Laws of History: Economic Determinism

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Economic Determinism is an undisputed law of history, though by no means the only one as many Marxists would argue. Societal institutions, the state, the economy, social classes, religion, the family, values systems and norms are to a large extent economically determined. The question is to what degree do other forces play a role in determining history and society? For Christians who hold to the doctrine of Divine Providence, history is guided by the hand of God, while for Hegel history is the unfolding of the mind of God. Are the laws of history more rooted in the spiritual as St. Augustine argued, the intellectual as Hegel and to some degree Kant contended, or in the material as Marx and Engels maintained? After the ceremony of president Ronald Reagan's funeral, former president Mikhail Gorbachev was asked if Reagan's high defense spending was the principal reason for the fall of the Communist bloc. Garbachev replied that there were multiple causes for the fall of Communism. Reflecting prevailing thinking among conservatives, Colin Powell insisted that defense spending was at the core. Since the early 1990s, Marxist scholars scrambled to explain why the fall took place and what this means for the future of Marxism as an ideology. If we assume that the laws of history are a reflection of the laws of nature, economic determinism is a very important law. Marx and Engels, among many others, deserve credit for their work in refining economic determinism into a coherent doctrine that helps all scholars explain history and political economy. Gorbachev was indeed correct that many forces precipitated Communism's downfall, among them economic. Semi-integrated into the world capitalist-system while pursuing its own regional integration, the Communist bloc was neither Communist nor capitalist, but a mixture of an anachronistic enclave that operated very inefficiently without meeting the material needs of its people and without offering much hope for the future. Ironically, the doctrine of "Economic Determinism" explains the fall of Communism. That should give hope to those who believe in Socialism as a viable system, and it should be a source of concern for those advocating globalization. The same forces that brought down Communism are at work in any political economy that fails to serve society and fails to keep pace with change".

Burn the Koran Day (Jon Kofas, Greece)

Posted on September 9th, 2010

From disparate perspectives that may perhaps contribute to the edification of all interested parties, in the last ten days WAIS has been entertaining the eternal issue of God’s existence and the equally controversial issue of institutionalized religion’s role in society. Amid such WAIS discussion, sparked by Professor Stephen Hawking and his new publication, just by coincidence comes a tiny religious fundamentalist group ready to promote hate and precipitate violence on a wide scale–all in the name of Jesus!
During the current crisis of socioeconomic dislocation for millions of Americans (and billions throughout the world), the religious right in America has been gaining strength a few weeks before the congressional elections in November. There are close to one million web sites devoted to Burn the Koran Day and the Florida group and its affiliates is running slogans like the following:
“Christianity - the religion of redemption and forgiveness v. Islam - the religion of terrorism!
“The Dove World Outreach Center, a non-denominational church in Gainesville, Florida, will celebrate “Burn the Koran” day on September 11. Terry Jones, pastor of the church, says the burnings will be held on church grounds “in remembrance of the fallen victims of 9/11 and to stand against the evil of Islam. Islam is of the devil! On its website, The Dove World Outreach Center sells ‘Islam is of the Devil’ T-shirts.”   www.thelastcrusade.org
Naturally, religious leaders from Islam, Judaism and Christianity have tried to publicly distance themselves from “extreme fundamentalists down south” calling Islam a religion of the Devil and doing so under First Amendment protection–no matter that their “religious” words and actions promote hate crime against another monotheistic religion and its followers. Along with Secretary of State Clinton and NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmusen, world leaders have pleaded with the Florida group and the undetermined number of people in the US and the world that agree with burning of the Koran on 9/11 not to go through with such high-profile symbolically hateful act that could precipitate violence. The question of course is not that this particular religious group led by Terry Jones is carrying out a symbolic crusade against Islam on a very symbolic day, but what are the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions that gave rise to such a movement? Islam and Christianity have a long history of antagonism that dates back to the Crusades, followed by European Imperialism in Muslim lands for the primary purpose of commercial and geopolitical exploitation. With the division of the World between East and West, the antagonism continued with Muslims detesting atheistic Communist East and cooperating with the capitalist West more out of expediency and “lesser of two evils proposition.” The Cold War ended. Islam took another look at the West immersed in a materialistic culture whose hedonistic value system it was spreading along with its products and services–and always under a patron-client integration model that favored the Christian West. Then there is the that unavoidable issue not just of religion, but of race that has so stigmatized the history not just of the US, but the entire Western Judeo-Christian World. Does Western Civilization have room for Muslims as they are, or must they conform to Western Civilization’s value system in order to be accepted? Given Western policies toward Muslim countries and given how the Western media and entertainment industry–motion pictures and TV–have portrayed Muslims, how is anyone surprised at Burn the Koran Day?
Religious hate crime in the US has risen sharply in the last decade. Hate is a moral issue, if the authorities choose to define it as such–as in the case of a previously unknown Christian pastor in Florida calling for the Koran’s burning. Laws defined politically as in this case, are not enforceable. Politicians who laid the foundations for the atmosphere of hate crimes in direct and subtle forms through foreign and domestic policies that are detrimental to a particular religious group are now asking for religious tolerance for a very specific case. If a Muslim group in Cleveland called for Burn the Bible Day, I wonder if the authorities would not define the term hate crime legally instead of morally. Within 24 hours the FBI would have arrested and every single individual connected with the announcement and their distant relatives and friends and interrogated them without due process–all under the US Patriot Act.
http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html
Watching on TV extremist Muslim leaders warn America that if the Koran is burned on 9/11, there will be retaliation is predictable, and I would have expected nothing less from the other side of the three-sided coin of monotheism! In the endless “cycle of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” practice of an ancient dogma that sinister leaders and faithful followers of the three monotheistic religions pursue, reason and compassion cannot and will not prevail because tangible interests and historical culture clashes are far stronger!

