Heart of a heartless world: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, March 2023

To be sure, some of the language adopted by Marxists — e.g., heresies, dogma, sects, orthodoxy, schisms — is clearly borrowed from theological disputes. Furthermore, the recantations made by ex-communists at times seems to lend credence to this view.
Ross Laurence Wolfe, The Charnel-House: From Bauhaus to Beinhaus

For the life of me, I don’t know how we managed before the internet.

Of course there was the 1960s underground press scene with hundreds of local papers around the country. I regularly picked up copies of the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and the mother of all alternative newspapers, the Village Voice, from Anne Chicoine’s Books. Anne was an expatriate New Yorker who ran a literary bookshop in a shotgun storefront along Main Street when I lived in Ventura, California. She smoked a meerschaum pipe, spoke with a Manhattan accent, and gave me suggestions for books to read from her wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She kept the alternative papers with the underground comics in the revolving newspaper racks at the front of the store.

“So what’s this?” I asked, pointing to the Credentials of Ministry from the Universal Life Church with her name on it beside the cash register.

“I’m a fully ordained minister,” Anne smirked. “I got my minister’s license from a classified ad in the Freep for ten bucks. You need a wedding, baptism or funeral done I’m your gal. All perfectly legal apparently.”

I got my minister’s certificate soon thereafter. Kirby J. Hensley’s ULC and his pay-to-play ministry licenses were beginning to be tested legally in the early 1970s with a 1974 ruling in “Cramer v Commonwealth” granting the organization a religious tax exemption. By then Hensley had ordained over a million ministers. Whether the UCL’s license constitutes a fraudulent religious affiliation for tax avoidance purposes remains a contested issue. Whether or not a supposed religious organization is due a tax exemption is a matter of “church and state” in that America’s religion has always been the almighty dollar.

ULC’s airy-fairy motto is “Do that which is right,” a blanket ethics that covered Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans, pagans, atheists and whoever else. It’s a vanilla version of Aleister Crowley’s rule for his Abbey of Thélème that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of The Law.” I bounced between atheism and agnosticism in those days so I got the minister’s license on a lark. I was just coming out of a six-month stint as an evangelical Christian after having been a Catholic through my sacramental Confirmation. I would go on to experiment with Unitarianism, Baháʼí-ism and Zen Buddhism, and I continue to have an ongoing interest in spirituality today.

That’s because throughout my life I’ve had what we called in the 1960s “spiritual experiences” produced by contemplative walking, religious conversion, meditative practices, and psychedelic drug usage. I never considered these experiences to be interventions from some spiritual being or realm outside myself. They were all the result of my individual biochemistry, but this isn’t a matter of crude materialist interaction. At base Aristotle’s expression that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” holds true in that, minimally, the accumulated parts need to be augmented by the relationships between those parts. Dialectics emerged in the nineteenth century while gestalt and synergy arose in the twentieth century all to describe the interaction or cooperation between elements of a totality to account for it being greater than the simple sum of those parts.

William James gave a series of lectures to categorize the different spiritual encounters humans have had across the world throughout time which were compiled into the book The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. Two common elements that seem to constitute universalities, are the mystical sensation of transcending the ego and of communion. Every hippie worth their salt in the 1960s had a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap with those text-heavy labels that read like schizophrenic word salad but which always started with the declaration “All-One!” The spiritual sense of communion, of belonging to some greater whole or that “I contain multitudes” as Walt Whitman announced in his poem Song of Myself, is paralleled by what those of us who took psychedelics in the 1960s called “ego death.” The drugs forced a temporary loss of a sense of self which we equated with Eastern religions that promoted negating the individual’s attachment to a separate sense of ego through various spiritual practices. James chose to limit his studies of mystical moments to direct, immediate religious experiences, explicitly excluding any examination of religious theology or institutions. Several of my mystical experiences occurred in the context of churches and other religious organizations that had extremely negative theologies and religious practices.

I encountered plenty of heresy, dogma, sectarianism, orthodoxy and schism during my brief involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ at Ventura Community College in 1970. The friend who converted me, upon expressing frustration at the rabid leftwing bent to my born-again Christianity, dismissed my politics and my friendship by insisting that I forget about all worldly concerns and simply study my bible. When our campus was invaded by a Children of God “commune” whose “hippie” members denounced “The System,” predicted the rise of a totalitarian One World Government under the Anti-Christ’s brutal dictatorship, and preached its revolutionary overthrow by Jesus in the Second Coming, my orthodox Christian friends were understandably confused. They considered themselves frontline shock troops against evil, so when the Hare Krishnas periodically showed up to dance and chant at our school the Christians confronted the saffron-robed dolts as demon-possessed. During one debate when a Krishna pointed to the chest of that same Christian friend to indicate that some fanciful Hindu deity resided in his heart, my friend yelled vehemently back that “There’s no devil in me whatsoever, no sir!” That was the first time I experienced the evangelical tendency to profess a love for Israel and the Jewish people while simultaneously expressing vile anti-Semitic insults against Jews. Christian Zionists consider Jews as both “globalist devils” and an eschatological tripwire for the End Times in which the Second Coming of Jesus restores a fully resurrected Israel to its rightful place as a religious and cultural beacon in the community of nations. It’s the metaphor of “Christ’s long suffering bride,” both abused and redeemed.

