Bob Dylan at the Villa Diodati

By David Polanski

Not traditionally understood as a gothic artist, the writings of Bob Dylan nonetheless embody what David McNally identifies as the genre’s most radical functions: to offer unsettling imagery and subversive narratives as a means to “disturb the naturalisation of capitalism” (a system wherein “individual survival requires selling our life-energies to people on the market”), and to counter Liberalism’s denial of such “quotidian horrors” by insisting instead “that something strange, indeed life-threatening, is at work in our world” – that “something is happening” and we need to know exactly what it is. From the depraved American landscape of 1965’s “Tombstone Blues” (wherein Jack the Ripper “sits at the head of the chamber of commerce,” and government officials seek to ritualistically resurrect Paul Revere’s horse), to the apocalyptic Eden of 2006’s “Ain’t Talkin” (whose Milton-esque protagonist wanders the world seeking vengeance against greedy speculators and the god-like elites who’ll “crush you with wealth and power”), Dylan has spent more than sixty years wielding the very same “armoury of de-familiarising techniques” that McNally attributes to Shelley, Marx and other gothic artists in an effort to undermine “the structures of denial that dominate conscious life in modernity,” and to remind his fans that life under capitalism will never be anything less than “bizarre, shocking, monstrous.”

As capitalism now lumbers through its most zombified phase, it is perhaps no coincidence that Dylan’s most recent engagement with the genre is also his most overt: 2020’s “My Own Version of You,” an unconcealed retelling of Frankenstein that mirrors Shelley’s allegorical use of the creation of physical life to represent the political construction of Liberal humanism (and its crude distinction between the “species of man” and the “race of devils” that must be annihilated if the bourgeoisie are to sleep well at night). Like Shelley’s “Victor,” Dylan’s narrator believes he has struck the ideal balance between dispassionate methodology and “decency and common sense” (that his naked self-interest is “for the benefit of all mankind”), and like Victor, Dylan’s narrator views human history as an arc that bends directly towards him, one whose greatest tragedies (which he and Victor both identify as slavery in the ancient world and the colonization of the Americas) could have been prevented had the leaders of such times felt “the way that I feel.” Most damningly, both characters freely confess their intent to create not merely a new human, but a new conception of what it means to be human – in Victor’s case, “a new species” possessed by a childlike devotion to him as their father; for Dylan’s narrator, someone akin to a “robot commando,” someone who’ll play the piano for him, make him laugh, then deliver the heads of his enemies on a silver tray.

Yet, whereas Shelley’s then-Modern Prometheus fixated on the corruption and politicization of the physiological sciences, Dylan’s target is more technocratic in nature, his narrator an embodiment of those today (such as Steven Pinker, Cass Sunstein, and the cast at Vox.com) who practice a reanimated form of 19th Century scientism. Scientism, as Jackson Lears explains, represents a grotesque “redefinition of science” from “an experimental way of knowing” to “a source of certainty,” one that that “ruthlessly pares down complex events to a single mechanistic causal explanation,” and whose disciples not only reject “the traditional tools of humanistic inquiry” (e.g. “archival research, close reading, attention to variety”) but also “any attempt to understand the mind through introspection.” These qualities are on abundant display in Dylan’s narrator, who believes his master plan to be free of “insignificant details,” who considers himself immune to the vulgar passions of the lowly masses, yet who cannot help but confess to the imperious urges that linger beneath the surface of his calculations and his spreadsheets (“I pick a number between one and two/and I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do”). Later, Dylan’s narrator indulges in a sadistic fantasy wherein Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx – two figures whose concepts clash violently with the scientistic approach – are being tortured in hell, whipped with a “raw-hide lash” until the skin is torn “from their backs.”

However, to focus solely upon Dylan’s forays into gothic terrain, or even upon his more overt critiques of our technocratic overlords (from the number-crunching imperialists marked for death in “Masters of War,” to the “Chicago-school” economists – also marked for death – in “Workingman’s Blues #2”) is to miss the haunted forest for the gnarled trees. As I demonstrate in a forthcoming article in Peace, Land, and Bread, the near-entirety of Dylan’s body of work has been infused with an artistic and a political consciousness that is diametrically opposed to the counter-revolutionary reformism at the heart of the Liberal tradition. Whereas the historical origins of Liberalism are “aristocratic” in nature (developed in response to the French Revolution and the events of 1848 as a means to discourage the “dangerous classes” at home and abroad from “interfering with the process of capital accumulation”), Dylan has spent his sixty-two year career casting his lot not with “ye gifted kings and queens,” but with “The Wretched of the Earth, My brothers of the flood,” composing songs that call upon the dispossessed masses to reject the political ideologies designed to defend the predominate order, to boldly and perpetually reinvent our personal and political perceptions of the world, and to accept the reality that violent resistance is required to liberate ourselves from a world that is (by design) “ruled by violence.” Although it is unlikely that Dylan embraces a revolutionary ethos as part of his personal identity (he’s become quite the corporate lackey in recent years, and his 1983 defense of the colonization of Palestine represents an ethical lapse impossible to ignore), he has nonetheless fulfilled his duty as an artist by exploring fields of perception and emotion that exist beyond his own intellectual and spiritual boundaries. As such, we can identify innumerable parallels between the anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian, and relentlessly unsettling spirit of Dylan’s six-decade body of work, and the “revolutionary consciousness” that voices such as Marx, Mariátegui, and George Jackson (to whom Dylan composed a loving ode in 1971) have all deemed a prerequisite to the invention of more communal forms of political relations.

That being said, a gothic approach to the topic of “Bob Dylan” allows us not merely to identify Dylan as a slayer of Liberal demons (a snake in the garden of the capitalist world order), but to cast a tormenting light upon the uniquely vampiric realm of Bob Dylan critical studies, a realm long haunted by un-dead practices and presumptions, and long teeming with bourgeois scholars who have spent decades draining the revolutionary spirit from Dylan’s body of work. Whereas, for example, my recent paper for Affirmations: of the Modern positions Dylan’s intertextual engagement with biblical and so-called “Classical” literature as a systematic critique of the autocratic beliefs that pervade such texts, tenured fuddy-duddies such as Raphael Falco, Richard Thomas, and Christopher Ricks depict Dylan’s relationship to ancient literature as fundamentally reverent (as Dylan honoring, rather than interrogating, the Western world’s imagined cultural heritage). Quite similarly, whereas my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread identifies within Dylan’s writings a fundamental rejection of the American political project (demonstrating how Dylan frames American history as a “Godot-like nightmare,” and America itself as “exceptional only in its propensity for sadism”), Dylan Review founder Lisa O’Neill-Sanders depicts Dylan’s writings as concerned not with America’s systemic and foundational rot, but with mere acts of “injustice,” while Graley Herren imagines Dylan as waging a “battle” on behalf of something Herren terms the American “freedom movement” (an arch of history, Herren claims, propelled not by revolutionaries such as Dylan muse Jackson, but by reformist icons like “Lincoln, the Kennedys, and King”). Most damningly, whereas I identify “My Own Version of You” as a gothic critique of corrupt scientific inquiry and Liberal hubris, a who’s who of prominent “Bobcats” (Michael Gray, Paul Haney, Laura Tenschert, and Dr. Thomas yet again) have reduced it to a winking communiqué from Dylan to his fans as to the nature of his creative process (“a literary Frankenstein,” “Dylan’s ars poetica,” a “personal” reflection of “the obsessive pursuit” to “put the parts together and create something new,” as well as an opportunity for Dylan to vent his sadistic “grudges” against Freud and Marx).

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Far more troubling, however, are the attempts by influential ideologues such as Greil Marcus, Cass Sunstein, and Sean Wilentz to redirect (in a most Orwellian manner) Dylan’s anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian gaze away from the Liberal/capitalist order that has reigned predominate for the entirety of Dylan’s life and career, and subsequently towards those of us who have embraced the oft-criminalized perspectives of the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist Left. Wilentz, for example, begins his Bob Dylan in America with a tortured parallel between Dylan’s evolution as a songwriter and the personal journey of composer Aaron Copland (with whom Dylan has no substantial relationship) from youthful Communist flirt to “staunch political Liberal,” then spends the next three-hundred pages depicting Dylan as a kind of counter-revolutionary troll (as warning fans of the danger posed by “high-toned intellectualism,” as whitesplaining the true nature of inequality to the experienced activists at the “March on Washington,” and as hoisting an American flag in Paris in ‘66 so as to teach the future participants of May ‘68 a lesson about the real America). As for Sunstein, his recent keynote address at the 2023 World of Bob Dylan conference offered a strategically reductive portrayal of the revolutionary organizations active across the globe throughout the 1960s (one that erased their respective histories, methods, and goals), then positioned these now-indistinct “political movements” (many of whom were directly influenced by Dylan’s artistry) as the monochromatic antithesis to Dylan’s freewheelin’ spirit. Last, but never least, Marcus injected his influential The Old, Weird America with sentiments as jingoistic as anything uttered by the Trumpian Right, depicting the America of the 1960s as haunted by the spectre of nihilistic radicals hell-bent on rejecting democracy, rock n’ roll, apple pie, and the “covenant with God” established at Plymouth Rock, then portraying Dylan (in defiance of such devilry) as delving into the archives of the American folk tradition so as to resurrect a long-buried “national experience” without which (Marcus breathlessly warns) “all bonds” will be “dissolved,” and “people will begin to kill each other, even their own children.”

Like Edmund Burke before them, who co-opted gothic tropes in his Reflections on the Revolution in France so as to slander the radicals with “charges of cannibalism, sorcery, grave-robbing and alchemy,” Marcus, Sunstein, and Wilentz appropriate Dylan’s revolutionary spirit for counter-revolutionary ends – and like Burke, their arguments are a bluff, premised on the presumption that no one will call them out for their rhetorical distortions or dearth of historical or textual evidence. Unfortunately for Burke, that’s exactly what Thomas Paine did in his Rights of Man, offering what David McNally describes as a “deliberate provocation” wherein aristocratic landowners were portrayed as “cannibal-monsters,” and the revolutionary forces presented as “slayers” of such spoiled, snooty beasts. Fortunately for Marcus, Sunstein, and Wilentz, the realm of Dylan studies has long represented a safe haven for those harboring reactionary or otherwise counter-revolutionary sentiment (with nary a Jacobin, nor even a Girondin in sight).

It was not until recently, for example, that the decades of “racism, misogyny, [and] homophobia” espoused by influential biographer Clinton Heylin was met with a substantial public rebuke (by Laura Tenschert, in fact), and my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread represents the first systematic rebuttal of the crude manner in which Gray, Heylin, Marcus, Wilentz, Peter Doggett, Will Kaufman, and others have for years sought to dismiss Dylan’s ode to George Jackson (and to delegitimize Jackson himself). More to the point, there exists within Dylan studies a creeping anti-intellectualism, as evidenced, in large part, by the growing antipathy among Dylan scholars towards the practice of critique. Critique, as Robert Tally notes, represents the rigorous, yet thoroughly joyous (and unabashedly political) practice of “careful reading, considered meditation, and creative speculation” through which we “affirm our collective and individual freedom,” and “imagine alternatives to our intolerable circumstances” (and without which we allow the “crassly utilitarian” opponents of the humanities “to set the terms of the debate”). Amid the political violence, existential risk, and “boundless mystifications” that mark these modern times, Tally rightly declares that the denizens of our scholarly institutions should be loudly and proudly calling for “more critique, more theory, and indeed more critical theory.” Within the un-dead dominion of Dylan studies, however, a parade of prominent figures have adopted postcritical postures centered around “surface reading,” “thin description,” and reader-response criticism, and all for the supposed benefits of the “ordinary” fan. Sean Latham, for example, has suggested there may be no “way of understanding” Dylan’s songs other than “within the moment and context of performance itself,” Anne-Marie Mai has offered a Felski-inspired call for scholars to produce “emotionally engaged,” chatroom-esque depictions of our relationship to Dylan’s music, Douglas Brinkley has decried (without offering a single example for us to scrutinize) “a new wave of over-intellectualized critical writing” that he believes has “mummified” Dylan’s artistry, and Raphael Falco has positioned his Dylan Review (the only peer-reviewed journal focused on Dylan studies) as an Edenic utopia devoted to the promotion of “coeval” perspectives as opposed to critical “quibbles” (with Falco going as far as to warn fellow scholars of the intrusion of devilish figures bearing “glozing promises” that we may yet obtain what Falco claims is “too much knowledge”). Even Heylin-slayer Tenschert has accompanied her otherwise laudable efforts to expand Dylan’s fanbase with vague denouncements of unnamed elites who have supposedly “over-intellectualized” Dylan’s music and rendered him inaccessible to younger fans (claims which echo the faux-populism of the postcritical crowd, along with the tendency of Felski and company to conjure elitist, tweed-suited strawmen with which to do battle).

So what is to be done?

In no uncertain terms, to consider the realm of Dylan studies by way of a gothic perspective is to cast aside any and all delusions of reform, and approach the matter instead as one would approach the nosferatu itself: with a sharp stake (“hardened by charring it in the fire”), a heavy iron hammer, and murderous intent. As such, my scholarly project aims not merely for the resurrection of Dylan’s long-buried revolutionary attributes (from his gothic inclinations, to his relationship to George Jackson, to his intertextual repurposing of ancient colonial and imperialistic texts for decolonial and decapitalist ends), but for the ruthless critique of the practices and practitioners most responsible for this act of critical and political vivisepulture. My recent article for Affirmations: of the Modern (one which analyzed Dylan’s six-decade engagement with the Garden of Eden motif in relation to the revolutionary theories of Franco Berardi) represented an initial volley, and my forthcoming paper on the intimate and multifaceted relationship between the respective writings of Dylan and George Jackson will pour copious amounts of fuel on this purifying fire. A monograph on such subjects will follow in due time, along with battles fought on other fronts (reviews, conferences, and online debates when appropriate), with the goal being nothing less than the utter decimation of Bob Dylan critical studies as we know it today.

To identify the spiritual and intellectual predecessor to this approach is to look no further than Huey Newton’s gothic-tinged depiction of “Ballad of a Thin Man” as a scathing deconstruction of the voyeuristic impulses of the white bourgeoisie toward Black America (as well as a celebration of the terror experienced by such oglers when they realize that those they gawk at view them as the real freaks), along with his portrayal of Dylan’s “Mr. Jones” as representative of the politicians, cops, and businessmen who “cause the conditions which make it necessary for people to go to these lengths to survive,” then “pay to see the performance the people put on.” Just as Newton rightly identified decolonial and decapitalist attributes that exist in Dylan’s writings regardless of Dylan’s awareness or intent (then thanked Dylan for all his music meant “to the Black Panther Party, and to [he and Bobby Seale] personally”), I seek to map the uncharted radicalism of Dylan’s artistry in a manner unbeholden to Dylan’s personal beliefs or approval, and I express my solemn debt to Newton for the still-smoldering critical trail he blazed. Along the same lines, the ideal modern model for this project is undoubtably Andrew Culp’s remorseless reclamation of the legacy of French theorist Gilles Deleuze from claws of reactionary factions such as the Israeli army, Silicon Valley shills, and Slavoj Žižek. Just as I aim to wrest Dylan’s artistry away from those who have recast him as a prophet of positivity, a guru of Liberal universalism, an apolitical humanist, and a bearer of the torch of Western civilization itself, Culp boldly confronts those who have reduced Deleuze to “a naively affirmative thinker of connectivity” (“the lava lamp saint of ‘California Buddhism’”) with the tormenting vision of “a different Deleuze, a darker one,” a Deleuze discovered only “when we escape the chapel choir of joy for the dark seclusion of the crypt” (a wild-eyed voice in the wilderness advocating a “revolutionary negativity” through which we wish “a happy death” upon the “calcified political forms” that sustain the capitalist world-system).

More to the point, the spiritual and intellectual antithesis to my project is undoubtably the postcritical utopia that is the Dylan Review. In addition to his pastoral vision for this particular publication, Raphael Falco actually had the nerve to ask fellow scholars (in the journal’s inaugural issue, no less) to consider whether the act of “systematic study” might hasten the “death” of Dylan’s influence as an artist, or would otherwise stifle the capacity of Dylan’s music to produce “spontaneous experiences of shared intimacy” between himself and his listeners. With such a reactionary foundation, it should surprise no one that the Dylan Review has come to embody a kind of intellectual “safe space” wherein amiable but critically mundane ruminations on Dylan’s artistry mingle with regressive efforts to immortalize the un-dead practices and presumptions that have long-haunted this critical realm (especially as they relate to Dylan’s intertextual practices and his relationship to political topics). It likewise came as no surprise to me (but I needed to be able to say that I tried) that when I submitted to the Dylan Review in 2020 an early draft of my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread (an unapologetically “systematic study” of Dylan’s relationship to George Jackson, one which most assuredly met the journal’s stated expectations for rigor, structure, and originality, and which spoke directly to their call for papers regarding "the special topic of political authority and race in Dylan’s work"), I was informed by one of its editors that the draft had not merely been rejected, but had been deemed unworthy of even being sent out to reviewers. Far more telling than the rejection itself was the journal’s refusal to justify their decision, with the editor in question responding to my query with an assertion of the journal’s right to reject submissions (as if I was contesting such an obvious point), as well as a declaration of its desire for confidentiality. Evasions of this nature, of course, are reflective of the trepidation universal among those who construct such arcadian states, whose borders are invariably porous. To put it another way (to put it in terms that Falco might understand), such a fair foundation he has laid whereon to build their ruin.

