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The idea of "independence" is hence an unconscious act of self-degradation of the Puerto Rican peoples, akin in this respect to the popularity of "local control" among self-hating U.S. ghetto blacks. "Local control" of what? "Of our poverty, our slums, our degradation!" What is the ironic mythos of "self-help" prevalent in the U.S. black ghettoes since the 1950's? It is noting but the looting of one black neighbor — of clothing, TV sets, and so forth — to sell this loot to another, neighbor, sometimes in the same neighborhood within almost the very hour it was stolen: "self-help," "local control." The essential, unconscious notion involved: "We are so inferior that we can achieve a sense of equality only by separating ourselves from our superiors." It is the profound, colonialism-induced poverty, ignorance, lack of culture, and so forth, of the oppressed Puerto Rican which induces him to believe that he would be equal only if cut off from all direct comparison ("competition") with the higher-ranking species of man. By playing up to this belief in independence — this belief in inherent inferiority of the Puerto Ricans — this self- degrading mythos of "independence," the PSPer, notably expresses his petit-bourgeois comprador's belief in the innate superiority of, Coca-Cola.

In this connection, it is most useful to compare the pervasive preoccupation with "Spanish culture" among Latin-Americans to the attitudes among democratic and socialist revolutionary Germans over a century ago. The revolutionary Germans, typified by Kant, Hegel, Marx, seized upon the more advanced culture of their immediate oppressors (Napoleon's French, the English), and made a gigantic advance in capitalist culture over the heads of those from whom they appropriated such things. By contrast, the Latin-American petit-bourgeois (e.g., from the comprador classes), seizes upon that which is most bathetically backward in the world; he claims his right to the rubbish of the world — as that which, alone, he considers peculiarly fit for the inferior Latin peoples. This "cultural relativist" seeks in Indian relics, in the misery of the mestizos, in the pathetic possessions of the backward, ignorant and oppressed, that which is peculiarly suited to the perpetuation of a culture of inferiority, of oppression.

The "Glories of Spain"?! Peron's friend, Francisco Franco, perhaps? That wretched, debased crew of present-day Spanish upper classes and bureaucrats who typify and subsist on the most backward culture of Western Europe, who could not "compete" in a world in which peasants and workers were not so miserably oppressed and debased as they are in Spain today!? The Spain of the Conquistadores? Bankrupt Spain of the sixteenth century, ignorant, priest- ridden, horse-ridden, almost bestial baboons of Conquistadores, raping, illiterate butchers? All to pay the debts of Charles V to Italian, German and Low Countries usurers? The Spain of the Inquisition?

Cervantes and other products of the Moorish-Latin heritages? Yes. Even the minor composer, Soler — yes. Goya? Absolutely! These are world-historical figures who rose above parched, miserable, hungry, priest-ridden, bull-baiting Spain with its Burgundian-Hapsburg bestialities.

These achievements of the great Spaniards are not what fascinate the Latin-American comprador.

Rather, he is fascinated by the wretched Spain, the cheap, inferior Spain, the only Western European culture (barring the wretched Portuguese) which is miserable enough to be within the price of the Yanqui's Latin slaves ... unless one considers also the most degraded existentialist, structuralist offal of decaying Parisian "culture," which can be had for no price by anyone sufficiently lacking in respect for himself. The fascination with Spanish culture is primarily a preoccupation with the world of the Spanish-language ghetto, it is the self-image of the Latin comprador as an inferior person in the world.

Pathetic Lorca, imbecilic Neruda. The gifted Cortazar self-degraded into composing Parisian buffoonery. Marquez's genius slipping into pathetic existentialism. What is wanted is a true revolutionary spirit in Latin culture, which self-situates the best spokesmen of an oppressed people in the proper role of world-historical figures, leading not merely the "inferior" people of the vast Spanish-speaking ghetto of the world, but participating as equals in the remaking of the entire world. The world wants Latin Goethes, Hegels, Heines, and Marxes.

Of such human aspirations, such revolutionary aspirations, the petit-bourgeois comprador mentalities of the PSP leadership have absolutely no sensibility. Hence, their contempt for the human potentialities of the Puerto Rican people, and — not incidentally — the Macho's deep contempt for himself, in the pathetic cult of Puerto Rican "independence."

Like everything else about the PSP, even the comprador pose of its leading strata is a pitiful parody of the Latin-American Left political farce in general.

In the major Spanish sectors of Latin America, the comprador families who rule the country for the Yanqui send their sons to the university. At the university, the sons and cousins of the leading families begin their roles as future Yanqui's satraps by political assortment. One son assumes the traditional political pose of "cornprador orthodox politics" — caballero conservativism, — another becomes a future colonel, another becomes the fiery democrat, another becomes a populist publicist, another, or perhaps a cousin, becomes the family's "official Marxist-Leninist" firebrand. These sundry roles are, naturally, reviewed with suitable courtesies at all family gatherings. It is all a family affair — from extreme Right to extreme Left — every department of political life duly put under the supervision of some member of the comprador family. A guerrilla nephew may take a conservative uncle hostage: "Excuse me, uncle; this is merely political." The uncle may, in turn, politically shoot the Leftist nephew and then weigh the delicacy of appearing at the family wake; or, the nephew may, after ending his term of temporary service to the family in the Left, be pensioned off as minister of education to his uncle's Popular Democratic government.

In certain poorer, rural-mentality-ridden sections of the U.S., it was once fashionable for young plebian ladies to join sororities based on the local public high school, in pitiable emulation of the university sororities to which their parents could ill afford to send them. On the same principle, the PSP leading strata attempt to pitifully emulate the comprador traditions of the political life of Venezuela, Colombia, etc. What contemptible little charades of a show of respect for the prestige of the other leader! What a picaresque charade! Poor, plebian, faceless PSPers attempting to play at the courtly manners of the comprador "aristocracy" of more auspicious Latin regions. One is astonished that the PSP's Claridad does n )t write of Don Juan Man Bras! Thus, the PSP of poor Puerto Rico parodies the comprador farce of other Latin regions.

CLARIDAD Attacks Casals

If one searches his knowledge for the name of a contemporary Spanish artist of present- day world-historical importance, the obvious choice he could unquestionably defend would be that of Pablo Casals. Casals was the world's great instrumentalist of the cello for several decades of this century, generally now more reknowned more for his more significant musicianship. He was the guiding spirit of the world's greatest musical event of the past quarter-century, the Perpignan "Casals Festival." He unquestionably ranks high both as a leading Spanish humanist and among the greatest figures of the Spanish artistic heritage, certainly the outstanding contemporary world-historical figure in Spanish art. Otherwise, up to his recent death he was the only notable person of genuine world-historical importance living in his adopted home of Puerto Rico.

It happens that with a good taste rarely exhibited among the dilettantes of the Puerto Rican comprador caste, Casals was the honored figure of a New York City "Fiesta Puerto Rico." The pathetic, contemptible reaction of the PSP's Claridad weekly to Casals' participation in this concert is most revealing.

The weekly's June 24, 1973 editorial denounced the festival's inclusion of Casals as "Cultural Aggression," denouncing in particular, "twenty-five thousand dollars stolen from the workers of Puerto Rico to sponsor a program which was not representative of what is our culture."

The editorial continues, characterizing the concert in the following terms:

... clearly another attempt to force us into "another cultural bag." The implication was clear: that part of the program which was termed "folkioric" was seen as being inferior; it was the classical part of the program which "saved" the event. But we no longer believe such fairy tales. As Puerto Ricans, but especially as revolutionaries struggling for a new society, a socialist society, we understand the importance and necessity of all peoples developing their cultures.

Our anger is not directed at the classical music of Europe, but at the attempt of the imperialists to force it upon us, and imply that our music is inferior to it ... It is the culmination of this genocidal process which will convert all Puerto Ricans, whether here or in Puerto Rico, into a national minority ...

What degrading, pathetic philistinism! "European" music? What of the Spanish language, which is also European? What of mathematics, textile manufacturing methods, modern types of vegetables and meat, the automobile, the airplane, etc., which are also pre sumably the efforts of the "imperialists" to impose a "culture" upon the native islanders?

Or, in a similar vein, is it "cultural aggression" upon Puerto Ricans that gringo "Rock" and "folk" fads are spreading through the island today; is the growing popularity of Mexican Macho ballads in the island to be construed as an example of Mexican "cultural aggression"? The following three examples of Mexican popular song lyrics are exemplary of the genre now sweeping the island.

I.

Nada importa hailer la muerte

en Ia reja de una ingrata,

o llevar en la conciencia

otra culpa por matar.

En los Altos es de machos

respetar la valentía

y su ley son unos ojos

que enamoran al mirar.

