CAPITALISM’S DEMISE: WHAT WENT WRONG?

CAPITALISM’S DEMISE: WHAT WENT WRONG?
Erle Frayne Argonza

To all fellow men and women out there who may have deep fondness for the liberal capitalist model of economic adaptation, I hope that you can make some adjustments in your cognitive banks. Capitalism is not a permanent facet of human life, but merely one among various epochs that will come to pass. Only impermanence is sacrosanct in the cosmos, so please refrain from singing hallelujah to a world system that is on its death knell as I articulated in a previous article.

And please refrain from swallowing hook-line-&-sinker the contentious propaganda of Francis Fukuyama about the ‘end of history’, that accordingly history had concluded with the galvanization of liberal capitalism, that history makes no more sense. Fukuyama’s theory is a slapstick narrative of hyper-valuation of the ‘mad economics’ of late capitalism and hypo-statization of reality that has no relation at all to the real in the world out there. Fukuyama had taken as ‘real’ what is actually ‘virtual’, and froze time much like unto a fairy tale of timelessness, of history-less Nietzschean moment that is fit more for infants than for adult humans.

Fukuyama epitomizes the ‘mad economics’ of all those Pied Pipers of the global oligarchy for whom he works, and his discourse is akin to the ‘mad discourse’ so described by the late Michel Foucault. The ‘mad economics’ of Friedman, Hayek, Fukuyama, and all those technocrats who serve as processors and bagmen for the global oligarchy, is precisely symptomatic of that colossal ailment of a world system, and as we all know, madness can never salve ailments but rather hasten the system’s death. Caput! Blow your horns, prepare dirges to this Dead One!

Unless that you yourselves have become maddened by the seemingly infinite monies flowing unto your purses as you are among the beneficiaries of ‘late’ capital, unless that you are indeed now suffering from combined maladies of sociopathy and schizophrenia, unless that sanity had departed from thee forever, please heed the last plea of your own conscience where sanity had retreated: CAPITALISM IS DEAD! No amount of propagandizing, of contorted interpretations, can ever change the course of history at this juncture, as we are all headed for a TOTAL SYSTEM COLLAPSE in the months ahead. Read that please: MONTHS AHEAD, not years ahead.

What went wrong with capitalism? I’m sure all of you fellows knew what went wrong, do I even need to answer that? Your previous thinker mentors, among economists and sociologists, forewarned you all of the forthcoming demise of capitalism, but you paid nary an attention to those brilliant minds as you were so engrossed in your ‘conspicuous consumption’, behaving more like some infantile EATERS or as anthropoids rather than as thinking and spiritually evolving humans. You are all very much human, so please consistently behave like one, and begin by listening to the Inner Voice of your conscience, for that voice is your soul’s.

Let me summarize the diagnostics, forewarnings and/or prophecies of our thinker mentors from the West, and I’d stress WEST because there are some other thinker mentors from the EAST and SOUTH whose peregrinations are so recondite they are not so easily digestible. Let me just stress the WEST as this is what is common to us all. So let me re-echo the thinkers and their theories:

• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: The internal contradictions between the private nature of capital (ownership of means of production) and the social nature of production. The ‘crisis of overproduction’ and the ‘law of the falling rate of profit’ are attendant patterns. Social revolution results, then the alternative society will be constructed.

• Max Weber: Industrial capitalism’s granite product, the bureaucracy, led to dehumanization. He never forecast though whether this dehumanizing system can be sustained—but please read between the lines. (His contemporary Emile Durkheim had a similar observation about ‘anomie’ or normless state of urban/industrial society.)

• Thorsten Veblen: The end-phase of industrial capitalism is markedly pathological. ‘Conspicuous consumption’ is the disease of this phase, the toxic behavior from the ruling class that later filtered down to the emerging middle class.

• Joseph Schumpeter: The internal contradiction between the desire for profit and the revolutionary character of innovation. The demise of capitalism will see the possibility of the technical class taking over society and build that alternative system later.

• Daniel Bell: The ‘post-industrial’ society had already been born right inside capitalism. A distinct modality in itself, post-industrialism will eventually prevail in a system that isn’t capitalist (or money economy) but rather knowledge-based. The ‘service worker’ had arrived on the social landscape, the prototype class of the future.

• Theodore Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse: ‘Late’ capital is characterized by the pervasiveness of ‘instrumental reason’, where reason is used to justify the non-rational (‘madness’ in Foucault’s argot), where state planning/intervention was infused into a system that scorned intervention.