Accordingly, I stand on the lookout for lost souls laboring within this fragile Xanadu whose minds might be excited by the prospect of the decimation of Dylan studies as we know it – and as always, I will continue to find allies among those on the front lines of the global struggle against climate change, fascism, and all the other horrid by-products of capitalist development. Although there is much to admire, for example, in the efforts of Tenschert, Harrison Hewitt, and Rebecca Slaman to use social media to cultivate a more youthful and diverse cohort of “Bobcats,” the (almost entirely) depoliticized manner in which they approach Dylan’s artistry flies rather brazenly in the face of the political awakening and radicalization that has transpired in recent years among this planet’s youngest generations (developments which have, unsurprisingly, caused ruling class elites such as Sunstein so much consternation, and which inspired no less than three Dylan scholars – Marcus, Wilentz, and Gregory Pardlo – to attach their names to the deeply reactionary 2020 “Harper’s Letter”). The youngest and most open-minded among us are increasingly recognizing that our species no longer has the luxury of mere political reform, and as such, are increasingly embracing (as the most direct and practical path towards a more humane, sustainable future) the kinds of “love-inspired,” thoroughly egalitarian, and unapologetically confrontational approaches associated with the decolonial and decapitalist traditions. Bluntly put, a radical Dylan is a relevant Dylan to the next generation of scholars and fans, and thoughtful, well-meaning folks like Tenschert, Hewitt, and Slaman would be wise to realize that no amount of social mixers, amiable podcasts, or Dylan-themed karaoke nights (however lovely such things may be) can compare to the comforts of revolutionary comradeship and the pleasure of knowing we will leave this world far better than we found it.

So, comrades (and future comrades), let us get on with it. Let us sharpen our stakes, and polish our pitchforks, and whatever other pointed metaphors may apply, and do the work that must be done (and do it together). Or as Dylan once so darkly declared, “this is how I spend my days – I came to bury, not to praise.”

Force Breeds Counterforce: On the Legitimacy of Resistance and its Methods

By Youssef Shawky

The widespread saying “to throw Israel into the sea” resonates with critics before advocates, and despite its unreasonableness in light of the current circumstances and arrangements, it carries within it a legitimate and logical right because Israel, since it has been invented, has been the one who always wants to throw the Palestinians into the sea. It seizes their land by implementing a depopulatory/substitutionary settler colonialism supported by a racist, religious ideology. As a result, resistance with a religious inclination is not only legitimate, but also a necessity in light of the cultural and historical characteristics of the Arab peoples and the ideological methods used by the occupation.

There is no escape from ideology; As it is the standard that classifies things and gives them different definitions and meanings. Humans, throughout their lives, indirectly interact with “reality,” resulting in a world of their own. That world is not the real world, but rather a world within which two types of relationships merge: imaginary relationships and real ones. If the individual is the first party in those relationships, the second party is the real material conditions of existence, which in turn consist of forces and relations of production, class, political and national power balances, etc. Thus, ideology is the expression of the relationship between the individual and her “world.”

Louis Althusser wrote that ideology is an imaginary representation of the imaginary relationships that a person gets into with the real conditions of her existence. Ideology is not an illusion, or a negative false consciousness, rather it effectively engages with real conditions.

This affirms that each conflicting party in any society formulates its own ideology in a way that serves the interests of the party in its conflict with the rest of the parties. The capitalists have their ideology, just as the proletariat has its ideology… and the two are in contradiction with each other. The same applies to the relationship of the colonizer with the colonized.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the explicit call for the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, or as the Zionist Finance Minister called, “dispersing them throughout the world,” has reminded many Arab writers of the term “depopulatory settler colonialism,” a colonialism which does not aim to exploit the local population in a system that appropriates surplus value and natural resources, as happened in South Africa and Algeria. Rather, it aims to seize the land of the indigenous people and displace or exterminate them to make space for settlers. Through this path, Zionist colonialism and the emergence of the State of Israel are similar to the emergence of the United States of America, with a clear historical difference that is not just several centuries separating the two events, but that Zionist colonialism occurred during the rise of national liberation movements, the awareness of the oppressed peoples about their rights including the Palestinian people, and the solidarity of the peoples of the Third World with them, especially the Arab peoples, who always emphasize the unity of their fate (and also their structural problems) with the fate of the Palestinian people. All of this created a strong ground for resistance, with which it is impossible for the fate of the Palestinians to be similar to that of native americans.

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The substitutionary nature of Zionist colonialism is the general framework within which the occupation operates from its beginning until now. It is the method that appears clearly in the defining moments in the history of the occupation. The first, of course, is the beginning of the Zionist gangs immigrating to Palestine and planning to gradually acquire the lands before eventually launching a war to establish a colonial state on 78% of Palestinian land. In 1967, the occupation adopted the method of displacement in the West Bank and the canal cities in Sinai and the Syrian Golan and, over the years, has gradually been fragmenting the West Bank with new settlements, aiming to finally annex it to the Jewish state.

This is what is happening today after the real threat that the occupation faced on October 7th. It is now trying to pressure the Palestinians of Gaza to migrate to Sinai or face the risk of genocide.

This does not cancel other frameworks of occupation that depend on the historical stage and the strategic goals implemented by the occupation towards the Palestinians and Arabs. There is an apartheid system within the occupied land of 1948, where the so-called “Israeli Arabs” are exploited and deprived of land and professional and social opportunities. There are also neo-colonial relations that include exploiting the natural resources of neighboring Arab countries and forcing them to open up to Israeli goods in a process of Unequal exchange through unfair economic agreements signed by local compradors.

As colonial methods diversify, ideologies accompanying them also diversify; from neoliberal ideology to pacification ones. This makes us wonder about the general ideology governing the course of occupation. Based on its depopulationary nature, this ideology is supposed to reject the existence of the Other, fundamentally. It does not just claim that the Other is less important or that she does not have the same rights, or is less intelligent, strong, civilized or beautiful...etc. All of this justifies subjecting the Other, exploiting her and denying her rights, but it does not stipulate the annihilation of the other or ending her existence. Rather, the “substitutionary ideology” necessarily rejects the existence of the Other because her existence constitutes a threat to the depopulationary entity.

The greatest representative of this tendency is the racist religious ideology that the Jewish state has espoused since its invention and is evident in all of its internal and external practices, laws, demographics, popular literature, daily conversations, and colonial ambitions, even in the state’s name, flag, and national anthem.

In fact, when Zionists kill Palestinians, they do not consciously believe that they are doing these actions “because they are substitutionary colonizers,” as this thought would reflect objective, concrete reality. They believe in something like: “We are defending our land, which is our right, based on the divine promise,” or “We are expanding our possession of more lands based on the same promise,” or “We must depopulate these Muslim Arabs who hate us so that we can protect ourselves” or that “we are God’s chosen people” and other religious racist ideas that are not just illusions but illusions that transform zionists into depopulatory colonizers.

While the diversification of colonial methods induce a parallel diversification in resistance methods, an armed resistance with military planning will always remain the most important and influential resistance. The other forms integrate with it, support it, and increase its strength and influence. When the general form of occupation is the genocidal substitutionary form that always and forever seeks displacement, settlement, and even mass murder, the only effective form of resistance to it is the military form.

Regarding the ideology of resistance, any party or group does not create its own ideology consciously and freely or choose from many alternatives. Rather, the ideology is formed simultaneously with the formation of the group. The nature and content of the ideology emerge due to several factors, the most important of which are the goals of the group, its cultural and social history, and the ideologies, goals, and strategies adopted by the surrounding groups (maybe conflicting ones). 

On this basis, we can understand why global Zionism has adopted Jewish racism as an ideological façade, and we can also understand the ideological nature of the resistance and its religious component. Just as substitutionary colonialism has a racist, religious face, it is not strange for the resistance to have a religious  “national liberation” face. This is not identity politics, as the religious aspect of the resistance did not discourage it from its liberation tasks, but rather an increased commitment to the tasks. The success of national liberation relies on formulating an ideology stemming from the characteristics and way of thinking of the resisting masses, and not in a condescending manner with imposing ideas on them, but rather by discovering the “special/local” way for the masses to be liberated so we, or they, can discover their own path of modernity.

This does not negate the attempts of islamists (originated from Al-Qaeda terrorist organization supported by US) to empty the Palestinian cause of its liberation content through the use of religion… but these attempts have so-far failed. The resistance axes, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, have engaged in armed conflicts with such Takfiri terrorists (ISIS, Al-Nusra Front, and Islamic State – Sinai Province). Hamas has officially separated from the Muslim Brotherhood since 2017 according to its charter, and much evidence supports that the religious-faced resistance has no relationship with political islamism, whatever its form.

Thus, the arab liberal intellectuals and some arab leftists who do not support the resistance under the pretext of its religious tendency suffer from a lack of understanding of the historical characteristics of their people, the way they think and feel, the time and manner of their movement and revolution, and the time of their latency and indifference. In doing so, many of them, who resemblr elitists rather than revolutionaries, play the role of cultural compradors hindering the organization of the Arab masses to liberate themselves from colonial and neo-colonial powers.

Settler-Colonial Theology: From Lāhainā to Palestine

By Kieran McKenzie Clark

From grandstanding in the rubble after our fire in Lāhainā to posing on top of a tank in Palestine, Harvest pastor Greg Laurie is the poster boy for white Christianity in occupied lands. I went to Kumulani Chapel for over a decade (through its transition to Harvest). I got my undergraduate degree in religious studies... let me tell you something: this is what settler-colonial theology looks like. The corporate religion espoused by Harvest is performative and littered with internal contradictions; it is quite explicitly a demonstration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave”. As a friend of mine noted, Laurie “was one of the early Trojan horse pastors that dressed Christofascist bullshit in a hip new package”. His church serves as a superstructure to reproduce Settler-Colonial/Capitalist society.

Harvest Pastor Greg Laurie walks among the rubble in Lāhainā

According to the four accounts of Jesus’ life held by Christians as Scripture, Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was here (on Earth) right now. It’s what Jesus is recorded to speak on the most. According to the authors of these gospels, Jesus teaches that this Kingdom lives within us (Luke 17.21) and is expressed through our actions and social relation to one another. The preachings on such a kingdom include an active identification and critique of coercive relations of power as well as the call to an alternative community based on a kind of interconnected care and service - a horizontal society of group messiahship. In other words, the gospel of the Kingdom is prefigurative and rooted in material reality; including love of enemies and the subversion of leadership through mutual service. A summary of such teachings is known as the "Sermon on the Mount”.

The gospel of Harvest looks different; their theology is the extraction of souls for the expansion of "heaven". This is because they have inherited the legacy and refinement of imperial theologies from settler-colonialists. It is a theology that is about empire, security, accumulation, and fame. This is why they are anti-intellectual; they have to be. They need to push theologies made up a couple hundred years ago like “The Rapture” because they need the escapism. They need to focus on the amassing of souls for God in relation to the damned to rationalize the inaction they take toward material reality. It is seated in the Capitalist delusion and game of infinite growth. This shows face blatantly. The "Greg Laurie" Bible - all the commodities with his name on it, the grandstands, the movies, the events, the shows, the endless multi-industry marketing; it is not for Jesus, because that's not what Jesus was about.

For Harvest, whether they are playing their imaginary heavenly infinite growth game or wealth-building game, it is about profiteering, growth, and security; and it serves to conceal inaction towards the material conditions of human beings. This is why Harvest at Kumulani will have a Hula show on Sunday morning but will never mutter a word on the diaspora or plight of the Kānaka Maoli. The decline of health, land, population, culture, and language of indigenous populations are of absolutely no importance to them. The motive of their evangelizing is simply the accumulation of imaginary numbers and the assimilation of those willing to conform. Because their theology serves to reproduce a particular kind of society: settler-colonialism. This is why their politics are based on American culture wars and U.S. foreign interests.

Laurie posing on top of a tank in Palestine.

Pastor Greg Laurie, despite frequently bringing up the topic of the state of Israel, has not a muttering word for the Palestinians and the abhorrent treatment they suffer under the Israeli government - not on the apartheid, expulsions, ethnic cleansing, illegal settlements, occupation, and (now accelerated) genocide. He is in unwavering support of Israel, attending nationalistic rallies and endorsing Zionism. Atrocities at the hands of Israel are outshined by a pretend eschatology. Laurie preaches novel dispensationalist theologies of a “rapture” in which there will be a time when Christian believers will literally rise “in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” A sign of the times for this rapture in Laurie’s words is “the regathering of the nation Israel in their homeland”. Laurie conflates, which obscures, which conceals. He conflates the modern nation-state of Israel with ancient Israel, and he conflates the modern nation-state of Israel with the Jewish people. Thus, creating the illusion that if someone is an anti-imperialist or an outspoken critic of Israel, they must be antisemitic. This tactic produces and maintains the conditions for Zionism. The irony of course is that the kind of conflating being done by Laurie is anti-Semitic. It is in blatant disregard of Jewish anti-Zionists willing to condemn and illuminate the injustices perpetrated by the Israeli state and their policies towards Palestinians.

This theology (along with the normative social influence of the congregation) acts as a reciprocal and circular pattern in reinforcing and perpetuating settler-colonialism. This is why Harvest Riverside or other locations of the Harvest franchise import settlers to Maui from California to preserve their institution. Consequently, contributing to the reproduction of Capitalist structures in Hawai’i, which reinforces occupation, which continues the process of settler-colonialism. Between the 9th and 15th centuries, Christianity serviced feudalism by validating its power structures. The Catholic Church produced the theology of the “divine right of kings'', ultimately maintaining feudalism. Pastors like Greg Laurie and church franchises like Harvest fill this role today as the ideological apparatus supporting Capitalism. The internal structure of Harvest from their theology to leadership is a reflection of the dominant economic-power structures. They commodified religion to sell white culture. Within this business model, they paint their brand's image with the American dream: Greg Laurie. From being Trump's spiritual advisor, to leading tours in Israel, to slapping his name on the Holy Bible and selling it. He is the poster child of American settler-colonial theology.

The United States empire as a settler-colonial project moved from 13 colonies to 50 states by imperial expansion; through ethnic cleansing, indigenous erasure, and the enclosement of lands into private property. The last territory to become a state was Hawai’i. Hawai’i became a territory through a joint resolution in Congress in 1900 prompted by the reactionary forces of nationalism during the Spanish-American War. There was no treaty of annexation because in 1893 the United States conducted an illegal military coup of the internationally recognized sovereign government of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. This overthrow of the constitutional monarchy installed a provisional government that was facilitated by American missionaries and businessmen.

The violence of settler-colonialism that amalgamates the United States and Israel as they both seek to replicate, capture, and preserve structures of Capitalism is what informs Harvest's unwavering support of Israel and their mute dismissal of the material conditions of Kānaka

Maoli. Lāhainā town burnt to the ground on August 8th, 2023; Harvest at Kumulani is less than 10 miles away from the burn zone. While the U.S. occupation secured and maintained the conditions that made the devastation possible, Laurie co-opted the event to rewind his end-times business pitch of escapist eschatologies. As Israel commits war crime after war crime– targeting and bombing churches, mosques, hospitals, shelters, markets, and refugee camps– Harvest has only cranked up the volume on this sales pitch; effectively aiding in the manufacturing of consent for the genocide of Palestinians. They will never speak for the oppressed, not in Lāhainā, not in Palestine. They lavish themselves in the privilege and luxury of being white landowners in the imperial core of expanding empire. They rake in capital and 10s of millions of dollars and give tokens back. It is a scam. Unless you're buying enclosed patches of stolen land as private property from the money of people in your scheme, then it is profit.

Matthew 25.40-45 absolutely applies to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians - and the people supporting their regime. Luke 18.25 absolutely applies to Greg Laurie and his constituents. The Jesus of the gospel of Matthew is recorded to say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” At the time of my writing this, since October 7th, Israel has killed 1 child in Gaza every 15 minutes. It is the position and belief of Harvest that if these beloved children and families are of the Islamic faith (or anything “other” than Christian), they are getting blown straight to hell. In mid-October, posting about the fulfillment of “biblical prophecies”, Greg Laurie uploaded a photo onto Instagram asking “Are you watching for Christ's return?”. Their theological anthropology projects God as the white man. They would nail Jesus back to the cross if he “came back”.

