its Ancient Regime.

A post-modern historian might argue that this was simply a case of the radical extremes of politics misinterpreting history in the light of modernism. After, all slavery didn't actually end in Europe until the post-Caroliginian age and the new testament (at least the one preached by the Roman Catholic Church) doesn't explicitly condemn slavery. As always according to a post-modern critic (this is said without saying it) the correct epistemology is rooted in the prejudices of the radical center. That aside, the great science fiction author and phenomenologist of fascism, Philip K. Dick believed that the Empire never really fell. He authored the VALIS trilogy of novels where Rome never fell and the last 2,000 years have been a kind of collective delusion suffered by mankind. There is some truth to this view, when the Empire formally collapsed, the informal institution of the Catholic church slowly built it's hegemony throughout Europe. Likewise, the bastard of the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, which attempted to reconstruct the Empire through the military force of newly christianized German tribes, began 962 A.D. and did not formally fall until 1806. The Byzantine Empire, a regime directly descendent from Rome did not fall until 1453. Czarist Russia and the Second Reich made claims on the Imperial inheritance of Rome; they both fell in 1918. The last regime openly claiming this imperial inheritance, The Third Reich fell in 1945. The real point is not whether Roman intellectual baggage and cultural baggage continued to weigh down the brains of the living; that is indisputable; but rather, whether the true essence of the Empire and it's classical world survived. Few will claim that is so. The political unity of the regime did not even survive. What the Christian radicals did was to radically alter the essence of the Roman Empire, they radically undermined and altered nearly every European pagan culture they came in contact with.

From a Marxist perspective, I have many questions of what this meant for the means of production that prevailed in Europe. Firstly, as Marx and Engels pointed out, and as Chris Harman also pointed out in his  A People's History of the World  the main social basis of the Christian Revolution was a combination of urban artisans, the urban underclass (or proletarii) and oppressed slaves. As Christopher Wickham has pointed out in his book The Inheritance of Rome  slavery in the late Christian  Empire had for the most part become akin to serfdom. Engels argued that overcoming the vastly diffuse social groups of the Empire required putting forth an escape from life into death, to place man's salvation in the beyond. The Christian notion of equality of souls and life in the late Empire coexisted with a society based on hierarchy and even served to reinforce it. But this Christian notion contained within it a preference for an ordered feudal society, in a word, by accepting the equality of souls in the beyond, all were to accept slavery in this life, that is slavery by degrees, slavery to God and Christ. This notion of slavery and submission to the supreme being is made much more explicit in Christianity's cousin Islam. Like Christianity, Islam was a religion of the poor and excluded, this is the real origin of so-called Islamic terrorism. Mitterauer has written at length at the role of the Church in organizing property relations in Medieval Europe, as the prime organizer of these relations. And what this reveals is a preference for Feudal relationships, which slowly crowded out even the thriving slave-trade of the Carolingian Empire, the Eastern European trade which gave slavery its original ethnic connotations, "slave" deriving from slav. What this speaks to is the long-range coexistence and resistance of differing modes of production against each other. Eventually, the industrialization of grain-grinding, rather the replacement of slave-labor with water and wind power led to the fall of the remnants of slavery in Europe. Ironically, it was the "Dark Ages" in which the mechanization and true style of European agriculture truly emerged. The People of the Empire responded to the crisis of Rome and their civilization by investing their energies in new crops, new technologies, in redoubling their commitment to their crafts. Gradually, the High Middle Ages brought about an unparalleled industrialization, emerging from a triad of an apocalyptic spiritual belief in deliverance through technology or "spiritual machines" , colonization, and radical resistance and popular revolt. This led to the conjoined emergence of mercantile colonial capital and industrial mining capitalism (based primarily on water-energy) within Europe, these new forces served the feudal economy and its market place. The industrialization of Europe is to be partially sought in the peculiar need for Iron in European feudal agriculture. Eventually, agriculture and finance began their transition to modern capitalist forms, in the former emblemized in the capitalist estate of England and the rich wage-based peasant economy of the Netherlands. The latter was embodied in the proscription of feudal modes of usury in favor of modern banking and money lending practices, in particular the conjoined institutions of the republican bank and the public debt, both unique innovations of the middle ages.

