Читать книгу Ziggurat - Bob Mazzei - Страница 9

Well, that was one of my periods of transition. I had to look back at my past, to find out if I was a dinosaur. I was losing my ability to recognize possibilities in and amongst the breaks of history, the length of the long walk towards liberation. For a certain time, I had forgotten my younger intuitions, and departed from the path of radicalism. Yet, I didn’t realize I had placed myself in with the forces that have a great power of retention. Sometimes, the passion for changing things, guides you to a flat sight where the horizon is a wall, and all is silent. Goodnight!

It’s so exciting to find you were wrong!

When I was younger I didn’t let myself get homologated, and many times, traveling on the roller coaster of Rock and Roll, I had realized that there is a hidden meaning, something you have to work hard at to dig up.

Well, after all I am not unhappy to be a seeker again, and when I will finally get what I’m after, I hope to live on again for many many more years.

Today I’m having dinner with Flynn and Kevin. Our years in college were great, and then our careers went different directions, they are now brilliant unconventional professors, I am an analyst, and if I could, I wouldn’t do that again. But I cannot live without Rock and Roll, and I feel myself somehow joined to a big tide, extorted and vilified, that shall have to change the world one day. Nonetheless, sometimes I think what can I do so that my class-consciousness can go beyond my poor hungry intellect?

The spot is quite friendly, and the food is delicious. The music’s not too loud, reviving in me times that are gone and long behind us. The Police have just sent their SOS, a bottle with a message they hope someone will find washed up on a shore, and soon after Jack is on the run but the mourners catch him at the border, and he’s very lucky that day the hangman is not hanging. Kevin is peering at the wine chart, and in the meanwhile hums, but he doesn’t remember the lyrics, so he comes out with rambling words.

When Flynn stops croaking over Kevin’s inconsequent singing, he yells, “Yo guys! Did you read about that last essay by Reginald?”

Hell, no! I would rather talk about soccer or Rock music tonight; still my friends are persistent, like death and taxes. Damn! Just don’t feel like working anymore today.

“Spare me please! Can’t listen to it anymore Man! These guys look as if they have been mass-produced. You read one, and you’ve read them all!” Kevin interjects.

Then, Flynn pipes up, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that the cold war was a clash between the capitalist world and the communist bloc. It takes a lot of courage to call communism what was an immense system of exploitation to the benefit of state capital accumulation”

“Yeah. Not a single drop of socialism has ever been dripping anywhere in this world. Much less the palest attempt to inaugurate a communist society”, I utter back with absolute firm belief.

“It was nothing but the clash between two imperialist superpowers. In my bedroom I have a green wall and a blue wall. Well, scrape off the paint, and you find bricks, mortar, and cement. The two blocs were just the two sides of the same coin”, Kevin rationalizes and then concludes, “Lot of nonsense you hear from around the world. Even from the academic world…”

Flynn pipes in again “Yeah. Do you remember old professor Yelvington? “So, why are there countries which can live off of finance and commerce?” “Because those countries produce goods from exploiting people”, answered Jones”, and we all burst out laughing. Yeah Man! Good times!!

“Not that there are no reasons to split one’s sides when you read Murray”, Kevin incites.

“Gees! I don’t know whom I would kill first. One from the left, or the other from the right, they just don’t realize they are headed in the same direction”, Flynn declares.

“No later than a couple of weeks ago, I found them spitefully arguing in the staff room at the faculty. I had to tell them, “Hey, hey, do you want all those old fogeys here to call you wild and hotheads? Damn! No need to get heated uo. Everybody knows that industry and finance fight each other about which of them is entitled to get the most part of the loot, it doesn’t pay to be an economist!” Kevin tells, and we all burst out laughing again.

“Gee! Some days ago I was taking a stroll through Holland Park, and there was Rave in his usual mood for haranguing” Flynn said.

“Who? The raving poet? That guy is sick! I think he really rocks! I intervene.

“Huh…Rave the street poet??, that guy is more sensible than all of our colleagues from all the universities we have been studying and teaching at, you bet!” Kevin replies.

“Yeah. Him and his stooge, Butch. They’re a traveling company, and a good one! Well, there were some guys confabulating around an e-tablet, he approaches them and starts, “We, the consumer are grateful to you the industrialist for giving us your product. You are rich, and you deserve it! You, the workers, are under their thumb. Don’t you know that you have an appointment with your job today too? Aren’t you thinking of extinguishing the sacred fire of accumulation? You can have human or inhuman needs. Why do you call them natural or artificial? Those guys have knowledge enough to make your needs inexhaustible. There are vital necessities of valorization that must be satisfied, yes indeed! What’re you studying? Under the influence of money science is a tool to give a price to all, from Nature to dreams. You should take care of yourselves!!” And he and his pal walked away” Flynn remembers.

“Guys, we laugh, but things are really twisted like a screw. Is there any possibility to be free from the econometric reality?” Kevin gravely asks.

“The bourgeois legality draws a line, and no one can move it back. Everyday life is under a totalitarian social relationship, no way out”, Flynn observes, and his eyes aren’t laughing anymore.

