Zizek: Hollywood Today & the Last Man on Earth

Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline
Slavoj Zizek

excerpt:

The Sad Lesson of Remakes

The Dark Knight is a sign of a global ideological regression for which one is almost tempted to use the title of Georg Lukacs’ most Stalinist work: the destruction of (emancipatory) reason. This regression reached its peak in I Am Legend, a recent blockbuster with Will Smith as the last man alive, whose only interest resides in its comparative value: one of the best ways to detect shifts in ideological constellation is to compare consecutive remakes of the same story. There are three (or, rather, four) versions of I Am Legend: Richard Matheson’s novel from 1954; the first film version, The Last Man on Earth (Italian title: L’Ultimo uomo della Terra, 1964, Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow), with Vincent Price; the second version, The Omega Man (1971, Boris Sagal, 1971), with Charlton Heston; and the last one, I Am Legend (2007, Francis Lawrence), with Will Smith. The first cinema version, arguably still the best one, is basically faithful to the novel. The starting premise is well-known – as the publicity-slogan for the 2007 remake says: “The last man… is not alone.” The story is yet another fantasy of witnessing one’s own absence: Neville, the sole survivor of a catastrophe which killed all humans except him, wanders along desolate city streets – and soon discovers that he is not alone, that a mutated species of the living dead (or, rather, vampires) is stalking him. There is no paradox in the motto: even the last man alive is not alone – what remains with him are the living dead. In Lacan’s terms, they are the objet petit a which adds itself to the 1 of the last man. As the story progresses, it is revealed that some infected people have discovered a means to hold the disease at bay; however, the “still living” people appear no different from the true vampires during the day while both are immobilized in sleep. They send a woman named Ruth to spy on Neville, and much of their interaction focuses on Neville’s internal struggle between his deep seated paranoia and his hope. Eventually Neville performs a blood test on her, revealing her true nature to him before she knocks him out and escapes. Months later, the still living people attack Neville and take him alive so that he can be executed in front of everyone in the new society; before execution, Ruth provides him with an envelope of pills so that he will feel no pain. Neville finally realizes why the new society of the living infected regards him as a monster: just as vampires were regarded as legendary monsters that preyed on the vulnerable humans in their beds, Neville has become a mythical figure that kills both vampires and the infected living while they are sleeping. He is a legend as the vampires once were… The first film version main difference with the novel is a shift in the ending: the hero (here called Morgan) develops in his lab a cure for Ruth; a few hours later, at nightfall, the still living people attack Morgan, who flees, but is finally gunned down in the church where his wife has been buried.

The second film version, The Omega Man, takes place in Los Angeles, where a group of resistant albinos calling themselves “The Family” have survived the plague, which has turned them into violent light-sensitive albino mutants, and affected their minds with psychotic delusions of grandeur. Although resistant, the members are slowly dying off, apparently due to the plague mutating. “The Family” is led by Matthias, formerly a popular Los Angeles television newscaster; he and his followers believe that modern science, and not flaws of humanity, are the cause of their misfortune. They have reverted to a luddite lifestyle, employing medieval imagery and technology, complete with long black robes, torches, bows and arrows. As they see it, Neville, the last symbol of science and a “user of the wheel,” must die. The final scene shows the human survivors departing in a Land Rover after the dying Neville gives them a flask of blood serum, presumably to restore humanity.

In the last version, which takes place in Manhattan, the woman who appears to Neville (here called Anna, accompanied by a young boy Ethan and coming somewhere from the South (Maryland and Sao Paolo are mentioned), tells him that God has sent her to bring him to the colony of survivors in Vermont. Neville refuses to believe her, saying that there cannot be a God in a world with such suffering and mass death. When the Infected attack the house that night and overrun its defenses. Neville, Anna, and Ethan retreat into the basement laboratory, sealing themselves in with an infected woman on whom Neville was experimenting. Discovering that the last treatment has successfully cured the woman, Neville realizes that he has to find a way to pass it on to other survivors before they are killed. After drawing a vial of blood from the patient and giving it to Anna, he pushes her and Ethan into an old coal chute and sacrifices himself with a hand grenade, killing the attacking Infected. Anna and Ethan escape to Vermont and reach the fortified survivors colony. In the concluding voice-over, she states that Neville’s cure enabled humanity to survive and rebuild, establishing his status as a legend, a Christ-like figure whose sacrifice redeemed humanity.

