Das Narrenschiff

According to an Wikipedia article, Das Narrenschiff or the Ship of Fools  “is an
allegory that has long been a fixture in Western literature and art. The
allegory depicts a vessel populated by human inhabitants who are deranged,
frivolous, or oblivious, passengers aboard a ship without a pilot, and seemingly
ignorant of their own direction.” Jose Barchilon explains in his  introduction
to  Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization that
  "Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with
  their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because
  folly, water, and sea, as everyone then "knew," had an affinity for each
  other. Thus, "Ship of Fools" crisscrossed the sea and canals of Europe with
  their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even
  a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while
  others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their
  families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their
  crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow
  when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors."
Katherine Ann Porter’s novel Ship of Fools invokes the Narrenschiff motif in her depiction of representative figures aboard a ship who are oblivious to the forces at work to create World War II.

I thought of the tradition of Das Narrenschiff while on a cruise around the boot of Italy as part of my Wanderjahr. Except for crossings of the English Channel or the Irish Sea I had not traveled on a ship for over thirty years and looked at ship travel exclusively as transportation. (I did not risk air travel until 1977, when I was already 39 years old.) I knew, however, that “cruises” had become popular over the intervening years. Cruises take place on ships fitted with amusements of all kinds, including gambling. Disneyland and Las Vegas influence the planning of the ships as do luxury resorts and grand hotels. All entertainment having been concluded, the cruise returns to the port from which it set forth.

The ship that my companion Diane and I were on was the Costa Fortuna, an Italian ship but staffed largely by people from South America and Asia. The ship is so massive--over 100,000 tons--and so thoroughly stabilized that one is rarely aware of being on the ocean. Indeed, unlike the ships on my Atlantic crossings, it is difficult to find an open deck from which to view the sea. The experience is that of life in a grand hotel although the sense of enclosure made me at times remember the Beatles’ song that sees us all living in a yellow submarine. The Costa Fortuna attempts to reproduce some of the most impressive features of the famous Italian ships of the 1920s and 1930s: the slightly ominous result--if one remembers Porter’s Ship of Fools--is that the décor  might well be described as Mussolini Modern.

But was this a Ship of Fools, a Narrenschiff?  Not exactly, we were fools not because of madness but because of being fooled. It was a ship of the fooled. The genuine boom of the post-war years and the credit bubble that followed encouraged ordinary people to aspire to consumption that was previously only possible for the wealthy . The cruise ship is part of that fantasy world in which everyone is “middle class,” a fantasy that is a feature of the economy now winding down. It is a good thing that  these pleasures seem available for all, and the cruise is democratic in character once you have paid the stiff price of a ticket. It is meant as “affordable luxury.“ Every large ship on which my late wife Donna and I had previously sailed--with the exception of the Soviet ship the Alexander Pushkin--had a First Class from which we were firmly excluded. I remember that we tried to get a peek into First to spot celebrities--the kind of people who now travel by private yacht or private jet. Dress is now casual, and there were no tuxedos even on Gala Night. One meal a day is served with traditional restaurant service, but breakfast and lunch are usually taken from a buffet of one’s own choosing, including one always offering hamburgers and hot dogs. The entertainment was for all ages, but I would say 70s disco music got a heavy play. I did like the Cole Porter and Sinatra era piano music in the bars. The only entertainment that I disliked was an event in which fat men from among the passengers--not me though!--dressed in drag, but were mostly bare-chested with their layers of fat hanging out as they postured sexily (with bumps and grinds)  to compete for applause and a prize.  Well, different strokes for different folks.

People had fun, and that’s a good thing. Because port visits were on quick bus tours, I can’t say that anyone experienced a new country or culture. It reminds me of the resorts that I hear about where guards with machine guns protect the hotels used by Americans lest they come in contact with the natives. It also reminds me of  some executives and university administrators who boast of their international experience, which seems to consist of having stayed in the Hilton in numerous cities around the world. Cruises will soon suffer from the brutal fact that the  affluent “middle class” for whom cruises were created will find themselves again a struggling working-class.

While we were on our cruise, the protests against austerity programs contined across Europe. We, however, pushed on to Amsterdam, where the fantasy world that began in the the mid-70s there, continues, especially for narco-tourists, including many American students. Even there, however, there is a sense that the party is winding down. Proposed new regulations would turn the coffee shops that sell cannabis into private clubs that would not be open to foreign visitors, and the Dutch do not themselves smoke more dope per capita than people in neighboring countries. Earlier we had been in Ireland, where the Celtic Tiger economy is dead, and a grim reality is being faced. A strong protest movement in which the Socialist Party of Ireland (CWI) plays a leading role is, in effect, demanding default on Irish debt and independence from the Eurozone. Amsterdam and Dublin had been Ships of Fools during the bubble economy.

Opposition to the austerity measures is rapidly bringing large groups into protest. Diane and I got off the train at Charing Cross just as the huge protest against tuition increases was occurring at nearby Trafalgar Square. The station was in a chaotic condition, and we were hampered by too much baggage, so Diane’s wallet was snatched. What Marx calls “the dangerous classes" see opportunities in times of crisis, and so does the fascist movement. The challenge is to build the movement for socialism even more rapidly than the forces of barbarism grow. It’s time to disembark from Das Narrenschiff.

It's Not Just About the Pensions--Listen to the Music

The protests that continue in France are not just about the pensions.  The US media fail to understand that and also distort the pension --“Social Security” in the US--issue. The age for full pension benefits in France is 65. The Sarkozy government wants to raise that to 67. Just as Americans can start receiving Social Security benefits at a reduced rate at age 62, the French can get reduced payments at age 60, but only if they have worked for 40.5 years.

The early stages of the protests, largely organized by the trade unions, were a response to the proposed changes in the pension. For millions of French people the protests also  became an opportunity to voice many other suppressed demands and dissatisfactions. The protests are rightly called a referendum on the Sarkozy administration, which is seen as pandering to the rich elites. The protests also target the huge economic inequality in French society, the squalor of the housing projects, and the way that immigrant populations have been received. The placards show a wide range of demands. In Nanterre, where, as in 1968, the protests are at times violent, issues include the fact that the opening of the University has this fall been delayed because of overcrowding, with 35,000 students squeezed onto a campus built for 14,000.