Indian Secularism and Right-Wing Politics

By Yanis Iqbal

The rapid rise of neo-fascist politics in India has foregrounded issues relating to the politico-ideological valences of religious traditions and the desirability of secularization. Does communalism owe its strength only to a specific political structure or is it also rooted in the tendential exclusivity of popular religiosity? Is the contemporary Right’s vitality to be blamed only on the manipulation of religious sentiments or do religious systems also provide normative nourishment to xenophobic zealotry? Is it the failure of progressive religiosity that has elicited religious extremism or is it the presence of desecularized cultures – in the form of the extended influence and importance of religious institutions, ideologies and identities – that accounts for deeply engrained communal prejudices? While the first parts of these questions assume that Indian communalism is linked to the misuse of religion and can be neutralized through a more democratic invocation of pre-existing religious resources, the seconds parts of these questions complicate the apparently harmless status of religion, drawing attention to how a modernist emphasis on secularization can more effectively counter neo-fascist revivalism. Currently, what dominates the Indian political landscape is the critical traditionalism of the former. In the Hinduism vs Hindutva debate, for instance, the main emphasis was on the articulation of the liberal-democratic arguments within the traditions of the Indian past against the masculinist faith system of the Sangh. This entire discussion ignored Aijaz Ahmad’s warning about how Indian communalism is not just a form of cultural assertion but a totalizing project of national hegemony, which can consequently be countered only through the construction of an alternative national project encompassing all the levels of society:  

If communalism for the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] is really only the cutting edge for the popularization of a fascist national project which has come about to challenge and displace the Centre-Left power blocs that had previously contended for hegemony, then it necessarily follows that the posing of secularism against communalism is necessary but insufficient; that the posing of the more humane and subversive traditions within the belief systems of the Indian past against the Sangh’s masculinist and market-friendly Hinduism is necessary but insufficient; and that it is not possible in fact to challenge a fully articulated fascist national project without posing against it a superior national project capable of organizing what Gramsci once called the ‘national-popular will’. 

One of the major weaknesses of critical traditionalism that prevents it from creating a full-fledged project of national hegemony is its passive reliance on the public significance of religion, as evident in the debate on Hinduism and Hindutva, wherein the political relevance of religion as a spiritual compass remained unquestioned. This stance forces the proponents of critical traditionalism to remain more or less subservient to the institutional complexes associated with the types of religiosities found in India. This article will critically analyze religion in the context of Indian politics to highlight why modernist values, in particular secularization, serve as more effective responses to communalism than the neo-traditionalist refashioning of religious traditions. 

A Historical Analysis of Religious Tolerance

In India, secularism was established as a popular ethic of religious tolerance, with the notion of tolerance itself being consecrated as forming the cultural core of an ancient and stable Indian civilization. This meant that the necessity of secularization never arose. Satisfied with the primordially defined concept of an unchanging religious-spiritual-cultural essence, the Indian political class never attempted to initiate changes within a heavily religious civil society, considering secularism to be a state of affairs ready at hand to be used in an expedient manner. “In the Indian context,” writes Achin Vanaik, “the overdetermination of the notion of secularization by the idea of tolerance did mean that the question of the secularization of civil society was never posed in the same way as in the West. Whether Indian civil society was, could be or needed to be secularized were effectively non-questions since, for most, the tolerance (i.e. secularism) of Indian society was treated as axiomatic, despite the communal horrors of Partition”. To what extent is this notion of tolerance historically accurate? In the traditional Indian societies, the political authority of the state was marginal, composed of local arrangements of power based on access to land and temple, regional kingdoms and a far-removed grand empire, whose grandiose spatial spread was matched by its superficial penetration into different areas. The third case of power arrangement needs further elaboration. The reign of the great empires of India – the Mauryas (1st century BC), the Guptas (4th century AD), the Delhi Sultanate (12th-16th centuries AD) and the Mughal Empire (16th-18th centuries AD) – was witness to the existence of smaller units of political authorities that practiced diverse forms of vernacular cultures. The imperial center was always embedded in a wider system of multiple regional structures. This dual arrangement was an outcome of the peculiar characteristics of Indian society: 1) in a religiously diverse country, organized political power had no other option than to maintain some distance from the dominant religious group for the sake of stability and peace; and 2) the geographical vastness of the areas made it difficult for imperial agents to forcefully impose on them a completely uniform system of political rules and cultural codes. These concrete imperatives manifested themselves in the theological principles of Hinduism and Islam. In the Manusmriti, we find “a fundamental distinction between the king as the human agent and the law as the superhuman abstract order leads to a theory of restrained rulership and a conception of fairness of treatment towards different types of subjects.” The realm of kingship has various obligations to and relations with the morally transcendent sphere of spirituality. Since society is the embodiment of spirituality, the social order – consisting of different castes – is said to be prior to the state, with the rulers being tasked with the protection of socio-cultural customs. Hindu political theory articulates this subordination of the king’s legislative function to the social order in “the relation between the political ruler and the social practices of the caste order. The ruler’s power is executive or administrative; it cannot make fundamental rules of social conduct or change them. The rules of the caste order as a system of social relations are thus impervious to the constant fluctuations of royal power.” The self-regulating permanence of “deep social life” is to be distinguished from the unstable power dynamics of dynasties, kingdoms and individual rulers, which “affect the lives of a very small number of individuals who are born, by their caste fate, to endure the impermanence and aggravations of a life of political power.” A similar Islamic political theory of restrained rulership and a legislatively powerless state can be seen in the structure of Mughal rule. Its theological precepts derived from the Persianate Islam of the Khorasan region, which had to deal with the conquest of non-Islamic rulers. Relying upon a specific reading of Aristotle, the Muslim intellectuals of this version of Islam asserted that the duty of the ruler, regardless of his own individual faith, was to ensure the development of conditions that would allow the flourishing of his subjects. The royal authority was to work toward the creation of a society that guaranteed not just mere sustenance but also human development. “Living as human beings – not just zoe [life of biology] but bios [life of language and politics] – required conditions in which subjects could use their intellectual and spiritual capacities. On the basis of this interesting derivation from Aristotle, they were able to assert that the task of the non-Islamic ruler was to preserve the religious practice of his Islamic subjects.” Basing themselves on this unique Aristotelian interpretation of Islamic rule, the Mughals practiced forms of toleration that incorporated the religious beliefs of the Hindus. In sum, both Hinduism and Islam established a system of political authority that recognized itself as being conditioned by the constraints of society. While recognizing this historically specific feature of the pre-colonial state, it is important not to advance the theory of “segmentary state,” according to which the grandiose verbal claims of pre-colonial states only hid the empirical reality of near-total lack of authority. In the words of Irfan Habib, “[i]t is held that the British conquest was the product of a ‘revolution,’ by which the East India Company merely replaced the titular Indian state as a partner of the local elites, and the British conquest was thus not really a conquest at all!” Here, the question of centralization is conflated with that of the strength of state power. It is presupposed that a state capable of maintaining sovereignty over its territory has to be centralized in terms of administrative structure and socio-cultural practices. In opposition to this, we need to insist on both the strength of the pre-colonial state and its distance from society – something inconceivable within an analytical perspective mired in European notions of sovereignty. Sudipta Kaviraj articulates this succinctly: 

In terms of their external relations with other kingdoms or empires, these [pre-colonial] states were certainly ‘sovereign’ over their territories; but we cannot simply assume that in their internal relation with their subjects these states exercised the familiar rights of sovereignty. It is essential to understand the difference between actual weakness of a state and its marginality in principle. The relative autonomy of the social constitution from the state did not arise because the state was weak, and would have invaded social rules if it could muster the necessary strength. Rather, it accepted a marginality that was a consequence of its own normative principles. The marginality of the pre-modern state was a social fact precisely because it followed from a moral principle which guided the relation between rulers and subjects.

The lack of a clear locus of political authority in pre-colonial formations meant that the state could not act decisively on behalf of the society. Instead of actively attempting to implement its favored political programme, the pre-colonial state had to respect the internal regulations and practices of social groups as long as taxes and revenues were paid. Hence, a segmented societal architecture relied for its sustenance upon the multiple, dispersed and stable rituals of community social life. This is what is meant by ancient pluralism. Unlike the modern culture of individual rights, such pluralism was restricted to the mere fact of coexistence, with the normatively stronger attitudes of inter-religious respect being generally absent. In the words of Kaviraj: “Coexistence of numerous local communities which would have liked to impose their ways on others had they the power to do it, is not equal to a situation of pluralism-tolerance. It is a pluralism which represents a powerless intolerance.” This model of ineffectual intolerance rather than positive ideological tolerance is evident in the actual workings of the much glorified “composite culture,” in which liberal nationalists give a modernist flavor to the interaction between Hindus and Muslims through a retrospective imputation of secular values to past traditions.  According to Kaviraj, the Muslim control of “the upper layers of political authority” and the Hindu control of “commercial, craft and other productive practices” gave rise to “an effective protocol of trans-active relations for the prosecution of everyday business.” These “transactions in mundane matters like commerce and administration” were strictly separated from the domestic space of family, where spiritual exclusiveness remained dominant. Further, “because the mundane is less important than the sacred for pre-modern mentalities,” the public domain of material transactions was considered less important than the private domain of familial spirituality. “[T]he temple and the mosque, the household puja and namaz remained more significant than the market and the court; and these interactions did not result in the creation of a public space under the state’s control.” Any cultural synthesis in the areas of art, architecture, music and literature was confined to the elite boundaries of the state. Despite the efforts of the Bhakti-Sufi tradition, the message of religious egalitarianism could not percolate into the concrete ethos of Indian social life, becoming ossified into otherworldly quietism. The weakness of syncretic-fusionist traditions flowed from its pre-reflective nature – it was not epistemically organized and consciously claimed by the people belonging to different religio-cultural communities. It functioned as a loose moral code liable to dissolve when extended into spheres of society explicitly concerned with power equations. Javeed Alam writes that the pre-reflective compositeness of folk traditions “was not aligned with contending orthodoxies in a way as to be taken as necessarily acceptable when consciously thought about. Once the orthodoxy felt the danger and began intervening, by whatever modalities from above, they more or less succeeded…in pushing back or defeating most of these trends”. The spirit of religious equality and universalism propagated by the Bhakti-Sufi tradition was a systematization and popularization of the everyday experience of demographic diversity and cultural heterogeneity that formed the core of pre-colonial India. More particularly, it was concretely rooted in the material experience of religiously diverse people coming together for the purposes of commercial and administrative work. People skilled in these practical activities had a tendency to think in secular terms when dealing with the phenomena and problems of their work. For instance, the government institutions, from the medieval period onwards, had officials, generals and soldiers belonging to all religions. The Muslim and Hindu rulers (Sher Shah Suri, Akbar, Aurangzeb, Shivaji, Ranjit Singh etc.) freely employed the followers of other religions, specifically in the revenue administration and the army. These rulers also made efforts to ensure that the execution of public duties by the officials was done within a nonreligious framework. Given the emergent materialism of this secular framework, it was in consonance with the spirit of social and scientific development. The Bhakti-Sufi tradition denoted a cultural radicalization of these secular-scientific experiences, extending the materialist principles found in the public sphere of work into the private sphere of religiosity. However, the domain of the private was dominated by Brahmanical ideology. Unlike the overwhelming majority of the common people, the upper castes were divorced from any kind of material labour for their livelihood. The life of Brahmins depended on intellectual exercises that did not have a practical orientation toward materialism. They were one who controlled the means of intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual production, while the rest of society produced material wealth. Thus a division emerged between intellectual and physical labour, between spiritual and temporal life. Driven by cosmic ideas of a distant mental universe, rather than phenomena of the socio-material world, the Brahmins developed themselves into idealists – the most powerful example being the philosophical system developed by Adi Shankara. Insofar that this idealism was backed by the social and political might of upper castes, the developing secular-scientific culture of the working people and its cultural counterpart in the Bhakti-Sufi tradition suffered a defeat. Due to the hegemony of casteism, the working people as a whole and the cultural representatives of this class were beholden to the ideological power of Brahmanical idealism. As EMS Namboodiripad writes: “It was therefore, an unequal battle between the toiling people who were inherently materialistic in outlook and those who lorded it over them with their idealistic philosophy.” The victory of idealist philosophy led to the entrenchment of an anti-scientific outlook that ossified the social structure through a continued dependence upon closed religious abstractions. The predominance of separate religious identities in the private sphere along with growing inter-religious interaction in the public sphere meant that pre-modern forms of tolerance represented structures of coexistence in which there were neither any sharp and conflictual religious divisions nor any widely prevalent processes of cultural synthesis. This traditional society was an intersecting network of hierarchies, tolerances and intolerances: some differences were accepted, others were frowned upon, with the elites of religious communities never forgetting to draw lines of demarcations and establish diverse inequalities. 

Colonial Modernity and the Indian Renaissance 

With the onset of colonialism, the ancient framework of coexistence came under stress. Faced with the foreign threat of the British, Indian society was forced to reflect upon its internal constitution; colonialism provided an external vantage point from which the loosely held diversity of national life had to transcend its status as a structural mode of pragmatic coexistence. In order to effectively encounter the colonial Other and protect their interests, many of the numerous communities of India began to think about their position in the socio-cultural word, thus generating diverse notions of social good. These differing notions of good were engaged in competition not just with one another but with the conception of good attached to the colonial introduction of modernity. As the elites of various religious entities organized themselves into pressure groups to negotiate with the colonial authority, the self-consciousness of the Indian people came to include a degree of community-based political coherence and national-level exchange of ideas. To take an example, the growth of new communicative infrastructures and the emergence of census-making sharpened the sense of difference between Hindus and Muslims, giving rise to the statistical imagination of majorities and minorities. Within this numerical battle, the practical behavior of ineffective intolerance was superseded by the modern capacity to orchestrate well-thought-out communal mobilizations. In such a situation of growing – and discordant – integration and the rise of modern forms of collective action in the political sphere, the local arrangements of static coexistence could no longer function as adequate methods for the resolution of various conflicts. As Alam elaborates: 

The happy coexistence of the numerous communities each living with minimal interactions though with cordial understandings could no more be taken for granted as in earlier times. This was the source enormous strains on the inherited capacities of people to handle interpersonal, intra-community, and inter-community relations. This was over and above the new competition generated by the establishment of colonial economy and administration and the struggle for share in power in the social arrangement taking shape then. The situation required interlocutors for exchange of opinions and ideas and adjudication of diverging interests and diverse notions of good between these very differently positioned worlds. Successful mediation required either people placed outside the numerous communities or those who could think beyond the limits of these communities, each of which was getting more and more unified as well as assertive. Old style dialogue as used to take place between adjacent communities enjoying local autonomy would no more do between people now more and more distant from one another and demanding things from the world which was unfamiliar to old type of transactions. All this was to sap the traditionally built-in resources including those of tolerance and mutual perseverance.