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Much as I respect Zizek's knowledge of Hollywood movies, he forgets another version of I Am Legend/The Omega Man, here. More Marxist appraisals of The Dark Knight appear here and here. JR

For communists, religion is not a dinner party

Patiently deciphering religion

Reason, Faith and Revolution by Terry Eagleton (Yale University Press, 2009)

Reviewed by Andrew Johnson

In recent years, there has been quite an outpouring of books on the subject of religion, or more precisely of arguments for and against atheism. Two of the most popular atheist polemics have been The God Delusion by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and God Is Not Great by journalist Christopher Hitchens. Although the two books are bracketed together, they serve somewhat different purposes. Hitchens, who had previously authored an entertaining attack on Mother Teresa, is interested mainly in turning his formidable store of rhetoric against Islam, although he takes in many other targets on his way; Dawkins seeks to put forward a rigorously materialist scientific worldview as an alternative to religious belief. Which approach the reader prefers is largely a matter of taste.

The unwary reader might expect Terry Eagleton, an atheist and a Marxist, to add to the chorus. Yet, in this new book, he does the opposite of what is expected. What he has instead produced is a witty and often devastating polemic against “Ditchkins” (his portmanteau term for Dawkins and Hitchens). In the course of his argument, Eagleton ranges between theology, philosophy, literary criticism and contemporary politics to damn his antagonists, and more than once traps them in their own categories.

Eagleton’s argument is a complex, multi-layered one, and at points rambles off on tangents. Any summary of his argument therefore risks misrepresenting it. However, Eagleton begins from a sensible starting point, which is the separate domains of religion and science. This is a risky area, since Dawkins, the great exponent of Darwinian evolution, is at his best when deconstructing American creationists and other religious fundamentalists who make scientifically dubious claims. However, as Eagleton points out, most Christians do not regard their faith as being incompatible with science – holding that the validity of the Christian message does not stand or fall on the literal truth of the creation story in Genesis, or whether Jesus really performed miracles.

There is more than reason

What scientific progress has done is to render supernatural explanations of the natural world unnecessary. However, Eagleton argues that this is largely beside the point. Physics does not explain Elvis; and increasingly sophisticated scientific explanations of the natural world do not render metaphysics redundant any more than they render art redundant. The major concerns of theology are with questions such as justice, truth, love, solidarity and what it means to live a good life. No faith in God is necessary to be interested in these questions – Greek philosophers and Indian Jains and Buddhists were exploring them in an atheistic context more than 2000 years ago – but the answers to them cannot be deduced from science. Reason, as Eagleton says, is a necessity; but reason is not all there is.

In recognising that metaphysical propositions cannot be either proved or disproved by science, Eagleton thereby avoids getting bogged down in sterile arguments over the existence or non-existence of God. He knows very well that all of those arguments have been around for centuries, and have never convinced anyone who did not already want to be convinced – Aquinas’ famous proofs of God’s existence already presuppose belief in him, just as Dawkins’ arguments to the contrary will seem feeble to a believer. Eagleton is more interested in why people choose to believe or disbelieve – which is as much an aesthetic question as an intellectual one – and what they mean by it.

Repeatedly, Eagleton accuses Ditchkins of buying his atheism on the cheap. What he means by that is that there are plenty of good reasons for rejecting religion, but his antagonists choose bad ones. As an illustration, he mentions the tendency of Irish people to reject Catholicism based on the shocking history of clerical abuse of children. This he regards as equivalent to renouncing the idea of socialism because of the Stalinist purges. Dawkins and Hitchens both present a lengthy account of crimes committed by organised religion, some of which is inaccurate or overstated – for instance, Dawkins’ curious idea that the conflict in the north of Ireland has been over rival interpretations of Christian doctrine. However, even if we accepted their entire charge sheet, finding a justification for the Inquisition in the teachings of Jesus would be as difficult a proposition as finding a justification for the Gulag in the writings of Marx.

In fact, Ditchkins’ account of the history of religion is so unremittingly grim and lacking in any redeeming features that it should be nothing short of a miracle that huge numbers of people freely subscribe to it. Does religion have nothing going for it at all? Eagleton, a confessed non-believer, who does not spare organised religion responsibility for its crimes in this book, nonetheless outlines at length what he believes would be a positive, emancipatory theology. This can be derived directly from the Gospels, which after all form an account of Jesus’ struggle against organised religion. Jesus appears in Eagleton’s account as almost a guerrilla fighter, contemptuous of the wealthy, the powerful and the hypocritical. Instead of acting as a respectable middle-class vicar, he challenges the authorities and preaches the overthrow of existing social relations. He consorts openly with the lowest elements of Palestinian society – lepers, money-lenders, prostitutes and the heretical sect of Samaritans. In contrast to many centuries of Christian puritanism, Jesus is so relaxed about sexual morality that he says virtually nothing about it.