• Alvin Toffler: Both capitalism and socialism are based on hoarding, both are variants of the same industrial society of yesteryears, both are based on ‘2nd wave’ capital-intensive technologies and non-renewable energy sources. The ‘post-industrial’ society is altogether distinct, isn’t based on hoarding, production-consumption (‘prosumer’) is based on ‘3rd wave’ knowledge-intensive technologies and renewable energy sources, knowledge cannot be hoarded.

I need not articulate further, do I? They all converged on one theme: capitalism is transitory, it bred social maladies (alienation, dehumanization, anomie, conspicuous consumption,…), is systemically flawed, and will be dismantled at sometime in the future.

No matter how delimited their theories maybe, as they all proceeded from certain perspectives (they were all ‘paradigm’-based in the jargon of Thomas Kuhn), they all proclaimed—in either tacit or explicit fashion—the coming demise of the system. They weren’t as silly as Fukuyama who popularized seemingly ‘satanic verses’ (distorted precepts) about a non-changing, permanent economic landscape called ‘liberal capitalism’, but were rather so adroit at social forecasting that they saw a vision of the future as they were articulating on their empirical observations of the present society.

So, fellows out there, prepare for the months and years ahead. We are headed towards those stormy months, years, maybe even decades. How the future society will come to shape is not easy to forecast. “Something blurs the Force, darkens our sight of the future,” declared a Jedi Master in the Star Wars cinema fame. Let me end right here.

[22 August 2008, Quezon City]

MADNESS IN WISCONSIN: HARDLINERS JUNK LABOR RIGHTS

MADNESS IN WISCONSIN: HARDLINERS JUNK LABOR RIGHTS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Madness masquerades as rational-legal in today’s postmodern context. The fiasco over the collective bargaining issue in Wisconsin, a state in the USA, is strong evidence of the erasure of the boundary between madness and rationality.

Industrial relations modalities of the moment have already graduated to a higher ground since the early days of management science. During those ancient days—of the likes of Taylor, Fayol, Weber—it was still customary to debate over how management should treat labor. Times have changed since then.

Collective bargaining as a sacrosanct ‘best practice’ has attained granite-rock acceptance as a social technology. It is the bedrock of industrial relations or IR. Needless to say, it had ceased to be an issue whether to accept that collective bargaining has full import in inducing productivity, efficacy, and efficiency in the work sphere.

As a social technology expert and analyst, it surely comes as a shock to me that collective bargaining has been put on the drawing board of decisional chips in a state of the USA, and debated whether it should even exist in that state at all. As far as the Philippines is concerned, where industrial peace has prevailed for two (2) decades now, collective bargaining is a sacrosanct tool, even as it is underpinned by human development paradigm championed by global institutions such as the ILO.

Even when Martial Law prevailed in the Philippines—under dictator Marcos—trilateral talk between state, market (business), and trade unions (civil society) was already at the height of institutionalization. It was followed through by best practices of labor-management dialogue in the micro-setting that led eventually to the industrial peace we are now experiencing here.

The same best practices were highly lauded by the International Labor Organization or ILO, and were adopted as some of the core practices recommended by the same magnanimous body to its member countries. Those same practices were hatched in the University of the Philippines’ School of Labor Industrial Relations or SOLAIR, an institution that had championed the generation of social technologies for the work environment.

The move by Jurassic politicians in Wisconsin, who maneuvered to junk collective bargaining supposedly to prime the state’s coffers and enable the payment of $3 Billions of debts, betrays a lack of understanding of the human condition and IR best practices. That the work force of Wisconsin has to serve as sacrificial lamb to be able to pay debts shows the degenerative madness that has permeated the mental banks of the politicians there.

I can only state one word to describe the Wisconsin condition: appalling! The protesting professionals and workers there were right when they said that the world is watching the Wisconsin fiasco, and yes indeed we are watching. There is no way we can allow a domino effect of that political madness to other democracies, and I do hope my own fellow Filipinos in America will make a strong voice in protest over such a madness by conscienceless policians.

Such madness is indicative of the Fascism that had encroached in almost all known sectors of the United States, a mindset that almost justified a martial law by the former president Bush. To use democratic institutions (e.g. legislation) in order to stifle workers’ rights is plain fascistic behavior, and should be exposed and junked pronto before the fascistic precedent spreads to other countries.

