CYCLE FIFTY
1. Football is effectively the last bastion of
slavery. Despite the astronomical sums
for which they are bought and sold, players are no better than commodities ...
to be sold on the market to the highest bidder.
2. The shame of
transfer slavery, as one might call the ever-increasing fees with which the
better players change hands, is the most damning indictment of professional
football, which reduces people to commodities whose value is determined by the
marketplace.
3. The difference
between a commodity and a human being ... is that where the former, as a thing,
has a price tag, the latter, being sentient, is priceless.
4. The crime of
capitalism is to reduce everything to the status of a commodity, not excepting
certain categories of persons. Even the
so-called Holy Bible can be bought and sold as a commodity!
5. Capitalism does not spare anything, least of all
the Arts, which it systematically subverts in the interests of commerce,
reducing their various productions to a commodity which can be bought and sold
on the marketplace, like any tube of toothpaste.
6. The subversion of the Arts does not begin
with a price tag; on the contrary, that is merely the culmination of a process
which began much earlier ... with the subversion of the artist himself through
the twin tyranny of commercial and financial pressures, the consequences of
which are to render his creations more amenable to commercial presentation, and
thus effect their undoing as 'art'.
7. By the time the so-called 'work of art'
reaches the shops as a commercial product, there is relatively little about it
which would suggest that it deserves any better fate than that which the
capitalist bourgeoisie have reserved for it.
Far from being the 'handmaiden of religion', as genuine art should be,
it is now very firmly the whore of economics, with an equally spurious content.
8. None of the Arts escapes the curse of
capitalist subversion, but literature, on account of its reliance on the
printed word, suffers an especially cruel fate at the hands of those for whom
it is a product to be bought and sold in the marketplace.
9. By reducing
literature to a price tag in the marketplace, the commercial bourgeoisie have
put it on a par with pizzas, cigarettes, toothpaste, alcohol, jeans, and other
such products which, despite the criminal rhetoric of commercial advertising,
one would hesitate to associate with the Arts!
10. Nowadays a novel or a symphony is worth as
little or as much as a pizza, an umbrella, or a pair of jeans! It has no special status, such as was
formerly reserved for creations deemed to have some spiritual significance,
some connection, in relation to culture, with 'eternal values'. For capitalist criminality has seen to it
that nothing escapes its commercial grasp, not even God, Who, usually in the
guise of Jesus Christ, must likewise be 'brought low', the better to fit into
the materialistic scheme of things.
11. Only when the capitalist lion lies down with
the socialist lamb and commercial crime accordingly ceases to prevail ... will
there be any prospect of an economic Heaven in the corporatism of 'Kingdom
Come', the graceful transmutation of socialist sin (from mass ownership to
Centre trusteeship), following the democratic establishment of religious
sovereignty under Messianic auspices.
12. Since crime is not rooted in the People but
stems from the capitalist exploitation of the People by the bourgeoisie,
punishment is largely directed towards protecting the former from the excesses
of the latter, since the Devil's role in society is less that of an enemy of
the World than one of defending the World, and hence the People, from overworldly encroachments, much as the sun defends the
earth from the moon.
13. Hence so long as there is crime, or commercial
exploitation of the World, there will be punishment, since the Devil cannot
abide the prospect of man getting away with the desecration, for example, of
'Mother Nature', the People, woman, etc.
Punishment is directed against crime, not against sin, which is of the
World. Though occasionally the Devil
will punish God if it looks as though the latter is becoming too influential
with the World at his expense! Such a
paradoxical punishment usually takes the form of a barbarous subversion of
culture, since the Devil can do no more than to clip or, rather, singe God's
wings whenever he feels unduly threatened.
14. The Devil's justification for punishing
criminals is premised upon the existence and perpetuation of crime, not upon
the existence of either sin or grace, and therefore his reign can only last so
long as there is crime, and hence a lunar/purgatorial Overworld,
in existence for him to punish.
15. Should the capitalist criminals have cause to
'turn over a new leaf' and renounce their criminality in favour of worldly
sinfulness, so that the bourgeois lion effectively lies down with the
proletarian lamb, then the Devil's justification for existing would be called
into question, and the necessity of punishment likewise.
16. Only when there is little or no capitalist
crime and much socialist sin, will society be ready for the possibility of
corporate (not to mention totalitarian and idealist) grace ... in the
transcendentalism of 'Kingdom Come'.
17. With sin saved to
grace, the Devil would be isolated and in no position to punish anyone, least
of all the non-existence of criminals, and so his own standing, as defender of
the World, would be under divine review.
18. Probably, at the last, the Devil will also be
absorbed into God, since what fell, as noumenal
objectivity, from alpha God in the beginning ... must surely return, in noumenal subjectivity, to omega God in the end, as divine justice
replaces diabolic justice in the heavenly Kingdom, and punishment is
accordingly transmuted towards grace.
19. There is no
punishment in God, only grace, and therefore there is no way in which God can
punish the Devil. Punishment will cease
to be relevant in 'Kingdom Come', and therefore even the Devil will be
encouraged to 'turn over a new leaf' and accept the salvation of grace.