Tienen fama sus caballos

que los charros jinetean,

y sus chinas son luceros

de belleza sin igual.

Por sus besos van sus hombres

sin temor a la pelea,

entre sangre de sarapes

y cortadas de puñal.

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II.

...

y los machos de Jalisco

afamados por entrones

por eso traen pantalones.

Vengo en busca de una ingrata

de una joven presumida

que se fue con mi querer,

traigo ganas de encontrarla

pa'ensenarle que de un hombre

no se burla una mujer.

Se me vino de repente

dando pie pa'que la gente

murmurara porque sì,

porque a ver hoy que la encuentre

y quedemos frente a frente

que me va a decir a mi.

III.

!Ay Jalisco, Jalisco

tus hombres son machos,

y son cumplidores

valientes y ariscos

y sostenedores,

no admiten rivales ...

en cosas de amores.

!Ay Jalisco no te rajes!

...

Yo fui uno de aquellos

"dorados" de Villa

de los que no tienen

amor a Ia vida,

de los que a la guerra

llevamos nuestra hembra,

de los que morimos

amando y cantando,

yo soy de ese bando.*

* [footnote]

"I.

It doesn't matter to find death

at the gate of an ingrate,

or to carry on one's conscience

the guilt of another killing.

—

In Los Altos all machos

respect bravery,

and its law is a pair of eyes

whose look is bewitching.

—

Famous are its horses

that the charros ride,

and its women are stars

of unequalled beauty.

—

For their kisses,

their men go

without fear into a fight,

amidst blood of sarapes

and dagger wounds.

II.

...

and the machos of Jalisco

famed for getting everything,

that's why they wear pants.

—

I come in search of an ingrate

of a conceited young girl

who left with my love,

I want to find her

to show her that a woman

never mocks a man.

—

She came to me suddenly

giving people a reason

to whisper,

we'll see today when I find her

and we meet face to face

what she tries to tell me.

III.

Ay, Jalisco, Jalisco

your men are machos,

and they always come through

brave and tough

and sturdy,

they don't admit rivals ...

in matters of courting women.

Ay Jalisco, don't back down!

...

—

I was one of those

"Golden ones" of Villa,

those who have

no love of life,

those who take

their females to war,

those who die

living and singing,

I'm one of that gang.

Source: Aramoni, Aniceto, Psicoanalisis de Ia dinamica de un pueblo (Mexico, tierra de hombres), Second Edition, Mexico: B. Costa-Amic, 1965

The two cited examples of popular "folk culture" from Mexico illustrate not only what is so readily assimilable as Puerto Rican "folk culture," but in that way we have illustrated two other points of general importance here. Firstly, considering the psychopathological content of these songs — and therefore the self-degradation of the persons to whom these songs appeal — we are illustrating the point that most so-called "folk art" of this sort is principally significant as clinical evidence of the self-debasement of an oppressed people. However, secondly, sometimes the very articulation of psychopathology in such "cultural" forms does attain to the status of art.

Some development of this latter point is relevant to the PSP attack on Casals.

In the case of the psychological portraits of the older Goya, the material displayed by the artist is nothing but the content of his own mind. Goya's chimerical figures are not sheer concoctions, not strictly fictions; they are what any qualified psychoanalyst would recognize as psychological truth, accurate representations of the horrible images one finds in the process of deeper probing of unconscious processes. Hence, in the case of these portraits (or, similarly, the psychologically important bull-fight sketches of Goya), or in the similar psychological revelations of Hieronymous Bosch, we have artistic works which are great art exactly because they exemplify the artist (and, implicitly, the audience) gaining self-conscious wilful control over those hideous forces through which his society oppresses him, bestializes him internally.

Is the psychopathological behavior of the street-corner Macho therefore also "artistic" on such grounds? On the contrary, his performance, and the exemplary celebration of that self- degradation in Mexican ballads, is an act of strengthening and perpetuating the degradation expressed by this behavior. Art focuses on psychological truth, and hence often enough on portraying the hideousness within man, but to the effect of liberating man from that hideousness. Great art often "gets out" the representation of the hideousness within man to the either explicit or at least implicit end of enabling man to master, to conquer that self-degradation through self- consciousness.

The essential feature of great art is that it is a product of more or less direct and self- conscious recall and application of the special kind of emotion to which we refer in the concluding summary of this present article. It is the application of the emotion otherwise identified with creative mentation or with "oceanic" impulses of "non-erotic loving" to the effect of liberating the individual from the sort of banality of feeling expressed typically in vulgar "folk culture."

However, this is not to brush aside all of what is sometimes termed "folk art." Most of the great musicians of the past. Beethoven notably included, have seized upon so-called "folk songs" and other elements of popular music (dance-forms) as a point of departure for artistic production. In such instances, they do essentially what Goya did in his psychological portraits; they abstract, so to speak, from these "popular forms" of experience for the purpose of revealing a truth otherwise concealed behind the ordinary experience.

Sometimes, a naive, uncelebrated person, thus termed a "folk artist" because he lacks formal credentials in fine art, applies the same essential personal, less-developed gifts to some of his productions, lacking only the depth of training required to express the accomplishment in better than a clumsy fashion. Yet, despite the predominant banality of, for example, the resulting folk-song he produces, there is an offsetting element of "genius" in his work which enables it to serve an artistic purpose in the exertions of a gifted performer.

Hence, since there is only one set of standards for judging all art, the question of what should have been represented as the achievements of "Puerto Rican culture" at the New York "Fiesta" is a concrete issue. Is there, today, some outstanding Puerto Rican com poser whose work was ignored (i.e., suppressed)? Was there some particular song, etc., some group of musical works from Puerto Rican sources which was of equal merit to that featured in the Casals segment of the "Fiesta" program? If not, then all that could have been offered in decency was the best possible interpretative performance of great "European classical music" by the most gifted residents of Puerto Rico aided by their friends from all parts of the world.

Unless there is some work of unusual artistic merit buried in Puerto Rican popular musical entertainments, then the really oppressive feature of the "Fiesta" was the inclusion of the actually inferior "folkloric" trash. To hold up the pathetic "folkloric" works of Puerto Rico as exemplary of the human qualities of the Puerto Rican people is the most contemptible sort of imperialist patronizing. A comparison can be obtained from the tasteless wealthy dilettante father who arranges a major exhibition for the productions of an ungifted daughter who "paints" without a semblance of creative talent.

There can be no doubt that the editors of Claridad do express exactly such patronizing contempt for the Puerto Rican people. The attempt to contrast the "classical music of Europe" to a "native culture" of pathetic Macho ballads, etc., already says several things of decisive importance respecting those editors. Firstly, in terming the greatest music of the modern world "European" in this sense, they are insisting that Puerto Ricans are so inferior in mental and emotional potential that they are not a part of world culture, and could not possibly rise to such levels as to master Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. When Claridad writes of the need of all peoples to develop their own native culture from the standpoint of the apotheosis of "native" trash such as the Mexican Macho songs we cited, it is the editors who are expressing the dominant philosophical world-outlook of the most reactionary imperialists.

Just as drunken capitalists used to go "slumming" in the U.S. black ghetto, and as white racists thus de. veloped the myth that black people are "naturally good at" jazz, and have "soul" (i.e., have emotions, not intellectual competence), the post-war imperialists developed the reactionary fad in anthropology called "cultural relativism." "Cultural relativism" is the groundless, racist theory that each people is genetically predisposed toward a certain kind of culture, that different national groups and races are merely different species of talking cattle, and therefore do not require the same quality of nutrition, housing, education, and rights as the wealthiest capitalist families. ("The happy-go-lucky slaves must be left to enjoy their own quaint customs.")

It is the editors of Claridad who insist that Puerto Ricans are intellectually and emotionally inferior people. Claridad insists that a world-historical genius in music, Casals, could be understood only by wealthy, well-educated "Europeans." Puerto Ricans, Claridad insists, are not capable of any higher intellectual and emotional level of "culture" than psychopathological ballads and quaint dances.

[Goya picture]

[54]

Notably, the "revolutionaries" of Claridad make no protest against the invasion of Puerto Rican cultural life by "Rock music," a form of pseudo-music which celebrates and exacerbates the bestialization of intellect and emotion.

When the editors write that they are not attacking "classical music, "they are lying. It is precisely "classical music" — and all other serious forms of art and intellectual life — to which the obviously philistine, sexually-impotent moral cretins of the weekly are most violently opposed.