The hardliner politicians in Wisconsin better go back to their kindergarten lessons and get some crash courses in industrial relations, if it isn’t too late a thing to do this corrective measure. They should also be reminded of the lessons of America’s history, whereby the Civil War erupted precisely because of polarization over how to treat human resources there: whether to enslave or to free the colored peoples of the south.

[Philippines, 11 March 2011]

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HUMAN RIGHTS AGOG IN BARBARITIES & MADNESS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Pleasant day to you all!

The Maoists in Manila have just released the update news that an activist (Left-leaning) is killed every week during the incumbency of President Aquino. Maoists constitute the largest Left group in the country, with an organized force large enough to participate in electoral contests and win legislative posts.

That report is surely a very revealing fact. Not only activists, but media men are also the target of summary executions and assassinations in this country, supposedly a bastion of free press in Asia.

Just recently, a topnotch botanist, Leonardo Co, was sprayed with automatic rifle bullets while conducting research on field, killing him and two of his associates. The army unit that is subject of investigation as culprits claimed that the research team was caught in a crossfire between state and rebel forces.

Human rights constitute a totality of entitlements that we have won after so many hard struggles. So much blood has been sacrificed just to make our world a livable one, blood poured to erect the edifices of prosperity, good working environments, balanced ecology, and exercise of our basic freedoms.

During the regime of the previous president Arroyo, an economist with a doctorate among her credentials, hundreds of human rights-related deaths, largely through summary executions by army and police forces, were recorded. No less than the United Nations Commission on Human Rights sent a team to investigate the human rights situation here, with the findings clearly indicating a bad situation for human rights.

Just recently, another team of experts, this time from the Human Rights Watch, did the investigations about the same theme, with focus on those committed in Mindanao. The feudal-fascistic Ampatuan family became the most focal subject of the research, with findings of gory stories of murders committed by Ampatuan politicians blindly intoxicated with power, using state paramilitary forces to commit heinous crimes.

It surely takes time for civility to take shape everywhere else in our planet. Even the bastions of democracy such as the Philippines fail in the tests of indicating successes in building human rights. In the USA, martial law was almost declared during the Bush era, a cryptic act that could have seen millions of Americans jailed and hundreds of thousands exterminated in concentration camps.

In Europe we are witness to the massive prejudices against immigrants, with Muslims appearing to be the key target of slanders and employment discriminations. Sarkozy expelled Romanian Gypsies just a few months ago, and he seems to watch with glee as his economy burns down like hell.

Power assymetries that we though would disappear with the advent of modernity, keep on being recycled in new forms. Rationality—authentic reason characteristic of authentic persons—is fading and giving way to Madness, as lamented by the contemporary philosophers.

Human right is synonymous to civilization, and the full respect of human rights can only happen in a society of rationality, wisdom, and universal love. Such a society operates on the culture of dialogue, the respect for differences, recognition of talents and competencies, and the essential respect for one’s humanity.

Sadly, such a society is not around yet, even as we need to do colossal spade works to build it. I still recall the likes of Jurgen Habermas, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse pontificate about the ‘sane society’, the ideal society that is rational, full of compassion (loving behavior), and productive. I resonate well with the minds of these thinkers who contended that no matter how bad the situation is, hope is there in building that culture of civility in a ‘sane society’.

Such a dream of building a future world can be done in a non-exclusionary way. Let us not tire in doing our spade works to build it.

[Philippines, 02 December 2010]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,

UNLADTAU: https://unladtau.wordpress.com,

COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,

BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,

ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

NERO SARKOZY EXPELS GYPSIES: PRELUDE TO BONAPARTIST EUROPE?

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Good Day and goodwill to you fellow global citizens!

It is now September as I write this piece. September is the end of summer up North, while here in the tropics it is another month of monsoon rains and powerful typhoons.

Well, in France it is summer for the legitimate scions of the Republic and Caucasian Europeans, while it is typhoon season for the Gypsies. Ethnic groups that are migratory bands don’t have a place at all in Sarkozy’s France and the likes of him who are indubitably Nero types of leaders that burned Europe’s economy while they fiddled in their palaces.

Actually, if you take a cursory look at all the planet’s regions, indigenous peoples or IPs have been effectively excluded in the development game. They are the labor robots for Big Business mines and forestry enterprises who are expendable as flies. Never mind if they die by the thousands in mishaps or dreaded viral epidemics in the boondocks, their value is as low as a cheap cyborg that can be decommissioned anytime.