“You see that there is still so much ado about which measures to take to stop this or that social alarm. It looks like we are invaded by crime but instead of abolishing causes we’re increasing control and criminal laws. From where I come, y’ know, people were considered the most degraded, the despicable. Some old people over there said that we were good as long as we reeked of factory, and waste when we reeked too much of jail”, Kevin presses, and his comment reminds me of an old man from the East End, who once told me, “My old poor bones stink so much of jail, that in the shack we live in, my wife put bars on the windows. In the end, that’s giving me a good feeling”. Well, you cannot regulate a system whose capacity of transforming is absolutely higher than any other good intention of revamping it. You can only remove it. And, who better than the most degraded know the weight? They are the tide that can extinguish the fire of the most heinous injustice.

My divagations are interrupted by Flynn who resumes, “You may find great consolation to blame people for what they do. But in most cases they cannot but do that. It is not a law of nature; it is the brutal social game we are all forced to play. And when you punish the trespasser, thinking that it is all you have to do, you are avoiding to understand what has caused them to offend in the first place”

“Yes, I often ask myself whether you can humanly control your actions, being immersed in such an inhuman reality. The last thing you have to do is ask yourself whether this is logical. As natural beings we’ve existed for a very long time, but as humans we must still find ourselves. I think that someone, very wisely, once said, that totality can be worth, and makes sense, only if the individual is fully free. But the bourgeois society has atomized and destroyed the person, to make a desperate individual, lost and alone in state institutions, adequately protected by bourgeois laws, sufficiently dehumanized into being a good citizen, a good worker, a good subject, and for a fact, be a robot; anything but a man. Kill the classes, and you will get a human community” Kevin interjects, and that sounds very sensible.

“The highest illusion lies in the con of that marketplace that are democratic elections. When you go to vote you are but a sacrificial victim. The holders of the power send along their puppets, choosing between this and that political party. All the responsibility is upon you. They give you the power to taste your vendetta, but in reality you are not less the puppets than the politicians they send along” Flynn resolutely rivets.

“There was a time where people complained about the fact that there was an unjust distribution of rights. They had then been pleased, somewhat. Rights are equal, no way! Can you see what they are? The tool used by power to make the ruler control everybody and everything. Do you know what is politically correct of the western democracies? The means, by which the bourgeois state, with all its luggage of hypocritical human rights, can seize all of your person, and make you a perfect subject. If you don’t kill the power, the power kills you” Kevin follows up, which sounds very challenging.

“I see only rhetoric figures. We are just functions of a system where everything is admitted except to knock down the system itself. So, what is responsibility? It is a way to maintain the status quo”, Flynn offers up, and I perfectly understand what he means. He’s saying that if you want to know where all the evil in society comes from, you have to look at the social game. Although we are driven to consider our countries democratic systems, based upon rule of law, like pompously boasted by the jurists, our legal systems impose an atrocious form of slavery based upon capital accumulation.

“Well, Flynn, exploitation comes before capital formation, then the power makes possible all the rest”, Kevin makes clear, just to highlight like the entire state apparatus makes exploitation and slavery real. Then he adds, “I am so tired to always listen to the same blather, that money is nothing but a conventional means to buy wealth, that human needs can be satisfied by policies that aim to realize common good, and that finance must be ethical not to harm real economy and all the blah… blah… blah…”

I butt in, “Capital goes where profit is. It disregards human needs. Money is not neutral; it is the unequivocal expression of social relationships, in fact. About those who keep insisting on common good, I would respond that the common good and the good of capital agree. They match as much as hot cookies and cold milk. It is in the real economy that you need to investigate, because it is in the real economy that we see exploitation, there where capital commands over labor”

“Exactly! It is where new value is created that everything is originated. All those who produce objects that can be traded with capital, not with returns, are productive. All the rest are sucking milk from the prolific cow” Flynn makes it very clear.

I follow up again, “Remember, surplus of labor – surplus of product – surplus value, this is the sequence from which the process gets developed. If a job is able to increase the initial capital, beyond that the employer pays to the workers, it is productive”, I specified, yet probably not so plainly since Kevin wants to adjoin, “Without the product of the salaried workers employed by the industrial capital, all the rest of the social body would die. While the productive work is exchanged with capital, the unproductive work is exchanged with returns. The productive workers are those who produce wealth for everybody”

But Flynn sees the need to provocatively ask “Don’t you think you have forgotten agriculture as a source of production?”

“Huh… Of course. When I mentioned industrial capital, I meant agricultural too,” Kevin admits.

“Money, and that particular form we call capital, is the software that sets the hardware of our society in motion. Indeed, capital is a social relationship, with no doubts!” Flynn says laying his right hand on the table and extending his fingers.

“It’s not possible to conceive a capitalist society without exploitation. How could the production of goods create any surplus value otherwise? Those who think that this does not happen anymore, are not capable to understand the real process through which social wealth is created”, Kevin deals.

