An old friend of mine posted an essay by Domingo Castro de Guzman in her blog. Check it out:

http://sarahbelle.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2005/10/why_be_a_revolu.html

The essay, like a lot of the discourse on liberation and freedom these days, smacks of the postmodern tendency to take post-structuralist assumptions to their logical conclusion--a totalizing discourse that ironically started out to combat totalizing discourses.

I feel uneasy about the essay, suspicious that there might be verbal sleight-of-hand involved. First, it defines the revolution as negative liberation, liberation "from" something instead of freedom "toward" something. Then it lists down almost everything that can be construed as an object for idolism. some of the items in the list are even things some of us don't view as "bad" or needing freedom from ("the nation," "work," etc.) It pushes us and challenges us to take away any metaphysical ground beneath our feet. It denounces "God, Man, society, the proletariat, the race the nation, the party, the feminine, the masculine, the androgyne" because it "amounts to the same thing--dolism." It basically warns us against the dangers of fetishism.

At this point in the essay, I was expecting one of two things: that he would either 1) pursue this liberation viewed negtively to its radical conclusion and theorize how a social order free from everything would even look like, or 2) replace the vacuum of the metaphysical idols he denounces with something else. I think that it is the second option he chooses to do. For work, science, nation, God, even the proletariat are now replaced by the just-as-metaphysical "love." Granted that he avoids metaphysical love by drawing our attentions to personal love, he nevertheless leaves the issue of how personal love can translate into structural freedom. The worst totalitarian rulers can be very loving fathers and husbands, after all. And even if were all to be magically transformed into Mother Teresa, the poor would still be poor.

I'm not saying love is not a good thing. I'm saying love here seems to be fetishized just as badly as we fetishize God or the proletariat. Moreover, i have a nagging suspicion that "freedom" itself is here being fetishized. The second paragraph describing his ideal society reads like a hippie commune. This is essentially what you get when "liberation viewed negatively" is itself fetishized. Why should freedom be an end in itself? And why should freedom from the Collective necessarily be a good thing. We human beings have always operated on two levels when it comes to love--the personal where we love people around us "as persons" and the political where we love "the collective," be it family, tribe, or nation not because we are idolists but because the collective is part of who we are. So added to my suspicion of his concept of "love," i am also wary of the extreme individualism of his version of liberation.

So where am I coming from? My own contention, until I become otherwise convinced by a good essay, is that we cannot escape a metaphysical ground. Now, i can be convinced otherwise if an essay can show how it is to be done. I feel that in this essay, however, the author fails to do this and merely replaces the fetish of God and nation with the fetish of an anarchist community founded on personal love. Until it can be truly demonstrated that we can live without idols, then we may have to content ourselves with choosing our idols intelligently. Moreover, I am suspicious of discourses that try to transcend totalizing concepts such as God or other "idols" by wanting to destroy all these concepts in a manner that seem just as totalizing as the next discourse.

in short, i think the author is as much an idolist as i am now. Despite the supposed radical epistemological breaks occuring these days, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes is still right: "there is nothing new under the sun." Now, as in the old days, battles are still being fought in the name of idols. Perhaps they always will be.