Taking to the streets and erecting barricades are what the French turn to when democratic participation in government policy is denied. Sarkozy is very unpopular. 70% of the French people support the strikers. The police are not liked because they resort too easily to violence.

My initial Wanderjahr project involved looking at the economic and cultural aspects of this late phase of late capitalism, particularly in Europe. Were I there, I would I hope grasp enough of the consciousness and mood of the protestors to offer some assessment. From this distance, the best insight that I have comes from the song adopted by the movement: “On Lache Rien” or “Never Give an Inch” as originally performed by HK and Les Saltimbanks but now cropping up everywhere on videos of the protests, on YouTube and other video and music-sharing sites.

“Never Give an Inch” speaks from the “urban project” and in behalf of “the homeless, the unemployed, workers/ Farmers, immigrants, the undocumented.” It directly indicts Sarkozy: “It’s crazy the way they’re protected/ All our rich and powerful/Not to mention the help they get/For being the friends of the president.” HK, who sings the song, is Kadour Haddadi, from an Algerian family settled in Calais. The music is a blend of Algerian Chaabi, reggae, rock, hip hop, blues, and gipsy, a mixture which reflects the emergent culture of France. But it must be heard, and its performance seen. It is perhaps the sound of revolution, but it is life-affirming, joyful, and sexual. One hears within it the potential for the completion within this new France of the project of human liberation that Marx set forth.

The Tea Party on the Eve of Mid-term Elections

Earlier in the blog, I expressed the opinion that there is not substantial evidence for the rise of a fascist movement in the United States. And, even though some leading figures in the Tea Party and one of its internal tendencies have, as the Guardian (UK) reported, allied themselves, with a violent neo-fascist group in England, I am still not convinced that neo-fascism is precisely what the Tea Party as a whole intends to embrace. I must now, however, admit that the danger of a turn to overt fascism exists and try to explain why it does.

I quoted earlier in the blog the formula that says that fascism is the socialism of the middle class. I also tried to explain that the illusion that someone is “middle class,” although really a well-paid member of the working-class, is a fantasy fed  by genuine boom periods or by credit bubbles such as the one recently ended. With the disappointment, felt in both consumption and aspiration, that ensues when the boom ends or the bubble bursts, a labor aristocracy experiences the same emotions as the fading petite bourgeoisie (the class of small shopkeepers), and these emotions are largely those of fear.

The fears of a “middle class” are fears of falling into a working-class that lacks opportunities for consumption and prestige. Fascist groups have directed such fears into suspicion of working-class organizations and of socialists, who are reputed to be levelers or equalizers. This ’middle class” itself finds groups to scapegoat for reduced opportunities. It fears minorities who take jobs and university places through affirmative action and immigrants who receive support from the taxes the middle class feels itself unfairly forced to pay. It resists welfare programs that tend to equalize quality of life between the middle class and the lower orders. It feels that the American way of life is what brought its own benefits, and it fears the enemies of America, whether political or ideological. 9/11 added an immediate sense of being under siege, and one result is the anti-Islamic hysteria of one wing of the Tea Party including those in discussions with the English Defence League in the UK.

An identity coming out of all these middle class fears would seem to present a group of people ready for fascism: disappointed, robbed of their chances, scapegoating Reds (including the “Marxist” Obama),  Affirmative Action recipients (seen as African-American and Hispanic or even, simply, female), and immigrants, and ready to cleanse America of the Muslim menace. They look for a strong and charismatic Leader (Glenn Beck? Sarah Palin?). They defend their right to bear arms (as I do myself). For the most part, the Tea Party supports the costly wars that are one large factor in their threatened impoverishment. They have strong financial support and a major television network to back them up. Do they project a new form--or is it an old form?-- of patriotic, industrial, and military state? The neoconservative intellectuals serve them by putting an intellectual gloss on such a vision when they pontificate on Fox News.

I must seem pretty naïve to my faithful reader by not getting the point by now, but I still wonder whether they are, precisely, fascist. They will certainly take their revenge on their perceived enemies by assuring the election of representatives who will cut funding of social services--and giving tax cuts to the party’s wealthy supporters. They are definitely an electoral force. I don’t, however, believe that they do envision a society in which a powerful centralized government with pervasive military and police control runs the country for the benefit of the corporations--or for the benefit of what I think I’ll call the Financial, Industrial, Military, Political Complex (FIMPCO). Perhaps I take their Libertarian rhetoric too seriously. Maybe I shouldn’t believe that they dislike big government, but in the bank bailouts FIMPCO exerted its presence and power, and the Tea Party didn’t like it. With the austerity programs now, however, beginning to  wreak destruction at the state and city level, the recession will worsen. The bottom won’t, I think, be reached until 2012--without prospects for an upturn. Maybe the uniforms, armbands, and jack boots will have more appeal for these people by then. And I will be one of those who could not see the dangers.

Twilight of the Liberals

The sun shone brightly at the One Nation Working Together rally in Washington, D.C. on October 2, and there may have been 100,000 people there, but watching all four hours of it on C-Span, I realized that I was watching the Twilight of the Liberals. It was perhaps not yet their death agony, and there was energy and eloquence throughout, but the speakers were caught up in the dilemma of reformists, the dilemma of the social democracy, and the dilemma of the parties of the Second International. Indeed there was not even the electoral campaign of a party like Britain’s compromised Labour Party to support --although there were numerous speakers from the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that has been given Second International recognition. The DSA, however, supports the Democrats, and that points up the fatal contradiction in the claim to relevance made by the participating groups.

The contradiction that was almost always at work was evident in one of the best speeches, that by Harry Belafonte. He clearly condemned Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan and pointed to Congress’s having funded it over social programs. Then he went into a sustained litany about being sure to vote in November.

For whom are we supposed to vote? One guy had a sign that said, “I’ll vote. You betcha.” Yeah, but for whom?

This movement, sincere and eloquent, has no electoral outlet. And some of the speakers were the same kind of trade unionists who killed off the Labor Party that we were trying to create with them.

The One Nation rally was undertaken to show the relevance of these activist groups in meeting the unmet needs of this country, but such groups come up against the fact that capitalism cannot be reformed. The Democrats and Republicans will finally say, “We can’t afford it”--a statement that means that Our Masters cannot afford it.  Systemic change is needed, but the corporation-supported parties--Democrats and Republicans, ultimately the parties of Wall Street-- cannot run on a platform of genuine change. How would they get campaign contributions?