Thus, India’s interaction with colonial modernity led to novel forms of political churning whose ideological intensities and normative horizons could no longer be contained by the structural pluralism of traditional society. Ancient pluralism was only suitable for the small-scale scenario of pragmatic inter-community interaction – a form of segmented toleration propped up by the lack of a centralized political authority. With the British conquest of India, the fragmented sociological and political landscape of India had to respond to a common Other embodied in the colonial state. This process of responding to the British state as part of colonial modernity decisively changed the structural organization of Indian society. In the pre-colonial society of plural traditions, the state ruled society as a group of rulers separated from the society situated below them, lacking any substantive ideological and institutional bonds with the latter. This allowed Indian society to persist with its compartmentalized dynamic of inter-group toleration. However, with colonialism, the presence of a foreign state not hesitant to introduce deep changes in society led to the politicization of the latter; power became the major concern of different groups, with the privileged spokespeople of these groups deploying new idioms to articulate their interests. This produced the conflictual intermeshing of diverse notions of social good. In this condition, what was of prime importance was the establishment of a secular system that would ensure that the competing, and often irreconcilable, conceptions of good in public life did not lead to the eruption of conflicts. The indispensability of secularism, the need for a principle capable of democratically managing the competing notions of good, thus emerged from the internal exigencies of Indian society. But such a need was not satisfied by the peculiar logic of Indian modernity, which produced new styles of culture and politics in a highly uneven manner. The intellectual origins of modernity in India can be found not in an internal dynamic of cultural churning, but in the foreign ideas introduced by the British state and its myriad apparatuses. The recipients of these ideas were the newly emerging middle class who were roughly divided into three sections: 1) those who occupied most of the administrative posts in the colonial government; 2) those who enjoyed economic privileges owing to the landed interests that had been created by the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793; and 3) those comprador sections of Indian traders who were valued by the British for their knowledge of internal markets and sources of supply. Given the social and economic proximity of these middle class trading intermediaries and administrative subordinates to the British state, they were inevitably influenced by Western ideas. Finding themselves in a novel cultural configuration, the Indian middle class started glorifying the West and imitating the liberal trends of their British superiors – a response that first developed in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, and spread to other parts of the country later. Guided by the newfound perspectives of the colonial-modern Other, the Westernized middle class of India subjected tradition to critical enquiry. This yielded some positive results: cruel social practices like sati and infanticide were abolished, irrational religious rituals like hook swinging and human sacrifices were rejected, and patriarchal regulations over women were loosened to some degree. However, the social base of these reforms was an economically exploitative middle class which mainly wanted to reconcile its traditional position of power with the modern milieu of colonial rulers. The agenda they were pursuing was one of individualistic compromise that wanted to change native culture without engendering any sort of socio-political radicalism capable of disrupting the economic programme of the British Raj. Naturally, the primary thrust of 19th century social reformers was on the Reformation of personal faith rather than an all-encompassing vision of Renaissance that could have challenged all sorts of exploitation. Insensitive to the problem of social exploitation and political subjugation, the approach of the leaders of the Renaissance toward the feudal order and colonial rule was shrouded in confusion and silence. Failure to associate with either the anti-feudal opposition of the oppressed subalterns or the anti-colonial sentiments of the Indian masses restricted the area of operation of the Indian Renaissance. Its middle class social foundation was content to merely harmonize private religious beliefs with the new conditions of colonial modernity. As such, the conceptual vocabulary of the Indian Renaissance was based on religion and caste, severely neglecting the broader theme of socio-political struggles against exploitation. Looking inwards within religiocized communities, the Indian Renaissance leaders legitimized or opposed social reforms through an interpretative dependence upon religious texts. “Almost every leader of the renaissance,” KN Panikkar writes, “from Rammohan to Narayana Guru, drew upon Vedanta as the philosophical inspiration of their social vision. It was from the influence of Vedanta that they derived their belief in monotheism and universalism.” Instead of radically transcending tradition through its incorporation into a new secular paradigm, the Indian Renaissance changed tradition through its selective reformulation, which itself was conducted in wholly religious terms. Even when conceptualizing monotheism and the unity of godhead, the Indian thinkers of Renaissance put the matter in a religious language. In the Hindu community, religious reformation relied upon the Vedas for its articulatory structure and nearly every Renaissance leader saw the propagation of the Vedas as an important goal: “Rammohan translated the Upanishads into Bengali and English, Debendranath devoted his life to the dissemination of the philosophy of Vedanta from which he earlier received enlightenment, and Keshab Chandra Sen propagated Vedanta through popular publications. Vedanta was the inspiration of Narayana Guru also, even though he belonged to a low caste and his teachings were the ideological influence of a low caste movement.” In the Muslim community, a similar influence of religiocized perspectives could be found. “Be it for a Makti Tangal in Kerala or a Syed Ahmed Khan in North India,” notes Panikkar, “reforms were to follow scriptural prescriptions. However, they tried to interpret scriptures in such a fashion that the demands of a modern society could be accommodated. It was such a perspective which informed Syed Ahmed Khan’s efforts to reconcile Islam with modernity or Makti Tangal’s attitude towards the study of languages.” The constant invocation of religion for either the approval or disapproval of reforms facilitated the growth of particularized identities that stood in antithesis to the universalist social philosophy of Indian Renaissance. Proclaiming that different religions are just varying embodiments of the same universal truth of humanity’s oneness, Renaissance ideas had tried to overcome the different regional and cultural barriers to unite people on a common platform. But these ideas were undermined by the contradictory pull coming from the strong commitment to scriptural narratives – a narrow approach that failed to transform the religious ideal of universal oneness into the socio-political discourse of equality, justice and fraternity. As the exclusivist tendency of Indian Renaissance overpowered its universalist message, a new tension emerged between the two basic ideas of Renaissance – rationalism and universalism. Having hitched the project of rationalist critique to the cultural authority of religious re-interpretations, the Indian Renaissance thinkers contributed to the entrenchment of faith as the dominant criterion for considering the validity of any change. The critical application of reason to unjust social practices was set aside in favor of a more subdued strategy of rejigging the textual coordinates of religious teachings to align them with the liberal sensibilities of the Indian middle class. While this was the general historical outcome of the Indian Renaissance, there were some cases that displayed the alternative trajectories available to the social reformers. This is encapsulated in the journey of the Brahmo movement from Rammohan to Anandamohan Bose, which demonstrates how different class interests led to different cultural strategies on the part of the Renaissance leaders. The early feudal interests of Rammohan and Debendranath circumscribed the extent to which the multiple brutalities of Indian tradition could be resisted. This gave rise to a counter-movement of the young Brahmos, which soon abandoned its former leader Keshab Chandra Sen to press for a more radical agenda, which ultimately resulted in in the formation of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj in 1878 – a Brahmo subgroup that advocated for the universal liberation of all people, democratic republicanism and the welfare of labour. Inspired by Anandamohan, the young Brahmo radicals belonged to middle class and lower class families. Driven by a humanitarian desire to do something for their working class brethren, they used the legal constitutionalism of Western political theory to protest against the British policy of exploitation of Indian laborers in the tea gardens and other places. Sibnath Sastri, a leading young Brahmo, published “a poem “Sramajibi” in “Bharat Sramajeebi” 1874 Vol. 1 edited by Sasipada Bandopadhya through which he gave a call to the workers to rise and emancipate themselves from the bondage of exploitation. It may be recalled that Muzaffar Ahmed one of the founders of the Communist Party of India recognized Sivnath Sastri as one of the first enlightened persons who welcomed the need to form an organization for the working class.” These socio-political expansions of the meaning of Indian Renaissance were weak exceptions to the dominant trend of increasingly religiocized communitarian interests. 

Cultural Nationalism and the Left Alternative 

Modern politics in India inherited the intellectual legacy of the Indian Renaissance, which meant that it forewent the discourse of universal citizenship in favor of a more culturally localized focus on religio-communitarian interests. The initial interaction of the Indian political class with the British was carried out not as a modality of citizenship, since the Renaissance had failed to create a non-exclusive imagination of secular identity, but as multiple attempts to build pressure groups that could both bargain with and resist the British authorities, and, unavoidably, these pressure groups reflected the actual divisions of Indian society – religion, caste and community. The entanglement of Indian politics in socio-structural fault lines was visible even in the secular Indian National Congress, whose internal workings were oriented toward striking a balance among the elites of the various religious entities and denominational communities. Given that Indian politics claimed to represent the sectional interests of different communities in relation to the colonial authority, the emerging forms of Indian nationalism were stamped with a cultural character that gave preference to the language of internally homogenous and politically meaningful religious groups. Ahmad talks about how “diverse individuals and groups subscribing to a particular religion or sect came to be defined as coherent communities and political entities precisely because groups of elites needed to claim that they represented such communities and entities.” In colonial society, the discursive predominance of community over citizenship, the invention represented by the representors, translated into a form of anti-colonialism dominated by elite Romanticism. This cultural nationalism of colonized India used revivalist nostalgia and a demand for national re-purification against the British Other, which was perceived as an agent of defilement that used alien cultural forms to violate the country’s collective India. In this narrative of past greatness, ahistorical references were made to a Golden Age when India was a landscape of Hindu purity, undisturbed by Christian and Muslim incursions. The ruling intelligentsia of a caste-ridden society such as India very frequently confused culture with religion, fueling Brahmanical generalizations of caste cultures as “national” culture. In effect, these representational strategies solidified the colonial view of Indian history, which consisted entirely of discrete ages populated by equally well-defined communitarian interests. The Indian nation was posited as an already existing incarnation of an inexhaustible reservoir of shared culture and not a concrete outcome of common citizenship and juridical equality. Nationalism among the anti-colonial leaders remained deeply cultural in its constitution, with its political and civic aspects being overshadowed by the sentiments of blood and belonging, spiritual identity, ethnic or religious essence, revivalism and purification. Generalizing this traditionalizing impulse of Indian nationalism, Ahmad notes how “the slide from dreams of cultural retrieval to religious revivalism, and from cultural nationalism to religious purification and particularity, always lurks as a real potential at the very heart of anti-colonial nationalisms of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois strata.” While the Romantic and anti-progressive imaginary of nationalism confused culture with religion and attempted to valorize India’s historical past for the purpose of defeating colonial culture, there also existed a subaltern thrust towards a materialist conceptualization of culture. Whereas the strategy of Romantic nationalism was to construct an identity between religion and culture throughout society with the help of politically homogenized communities, the strategy of subaltern nationalism was to show how cultural practices included not only religious features and meanings but also social experiences of secular struggles against material exploitation. Instead of eternalizing the essentially historical and contingent intertwinement of religion and culture, the subaltern re-fashioning of nationalism based itself on the modern subjectivity of self-reflexivity to critically highlight the internal contradictions that vertically divided the supposedly cohesive communities of religious interests. Against the class elites of religious communities who insisted upon building social identities around primordial loyalties, the Indian subalterns foregrounded the concrete intersection of religious identity with a host of other social and economic vectors, like the existence of class and caste oppressions. In broader terms, subaltern nationalism advanced a concrete understanding of the Indian social formation, grounded in an analytical perspective for which the history of the people was bound with the history of material production and hence of the classes that constituted those productive structures and its effects. This framework recognized the concrete importance of class struggle, from which flowed the necessity of a multi-cultural and multi-religious community of the oppressed, and the replacement of the elite-dominated state by a people-centric democratic community open to all the citizens of the country without any form of discrimination. Counterposed to this subaltern materialism was the cultural nationalism of Romanticists for whom real history was the history of blood, belief, belonging, race, ethnicity etc. The criteria of truth for any change in society was to be the national ethos of the country, which set its cultural subjects upon the path of divine liberation and constant purification – a permanent circling around the lost zone of a glorious past. What remained central in the minds of cultural nationalists was not the logic of class conflict and social production but the politically manipulated discourses of parochial identities and communities. 

Within the Indian anti-colonial struggle, the materialist perspective continued to exist as a subterranean force, calling in question the mainstream language of cultural myths, civilizational clashes, and collective spirit. Such questioning led to radical hostility toward the traditional status quo, and generated a very modern conception of every people’s inherent right to liberty, collective self-determination and popular sovereignty. This kind of anti-colonial social revolutionism produced a nationalism that was culturally diverse, religiously pluralistic, legally federalist and republican, with strong guarantees for individual and collective rights. Secular nationalism of this modern variety, cognizant of the need for displacing religion from its place of public importance and installing a democratic discourse of universal rights, was perceived by native Romanticists as disruptive for the unity of the anticolonial movement. What was considered more expedient was a blinkered focus on the struggle for political autonomy through a cultural movement with religious underpinnings. As a consequence, the secular politics of subaltern materialism was replaced by an elite emphasis on a common culture constituted by religions and castes. As a result, a disjunction emerged between the politically progressive objective of national independence and the culturally regressive goal of nativist rebirth. Panikkar writes: 

That a large number of people who supported and even participated in political struggles were unable to go along with temple entry or eradication of untouchability was an expression of this. A distinct gap existed between their cultural and political consciousness…at a time when political movement was the dominant force a transformation of backward elements of culture was possible only through an integration with it. As it did not happen, backwardness in culture not only continued to exercise its influence over the popular mind, it also succeeded in dominating it. What happened in India was not an integration of cultural and political struggles, but an intrusion of culture into politics. Instead of politics transforming backward culture, politics was vitiated by cultural intrusion. We find this tendency developing, even if unintended, from the time of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Ganapati festival and Gandhiji’s Rama Rajya, to assume monstrous proportions in the religion-based politics of the Muslim League and the Hindu Maha Sabha during the national movement. 

In Independent India, the weaknesses of the anti-colonial struggle are visible even today in the electoral tactics of liberal secularists, who have allowed the cultural discourse of primordial loyalties to constantly hollow out the modern message of political sovereignty. For them, nationhood is defined in a civilizational manner instead of being a common product of the anti-colonial struggle. As Ahmad writes: “Please contemplate the fact that the claim that we are a nation is, in our history, much older than the claim that we are a secular nation or that this nationhood in some fundamental way cannot be born without the abolition of colonial autocracy. Even the most secular of our nationalists continued to think of India as a primordial nation civilizationally defined, rather than a modern nation that was the product of the anti-colonial movement itself and an entity that arose out of the crucible of 15 August 1947.” Given that the Indian liberals continue to operate primarily on the terrain of culture and civilization, secular activities in civil society are mostly confined to the highly predictable invocation and idealization of the uniquely tolerant nature of the Indian religious tradition – a mechanical exercise that arises in response to the communal focus on religious conflicts and extremism. In this entire political operation, what remains constant is the undiminished primacy of religion as a moral and cultural code of political action. Both liberal secularists and right-wing fanatics agree on the status of religion as a totalizing model of existential ethic that is as sufficient as the secular and modern framework of the Indian constitution – a present-day manifestation of the cultural intrusion that took place into national politics during the period of anti-colonial struggle. In contrast to the uncritical attitude of the liberal-fascist forces to the public predominance of religion, Communists insist on displacing religion from its current status as a social totality in itself and reducing it to a mere subcomponent of a wider democratic discourse of universal values. As Vanaik says: 

Religious discourse is not communalist discourse. It only provides the alphabet, or perhaps some words, from which the ugly sentences of communalist discourse are constructed. But religious discourse must also be seen as only one kind of discourse, language or alphabet system among others in a modern, secular society. It is a discourse that must recognize its limited applicability. When it intrudes into other domains where other languages (and alphabets) are more fitted – i.e. when it becomes legitimized as an acceptable discourse on the terrain of modern politics – then it widens the field over which communal discourse operates. This is true even when, in that domain, it can be used to fight communal constructions of its ‘alphabet’. 

The Communist stance toward religiocization is visible in the controversy that the Indian Right has created over various historical events. In 1921, the Mappila Muslims of Kerala staged an armed revolt against the British authorities and their feudal allies who happened to be upper-caste Hindus. Since the landlords and peasants were from different religious groups, the revolts of the Mappila Muslims against their exploiters are regarded as communal riots, as expressions of Muslim fanaticism against the Hindus. The hidden presupposition of this communal angle is that an individual’s personality is wholly determined by a single identity, that of religious faith. “Therefore, a Hindu or a Muslim, whether he is a peasant or a landlord, a worker or an industrialist, a teacher or a bureaucrat, a politician or a scientist, is guided by a consciousness rooted in religion. An implication of this imputed univocal consciousness is that he is a member of a community of such individuals professing the same faith, regardless of the different secular vocations in which they are engaged.” Instead of revealing the multifarious constitution of the individual, and the historically diverse forces that combine to generate his/her contradictory consciousness, the Right obscures any form of concrete politics by imposing upon them the grand abstractions of religion. Instead of fighting this increasing religiocization of society, Indian liberals keep on talking about religious co-existence and harmony. This model of secularism as religious harmony is based on a unidimensional view of religion, which entirely ignores the internal differentiations that vertically divide religious communities. Each religion contains within itself multiple social, economic and cultural groups, among whom relationships are not just complementary but also contradictory. Taking into account the fact of intra-religious divisions, homogeneous religious communities don’t exist; religious categories are historically enmeshed in a network of social and economic relations. Any political position that singularly focuses upon religious pluralism substantivizes religion, giving it a solid character that it actually does not possess. The reification of religion in turn accentuates the sense of difference that is inherent in any religious identity, creating the religious base upon which communal forces can work. A Communist approach to secularism, in contrast, would de-institutionalize religion by showing how it is filled with social and cultural hierarchies that prevent the formation of a neat faith-based consensus. This shifts the emphasis from internally unified religious communities to the multiple material and ideological contradictions that sustain religion as a conflictual historical category. Since religion is no longer regarded as a complete totality but as a contingent and contradictory mode of social organization, the language of homogenous religious communities and the attendant liberal construction of inter-religious harmony becomes redundant. What matters now is the strong guarantee of universal equality that would end all forms of exploitation found in religious groups. The liberal narrative of religious co-existence and toleration no longer occupies a central place because it is superseded by a democratic narrative that transcends religious pluralism to construct an over-arching framework of justice, equality and fraternity. Within this all-encompassing discourse of modern values, secularism is re-articulated as the universal promise of citizenship, carrying within itself the “values of non-racial and nondenominational equality, the fraternity of the culturally diverse, the supremacy of Reason over Faith, the belief in freedom and progress, the belief that the exercise of critical reason, beyond all tradition or convention or institution, is the fundamental civic virtue without which other civic virtues cannot be sustained”. 