CLARIDAD On "Tango"

The exact form of the philistinism behind the PSP attack on Casals is revealed by a lengthy review of "Last Tango In Paris" appearing under the by-line of Carmen Vazquez Arce in the July 15, 1973 issue. (Notably, Claridad does not balk at the efforts of Arce to commit the "cultural aggression" of imposing Parisite existentialism upon the weekly's Puerto Rican readers.) Arce seizes upon everything in the film which expresses the most degraded form of bourgeois, bestial sexual relations and holds this up as a purgative "revolutionary" attack on bourgeois morality.

Existentialism, the point of view of the film, is both a professed "philosophy" and a psychopathology. The difference between the literary argument and the disease is located in the fact that many leading existentialists (notably Jean-Paul Sartre) are not entirely consistent exponents of the psychopathology which is otherwise the axiomatic kernel of their world-outlook in the writing; in writing, certain existentialists such as Sartre are "afflicted" by intellectual gifts and social conscience contrary to their otherwise prevailing mental illness, thus introducing into literary existentialism contradicting elements which preclude a simple equivalence between the philosophizing and a consistent exposition of the essential world-outlook expressed in the philosopher's axiomatic assumption.

There is nothing strained in any respect in our terming existentialism as a disease ("French disease"?). There is the development of R.D. Laing's cult out of Sartre's existentialist psychology and the parallels to this in the advocacy of insanity by such structuralists as Foucault and Althusser, as well as the advocacy of insanity (although in milder terms) in Sartre's psychological writings themselves. (A "structuralist" is an existentialist suffering from an overdose of grammar.)*

To make short of the point at hand in respect to the "Tango" review, in cultures in which the alienation of the individual is most extreme (France, Italy, Latin America, etc.), the sense of unreality of the self-conscious self is especially acute. For example, the case of the Macho, who is fanatically determined to conceal his "inner self" from all external access. As a result, the infantilism rampant in the culture is relatively more extreme in the form of a preoccupation with the individual sensual experience per se. The "strong feelings" of rage, fear, elation of object- possession, characteristic of the alienated (emotionally blocked) individual are perceived by the victim as purely-individual feelings demanding individual (heteronomic) sensual expression per se.

Correspondingly, just as in the Macho's "extracurricular" sexual relations there is absolutely nothing personal respecting the woman being used at the moment, the ideal of the existentialist lover is to "have" a woman without an exchange of names, to engage in a purely animal sensual relationship with the woman — without either of them knowing who the other is or incurring any other sense of a continuing social relationship — a "purely sensual" relationship, or, otherwise, a purely bestial sexual relationship a la D.H. Lawrence.

The bestialized person such as Carmen Vazquez Arce, imagines that because the existentialist sexual relationship is nominally "dirty" and "immoral" by bourgeois standards, that such a degraded form of sexual relationships is therefore somehow anti-capitalist and hence "revolutionary." Arce overlooks the fact that "dirty" and "immoral" prostitution is already an honored bourgeois institution, especially In Latin American culture. (The Latin father introduces his son to a prostitute — a sort of Latin "bar mitzvah." Later, the son, reared to sex in relationships to prostitutes, rapes his bride on their wedding night, a bride whose entire sexual education was probably at the hands of nuns. The Latin father is seldom offended by his son's "whoring around"; the Latin is offended only by treating a "madonna" as whore. Typically, in cultures — e.g., Spanish, Italian — in which this "noble" existentialist tradition of chastity prevails, the male feels most secure in "whoring around" with a woman from another language- group, etc.)** Is prostitution, the self-subsisting form of existentialist sex, therefore a "revolutionary" institution? We may judge that Arce speaks authoritatively for the editors of Claridad in holding up sexual impotence and sexual degradation as the official political policy of the weekly.

* [footnote] The case of R.D. Laing will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue of The Campaigner. Laing has been selected for this, rather than Focault and Aithusser, on grounds that Laing's version of existentialist psychology involves the hysterical perversion of actual clinical insights, and hence his version of existentialist insanity- mongering has a connection to investigation of psychopathological life entirely lacking in such outright quacks as Foucault and Althusser.

** [footnote] This is most visible in the U.S.A., where the "good Italian" cazziste limit their "whoring around" to non-Italian girls, e.g., Irish girls, and the Irish, Polish, etc., "Machos" reciprocate in kind.

In short, there is an obvious direct connection between Arce's professed sexual self- degradation tion and the weekly's countercultural hostility to "classical music" and great Spanish artistic achievements. Claridad's policy, on culture as well as politics generally, is that Puerto Ricans are an inferior people, who should never be subjected to important tasks of intellectual or emotional life.

Island Politics

The cases of the El Mundo newspaper strike and the general strikes adequately identify the total impotence of the PSP in its island politics. Unlike the now-defunct Puerto Rican Socialist Party of the 1930's, the leadership of the same party (as Marx would say, "repeated as farce") which has taken its name militantly denies the fact that Puerto Ricans are an oppressed minority within the U.S.A. (e.g., editorial, June 24, 1973). Thus the PSP pretends that it is unnecessary for island Puerto Ricans to constantly link their own class struggle to that of the mainland working class. Like all reactionary nationalists, the PSP hostilely rejects class princi ples whenever the "national question" is posed. It treats the U.S. working-class generally as almost equally "imperialist oppressors" together with the mainland capitalists.

The reactionary side of Puerto Rican nationalism shows most clearly as impotence whenever the PSP leadership is confronted with a situation which demands connecting the Puerto Rican workers' struggles to the mobilization of class struggle forces in alliance with mainland workers generally. By thus cutting off Puerto Rican workers from the of mobilizing mainland workers generally, the PSP (like other "left" nationalists) ensures the absolute crushing defeat of all island class struggles. As if half-conscious of this counterrevolutionary aspect of its nationalism, the PSP attempts to cover up its counterrevolutionary role of impotence with the most astonishing charades and double-talk.

The following summary prepared by a leading staff member in charge of the Island intelligence file, makes the essential case.

The EL MUNDO Newspaper Strike

From the first days of the strike in early February, both island and overseas capitalist firms put forth a united front with the newspaper to break this strike. They intended to use that strike-breaking as an example for on-going and future strikes. Therefore, the first picket lines were met with police clubs and the arrest of the strike leadership and rank and file.

Realizing the strength of the strikers, El Mundo decided to rent five helicopters to airlift the paper from the plant and to import scabs. When a legal challenge by the union failed, the "Armed Commandos of Liberation" (CAL), a petit-bourgeois nationalist terrorist group, bombed the five helicopters. CAL is viewed sympathetically by the PSP-MPI.

Labor Upsurge

General public sympathy for the El Mundo strikers was indicated by the rapid decrease of the newspaper's readership up until the point management opted for a lockout. Moreover, the United Workers Movement (MOU), a PSP front organization of progressive trade unions, mobilized their rank and file, especially the Teamsters, to join the picket line and to distribute propaganda about the strike. Similarly, students, intellectuals, and professionals organized rallies and marches in support of the strike.

During the seven-month El Mundo strike there were four other major strikes — by independent truckers, bus drivers and maintenance personnel, electrical and water services workers — and forcible land seizures by dispossessed people. In the first six months of 1972, there were more than a hundred strikes of more than 75,000 strikers. This figure is about twice the annual average in Puerto Rico.

All of this presented a clear opportunity for the Left to intervene in this mass-strike process. Immediately an island-wide strike-support organization could have been created to put forward a common interest program of expanded jobs, housing and necessary services by taxing capitalist income. In that period, such a Puerto Rican vanguard effort could have been made effective by spreading the struggle to the U.S. mainland.

Government Countermeasures

The local and "Yanqui" capitalists were very aware of the explosive potential of this strike wave. On June 23, the associate commissioner of the Industrial Commission of P.R. suggested the creation of a native Pay Board composed of eleven "authentic" union leaders selected by the rank and file. On the first week of August, 1972, the government of Puerto Rico (New Progressive Party) initiated a strike-breaker plan to temporarily replace the striking water services workers. The Civil Defense, the police, firemen, the Department of Public Works and Water Service would act as strikebreakers in this and other strikes in the near future. Although these two plans never materialized, it gives us a concrete expression of how aware the capitalists were of the potential mass-strike process going on.

Left's Response

In December 1971, Juan Mari Bras, the General Secretary of the PSP, said at a New York City lecture that his party had organized an "aspirant" group among El Mundo workers. Thus, by the outset of the strike on February 9, the PSP had an active militant caucus inside the Puerto Rican Newspaper Guild (UPAGRA).

The aims of this PSP-led caucus were to move within the union to more radical "pure and simple" trade-union positions, while the PSP militants played the role of the honest and humble "friends of workers."

