Daily Times

The very idea of being exploited for a very few brings back the subversive force hidden in the memories of an interred past. Prior to the arrival of a primal father (modern society), the past — primitive human history — was not only beautiful but equally merciful as well. The human was free both instinctually and materially to enjoy without rationalisation devoid of any puritanical feeling of guilt. Prior to the imposition of private property and the monogamy-based patriarchal superstructure, the only culture human kind was aware of comprised the freedom of id, economic equality and the deep-rooted fraternity.

Even after the enforcement of the patriarchal structure, humanity by repeatedly committing the original sin rebelled against it. It was the rebellion against submission led by women against the hegemonic rule of divinity that had dethroned the human being from the pedestal of freedom. The relinquishing of his paradise was a traumatic experience but the significance of liberated id, a hope to cultivate a new world, were highly prized trophies not to be lost for a paradise that, in return, offered chains and ties for both the body and mind. The human being suffered but survived with pride only to be enslaved, later through his labour by his own kind. The paradise regained was lost yet again.

Even after the domestication of the human by capital, which not only deprived him of his individual traits but also successfully turned his mind into a prisoner of formalised reason, the subversive content/force of the pleasant past continues to stay harboured in his unconscious as a repressed memory. Time and again, this return of the repressed incites and triggers a revolt against the predetermined existing present, manifesting in various acts of individual or collective aggressions.

The past ingrained in the unconscious as a subversive force keeps playing its progressive role. Even in moments of utter despair, the past manages to spurt the recollection of pleasant days, which asserts its right by borrowing the words of Ernest Bloch: “…that which is cannot be true”. Freedom once enjoyed refuses to be completely scaled off from the memory where it is deeply engraved. It keeps haunting the human species demanding its return yet again. Kundera succinctly reminds that “happiness is the longing for repetition”. The past blunts the razor’s edge of formalised reason. Freedom ceases to be a fantasy. The concept of utopia gets invalidated and the forces stymieing its realisation get exposed. “Freedom,” Gramsci states, “is not utopian, because it is a basic aspiration; the whole history of mankind consists of struggles and efforts to create socialist institutions capable of ensuring a maximum of freedom.”

Nothing, not even a revolution, comes without a price. Yet every revolution has taught humanity that all social privileges and class differences are the products of society; nature has no bearing upon them. The human being is a product of history and not of nature. How else one can define the class differences existing in society and a protracted but valiant struggle launched against this inequality? Death, “the impossibility of all possibilities”, in the shape of the sword of Damocles, has always been kept dangling over his neck, lacerating some while decapitating others, but has failed to curb his desire that broods and gets earnest with every string in which he is being tied by the existing morbid society. But human freedom is impossible in established societies, no matter how rationalised they become. To pulverise the past they resort to other instruments. Here comes the role of indoctrination. The media — playing its shenanigans that are never benign — begins to instil venomous indoctrination in the grey matter of the masses. Social impotence of critical thought remains its only objective.

History becomes the first victim. Twisted and distorted to fit into the scheme of design, which is maliciously pernicious, the past is chosen to be erased from memory. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by a ‘little boy’. The atrocities committed in My Lai and Abu Ghraib were undeniable stark realities but the US army was not to be blamed for this. Those responsible were a few psychopaths who, in a fit of neurosis/war mania, could not resist the temptation of slaughtering innocent human beings considering them mere bags of worms. This was not an act of terror but the consequence of a war syndrome, a case of personal unhappiness not of general discontent, hence amenable to psychiatric evaluation. People protesting against the hegemonic designs of imperialism in Syria, Iraq, Libya or Palestine are ‘enemy combatants’ even if they are combating this naked aggression unarmed. What a shame that after becoming the victim of a gory crime of homicide committed by Zionist fascists, Rachel Corrie, an innocent young girl of US origin who was peacefully protesting against the apartheid, had exposed the myth masquerading this terminology.

In the history of class struggle, forgetting and forgiving has always proved to be an invitation to compromise by the oppressor once the invincibility of the oppressed is certain to become a reality. The ‘truth commissions’, while recognising the horrendous crimes of the oppressor demand a reconciliation, a forgiveness for the perpetrator of heinous crimes that were committed against humanity in cold blood. How can one forget the crimes of blood soaked dictators such as Pinochet, Suharto, Somoza, Rafael Trujillo and others of their ilk, the latter according to former president F D Roosevelt “was probably a bastard”. Nevertheless, even in this capacity the US had the irrefutable claim of owning him. To be precise, his epoch making statement concluded with these words: “He may be a bastard, but he is our bastard.” In light of the stated ‘sarcasm’, one need not to be a philosopher to determine their position and designation in history.

On the behest of the US, these dictators bathed their own people in blood, destroyed fingerprints and mutilated history far too brazenly. One needs to have stone in place of a heart to forgive the presidents of the US who served the interests of corporations. The manufactured means of destruction produced by these technical giants are consumed, for the very purpose they are produced: to annihilate humanity since the beginning of the 20th century. Hence, forgiving is a capitalistic snare, a cunning of reason that demands the proletarian to perform an act of sacrifice, to inflict the injustice on itself, this time with its own hands. “Cunning,” Horkheimer and Adorno state, “is nothing else than the subjective development of the objective untruth of sacrifice” and “every sacrifice is a restoration belied by the historical reality in which it is undertaken.”

Was Edward Said not succinct when he wrote that “part of the main plan of imperialism is that we will give you your history, we will write it for you, we will reorder the past. What is more frightening is the defacement, the mutilation and ultimate eradication of history in order to create an order that is favourable to the US.”

At this critical juncture of history “what is at stake is not conservation of the past [alone] but the fulfillment of past hopes”. “Today”, Horkheimer insists, “however, the past is being continued as destruction of the past.” “The past,” Marcuse suggests, “defines the present because mankind has not yet mastered its own history.” If, according to Adorno, capitalism needs man without memory, the proletariat needs the recollection of the past, the subversive force of its memory. This will be the only way the workers will be able to master their own history.

(Concluded)

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com