The political situation that India currently faces demands a Communist version of secularism, one that would embed the multi-religious working class in the democratic totality of secular struggles against economic exploitation and political repression. This dialectical transcendence of religious pluralism stands in contrast to liberal anti-communalism, which merely searches national tradition to find instances of religious harmony. Socialist political practice will overcome this anemic agenda of national integration and communal harmony by waging progressive democratic struggles that include within their programmatic vision the fight of the multi-religious working class against all forms of exploitation, including communal manipulation. Usually, such a socialist universalism is rarely present in democratic struggles and therefore an organic connection between secular action and democratic struggles is not formed. Panikkar notes: “Almost all voluntary organizations engaged in fighting for peoples’ rights are secular in their conviction. Yet, they all tend to remain single-issue oriented organizations without incorporating a conscious struggle for secularism in their activities. Therefore, in times of crisis their secular commitment becomes rather fragile, as happened to some trade unions in Mumbai at the time of the Ramajanmabhumi campaign.” The viewpoint of socialist universalism will remedy the religious exclusivism of democratic struggles by consciously launching a movement for secularization dedicated to combating the exploitative practices of institutionalized religious formations. This is what the Left used to do before it began eulogizing India’s syncretic traditions and interfaith unity. In the past, the Left parties would use the local idiom of folk cultures to criticize piety and blind faith, thus promoting a secularized commitment to pro-poor universalism. In the words of Praful Bidwai: “Left-wing activists in the arts and theatre would deploy satire and parody to demolish the moral claims of devotees of Ram, including the Kshatriya prince’s upholding of customary casteist dogmas and practices such as beheading a Shudra for committing the crime of reading the Vedas, or driving Sita to self-destruction in defense of male-supremacist prejudice. They would pour scorn on religion and self-styled swamis.” Today, what we need is the construction of a left-wing secular discourse that consciously recognizes itself as a subset of the discourses of democracy and equality. Oriented toward the principles of socialism, such a general democratic discourse would secularize civil society and thus combat the resurgent wave of neo-fascism.

What is Nkrumahism-Touréism?

By All African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP)

Republished from Hood Communist.

The Africa which exists today, as well as the one we are struggling to build, is not the old Africa but a new emergent revolutionary society; a classless society in which a new harmony, a new cohesiveness, a new revolutionary African personality and a new dignity is forged out of the traditional African way of life which has been permanently changed by thousands of years of Euro-Christian and Islamic intrusions and by the historical development of the competing and conflicting slave, feudal, capitalistic and newly emergent socialist modes of production. A new emergent ideology is therefore required. That ideology is Nkrumahism-Touréism!

Nkrumahism-Touréism takes its name from the consistent, revolutionary, socialist and Pan-African principles, practices and policies followed, implemented and taught by Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Seku Touré; two of the foremost proponents and practitioners of the scientific strategy to liberate and unify Africa under scientific socialism. These principles, practices and policies are recorded in their speeches, writings, actions, achievements and life. In a larger and more complete sense, Nkrumahism-Touréism is the synthesis of the accumulated practical and theoretical contributions and achievements of centuries and generations of mass, revolutionary Pan-African and larger socialist struggles. Nkrumahism-Touréism is the application of the universal laws of revolutionary growth and development of the particular conditions of Africa and her children. Its concrete living manifestation is to be found in the creative contributions of the present day African Revolution.

Nkrumahism-Touréism provides the masses of African People with a program of human transformation turning individual defects into qualities by living the ideology. It is a Pan-African ideology that breaks the web of complexes put on us by the dominant culture and enables us to reclaim our humanity, reassert our dignity, and develop a new Revolutionary African Personality. It provides a revolutionary view of Africa and the world applying the universal principles of scientific socialism in the context of African history, tradition, and aspirations. It gives us a set of analytical tools which enable the masses of Africa People to correctly interpret, understand, redeem African culture and reconstruct Africa by way of the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumahism-Touréism provides a complete social, political, philosophical and economic theory which constitute a comprehensive network of principles, beliefs, values, morals and rules which guide our behavior, determines the form which our institutions and organizations will take; and acts as a cohesive force to bind us together, guide and channel our revolutionary action towards the achievement of Pan-Africanism and the inevitable triumph of socialism worldwide. Nkrumahism-Touréism includes the following principles:

The Primacy and Unity of Africa

The concept of the primacy and unity of Africa has its origins in the emergence of the modern Pan African movement which was characterized by our Peoples resistance to foreign domination in the 15th century. This foreign domination was soon followed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and full blown colonialism which culminated in the European partition of Africa agreed upon by the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885. The primacy of Africa dictates that we reject these artificially imposed colonial borders. A united Africa, the concept of continental African unity is the source of our strength and the key to our liberation. As Nkrumah says:

“African Unity gives an indispensable continental dimension to the concept of the African nation…Unity is the first prerequisite for destroying neo-colonialism. Primary and basic is the need for a union government on the much divided continent of Africa.” (Neo-colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism p.253) We cannot accept any other version of our land, to define Africa as anything less than the entire continent including its islands is to accept the neo-colonial strategy to divide and conquer. The primacy of Africa also speaks to our primary identity as African people. We are African. Rather than promoting our micro-national identities such as Nigerian, Ivorian, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Jamaican, Brazilian, African-American, etc. we must focus on the common denominator which is African. For us as Africans and Pan-Africanists as Nkrumah says, “the core of the black revolution is in Africa and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the black man throughout the world lacks a national home… All people of African decent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.” (Nkrumah, K Class Struggle in Africa)

The Integrity Of The Revolutionary African Personality

The African personality is the product of the evolution of African people’s conception of the world, way of life, their ethics and moral principles which are a particular reflection of African culture. This African cultural personality has been under attack by capitalism /colonialism and its extension neo-colonialism which have developed in diverse and sometimes subtle ways a moral, intellectual, and cultural superiority complex towards us as an oppressed people. Sekou Touré says, ”the science of depersonalizing the colonized people is sometimes so subtle in its methods that it progressively succeeds in falsifying our natural psychic behavior and devaluing our own original virtues and qualities with a view to our assimilation”. (Touré A. S.The Political Leader Considered As The Representative Of A Culture p.3) We are clear that the assertion of the cultural personality of an oppressed culture becomes the catalyst for its national liberation movement. Nkrumah and Touré both call for the revival and integrity of the African personality, it is this re-personalization, which constitutes the successful affirmation of the cultural personality of the oppressed culture. Re-personalization for Africans means re-Africanisation to be accomplished through the Cultural Revolution. Nkrumah says that the revolutionary African personality “expresses identification not only with Africa’s historical past, but with the struggle of the African people in the African Revolution to liberate and unify the continent and to build a just society.”(Nkrumah,K Revolutionary Path p 206). The Revolutionary African Personality is a pan-Africanist concept which identifies us not by our language, religion or geographical location but in terms of our goals which are dynamic, just and noble. Thus, the Revolutionary African Personality puts emphasis on our ideological identity over anything else. It is this ideological identity for which we must consistently struggle which can only be ultimately realized through the success of the Cultural Revolution.

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism

Humanism, Egalitarianism and Collectivism are the cluster of humanist principles which underlie traditional African society and define the African personality. Respect for human beings and social solidarity, coupled with a keen sense of fraternity, justice and cooperation between men and women are the very foundation of traditional African society.

However, Sekou Touré adds to this that “ society has been marked by the existence of two natures of life, two natures transposing themselves in thought, action, behavior and in the options of (wo)men, whether political, economic, social or cultural. In other words there are two human natures in mankind and in each People; we have the People [interests] itself and the anti-People [interests], with a permanent struggle being waged between the two, the class struggle.”…(Touré A.S. Women In Society p26)

The imperialist incursion into Africa has exacerbated these contradictions, and the battle against the anti-people’s class has dictated that we incorporate in addition to our class analysis the national and gender aspects of the struggle to include the full scope of our Pan African reality. Our ideology teaches us that the first principle of the Revolution is that everything we have earned in life is a reflection of the struggles and contributions of the People and that the masses of People are the makers of history. Included in this principle is the understanding that (wo)man is not merely treated as a means to an end but also as an end in themselves. This is the revolutionary operational principle that forms the basis for the egalitarian, humanist and collectivist character of our ideology.

In fact the (dialectical) relationship between (wo)man and the People shows that the Peoples interests are (wo)man’s interest because it is the People that generate (wo)man. Further more the value and level of the historical evolution of a People is faithfully measured by the condition of the women in society.

Dialectical and Historical Materialism

Revolutionaries want Revolution because it means a qualitative change in the oppressive conditions of the status- quo of capitalist society. In order to bring about this change, revolutionaries must study the science of Revolution. Dialectical and historical materialism is the essence of revolutionary science. Through the study and application of revolutionary ideology, which includes the scientific laws of dialectical and historical materialism, revolutionaries are able to understand the most general laws of the development of nature, human society, and thinking. It is therefore an indispensable instrument of scientific analysis and revolutionary transformation of the world. Sekou Touré says dialectical materialism “studies the general connections between the elements of nature, the laws of evolution of the objective world and the action that these laws exercise on human consciousness.”.(Touré, A.S.Strategy and Tactics of the Revolution, 52) “Dialectics is the method of scientific analysis which all [people] Christians, Muslims and atheist alike can use. Historical materialism is scientific. It objectively proves the rule of historical evolution from the production system. The changes society experienced, the succession of different regimes from the primitive community to socialism can scientifically be explained by historical materialism. Here dialectics deals with the method of analysis and explanation of facts of social and historical phenomena. Historical materialism made it possible to enlighten the process of changes recorded in every man’s life and characterized by the existence of production systems with properties and features different from one another.”(Touré, A.S. Africa On The Move vol xxiv chapterVI,Revolution and Religion p185) 

Historical materialism is the dialectical method applied to history. Historical materialism analyzes and explains the historical processes of evolutionary and revolutionary changes in society characterized by the changes in production systems with properties and features which differ from one to another. Historical materialism does not list the stages of the evolution of society, it analyzes society to show the specific origin of every stage of it’ s evolution, how every qualitative change originates and the specific characteristics of every stage.

The Harmony between Religion/Spirituality and Revolution

For Nkrumahism-Touréism, a revolutionary ideology coming from African culture there is and cannot be any contradiction between Revolution and Religion. In fact Revolution and Religion/spirituality are in harmony and are complementary aspects of culture. Religion and spirituality are dominant features of the African Personality. Nkrumah points out that “The traditional face of Africa includes an attitude towards man which can only be described, in its social manifestation, as being socialist. This arises from the fact that man is regarded in Africa as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity and value” ( Nkrumah,K. Consciencism p68).

For African people there is essential harmony in our faith in the Creator and the African Revolution. To fulfill our obligations to our religion or spirituality we have an obligation to properly serve one another, Gods’ highest creation. Man and Woman, the true servants of God and the People, have the duty to fight for the liberation of those deprived of liberty, whether an individual or a People.

Revolution is the collective action and struggle of an oppressed People guided and supported by a consciously planned process (ideology) and determination to qualitatively change an old, backward and oppressive political-economic condition (capitalism), into a new progressive and just system that will work for the People’s interests (Socialism).

Religion is a set of beliefs and principles that affirm the existence of one or more supreme beings or God(s) which govern us all. Religion influences and motivates social behavior in the sense that it serves as a moral guide and provides reassurance to People that in spite of what may seem to be an overwhelmingly negative situation, through the practice of religion and serving God, peace, justice and prosperity will prevail. Religion holds respect for human dignity and human virtue. Religion can also project man’s existence onto the next world, and reserves for a future world positive or negative existence according to their life conduct in this world. However as Sekou Touré, a revolutionary who practices Islam,  points out “The Revolution does not intend to deny this future world; it only wishes that the struggle against evil be not `deferred` or postponed, and this is actually what all sincere believers and the dispossessed, regardless of race, sex or nationality are pressing for.” (A. S. Touré, Revolution and Religion, Africa On The Move volxxiv).

Both Revolution and Religion share common values which they want people to reflect, and even more they want People to become the uncompromising and faithful advocates of. Some of these values are justice, peace and freedom for mankind, the nation and the laboring masses. Revolution and Religion proclaim, organize and conduct a permanent struggle, a universal struggle which, for the former is class struggle, the clash between antagonistic interests represented by classes that are opposed in the process of production, distribution and utilization of goods. While for the latter it is a struggle between good and evil, good embodying truth, justice and beauty, and evil embodying exploitation, lies, oppression, in essence all that is contrary to good.

Suffering, sweat and sacrifice are considered by both Revolution and Religion as necessary and ongoing on the long road to freedom. An important part of Religion and Revolution involves the unity of the philosophy and the behavior it advocates. In other words, not only is there is a constant struggle for the honest adherents of both Revolution and Religion to live up to the principles of each, but both Revolution and Religion have also been misused by corrupt men and women as a tool of exploitation and oppression.

Hence we should judge Revolution and Religion primarily by its principles not necessarily by its adherents. We know that our People’s faith and belief in righteousness and justice, which is upheld by their religious and spiritual faith must reinforce the need to engage in revolutionary political activity to defeat the enemies of God and the People on earth. The essential harmony of Revolution and Religion can only be affirmed in the struggle to build a just society.

The Necessity For Permanent, Mass, Revolutionary, Pan-African Political Education, Organization and Action

Following the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945, the mass political party emerged within the mass political movements as a qualitative leap and superior form of organized mass struggle, although mass political movement remained the dominant form of struggle. Some of these political movements can and do topple neo-colonialism, as most puppet regimes are weak. But generally speaking only mass-based revolutionary parties unified by a monolithic ideology will be strong enough to seize and sustain state power when confronted with imperialism’s counter-offensive of political, economic, military and psychological terrorism. Only mass-based parties with revolutionary ideology will maintain class struggle as a strategic principle and properly organize the class struggle along clear-cut class lines to defeat the internal and external enemies of the People’s class. Only ideological monolithic mass parties of conscious cadre are capable of organizing socialist transformation. 

A dialectical relationship exists between mass political movements and mass revolutionary parties. Revolutionary mass parties are a product of mass political movements. The mass movements remain relentless in struggle against oppression and for a better way of life. They serve as a source of sustenance and bulwark of defense for revolutionary party building. The wider mass movements stand as an inexhaustible reservoir of revolutionary mass potential, which ultimately must be tapped to realize our mass party. Revolutionary party building is integrally connected with and seeks to be a catalytic force with respect to ideologically transforming the broader mass movements into one revolutionary mass Pan-African party. Through ideological education and struggle, the Party seeks to progressively raise the level of class-consciousness. This transformation largely depends on acquiring the special Competence of ideologically recruiting and training cadre on a mass scale.

Revolutionary Ideology as The Greatest Asset

Nkrumahism-Touréism puts emphasis on the fact that the fundamental task facing Africa is the ideological transformation of man and woman. This transformation begins in the realm of morals and values:

“Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest, informed man [and woman] who submerges self in service to the nation and mankind. A man [and woman] who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of man [and woman] whose humility is his [her] strength and whose integrity is his [her] greatness.” (Nkrumah,K. 1975 Africa Must Unite p.130).

Both Nkrumah and Touré held ideology as the crucial element and the greatest asset in the African revolution. Touré teaches us that “Culture is the framework of ideology. Culture is the container, which carries ideology as its contents.” Africa has her own culture and thus must have her own ideology thereby conforming to the African personality. Nkrumah informs us that philosophy is an instrument of ideology and must derive it’s weapons from the living conditions of African people and that it is from those conditions that the intellectual content of our philosophy must be created. Nkrumah teaches us further that…. “a united people armed with an ideology which explains the status quo and illuminates our path of development is the greatest asset we posses for the total liberation and complete emancipation of Africa. And the emancipation of Africa completes the process of the emancipation of man.” (Nkrumah, K. 1964 Why The Spark p.2).

Touré echoes Nkrumah’s position that political freedom is a prerequisite for economic freedom and adds that political revolution is part and parcel of the ideological revolution. Hence ideological revolution is the fundamental requirement for political and economic revolutions. Likewise, political independence is incomplete unless it is followed by an economic revolution. Touré shows revolutionary ideology as the critical element in developing revolutionary consciousness as he teaches us the laws of developing consciousness. When he says,

“ Without revolutionary consciousness there is no Revolution! All those who have had to conduct revolution have been able to verify this. But where does this revolutionary consciousness come from, since it is certain that it is not basic datum, nor does it come into being and develop spontaneously? History teaches that it is created and developed through ideological education and revolutionary practice. We can equally affirm that without ideological training and without revolutionary action, there can be no revolutionary consciousness.”

Sekou Touré

To achieve a decisive impact on or recruit from mass movements the Party must have ideologically strong cadre and a program of ideological development. With the mass party our masses can bring forth and strengthen the best attributes of the mass movement into the qualified expressions of the mass revolutionary party characterized by mass revolutionary consciousness and mass ideological power as the guiding force to revolutionary practice.