[56]

At the time of the lockout (last week of June) the President of "El Mundo" Corp. sent a letter to her employees which was answered by the Workers Affairs Secretary of the PSP as follows:

In the present stage of our struggle, the strategy for economic strikes is set up by the workers headed by their own trade-union leadership. It is within this strategy that our support began to function. That is why we always insist that the terms of our support be determined by the workers. This is what is in harmony with the working-class-conscious development of the Puerto Rican workers and the ideological development of the most advanced trade-union leadership.

Thus, the only nominally socialist party on the island decided to throw politics out of the window at precisely the point where a government-employer front was developing to generate a political approach to crush the strike wave.

The soup-pail method of the PSP in the El Mundo strike reached its climax when, rather than seeking outside political support, the PSP sent its best cadres all over the island in a "Salvation Army" effort to collect the $10,000 fine slapped on the union through a Taft-Hartley injunction which banned mass picketing in front of the plant gate.

During this period all the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) had to offer was its cultural-nationalist militant image toward the bourgeois election. Even the potentially prole tarian faction in the Political Education Secretariat (at that time) was forced to play the party's opportunist election game. PIP had approached the El Mundo strike and all other interventions in the class struggle with this same gate-receipts perspective.

Although the El Mundo strike was in the PSP's "territory," for the second time the PIP decided to expand its vote-getting campaign into the PSP's area. It organized May 1 activities with massive pickets at the newspaper's plant culminating in an electoral rally. Even though the vice-president of the PIP was directing the truckers' strike at that time, his party refused to seek outside political support for either this or the El Mundo strike — because the PIP's sole concern was to win elections — not working-class battles.

At the time of the lockout, the PSP, unable to orient the labor upsurge, chose to interpret it as a "workers' victory;" workers who instinctively knew how to recognize lockouts as powerful weapons were told: "The regaining of the Fatherland means courage and sacrifice."

July General Strike

The island's firemen went out on strike July 4, 1973. They were followed by the Irrigation and Electricity Workers Union (UTIER) of the island's Water Resources Authority (AFF). A few days later the San Juan City Sanitation Workers went out. In addition to these three main strikes, minor ones erupted, among them the workers at Corona brewery and the San Juan Cemetery Workers.

The island's governor, Rafael Hernandez Colon, immediately brought the might of the government against the strikers. Injunctions were issued, along with bench warrants for the arrest of the strike leaders. Colon mobilized the National Guard against the firemen and the AFF work ers soon after they went on strike. For the first time in Puerto Rican labor history, the National Guard was used to break a strike. This made it only the third time that the capitalists have wielded the National Guard in Puerto Rico as an active force of repression. (The first National Guard action was an attack against nationalists during the 1930's and 1950's). With this move the capitalist class had declared open warfare against the Puerto Rican working class.

Hernandez Colon had to call the National Guard to demonstrate to the capitalists that he could deliver the, payments on debt obligations; and given the strike conditions, he could hardly afford to make concessions to the Puerto Rican workers.

The Puerto Rican workers responded very militantly but ineffectively to this declaration of war from the capitalists. Under the leadership of the United Workers Movement (MOU), demonstrations were held to protest government repression and to demand the withdrawal of the National Guard.

However, at no time did either the PSP or the PIP present the workers with a fighting method or a programmatic alternative to Hernandez Colon.

The AFF strike exemplifies this problem. The AFF provides most of the electricity used on the island. It also has debt payments which amounted to $38 million in 1972, and were to reach close to $40 million this year. Both the PSP and the PIP limited their organizing to "pressuring" the government not to be repressive, asking it to make concessions.

The PSP's newspaper Claridad cheered on the worst anarchistic behavior of the strikers, including acts of sabotage which only caused more misery for other workers. One of the places where the power failure first hit was the only hospital of Utuado, a town of 50,000 people.

At no point did they attempt to expand the strike perspective so that it could become a class struggle. They let other sectors of the class stand by and watch a "bunch of greedy workers" who would cause their bills to go up. The left forces never presented the whole population with a class program, which in the case of the AFF would have called for the expropriation of all form of debt held on public utilities and the use of those resources to increase the wages of the strikers and reduce the cost of electricity for everybody.

Lacking this class perspective, the strike failed to gain support. Many other sectors of the class actively supported the use of the National Guard. The activity of both the PIP and the PSP oscillated from reformist pressure politics to the worst extreme of workerist anarchism, as the AFF strike showed.

What, then, but such PSP antics of political impotence is the basis for the growing political credibility of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), while at the same time the PSP- MOU-UNT (National Workers Union) have also strengthened their influence on the organized labor?

During 1971-72, the PSP was forced to develop "semiindependent" political practice toward the PPD because they wanted to "polarize" the Puerto Rican population (pro-statehood vs. patriotic forces), while they also began penetrating the trade-union movement. During this period also, a potential mass strike process was developing, as organized labor, the land seizure movement, and students launched a united attack against the New Progressive Party (PNP), which culminated in the seven-month El Mundo strike.

Unlike the PPD in 1973, the PNP was unable to launch a frontal attack against these strike waves because of the constant outside support and the bourgeois election which was just around the corner. All this working-class ferment was polarized into the PPD, due to PSP electoral vacillations toward the PIP. After the PPD electoral victory, the PSP began tailing the "autonomous local control" faction of the PPD, which had temporarily gained control of the party. This faction began pushing for "Puerto Rican local control" over immigration, the draft, labor relations, and especially for anti-inflation measures. The PSP and a legislative representa tion of the PIP gave critical support to all these measures. The PSP went so far as to propose joining the government's anti-inflation town committees to police the greedy local merchants. The basic premise of the PPD "autonomous" faction is the same as that of the PSP and PIP: the immediate problem of Puerto Rico can only begin to be solved by cutting the cord connecting Puerto Ricans to the U.S.A.

After all these vacillations and blunders, it was no surprise that the PPD could calmly send the National Guard to start their offensive against the Puerto Rican working class. The July general strike was the Puerto Rican "Attica" to show all sectors of the class just what happens when they rebel. With the ebb of the working-class ferment, the government didn't have to pretend that they were dealing with the soaring inflation on basic food products; the PSP could now go back to its ritualistic politics — campaign against the construction of an oil super-port, the right for self-determination at the United Nations and at the Fourth Conference of Non- Aligned Nations.

The Badillo Affair

The most prominent feature of the impotence of the PSP on the U.S.A. mainland is the general refusal of the leadership to consider linking the struggle of Puerto Ricans in the U.S.A. to the general class struggle here. In fact, the PSP has no perspective at all for Puerto Ricans living in the U.S.A. but the general chiliastic hope that somehow these workers will rally to contribute money and adulation to the mainland branch of the party. It insists on the separation of even the mainland Puerto Rican struggles from the struggles of other ("non-Third World") workers, but has absolutely no revolutionary goal which it proposes to these workers except a vague implication that all will one day flock back to an "independent" Island nation. If that silly proposal is not explicitly made, since the Island could not support such a population, by virtue of implication and lack of anything else it is the de facto perspective the silly PSP leaders hold out.

This general policy is epitomized by the queer conduct of the PSP leadership here respecting the 1973 Democratic primary mayoral candidacy of Herman Badillo. Internally, the PSP voted up a resolution denouncing Badillo in relatively appropriate terms. However, during April and May, 1973, the period of primary campaigning, especially, the party refused to either publicize this denunciation or to act in any way according to such a policy.

Claridad later went so far as to criticize the Communist Party for supporting Badillo (in a primary run-off), but refused to "reveal" its own policy on Badillo to its readers. When hooligans working for Bronx honcho Velez attacked PSP members physically, Claridad did denounce Velez, and did make allusions to Velez's connections to Badillo, but even then refused to publicize its internal position.

Is there anything more typical of sexual impotence? "Inside myself, I do have certain values and attitudes toward important matters in the real world, but I never act on or let anyone see this part of myself." Attack the PSP leadership for failing to publicly denounce Badillo, and they become most indignant; "We have our position on Badillo." Insist that they state it if they have it, and they draw themselves up with Macho pride; they will not be forced to act upon what they think. What they think deep inside has no relationship to what they do in the outer world.

One is reminded of the Macho "lover" who has had a long succession of women in bed with him: there is nothing personal in any of these affairs; he is sexually impotent — the PSP is absolutely politically impotent.

It is not difficult to locate the motivation for the PSP's refusal to reveal its internal resolution on Badillo.

If the PSP leaders would be Machos in appearance, they are at the same time political whores in reality. During the early months of 1973, the mainland group concentrated on the effort to build a gigantic organization by calling together any individual who had once given as much as a friendly smile in the direction of either the PSP or its predecessor, the MPI. As for the neglected old whore stalking unchallenged through the lonely night, the effort failed, but the desire continued.