Lucky are those IPs up the boondocks as there are too many feel-good urban habitués who have taken up the cudgels of IP advocacies. After the Western anthropologists over-studied the highlanders for the purpose of acquiring data for the corporate oligarchs to control the said IPs (while anthropologists fatten their purses with research funds and academic promotions), here comes the feel-good urbanites who can perhaps balance the dark machinations of Western-cloned anthropologists and oligarchic patrons.

The Gypsies just don’t have such a luck it seems, and so are those migrating bands of IPs in Africa and Brazil. Ambulant IPs are not to be found in the notebooks and databases of anthropologists, or if they do, they are programmable for expulsion if not physical elimination.

Gypsies just don’t possess the combat prowess of the once mighty Sioux and natives of America, for if they did, they could have shot down so many robbers, psychopaths, cops and soldiers. They carry along with them their baggage and cultural wealth, and no more. They are not up to hold on to any piece of territory in the lands they occupy for a while, they don’t have visas or passports to show to immigration cops as these documents are alien to their ‘system’, and they come in peace and harmony with those whom they interact with.

Sarkozy and his ilk are scions of the Jacobites of pre-Bonaparte heydays, and should not be perceived as ‘democrats’ in the true sense of the term. Sarkozy, Merkel, Barroso and company are of the same mold of Nero leaders who would have no second thoughts in expelling migrants in the continent through miniscule expulsions of the nature of Gypsy kick-in-the-ass as pilot ‘project’ for a forthcoming grand scale of expulsions.

If there is any word of advice I can give to my fellow Asians in Europe right now, better depart in peace while there is time. Thou art the worthless Mandingos of a forthcoming Bonapartist gendarme state based in Brussels, and you can be butchered like fried chickens if the tide will turn the clock towards a full gendarme state indeed.

Sarkozy is a mere Robespiere, a pawn in the dangerous games being hatched by the oligarchs there. Sooner or later he’ll be booted out of office, replaced by one who would advance the Bonapartist agenda for a nation-less unified Europe. Merkel, Cameron, Barroso and their likes are going that path too, as more fanatical Bonapartists will be installed to power.

The Gypsies’ expulsion could very well be the ‘handwriting on the wall’ of neo-Mandingos of all hues (including White Mandingos from Eastern Europe), a prelude to a larger crackdown forthcoming.

[Philippines, 01 September 2010]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,

UNLADTAU: https://unladtau.wordpress.com,

COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,

BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,

ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

SPARTACUS UNVEILED: TROUNCING BONARPIST EUROPE

SPARTACUS UNVEILED: TROUNCING BONARPIST EUROPE

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Hail Bonaparte! Hail New Rome! Hail the Empire!

Such slogans could very well be the reverb calls across Europe any one of these coming months. Bonaparte is coming back to Europe, beginning with the consolidation of the union and the implementation of a state ideology based precisely on the centralized institutions that Napoleon Bonaparte seeded during his halcyon days.

New Rome has arisen, with its center at Brussels. Its ‘wings’ are EU and USA (with Canada its client-state), two continents that face each other across the Atlantic like select guardians of the West. As already elaborated by this analyst in couples of articles, Bonapartism in a new form is the emerging state ideology of New Rome that is sometimes referred to as the 4th Reich.

“Bombard the old world to perdition” was the late Emperor’s agenda and directive on his enthused army. The old world today refers to the nation-states, and their destruction would mean the return to the powerful cities plus regions that would altogether bow obeisance to Brussels.

The new twist in Europe today, when it is burning economically upon the burst of bubbles in the de-industrialized south (Greece began it all), is the entry of the Jurassic Bank—the International Monetary Fund—into the Bonapartist game of the oligarchs. A salvation agenda comprising of saving ailing banks and imposing austerity measures on creditor countries is the swagger of the rather thuggish dinosaur, as we observed recently.

When a dinosaur institution is called upon to salve Europe’s problems, it is clear that the ‘handwriting on the wall’ of the old world of European nations has come. With cities and regions demanding return to old days of social privileges (evaporated by austerity measures), more riots are anticipated, thus justifying more draconian gendarme tactics enforced upon angry wage workers and professionals.

If the violent protests will continue and reach ‘critical mass’ in both southern and northern sectors of the union, then the rationale for a continental police state will arise. A New Bonaparte, whoever may this politician be, shall be catapulted phoenix-like to the nadir of totalitarian power, with the support of the union’s central and national parliaments.