After community college, I eventually started reading Karl Marx, who wrote that:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

This tempered, dialectical understanding of human faith runs counter to the actual history of religion—the intolerance, oppression, sectarianism, mayhem, torture, slaughter, mass murder, and warfare that is SOP for religion. Doris Lessing made a similarly balanced evaluation of Marxism when she wrote:

I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects and creeds. But it was an attempt.

Religion is far and away the more destructive ideology when compared to Marxism. There are no “holy wars” between branches of socialism unlike the Catholic/Protestant or the Christian/Moslem bloodbaths that stain history and the present. I don’t accept the capitalist insult that socialism is an odious form of religion (Ludwig von Mises) or the bourgeois atheist’s claim that Christianity or Judaism are fundamentally socialistic in nature (Ayn Rand). Instead I’ll briefly touch on Marxism’s eschatological tendency per Raymond Aron to see the working class as humanity’s “collective savior… that is, the class elected through suffering for the redemption of humanity.” “One of the most common charges leveled at Marxists is that, for all their atheistic pretensions, they retain a quasi-religious faith in the revolutionary dispensation of working class dictatorship,” according to Ross Laurence Wolfe in his salient essay “Demonology of the working class”. “’It’s become an almost compulsory figure of speech to refer to Marxism as a Church,’ observed the French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1951. […] Socialism, however, is not about worshiping but rather abolishing the worker.”

The problems of Marxist “theology” aside, my time in various socialist organizations and movements acquainted me with a number of similar “spiritual” moments. There are analogous experiences of egolessness, communion, and community to be had on the Left compared with religion. Referring again to Wolfe’s brilliant essay, I reveled in the “mad rush” of direct action and the “demonic character” of revolution. Certainly the “Faustian dimension of Marxist thought”—his exaltation of the proletariat as “not just Promethean but Luciferian”—appealed to me viscerally. Wolfe’s lengthy discussion of Marxism’s deification of the proletariat versus the need to abolish the working class is well worth reading in full.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Introduction” by Karl Marx (1844)
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman (1855)
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
The Golden Notebook, “Introduction” by Doris Lessing (1971)
“Demonology of the working class” by Ross Laurence Wolfe, The Charnel-House: From Bauhaus to Beinhaus (2016)

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Party of one: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, April 2022

Four independent workers’ soviets operated concurrently in Moscow during the Russian 1905 Revolution. Proud Soviet historians were always quick to point out that the one aligned with the Bolsheviks operated a bomb-making operation out of Maxim Gorky’s apartment. Meanwhile, the more famous 1905 St. Petersburg workers’ and soldiers’ soviet, precursor to the 1917 Petrograd soviet, had puzzling gaps in its official Soviet history until the anarchist historian Voline published The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921 in 1947. In it he revealed that the soviet met in his St. Petersburg apartment.

Aside from the usual disputes over primary and secondary evidence or what constitutes historical fact, and before any arguments over what a particular history signifies, there are always the missing parts of history. What I mean is the things that happened and affected the course of history but that never got recorded in the historical record and thus were subsequently forgotten. The 1905 St. Petersburg workers’ and soldiers’ soviet met in Voline’s apartment and contributed to the development of soviet power whether or not that fact was entered into the historical record prior to 1947. So yes, if a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound.

By any other name: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, August 2021

I picked up an archaic paper flyer pinned to an obsolete cork board in the now-defunct Market Street branch of FLAX Art Supplies. The handbill advertised a web designer and mobile app developer—Daniel Goodwyn—who offered to teach virtually any platform or software. I wanted to learn social media to prepare for self-publishing my novel 1% Free, so I called. He was cheap. We arranged to meet at Philz Coffee on 24th Street.

“I only drink Philz coffee,” Daniel said.

We met six or seven times at the end of 2015, beginning of 2016. Daniel was an evangelical Christian favorable to fundamentalism, but he wore his religious beliefs close to the vest. He didn’t proselytize. Instead, he would produce his worn King James Bible from his backpack before starting each lesson. I pulled out my Handbook of Denominations by Mead, Hill and Atwood our third meeting and we were off discussing Christianity between social media tutoring. We talked dispensationalism, cessationism, and biblical inerrancy. He’d attended 24/7 worship and prayer events, and would soon do web design for the messianic Jews for Jesus organization.