The All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (AAPRP) is a permanent, independent, revolutionary, socialist, Pan-African Political Party based in Africa. Africa is the just homeland of African People all over the world. Our Party is an integral part of the Pan-African and World Socialist revolutionary movement. The A-APRP understands that “all people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any other part of the world, are Africans and belong to the African Nation”. — (Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, page 4)

The Contradictions of Bourgeois Secularism

By Yanis Iqbal

We live in a conjuncture characterized by the resurgence of fascist groupings. This has meant the activation of religious fanaticism, in which spirituality breaks out of the confines of secularity to openly assert undemocratic identities. The inability of the modern epoch to preempt the emergence of primitive fundamentalism is a result of its internal contradictions. In “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx writes that feudal civil society “secluded the individual from the state as a whole and…converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as…[it] converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation.” This specific configuration of social organization meant that “the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state…appear[ed] as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people. The advent of bourgeois political revolution changed this situation by smashing “all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community.” Henceforth, state affairs would become affairs of the people, a matter of general concern.

Thus, the bourgeois political revolution “broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals.” This division of humanity into the abstractness of political society and the concreteness of civil society “set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life.” However, the “political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts, without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation and therefore as its natural basis.”

Further, “man as a member of civil society is held to be man in the proper sense, homme [man] as distinct from citoyen [citizen], because he is man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person.” In other words: “The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen…Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person”. This disjunctive dimension of bourgeois modernity has special implications for secularism. Insofar that the bourgeois state does not abolish real distinctions in the realm of civil society and feels itself to be universal only in opposition to the particularity of the latter, religion under capitalism is not weakened but simply displaced from the state into civil society. In short, capitalism privatizes religion.

Marx writes:

“Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves…as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism…It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men…It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness”. This conversion of religion from the social medium of public life to the individual language of private life ensures that religion continues to exist as the irrational counterpart of rational secularism. In fact, the abstract secularism of capitalist modernity can exist only through its constant juxtaposition to the parochial religiosity that makes up the concrete content of civil society. This is because the bourgeoisie does not want to radically transform the social relations that prevail in society; it is content with the empty idealism of the state. Such idealism does not eliminate the egoism that is found in feudal civil society. Instead, it accepts the “egoistic man…[as] the basis, the precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this state in the rights of man. The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty…is…the recognition of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life. Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom.”

Since the capitalist privatization of religion perpetuates the existence of undemocratic spirituality in civil society, we need a communist transformation of political society that replaces its thin conception of juridical generality with the thick conception of socially evolved universality. This would entail the democratization of religiosity, the fostering of communicative rationality wherein participants would critically argue and question stereotypical suppositions about religion. While this won’t necessarily translate into a radical conversion or the adoption of a totally different point of view, it would certainly facilitate the creation of a public discourse that has a willingness for democratic dialogue and self-critical examination. In this democratically-collectively managed spirituality, one will gain the ability to be both religious and rational, and take part in a praxis of communicative rationality without being hindered by any dogmas.

Derek R. Ford’s “Encountering Education:” Bridging Marxist Educational Theory and Practice

By Peter McLaren

It was almost seven years ago that I participated in Derek R. Ford’s dissertation defense at Syracuse University. In that work—later published as Education and the Production of Space—Ford built on my own revolutionary critical pedagogy by further experimenting with the exact educational logics at work in revolutionary struggles and their spatial relations and implications.[1] After many twists and turns, for the last several decades I’ve worked to enlarge the scope of critical pedagogy into social movements because Marxist pedagogy is nothing unless it’s contributing to a social universe outside of capitalist value production.[2] Ford is one of several who continue to take that project in new directions, and since his dissertation he’s continued his work as a communist organizer at the local, national, and global levels and, just as importantly, has continued to write and theorize at the intersections of Marxism, pedagogy, and revolutionary struggles today. His seventh book, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy continues this trend in important and provocative ways.[3] The book is an incisive intervention in the fields of educational and political theory, yet it’s also one that’s relevant to organizers and activists today.

Ford begins by observing the frequency with which Marx’s eleventh Theses on Feuerbach—that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—is cited. From here he launches into his own intervention by noting that what is rarely mentioned is “the direction toward which he wanted to change it,” something that is inseparable from what he studied and the theory he articulated.[4] In other words, Marxist theory isn’t merely about changing the world but about advancing the class struggle toward the eventual abolition of class society. This is the transformation from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production via socialism, which “as a social formation” is a combination “of elements of both modes of production in which communist relations and means of production are ascending through the class struggle.”[5] The novelty of Ford’s work is the way he sees pedagogical processes as absolutely central to not only the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production but, more importantly, as key yet neglected aspects of the struggle for a new mode of production. Ford contends that we have to both explain the political context of our moment and the pedagogical philosophies of marxist education appropriate to that conjuncture, while insisting that neither are reducible to the other.

An Overview of Ford’s Latest Riffs

The first chapter begins where his last book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy, left off: with Ford’s unique and bold excavation of two latent pedagogical logics in Marx’s own works.[6] This is a theme he’s developed elsewhere in various ways, and in this sense Encountering Education is another extended riff on this theory. This is not mere repetition, but rather the result of Ford’s sprawling research that refuses to follow a linear trajectory. In this book, it serves as the foundation for the “elements of a marxist pedagogy” that Ford organizes around the “disinterpellative encounter,” a concept first proposed by another former student of mine, Tyson E. Lewis. Whereas Althusser articulated interpellation as the material process through which subjects are inaugurated into the mode of production, Lewis and Ford theorize disinterpellation as the disruption of that process. “The pedagogical encounter,” Ford writes here, “is ‘an exposure to an outside,” and an excess or surplus gap within the lesson.’”[7]

For Ford, Marx’s distinction between the method of presentation and inquiry serves as the starting points for a marxist pedagogical philosophy of learning and studying, the former of which is linear and guided by predetermined ends and the latter of which is open-ended and guided by a ceaseless wondering and wandering to and fro. Ford innovatively reads work by Marx and his commentators as gesturing toward but never reaching this pedagogical dialectic Marx articulates.

The next chapter develops a theory of “errant learning” in which both pedagogies are blocked together, and the political context here are anti-colonial and decolonial struggles. He begins with John Willinsky’s Learning to Divide the World, which looks at how education was and is fundamental to colonialism.[8] Ford attends to Willinsky’s neglect of learning and colonialism while at the same time contributing to revolutionary work on studying that has focused primarily on neoliberalism. He does this through a highly unique—and for some, probably, controversial—turn to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Space and Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres project. Here, Ford identifies “the grasping drive as the educational foundation of the colonizing apparatus. I argue that the grasping drive positions opacity as a potential that must be realized—as a thought that must be known—an orientation that ends up sacrificing opacity as such.”[9] Ford turns to the question of form through Sloterdijk, linking the grasping drive to “lordly imagining,” before drawing out the revolutionary potential of Sloterdijk’s work on foams. He develops his theory of “errant learning” as “another form of dialectically blocking together the methods of inquiry and presentation, but one that shows the necessity of presentation and the existing historical material conditions in which we engage in inquiry.”[10]

After exploring the colonial and imperial context of our times, Ford turns next to the urban coordinates of our struggle and our present. He shows how the grasping drive is the pedagogical logic of today’s urbanism, which he justifies and then develops a pedagogical response to by turning to Jean-François Lyotard’s later work. Indeed, here we will note Ford’s highly unorthodox marxism that, while it’s unapologetically committed to the proletarian class camp and the struggle for communism, looks for philosophical allies everywhere he can, even in the most unsuspecting of places. Today’s urbanism—the megalopolis—is one in which everything is put into circuits of communication and exchange and “is ‘an economy in which everything is taken, nothing received,’” and is thus illiterate. Ford takes illiteracy as a positive element for marxist pedagogy insofar as such illiteracy “is not the negation or suppression of literacy, but instead a development of literacy as grasping, through which forms and concepts constitute objects under the mind’s direction and the subject’s will.”[11] Instead of presenting what this looks like, he inquiries into examples, one of which is the use of “scare quotes.” When we write or read square quotes, we “create a margin around the words and prevent any firm links between the words inside and outside to be drawn. While we can produce uncertain connections (“what is it about ‘this’ word?”), these always slip out of our grasp.”[12]

Urbanism isn’t only about steel and pavement, bounded densities of population and production, but is also virtual and material at the same time. In the fourth chapter, he builds on Curry Malott’s work on the postdigital, which Malott sees as a struggle “over what form the postdigital will take, which will be determined,” Ford urges, “by what mode of production prevails.”[13] While there is much of interest in this chapter, what is perhaps most politically and theoretically important is Ford’s argument against marxist theorists who have abandoned Marx’s theory of value today on the basis that “immaterial” and “knowledge” or “cognitive” work and products are immeasurable. “Marx’s law of value,” he reminds us, “is precisely immeasurable” insofar as both aspects of socially-necessary labor time are “dynamic,” “unpredictable,” and at times even outside of even our individual and collective consciousness.[14] The main problem he identifies with capitalist postdigital pedagogy is “that it limits individuation to the capitalist form of individuality and reinforces our conception and experience of individuality as a finalized starting point rather than an endpoint.”[15] Capital needs the individual subject-form to produce commodities (like knowledge). Yet rather than argue for the collective alone, Ford proposes—in postdigital fashion—for the pedagogical and political process of individuation through incalculable thought.

Ford begins the conclusion by noting that “there’s an immense power that comes from hearing an explanation for one’s oppression and our collective poverty and misery,” but that “explanation is only one part of the marxist pedagogical dialectic. The other part—inquiry—is a different kind of power: the power of wonder.”[16]  Here he summarizes the political and pedagogical distinctions between inquiry and presentation beautifully:

“If one side of the marxist pedagogical dialectic is about knowing and presentation, then we have to attend to the other side, which is about thought and inquiry. Such a distinction turns on the dialectic between exchange-value and use-value, between abstraction and differentialization, between capitalism and communism. The dialectic itself is here, in the present, in the global capitalist world, but in the world in transition. Understanding or knowing involves a determinate judgment that takes place when given data comes under the mind’s order and comprehension is a faculty of determination in which data comes under the mind’s comprehension. Thinking, by contrast, is an exposure to stupor, an experience with immeasurable concepts that the mind can never grasp.”[17]

After an important presentation and study of interpellation, counterinterpellation, and disinterpellation, Ford turns to the role of noise and music in anti-colonial struggles to tie together the various riffs produced in the book, ending with the example of technologies that mediate the voice such as autotune, which show us that vocalization is a ‘process without a subject’ insofar as they prevent us from linking the sound of a voice to an essence of an individual subject or a piece of fixed capital.” These technologies produce a “sonic surplus” that we have to listen to both synchronically and diachronically as well in order to “receive an immersive education in the wonder as well as the theory of class struggle, a struggle that is advanced ideologically and materially through the forces of opposition and swerve.”[18] The swerve is the unpredictable but nonetheless intended action of the marxist pedagogue.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ford’s book—and this review—will be challenging to some. Yet for those who are confused, I can only urge you to spend time with Encountering Education, which makes these dense and difficult theories accessible and makes them come to life with real-world examples. That the book is available as an affordable paperback and a free online PDF will hopefully contribute to the essential ideas in this book proliferating throughout our movements. The pedagogical elements of the book aren’t recipes or dictates, but rather resources for us to use in all of our revolutionary educational endeavors.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. In 2005, a group of scholars and activists in Northern Mexico established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica to develop a knowledge of McLaren's work throughout Mexico and to promote projects in critical pedagogy and popular education. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

Notes

[1] Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[2] Peter McLaren, Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 373.

[3] Derek R. Ford, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy (Madison: Iskra Books, 2022).

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid., 94.

[6] Derek R. Ford, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

[7] Ford, Encountering Education, 14.

[8] John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

[9] Ford, Encountering Education, 43.

[10] Ibid., 44.

[11] Ibid., 76.

[12] Ibid., 85.

[13] Ibid., 86. See also Curry S. Malott, “Capitalism, Crisis, and Educational Struggle in the Postdigital,” Postdigital Science and Education 1, no. 2 (2019): 371-390.

[14] Ibid., 93.

[15] Ibid., 99-100.

[16] Ibid., 102.

[17] Ibid., 103.

[18] Ibid., 122.

'No Royal Road' to Revolutionary Education

By Patricia Gorky

Liberation School's new book Revolutionary Education is edited by Nino Brown.

Capital was a formidable book from the moment it was published in 1867. In an attempt to make the content more accessible, Capital's first French publisher published the book in multiple pieces.

Karl Marx wrote to the publisher and commended him for the new teaching method used to present Capital. "I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of Das Kapital as a serial," he wrote. "In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else."

The first three chapters, however, had a unique structure that were harder to understand split apart. Despite this tradeoff, Marx approved of the approach since the most important metric for him was whether people would understand his analysis of capitalism.

So as in 1872, so today: Socialism must be understood to be accepted. Socialism is a system where the working class wields control over the productive forces of society, and the economy is planned in a scientific manner according to the needs of the people and planet. Socialism unleashes the potential of the highest creativity and flowering of the working class.

Although the demonization in recent years has faded, socialism remains a badly-misunderstood topic. Teaching, therefore, is a critical skill that socialist organizers can and must hone and master.  Different situations calls for different teaching methods, or pedagogies. How do we know which method to use? How do we improve our own efficacy in presenting information? 

Liberation School's fresh book, Revolutionary Education: Teaching and practice for socialist organizers, explores these questions from the viewpoints of history, theory, and practice. Edited by Nino Brown, the book compiles essays from educators, organizers, and journalists on revolutionary education and socialist educational methods.

Brown explains in his essay on building organizations and developing cadre that organizers have much to learn from the suffering, sacrifices and victories of our comrades in struggle all over the world. "We are all linked by our common oppression under imperialism," he writes. The job of a revolutionary is to help make the revolution. To do that, socialists need to make more revolutionaries.

How do socialists win people over? Socialists are actually in the most favorable moment for socialists in the U.S. in decades. Organizer Walter Smolarek explains that organizers have the opportunity to make connections with working people and build a base of support through different tactics, including provisioning direct services.

Provisioning direct services, commonly referred to as "mutual aid", can be a way to make inroads with communities. Even an inherently nonrevolutionary activity can be used as an opening to bring people into the political struggle for socialism, but the tactic itself cannot be confused with the strategy. When a current approach does not work, organizers must recalculate and find new tactics to reach people.

The goal of Revolutionary Education, after all, is the emancipation of humankind.

Guinea-Bissau's struggle for independence led by the liberator, theorist, and educator Amilcar Cabral is one such example.

Curry Mallot traces the history of how the small west African country became a world leader in decolonial education, in large part due to the leadership of revolutionary Amílcar Cabral. For more than 400 years Guinea-Bissau was a colony of the vicious Portuguese empire, Mallot writes, whose colonial mode of education was "designed to foster a sense of inferiority in the youth." Colonial educators set predetermined outcomes sought to dominate learners by treating them as if they were passive objects.

Militant historian Sónia Vaz Borges, the child of Cape Verdean immigrants, grew up in Portugal. Vaz Borges experienced firsthand the colonial education taught to the African diaspora in the colonial center. In an interview with Breaking the Chains, she recounts how the African community "does not see themselves reflected in official versions of Portuguese history." Political education is not abstract.

Socialists must be able to explain the class character of all events. Organizers know socialist revolution is the only path to survival, yet how do we convince others of its necessity? Revolutionary teaching has to give the person all of the keys needed to be able to interpret events. "Every event has an origin and a process of development," explains Frank González, director of Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency in a 2006 interview with Gloria La Riva.

Television overwhelms us with images, González notes, but the same media denies space to interpret events. The development of social media has only exacerbated these effects. In the end, bourgeois media leaves people with nothing but confusion.

In a separate essay, Mallott explores Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky's ground-breaking work that shows how people's development corresponds to their past and present experiences. Thought emerges from engagement with the concrete world. "While all of us have been shaped by this racist, sexist, capitalist society," Mallott writes, "we never lose the ability to grow, change and think differently."

Intelligence is an attribute but also a social construct. How do you tell children facing hunger, homelessness, and police brutality to be more "gritty", when in fact they already put in tremendous effort to survive? Organizer Jane Cutter in her essay on comradeship emphasizes that all progressive people must be willing to learn from experience and work in collaboration. 

Revolutionary Education closes with two practical appendices for day-to-day organizing. "Formulating study and discussion questions" explains how to break out of a linear mode of education. The sample questions are in and of themselves instructive for the tactics they represent in addition to the thought that they provoke. Learning facts and timelines goes hand-in-hand with discussion with others, reflection on ideas and combining those with our own experiences.

Comprehension questions, for example, help distill dense texts down to their key points. Questions that focus on the identification of significance help people understand why the author themselves highlighted portions as key. For revolutionaries, perhaps the most important types of questions are those that apply and extend our knowledge of the world. How can revolutionary pedagogy sharpen our ability to educate and reach people?

The second appendix covers teaching tactics that can be applied in study groups or classrooms. Some material is best presented in a lecture form, while other situations call for more interactive engagement through having participants draw out concept maps.

How do we best reach people? How do we make sure that our message is getting across? Each situation calls for its own tactics. Revolutionaries must be flexible and adaptable according to the needs of the moment. Learning is an endeavor that requires effort on the part of both participant and teacher.