The PSP leadership, which represents a pitifully small mainland organization, pretends loudly to be "The Big Revolutionary Organization of Mainland Puerto Ricans." Like the Macho whistling at girls on the street-corner, the PSP must keep up appearances. It must not estrange any possible supporter — in its desperate fear that it might lose the potential financial contributions of some Puerto Rican, or that someone might be motivated to say bad things about its virility. Since a large proportion of New York City Puerto Ricans support Badillo, the PSP must not risk "alienating" them by telling the truth about Badillo.

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Such Macho "revolutionaries," who are afraid of the influence of a contemptible hustler as Badillo, imagine themselves to be the brave leaders of insurrections against real bourgeois forces! "Militant whores" so "revolutionary" they are afraid to say "bad things" about the neighborhood corner pimp!

The following extracts from our file on the activities of the mainland organization make the point.

Badillo and the PSP

The PSP in the U.S. uses the Puerto Rican population as a commodity in two ways: first, as a fixed pressure group, and secondly to financially accumulate from them the funds that the PSP needs in Puerto Rico. It is in this context that we must analyze their impotence in confronting the biggest illusion of the Puerto Rican population in the U.S. — the New York mayoral aspirations of Congressman Herman Badillo.

Badillo was set up by the ruling class at precisely the time when the third generation of Puerto Ricans in the U.S. were beginning to rebel against the conditions in the ghettoes. Since that time, he has also been pushing capitalist depression schemes, under the guise of the "special interests" of Puerto Ricans: he supports union-busting minority hiring and "work-study" programs, and lately he has argued that the U.S. federal wage should not apply to Puerto Ricans on the Island.

What is the ideological significance of Badillo? The average Puerto Rican, like all victims of bourgeois ideology, tends to look at things as fixed objects, especially since he is at the bottom of the economic scale. Thus, when confronted with two capitalists like Badillo and Abe Beame as mayoral candidates in New York, he deceives himself by selecting the "lesser evil." "Badillo is a Puerto Rican," he tells himself, "and maybe he can hustle something for us. Anyway, if we're going to get screwed we may as well get screwed by one of us." This was the typical response of Puerto Ricans confronted with Badillo's past record of scab-herding and slave labor. Even Badillo's recent endorsement of "greater evil" Beame has not shattered these illusions.

The Badillo mayoral campaign has also had a significant ideological impact on the Island: it has been used to diffuse labor upsurges there and to portray Badillo as the clever "jibaro" (peasant) who made it in the States.

The PSP, for fear of confronting these illusions fostered in Puerto Ricans since the 1940's, decided not to expose Badillo's capitalist schemes. They were afraid of "alienating" their progressive periphery who buy Claridad every week, the same periphery who also support Badillo, Luis Fuentes and other Puerto Rican scabs, simply because all of them represent different facets of the same cultural family. Like impotent "Father" Albizu Campos, they were more interested in uniting this "neurotic" (class-collaborationist) family, than in settling accounts with the subjective neurosis that generally renders Puerto Ricans impotent when confronted with revolutionary politics.

The PSP knew that to the extent that they exposed Badillo, their best periphery and membership would demand a positive revolutionary alternative from them, an alternative to be used both during the elections and afterwards to build a political machine in the U.S. to concretely support the struggles in Puerto Rico and in the rest of Latin America by building an international revolutionary movement here. But such are the tasks of potent revolutionaries, of cadre who are willing to bust up the "family" and organize around the socialist alternative for the future.

The PSP, however, succumbed to their bedroom manners instead, posturing for the outside world in the same way the Macho takes up a "position" for his woman and the outside family (mother). In the outside world they dared not break up the Puerto Rican happy family by actually organizing against Badillo. In private, however, they followed the typical Communist Party tradition: internally, with the organization, they were able to despise both Badillo and Fuentes, much as they do their own mothers. But making this public, actually organizing on the basis of this "secret" understanding, would mean to shatter the illusions that hold the neurotic family together, especially mother's illusions.

Thus, like good mama's boys, they put on their public personas and wrote "objective" articles about how Badillo was discriminated against by the New Democratic Coalition and Beame. Certainly they also felt compelled to chastise Badillo and especially his henchman Velez for stealing funds from poverty corporations, but only after Velez directly threatened them by hitting two PSPers who were selling Claridad outside his office. And to actually organize a revolutionary alternative to expose him and his kind?

Why, mother would blush at the very thought!

Furthermore, this would mean inviting "strangers" inside the household, outsiders who would certainly disrupt the internal affairs of the family. The powerful strangers, to the PSP, are the American working class as represented by the U.S. Labor Party and the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM). The U.S. Labor Party mayoral campaign and RYM are the real fears of the PSP, precisely because they are confronting the very illusions among Puerto Ricans and others that the PSP skirts entirely: the felt need of Puerto Ricans to view themselves as isolated, fixed commodities, and to block out the crude reality of the ghetto by constantly glorifying the myth of someday going back to the island. It was this fear that drove the PSP to refuse to join with the U.S. Labor Party in debating Badillo last February, and to reject a joint campaign to expose the Beame-Badillo candidacies.

Now, with Badillo's endorsement of Beame and the PSP's continued silence on the matter, the PSP has completed their surrender of the Puerto Rican, black, and white working class to the man that Rockefeller has appointed to implement slave labor in New York City.

3. Bourgeois Family/Bourgeois Ideology

The apotheosized model of U.S. worker-husband trudges directly to and from his job. If he is a "good husband" he returns directly to the house, or to a second job. In the house the "good husband" becomes an appendage of his mother-wife; he reprimands the children at her command — he becomes the stern, reproving father at her command, and ceases this mock- Jehovah role also at the command of the ruling mother. He carries out the garbage, runs the errands, and otherwise certifies the supremacy of the bourgeois household, his pathetic, secondary robe as a mere appendage of wife-mother's house.

If he lingers at the bar, or returns late in a drunken rage, his delay is merely a pathetic act of rebellion by "mother's little man." (Often enough, the "good husband" goes out once or twice a week — to spend the allowance wife-mother has given him for this purpose.) His male rage is guilt-rage, and often the image one sees in his contorted features are those of his mother in one of her rages.

In the bar or in the kitchen, he discusses "politics" and the "affairs of the world in general," all to no consequence. He almost never does anything about "politics" or the "affairs of the world;" he merely has "little manly" opinions which it pleases him to be able to air.

Behind him, wife-mother cynically giggles at men "with their political discussions," and in due course calls an end to the "little boys' chattering": "The world will just have to get along without your wisdom for a while," she asserts, "it's time to get washed up for dinner." This, to her, is realism. She occasionally giggles at men and their silly political discussions during her chattering with other women: "Talk, talk, talk," she chatters on about the men's conversations, until she brings the discussion back to housewifely gossip.

The reactionary content of women's ideology is often most directly and succinctly revealed in the family difficulties between the Left-political husband and the apolitical wife. She insists that the ordering of their personal lives be settled without regard for political obligations: "Don't drag politics into this," she often insists. Is it "politics" whether her children are fed? Is it "politics" whether she and her family are sent into slave labor, or die in a fascist concentration- camp? Is it sane for this pathetic woman to assert that there is such a thing as "personal" matters separate from politics in this period? Is her mental sickness not most clear in just such situations?

No woman has a right to drag her husband — or herself — out of an active socialist political life, for any reason. Any man who permits himself to submit to such "obligations to my wife" is a pathetic, degraded spectacle, a virtual Judas to the human race; any woman who succeeds in such a counterrevolutionary act is not only counterrevolutionary, but a vicious oppressor of her children. If her children go hungry, if her husband, her family are victimized by depression, by slave labor, or die in concentration camps, that woman is responsible for such atrocities to the limit of her influence — to that extent, the woman successfully makes herself less than human.

Any man who permits his wife to drag him down in such a fashion Is also permitting her to degrade herself to something less than human; he is thus degrading her.

What is the essence of the matter? What is it that makes wifely womanhood, motherhood so pervasively a reactionary "molecular" political force in capitalist culture?

Bourgeois life for the worker is essentially a family-centered life. The center of the worker's life is the mother's or wife-mother's home. Father runs errands into the "outer world" to get food and so forth for mother. It is a strange, unreal outer world, governed by mother's magic. "Behave as your mother teaches you," "Be guided by your mother's fears," "Respect your mother's fears," "and you will survive in the outer world." ("Don't step on a crack; you'll break your mother's back.") "Mother's magic" is the secret of religion. Organized religion is the supersensuous essence of the universal form of bourgeois mother's magic — mother's home remedies, mother-wisdom, "old wives' "remedies. Religion is for and by mothers, who conspire at religion with pseudo-men (priests) and impose the Mother-Church upon the household.