Israel and Palestine, confict without end: “What’s Left?” October 2014, MRR #377

The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.

Jim Hightower

I’m a middle-of-the-road moderate.

This feels like a stand up AA confession. Me, “Lefty” Hooligan, a moderate. But I’m middle-of-the-road when it comes to the whole Israel/Palestine conflict.

I grudgingly agree that Israel has the right to exist, but I vehemently oppose Israel’s military overkill, its collective punishment and massacre of Palestinians in pursuit of eradicating Hamas terrorism. I grudgingly agree that Palestinians should constitute their own nation, but I adamantly oppose Hamas terrorism, its indiscriminate targeting of Israelis and threats to wipe out the Jewish people. I think that Israel’s overwhelming military and economic superiority over the Palestinians, this massive day-to-day power imbalance, virtually guarantees the abuse of that power in the form of discrimination and slaughter, apartheid and ethnic cleansing.*

I wasn’t always such a reluctant moderate with respect to the bloody Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I know the subject deeply, but narrowly, and from one side only. As an undergraduate at UCSC, I studied Jewish history in general and Zionist history in particular, with a six month stay on an Israeli kibbutz (commune) in the Jezreel Valley with my Jewish girlfriend in the summer and fall of 1974. My grasp of the Arab side of things is glancing at best. Yet, like a shard of hologram properly illuminated, a slice of history properly studied will reveal the whole. What got in the way of my extremist sentiments, and what made me a moderate was what Israelis like to call “the facts on the ground.”

I was and remain a communist. I was intrigued by Zionist socialism and I had an affinity for kibbutz-style communism, but I soon discovered how intrinsically rightwing they were. Zionist colonial society was dominated from 1920 on by the Histadrut labor federation—part trade union, part capitalist owner and employer, and part de facto state. The Histadrut ran close to 75% of the Zionist economy in pre-1948 Palestine until the newborn Israeli state nationalized half of that, and the labor federation’s social power has been on the decline ever since. The national syndicalism professed by the Histadrut and key to Labor Zionism shunned class struggle for Jewish national unity. It was a non-Marxist, even anti-Marxist socialism rooted in Romantic notions of organic nationalism and ethnic purity.

That’s where the supposed radical communism of the kibbutzim came from. Labor Zionism, often used synonymously with Zionist socialism, was first cousin to Stalin’s “socialism in one country” in promoting a “socialism for one people,” the Jewish people. And Zionist socialism transcended its nationalist socialist roots into true proletarian internationalism only in communist fractions evident within the halutzim (pioneers) of the third aliyah (settler wave). These communist fractions were tangential to the kibbutz movement led by the Hashomer Hatzair and then by the old MAPAM political party. They were central to the Gdud Ha’avoda (Labor Brigades) founded by members of the Crimean Commune who followed Joseph Trumpeldor, which were then deliberately destroyed by the Histadrut. As such, this international working class communism, which attempted to make common cause with the Arab workers in Palestine, was a minority of a minority within the Zionist colonial project. It was doomed to failure. Probably why I identify with it to this day. Ze’ev Sternhell’s book The Founding Myths of Israel makes these arguments most cogently. Israeli society has since moved inexorably ever rightward.

Then as now, I’m an anti-statist. I don’t like to see the building and proliferating of nation-states. I don’t like people aspiring to create them, and I certainly don’t like people butchering each other with them. Arthur Waskow once spun out a lovely libertarian utopia for the area of Israel/Palestine that entailed decentralized federations of autonomous Jewish and Arab cantons residing side by side in a fully binational society. Sure, and if the cat laid eggs, so goes a yiddish saying, it would be a chicken. I don’t think I was ever that naive to imagine anarchism taking root in the area anytime in the foreseeable future. I was disabused of such fantasies by having experienced reality in Israel. Part of that reality is the current demographics of the region. There are 6.1 million Jews and nearly 5.8 Arabs living in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

These facts beg for a creative reconsideration of the “one state solution” put forward by the old pre-Oslo Palestine Liberation Organization for a democratic, secular nation-state in the region of Palestine. Not quite as elegant was the call for a binational state in Israel/Palestine by Zionist socialism’s left wing, the aforementioned Hashomer Hatzair and MAPAM, that evaporated with the formation of Israel’s Labor Party in 1968. The chances for either a democratic secular state or a binational state in Israel/Palestine however are slim to none, not without a lot of violence and social disruption. Far more blood and chaos will accompany the least favorable but far more likely solution, the “two state solution” that creates a Palestinian nation-state in the Occupied Territories alongside a mostly intact state of Israel. Not only is the two-state solution the highly probable outcome of decades of suffering and war, but it is likely to reproduce the same power imbalance, a militarily and economically hegemonic Israel running roughshod over a string of poverty-stricken Palestinian Bantustans.