Marx closes his 1872 letter with an encouragement to work through such difficulties. "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

Those in the struggle for socialism will find in Revolutionary Education a worthy climbing tool indeed.

Patricia Gorky co-hosted the podcast Reading Capital with Comrades.

American Fascism: The Men, the Money, and the Myth

By J. Richard Marra

On May Day 2016, well before the election of Donald J. Trump, the Boston Globe published, "'Never forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting."[1] In it, Jeff Jacoby worries about its implications for a world experiencing a resurgence of violent right wing political extremism. For American Marxists, the timing may seem ironic. On the day of global celebration for the working class, they are reminded of both the horrors of fascism and their duty to unceasingly oppose it.

Marxist and other commentators appreciate the toxicity of fascism. However, their explanations regarding its features, organization, and operations differ. Each has enriched our understanding, while also introducing a disconcerting complexity and diversity. Accordingly, anti-fascists should aim at simplicity when considering historical fascism and Trump's 'neofascism."

The libertarian commentator George Will understands:[2]

So many excitable Americans are hurling accusations of fascism, there might be more definitions of "fascism" than there are actual fascists. Fascism, one of the 20th century’s fighting faiths, has only faint echoes in 21st-century America’s political regression.

Furthermore, there are problems regarding recognizing fascism and justifying claims about specific political regimes. James P. Cannon recognized this in 1954 with reference to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy: [3]

Those who would judge specific American forms of fascism too formalistically by the European pattern, arbitrarily limit capitalist aggression against the workers’ movement in two forms:

They see the democratic form by which the workers are suppressed through strictly legal measures in accordance with the law and the Constitution—such as the Taft-Hartley Law, formal indictments and prosecutions for specific violations of existing statutes, etc....

On the other side they see the illegal, unofficial forms of violence practiced by “stormtroopers” and similar shirted hooligans outside the forms of law, as in Italy and Germany. This is characterised as fascist.

This kind of illegal violence under the outward forms of law has a distinctive American flavour; and it is especially favoured by a section of the ruling class which has very little respect for its own laws....This is, in fact, an important element of the specific form which American fascism will take....

Depending on one's perspective, contemporary fascism might appear nowhere, or anywhere. It is nowhere in the sense that Hitler and Mussolini are dead; and America's immigrant detention camps aren't as horrific as Auschwitz. Yet, it can emerge anywhere because capitalism is everywhere, and capitalism is its necessary and structural accomplice.[4] Given the right theorizing, many current capitalist regimes can exhibit fascist characteristics. For Will, fascism can occur anywhere because truculence toward liberal institutions and manners is common in social climates of political polarization and arrogance.

Three methodological problems contribute to the confusion. Consider, first, Lawrence Britt's[5] list of the identifying characteristics of fascism. Its items accurately capture salient features and establish a domain of likely candidate governments. Unfortunately, they don't supply an explanation regarding how any of these, or all of these, characteristics structurally realize the fascist form of governance. Lacking context, lists of attributes can become scattered and unwieldy, and fail to account for time-sensitive social and political contingencies, as Cannon anticipates. In addition, methodologies, and the theories supporting them, evolve over time. Although their theoretical "hard core" remains resistant, subordinate features may change. This may lead to reevaluations of the fascist-ness of political regimes. Finally, although Marxism, unlike capitalism, is fundamentally opposed to fascism, both are nevertheless liable to analytical bias. Will's commitment to capitalism prevents him from even mentioning it. He strips contemporary fascism of its theoretical and historical significance, dismissing it as merely a problem regarding hostile personalities.

To avoid these problems, this account will keep largely to operational matters, focusing on structures and functions. Parsimony is exercised in establishing necessary and sufficient characteristics, and explaining such features will help us introduce context. To do so, it proposes three fundamental structural components: Governance, economy, and ideology. Following Brecht and Lund, it suggests that capitalism plays a central role in the emergence and operations of fascism. However, unlike some Marxists, this analysis stops short of characterizing fascism as an extreme form of capitalism. Accumulation remains the prime purpose of the capitalist modes of production employed within fascism. Nevertheless, capitalists must routinely acquiesce to state requirements, which conveniently include protecting and advancing profitability. Both capitalists and fascists are keenly aware that workers, unions, and communists can negatively affect accumulation and the capitalist state. This mutual need is addressed by managing unprofitable class conflict through the establishment of state-run "corporations."

The Three Characteristics of Historical Fascism

When taken together, the following three necessary characteristics, involving both structural and ideological (especially nationalistic and religious) components, sufficiently define fascism.

1. Governance: Unitary and authoritarian national state controlled by a despotic "Leader."

2. Economy: State control of the economy through a system of sector-based corporations comprised of capitalist enterprises and labor.

3. Ideology: Traditionalist mythology justifying an exclusive moral exceptionalism in governmental affairs imported from 20th-century Futurism.

The key to recognizing fascism lies in appreciating how these characteristics synergize into a unique system of governance. With this in mind, let us now examine each more deeply.

Governance: The Leader Principle

The fascist state functions according to the "Leader Principle."[6] The "Leader" (aka Der Fuhrer, Il Duce) is the single sovereign authority over the state and its people. He/she stands atop a hierarchy of sub-leaders that govern the state's political and bureaucratic organizations. All sub-leaders pledge total obedience to all superiors, but always and primarily to the Leader. The fascist leader is not merely a person, but the ultimate manifestation of a state dynamically driven by its moral "will." In this way, the leader and the state are structurally and functionally identified. Mussolini writes, "the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State...." For Mussolini and Hitler, those consciousnesses, wills, personalities, and morality are theirs.

Economy: The "Third Way"

The leader dictates the structure and operations of the second necessary feature of fascism, an economic system called the "The Third Way." To understand the Third Way, let's compare how capitalists, communists, and fascists manage the class struggle that Mussolini denies.

Capitalists are attentive to class struggle, especially when it interferes with profits. They know that profit comes from their private ownership of the means of production and exploitation of labor. They understand that class struggle between owners and workers is a fact of capitalist social life. Capitalists understand that every rise in workers’ standards of living — living wages, pensions, healthful working conditions — are not only costly, but are costs that directly subtract from their profits. Thus, since workers will naturally demand such benefits, capitalists work continuously to weaken the political power of workers and unions.

For communists, class struggle is a symptom of capitalist social relations; yet they recognize that it is also a tool for working-class liberation. Their aim is to eliminate private control of the forces of production, while relocating ownership across the entire society. "Come the revolution," society will become classless. With the end of class struggle, a democratic economy is established that serves collective economic planning, and the physical and psychological well-being of workers.

Fascists place the needs of the state over all other national constituencies, including both capitalists and workers. This requires minimizing conflict between these two classes. To do this, fascists merge capitalist enterprises and unions into corporations, pairing them according to distinct economic sectors. Each corporation represents a sector of the economy wherein capitalists and labor are collectively bureaucratized, with all power vested in a state governed by an authoritarian leader.

The fascist leader principle is a relatively simple structural and operational conception, which any authoritarian state, fascist or otherwise, can implement. However, fascism couches the principle within a worldview that rejects the ideological foundations of both impotent liberal democracy and Marx's materialist sociology. [7]

...the liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results...the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production...if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

To summarize, the ultimate aim of capitalism is to end class struggle by subjugating the working class. The ultimate aim of communism is to end class struggle by eliminating the capitalist class. The ultimate aim of fascism is to corporatize the capitalist class and eliminate a collectivized working class through the formation of an absolutely supreme leader and state.

Ideology: The Nasty Superman

Fascism has three ideological pillars. The first concerns mythology. Mussolini's fascism is nothing without a myth:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.[8]

The existential conception of fascism lies in an identification of a heroic people with its leader and national mythology. Consider the two fascist "philosophers" Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Evola. Rosenberg served as the Nazi Party's Commissar for the Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education between1933 to 1945. Among his "scholarly" accomplishments is "The Myth of the Twentieth Century,"[9] a uniquely turgid and mind-numbing justification of Nazi anti-Semitism and Aryanism. Julius Evola, one of the founders of 20th-century traditionalism, enjoyed a continuing relationship with Hitler, high-ranking Nazis, and Mussolini. He took Rosenberg's work seriously enough to critique it his "The Racist Conception of History."[10] With Mussolini, myth and tradition join: "Tradition certainly is one of the greatest spiritual forces of a people, inasmuch as it is a successive and constant creation of their soul."[11]

The second foundation of fascism involves not bigotry but nastiness, its truculence finding its roots early 20th-century futurism. Evola enjoyed a brief artistic and philosophical relationship with Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Movement. This connection is important because it exposes the second, and little remembered, ideological foundation of fascism.

Futurism speaks: [12]

...we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.

We wish to destroy the museum, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian malignancy.

We wish to glorify War - the only health giver of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman.

This political grandiloquence finds translation in five of Britt's characteristics: distain for human rights, scapegoating, hostility toward intellectuals and artists, militarism, and sexism. These attitudes and behaviors are not Trump's alone. These come from Marinetti's Futurist Aristocracy (1923), edited by the Italian Futurist Nanni Leone Castelli. Marinetti influenced Mussolini, a person many worldwide view as the epitome of the aggressive and spontaneous futurist hero.

Mussolini the futurist:[13]

The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest....

[Fascism]... repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism....war [sic] alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies....[14]

For fascists, traditionalism and futurism are tools for cultural atonement, redemption, and political power. The cultural historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke[15] appreciates Evola's and Trump's ideological poison. Fascism:

 ...speaks directly to those who reject absolutely the leveling world of democracy, capitalism, multi-racialism and technology...[Traditionalists] acute sense of cultural chaos can find powerful relief in his ideal of total renewal.

It is not surprising that Steve Bannon, an Evola enthusiast and Trump's past political advisor, boasts, "I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."[16] Bannon's Lenin isn't a Marxist, but he is a futurist.

Fascism's third necessary ideological feature is a moral "exclusive exceptionalism" in public policy and international relations, particularly justified by its traditionalist mythology. The fascist state claims the exclusive moral right to do what it wishes: no individual, group, or other nation can assert the same right.[17] Antonio Salazar, a former Portuguese prime minister and authoritarian corporatist, explains: [18]

The fascist dictatorship tends towards a pagan Caesarism, towards a state that knows no limits of a legal or moral order, which marches towards its goal without meeting complications or obstacles.

And for Adolph Hitler: [19]

It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad....

The Three Characteristics of American Fascism

Governance: The Fascist Presidency

Since the Civil War, America has enjoyed reasonably stable governance. It's democratic republic, separation of powers, and presidential term limits constrain the rise of tyranny. Capitalism is thoroughly imbedded in its politics, ideology, culture, and religion. It's culture celebrates freedom, democracy, multiculturalism, personal individualism, and egalitarianism; suitably framed in a comforting mythology. It's religious doctrines profess kindness, compassion, and equality among persons.

Taken together, these blessings provide Americans with a deep sense of self-identity and exceptionalism. They also offer few prospects for the rise of a hell bent authoritarian Fuhrer. Yet, for opportunists like Donald Trump, the 2016 election provided just the right circumstances for a heroic self-actualization.

Trump's fascist handler Steve Bannon has a plan. It begins by peddling a well-known TV reality superstar and billionaire entrepreneur as a national hero for the 21st century. He is marketed as a blessed, unconventional, and unrelenting savior. His operatives then inject him into a rapaciously neoliberal capitalist party. That party seizes the opportunity to both deflect growing criticism from disgruntled workers still suffering from the 2008 capitalist crisis and a ballooning wealth gap, while simultaneously safeguarding capitalist profits. Republican spin masters publicly celebrate him in their corporate media, offering him a shot at the Presidency.

Once this leader controls the executive branch, and the Republican Party takes control of the Senate and the Supreme Court, an American fascism will command absolute political authority. It can control national production and labor policy, thus removing class struggle from the political equation. This tactic takes advantage of an increasing centralization of power in the executive branch.[20] This situation is significantly different from the weak power structure at the top of the unstable Weimar Republic in 1930s Germany. Trump will exercise his authority, claiming the exclusive right to do what he wishes, and remain unaccountable. Since this impulsive and aggressive fascist leader is the incarnation of the state, all governmental policy and functions obediently follow suit. Anything or anyone getting in the way will be eliminated.

Trump is a worthy inheritor of Mussolini's political persona. His distain for human rights, scapegoating, sexism, hostility toward intellectuals, and militarism is indisputable. His immigration policy, islamophobia and racism, glorification of sexual molestation, anti-science rhetoric, and massive defense spending all herald a potential American Fuhrer.

Economy and Ideology: Steve Bannon’s 'Third-Way'[21]

Steve Bannon's fascism maximizes the operational efficiency of its governance, and coincidently the profitability of capitalism, through their fusion with the ideology of White-supremacist Christianity. The leader commands a Third Way that subjugates capitalist enterprises and labor under his control through corporations, in order to ameliorate class conflict. Capitalists in this new theo-economic state[22] will enjoy growing profits as before, as workers endure neoliberal social and labor policy that reduces their political presence. Workers will live insecure existences living on subsistence wages, fearing illness, and defaulting on their college loans. They will work more hours, save little, and receive fewer benefits.

In contrast to historical fascism, the American form benefits from an enduring capitalist program to weaken labor. Trump is elected on a day when worker participation in unions is historically low.[23] The Taft-Hartley Act, and the damage done through its original anti-communist provision, continues to block mass revolutionary efforts by workers. There are few mass demonstrations and street battles like those in Germany and Italy during the early decades of the 20th century.[24] More recently, the Supreme Court Citizen's United and "right to work" rulings impair union fund raising and organizing. Trump's truculence toward both organized labor and Wall Street is consistent with a politic that abhors class struggle.

All of this comes with Bannon's traditionalism and Judeo-Christian ethos: [25]

...look at the leaders of capitalism at that time [late 19th- through the 20th-centuries], when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the [their] faith,...the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored....I don’t believe that our forefathers had that same belief.

...[S]hould we put a cap on wealth creation and distribution? It’s something that should be at the heart of every Christian that is a capitalist — “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us, that divine providence has given us to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?"

Bannon imagines America as a restored Judeo-Christian and capitalist nation with Trump as its leader. He revives and consecrates Americans as a new saintly and capitalist volk. The leader leads, and capitalists and workers reap the benefits. Value added: Everyone achieves salvation and immortality, as they are actualized in the form of the fascist state. For Bannon, "What Trump represents is a restoration — a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism.[26] This restoration carries the Cross, is wrapped in the American flag, and struts to the tune of a uniquely garish form of exclusive exceptionalism. MAGA emerges as a pathologically narcissistic demon in the form of Trump's exclusive exceptionalism:

They say I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s like incredible.[27]

Conclusion

George Will places the intersection of futurism and fascism within the broader context of European Enlightenment:[28]

Fascism fancied itself as modernity armed — science translated into machines, especially airplanes, and pure energy restlessly seeking things to smash. Actually, it was a recoil against Enlightenment individualism: the idea that good societies allow reasoning, rights-bearing people to define for themselves the worthy life.

George Will correctly distinguishes "Trumpism" as a populist fad from communism as a political doctrine:[29]

Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.

Trumpism...is a mood masquerading as a doctrine, an entertainment genre based on contempt for its bellowing audiences. Fascism was and is more interesting.

Fascism is interesting precisely because it offers a compelling doctrine, a powerful system of governance, and is doggedly persistent over time and space. But, it's also rare. Unfortunately, small samples resist generalization. Cultural, geographic, and historical variables make comparisons difficult. While Marxists understand that the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism can lead to fascism, they don't often synchronize with other potent proto-fascist interventions. Fascism requires a unique convergence of causes and conditions. Economically, a major crisis of capitalism, significant economic distress among workers, a burgeoning wealth gap, and strong anti-union sentiments and policies prevails. There is a social climate of fear and hostility regarding vivid internal and external threats; citizens distrust distant and detached governance. They are mesmerized by a nativist and nationalist mythology energized by mythic traditions and beliefs. The spark that ignites the inferno of fascism comes as a uniquely clever and hell-bent futurist demagogue.

It is astonishing that an otherwise intelligent species would establish such profligate stupidity, wastefulness, and destructiveness as a system of governance. But it is here and continues to threaten humanity. History begs that we never forget what fascism represents, what it does, and what it takes to remove it from our presence.

Notes

[1] Jeff Jacoby, "'Never Forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting," Boston Globe, May 1, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/30/never-forget-world-said-holocaust-but-world-forgetting/59cUqLNFxylkW7BDuRPgNK/story.html (accessed June 5, 2021).

[2] George Will, "The difference between Trumpism and fascism," The Washington Post, July 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-difference-between-trumpism-and-fascism/2020/07/09/377ae76e-c208-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html (accessed June 8, 2021).