As you can see, Bonapartism without a Bonaparte is an oxymoron. The maelstrom in the continent will continue to build up until the condition will be ripe for a totalitarian gendarme state. The maximum agenda of a New Bonaparte would be no less than “bombard the old world” of nations: eradicate them and replace them with pre-configured regions.

Such a move will deter whatever re-actions may come from the citizens to re-strengthen the bargaining positions of their respective nations and go back to the old national currencies. Necessarily, the assets of the national armies will be re-directed to Brussels that will serve as the central command, and the assets will include the nukes of UK and France.

Since the Roman pathos or spirit has been revived anew, with war pursuits (notably versus New Persia) on the menu of hawkish adventurisms, then Europeans can only but hope for the presence of a Mark Anthony who can battle the Emperor from within Brussel’s institutions. Wishful thinking, as in a totalitarian setting all the Mark Anthony wannabes will be either jailed or terminated. Like Mark Anthony of the last days of the Roman republic, dead, caput!

In the absence of a Mark Anthony in the continent, then Europeans can best leverage their strength via a new Spartacus. Let the Spartacists gel as a gigantic movement from the diverse grassroots and working class movements in the continent, and rest assured they can be the ones that can form the resistance.

Europeans better galvanize solidarity the quickest now as an anti-fascist front versus a determined Bonapartist oligarchy & technocracy. There is no better time to revive Spartacus than now. Reviving Spartacus after the Empire and neo-Bonaparte are in place will prove to be counterproductive and defeatist.

I hope that Europeans would wake up fast to recognize the dreaded dragon of Bonapartism rising so rapidly in their backyard. Only they can stop the new fascism from consolidating further and installing a new Emperor Bonaparte.

[Philippines, 30 July 2010]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,
UNLADTAU: https://unladtau.wordpress.com,
COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,
BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,
ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com%5D

GULF STATES: ENFORCERS OF OLIGARCHIC ‘CLASH OF CIVILIZATION’ MADNESS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Magandang gabi! Good evening!

Dusk is the mark of the day as I write this note. I wish to continue writing on the theme of Arab gulf states—whether they’re Asian or not. It seems that the ‘twilight of the gods’ scenario has been engulfing the gulf states altogether, a sort of reprieve prior to Armageddon.

For this piece, I’d focus on the observation that the Arab gulf states are the enforcers of the Anglo-European oligarchy’s ‘clash of civilizations’ madness. There has been so much military build-up in the gulf states lately, proof of a preparation for a larger conflagration. (The expenditure level measures by the hundreds of billions of dollars, with KSA leading the hemorrhage of military hardware buying spree.)

East Asia, as we can see, has been operating on the modality of a ‘dialogue of cultures’ expressed as economic, political, and cultural cooperation. The entire region has been the growth driver of the global economy for some time now, and will perform such an optimizer role in the foreseeable future.

Such a trend, however, does not characterize the gulf states. Already filthy rich with their petrodollars, they nonetheless aren’t progenitors of growth driving for the global economy. They grow for the sake of sustaining their own development gains and prepare themselves for the eventual drying up of the oil wells.

Gulf economies’ billionaire are deeply encumbered to the financier operations of the Anglo-European oligarchs who have been using the former as their dummies and/or junior partners. There is hardly any big commercial and industrial concern in the gulf states today that are not immersed in the investment interests of the likes of George Soros & cronies who represent the Who Is Who in the West.

Arab sheikhs style themselves in fact as Western-honed leaders who are no different from their Western counterparts. The difference lies only in the sheikhs’ profession of Islam, an ultra-conservatism that the West allowed to thrive to render the sheikhdoms as buffer regions versus pan-Arab nationalism or pan-Arabism of the Iraq, Syria, Lybia, and Nasserite Egypt.

Pan-Arabism is now rapidly decaying, and so the polarity game has shifted to Shiite Islam as the key enemy in lieu of the former. The Arab kings and sheikhs are surely having a great time nurturing hatreds versus the ayatollahs of Persia whom they demonize with deep disdain.

Back home, the sheikhdoms have to neutralize their homegrown jihadist movements led by the Al Qaida. While the home enemy grows in size and intensity of terror, tension grows as the sheikhs can’t help on anticipating the attacks by the revolutionary guards of Persia, attacks that may be accompanied by limited nuclear weaponry.

The situation in the gulf region had pushed the sheikhs into a toxic alliance with the Zionists who are the other leg in the beachhead of the Anglo-European oligarchy in regaining control of the entire Western Asia. A loose Zionist-Sunni (gulf states’ ecclesial religion) alliance has been in formation since couples of years back yet, to recall.

