[Marxism] In Debt to Islam

[Mehmet Cagatay <mehmetcagatayaydin@xxxxxxxxx>]

In Debt to Islam

Couple of years ago, British newspapers disclosed the legal but
'unethical' schemes of the famous soccer clubs, which enable some players
to avoid paying nearly half of the Inland Revenue. Among the various
methods of dodge, one of them was distinguished by its speculative
approach to the problem: Through employee benefit trusts clubs lend money
to the players, in a weak currency such as Turkish Lira and when the
repayment day arrives, the profit due to lira?s steady loss of value
against sterling remains at players.

We are now witnessing a similar speculative transaction on behalf of the
continuity of the historical forms of fundamentalist consciousness. The
absence of self-critique in fundamentalisms is being ensured by putting
the diverse modes of universal individual into debt on the cultural float
field of universal values. On the one hand we have the superior ideals of
the neo-liberal social contract (democracy, freedom of speech, social
security, human rights, equality of men and women, sexual freedom, etc),
on the other, we have the witch kettle of the evil in which our present is
dissolving in the archaic mixture consisted of totalitarianisms,
mind-control, terrorism, restriction of criticism, mass surveillance,
patriarchy, subordination of women, and so on. Since the promises of the
social contract had unveiled its dependence on class division and lose its
material relevancy to the day-to-day struggles of the working class, those
ideals have been re-established as a series of moral principles which
could attract the ordinary consumers only by fluctuations in their values
in comparison with the exchange value of the counter-moralism of
transcendental irrationality. And the shares of the outcasts of
neo-liberalism are intentionally being stabilized at over-price to
aggravate the debt burden of working class in the divine circle of the
moral ?relativism? of the modernity.

Opposing the procedure applied by Arsenal to praise its star players with
deceiving the Treasury, this cultural chicanery tracks the way of
swindling the working class for the benefit of the common treasury case of
global capitalism. For instance, since democracy (the abstract guaranty
for the individual to partake in the process of resolving social
questions) have been substituted by supra-political officialdoms which put
only frivolous issues to the vote of majority, the neo-tyranism could
maintain the commitment to the imaginary democracy (the moral image of
earthly democracy) via the fear of totalitarianisms originating from
celestial devotions but which also have a serious tangibility of
?barbarous? violence. Then the working class debtor thinks that he should
be glad for being offered with the potential advantages of the democratic
risk society, for being shepherded by the notion of national security to
assure his individual security to the cost of the ?security? promise of
the bourgeois social contract. Shortly, the imaginary virtue-value of
democracy is determined by the actual unsanitary-value of oppressive
paradigms. But as Marx disclosed, ?it is evident that by making the value
of one commodity, say labour, corn, or any other commodity, the general
measure and regulator of value, we only shift the difficulty, since we
determine one value by another, which on its side wants to be determined?.
After this difficulty has been shifted, there show up the debt collectors
to materialise the cultural debt burden on the back of working class. As
we saw in the case of the proposed First Job Contract in France, or in the
never-ending assaults against the social security system of Turkey, those
cultural debts are paid typically with the real money, with the genuine
vital energy of the nameless players who have the maximum work-rate
attribute just as in the soccer management simulations.

But who are those debt collectors? They are the self-enlightened apostles
of free market fundamentalism, of cultural individualism, of
quasi-universal values which could not be determined without the mediation
of their supplementary angles on the horizontal lines of global moralistic
space, etc. Last month, amongst those distinguished debt collectors twelve
of them issued a hot-tempered Manifesto against the resurrection of
classical totalitarianisms (Nazism and Stalinism) in the guise of Islam.
Those unblushing creditor?s lawyers were merely carrying out the legal
responsibility of reminding the cultural debtor that what criminal codes
will be applied if he dodge from compensating the particular Dominion
Theology of New ?Enlightenment: Universal values (such as indisputable
merits of capital, freedom of monopolising the instruments of speech,
defunctionalized suffrage, notion of ?equal opportunity? which postulates
that markets and social structures are exterminated and regenerated with
the entrance of every single individual, etc) grant the Universal
capitalists and their bootlickers dominion over the Universe.

In the celebrated Manifesto, we are being threatened with an infantile
narrative analogous to a fairy tale classic, Sleeping Beauty: There was
infertile king (inferior individuals of the History) who could not
impregnate his wife (Mother Nature). Then his wife cheats him with a
productive young man (bourgeois) to gave birth to a gorgeous princess
(democracy) who would be gifted to perfection by the right-minded fairies
(intellectuals of Enlightenment) of the Empire. But some envious fairies
(Nazism and Stalinism) cursed this little princess with a terrible gift:
On reaching maturity, she would wound his finger with a spindle
(Totalitarianism) and die. Then comes those analgesic fairies (the authors
of the Manifesto), assuring the king by a spell that she would not die but
fall into a sleep until a prince (Universal Values) would condescend to
kiss her. The whole story in their minds is as pathetic as this and all
their claims about the alleged cultural superiority rely on enchanted
narratives and historically conditioned inferiority of their comrades in
the global brotherhood of fundamentalisms.

full:
http://weblogmca.blogspot.com/


Mehmet Çagatay
http://weblogmca.blogspot.com/

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