When we look at what it is that writers do in their heads before they write, the really good authors tend to examine the underlying currents that take their form as perceived reality. Consider this statement by Flannery O'Connor:

"The writer writes because it is a necessity, a calling...Serious writers are like the Old Testament prophets who dedicated themselves to the task of 'recalling people to known but ignored truths.'"

Looking over the pundits this morning, I notice that a common thread in their ranting and posturing concerns their attention with the outward manifestations of our circumstances (Flannery's fiction), and I suspect this is because they lack the tools or the perspective required to view the inner workings of which all that we see is merely the result, but not the mechanism itself.

And so as an academic exercise I found myself wondering how a Marxist critic might examine our current situation, since even though Marxism hasn't been a very effective political philosophy in practice, it certainly has its uses as a mode of analysis. For example, a Marxist approach would consider the forces of history and the struggle between competing economic systems as the base causes of the war in Iraq, and would term our concerns with Middle Eastern freedom and democracy to be external, or superstructural elements.

That isn't to say that the superstructure isn't important—far from it—but that a full grasp of the variables at work here would recognize that it isn't the entire picture. Let's look at some particulars here for the sake of clarity.

In a paper titled "Middle eastern democracy" running in Prospect Magazine this month, the authors ask the rather pointed question of whether democracy is even possible in Iraq:

There are many problems with the democratisation approach to the war on terrorism, but the most serious of these concerns its very great difficulty. Muslim, and particularly Arab, political cultures are simply not so malleable that within a generation or two we can transform most of them into liberal democracies. There are few genuine democracies in the Muslim world (Turkey's is the most mature), and none in the Arab world. This is no coincidence.

From a fundamental perspective, however, the American and British institutions of free-market capitalism can no longer tolerate a Muslim authoritarianism that only indirectly communicates with our mercantile interests to the extent that it can strengthen itself. Thus it is quite possible that base-level realities are forcing a conflict over ideology, and while our Western governments appear oblivious to this dichotomy, our adversaries are acutely aware of it and are reacting accordingly.

Another way these issues play out is manifest in America's anti-war movement, which we've all seen to be so ineffective as to constitute nothing more than joke-fodder for late-night TV. Yes, you, Mr. Anti-War Protestor, are quite ignorable and you may be feeling somewhat frustrated as to why this is the case. As an answer, we could term the mechanism to be the impotency of the bourgeosie.

Nothing spells defeat for a protest movement more clearly than when its mobilized forces are carrying bottles of Evian water and taking rest-breaks in the nearest Starbucks. The movement never garnered the support of the proletariat, since the latter were bereft of the leisure time required to participate and were safely inculcated with the values of the ruling class; Marxism terms this identification with the rulership as false consciousness. Thus, the blue-collar workers returned to their homes in the evening and viewed the televised images of placard-waving fanatics with outright hostility. The protestors, for their part, were led by a coalition of Marxist ideologues whose slogans and speeches professed solidarity with the working class while being directed to members of the bourgeosie, the middle-class beneficiaries of the capitalist system that found war to be a historic inevitability.

You can see that this was a recipe for failure from the outset. What the bourgeois class should have done was to utilize its own power by disrupting the capitalist mechanism at its source. Hollywood entertainers should have simply stopped working, stock brokers should have stayed at home, every citizen involved in production should have ceased work and while the proletariat would have continued to staff factories and drive trucks and so on, without managers to direct their work the entire mechanism of our country would have ground to a shuddering halt. This would have gained the attention of the ruling class and forced a committed dialogue.

Marching in the streets? That was so 1950.

1:21:26 PM