In my own analysis, it is now too late to see the possibility of the sheikhs dis-engaging from their active participation in the polarity game of the West’s oligarchy. The sheikhs and Arab billionaires are an organic part of that oligarchy while they feign difference via Sunni wahabism or equivalents. A superficial difference that is, to note.

The clock now ticks for the gulf states, an Armageddon clock that could unleash the forces of destruction in the region. And such a clock will continue to tick, unless a paradigm shift will be initiated by the sheikhs & Arab billionaires which is nauseatingly impossible an eventuality at this moment.

[Philippines, 22 July 2010]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,

UNLADTAU: https://unladtau.wordpress.com,

COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,

BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,

ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

LARGE CLASS, MAD DISCOURSE: SAME ROOTS

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Magandang hapon! Good afternoon!

Classes have resumed here in Manila/Philippines, and our campuses are again swarming with pupils, students, teachers. Focused on their tasks, the same stakeholders are barely aware of what’s going on in the world around them, a world that is changing fast at confusing rate.

While the rugs under our feet our changing, the old context of large classes (class sizes of 100-250) are still in vogue in many universities worldwide. Some other universities that may have abolished them in the past, are re-instituting the large class platform.

As I’ve said in a previous article, the large class platform belongs to the past ages of medievalism and industrialism. To implement it now, at this time, is a regressive decision.

The large class, which unconsciously glues students to the ‘Herd instinct’, is anathema to the overall evolutionary movement of the human psyche towards greater individuation. University education is supposedly an opportunity field for the flourishing of that individuation.

The ‘mad discourse’ is finding expression in many venues today. The large class platform feeds inputs to the mad discourse, and is subtly rooted in it in fact. Its rationale hides under the rubric of technocratese language, but any sharp observer will easily unveil the illusion and show the large class platform’s connection to the ‘mad discourse’.

Imagine if all students are subjected to the same large classes, where they cannot air feedbacks or questions at all as they are consigned to passive receivers of inputs from a lecture professor. Imagine exposing freshmen students to this platform for 4-5 years, and assess the degeneration of the same students into the hovels of passivity.

Such a regimentation is just but one step short of what the Phase III cybernetics is up to these days: chipping humans. Phase III cybernetics had worked out to erase the dividing line between human behavior and machine behavior, with practical uses aimed at chipping all humans in the future.

The same chipped humans can then be put under the control of mega-computer systems, their behavior eventually reprogrammable to make them more in tune with what the System demands. They can be sent to war fronts as armies and technicians, and will experience no fear as fear will be deleted or subjugated by mega-control commands from their own psyche.

Wars and police states of the near future will be easily justified with every technocratese language conceivable, rendering them as typical ‘mad discourse’ in the argot of Michel Foucault. Mad, in that the erasure of the boundary between reason and the irrational has been effectively erased or deleted.

If there is anything that university policy makers must do now, it is to abolish all large classes while there is still time. Globally, we concerned citizens are doing what we can to deter moves by elites to install nazi-type regimes in the West, leading to a global state later that will be in need of compliant citizens.

Let us all do our tasks now to take down school platforms that will be the launching pads for compliant humans who can be chipped in couples of years’ time. The VeriChip by Verizon Corp is now out, and before 2015 a more perfected prototype will be out, ready to be implanted to humans via syringe (by trained doctors/medics).

We still have the time to act, to note. Any decision that infringes on human liberties is dangerously fascistic, such as re-instituting or maintaining large classes.

Failing to act in time, we shall watch in horror as new ‘das boots’ kids will be churned out from our youth, commanded via chips to participate in building a Draconian deux ex machina of the near future. And they’re products of our universities, products of large classes.

By then, I will be having the last laugh. With resonating guffaws will I declare “I told you so.”

[Philippines, 27 June 2012]

[See: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com,

UNLADTAU: https://unladtau.wordpress.com,

COSMICBUHAY: http://cosmicbuhay.blogspot.com,

BRIGHTWORLD: http://erlefraynebrightworld.wordpress.com, ARTBLOG: http://erleargonza.wordpress.com,

ARGONZAPOEM: http://argonzapoem.blogspot.com]

LIBERAL INQUISITIONISM: FASCIST TENDENCIES REVEALED

Erle Frayne D. Argonza

Good evening!