It was the end of an era, a twilight, for the forces that ended segregation, fought for basic healthcare, equal pay, and educational opportunity. It was the end of the Great Society, the end of the 1960s, a twilight or worse. Without a party to sustain it, the movement is dead.

The most encouraging aspect of the day’s events was the presence of many young people. They heard what demands can be made. And, although not invited to speak, the socialists did turn out. I hope that they succeeded in revealing some glimmerings of the socialist alternative.

****
In the meantime, the struggle continues in Europe. The RMT has shut down London again today in its effort to stop job cuts on the Underground. The new leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, has not yet endorsed the strike and is unlikely to do so. Ironically enough, he was called “Red Ed’” as a candidate for the party leadership. Instead, good old “Red Ken” (as he’s been called for ages) Livingstone has come out in support of the RMT. The Left in Britain has rightly been critical of Livingstone since his return to the reformist Labour Party, but he does have some memory of what it means to be pro-labor. In the UK, and in the USA, what is needed is a new mass worker’s party. In the USA, we haven’t approached that since the days of Eugene V. Debs.

Understanding the Line of March

The general strike in Spain, continued confrontation in Greece, a mass rally in Brussels, and auxiliary actions elsewhere all took place on September 29, yesterday, as planned. News reports have been a little hard to find, but the Guardian(UK) and Morning Star(UK) websites have done a pretty good job. The website of the CWI not only offers on-the-scene reports--from Greece and Brussels in particular--but some solid analysis of what the Left usually calls the Line of March--I.e, the way forward. I thought that I should myself say something about what to expect as the struggle continues. I do admit, however, that it is difficult at this distance to assess the mood of the European working-class.

Support for the actual strikes, as well as for marches and demonstrations without strikes, has been strong. Still, the time will come when some who do not feel themselves directly affected by the cuts will hesitate to give up another day’s pay. Nonetheless, as the RMT strike in London proved, one union in one industry can paralyze a city, and the cuts will shame the leadership of other unions into action. The hard left will make some gains in membership in the process, but the well-known pattern is that workers turn first to their trade unions and then to the established workers’ parties in a time of economic crisis. The parties of the Second International do, however, find themselves in a compromised position. So-called “Socialist” parties are implementing the austerity programs in Greece and Spain, and the Labour Party in the UK had already worked out a program of cuts before its recent electoral defeat. Circumstances would seem to favor parties with more radical programs to offer. Against the “Socialists” in Greece, the Greek section of the CWI campaigns with the slogans “Don’t Pay the Debt,” “Nationalize the Banks,” and “Tax the Rich.”

The protestors in Europe are conscious of their working-class identity. In the USA, the most successful protest movement, the Tea Party, defends those who imagine themselves to be “middle class” (see earlier blogs for discussion of this largely American fantasy), and I am fairly certain that this formation will assure victory in the November 2010 elections for the Republicans, possibly including control of the Senate as well as the House of Representatives. The American version of the European austerity programs is being implemented unevenly and at the state-level, but these cuts should assure a double-dip recession. At this critical moment, there is to be an appeal to the hearts and minds of working people, including those in the Tea Party, with a mass demonstration for jobs and peace in Washington, D.C. on October 2. Just as the European demonstrations and strikes were in part a show of strength by the weakened trade unions in those countries, the UAW and RainbowPush organized this event, with a preview event in Detroit in August, to show that they are still relevant to the lives of the working class. With AFL-CIO and NAACP support, and with the participation of the American Left, the event will be too large to ignore. Unfortunately, the Democrats will try to high-jack this event, participating in what should be seen as a protest against their own policies as the party in power. I have not heard whether Obama will speak.

All in all, it is still early days. The CWI is calling for protests that become multi-national in scope. The large protest in Brussels did include delegations from several European countries, and, with the European Central Bank and the IMF as the major players in the austerity programs, it is impossible not to see the crisis as encompassing many countries. A small event in solidarity with the Europeans was held at the Massachusetts State House yesterday with Socialist Alternative, the Socialist Party, and the IWW participating.

It is also early days in the economic crisis. Austerity measures will make it worse. The most basic rule of Keynesian economics says that you don’t cut in a recession. Europe and the states are doing that. American economists watch the consumer confidence number that the University of Michigan produces monthly. That number will continue to fall. The capitalist confidence number will continue to fall too--that’s called the Dow-Jones Industrial Average! Robert Prechter was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on CNBC a couple of days ago. He said that technical analysis based on the Elliott Wave Theory forecasts  the Dow falling to 1,000. Bartiromo struggled desperately to keep a straight face, and finally failed in the effort. Well, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. . . .

Changing the Subject

Enough about me. This long digression into one thread in my life history was meant to locate the “subject” in the subjective responses that I hope to supply to current events through writing this blog. I am aware that Zizek labels the “subject” a “fiction” and in saying that he supports a consensus that twentieth century French philosophy also reached. My readers, if I have any, may be surprised to find that I agree with Zizek and the French, but I do not follow their tortuous path to that conclusion from the neo-Freudianism of Lacan. I feel that Engels takes us down that route in his insight that in the division of labor human individuals are themselves divided.

The division of labor means that we are denied the use of the wide-ranging creativity that we possess. The free development of each is not possible under capitalism. Instead, we suffer alienation from ourselves and from our labor. In this state, we reason from a false consciousness and produce ideology rather than science. The hegemonic forces in our culture, shaped to defend capitalism, further block us from knowledge of our own humanity. We occupy an “identity” that can fairly be called a fiction.

Marx saw that humans differed from other species in their ability consciously to change the world. They perform conscious labor upon the world to provide sustenance for themselves and their offspring. The alienation endured under capitalism divorces us from this fundamental transformative power, from the full humanity found in free conscious labor. The individual in the species fears the extinction of his own identity through death even though that identity is, as all seem to agree, a “fiction,” and there is no comforting that fear. An identity that is not a fiction is to be found only as the individual resumes the potentialities of species being. In creating socialism, we initiate the return to the humanity of species being. To not be a socialist is to be less than human.

While I have pursued my navel-gazing here--what better metaphor for exploring one’s subjectivity?--the European working-class has again been on the move. You have to love the French. Now even the champagne makers and bottlers are on strike. And autumn is here.