Economics: The Future of the Middle Class (Jon Kofas, Greece)

Posted on August 30th, 2010

The Obama administration remains concerned that the American Dream is fading because the middle class is weakening, especially right before the 2010 congressional elections that the prospect of a double-dip recession may be more real than it was six months ago. Arguing that the “middle class dream” (synonymous with the American Dream) is fading fast, the Obama administration has a task force operating on the assumption that “everyone wants to and can be in the middle class.” Clearly not the same definition as in 18th century France or England, a definition that underwent change since then in Europe that operates in America’s shadow since the 1940s, US government (media and mainstream institutions as well) defines middle class on the basis of a) owning a home, b) car, c) college for the kids, d) retirement fund, e) health care, and f) family vacations. If you have these six things, you too are in the shrinking “middle class” as US government (and mainstream institutions) defines it. Therefore you are happily conformed and the social order will continue to exist for a very long time. But what if you lack one or more of the six criteria? High-paying jobs in the secondary sector of production (manufacturing) have been going to Asia and Latin America and with it the drop in salaries and benefits for Americans, followed by white-collar jobs in sectors from computer science to medical engineering. The situation is not very different for many other advanced capitalist countries that have experienced downward social mobility under globalization. Although Americans and their European counterparts became two-income families, some taking second jobs, the cost of living rose sharply in the last two decades, while wages, salaries, benefits, and social security income could not keep pace. “For most of the 20-year period following 1990, the Commerce Department reports that real median income grew at a rate of about 20%, while the cost of a college education grew between 43% and 60%, the cost of housing rose 56% and health care costs jumped by 155%.” Joe Biden’s web site describing the task force notes that “A strong middle class equals a strong America.” But was it not government policies regardless of political parties whether in the US or any of the advanced capitalist countries that led to the shrinking middle class since 1970? Is the solution to a strong middle class a more even income distribution where the majority of the population does not live on less because the pyramid is becoming increasingly narrower at the top and wider at the bottom? Who knows what Joe Biden will do to get Democrats elected this year against the background of a Republican assaults (Glenn Beck calling Obama racist)? It seems any solution that proposes social and economic justice would be unacceptable for mainstream America. A more acceptable solution for US government and mainstream institutions is: a) find another job to supplement your income, b) work harder, c) plan and invest better, d) return to school for more education or re-training; and e) wait for “lady luck” to ring your doorbell because you have conformed to the Calvinist work ethic! If indeed the assumptions of the US government (and the entire mainstream institutional structure) that “securing a middle class” is the key the American Dream, how do we explain US public opinion polls indicating that the “happiness” level (granted the obvious difficult of quantifying it), has been under 50% and steadily declining since 1970? And how do we explain that in a global public opinion poll, the top four “happiest” countries in the world are Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, while the US ranks 14th, despite the largest GDP on the planet?
Even if we accept the US (political and financial elites backed by media and academia) ubiquitous PR campaign, to project the image that upward mobility is the dream, scholarly studies by individual academics and think tanks for the last three decades indicate that there has been downward mobility in America, spreading to the rest of the world with some exceptions. Global outsourcing under neo-liberal policies has resulted in a shrinking middle class likely to shrink more in this decade in the US and EU.
(Earl Wysong, 2007, Levy and Murnane, 1992; Karoly, 1993; Duncan, Rodgers, Smeeding, 1991 and 1992; http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2006/06poverty_booza.aspx)
In March 2009, I issued a posting on WAIS entitled “Twilight of the Middle Class,” where I argued that the middle class in most of the world has been created on paper owing to the credit economy. When I presented the same point last spring as a guest speaker at a Greek university conference dealing with issues of international political economy, no one in the audience was surprised that indeed the middle class was built on a mound of debt under an unsustainable global (public and private) credit economic structure designed to keep wealth concentrated. People know where they stand versus the image they project, a dream that the political and financial are projecting while constantly working to make the social pyramid even narrower.
The larger question today is should the six-point criteria developed by individuals who want to perpetuate consumerism be the basis of the American Dream, or should there be an re-examination of peoples’ values in the wake of this prolonged global recession–and I mean all people, not just the middle class that constitutes the popular base of bourgeois political parties? Are these the values America wants to continue exporting to the rest of the world so it can strengthen finance capitalism at the expense socioeconomic chasm and social polarization from which arise extreme right wing elements? Is the essence of humanity predicated on the six points mentioned above? In the US government report, there was no mention of creativity, no mention of empathy in thought and deed for one’s fellow man, no mention of protection of nature, no mention of philosophical/spiritual self-reflection, no mention of greater social equality or collectivist action that alleviates suffering of the vast majority, no mention for lessening societal and institutional violence. America is becoming more polarized, and Europe is following in its footsteps as indicated by race riots in England, anti-gypsy sentiment in France, xenophobia in Italy, and of course America’s Beck and Palin backed by the extreme Christian right promising a slice of Heaven to “Real Americans.” The Obama administration needs to appoint a task force to reexamine what values it should be peddling to the American people and the world. At 4% of the world population, the US consumes roughly one-quarter of the world’s resources, but a mere 1% of the population owns 35% of the wealth. Is there a future for a growing middle class (the realization of the American Dream and the avoidance of sociopolitical polarization) under such wealth concentration?
source: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Policy Formation and Consent Theory after the Crisis (Jon Kofas, Greece)

Posted on March 19th, 2009

 