It is night time as I write this piece. The prominent cloudless black night outside my window is akin to reality being concealed by subterfuge or ‘illusions’ (to use Freud’s term), so it may prove worthy for us to reflect on what is being concealed by the resort of the Liberal Party to moralistic jingoism in its latest poll campaigns.

It would be fitting to begin with the behavior of the presidential  candidate Noynoy Aquino, who, just a couple of nights back, made a public declaration about the Ampatuan family’s support for the Noynoy presidency and his Liberal Party or LP. The Ampatuan family is being indicted for mass slaughter of political adversaries and media persons in Maguindanao province, besides that it had shown how it could cheat in the polls as support for a presidential candidate in 2004 (Gloria Arroyo).

That the LP is openly supported by a family with sociopathic, hostile, and/or antisocial members is indubitably confounding to the unsophisticated folks. However, to more knowledgeable observers, notably behavior analysts, it isn’t surprising for a sociopathic gang to converge in interest with Noynoy Aquino who, as per classified internal information now filtering out, suffers from psychological disorder conditions.

Gangster-type antisocial, hostile, sociopathy is the base of recruitment for fascist and racist movements. Hitler knew that formula well, so his ideologues hastened to recruit unreformed malefactors who would constitute the Nazi party’s mass membership and SS cadres.

Lenin himself revealed that the dividing line between liberalism and fascism is thin. Unfolding events proved him right in Europe, when the first fascist movement, led by Mussolini, seized power in Italy. To recall, the Italian fascists were rabidly moralistic in their campaigns, and bullied their way to power.

I wish Lenin were still alive, so I could argue with him that there really is no dividing line between liberalism and fascism, that the dividing line is merely an illusion. The philosophers Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze demonstrated, in the case of schizophrenics, that the dividing line between rationality and irrational (e.g. manic-depressive) behavior is non-existent, by using  ‘schizoanalysis’ as their theoretical rampart.

If we were to follow Deleuze & Guattari well, we would say that, in the case of Noynoy Aquino and the criminal Ampatuans, the dividing line between the sane and the mad has been effectively erased. I would further advance that Noynoy is just but an infinitesimal representation of a much larger reality, the members of the Liberal Party, who are concealing their own authoritarian personality traits behind a mantle of moralism (i.e. good governance cliché) discourse.

To be fair to the LP officialdom, it would be more fitting an exercise to let the party top brass at least be tested for ‘authoritarian personality’ tendencies. In behavioral science we call this the Adorno Scale, developed by the late Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer and tested on very large samples in Europe and the Americas.

The Adorno Scale is available anytime for testing, it uses a very innovative approach to testing that combines quantitative and qualitative methods, and we have the experts (psychology, sociology, psychiatry) who can team up to administer the test on Drilon, Noynoy, Abad, Roxas, Gascon, and other party stalwarts. It would be much fairer if the stalwarts of other parties undergo the same test.

In my preliminary analysis, the Liberal Party will have the highest scores on Adorno Scale, indicating the ‘authoritarian personality’ type among its leaders and cadres. The result is as predictable as the sun would shine tomorrow. In layman’s parlance, ‘authoritarian personality’ means fascistic personality.

Fascism is on the rise again globally, and global fascism is not a remote phenomenon to ascend phoenix-like. Fascism often ascends at the tail end of an economic crisis—of a 60-year cycle called the Kondratieff Wave. In the early 19^th century, Bonapartism emerged so suddenly as a scourge of Europe, while White racism (Ku Klux Klan) emerged before and after the American Civil War.

Fascism and Nazism occurred at the tail end of a K2 wave (Kondratieff wave’s downward end phase). The Weimar Republic (Germany was then the greatest industrial power) collapsed, hyper-inflation ate up the folks’ pockets, and lo and behold! Mussolini and Hitler arrived on the political terrain.

Moralistic inquisitionism, which employs good governance cliché to witch-hunt political adversaries today, is for me an indubitable sign of an underlying fascism, both individually (among leaders) and collectively in the Yellow Forces’ camp. It just takes a matter of provoking mass panic, e.g. poll failure, added to a Bogey Man, e.g. General Bangit declaring a coup, to ignite a hysteria that would find catharsis via social upheaval or equivalent.

With sociopaths and manic-depressives at the head of a party such as the LP, and with Noynoy and Mar Roxas winning the presidential and vice presidential posts, the country would surely be in trouble.