For bourgeois mothers, the object of consumption is not a creation of self-consciously acting humanity; for mother's household, the object of consumption is a magical object secured because mother's husband "is a good provider," because "mother's prayers" are protecting the family from want, etc. The object of consumption is thus a magical object. Only mother's world, the family circle, is real; the outer world is alien, unreal, unpredictable, unsafe without the protection of mother's magic, mother's religion, mother's "law and order."

Hence, the mother-centered household existence, which denies the objective reality of the world outside the household, is the active principle of bourgeois ideology. The real processes by which the real world is determined, the political-economic processes which determine the material conditions of life, are depicted by mother as somehow unreal, a matter of "little boys' silly talk," whereas the pathetic, impotent individual household, the impotent isolated family, the infantile self-conception of the family, is defined as the only reality — the only domain for exercise of the individual will.

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The reductionist world-view, the formal expression of bourgeois ideology, is essentially symptomatic of such mother-alienation in two interconnected ways.

Since mother portrays father as impotent, and since father is a creature of the outer world, there can be no real emotion in the outer world, but only rituals, poses, masks, mime. Color (emotion of the will) exists only in the family, in mother's world — in personal relations; the real world, i.e., the subjective world, exists only in close personal relations. Outside close personal relations, the world is merely objective, i.e., without real emotion, i.e., merely a black-and-white world of self-evident objects, a world of inexplicable abstracted predicates.

In the outer world, the son or daughter who becomes a professional or wage-earner, does so (except in certain woman's surrogate household professions, such as teaching, secretarial — office-wife, and similar occupations) by utilizing the image of father (or a surrogate father- image) for the persona worn. However, since father is viewed as essentially impotent by the child, the child attempting to act in the outer world models himself or herself on the image of an impotent father, a creature of formality, objectivity — impotence.

Secondly, as we have already emphasized, the outer world itself is seen as magical by the victim of the family tradition, a world of inexplicable objects, of objects controlled by mother's witchcraft, not objects whose existence is wilfully determined by a lawful social process. The essential relationship of the bourgeoisified (i.e., mothered) individual to the objects of the outer world is essentially a fetishistic, i.e., propitiatory relationship. One does not attempt to change the outer world, "silly little man!"; one propitiates the outer world by ordering one's life according to mother's prescriptions for a proper son or daughter of her household.

Hence, the important, vicious psychoanalytical flaw in Feuerbach's great Essence of Christianity. Poor genius Feuerbach, afflicted with his mother-image, could see the outer world only in its fixed-object aspect as a given world to be explored, a world of a fixed reality to which self-consciousness could only submit respecting the fundamental order of things. Feuerbach's great flaw, in his Essence of Christianity, is akin to the flaw of the superficial psychoanalyst, who permits himself the consoling delusion that fathers, not mothers, are the underlying secret of neurosis, ideology, religion and the deity. Hence, for Feuerbach, the Object could not be seen in other than its "dirtyjudaical" or fetishistic quality, as a fixed sensuous object, an object of mother's magic. (Hence, the "feminine" feeling of Feuerbach, vis-a-vis the "fatherly" Gestalt of Marx.)*

* The argument that "God the father" reveals "male-dominated" religion is entirely specious. The male deity is not an abstract essence of ordinary males in general. The "typical male" of capitalist society is a pathetic figure, reduced to fury at his mother and wife. The "father figure" of the deity is derived from the image of the King, from the magical potenties of society.

Exemplary, in the New Testament we have cuckold Joseph left outside the bedroom as the Virgin Mary is being impregnated by the visiting Angel Gabriel. "God the father" is not adduced from the wife's husband, but from Washington, D.C., Big Corporations, and other potencies of established authority. In recent U.S. history, President Eisenhower epitomizes the image from which modern notions of "God the father" are sustained. The male Deity, whether Christian or J udaic, is Mammon, is the abstract maleness of established capitalist authority — is the Big Corporation Executive who sleeps in mother's bed while cuckold father is at work in the corporation's plant. He is mother's not-so-secret lover, the same figure of "law and order" which mother warns her children to "respect and obey." The paterfamilias, the moral cuckold of the household, merely pathetically, impotently echoes her: "Do as your mother says."

To recapitulate this essential point. The formal essence of bourgeois ideology is the mother's belief in the unreality of the "outer world." The outer world is unreal precisely because the victim of capitalist ideology denies the fact that the material conditions of life are totally the wilful creation of human practice and can be changed according to the wilful change of human practice. Bourgeois ideology sees the outer world as essentially given, as something to be propitiated, not to be changed. The recurring origin of this ideology is the bourgeois family, notably the infantilism of sadistic mother-possession of the infant and child, and the degradation of woman, emotionally and intellectually, into the appropriateness to become bourgeois mothers and wives. The most notable dynamic feature of the interconnection between family and ideology is the separation between family life (real) and the outer world (the alien realm for mother's propitiatory magic — religion), such that the individual imagines himself without power over the wilful determination of the outer world as a whole.

The most conspicuous single feature of mother's oppression of the son, daughter, and husband is her fears, her fear of rats — her demand that the family — out of respect for her fears — keep the house free of "strangers," and do nothing to bring down the rage of the outer world upon the house. Thus, "I love and respect my mother" becomes the expression for the very essence of bourgeois ideology — and ultimately even the essence of fascism.

The Remedy

The situation is not hopeless. To the extent that the male worker finds a meaningful social-productive role in the outer world, and his children thus see him as a potent producer of wealth in a social way, his children, as workers, sense the possibility of non-childish adult life as potent producers of the material conditions of life.

Clinically, this point is borne out in a perverse way by the obvious increase in sexual impotence in the current U.S. youth generation over that of their parents' and especially their grandparents' generation. In the sort of case identified for this purpose, one notes the young scions of suburbia whose grandparents were workers, but whose mothers and fathers degenerated from workers (potency) into petit-bourgeois professionals, shopkeepers, paper-shufflers, and — morally, the lowest of the low — salesmen (impotence). This dismal phenomenon extends into even the ranks of the children of skilled and semi-skilled workers by the post-war U.S. deemphasis on productive development, the imposition of Zero-Growth-type "anti-materialism" (petit-bourgeois paper-shufflers' cultural norms) upon the household standards of the working- class family, principally through the influence of the "upward-mobile" working-class wife. The more the emphasis on productive values lessens (less potency) the more impotent, the more "feminine" (in that sense) the culture becomes.

The same point is to be made respecting Latin culture. In that culture, we have both the peasant tradition, in which the bestial principle of the isolated family versus the unreal outer world is most extreme, and the backwardness of the capitalist development, such that working- class values (potency) are less developed for the males than in a developed industrial culture. The male Latin culture is objectively (productively) more impotent than the male in Germany, Britain, the U.S.A., or Canada generally. Latin culture is permeated with peasant, latifundista, bureaucratic mentality and morality, in which the male is objectively impotent, in which the mother is objectively more relatively potent than her husband. Hence, Latin culture's underdevelopment (Italy, Spain, Latin America — and also peasant-petit-bourgeois France) is associated with the pathetic image of the "Latin lover" and of the squatting, infantile, sadistic Latin mother. Hence, Latin culture's predeliction for Catholicism, the most vicious expression of the Mother-Church, cultural backwardness, and sexual impotence.

However, respecting remedies, what is true for the male is more than equally true for the female. If the male is to free himself from the oppressive, emasculating mother-image, he must replace the mother-image as the central internalized figure of his identity with a real woman, his wife. This cannot be accomplished unless the wife is a liberated woman, a woman whose liberation from the bestial "witch" or "cow" mother-image within her depends upon the recipro cated support and commitment of a socially potent husband.

It is not the woman (wife or mother) who is the original oppressor, nor the man. The oppressor is the mother-image, an internalized monster within the mind of the child, a monster based not on the existent woman, the mother, but the mother's bourgeois-family relationship to her husband and children. The male does, as we have noted, mediately oppress the woman who mediately oppresses him and the children — by encouraging, even forcing the wife to retreat into a banalized (sadistic) role. As every self-conscious wife knows, bitterly, the agency within the husband which is most responsible for her husband's oppression of his mate is the mother-in- law, the internalized image of his mother within him (unfortunately, too often assisted by reenforcement from the existent mother-in-law). Similarly, the wife's oppression — sadism —toward her husband and children is immediately generated from the control of the internalized mother-image within her (sometimes assisted by reenforcement from her actual mother). Indeed, the oppressive feature of most bourgeois marriages is that the puppet-victims of that institution are largely proxies suffering the actual "marriage" relationship between the two mothers-in-law.