Now a new heresy took hold which precedes protestantism and informs it, that of a new paradise of equality existing within this world. Although the several massive revolutions tried (and failed) to bring this new sense of equality based on the world-view and class consciousness of rich peasants, it eventually succeeded in coming to power in Early Modern and Modern Europe. Even the secular revolutionaries and reformers of the 19th century were informed by what were in reality deep scriptural roots of the coming millennium, of heaven on earth and technological transcendence. The equality of the beyond, that informed the feudalization of Europe, came more and more to represent an equality in the here and now as Europe began to be capitalized.  However, equality in the market, even more than the notion of equality of all souls in the beyond, leads inevitably to the terrorization and oppression of the vast majority, as this equality based in contractual theory in exchange tramples and oppresses others forced to engage with it. As the capitalist and the worker share theoretically equal rights, the capitalist is free to use his means of production and social power in the realm of law, to pressure the worker to work harder. Defense of the rights of all, when viewed through the prism of the market, which by its nature is an unequal method of social distribution, leads to the terrorization and usurpation of the rights of the majority. This is because the wealthy and rapacious minority lays claim to the exact same rights the majority are theoretically entitled to. To usurp their rights, as so many liberals have argued, is to throw out the entire notion of "equal right" furthermore, as long as the masses have symbolic representation according to many liberals this order does not represent tyranny.  So it would seem that the Christian Revolution was instrumental in pioneering two shifts in the mode of production, even if the theologization of public discourse inhibited clear articulation of scientific discourse and its role in inspiring revolts turn even conservative elites against religion for a brief time.

 As the French Revolution came galloping through Europe, overturning centuries, even millennia of history, enlightenment ideologues (the origin of this word is traced to counter-revolutionary secular centrists who celebrated thermidor) turned against the very revolutions they helped inspire, denouncing it as Christianity in dress and disguise. As Gibbon's apocalyptic portrait of Christianity and Roman collapse shows, this may have been truer than even they themselves claimed to know.

American Gong Show: The Hipsterization of Western Incompetence

Here we go again. That's right this is War-A-Go-Go. I couldn't help but cry at the beauty of all the millenials in my Facebook feed praising our sagacious Dear Leader Barrack Obama. Of course everyone knows ISIL are genocidal maniacs, and its that straightforward, bomb Iraq to stop genocide.  I know, I know, Islam is evil. Islam is genocide. Muslims want to rape your daughter, Jews Muslims own the banks...errrr....I mean the oil wells.

Just like how the Israelis are bombing Gaza now to avoid a future Holocaust. Everyone knows ISIL are bad guys, well you know why? Because we trained them. We supplied them. Don't you hate that, when the freedom fighters of yesterday, blow up our boys and our puppets? I know that was then. Then was SIX MONTHS ago, you know how much changes in six months? Please, don't mention whether or not we or our allies are still arming them in Syria, or the fact that there are many other factions involved in the present Iraqi Civil War than simply ISIL. This is simple. Clear cut. Bomb to stop genocide. Bomb for the children. Please don't mention the millions of Iraqis that we killed, please don't mention about how US leadership used ethnic rivalry and ethnic cleansing to keep Iraqi resistance divided during the occupation. That was then. This is a clear cut battle with the new evil empire, riding in Toyota trucks we supplied and using the equipment puppet troops left behind. Please don't question our historical revisionist claims that we had the war won before the politicians got cold feet and wanted to get out. Please don't point out that America has lost nearly every major war it's fought since WWII. I know, I know, those were dignified retreats, never fight a land war in Asia and all those commonplaces. Anyone know why the Korean war was the forgotten war? No, it didn't have anything to do with media, but rather the humiliation Uncle Sam suffered when it's veteran greatest generation soldiers got the hell pounded out of them by the PLA. That was the cream of America's crop, the greatest group of soldiers America has fielded since the Civil War, they ran into Chinese soldiers who had been fighting multiple enemies for almost 30 years. Those feminine chinks sent them running back to the 38th parallel and those American Immortals, the very same Gods of War, living deities, who stared down Nazi "crack troops" (I get tears of laughter when I hear this) at Normandy. Yes, they shat themselves at the Battle of the Bulge, as they fought off a crippled German Army consisting of third rate soldiers who were far less motivated when it came to killing Americans than they were to killing Russians. We won the war didn't we? I'd like to see you do better!