Crawl (concluded, for now)

Moving to East Lansing to teach at Michigan State meant buying on land contract a big white house in easy walking distance of the University--I never learned to drive--and I did wonder whether I wasn’t turning into the sort of kindly old professor who lives in such a house in 1940s and 1950s comedies and musicals. In 1969 our son Karl was born, and in 1973 our son Neil. Our trips to England, sons in tow, became very nearly annual. In 1982, we acquired a second home, a seafront flat in Hastings, East Sussex (”popular with visitors since 1066”)

This blog concerns politics and not family, but it should already be clear that my constant companion from the Wisconsin years forward, until her death in 2002, was my wife Donna. In my entry for the 45th Reunion book of my Harvard class--a “blog” written at five-year intervals--I wrote:

“My wife, Donna, was killed in a car crash in Holland, Michigan, on August 19, 2002. Our relationship was based on love, respect, and support; we were the best of buddies and fully shared our lives. My admiration for what she achieved as a writer, arts activist, and mother continues to grow.”

In my introduction to British Marxist Criticism, I called her “the best of comrades.,” but Donna was not herself a member of a socialist organization--in part because, as a former Presbyterian missionary, she found the atheism of some socialists offensive and  in part because McCarthyism had instilled a fear of socialist groups in a generation of Americans. Donna had, nonetheless, served on the Governor’s Commission for human rights while still in high school and worked as a missionary among the poor people in the hills of Puerto Rico. I remember our marching together on a May Day demonstration in Dublin in the year 2000, she holding up copies of the newspaper of the Socialist Party. At her death, both The Socialist (UK) and Socialism Today (UK) published tributes, and both a conference at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea and the World Congress of the Committee for a Workers International meeting in Belgium were that year dedicated to her.

This blog entry covers much of the thirty-four year period that I spent at Michigan State University, and over that length of time it is more difficult to recall the sequence of events, particularly since they were not punctuated by changes of place, other than our back-and-forth movements to England. I want, moreover to take steps to shorten a blog that would be excessively long. My organization of this section will be more topical than the other sections. It will skip over my thirty-four years teaching English romantic poetry, the task for which I was hired at Michigan State, and my administrative work as Assistant Dean of the Graduate School (1977-82) and as Chair of the Department of English (1988-96), except as they are relevant to our political theme. On this principle, I pause here to mention writing an article for the Graduate School Newsletter using Marx as an example of how doctoral work in the humanities can be part of the preparation of a thinker who will have profound impact.

Socialist newspapers, which had been hard to find before, were now available, and I at various times subscribed to the Guardian--not the British paper, but the left-wing New York publication, now defunct--and Militant (published by the Socialist Workers Party, also in New York) as well as various Communist Party papers, including one from California later merged into the People’s Daily World and the Finnish-language Tyomies-Eteenpain from Superior, Wisconsin. I, however, took a detour in my crawl toward socialism, by studying Anarchism , reading some Kropotkin, Bakunin, Proudhon, etc., and teaching a course on Literature and Anarchism, anarchism being a political outlook often associated with the English romantics, especially Shelley. I remember visiting Freedom House in Angel Alley in Whitechapel, where Kropotkin had once worked, and meeting an anarchist who had edited Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy.  (Angel Alley will be known to some as the site of a Jack-the-Ripper murder.) It was with anarchist texts to contribute that I joined Professor Richard Peterson of the Department of Philosophy, an expert on Marx, in team-teaching an honors course with the alarming title A Critique of Bourgeois Culture. Peterson, and Marx, got me back on track, and I remain grateful for Professor Peterson’s guiding me and these students through Capital, and revealing the wide range of philosophic, political, social, psychological, and economic thought  that Marx` and Engels contributed.

Some experience with Anarchist thought did have the beneficial effect of making me see that socialism could not simply be superimposed on the existing governmental structures, an assumption which is generally the error of the socialism of the Second International-- the error of social democracy. But Marx and Engels also exposed the modern state as simply the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the ruling class. New participatory structures such as those first tested in the Paris Commune would be needed.

I worked on some biographical essays on socialist and anarchist writers for the Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, starting with an essay on Robert Burns but moving on to the Communist authors T.A. Jackson, A.L. Morton, Jack Lindsay, and Christopher Caudwell and the anarchists Herbert Read, Colin Ward, and George Woodcock. In the process I had some correspondence with Ward and Woodcock, but in England  I was able to meet both Lindsay and Morton, who was married to the daughter of Jackson. Leslie and Vivien Morton became family friends, whom Donna and I and the boys visited in their thatched-roof home The Old Chapel in Clare, Suffolk, and who visited us in Hastings. I treasure the memory of my son Karl leading the distinguished historian A. L. Morton--author of the People’s History of England--around the battlefield at Hastings and explaining the geographic aspects of that event. My chapter on Morton in British Marxism Criticism is a tribute to a man that I felt to be the very model of a committed socialist scholar.

Soon after my first visit to England I began teaching courses on contemporary British literature, and I also saw the value of immersion in the culture of which the literature is only one aspect.
My Department lacked an overseas program when I arrived in it, so I organized first an annual London summer program in Central London and then an annual fall semester program at Roehampton University and occasionally taught in these programs. Living in Hastings led to my interest in the great working-class novel written there by a house-painter: The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by “Robert Tressell.” At least four doctoral dissertations that I directed would deal with aspects of this book.

In the USA, I wrote some articles and reviews for Nature, Society, and Thought published at the University of Minnesota and attended their Marxist Scholars conferences, one of which caused me to be named in a Marxists on Campus expose in a right-wing journal. These conferences put me in touch with Marxist scholarship on many fronts, including a field about which I had not thought for a long time--physics, the research area of the editor of the journal and the organizer of the conferences, Professor Erwin Marquit.