Classical Liberal (Lockean) political theory maintains that individual consent ought to determine politics and policies. “Wherever, therefore, any number of men so unite into one society as to quit every one his executive power of the law of Nature, and to resign it to the public, there and there only is a political or civil society.” John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government. However, the reality is that T. Hobbes’s Leviathan that Locke rejected lives inside competing interest groups among the elites (including the 17th century, when Locke represented mercantile interests) that have played a catalytic role in shaping policy in modern pluralistic societies governed by varieties of Liberal-type constitutions. Though policy-formation is the presumed domain of competing interest groups whether politically organized like the Whig faction in Locke’s time, or modern-day corporate lobbies, consent-theory is more easily justified and implemented during times of national emergencies or crises than during “normal times.”
Having built a national consensus during the Great Depression for economic reasons, the US continued to expand the consensus to include the entire Western Hemisphere under bilateral and multilateral agreements. These culminated in redefining the Pan-American system during the war, and then globalized during the Cold War when besides NATO, OAS and SEATO, IFIs were also established to complete the triumph of Pax Americana. The dynamics of the Cold War necessarily resulted in domestic national consensus not only in pluralistic societies like the US at the helm of the world-capitalist system, but also in Communist nations and in the non-aligned bloc. Therefore, the Cold War as the point of origin for policy-formation and consent-theory entailed that the state forged consensus among competing interest groups under a neo-corporatist model that would presumably serve not only the political and financial elites, but the military establishment, intelligentsia, farmers, and labor unions whose cooperation was crucial for policy-formation against the “common external enemy.”
Nor is this to be confused with the military-industrial complex that was only one byproduct of conformist policy-formation. After the Communist bloc collapsed and China became thoroughly integrated into the world capitalist system, the institutionalized co-optation of the disparate interest groups needed to remain intact. This is not because there was a “common external enemy”–of course one had to be created as catalyst to interest-group co-optation–but because consent-theory assumptions were obviated by the changing structure of the political economies around the world and the neo-liberal globalization trend. The interdependent world economic structure as the basis of consent-theory and as a reality cannot change systemically as Russia, China, Brazil, India, and even some EU leaders wish. However, economic nationalism–from the political left and to the ideological right–and varieties of Socialism will challenge and try to replace classical Liberalism and the American-centered world system as the ideological foundation on which political economy and international security rest. This means new international division of labor, redefinition of the terms of trade and investment that do not disadvantage the Third World and new “North-South” hemisphere relationship that allows for a more equitable redistribution of wealth–all of it used as leverage by those wishing to further dilute Pax Americana.