See, Americans are bad losers, and when they lose just like the French in Algeria or the Germans after WWII, our hallowed military dictators leaders go around telling the world that the politicians lost the war. That deluded fantasy of every reactionary army that suffers stupendous catastrophe at the hands of "poorly" armed and trained subhumans. We killed more of them so that's all that matters.  Look how many civvies we killed, millions! Not that we'd ever stoop to genocide or anything!

Back to the Cold War. Back to Iraq. Back to the Future. Some Change, hope you got what you voted for! We're going back to Iraq because we never truly left, it's just that a small contagion of private mercs, glorified security guards, recruited either fascist goon squads or aging career soldiers with bad knees, couldn't swing it for us. I know Americans are cowardly, and I know Obama says there's never going to be a ground war,  but you can't bomb all the time. Contrary to what our enlightened citizenry believes. At this point no one really cares that American justifications for war in Syria, Iraq, or Ukraine is paper thin. Their following the IDF's lead which just recently put on the world's greatest gong show during it's Gaza war. None of Israel's propaganda made sense, the purpose and message was convoluted, the eyes of even the converted shifted back and forth in doubt, but it was best to carry on anyway. See by Gong Show I mean the audience appreciates the act in spite of it's obvious lack of talent, in fact that's exactly what makes the show enjoyable. It's the same effect that the lovable loser from any Adam Sandler movie has on the audience. The more he tries and fails spectacularly, the more endearing he is.  The history of political conservatism is full of a great many losers and incompetents and hence that makes them lovable all the more. Thus the IDF bangs a trashcan while doing it's best imitation of tibetan throat-singing: "HAMASSSSSSSS! TUNNELS!!!!!" one contestant farts h-u-m-a-n s-h-i-e-ld-s in morse code before shitting himself loudly as a look of pain streams across his face. All the Zionist judges love it, all the more because it's not any good, it's so bad it's good like having a drunk sing-a-long to Kesha. Elie Wiesel, descends from heaven and speaks solemnly on how pants shitting, the grunt, and the uncomfortable silence are really all just metaphors for the Holocaust. We all saw the man shit his pants, did nothing to stop it, now all we are left with is silence.

Enter Ukraine. The US government bases it's accusations against Russia on social media. Hilariously, the US gov goes ahead and keeps making it's claims as if the counter-claims and refutation of the evidence never happened. It's like a hipster who turns in a collection of his tweets about his childhood and/or anal leakage as his Master's Thesis and then turns around argues with the board: "NO! THIS IS LITERATURE! YOUR JUST NOT WITH IT! YOUR A DINOSAUR AND I'M A HIDEY LITTLE FIELD MOUSE" Suddenly, the accused becomes the accuser but more spectacular than anything is the incompetence with which the defendant defends himself. It's like he wins the jury's heart just by his strained argument, unintentional humor, and folksy naiveté and bluster. Right now all of the West is working to gang up on Russia, a country whose fallen into complete disrepair since 1990, whose glory days faded with the end of the Stalinist period. So the collective will of the G-7 is dedicated to punishing this second rate nation, hilariously the West's inept response has blown Russia up into super-power. Meanwhile China whose economic might arguably surpasses not only America, but even the collective West (especially industrially), looks on quietly at the show of stupidity. Their next... after we get Putin-Hitler-Stalin and liberate the gays. Out of the many convenient lies, Americans tell themselves, and this logic applies across today's hipsterized economic doctrines, is that America is rich precisely because it has such a big military. In other words, we don't have to do anything but keep our pimp hand strong and all the bread and butter will flow in. Unfortunately, while America has always been an expansionist power, it did not become rich simply because it was extremely violent or because it stole from the Indians, but because it invested more in production than anybody else. When you have half the world's industry, like we did after WWII, you can make a lot of rules, even after you suffer humiliating defeats in Korea and Vietnam. Now I'm not saying that American Imperialism wasn't pillaging on a grand scale even then, but look the Chinese are social-imperialists and even they needed a strong economic base of production before they could start reaping the benefits of large-scale conglomerated finance capital. The average Chinese worker puts a lot more into the capitalist system than they usually get back, so while that keeps China's economy healthy and bustling, it also means there is a class interested in it's overthrow.