I would single out two books that consolidated my grasp of Marxism. One was Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams, a book whose scope goes far beyond what its title implies to develop the Marxist positions on language, the hegemonic, and alienation, among other topics. The other is History and Class-consciousness by Georg Lukacs who proves the startling thesis that the class-consciousness of the working-class is the self-consciousness of history. In this formulation, the process that Marx undertook in turning Hegel right-side-up in completed, and the meaning of history is freshly asserted. Lukacs also helped with other points that are difficult for someone like myself who lacks training in philosophy. He led me finally to see, through his chapter “The Antimonies of Bourgeois Thought,” what the flaw is in Kant’s conception of the Thing-in-Itself, the seeming impasse that has justified the irrationalism that extends through modernism to the influential French thinkers of the twentieth century. But reading all of the work of A.L. Morton and Christopher Caudwell and most of the work of Jack Lindsay (the author of about 150 books), the other books by Raymond Williams, and the work of the rest of  the writers included in my British Marxist Criticism also contributed to an education that I had sought for a long time.

From the years at Williams College onward, I also read what I could find about political organizations of the British left. Living in England meant that I became familiar as well with papers like  The Morning Star, the daily paper of the Communist party--Leslie Morton had been the “proprietor” of its predecessor The Daily Worker. Leslie Morton personally walked me over to the Marx Memorial Library in London so that I would get to know its resources. I came to know the several left-wing bookshops. And, through my reading, I had come to know something of the Militant Tendency in the Labor Party and such leading figures in it as Ted Grant, Peter Taaffe, Lynn Walsh, Clare Doyle, and Keith Dickinson, but I had never seen its paper Militant, which was not related to the paper published in the U.S. by the American SWP. In fact, I walked into the Pathfinder Bookshop of the American SWP in the Cut in London, near the Old Vic, and saw the American paper on sale there. I said, “There’s a British paper by that name.” The person in the shop said, ”Yes, but we don’t like it.” Then, one day, in the center of Hastings, there was a young man selling Militant, and I bought a copy then and whenever he reappeared.

I was pleased with the correctly applied genuine Marxism of the paper and its focus on the working-class rather than on squabbles on the left and reformism. I attended one of their meetings in London and soon subscribed to the Militant International Review, as the journal now called Socialism Today was then called. I received the magazine by mail for a couple of years but assumed that I was the only reader in the USA. Then, to my astonishment, I found a classified ad in the Guardian (the US paper) for a US organization allied to the Militant Tendency of Britain. I contacted them at their Chicago address of the time, and eventually became a member. I was involved for the next ten years or more in trying to create a Labor Party on the British model for the USA and, since then, in other efforts. I published occasional articles and reviews in the Militant International Review and in Socialism Today, and with others maintained an East Lansing branch of the US organization, Socialist Alternative, until my retirement. I am now a member of one of the Boston branches.

  

My Long Crawl toward Socialism (Part 3)

Harvard in 1956-60 was not the place for serious undergraduate or graduate study of Marxism. Nor is it now. In the study of English literature, my field of concentration chosen early in my freshman year, literary history and New Criticism, with some important insights from intellectual history, dominated inquiry. Nonetheless, I did manage to enroll in an advanced course in twentieth-century literature, taught by Howard Mumford Jones, in my freshman year and appreciated his fairly extensive survey of what he termed, following the usage of the 1930s, “Proletarian literature.” The honors program in English required that one course per semester be done by tutorial, so in my junior year  I asked Professor Jones for a tutorial in Proletarian literature, but he was, although willing, clearly reluctant, and I instead had a tutorial in Henry James and Theodore Dreiser (the latter somewhat in the Proletarian camp) with Francis X. Murphy. One of the two readers of my senior honors essay on Hart Crane--“Uses of the Imagination in an Industrial Age”--was, I’m pretty sure, Howard Mumford Jones. The essay was directed by Albert Gelpi, who went on to a long career at Stanford.

Marxist criticism was considered fairly disreputable both then and in my later graduate work at Wisconsin, but at Harvard I did read the Communist Manifesto for the first time in Social Science 2 and wrote a good examination essay that was a Marxist account of the origins of World War I. I occasionally looked for socialist activity in the community but failed to attend meetings of the Socialist Club, which was at any rate, I was told, infiltrated and taken over by the Ayn Randians. I was still, in my freshman year, a fairly enthusiastic chess player, and instead attended chess club meetings or played in matches organized by the club. (I remember an especially humiliating blunder in a game jn a team match that we had with Philips Exeter, in which I had seemed to be moving toward an easy victory but miserably lost.) I do remember a debate in Boston between a former and a then current member of the CPUSA that I attended and that I could not find anyone else in my Harvard circle interested enough to attend. I did not see Fidel Castro during his well-reported visit to Harvard after the Cuban Revolution.

Harvard was in those days segregated by income in that room rentals varied according to the quality of the rooms or, in the Houses occupied by upperclassmen, by the number of flights of stairs one had to climb. The result was that scholarship students were clustered together, but this worked to my benefit by putting me in  a group with some exceptionally bright and talented young men from whom I learned a great deal. We remain close friends. There were of course no socialists, and the standard wisdom, garnered from the faculty, was that Marxism was all right for the nineteenth century but had no relevance for the twentieth century. Nor were there any women in Harvard student housing, Harvard and Radcliffe not having yet been merged, despite the fact that Harvard men and Radcliffe women took all their classes together.

After my graduation from Harvard, my mother and I were pretty well broke, and I needed to find work as quickly as possible. Selling our house in Finn Town realized very little equity. Making the job search more difficult was the fact that prospective employers assumed that I would soon be drafted. But I managed to find a job in Cleveland, where we then moved, and I became a fidelity and surety bond underwriter for the Cleveland office of the Fidelity and Casualty Company of New York and its several associated companies. This was a time for learning about capitalism rather than socialism, but a co-worker loaned me his copy of Ray Ginger’s The Twisted Cross, the biography of Eugene V. Debs, the American socialist pioneer, which I liked very much. (Many years later, my wife and I would visit Debs’s home in Terre Haute.) The company sent me to a bond school in the Wall Street area of New York City, on Maiden Lane, and that was interesting too and allowed me to spend some time in the Village, where I heard a young singer called Bob Dylan at the Café Wha?

My mother, however, remarried, and I had to move quickly to find a graduate fellowship at mid-year. Harvard would have required me to wait for the fall, and I knew that as soon as I ceased to support my mother I would be 1-A for the draft. The University of Wisconsin obliged, and I enrolled there in January 1962. Wisconsin is the state in whose history both socialism and Joseph McCarthy play major roles, and the University of Wisconsin was quite unlike Harvard in the lively discussion of socialism that could be found. My fellowship was, however, only for one semester, and I would not qualify for a teaching assistantship until I had an M.A., so I was happy to be offered a one-year appointment as an instructor in English at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which carried a draft deferment as did all  college teaching positions at that time.