Scandalous Jesus

And, having established Jesus as a scandalous figure in his own time, it follows that there is much here that does not form an easy fit for conventional organised religion. If it sounds like liberation theology, then that is because it seriously addresses what should be the proper concerns of theology. In this context, Eagleton remarks on Hitchens’ brusque dismissal of Latin American liberation theology, on which subject Hitchens is at one with the most hidebound Vatican conservatives. Eagleton also remarks on Dawkins’ proposed alternative Ten Commandments as a terribly boring, suburban vista – which may be uncharitable, as, in trying to deduce an ethical code from natural science, Dawkins is wrestling with a problem that has confounded the best philosophers, who too often have to fall back on mere utilitarianism.

More generally, Eagleton convicts Ditchkins of a number of interlinked philosophical faults. For materialists, they are remarkably idealist in their view of religious belief as the source of most of the world’s evils. The question of their positivism is not quite so clear. Dawkins, as a distinguished scientist in his own right, is well aware of the provisional nature of scientific knowledge, and certainly knows that scientists disagree with each other all the time – as they would have to for there to be any scientific progress. The air of absolute certainty Dawkins adopts – which stands him in good stead with those laymen who are in awe of scientists – is to a large extent a matter of style, and is less in evidence in Dawkins’ scientific writings. As for Hitchens, he is always more comfortable with concrete political issues than theoretical ones, and his great sweeping statements are not so much a case of dogmatism as of his using rhetorical flamboyance to cover up the gaps in his knowledge.

Finally, Eagleton regards Ditchkins as guilty of a strongly Whig interpretation of history, in which the commitment to reason and hope for progress – without which we would have no socialist movement – is replaced by an ideology of Reason and Progress. It is here that we see Dawkins at his most mid-Victorian, as he takes a rather complacently liberal view of civilisation constantly progressing along with scientific knowledge, a few minor hiccups like two World Wars and the Holocaust notwithstanding, and further progress only held up by man’s inability to shake off primitive superstition. But again, perhaps Eagleton is a little harsh on Dawkins, who is much better when he leaves his speculations on the broad sweep of history for more concrete matters. Though he is a strict Darwinian in his writings on evolutionary biology, Dawkins is by no means a follower of the dubious theories of Social Darwinism, and has often said that the best thing about the human condition is the ability to rise above one’s genetic programming. Dawkins is not an amoralist, as his strong opposition to the Iraq war made clear, whatever problems he may have trying to deduce ethics from science.

Rambunctious anti-religious polemics

Hitchens is another matter, and if Eagleton is a little too harsh on Dawkins at this point, perhaps he could have been harsher on his former comrade. As noted, Hitchens’ rambunctious anti-religious polemics go back a long way, but his current preoccupation is with Islam. It is not implausible to suspect that the urgency of Hitchens’ current need to battle religious obscurantism is intimately connected with his support for recent imperialist wars and his alliance with Washington neoconservatives. Since at least 2001, the pro-war “left” has been loudly insistent on its narrative of Western civilisation versus Islamic barbarism, often with Hitchens setting the tone. Here we see something that Eagleton has touched on in recent articles and especially his polemics against the Islamophobic ramblings of Martin Amis, a sense in which evangelical atheism can replace the evangelical Protestantism of the nineteenth century as a justification for imperialist aggression and the White Man’s Burden. It would have been helpful for him to have developed this theme a little further.

But, as Eagleton would remind us in the Marxist dialectical spirit, both religion and irreligion can be either oppressive or emancipatory – often both at the same time. The evangelical Protestantism that justified Britain’s imperial expansionism also fired the reformers who abolished the slave trade and fought to improve the lot of the poor, following through into the Methodist roots of the British labour movement. At the same time, anti-religious campaigns could be an effective weapon against clerical reaction in Spain, while becoming an aspect of Stalinist totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. (Which is why Hitchens’ strange belief that Stalinism was a religious regime cries out for debunking.) As with any set of intellectual prisms for understanding the world, they are to be judged by the uses to which they are put.