Really economics over the past 30 years has been increasingly hipsterized. Silicon Valley tycoons and their upper-crust lackeys are responsible for all scientific innovation, and not public universities, government funding, or any of the numerous workers (especially third world workers) down the chain. This persistent romance of pony tailed CEOs supposedly fighting authoritarian regimes and stodgy old timey capitalists with nothing but computer codes, bowls of swag weed, and passion refuses to go away. It even seduced even a normally perceptive thinker like Terrence McKenna. Markets, stylish blue jeans, GOOD GOVERNANCE are the keys to economic success. Who cares if you perform well, so long as your stick-can performance draws a good crowd and  healthy tips from the market? The extreme decadence of the idea that being paid well is indicative of quality work would've made Oswald Spengler roll in his grave. Yet that's the very idiotic idea behind the idea that the market rewards work appropriately, another pillar in the edifice of the meritocratic delusion. Everyone starts as a Van Gough in the market, we're all artists, unique snowflakes, the point is to finish as a Warhol--well paid. But still there is the hokey romanticization of even the shittiest, dirtiest, most underpaid work. In the same sense, that we come away with an admiration of the fisherman in The Old Man and The Sea  HOWEVER the Old Man wasn't written to be a cuban magical negro but rather to expose to the reader the injustices that pervade the lives of the cuban working class. Similarly, as Paul Craig Roberts shows economic failure is explained away as a good thing, the economic hipsters come a long and turn conventional wisdom on it's head. Not only is industrial production insignificant, and inferior to the information sector, but in fact we are gaining by sending it abroad. What was Freakonomics except an economic hipster's manifesto? Oddly Levitt's "work"  has become one of the most widely read economic treatises of the Empire, it fills its rightful spot as toilet reading for the powerful. I'm not too invested in the industry question per se as it is largely framed in terms of American Imperial politics. However, it can hardly be doubted that the damage done by the economic hipsters who spent trillions of taxpayers money with pathetic, painfully slow rates of growth to show for it, have done incalculable damage, perhaps much worse than the traditional marginalists and keynesians before them.

What amazes me is failure is never failure it's something else. Which was quite apart from how I was raised when winning and succeeding actually mattered. Now "succeeding" and "winning" are quite arbitrary, largely determined by adherence to groupthink and conformity at the moment. I would say here is one of the few places conservatives have a point, but love of order only reinforces this problem. Shockingly the conformity masks itself around as rebellion, like the youthful professor who drops pop culture references and acts like your buddy before asking you to do a million different things for him without much thanks or reward. Suddenly you realize a typical distant student-teacher relationship would've been much better. In fact, that is exactly what it was except in disguise.

In fact, Obama's African Summit as Washington's blog points out is actually weakness instead of strength, it hardly stunned even lackey leaders, and all Obama had to offer was more weapons and defense agreements. All Empires are doomed to extinction. But the shortest-lived are those based on the sword alone. It is hard to see how the American Empire, as the world hegemon could last much longer. The crises are insurmountable and the responses confused. Thus if America survives the early decades of the 21st century, it maybe as something like the Byzantine Empire or the Holy Roman Empire, an inheritor but devoid of the true spirit and essence of the original.

A Critical Reading of Marx's 'On the Jewish Question' (part 1)

                  A Forgotten insight: Democratic Ownership of the Means of Repression

   My somewhat recent interest in Zionism as a political movement and the reinvigoration of my very old interest in Nazism, led me to read a work by Marx that is infamous to say the least. For Post-Modernists it's just more confirmation of Marx's racism and for Zionists it's just more proof that Marx was a "self-hating" Jew despite the fact that he was raised a believing Christian and identified as an Atheist. Many Socialist countries did not even teach this particular work in school, and to be honest it's not a necessary work for understanding Marxism. Its possible that it is impossible to take this work as it was originally intended especially with our foreknowledge of a coming Nazi Holocaust in Germany. However, the outbreak of Israel's fascist pogram against Gaza has again put the 'Jewish question' back in the headlines. Or at least the appearance of one, as what seems like a "Jewish" question in the post-Holocaust era is just the Zionist question and only that. However, for me this work is interesting as an explication of Early Marx's views on Civil Society and dealing with internal contradictions in German society, in this case a religious one. Marx evaluates Bauer's rejection of the call for a specifically Jewish emancipation. As Marx summarizes Bauer: "The Christian state knows only privileges. In this state, the Jew has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which the Christians do not have. Why should he want rights which he does not have, but which the Christians enjoy?" How can Jews ask to be citizens of a state that only recognizes privileges? When they ask to be treated in the same manner as Christians,  will they give up the 'privileges' afforded to them as Jews? In that case their asking for the abolition of the Christian State and Bauer suggests they give up their religion and work for the universal emancipation of mankind and Germany. Marx summarizes again: "On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens? In Germany, there are no citizens. As human beings? But you are no more human beings than those to whom you appeal." And here again he summarizes  a sentiment no less foreign to the secular Left than it is to Christian philanthropists: "We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others." While whether Bauer's attitude is inherently anti-semitic is debatable, he at least comes to a correct and admirable conclusion: "The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion."

