The stop in the mind again

I have written about the "Stop in the mind" so many times I am sure people who read my stuff get sick of it. The English historian, Christopher Hill used the term in his excellent history of the English revolution. * He described the heroism and commitment the rising capitalist class and other opponents of feudal absolutism had in the struggle for economic and religious freedom under these regimes.

He used the term "stop in the mind" to describe the greatest obstacle the revolutionists faced in their struggle against the feudal regime----their own consciousness. They accepted the dominant ideology of the day which was termed "The divine right of kings". This expressed the view that the King was gods emissary on earth, he was king by god's proclamation.

Naturally, if you believed in god this was an insurmountable hurdle. How could you get rid of the emissary of the person that created you and the world in which you live? This view eventually lost some credibility after they cut off the kings head and god never intervened.

I write about this term all the time in part to constantly remind myself of what is and what is not. It's my attempt to defend myself against the dominant ideology of today, the ideology of the capitalist class.

Yesterday I was at a rally of teachers here in California. The Union they belong to, the largest in the nation with over 300,000 members in California alone, called for rallies and for its members to wear pink as teachers received pink slips (layoff notices in the US) due to the fiscal crisis. The employers laugh at this completely inadequate response to their savage attacks on working people by the trade Union leaders and members eventually get demoralized by what is in actuality a pep rally that accomplishes nothing concrete.

There is no money in this nation for education. We are told this by the rich through their control of the media. The Union leaders pick up the story and repeat it unchallenged. The priests and preachers echo it from the pulpits and eventually many of us believe it ourselves although we also see that money goes to wars and other profitable (for some) enterprises.

The Financial Times mentioned in one of its editorials today the sum of 11 thousand billion dollars or 11 trillion dollars that they say is stashed away in offshore accounts dodging taxes. I had read about this figure before and they are now, in the light of the present financial crisis, curbing some of the excesses, or pretending to.

It should be noted that this 11 trillion dollars (about one fifth of world GDP) is money that rich individuals have stashed away---it does not include corporations.

This 11 trillion is just the tip of the wasteful iceberg, it is our money---the product of those who work productively each and every day.

So we should also unplug that stop in the mind as there is no shortage of money in society. It's like the domestic violence victim, once they realize they are not the cause of the violence just the recipient of it, that there is a real problem that is not of their own making, it opens the door to correcting the situation. A strategy of accommodation to a domestic violence abuser doesn't stop the violence (it can only be a tactic along the road to stopping it) and wearing pink won't stop the bosses violence against workers---weakness breeds aggression is a well known saying and in exploitative situations it is true.

Once we're free of the stop in the mind, we can address the next obstacle, the view that there is nothing we can do about it. But a glimpse at our history and the struggles of those who gave us what we have today holds great lessons if we can tear ourselves away from the daily grind and their mindless TV shows.

Another lesson for us is to learn is from our enemies. Yesterday's Financial Times, one of the most important and influential journals of capitalism in the world advised its readers to read four great economists in order to help them understand capitalism and how it works.

They were Adam Smith Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes (Lord Keynes, obviously not a Marxist) and Karl Marx. This is not the first occasion in the past weeks that a distinguished journal of capital has urged its readers to read Marx.

USA today, The Sun in Britain, The New York Daily news or Fox TV are all owned by the same group of folks that own the Financial Times and their audience is millions of working people.

They don't urge us to read Marx.

So obviously we should do so.

* http://www.amazon.com/Century-Revolution-1603-1714-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415267390/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1237046088&sr=1-1