Mar Roxas was involved just some couples of years back in supporting Christian militias to counterveil against the Muslim rebels (MILF). He did made public statements about the matter, and he was among those legislators role-playing barriers to the signing of a peace concord between the GRP and MILF.

Christian militia members are terribly antisocial types, with so many who are borderline personalities (below average intelligence), who would become criminals if not trained to do productive work properly. The Tadtad, for instance, has a track record of genocidal massacres against simple Muslim folks, and they’re intact organizationally.

In case that a local fascist movement is bound to arise in this country, don’t ever search for them now among Erap’s forces or Villar and Red forces. Search for them inside the Yellows, particularly inside the LP leadership. Administer to them the Adorno Scale and see for yourself what I’m discoursing about.

Hardly have they won, and many LP candidates are already beginning to behave like medieval Inquisitors who would take down grafters very soon. Their faces look grim when they discourse, like the grim Nazi propagandists Goebbels and ideologues, or better still the Knights Templars and Teutonic Knights whose arrogance and hubris were so colossal and who were emulated by the Nazi leaders themselves.

Inside the LP think-tank/directorate are university professors, in like vein that university mentors formed the Nazi Party and molded Hitler & partisans into mad Nero-types. They are so low profile, the public wouldn’t even notice their presence. I do personally know some of them, know their levels of narcissism, egoism, arrogance, and authoritarianism, and they secretively are powerful inside the party.

When imbalanced personalities would lead a political party and flaunt inquisitionism so openly, we may be experiencing the ‘sign of the times’. Democracy may again take the back seat, as a new cycle of authoritarianism becomes ascendant. Such an authoritarianism, now gelling inside the Liberal camp, could converge with other fascisms toward a consolidated global fascism and the rise of a global Bonaparte.

[Philippines, 23 April 2010. See also: IKONOKLAST: http://erleargonza.blogspot.com; UNLADTAU: https://unladtau.wordpress.com.]

GAZA: NEO-CONSERVATIVES’ HATCHERY FOR LARGER CONFLAGRATION

Erle Frayne Argonza

Magandang gabi! Good evening!

Modern Israel had ceased to be an underling state that it used to project itself during its early historic phase. It had grown into a regional power, its military might made possible by massive infusion of western aid and the economic prosperity resulting from that external intervention. It has 300 nuclear warheads, per intelligence reports and revelation by former US president Jimmy Carter, and is a key pawn of the Western financier oligarchs in their political pandemics worldwide.

The ascent of the neo-conservatives in the USA, led by the likes of Cheney, had surely been a great boon to the fascistic forces within the Israeli Establishment whose appetite for aggression has been driven by obsessive desires to carve out new territories—for the rambunctious nation—outside Israel’s borders. A convergence of mindsets between two fascistic forces, in the USA and Israel, would surely fit into the mad plan of hegemonistic Anglo-European-American oligarchs to ignite another world war, which coincides with the crashing recessionary economies in their backyards.

To contend that the latest conflict between Israeli forces and the Hamas is merely a brawl between neighbors is idiocy fit for the blind and simpletons. The neo-conservative agenda, hatched by Cheney & comrades, is to hook up Israel in an alliance with Sunni Arab states and pit the alliance against Shiite Islam led by Iran. Israel was simply compliant with agreements already preset as early as late 2007 yet, when neo-cons officials frequented the region and forged this Zion-Sunni.

That the conflict has already quite spread to a new domain, namely the Israeli-Lebanese rebel conflict, shows that some hidden forces are working to expand the conflict to one that is region-wide. A terrorist 3rd force in Lebanon, which the British & American intelligence could have created (just as they did in my own country by creating and funding the Abu Sayyaf), was hatched with the purpose of widening the latitudes of the conflict.

Now that the neo-conservatives were effectively booted out of power, the world community can dowse water on this mad conflict which doesn’t serve the welfare of both Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Let us hope that the new US president, Barack Obama, will be informed and advised more wisely by cooler and saner officials in Washington about the real score in Western Asia: that the conflict better end up and a ceasefire declared.

Let us also hope that the leaders of Israel, Palestine, Eqypt, and Jordan, who are all stooges of the Anglo-European financier oligarchy, would recognize to some fresher insights about how to attain stability in the region, by listening to new leaders in Washington who, in turn, should work to veer away America from the mighty clutch of the same oligarchic cabal. The prophetic timeline for World War III is not a fixed one, but rather a flexible timeline that can be changed, leading us away from abominable conflagration to world peace and cooperation.

[25 January 2009, Quezon City, MetroManila]