Spartanburg was in the old segregated south, and I saw for the first time the separate drinking fountains and waiting rooms, and the restaurants closed to African-Americans. You will not believe that I had a room in an old southern mansion, owned by two elderly maiden ladies, that featured tall white pillars in front and confederate battle flags in the living room, but I did. I made all sorts of Yankee blunders in this first encounter with Apartheid, but the other faculty were sympathetic to my feelings, which they to some extent shared. Among the older faculty, with long-time southern roots, I saw a kind of concerned paternalism directed at the families of their servants--usually one Black woman who cooked.  I taught five courses per semester, but I did read a little more from Howard Mumford Jones’s list of Proletarian novels, some of them back in print in paperback.

Back in Wisconsin on a new fellowship after nine months in Spartanburg, I soon married Donna Jones, a graduate student in Speech and Theatre, whose family had experienced the Great Depression as family farmers who ultimately had their farm and possessions auctioned from under them. I attended a couple of meetings of the Socialist Workers Party, who had taken the leadership role in the Viet Nam-era anti-war movement, but, wearing a jacket and necktie--as required at Harvard--and sporting a crew cut and clean-shaven, I looked out of place in the increasingly hairy 1960s. No one at these meetings ever spoke to me; they probably thought I was FBI. I also found and subscribed to the newspaper of the Socialist Party but found little in it about socialism. My doctoral dissertation, on the impact of Humean skepticism on literary expression in Byron and Browning, was finished by June 1966, but with the arduous final typing ahead of us, and our flat in Madison plagued by bats, Donna and I left for Massachusetts, first to live in Peabody Terrace, Harvard’s married housing high-rise, in a summer sublet, and then to move to Williamstown, where I had accepted a position as assistant professor at Williams College.

Arriving in the tranquil purple valley of Williams just as campuses like Wisconsin were erupting in revolt over Viet Nam pulled us out of the main events of time, but there were some minor demonstrations against the war by the Williams faculty. We spent the summer of 1967 in London on a small grant from the college. We lived just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, the heart of what the media called “Swinging London,” and we attended the now legendary Liberation Conference at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, hearing Allen Ginsberg (whom I had heard in his famous first reading at Harvard) and Stokely Carmichael, but not R.D. Laing or Marcuse. That summer was the beginning of a decades-long pattern of life divided between England and the USA, and I was starting to learn a little about the British left, but I remember that the Tribune newspaper of  one socialist tendency in the Labour Party disappointed.

Back at Williams, I taught a January interval course on the Literature of Social Protest in the USA in the 1930s and 1960s, an extension of my Howard Mumford Jones reading list, but I don’t remember it generating much excitement among the very able Williams students. In the meantime, at Christmastime 1967, I had accepted a new job as Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, East Lansing, and we arrived there in the summer of 1968. (to be continued)

My Long Crawl toward Socialism (Part 2)

World War II brought long hours in the railroad yards for my father, and the steady income meant that my parents could qualify for a mortgage on a modest house in the Finn Town section of the Harbor.  My father was exempt from the draft because of the critical importance to the war effort of the iron ore docks that the railroads served. During World War II, more iron ore moved through Ashtabula Harbor than through any other port in the world. Security around the docks and the railroad yards was extremely tight.

Buying a home on a mortgage did not cause us to think of ourselves as “middle-class,” which was not a label much used then. Owning an automobile was unthinkable, and my father walked to work as did most of the neighborhood. We slowly accumulated a telephone, an electric refrigerator, and by the 1950s a television set.

My education in socialism was on hold--I did not read Marxism for Infants by Comrade X, that mythical book projected by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier--and in fact socialism was better not mentioned as the repressions of the McCarthy period grew. Some Finns were deported, and of course the well-known Finnish-American Communist Gus Hall went to prison.

My political outlook as it slowly took shape was that of a social democrat, left of Roosevelt and most Democrats, and heavily influenced by the union movement. I had no contact with socialists. In high school, I was, I remember, greatly interested in articles about the public ownership of utilities, written by such unlikely people as Hubert Humphrey, that I read in Progressive magazine, to which somehow or other the Harbor Public Library subscribed. (I was years later surprised to find myself living near the Progressive offices in Madison, Wisconsin.) In my senior year in high school, I ran for Harbor High School’s nomination for “City Manager for the Day,” won that, and then ran successfully against the nominees of the other larger high schools in Ashtabula. My platform included taking into social ownership the city’s privately owned waterworks. I was asked at least twice during the campaign whether that wouldn’t be “socialism.”

I did read widely in my high school years, and some of the authors showed some leaning toward socialism--Steinbeck in particular. The library had a copy of the autobiography of Big Bill Haywood, the IWW leader, that I read with pleasure and profit. Still, many of the books in those years were chess books, science fiction, or detective stories. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist was an important book to read at that age. I wouldn’t have known how to find a book on socialist economics or Marxist philosophy.

While my father was still alive, between my junior and senior years in high school, I worked, as a laborer, in the same railroad yards in the Harbor, but union membership was waived because it was a summer job. I remember the long walk home on hot summer days, sometimes coated with coal dust and looking like someone in a Welsh mining movie. But it was good to make real money--$1.56 an hour--after having been only a paperboy before. After my father died, I took a job as a lab technician in an alcohol factory to finish out my senior year in high school and work the summer before starting college. Here I joined my first union, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, whom I would find again years later when they played a leading role in the effort to build a Labor Party. The union meetings, at the Sons of Italy Hall in East Ashtabula, were the first that I had attended since early childhood.

My interest in literature, despite my plan to become a scientist vocationally, caused me to choose Harvard over M.I.T. when I was admitted to both. I had never visited either institution or the Boston area. (to be continued)

My Long Crawl toward Socialism (Part 1)

When I decided to undertake my Wanderjahr, I thought it would involve my participation in a few of the national cultures of Europe in the waning days of capitalism. The reaction of the various governments to the collapse of the bubble economy of the credit boom has uniformly been through austerity measures or “cuts,” so the strikes and demonstrations that are now occurring are the predictable response of a working-class that has not entirely lost its class-consciousness. Indeed, I started writing the blog in the expectation of events that would begin on September 7.

