Non-violence and Jesus

I'm reading The Impossible Will Take a While, a collection of political writings designed to inspire hope in activists. One of the essays caught my attention because it offered a radical interpretation of several of Jesus's parables, and what it means to be a good Christian. The essay, entitled "Jesus and Alinksky" by Walter Wink, suggests that while Jesus never recommended violence, he was also not committed to passivity either.

The three stories that Wink analyzes - to turn the other cheek, to go two miles with someone who asks you to go for one, and to give someone your cloak if you are sued for it in court and that is all you have - suggest that Christians should accept their fate of the world around them in light of great evil. But what Wink suggests is that Jesus was suggesting that 1) one should not allow violent actions to rob one of dignity (turn the other cheek); 2) to stand firm with strong opponents (go two miles); and 3) allow ridicule to expose others who stand against you (give away your cloak even if it leaves you naked). Wink's essay, in essence, suggests that Jesus counseled non-violent resistance. This kind of reading is of course in the minority; with many people waiting for the rapture as followers of Christianity, the passivity route seems to be very popular with many.

Although Wink doesn't discuss it, the issue of Christ's divinity also plays into this creation of passivity. If we accept that Jesus "died for our sins," and that his actions stemmed from the fact that he was the "son of God," there is little we can or need to do in light of the great evil in the world. Religion, in this way, only becomes opium (to gloss Marx) because a great many of us accept that someone else is ultimately responsible for our salvation. Although the analogy is crude, Christ's divinity allows us to pass the buck to Jesus.

Bad Samaritans

Reviewed:

Chang, Ha-Joon. 2008. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York: Bloomsbury.

Chang's book is a bucket of water on the mythical fire of the benefits of unfettered free trade. Taking the real world and its history as his starting point, rather than an abstract mathematical models, Chang convincingly demolishes the idea that free trade is the best of all possible worlds at all times for the world's economies. Instead, he portrays rich countries as themselves being propped up by massive government intervention, controls, tariffs, and all manner of unfreetradeslike programs in order to grow their own economies. It was only then that the rich began to tutor and heckle their governments for the power of free trade. In this, they were taking a lesson from Friedrich List, who in 1841 suggested the following:

"Any nation which . . . has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to ther nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto succeeded in discovering the truth" (Chang 2008: 224n8)

In other words, free trade should be used as an ideological bludgeon against potential competitors so that they can never develop to the level to compete as equals with the user of the ladder. A great deal of Chang's book is to precisely lay dynamite all around the ideas of free trade history as they have been preached by their disciples, to show that no country ever relied on free trade as its primary means to secure development and wealth. Even today the market is not free in those nations that profess to its doctrines; the United States sustains one of the most heavily subsidized agricultural sectors in the world, and the effect of this has been to flood other markets with cheap food, to destroy nascent business farming in those countries and to drive the poor and jobless farmers off their land.

It's also worthwhile to think about the growing subprime mortgage debacle in the United States as an another example of "bad samaritanism," because one of the cornerstones of modern conservative economic theory is that government can do no good in the free market. Hudson's article suggests that ordinary Americans are going to be on the hook for building another golden ladder by bailing out the many banks who took on bad debt by accepting people who could not afford (and perhaps did not understand) variable rate mortgages when they were signing the papers. In an economic system of limited resources, this means increasing the taxes on the 90% at the bottom (the rich will never pay for their own bailout, as they have many more ways to hide their money in tax shelters, compared to the poor), or else diverting it from other services. This cry for government intervention is characterized as "socialism for the rich" (privatize the profits, but put the costs of bad business on everyone), or perhaps "Bad faith Keynesianism" (government intervention allowed only to save the markets of the wealthy). This points to another glaring omission of the idea of free trade as well, one that I would guess would be sustained by a reading of world economic history: the wealthier nations never truly kick away their ladders, they simply hide them in the shed, waiting for signs of trouble to call for it. But they would never see this as a contradiction: after all, isn't government intervention only to save the self-regulating market from itself? What self-respecting conservative or neoliberal could disagree with that?

Chang's book is filled with other demolishions of free trade principles, such as the notion that culture plays into development, that copyright and other property rights are necessary to secure economic growth, and that government control over any industrial is necessarily inferior to private control. Lest this sounds very abstract, Chang illustrates most of these ideas with key examples and readings from specific history. One of the most interesting examples and disheartening examples are the case of HIV/AIDS drugs in Africa: with most people not being able to afford the drugs, with people dying, with drug companies being unwilling to lower the price, and with legal precident for "breaking patent" in such cases, such countries would be best to produce cheap generics of the drug. But instead, drug companies are pushing for enforcement of patents that will in any case benefit them little in this instance, ignoring of course that they are inflicting death upon the continent and practicing bad faith (as much of their patented research was subsidized by taxpayers; without basic biology and chemistry, there would have been no drugs). The result of this is to further kick the ladder away from African countries, because of course development depends on having healthy people to climb the ladder in the first place.

If there was one lesson to take from the book, it would be this: whenever you hear the words "free trade," you should poke around the yard a little. Somewhere, there is evidence of a ladder that has been recently used, or that is being used to climb the house of wealth away from the eyes of the public.