Women's Liberation Versus "Feminist" Self-degradation

This will undoubtedly produce rage from the so-called "radical feminists." The woman who is banalized and otherwise degraded by capitalist culture is stripped of every possible power over society except the role of the female sadist. Until she is confronted with her real oppression — her banality — and her real oppressor — her internalized mother image, and unless she is also offered a real alternative, human role in society, she will cling with rage and terror to the one power — female sadism — bourgeois society offers her. Hence, hyper-neurotic petit-bourgeois women, frustrated with their own impotence, frustrated with the collapse of the traditional woman's institution, the family, lacking a real, alternative, potent role in the real world, feel the terror of their meaningless lives, and locate the cause for that terror in the form of whatever hysterical rationalizations their internalized mother-images will permit them.

If the healthy woman's liberation struggle against objectively oppressive customs and practices is pathologically extended as a thing-in-itself into such quackery as "consciousness- raising" sessions led by incompetents, what will be dredged up by group sessions will be nothing but an almost psychotic reenforcement of the fundamental neuroses: in the form of "man-hatred" and lesbianism (complete heterosexual impotence). (This is quite distinct from the human dynamics of homosexual pairings.)

This ought to be the ABC of any competent clinician. Along the lines indicated earlier in this article, the essence of clinical work is the successful counterposition of the will of self- consciousness to the infantilized impulses of the Ego-state. If group sessions are constituted on the basis of socially reenforcing the Egostate impulses in opposition to the "ego-ideals" of self- consciousness, then the result of the group sessions can only be to exacerbate neuroses, and to even harden mere neuroses into actual psychoses. The correlatives of such quackery "consciousness-raising" sessions are a marked increase in selfishness, accompanied by deep personality changes and intensified infantilism generally — as is the typical outcome seen in those who have subjected themselves to the degradations of the "extreme" wings of the women's movement, a "radical feminism" whose literature verges upon or even into the most blatant paranoid-schizoid expressions.

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The task of real women's liberation is to generally strengthen women's self- consciousness and their power and opportunities to act upon self-consciousness. It is necessary to add something to what must be done for map on this point. Since the woman has a special, doubly-hard struggle to realize a socially potent intellectual life, it is necessary to go beyond mere self-consciousness of adult individual roles, to self-consciousness of the process of struggling against the special kinds of problems which confront women in their efforts to play a positive role in the socialist movement.

For example, the most vicious problem immediately confronting any woman who has resolved to overcome her past banality is the general lack of any suitable, prospective male who will struggle with her for a mutually-self-conscious human mating relationship. The sexual banality of the available prospective mates constantly threatens the woman's self-consciousness, impelling her to compromise with her self-consciousness out of the urgency of being loved. She finds herself agonized by the temptation to accept infantile expressions of male love as the only visible alternative to no love at all. Once women begin to struggle against their own self- oppression in this way, it becomes absolutely impermissible to tolerate banality (i.e., mother- image domination) among the majority of males in the movement.

Thus, the vicious problem confronts us. As long as Latin would-be revolutionaries remain Machos (i.e., mother's "little men") the Latin woman has poor hope of finding a full life as both a revolutionary and a woman within the movement. Yet, without such women, struggling for self-consciousness against banality, the Latin male would-be revolutionary has virtually no hope of freeing himself from his mother-image, his Macho impotence. Hence, the coordinated, simultaneous, ruthless attack on the mother-image in both the male and female young would-be revolutionaries is the essential precondition for building a mass-based vanguard force of genuine Latin revolutionaries.

We have merely indicated the scientific form of the problem and its general solution. Beyond that, we are not entirely so original: all important Latin American literature, whether otherwise reactionary or revolutionary in intent of the author, shrieks out the images of the special psychological oppression of the Spanish-language man and woman. The great novels and poetry of Latin America have contemplated this monstrous problem; now is the time to change it.

The Clinical Form of "Love"

As the writer emphasized in "Beyond Psychoanalysis," the short-term focal objective of the Labor Committees' work in applied psychology is the wilful development of powers of creative mentation in a growing plurality of the organization's cadres — with the further objective of replicating that achievement among a vanguard of the broader working masses. Limited success to this end has occurred for a portion of the participants in the special psychoanalytical groups established to date. In general, these results have been encountered in less than fifty hours of sessions, in each group's cases. Otherwise, study of the present writer's materials on psychoanalysis and certain other subjects has produced parallel reactions meanwhile among a few persons outside the sessions of the several groups now in progress. The clinical results obtained in that way clarify the most urgent positive features of the present critique of Latin ideology.

The direct conscious perception of the fundamental emotion (lovecreative mentation) has been brought forward in two different but fundamentally connected ways. In some of the cases, it has been classically identified by the subject as an overwhelming ("oceanic") and absolutely terrifying "non-erotic" feeling of "love-death" (Yes, the opening — storm at sea — and famous duet of Tristan and Isolde are of extraordinary clinical relevance). In a few other cases, the identical emotion is brought forward by concentration on certain key features of the writer's papers, in connection with the conceptualization of a self-perfecting continuum as a "true infinity." In both types of instances, the quality of feeling is identical with the most fundamental emotions brought forward in depth analysis of individuals.

Ordinarily, outside the Labor Committees, there are dangers in exposing a person to such an overwhelming emotion. The program is safely undertaken in the NCLC, where it could not be so with laymen, since the LCer has a self-conscious identity in the world, which the ordinary layman lacks. Under some unfortunate circumstances, this experience, absolutely the most terrifying the human mind can know, can prompt suicides, or provide the impetus for psychotic collapse.

The danger is not located in the emotion itself; it is not the emotion involved which is "bad" or "dangerous." The popularized "Eros-Thanatos" thesis is absolutely nonsensical, even though the surface form of the phenomenon in bourgeoisified individuals is normally that of "love-death" or "love-insanity-death." The danger is located in the fact that the initial out pouring of such an unleashed emotion dissolves all ordinary sorts of mental object-images, including the infantile form of the bourgeois individual ego itself. Hence, if the individual has no sense of personal identity apart from his identification with the infantile form of the ego, the outpouring of this emotion is indeed therefore the sense of death. The fact that this emotion is also the overwhelming sense of what the feeling of love ought to be results in the ambiguous judgment that this is the feeling of Love-Death.

There is no actual distinction between "Eros" and "Thanatos" in mental life; the feeling is identical — Love-Death is merely a name appropriate to the single fundamental emotion of identity from the standpoint of the bourgeoisified infantile ego.

The point is probably clarified for a larger number of readers if we introduce the following explication with the aid of a metaphor. If one imagines the infantile ego-object to be like a rock jutting out from the sand at the low-tide line, imagine the effect of holding firmly to this rock during the incoming tide. If one can swim, or even float, the gentle incoming tide is no danger; however, if one is chained to the rock, one must drown — die. It is "holding onto" the infantile ego which causes the incoming tide of the fundamental emotion to be so terrifying — and destructive.

Exemplary is the "Werther"-type model of adolescent suicide. The love-object of adolescent infatuation is an infantile ego's surrogate for the mother. Adolescent love is infantile mother-love-seeking. This feeling brings up, however — or tends to bring up, a sense of the fundamental "oceanic" feeling of Love-Death, whose prescience the adolescent recalls usually from the earliest years of post-infantile childhood. The attachment to the ego through the idea of the love-object's giving (infantile) identity to that ego, and the overwhelming sense of "oceanic" feelings, lacking an object (person) to attach to those feelings, causes the threat or actuality of the psychological death of the ego. Under special circumstances, this experience of psychological death can become either a will to enact death or to realize psychological death in the form of psy chotic withdrawal. That account is of course oversimplified out of respect for the principal objects under consideration in this paper, but the gist of the point is nonetheless accurately, if metaphorically made.

Unless the individual has developed a durable sense of self-conscious identity in the world as an alternative to the infantile ego of "family life," the outpouring of the fundamental emotion is the experiencing of "psychological death."

The self-conscious identity is readily located. In respect to Goya's psychological portraits, this identity is not one of the figures in the portrait, but is the eye of the painter looking at the portrait. It is, as Hegel defines it and as we noted before, the self which can come up behind the back of the ego.

This ultimate terror of the fundamental emotion is also the experiencing of the emotion of potent love, properly the form of love between self-conscious identities, the affective concomitant of wilful creative mentation, and the emotion associated with cognition of the most powerful of the great classical musical compositions. (Indeed, many persons who never experience this emotion enjoyably under any other circumstances, including those who never experience it in sexual relationships, have fairly frequently experienced it in connection with certain musical compositions. Parts of Bach, the early passages of the Mozart Requiem, Beethoven's Grosse Fugue are typical of the more moving compositions through which a certain degree of the fundamental emotion is more frequently experienced. The case of the gifted pre- adolescent musician who loses his or her intimate relationship to music in adolescence and later is also relevant.) What is the greatest imaginable terror for the ideologized individual of bourgeois culture is identical with the emotion giving the greatest serenity to a Spinoza — or to any other person who has known either potent loving or wilful creative mental life.