Depending on its severity, the current economic dislocation will force political and financial elites along with the intelligentsia to re-examine the “consent-theory” paradigm with the US as the leader. They must seek alternatives that would ensure policy-formation does not drift toward the lower classes or to the Third World whose conformity and co-optation must be guaranteed to prevent any change either in the social order or the international order. The unfolding civil disobedience combined with labor and middle class protests throughout the world will continue to challenge consent-theory that the political and financial elites are interested in preserving. Assuming that the forthcoming G-20 meeting (April 2009) will result in consensus and assuming the Chinese prediction about national recovery by June 2009 is correct, it may be possible that by early-to-mid-2010 the US will be coming out of recession as the FED is now predicting. The EU will realize real growth much later than previously expected (the latest IMF report is very pessimistic about Europe) and gradually Japan and the rest of the world will follow the EU. Such scenario depends largely on what policies the G-20 will adopt to better-regulate the crippled economy for the duration. The middle class and workers will lag far behind in the recovery process, as will the Third World–regrettably, there are no AIG-type bonuses for the middle class and workers whose consent must be manipulated back toward support of the elites.
In short, the lower the social strata the slower the recovery; similarly the less the country is developed the slower and more painfully it will emerge from this crisis. The crisis will exacerbate societal polarization that manifests itself in increased social protests, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, racism, chauvinism, etc. Whether it is to the extreme right or left, going to the roots of society in times of crisis will be a normal response on the part of the masses; that is where a large segment of the population feels a sense of belonging and safety, not in institutions that failed them. The current crisis will intensify the “revolutionary” impulse to alter the social and political structure as well as a minority counter-revolutionary impulse to retain the social structure by an authoritarian movement, regime, or authoritarian policies adopted by otherwise liberal-bourgeois regimes. The dialectic between the two impulses will entail the biggest challenge to the political elites in pluralistic societies since the Great Depression. If as Jean-Jacques Rousseau has argued the repressive conditions imposed by a minority over the majority necessitate force morally and socially justified, then we can expect in the upcoming months and years more voices of leftist dissent and reactionary outcries to maintain the status quo by force.
The current crisis has diluted if not obviated policy-formation and consent-theory, as we knew it under Pax Americana throughout the Cold War and in the post-Cold era of the global anti-terrorism campaign on which foreign policy of many states are based; with all its intended and incidental domestic policy-formation consequences. To counter the inevitable challenge that pluralistic societies will be facing, the political and financial elites will have to deliver on the promise that after the crisis there will continue to be “ever-rising living standards” within the existing stratified social and international order. Such promises of what Kenneth Boulding, Beyond Economics (1968) called “cowboy economics” rooted in arrogance of financial power buttressed and protected by the political elites will not be sufficient to convince people who lost homes and businesses, jobs and careers, savings and retirement nest eggs, and their lifestyle turned upside down. Given that the political and financial elites have always manufactured consent, consent-theory is their domain to define and implement to preserve and advance their privileged position. Crises, however, bring out in otherwise docile-conformist citizens tendencies that range from reactionary to revolutionary, from cynicism to “apocalyptic nihilism,” which is what most people act on and understand by the term (as opposed to anarchist or existential). Besides resorting to more austere laws to “contain” dissidence as it arises with greater socioeconomic problems, the state along with the media, think tanks, and anyone with access and influence to public opinion will have to argue that any alternative to systemic transformation of the social and political order nationally and internationally will entail the demise of civilization as we know it.