I had, however, to begin my report on European moods and actions from my perch on Revere Beach, looking across the Atlantic but not seeing that distant shore. What I have written is not the report of an eye-witness, and it is thus far filtered through theory rather than being experienced. I have been largely invisible. Such writing may serve some purpose, but it will hardly engage the reader as would news of a first-hand confrontation with pepper gas and snarling police crowd-control dogs such as opponents of the Iraq war ran into February 15, 2003, in New York City.

Let me introduce, therefore, the “subject” in what I still plan as a more subjective account of this historical phase: that’s me, Victor Paananen, 72 years old, portly, with bad eyesight. I am not going to begin to write an autobiography here, and there will be no substantial attention given to my life as student, family man, professor and academic administrator (or “bureaucrat,” if you prefer). Instead, I propose to account for the socialist outlook that has been evident in my first-three blog entries.

Socialist Alternative, of which I am a member, regularly runs in its newspaper Justice a feature titled “Why I am a Socialist.” This blog is of that kind, but I will accept that the reasons why I am a socialist may be more evident to a psychologically acute observer than to me. I was not born into a time when the USA was hospitable to socialism, and my socialism had to be worked out over a long period and was not really assisted by the two excellent universities that I attended. “My Long Crawl toward Socialism “ might be a more apt title for this blog rather than “Why I am a Socialist.”

I was born into a working-class family in the Harbor area of Ashtabula, Ohio. The Harbor is the part of this Lake Erie iron ore port that was largely settled by Finns. My parents had had a hard time in the Great Depression, but by 1938 my father had found work, as my birth certificate says, as an oiler on the New York Central Railroad. Finnish-Americans are often divided into Lutheran Finns and Red Finns, and my parents were on the Lutheran side but not by a large margin. My father and his brothers were also active in the Temperance movement which organized sport and music for the Finns in the hope of providing an alternative to alcohol.

The Depression had made my parents Roosevelt Democrats, but both had a class-consciousness that ran deeper than that. All Finnish-American communities had a socialist presence, and Finns made up a large percentage of the membership of the Communist Party and the IWW. I remember seeing the Finnish-language IWW newspaper Industrialisti a couple of times as a child even though my parents were not members, and the IWW had its hall in my neighborhood. There was no escaping the awareness that resistance to the system that produced the Great Depression could run deeper than that put forth by Roosevelt.

Before her marriage, my mother, who was born in Finland, worked as a domestic servant, beginning in her teens. The employment of Finnish maids was not unusual in the years between the two wars: the one who appears in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was by no means unique. My mother received very bad treatment from her employers, and was at times denied both proper food and needed medical attention.

I dedicated my book British Marxist Criticism to my mother, saying that her class-consciousness was formative--”formative” being a favorite word of the critic Raymond Williams, who used it to describe shaping forces within an individual or culture. To put it simply, my mother detested with a passion the people that Finns call herrat, a word which very literally would mean something like “those whom we must call ‘mister.’” They are the Big Shots, the bosses, our Superiors, or in a phrase that I’ve more recently preferred Our Masters. Some of these feelings about herrat she brought with her from Finland, where the class encompassed landowners, clergy, and government officials.

My grandfather Otto Paananen had been seriously injured in a mining accident in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but after moving to Ohio did hard manual work on the iron ore docks of Ashtabula Harbor. He had left Finland to avoid conscription into the Czar’s army, Finland being then a semi-autonomous part of Russia. His four sons, my father the youngest, struggled through the Depression, working at times in CCC camps or on WPA projects. After that, as a member of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, my father advanced from “oiler” to “car inspector and repairer” and did some union work. I have early memories of attending union meetings with him, and being half-suffocated in cigarette, cigar, and pipe smoke. We received the union paper, titled simply Labor, in the mail, and I not only read it as a child but continued a subscription to it as a freshman at Harvard. My father died aged only 46 while I was still in high school.

(I’ll stop here for now. There are several sections yet to come of the particular blog entry. My crawl toward socialism is perhaps of interest as the experience of someone NOT of the 60s New Left but one of the last of the children of the 1930s, caught between Stalinism on one side and McCarthyism on the other. Or not.)

Whose Streets? Our Streets!

Both Paris and London are today witnessing a late summer preview of what will be an autumn of discontent across Europe. In Paris--and throughout France--there are strikes and mass demonstrations opposing a government proposal that would raise the age at which full pensions can be paid. In London, the trade union RMT has closed down most of the Underground--“subway” is the American word--system.

In these actions, the working-class asserts that, in the words of a song widely sung yesterday on American Labor Day, “without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.” These actions demonstrate that the working-class is always potentially hegemonic, can lay claim to Herrschaft, and lead society forward.

Even though many French people would agree to raising the age at which full pensions can begin, 70% of them--according to an interesting poll--support the September 7 strikes and demonstrations. This support indicates wide approval of a display of working-class strength and solidarity.

Relatively early retirement was one of  benefits offered to the new “middle class” that arose in the boom and subsequent credit bubble periods. The attempt to withdraw this benefit suggests the temporary and ultimately illusory character of this class formation. But it should be understood that retirement at age 60 on a full pension is possible only for those workers who have worked and paid into the system for 40.5 years. Unless one accumulates the 40.5 years, retirement with full pension is at age 65.

The RMT in England is one of  the first trade unions to begin to distance itself from the Labour Party, which has removed from its constitution a commitment to socialism. The RMT and its general-secretary Bob Crow
have participated in electoral alliances involving the Socialist Party (CWI) and the Communist Party of Britain. Its militancy is evident in this strike of the Underground workers.

The austerity measures (or “cuts”)  proposed in the two nations and across Europe have not yet won parliamentary approval. When they are implemented, there will be huge job losses.  The RMT faced the loss of 800 jobs and closed down London. What will the working-class response be when the job losses are in the thousands or tens of thousands?