As Eagleton puts it:

“Karl Marx, who as we have seen heard in religion what he called the sigh of the oppressed creature, was rather less naïve. Religion needs to be patiently deciphered, not angrily repudiated. It springs from a realm to which reason should be no stranger. Only if reason is able to acknowledge the a-rational interests and desires from which it draws so much of its force can it prove sturdy enough to prevent those desires from sliding into anarchy, thus overwhelming reason itself.”

And following in this spirit of Marx, the criticism of religion – which requires understanding it rather than simply denouncing it, grasping the ways in which masses of people decode their social existence – remains fundamental for any socialist project, which must seek to fuse the struggle for (lower-case) reason and progress with the subjective drive towards truth, justice and equality, which – like a commitment to reason itself – does not simply spring from reason, but is a subjective moral choice.
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Another review of Eagleton's book appears here.

What Does the Dictatorship of Capital Have in Store for Working People?

Public Meeting — New York City

Saturday, November 7

• The Truth Behind “Financial Crisis” and “War”
• The Working-Class Response

Speakers include:
Jack Barnes, national secretary of the
Socialist Workers Party
Mary-Alice Waters, editor, New International Magazine

Saturday, November 7
Reception 2 p.m. — Program 3 p.m.
32BJ Service Employees International Union Hall
101 6th Avenue, New York, New York

By Subway, take the A, C, E, or 1 line to Canal Street

For more info, call: (212) 629-6649 or (973) 273-0075
Sponsored by Socialist Workers Party, Young Socialists

Товарищ Х: All Hail EmoBracelet!

'EmoBracelet' tells traders when

they need a time-out to prevent Repetitive Speculation Injury

Товарищ Х suggests a design change to the maker of the EmoBracelet, a sort of mood-ring-for-the-wrist billionaires bauble that changes color and pattern to match the purported feelings of its wearer. Have it instead flash these words of encouragement, straight from the Marxist Update masthead, "JUMP YOU FUCKER." If that does not produce the hoped-for result, perhaps a jolt of 220V mains current would do the trick. This could be sold as an accessory cord terminating in a retro hairpin connector to be plugged into the nearest wall outlet on cue.

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Товарищ Х is a political activist and composer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Political convergence between sections of the U.S. and European ruling classes

U.S. commander in chief gets ‘peace’ prize

(As I see it column)
BY BEN JOYCE

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced October 9 that its Peace Prize recipient for 2009 is U.S. president Barack Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

The committee chose to bestow this honor upon the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful imperialist armed forces—as he is deepening a multitheater war with an expanding front in Central Asia involving more than 60,000 troops in Afghanistan and regular aerial drone attacks in Pakistan. Obama has been awarded a $1.4 million prize for his work in “the abolition or reduction of standing armies” while his administration is leading the drive for stiffer economic sanctions against Iran and North Korea.

The reaction of many upon first hearing news about the committee’s choice was that it is a joke. After all, the prize is named after Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who was one of the world’s biggest armaments makers. On the face of it, the decision may seem at least contradictory. However, since the inception of the Nobel Peace Prize, nearly all of the recipients have been, with few notable exceptions, prominent representatives of or apologists for the capitalist system of class exploitation and imperialist domination.

U.S. president Woodrow Wilson was given the prize for 1919 after Washington and its allies had smashed its rivals in the first imperialist world slaughter in which millions of workers died. In 2007 Al Gore was chosen for his work in “climate change,” less than a decade after leaving the administration of President William Clinton that orchestrated brutal military assaults against Iraq, Somalia, and Yugoslavia. And in 1988 the prize committee even went as far as to grant the award to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces—a “standing army” of imperialist allies.

The selection of Barack Obama also registers the political convergence between sections of the U.S. and European ruling classes. The social layer that Obama represents—the “enlightened” meritocracy and cosmopolitan elites at the tops of “nonprofits,” NGOs, foundations, and other institutions committed to the maintenance of capitalist social relations—is converging politically with their counterparts in Europe, found in the leadership of various Social Democratic and “Socialist” parties that hold power in imperialist governments across the Atlantic.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, in its majority made up of representatives from this layer, has made an attempt to shore up Obama’s image at a time when his administration faces increasing difficulties at home and abroad.

The “peace” that the Obama administration, his European counterparts, or any other wing of the ruling class are interested in obtaining is one based on the subjugation and deepening exploitation of toilers around the world.