Which is a tragedy considering that, at least on the Jewish side of things, there have been imaginative ways for a people to live and thrive without the need for a nation-state. At the beginning of the 20th century, as youthful European Jews took to socialist ideas and movements of various stripes, Zionist socialism predominated in a nationalist Zionist movement that promoted the colonization of Palestine under the patently false slogan of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Diametrically opposed to all forms of Zionism were the Jews who committed themselves to Marxist social democracy, specifically to the internationalist socialism embodied by the Bolsheviks and their Third International, which called for world proletarian revolution to bring about a classless stateless society. The Jewish Labor Bund positioned itself between these two poles to develop a hybrid socialism unique to the social situation of the Jewish people.

The Bund operated in eastern Europe, in the territorial ghetto known as the Pale of Settlement to which the Jewish people were confined and in which the Jews often comprised a sizable minority of the population. The socialism advocated by the Bund aligned with the international working class movement while defending the national characteristics of the Jewish people in the Pale of Settlement. The Jews of the Pale lived separately (in urban ghettos and Jewish villages called shtetls), had their own language (yiddish), religion, customs and culture, and shared various autonomous social institutions (schools, community councils, and mutual aid societies). From these facts the Bund derived a form of Jewish nationalism that downplayed any united sovereign Jewish territory for one based on Jewish community control of local schools, police and government. As such, the Jewish Labor Bund’s program prefigured the program of the Black Panther Party in the United States.

The Third Reich’s “Final Solution” put an end to the aspirations of the Jewish Labor Bund by liquidating the Jewish people in eastern Europe. I got to know some Bundists who had immigrated to New York City after the second World War. When they didn’t entirely assimilate, they became either ardent Communists or soft Zionists. Few remained affiliated with the Jewish Labor Bund, which like yiddish has recently experienced a revival in interest.

The spectrum of Zionist socialism/ Jewish Labor Bund socialism/ international socialism parallels a broader spectrum within the Jewish people at large, generated by the question over the nature of the Jewish people. There are those who would argue that the Jews aren’t a people at all, among them outspoken jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, and academic Shlomo Sand whose book The Invention of the Jewish People summarizes this position clearly. Then there are those at the opposite end of the spectrum like the Jewish Defense League who believe that the Jewish people are a nation, even a race, chosen by God and given the land of Israel as their inalienable birth right. Most who weigh in on the subject, including most Jews, hold a middle position, that the Jewish people are some amalgam of race, nation, ethnicity, tribe, culture or religion which cannot be clearly fixed. The point is moot however, given that Jews consider themselves Jews, and define themselves as Jews no matter the argument or the circumstance.

The Jews have existed as a self-identified, dispersed people at least since the Babylonian destruction of the first temple in 586 BCE. Thus, the Jewish people have survived partly or entirely without a nation-state for over 2,500 years. The Roman destruction of the second temple in 70 CE forced the Jews to adapt with the development of the synagogue as a temple in absentia. Yet whether this Jewish dispersal is termed exile or diaspora, it took more than the institution of the synagogue to hold it together. Vibrant centers of Jewish culture and learning overlapped concentrations of Jewish population first in ancient Babylonia, then in Moorish Spain, and finally in Medieval Poland.

These dynamic social/cultural/religious centers provided guidance and cohesion to the Jewish people as a whole, throughout the eastern hemisphere and eventually the world, and were crucial to Jewish survival. It can be argued that this core/periphery structure of Jewish existence was in crisis by 1850, with the rise of the modern nation-state. But what can’t be substantiated is the Zionist assertion that without a Jewish nation-state, the Jewish people will always be threatened by discrimination, harassment, murder, pogrom and holocaust. One of the most dangerous places in the world for a Jew to reside today is in Israel. All it would take is for Israel to lose just one war in order to raise the very real specter of Jewish genocide once again.

Between the wholly inadequate two-state solution and Waskow’s anarchist idyll, there are a number of quite possible, favorable resolutions to the Israel/Palestine conflict. I’ve highlighted as viable examples leftwing Zionist socialism’s binational state, the one-state solution of the PLO’s secular democratic Palestinian state, the Jewish Labor Bund’s socialist program for Jewish territorial autonomy, and the non-state core/periphery structure so critical to Jewish survival as a people over the millennia. This middle ground is quite broad, providing a wide political middle-of-the-road from which true moderation can arise. And a moderate, just solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be wonderful. In this instance, I would dearly love to refute Barry Goldwater when he said: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

*I rely on Max Boot’s exhaustive study Invisible Armies for the distinction between formal military action and terrorism.