History and Class Consciousness

When the post-war economic boom showed clear signs of ending, there was a frantic effort by banks and governments to sustain it through easy credit. Because their consumption of goods, including the purchase of homes, not only continued as before but increased, many members of the working-class in the USA, Canada, and Europe acquiesced when encouraged to consider themselves part of a new "middle class."  A comment on this illusory class formation follows, edited from an email note that I sent in December 2009:

>   Living through both the genuine boom of the post-war
>   period and then the bubble or credit economy of the
>   last thirty-some years, I saw the rise of this
>   so-called "middle class." Elizabeth Warren and other commentators
     have rightly expressed concern about its future..
>
>   The "middle class" is in fact something that emerges
>   only during such economic decades. There are really
>   only two classes, those who buy labor power and
>   those who must sell it. In the post-war boom and in
>   the subsequent bubble, there however arose what
>   Engels would call a "labor aristocracy," working
>   class people able to win wages and benefits that
>   allowed them a version of the life of the
>   bourgeoisie or the petite bourgeoisie (i. e. owners
>   of their own means of production such as small
>   shopowners or farmers). The same conditions that
>   produced this lifestyle produced value systems that
>   were similar to those of the petit-bourgeoisie and
>   based on the defense of the automobiles, college
>   education for their kids, and occasional luxuries
>   that they could now afford.
>
>   I don't personally like to see the word "middle
>   class" used to describe this formation. For one
>   thing, it is based on income rather than on the
>   place of the individuals in the means of production.
>   It is "structurally" a meaningless phrase.
>
>   What does the "middle class" do when under attack?
>   Here, the illusions bred by an illusory status
>   become a danger--as Germany between the wars would
>   suggest. Fascism is middle class "socialism."

I do not, however, see Fascist movements on the rise despite the shock to their expectations that this "middle class' has endured. It is true that there has been a turn to the right evident in such phenomena as the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts and in the rise of the Tea Party nationally, but these are the actions of people still bewildered after the bursting of the bubble. There is hope that recognition of the "new normal" (as the financial commentators call it) will restore the class-consciousness that had been obliterated--or at least suppressed--in the bubble economy. Unfortunately, there is at this time in the USA no large and visible movement that can give voice to the demands of this restored consciousness of what it means to be a member of the working-class, but there has been a beginning in actions like the march for jobs and peace in Detroit on August 28, which was a prelude to a much larger gathering in Washington, D.C., on October 2.

In Europe, where the ideas of socialism have never been totally effaced, not even by some decades of affluence, the fightback against the austerity measures that will further erode living standards for the damaged "middle class," and in fact deepen the recession, is beginning now that traditional August vacation days have passed. A preview of what is to come across Europe will occur tomorrow in France on Tuesday, September 7--and that is one reason that I felt that I had to begin my blog now, even though I will "observe" the day's events from far-away Revere Beach. On September 29, there will be a trans-European eruption of protests and strikes.

It is significant that European resistance to the austerity measures immediately takes the form of strikes, the unique weapon of the working-class. Class-consciousness has not been lost there, nor is it greatly befuddled by the thirty-year bubble economy. Georg Lukacs argued in History and Class Consciousness that the class-consciousness of the working-class is the self-consciousness of history. Will the class, and history, begin to move forward this month?

Wanderjahr Journal

In proposing to set forth on a Wanderjahr after my 50th college reunion, I thought about whether or not to attempt a journal. I envisioned an old-fashioned composition book in which I would make entries by hand, but after some years of composing only on the computer, I did not feel happy about returning to cursive writing, particularly since it has always been my habit to correct as I write, an approach that inevitably produces a messy text that is hard to read or transcribe. My son Neil asked whether I planned a blog, and I realized that might be the easier way to compose. The problem may be that, when actually travelling, I have limited access to the Internet.

I had planned to set off on my Wanderjahr in June 2010 but could not, and I am still in Revere, MA, although I now plan to leave in late October.

In the 50th Reunion report of my class (Harvard '60), I said


"Although as certain as ever of the eventual socialist transformation of society, I have done little politically over the last five years. Members of the class of ‘60 in the Boston area must at times encounter my young comrades selling our newspaper Justice, but all that I have recently done myself is give a talk on Marxism and literature at a union hall in Boston’s Chinatown. I was again one of the Electors for Nader on his 2008 ballot petition in Massachusetts, and--not because of me--he did get on the ballot this time.

"I’ve been filling empty hours and gaps in my education by taking courses in the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement. Thus far, I’ve studied the Communist Party in the USA, the Slovenian philosopher Zizek, surrealism, the art of the Russian avant-garde, Walt Whitman, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, and French philosophy in the twentieth century. This semester (Fall 2009) I’m taking a course on militarism, and, despite having happily given up teaching in 2002, teaching one on Dylan Thomas. I also returned to playing chess after a fifty year absence, last having played at Harvard Chess Club events as a freshman. I had to learn the algebraic notation now current and get some minimal skills back to start playing internet chess. I’m now ready to quit again, maybe for another fifty years, but it was interesting to see what is going on in the chess world.

"Diane De Santis, who joined me at the forty-fifth and will join me at the fiftieth, has been my close companion over the years in between. After the reunion, I contemplate taking a leave from HILR and embarking with Diane on a Wanderjahr, traveling mostly in Europe but perhaps also to some places in the USA. I don’t know whether I will keep a journal in which I comment on the cultural and economic landscape of the various countries in this very late phase of late capitalism. Probably not.

"Needing a break from what I’m not doing--a sabbatical from retirement--is a symptom of my usual restlessness. I still need some Great Enterprise in which, despite old age and mediocre health, I can play an active role. The poet Philip Larkin, however, reminds us that, even though we are waiting for our ship finally to come in, what really approaches is  'a black-/Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back/A huge and birdless silence. In her wake/No waters breed or break.'"

The Wanderjahr was then  to be a year's interval of travel, the word originating in the medieval practice in which a Wanderjahr or Wanderjaehre followed the period of apprenticeship. (Our word "journeyman" still reflects the medieval custom.). A friend misunderstood my word as Wandeljahr, which would be a year of change either in myself or in the economy, society, or the environment. It is quite true that I would like to identity such change in this journal/blog. Wandeljahr also is used to mean a necessary shift in the calendar to bring it into line with reality, a necessary paradigm shift as one might say. Again, I will be looking for a fundamental change in consciousness as human endeavour comes to be understood more accurately in these difficult times. My friend may have proposed a better word than I did.

My next blog entry will try to explain our historical moment and my expectations for change. I hope that it will give a better idea of what processes I hope to see at work in my travels.