In the case of the individual clinging to the bourgeois infantile ego, either through the mediation of the mother-image or the love-object of a banalized sexual relationship, the experiencing of even a significant outpouring of the fundamental emotion is an experience of psychological near-death. The "threat" of the emotion is associated with the shrinking of the ego down to a "point," surrounded by a "Schwaermerei" of fragmented thoughts and feelings. In such instances, where they occur in a clinical setting, the problem is resolved by bringing the self-conscious identity to "wakefulness" at the same time that the individual is disassociated from whatever infantile preoccupations are causing strong attachments to the infantile ego.

One should add, for emphasis, that there is a direct connection between this sort of phenomenon and the remedying of even severe psychosomatic illnesses. Intestinal psychosomatic involvements and migraine headache syndromes are among the most accessible to remedy in this way. (Indeed, the variety of disturbances falsely deemed of organic etiology which are susceptible of remedy or significant improvement through analysis indicates that psychosomatic medicine is of far greater importance and engages much more of the realm of "organic" disorders than is usually admitted even by professionals. If the "organic" problem can be remedied or checked by psychoanalytical clinical methods, then the case for its probably psychosomatic origins has been strongly made.) The link between psychological disorders and somatic disorders shown to be connected to this psychopathology is through the mediation of the fundamental emotion, which is obviously linked to proprioceptive and ACTH dynamics.

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Much more could (and, soon enough will have to) be written on this set of phenomena. For the present, we confine ourselves to that which is essential to the topic at hand.

Limiting ourselves momentarily to the general incompetence of self-professed "Marxist theoreticians," the progress of the movement demands two interconnected competences from leading cadres (from especially the leading cadres).

Formally, there can be no competent strategic and tactical analyses nor competent economic program until the notion of "expanded reproduction" has actually been conceptualized. This conceptual problem is identical with that otherwise posed by the case of the "perfection" theorem of Descartes (as we develop it in "Beyond Psychoanalysis") and the connected problems of physical science in developing a "unified field theory" from the standpoint of a negentropic principle connecting the historic succession of nested manifolds. In sum, the ability to conceptualize expanded reproduction in more than descriptive terms demands that the individual locate within his mental processes a referent which is not an object-image, and which is not merely simple continuity.

The only referent which exists in the mental processes which corresponds to a self- perfecting continuity, to such a notion of infinite negentropy, is the emotion of creative mentation, the so-called Love-Death fundamental emotion. Hence, it is no metaphor to insist that the leadership of the PSP (in particular) is shown to be characterized by sexual impotence on the sufficient grounds of its anti-intellectualism and its correlated banalized hearsay knowledge of the existence of Karl Marx's writings.

The same form of conceptual problem is encountered in the second aspect of the matter. It is impossible to uncover and conceptualize the dynamics of social processes without making the same fundamental emotion conscious and agreeable to deliberate usage.

This is no broad descriptive generalization. In the Labor Committees we have been able, and recently with increasing precision, to locate the exact points of reasoning at which members are blocked from going the next step to a direct conceptualization of expanded reproduction and social processes. Typically, the affected member is able to formulate the problem to be conceptualized in ample scholarly, statistical, etc., terms. The result of these preliminary exertions is to locate the notion to be conceptualized, not directly but by a process of circumnavigation of the idea to be seized. Then, the member attempts to leap mentally directly into the middle of the circle or ellipse he has defined, to seize the subject he has circumscribed in that way. It is at just this point that various sorts of blockages occur, usually with definite physiological correlatives: sleepiness, fainting, choking sensations, etc. Where these physiologically-linked phenomena are clinically explored, the block proves to be a block caused by the threatened onrush of the fundamental emotion.

The isolation and analysis of this blockage is one of the most important clinical discoveries in the history of psychological science. It represents what G. Riemann identifies as a case of "unique experiment." We already know from epistemological analysis (Cf. DIalectical Economics, passim; "Beyond Psychoanalysis," Sections 2,3) that the necessary form of both the fundamental law of the universe and the "a priori" physiological principle of human mentation are of an equivalent form, the form of Cartesian self-perfection identified by the notion of self- moving negentropy as invariant for an historic nesting of manifolds. It is therefore the most important breakthrough in empirical scientific knowledge to discover that the attempt to directly conceptualize the notion of negentropy is identical with the effort to self-consciously bring forth the most fundamental emotion, and that the block to conceptualizing the dialectical method is related to the blocks causing sexual impotence.

Both tasks, that of programmatic and social-process conceptualization, absolutely demand the cadres' ability to wilfully call forth and apply the "terrifying" fundamental emotion. For, to conceptualize it is necessary to locate a comparable quality within the mind for that external reality which must be cognized. The only quality of inner mental life which corresponds to actual expanded reproduction or to actual revolutionary transformations of social processes is the fundamental emotion.

Ordinarily, victims of bourgeois ideology and social relations are blocked (by anticipated terror) from directly and consciously experiencing this emotion, and most victims are unable to experience any emotions at all but the three bourgeois-feeling-states of fear, rage, and elation of object-possession. (For example, rage is the primary emotion employed in mathematical logicizing and most chess-play, etc.) The difficulty of conceptualizing a negentropic true continuum or, analogously, actual extended reproduction or dialectical method, is entirely a result of commonplace, vicious neurotic (ideological) blockages, blockages characterized by a determinable dynamic of suppressing more fundamental emotions. Hence, the direct connection between neurotic blocks of intellectual life and sexual impotence. For example, it is strictly accurate to diagnose the interest in "analytical philosophy" rampant on campuses today as conclusive evidence of sexual impotence in academic life.

There is nothing accidental about the blockage or the sensation of terror. The blockage of the fundamental emotion does not arise directly from capitalism's intention to produce sexual impotence as such, but from capitalism's implicit concern to prevent creative mentation in the general population. For, a person who operates from creative mentation is necessarily char acterized by hubris toward "established authority," and is motivated by his sense of identity to change things constantly in a fundamental way. Apart from the immediate terror of the "death of the infantile ego" which the experiencing of the fundamental emotion involves, the implication of acting upon that emotion (upon self-conscious identity, Spinozan identity, motivated by such emotion) is to change the outer world drastically, and to act in concert with a mobilized creative humanity to change the world into that which our powers of reason dictate that world must become. To experience the fundamental emotion is to leave the protection of the illusions of the alienated bourgeois family and to enter into the outer world, to find one's identity in positively changing the world rather than in the infantile consolations of the compartmentalized "family life" or infantile "love-relationships." The terror which the fundamental emotion thus presents to the infantile ego is thus both coherent and in projective relationship to the implicit objective terror resulting from acting upon the dictate of the fundamental emotion.

Self-consciousness experiences discovery, and the self-conscious self, once knowing that the discovered act is a socially-necessary act, is suddenly and brutally repelled by the charge of hubris (usually from the mother-image's sneer: "Who are you to consider doing that? Be yourself. Stick to what you are" — mother's little baby, mother's "little man."). The discovering mind is so plunged into despair, and snuggles into the warming consolations of the family hearth, resolved never to go to the cold slopes of mountain-ascent again.

There is therefore a direct and necessary correlation between the sexual impotence of the PSP and its banality, a correlation between that sexual impotence and the consummate cowardice of the PSP in political life. Like any petit-bourgerois schoolboy of a cowardly bully, like any cowardly Macho, the PSP mistakes courage for mere bullying and insolence (indeed, even the Puerto Rican dialect expresses pathetic psychological truth by equating "coraje" only with anger — insolence). The miserable "objective" political record of the PSP exemplifies its pathetic cowardice in face of the mere threat of popular criticism from among the ranks of the Puerto Rican majority. The PSP cowards lack the moral conviction to attack the self-degradation of the oppressed Puerto Ricans. Hence, the sexually-impotent PSP is incapable of a single gesture in direction of an actually-revolutionary act. The PSP schilmihls are determined not to even suggest a single change in the dominant self-degrading ideology of Puerto Ricans!

The PSP loves Puerto Ricans in the way a whore loves her clients, which absolutely does not entail freeing them from impulses of moral self-degradation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON MACHISMO

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Back, K., Hill, R. and Stycos, J., Machismo in Puerto Rico, Cultural Norm and Attitude Complex.

Carrion, Jorge, Mito y Magic del Mexicano, Mexico City: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1970.

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