Greece, EU and Goldman Sachs: Economic Crisis and Crisis of Confidence (Jon Kofas, Greece)

Posted on February 16th, 2010 

The stability of a society and its institutions is tested not in times of relative growth and domestic and foreign harmony, but during domestic and international turmoil. Last week, the New York Times exposed a global scandal involving Goldman Sachs and a number of governments, including Greece and Italy. Apparently, in the past two decades, Goldman Sachs has been striking elaborate deals not only with businesses to conceal their actual earnings, but with governments to conceal their actual debt, so that they qualify for more loans at lower interest rates. In a number of pieces I wrote a few weeks ago, I noted “investment scams” were behind EU government bonds and the falling euro. I specifically mentioned in one of those pieces that Goldman Sachs, reputedly behind the massive AIG collapse and a number of Hedge Funds that were at the heart of the global financial crisis, had announced that it would reward its executive with $100 million in bonuses. This took place at a time that the Obama administration is trying to have the banks and investment firms set the example of restraint amid 10% official (15% real) unemployment. Naturally, I have no idea as to the NYT sources for the Goldman Sachs story, though I suspect one of the US Treasury, or one of the agencies, and all in retaliation for Goldman’s defiance of the Obama administration’s attempts to control some of the excesses in investment banking. The EU knew about Goldman Sachs deals with governments, but in 2001, it issued a directive to all governments to stop making deals with Goldman that resulted in “fraudulent debt figures,” a practice that burdened the fiscally stronger EU countries which subsidized the weaker ones. Presumably, all governments officially agreed to comply. However, the EU agreed to allow the false statistics Goldman was “cooking up” on behalf of governments in exchange for “liberalization” reforms, especially sales of public enterprises to the private sector. In short, Goldman operated with the EU’s indirect, “back-door” condoning because larger interests were served. In November 2009, Goldman approached the newly elected Socialist Government of George Papandreou in Greece and proposed purchasing the Greek debt, at least a portion of it, presenting it to the EU lower than it actually is, and in exchange take control of the airport tolls and other frozen income sources. In October 2009, Greece’s official debt presented to the EU was 6% of GDP as opposed to 12.83% that was the real debt. Having run a campaign to clean up rampant corruption involving both domestic and foreign firms, Papandreou rejected the Goldman proposal. What followed was a campaign by Goldman Sachs to expose Greece along with all of Southern Europe as EU weak links, whose bonds should command much higher bond yields than what Germany pays. Before the NYT published the Goldman-Sachs story, Papandreou went public with implicit accusations that the EU was complicit in covering up fraudulent statistics that Greece was submitting for a number of years in exchange for policy measures that it (EU) wanted Greece to adopt. The German government acknowledged that the EU had not done its job properly. Greece is by far the most corrupt country in Europe, where “baksheesh capitalism,” as I have baptized it, permeates every sector from government and business to the Orthodox Church and universities. According to the NYT article, Greece is just the tip of the iceberg, as other countries in the EU have also imbibed of the banking industry elixir. These arrangements are conceptually similar to the SIVs (Special Investment Vehicles) that banks have used to place assets off the books so that their capital requirements are less demanding. In other words, like a