Notice that this conclusion is quite different from Nazism program of elimination. It proposes to abolish organized religion in general and not judaism or christianity in particular, which I largely agree with. It does not advocate the physical elimination of anyone, though its not hard to see where it could be abused. To do away with oppression and misery of the Jews, it would be best for Jews to join with Christians to eliminate the Christian state. It's not hard to see where this point of view may take a patronizing bent. However, Bauer simply asks for the State to quit recognizing Christianity and Judaism from the erroneous point of view that once they are removed from their relationship to exclusive state power and civic society is made independent of anyone's whim, they will simply decline and decay. Maybe it isn't so irrational given widespread atheism, indeed we must all act in public as if God is Dead   in order to respect the laws of the state. And this precludes the discussion on whether Theism or its aftermarks are still ideological operative across wide swaths of society and culture. It could even be argued that the so-called Jewish Question is on its way out, with only 14 million followers and dwindling prospects for expansion, it seems like Judaism is losing what a follower of Dawkins would call the war of memes. However, now that 'question' has been supplanted by Islam with its billion+ followers, allegedly the fastest growing religion.  But I am of the opinion, given the often unnoticed secularization of the Islamic World, particularly the Middle East, that Islam may simply be the smallest loser, not the greatest expander. The "growth" is not coming from Islam's expansion into new lands but rather by population growth in Old Lands where criticism of theocratic movements, states, and culture is growing. We're not simply seeing a political abolition of religion such as what Bauer demanded, but the growing social and cultural decline of religion in regions where political forms of religion remain openly operative. Marx decodes the Bauer's meaning here: "On the other hand, he quite consistently regards the political abolition of religion as the abolition of religion as such. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true, real state."

The true modern state is the agnostic state or deist state, like the idol of Concordia under which Roman traders and Citizens of many faiths all paid tribute to in their turn, the state's impartiality to religion is a product of its supremacy over it. Pluralism simply means submission to the state idols, and to that end commerce and exchange of commodities and even people that the state finds to its interest. Like money, deference to the state is a kind of universal commodity of exchange which makes all religions under its domains, if not mutually intelligible than at least mutually hospitable within the realm of commodity exchange. This is of course pure Hegel, those who focus on the early Marx and his 'humanism' generally do not treat deeply Hegel or his dialectic. Those who adhere to the late Marx find his youthful Hegelian side to be inconsistent with his later clinical diagnostic work, and therefore either Marx's materialist dialectic is emphasized or it is accompanied by a rejection of dialectics. Then like the debate on who ruined the Russian revolution it always comes down to the real and imagined failures of Stalin, Lenin, Engels, with Marx remaining the prophet whose pure message was 'distorted'. Only open and visceral  anti-communists perceive a flaw present from the very beginning and most of these analysis are not enlightening, consisting mostly of propaganda with footnotes to quote Grover Furr. It is my personal belief that only an enchanted, supple, dialectical materialism of the kind expounded by Mao, who to be honest, had a much clearer grasp of dialectics than Marx, can save "Marxism from the Marxists" as that old saw goes. In the final instance, it will be the only way we can save Marx from the Anti-Communists, as the flaws of Marx's social democratic conception of the transition to communism is ripe for appropriation by social-fascists. That is not excluding your average tumblr social justice warrior. 

It's key to realize that when Marx wrote "On the Jewish Question" in 1843, he was the ripe old age of 25 and so he is ripe for thrashing from social justice warriors because he shared some chauvinist conceptions popular at the time. Nowhere in Europe was there actually universal male suffrage, Germany would be the only country with universal male of suffrage in 1914. So many of these issues might seem tangenital or theoretical to those living at the time. However, as a stand in, Marx analyzed the conditions of America in this period, where there was universal male suffrage for whites in the North and found: 

Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property owner has become the legislator for the property owner? The property qualification for the suffrage is the last political form of giving recognition to private property. Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of theirspecial nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.