“You hear many recipes are being delivered to resolve this crisis, but what they don’t make clear is that capitalism cannot but expand poverty as it increases productivity. Everything is based upon the value of trade; time itself is a value to be traded for money. Imagine instead a society where the distinction productive unproductive does not exist, because the social wealth is given by values of use, no matter material or immaterial. In that society, time acquires a human dimension within human relationships”, I avow, and I must admit to be pleased to have regained such a clear vision. I have conceded too much to the progressive thought for all these years, inasmuch I have risked to get my sight dimmed. Yet, I have concluded that the progressive and the conservative forces have much more in common than their respective fans loiter to differentiate. Their characteristic worry to keep things from breaking, to get the device unaltered, to repair the wrong—no matter if with more wrong—that amplifies the power and makes it even more dominant, that I have come to call Neostance. And Neostance, is this whole of seemingly contrasting views that want to restrain History, trapping it within a dome of crystal, though that it has already broken.

“You are correct, Duane. Capitalism has never been preoccupied as to satisfy individual needs, nor has it ever done its utmost to please collective needs. Profit is its only goal, full stop!” Kevin says loudly.

“Go where profit is higher, go where risk is lower. That’s globalization, no need to find more implications. Capital subdues labor, and everybody is subject to capital. The domain of capitalism has grabbed the entire world, Flynn insists, and then maintains, “My people had been dragged in chains to the Americas because they could be sweated without compunction. It was part of the game of dominion. Each age has its trade, and since capital can now travel everywhere, there’s no need to move people. What matters is not private or state property, what matters is to go beyond property”

Rockefeller used to repeat, “Pay profit to no one”, he knew the game, and he knew how to win. Capital is absolutely something living. It lives among the social relationships of our everyday reality. This living force is inside everybody’s life.

Who would not want to take flight now and then? The very trouble is that we have then to go back. Sometimes we are left there, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yet, it’s hardly ever that the other shoe is the one that suits.

But, have you ever thought that we are moved by necessity, indeed, and that our freedom is rather limited? What are we actually free to do? We are driven to think that our discomfort is because there are so many greedy people, tragedies happen because there are so many wicked men, that peace and wellbeing would be absolutely diffused all around the earth if only human beings were more religious, or more ethical, or more respectful of the law. Good intentions!

Yet, which freedom for individuals can really exert under these circumstances? How, what circumstances? These, these that crush us all to be subjected to produce so that it may be possible to accumulate, that enclose us all in a cruel system where all the battles are bloody, where no place is safe, nobody is innocent. We are more forced than free.

Nobody is born wicked, yet they can become that, and very much so. If there are too many walls between our being and our humanity, then everything is possible. Our conscience is modeled and shaped in that big forge that is social environment; society has always been a breeding ground for deviancy. If all around me is inhuman, I cannot humanly live as a human, because I am impeded even from seeing the human in me. And if we subside into our social conquests, thinking that our laws expressively define good and bad, then we mistake the lawful for the good and the illicit for the evil, but right and wrong are legal categories that say nothing to our humanity. The axe of justice falls upon anyone who is not disposed to meet the right, not the good. To believe that the law, which defines the right, coincides with the good is tantamount to closing one’s eyes before human’s pain. I too have made that mistake indulging in a sick vision, which sustains to change the world by dint of injections of ethics, without any way for amending the least social relationship though. But no one can dry up the ocean taking a bucketful of water a day.

There are things that exist, and that nobody can now deny, because they are apparent, and they are frightful; yet, there are others that nobody can see, but they are alive, and these latter determine the first, and are even more dreadful. A tsunami causes destruction, sows death, and it may well demolish the patient work of long, long years, but it never comes out of nothingness, it is, indeed, the consequence of a specific cause. We may be caught off guard by the sudden billow, but nobody can say it happened without anything to provoke it, good, bad, or indifferent!

It is in the difference between necessities and freed will, that responsibility can be assumed.

Freed Will, is not a typo, it is instead used deliberately to mean that it is possible to speak of freedom and of responsibility only when the will of all human beings has been liberated]

As long as human beings are not freed from want and need, free will, is only a mere delusion. There is no free will, in fact, because it keeps being played between the right and wrong defined by the abstract form of law, which is always headed to maximize this or that interest within the logic of the dominant and the dominated. Man can adapt to everything except to and for power, and when they do, they quit being human.

Ask yourselves if they are human beings when you see beating and you see those being beaten, some wining and some being conquered, some yelling orders and some bowing their heads, some shooting and some shot dead, some being born in abundance and some dying in loneliness and obscurity, some rejoicing in their minds and some only soiled by sweat and dirt for nothing in return but sour food, some creating and some destroying. Many things are found between servant and master, yet not certainly the human.

So, I wish I could give myself a dream, not for gaining wings to make me fly higher above the con and the betrayal, but to get my arms to dig, legs to walk down the path, sight to unravel the dark. Because there, it hides the origin of slavery, moved by the same hand, the one, which brandishes the whip and furrows wounds, and the one, which ties chains that not even the sun, can light up.

And how can I transmit such clearness if I lack it myself? Maybe, just the impalpable glow of a dream will lead me to that trip that I have missed so far.