magician, wave the left hand to distract the audience while the right hand moves the pea under a different shell. Among the common sleights of hand are loans disguised as currency trades and selling future revenue streams from lotteries, tolls and fees. Greece is not alone in cooking the books, as we now know as a result of the Goldman Sachs scandal. Hedge Fund and other speculators in Europe and other countries took advantage of the inordinately high budgetary deficits (presumably much higher than official statistics indicate for a number of countries) in the EU to drive bond yields up, and the euro down along with declining security values. That Goldman was engaged in the type of “financial control” that is somewhat similar to what the “Great Powers” imposed on the Ottoman Empire and China more than a century ago is not surprising. That the investment firm did so with the cooperation of governments at a time that central banks knew of the fraudulent operations in the private and public sector is indicative of how finance capitalism really works. Scandals of such magnitude are not free of cost. On the contrary, the cost of fraudulent statistics in times of crisis entails austerity measures–higher unemployment and lower living standards. But it is all worth it knowing that the “free” enterprise system works! At the heart of finance capitalism is a predatory monster feeding ferociously on expanding and contracting economic cycles, a monster that would not exist or operate in such fraudulent fashion if the state did not constantly feed it and render it protection. With each contracting economic cycle, “free” enterprise weakens and regains its strength solely by the state’s vigorous intervention. Despite all that has transpired, the majority of the people–more in the developed countries and less so in the developing–believe in capitalism. What most people see is a “few bad apples” responsible for manipulating an otherwise “good system,” but one must have faith in the apple cart because it is the only temple of worship in town. Even the trade unions, most of which have been co-opted by the mainstream political parties, worship in the same temple just as they are declaring labor strikes. Faith by the masses in the political economy is what keeps it going even in crisis mode.

US: Neo-Corporatism under Obama

Every presidential candidate who challenges an incumbent or incumbent system necessarily campaigns on the promise of “change”; otherwise there is no reason to seek office. And the more vaguely optimistic the promise of “change” that pledges to “improve society,” the more the candidate is likely to succeed in securing votes. Such success is predicated on the candidate appearing as a quintessential “outsider” and “the people’s candidate” while essentially enjoying the establishment’s backing. US presidents have always been symbolic figureheads serving the entrenched establishment, or at least a segment of the establishment.

Obama has not taken office and he must be given a fair chance–the usual first 100 days–before his administration can be assessed. However he has made top cabinet appointments that point to more of the same amid an ongoing costly war and mini-depression, both of which require bold policy changes to the match campaign rhetoric that swept Obama to office. When the President-Elect recently met with Defense Secretary Gates, it was decided that US troops will stay in Iraq until 2011–a year before Obama goes on the campaign trail in 2012. The troops will not be withdrawn in 16 months as the candidate promised voters–not even the two-thirds reduction he claimed must return home. Moreover, the war against “Muslim terrorism”–the ultimate specter and trap haunting US foreign policy–will be expanded in Afghanistan, especially now that India was hit and will be more receptive to cooperation with the US.