In other words, when non-property owners elected the membership of the bourgeois state, they act in such a way to perfect the conditions of their exploitation by extirpating all the particular feudal customs and lifestyles  that had hitherto governed life. Industrial Britain, which was more industrialized than the United States at the time, after centuries of economic development and multiple revolutions only slowly started to separate and take apart these barriers. But Britain was by far the state were the modern state was least contested and the most stable environment for the development of property, especially in Europe. Absolute monarchy could've had a similar 'leveling' factor in principle, due to the elevation of the King above all subjects, and thus their relative equality in comparison to his God-like point of view, but the reality of this is hard to know without more historical research. In America, the non-propertied population "voted themselves a farm" to quote Lincoln's electoral campaign. So they turned themselves into miniature capitalists by using the state to appropriate vast quantities of Indian land. However, in the South this actually led to the most profitable agricultural real estate in the country being grabbed by slavers. America's great class of petty farmers rose and fell, in inverse proportions to that of Big Business which is entitled to expect the same treatment from the state as the small peasant. Neither have, legally speaking, particular privileges such as what would've been laid out underneath the Feudal State. However, the development of capitalism often in proportion or slightly behind that of parliamentary rule (and itself in proportion or behind democracy) leads to the internal ruin of the societies that it overtakes. It magnifies inequality to unheard of positions, it leads to an idiotic state of affairs where subconsciously poor workers and peasants are treated much like billionaires, at least in theory, by the state. In other words, the spread of what Hegel would call 'absolute freedom' within the realm of commerce and occupation, even within the political sphere leads to its negation under capitalism. Engels describes at length the origin and ironies of this kind of equality:

The demand for liberation from feudal fetters and the establishment of equality of rights by the abolition of feudal inequalities was bound soon to assume wider dimensions, once the economic advance of society had placed it on the order of the day. If it was raised in the interests of industry and trade, it was also necessary to demand the same equality of rights for the great mass of the peasantry who, in every degree of bondage, from total serfdom onwards, were compelled to give the greater part of their labour-time to their gracious feudal lord without compensation and in addition to render innumerable other dues to him and to the state. On the other hand, it was inevitable that a demand should also be made for the abolition of the feudal privileges, of the freedom from taxation of the nobility, of the political privileges of the separate estates. And as people were no longer living in a world empire such as the Roman Empire had been, but in a system of independent states dealing with each other on an equal footing and at approximately the same level of bourgeois development, it was a matter of course that the demand for equality should assume a general character reaching out beyond the individual state, that freedom and equality should be proclaimed human rights And it is significant of the specifically bourgeois character of these human rights that the American constitution, the first to recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the colored races existing in America: class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctified. (Anti-Duhring)

Aside from Lenin's brilliant inquiry into the economic origins of Modern Imperialism, this is for us a brilliant exposition of how equality could be sanctified for some in some countries while practicing the most cruel and dictatorial colonialism. It also gives us the spiral trajectory of the beginning, development and the abolition of bourgeois equality as we know it. Third Worldists have described the process by which relatively slight divergences (by modern standards) in economic fortunes between nations turned into vast gulfs, with workers in the richest and poorest countries sustaining a gap of over 72:1 (over 100:1 by some accounts). The Post-WWII era which ushered in the end of formal colonialism actually brought a kind of colonialism functioning (formally and theoretically) within the bounds of equality.

Gap between Whites, Asians, and Blacks since the de jure fall of apartheid.

As seen by the chart, its very possible for things to actually get worse since the advent of formal bourgeois political equality. In dollar terms, black south africans are doing better, but inequality is worse than it was under the apartheid regime and there are immiserating factors of post-Aparteid ANC capitalism that we will not treat here which are often not considered by dollar terms. Hence, we should be very wary of movements desiring simply formal legal political equality. While sometimes necessary, the democratic state can be an effective tactic of exploiting and repressing the people, precisely when they allegedly control the bourgeois means of oppression. If Palestinian Revolutionaries aren't careful this could be a graph of the future under a liberal democratic one state regime. The only solution is the abolition of the settler state not its democratization.