As the worldwide capitalist depression deepens, the ruling classes in each of the imperialist countries are preparing for fiercer competition against each other, spreading imperialist wars, and increased social and political unrest as working people react to the deteriorating conditions being imposed on them. In preparation for this, Obama has extended many of the attacks on our rights, such as domestic spying programs, militarization of the borders, and arbitrary detention.

The only way to achieve peace is to take political and military power out of the hands of the war makers. It’s only by the conquest and exercise of state power by the working class against the most violent force in history—the capitalist class—and the rebuilding of society from top to bottom along lines of social solidarity and the needs of the majority, that lasting peace is possible.

Товарищ Х: Setting "a personal example of moderation"

Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man at $20 billion, is pictured here saluting the poor people of India and the world as he announces his pay cut to a mere $3 million for this year's work.

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Товарищ Х is a political activist and composer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Behind the Nobel: Obama's role and social base explained

International petty-bourgeois “merit-ocracy” awards Obama Nobel Peace Prize

excerpt below from "The Cosmopolitan ‘Meritocracy’ and
Class Stratification of Black Nationality"
a chapter of Malcolm X, Black Liberation,
and the Road to Workers Power’

BY JACK BARNES

[The] expanding layer of the comfortable middle classes, whose place in bourgeois society is registered by Obama’s election, is composed of the handsomely remunerated staffs of so-called nonprofit foundations, charities, “community organizations,” and “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs)—in the United States and worldwide; of well-placed professors and top university administrative personnel; of attorneys, lobbyists, and others. The lives and livelihoods of these growing foundation- and university-centered strata in capitalist society—who, along with bankers and businessmen, cycle back and forth into and out of government positions—are themselves largely unconnected to the production, reproduction, or circulation of social wealth. Their existence is more and more alien to the conditions of life of working people of any racial or national background.

This reality was reflected in the presidential election results in November. Obama, of course, largely locked up the so-called Black vote. That isn’t what pushed him so decisively over the top in the race against Republican John McCain, however. Among the most striking changes from previous elections is that Obama won 52 percent of the votes from those with annual incomes of more than $200,000, whereas Democrat John Kerry had won 35 percent of this layer only four years earlier.

And for the first time in many decades, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 won more than 50% of the votes in the nation’s largely white suburbs, compared to the 41% and 47% share taken by Clinton in 1992 and 1996. What’s more, while the Republicans still dominated many suburbs populated by more established “old wealth”—places such as New Canaan and Darien, Connecticut; Saddle River and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; or Sunfish Lakes and North Oaks, Minnesota—he tallied substantial margins in towns with larger congregations of high-income professionals, the parasitic users of wealth—places such as Westport (65%), West Hartford (70%), and Greenwich (54%), Connecticut; Montclair (84%), Tenafly (64%), and Ridgewood (56%), New Jersey; Edina (56%), Minnesota; and numerous others. More than 65% of voters in Scarsdale, one of New York City’s most exclusive suburbs, voted for Obama, and Westchester County—the second wealthiest county in the state, and twelfth richest in the United States—went for Obama by a 63% margin (up from 58% for Kerry in 2004 and 56% for Clinton in 1998).

The aspiring social layer Obama is part of is bourgeois in its class interests, its values, and its world outlook. But it is not a section of the capitalist class in becoming. It is not “entrepreneurial.” It is not composed of the owners, top managers, or large debt holders of rapidly expanding new capitalist businesses—factories, farms, technology companies, or financial or commercial enterprises. The long, debt-fueled capitalist “boom” of the past three decades was marked by the stagnation of investment in capacity-expanding plant and equipment, and by an accompanying slowness in the drawing of production labor into the creation of social wealth. This stagnation of capital accumulation, together with the expansion of the middle-class layer we’re discussing, are in fact two sides of the same coin. Its members enjoy high incomes, but very few can or will pass down sizable capital through family trusts to coming generations.

Instead, this is a self-designated “enlightened meritocracy,” determined to con the world into accepting the myth that the economic and social advancement of its members is just reward for their individual intelligence, education, and “service.” Its members truly believe that their “brightness,” their “quickness,” their “contributions to public life,” their “sacrifices” (they humbly point out they could be making a lot more in business or banking) give them the right to make decisions, to administer society on behalf of the bourgeoisie—what they claim to be on behalf of the interests of “the people.” In exchange they get better and bigger homes, obscenely expensive K-through-16-plus education for their bloodline, consumer “necessities,” plus the equivalent of a “law enforcement discount” on all major financial transactions. (The killing the Obamas made on their Hyde Park manse and grounds in Chicago, generously subsidized by a big-time Daley machine fund-raiser, is but one example typical of these milieus.) And believe it or not, these bourgeois wannabes see all this as social sophistication, not the conspicuous consumption of schlock.