 Putting aside Obama’s Clintonite administration that is bound to be an improvement over the Bush-Cheney team in many areas from stem cell research and a more rational environmental policy to shutting down Guantanamo and improving US image in the world, it is worth asking in what domains we are unlikely to see policy changes as promised. Will there be change in:

*Privatization of public services at all levels?
*Government decentralization that has been ongoing since the early 1980s?
*Fiscal policy to reflect the public sector’s dominant role in the private sector?
*Strengthening trade unions or continuing the same course of weakening them?
*Practical or ideological foreign policy?
*A multilateral foreign policy and stronger UN?
*Palestinian state at long last and rapprochement between Israel and its Arab neighbors?
*Rapprochement between US and Iran and Latin American countries with populist left-leaning regimes, especially Venezuela and Bolivia?

Change means different things to disparate supporters backing Obama; after all he was elected on the Democratic ticket with all that entails. Does “change” mean the same thing to an autoworker as it does to wealthy Obama campaign donors? Will there ever be a change from the neo-corporatist model rooted in the American folkish philosophical assumption that “we are all in the same boat but capital is the captain, so why shouldn’t workers, small farmers, and middle classes get behind the captain” to make the boat go in the right direction? Like religious followers, millions of people in the US and billions around the world wanted to believe that Obama meant hope beyond the average Democratic politician, a real change from the Bush-Cheney era of incompetence, deception and destruction, from an administration running the country with the naive ideological confidence of an intoxicated ship captain whose ship is about to capsize but he remains oblivious to the ocean waves.

Based on cabinet appointments, and on what Obama has said regarding policy direction, the evidence so far is overwhelming that we can only expect some substantive changes from his administration, but mostly staying the course. Regrettably the neo-corporatist model that keeps America steadfastly and institutionally unchanged seems alive and well under the future president. As much as progressives must always and without hesitation come to Obama’s defense especially when he is a target of an assortment of racists and right-wing fanatics domestically and around the world, progressive critics would be remiss not to point out that behind the mask of stylistic changes remains the permanence of American neo-corporatism.

Portugal: Christ and *Playboy* Magazine (Jon Kofas, Greece)

Posted on July 9th, 2010 
In the 20th century of mass wars and revolutions, mass anxiety and hysteria that drives people to pop pills for everything including shyness, in the century of triumphant materialism when the value of people is lower than that of commodities, some artists, sculptors, and novelists justifiably depict revered religious figures like Christ as a whore-tempted atheist. There is a fundamental difference, however, between genuine artistic expression intended to provoke aesthetic and reflective response, and Playboy depicting Christ with naked women on its cover for profit. Playboy represents the commercialization of people and uses the “artistic” argument as a thin veil to justify its exploitation. The same picture that appears on the cover of Playboy would have been very appropriate if it was a painting by an artist creatively representing a dissenting viewpoint. Playboy’s only goal is profit for the duration, whereas the goal of the artist is creative expression that could lead to possible edification of the interested audience. Curbing free speech by not issuing the Playboy edition with Jesus and the naked models in a predominantly Catholic country makes business and political sense. The same Playboy issue, however, could become a collector’s edition among an urban US/West European audience skeptical about religion and disgusted by its commercialization. The same issue could also be used by anti-Christian groups that feel exploited by the West, and justfiably so in my view. If Western media periodically promote anti-Muhammad material in the name of “free speech,” the same standard must apply to Jesus, if for no other reason so we can claim ownership of “pluralism and free speech ideals.” Anti-clerical humor of course is centuries old, often by people within the same faith, often clerics of the faith. The artistic purpose of such material as distinguished from the political is also centuries old and only natural that it exists. We have become used to the Western establishment–political parties, businesses, media–promoting its own God while demonizing the other’s, and that too is a form of warfare as old as civilization. The Last Temptation of Christ may be creative expression, or part of an anti-Christian, anti-Western propaganda machine. And that too is part of the nature of warfare.