While the existence and expansion of these strata are largely divorced from the production process, they are very much bound up with the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. They have a parasitic existence. To maintain their high incomes and living standards, they are dependent on skimming off a portion of surplus value—”rents”—produced by working people and appropriated by the bourgeoisie. Yet the big majority of them contribute nothing to the creation of that value, even in wasteful or socially harmful ways.

Instead, many of them pursue careers—in the universities, the media, “think tanks,” and elsewhere—that generate ideological rationalizations for class exploitation and inequality (as they strive to “reform” it, of course). Others, whether as highly paid supervisory personnel, staffers, or attorneys, administer the rulers’ efforts through foundations, “advocacy groups,” charities, and other “nonprofit” institutions, here and around the world, to postpone and buffer the explosive social and political responses by working people to our worsening living and job conditions.[footnote from original: "The trade union officialdom, despite their petty-bourgeois lifestyles and bourgeois outlook, is not really a part of this layer. They are still too connected, just by the character of their dues base and function in capitalist society, to the grit and grime of working. JB"]

This is a social layer that is insecure in its class position. It lacks the confidence exhibited by the bourgeoisie, even by the nouveau riche bourgeoisie. The propertied rulers—comprising only hundreds of families, not thousands—are a confident class (except during prerevolutionary crises or times of a rapidly accelerating breakdown of the capitalist order). Not only do they own, control, and hold the debt in perpetuity on the commanding heights of industry, banking, land, and trade. They also dominate the state and all aspects of social and political life, and finance the production of culture and the arts, including its “cutting edges.”

The meritocracy, to the contrary, is not confident. Dependent on cadging from the capitalists a portion of the wealth created by the exploited producers, these privileged aspirants to bourgeois affluence—a lifestyle they are convinced “society” owes them—nonetheless fear at some point being pushed back toward the conditions of the working classes. On the one hand, due to their very size as a stratum of society—it’s millions, if not tens of millions in the United States today—they recognize that the rulers find them useful to bolster illusions in the supposedly limitless “careers open to talent” under capitalism. At the same time, and despite their shameless self-promotion, many of them also sense that since they serve no essential economic or political functions in the production and reproduction of surplus value, they live at the forbearance of the bourgeoisie. In the end, large numbers of them are expendable, especially at times of deepening social crisis.

The capitalist rulers are utterly pragmatic in their policies, but they do have class policies. They do what they deem necessary to defend their profits, their property, and above all their class dictatorship. They use that dictatorship—they use their state power: their cops, their courts, their armed forces, their currency, and their border controls.

In contrast, this “meritocratic” middle layer has no class policy course of its own. To the degree they commit themselves to a course of action—often camouflaged as caring, feeling, thoughtful, and above all very intelligent—such policies are in fact derivative of the needs and demands of their bourgeois patrons. Despite the Obama campaign’s mantra of “change,” for example, the Obama administration is relying on exactly the same top Wall Street bankers and financiers as its predecessors, in fact, the very same moneyed interests—even the same individuals—who are the architects of today’s accelerating capitalist economic and financial crisis. And more than any other administration in the history of U.S. imperialism, its foreign, military, and “domestic security” policies are stamped by near total deference to the top echelons of the professional officer corps of the U.S. armed forces.

This is the social layer from which Barack Obama emerged. Not from the majority proletarian Black nationality. Not from the producing small-business milieu, the petty bourgeoisie. And not from the bourgeoisie. It is with the class interests and world outlook of this increasingly multinational “meritocracy” that Obama identifies.

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Mike Italie's 2002 article demolishing another "humanitarian imperialist," Nobel Peace Prize winner (Jimmy Carter), can be enjoyed here.

An excerpt: "Carter’s speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony was consistent with his record as a war president of a liberal stripe. Alongside the usual empty pacifist blather that "we will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children," Carter endorsed the fundamentals of George Bush’s policy all along the line. He warned Iraq that it must disarm because "the world insists that this be done." Later he told a CNN interviewer that if Iraq does not disarm, then a U.S. bombing campaign and invasion would not be "unprovoked."

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