[3] James P. Cannon, "Fascism and the Workers' Movement," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication March - April, 1954, The Militant, https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1954/mar/15.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[4] See Bertholt Brecht, "Fascism is the True Face of Capitalism," Off Guardian, Original publication 1935, https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/01/fascism-is-the-true-face-of-capitalism/. (accessed June 23, 2021). Ernest Lund, "Fascism Is a Product of Capitalism," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication Labor Action September 27, 1943. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/erber/1943/09/fascism.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[5] Lawrence Britt, "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism," Free Inquiry Magazine, 2003, https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.pdf (accessed June 5, 2021). See also umair, "Are Americans (Really) So Dumb They Don't Know Fascism When They See It?," Eudiamonia, April 6, 2019. https://eand.co/are-americans-really-so-dumb-they-dont-know-fascism-when-they-see-it-34cae64efa72 (accessed May 29, 2021).

[6]  "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression," A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, Florida Center for Instructional Technology, 2005, http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/document/DOCNAC3.htm.

[7] Benito Mussolini, "What is Fascism?," Marxist Internet Archive, Reference Archive, Original publication 1932, Italian Encyclopedia, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mussolini/works/fascism.htm. (accessed September 4, 2021).

[8] Franklin Le Van Baumer, ed., Main Currents of Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 748.

[9] Alfred Rosenberg, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century," Internet Archive, Original publication 1930,  https://archive.org/details/the-myth-of-the-20th-century-alfred-rosenberg/mode/2up (accessed September 4, 2021).

[10] Andrew Joyce, "Review: Julius Evola's 'Myth of the Blood: The Genesis of Racialism,'" Occidental Observer, September 18, 2018, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/09/18/review-the-myth-of-the-blood-the-genesis-of-racialism/ (accessed June 9, 2021).

[11] Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)," World Future Fund, http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm (accessed September 10, 2021).

[12] N. L. Castelli, ed., Futurist Aristocracy (Rome: Prampolini, 1923).

[13] Le Van Baumer, op. cit.

[14] Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)."

[15] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

[16] Seth Millstein, "13 Quotes From Steve Bannon That Show The Toxic Worldview He Took To The White House," Bustle, August 18, 2017,

https://www.bustle.com/p/13-steve-bannon-quotes-that-paint-a-diabolical-worldview-he-took-to-the-white-house-77612  (accessed May 24. 2021).

[17] Charles L. Stevenson, "Value-Judgments: Their Implicit Generality," in Ethical Theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century, ed. Norman E. Bowie (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 13 - 37.

[18] "Corporatism," Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, August 30, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism.

[19] Louis Paul Lochner, What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943), 11–12.

[20] "The Concept of the Imperial Presidency," UKEssays, May 16, 2017,  https://www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/the-concept-of-the-imperial-presidency-politics-essay.php (accessed September 6, 2021).

[21] Here, I allude to the fascist self-branding of being fundamentally opposed to both capitalism and socialism, offering a third way of social organization. See Roger Eatwell, "The Oxford Dictionary of Political Ideologies," Oxford Handbooks Online, edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears, December 2013,

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199585977-e-009 (accessed September 6, 2021).

[22] Jennifer A. Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

[23] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016 Union Membership In The United States, https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in-the-united-states/pdf/union-membership-in-the-united-states.pdf. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[24] Mack Harden, "What is Taft-Hartley and Why Is It Bad?," Emergency Workplace Organizing, April 5, 2021, https://workerorganizing.org/what-is-taft-hartley-and-why-is-it-bad-1291/. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[25] J. Lester Feder, "This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World," November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world (accessed June 8, 2021).

[26] James Hohmann, "The Daily 202: Bannon will be the id, Priebus the super-ego in Trump’s White House," The Washington Post, November 14, 2016,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/11/14/daily-202-bannon-will-be-the-id-priebus-the-super-ego-in-trump-s-white-house/58292237e9b69b6085905df2/ (accessed May 31, 2021).

[27] Katie Reilly, "Donald Trump Says He 'Could Shoot Somebody' and Not Lose Voters," Time, January 23, 2016,

https://time.com/4191598/donald-trump-says-he-could-shoot-somebody-and-not-lose-voters/ (accessed May 21, 2021).

[28] Will, op. cit.

[29] Ibid.

Spectacular Death and the Histrionics of Loss

By Michael Templeton

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

For one summer, I worked at a local cemetery mowing grass. Spring Grove Cemetery encompasses over 700 acres of land. It was chartered in 1845 and remains open to this day. The cemetery is a major destination for walking, biking, sight-seeing, and simply relaxing in the natural surroundings. One of the things I came to notice as an employee was the stark contrast between the older parts of the cemetery and the newer plots. The oldest stones and grave markers contain little information. Some stones do not even have names on them. They simply say “Father” or “Infant,” etc. Older stones that do have writing on them generally state the date of birth, the date of death, and a few lines from the Bible. There are symbols on some of the stones which denote certain professions—doctors, clergy, military men—carry an iconography specific to those vocations and most of this iconography is quite ancient. By contrast, the newer stones are covered with writing. Lines from popular songs, poetry, and sentiments from the bereaved clutter these stones. The newest stones may have etched images from photographs so that an image of the deceased is engraved onto the stone. In the newer parts of the cemetery, one can find grave markers shaped like cartoon characters. Some of the stones have the appearance of modernist sculpture so as to set it apart from older gravestones. The change from stones and graves which leave nothing but a bare stone to graves which are covered with information is not attributable to mere fashion or advances in technology. Rather, this change has everything to do with the ways people understand death itself.

Spring Grove Cemetery itself came into existence due to increasing concern over cholera outbreaks and the unsanitary and unsightly presence of old church cemeteries which left dead bodies to decay into sources of drinking water and were an affront to middle-class ideas of how neighborhoods should appear. The dual pressures of public health and changing attitudes toward the emplacement of the dead coincided throughout the Western world with the emergence of the modern cemetery and Spring Grove Cemetery is emblematic of those pressures. It is now an enormous example of the drive to create a space for the dead which was easily accessible to the city center but outside of the city proper, and it is an example of such a space that serves the additional purpose of being a destination for recreation. It is adjacent to the city but not in it. It is a space reserved for the interment of the dead, but it is a marvel of landscape design and architecture. Lastly, it contains something of an archaeological record of a shift in the way individuals understand death itself.

The cemetery is an example of that type of space defined by Foucault as a heterotopia. It is both real and unreal. It occupies a border region in terms of the actual space which is occupied by real individuals.

Heterotopias are liminal places—the way a mirror offers a real place which is both present and absent:

"The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there." [1]

The cemetery offers a similar social function. It is the mirror image of the city in that it is completely deliberate in its spatial design and it is occupied. Yet, the cemetery is designed not to facilitate the movement of bodies but to inter bodies—and it is occupied with the dead. It is the inverse version of the city itself. Like the mirror, the cemetery is a real place, but it operates in a manner that is unreal since it does not function as a place for individuals to exist, only to desist. So, the modern cemetery emerged as a site in which societies could place the dead in a real place that functioned as a kind of unreality with regard to everyday life. There is the place of the dead which one could visit and even enjoy, but the place of the dead could be put out of mind when it came to living life.

Spring Grove was born of this social movement. Founded in 1845, it coincides with the historical period described by Foucault and it bears the cultural traces which Foucault describes as signs of the modern cemetery. These are sacred spaces, but they emerged during a time that was distinctly secular. The modern “cult of the dead” emerges during a time of a paradox:

"This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become ‘atheistic,’ as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead." [2]

An “atheistic,” or secular, society is also the society that creates an entire city devoted to the preservation of the dead. It is under these conditions—conditions in which a firm belief in the life of the soul is fading and therefore must be performed in an ever more elaborate fashion—that the place in which commemoration of the dead becomes a visible and dramatic presence. In previous times, when the conditions of possibility created the conditions in which individuals firmly believed that God guaranteed the care of the soul, people did not need to commemorate bodies. As faith in the soul decreased, care of the body increased. Again, Foucault:

"Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body’s remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities." [3]

We create a city of the dead only when we are no longer certain that God has done this for us. This is not to say that the advent of the cemetery coincided with the complete abandonment of faith in the afterlife. Rather, the rise of the modern cemetery marks a time in which faith in the afterlife is no longer a fundamental fact for the living and must therefore be demarcated in the form of a space that is both sacred and secular so that the living may continue to have access to some kind of symbolic place and sign which stands in for both loss and faith in the afterlife. The modern cemetery is a heterotopia in the sense that it is an “other space” and it is a place in which a paradoxical understanding of death could find some measure of reconciliation.

We see evidence of complete faith in the afterlife in the forms of gravestones which carry little to no information. The facts of the life of the deceased are of no importance because the deceased is no longer in the world and has passed on to another world. To consign the dead to a nearly anonymous place in the world requires absolute faith that the soul of the dead has literally passed on to another world. A parent who has lost a child, for example, does not require a stone with the child’s name engraved upon it in order to remember that child. The stone simply does not perform that function. It marks the site of a burial and nothing more. As Foucault states, it is the move toward a more “atheistic” society which demands monuments to testify to the life of the deceased. What is more, the monuments and the small personal boxes for bodies speak more to the living than to the dead. We do not erect monuments for the dead for the simple fact that they are dead. We erect monuments for ourselves. They are markers to prove to ourselves that the deceased were in fact important to us, and the monuments are to show others that we care. The heterotopia of the cemetery has much more in common with the mirror than the dialectic of the real and the unreal.

As we move into the 20th century, the gravestones become more loquacious. Modern and contemporary stones are engraved with lines of biblical scripture. They bear poetry and song lyrics. The most recent stones bear engraved images from photographs. These are extremely realistic images which look like black and white photographs which have been directly printed onto the stone. In another cemetery in Southern Indiana, the stones are almost all this type. People leave photographs, toys, trinkets of all kinds, along with religious items such as rosary beads and crosses. As we move into contemporary times and the function of religion and faith fades from playing any role in everyday life, the demonstrations of grief and loss, the sheer number of words used to mark loss, and the profusion of images just explodes all over the cemetery. The more removed faith in the afterlife becomes, the more pronounced the declarations of faith in the afterlife.

More words are inscribed to mark the faith of those who still live. More realistic images are rendered to commemorate the lost loved ones. This would indicate more than a loss of faith. It indicates a turn away from loss itself and a nearly obsessive focus on the ego of the bereaved.

The contemporary grave marker is a mirror of the ego on which the bereaved can gaze upon themselves. The heterotopic structure remains, but it has returned on the level of the ego.

A fundamental lack of real belief finds an expression in the iconography and cluttered language of the contemporary headstone. What we see in these histrionic displays is a profound inability to confront the reality of death. One forestalls the reality of death by filling in the loss with a profusion (and confusion) of images, words, and trinkets thus shifting the focus away from loss itself and onto the individual who experiences the loss.

Rather than allow the progression of psychological mechanisms in which an individual experiences loss, suffers the process of mourning, and finds resolution in the acceptance of the loss, we see the cultural expression of a complete fixation on loss itself. This is Freudian melancholia on the scale of public theater, and it manifests itself in forms which resemble graffiti. Freudian mourning and melancholia are distinguished by the thorough process of mourning in which the ego is directed outside of itself and melancholia in which the ego contemplates itself:

"In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself." [4]

This would be sufficient except that the contemporary ego is already poor and empty since it has been evacuated of substance by finding a place of meaning exclusively in the exterior drama of the spectacle. This is an inversion of Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty” in that these demonstrations do not reflect what Artaud envisioned as an expression of “both the upper and lower strata of the mind.” These are theatrical advertisements for loss that express only the most superficial marks of grief. [5] Contemporary life projects the ego into the external world and can only find a ground of being and meaning to the extent that this exterior ego function is reified in the system of exchange which only knows consumer existence.

Consumer existence requires the system of exchange in order for anything to be real. The form of melancholia expressed through the verbose and graffiti strewn headstones we find in the newest parts of the cemetery indicate an ego which cannot comprehend death at all except as an affirmation of itself.

Far from paying homage to the deceased and far from a spiritual declaration of faith in the afterlife, the contemporary headstone is a testament to the flimsy ego of the same individuals whose lives are devoid of any reality because at the level of individual experience. There is no reality which exists outside the realm of merchandise and display. The profusion of words and images is designed to compensate for an ego that has been entirely evacuated of substance.

What we witness in the contemporary graveyard is not melancholia proper since the ego fixation on itself is in fact an ego fixation on a prescribed mode of performance loss. There is no confrontation or meaningful experience of loss since it is denied in the form of a spectacular show of loss.

"The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of experience, the most eloquent symptom of which is certainly the formation of that category of “experience”, in the limited sense that one has “experiences” (sexual, athletic, professional, artistic, sentimental, ludic, etc.). In the Bloom [the indeterminate form of contemporary life], everything results from this loss, or is synonymous with it. Within the Spectacle, as with the metropolis, men never experience concrete events, only conventions, rules, an entirely symbolic second nature, entirely constructed." [6]

The loss of experience means the loss of the ability to truly experience death. People experience the forms of loss, grief, and mourning only to the extent that there are prescribed modes of experience which come from elsewhere. That is to say “forms” of loss, grief, and mourning because the actual experience is deferred in favor of the performance of these modes of experience. The loss of experience proper negates the experience of loss.

Death, of course, remains a reality, but in its social forms, the reality of death cannot exist except insofar as it can become a commodified abstraction. Death is the abstract nothing forestalled by the business of creating a form of life. Individuals render the loss of their own loved ones with the histrionic displays engraved onto headstones. They otherwise deny death by buying into economic abstractions which further render death an abstraction. There is a business of death prior to death: “Promoters of life insurance merely intimate that it is reprehensible without first arranging for the system’s adjustment to the economic loss one’s death will incur.” [7] Death can only be grasped from within the abstractions prescribed by the spectacle, and rendered in equally abstract images that have more in common with advertising than individual loss and grief.

Under present cultural conditions, this theological ground no longer holds, and we see this clearly in maudlin displays of grief which are in fact desperate displays of melancholia. The nature of contemporary consciousness is such that we find no resolution in the face of death therefore we simply deny it. We hide from death because it is invisible and unknowable, yet we perform grief with ever greater histrionic displays so as to affirm our egos in the face of the one thing we know expunges the ego.

Returning to the most basic features of the spectacle, we can find the same mystifications at work that we saw in spectacular pseudo-belief:

"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." [8]

Our relationship to each other and to the world around us is mediated by images to the extent that what is known is no longer things in the world but our relationship to images of things in the world. Our understanding of death is now captured in the spectacle as much as any other aspect of life. Death is negated by the image of death and we find a sense of solace in loss through our relationship to these images of death, mourning, and loss.

There is no death, mourning, and loss; there is only the performance and image of death, mourning, and loss. One expresses themselves through engraved images of the lost loved one, not the lost loved one. The contemporary grieving person finds some measure of peace in contemplating the image of the person they lost, and this constitutes a fundamental denial of loss. The only thing that matters is that the grieving person remains alive and anyone who passes the grave of the deceased knows that someone lost someone else. In this way “it is thus the most earthbound aspects of life that have become the most impenetrable and rarefied.” [9]

It is not death that is impenetrable and rarefied, it is the consumer of signs of loss and death.

The spectacle denies the validity of life as it is lived in everyday experience. Nothing so common as loss can be commodified unless images and tangible commodifiable expressions of loss can be made to supersede the lived experience of real loss.

Thus, it is that “the absolute denial of life, in the shape of a fallacious paradise, is no longer projected into the heavens, but finds its place instead within material life itself.” [10] We find a sense of the afterlife only in images that dramatize the beyond because there can be no way of conceptualizing anything that is not material and commodified. Gravestones are no longer markers of death and loss. They are markers of the ongoing participation of one who has lost, but one whose sole understanding of loss is as a histrionic expression of their own ego within the heaven of spectacular images.

Spectacular life cannot include death. There is simply no place for something so utterly final and real. As we saw above, we never experience concrete events; we only experience the conventions and rules of events. The experience of events has been replaced with the formal specifications of events. We do not experience a rock concert, we experience the prescribed modes of behavior which a rock concert demands. There are formal aspects to concert experiences which are dictated ahead of time by representations of musical events. In the same way, contemporary life excludes the possibility of experiencing death.

One does not live the experience of the death of a loved one. One experiences the formal attributes of loss.

The television news will never show you a person bereft of any and all expression as they are overcome with loss and grief. What we see through the screens are rehearsed performances, histrionic displays. People repeat the same clichés: “they were too young,” “they had their whole life ahead of them,” “our thoughts and prayers are with the family,” etc. In the absence of the possibility of belief, as we saw above, there can be no understanding of anything that resists representation. There is no real death, only images that mediate a collective inability to recognize the reality of death.

The function of religion with respect to death was, in essence, a Hegelian sublation. Death negates life. Religion serves as a mediating force which negates the negation. The simultaneous negation and transformation of the fact of death constitutes a resolution. The dead are negated and elevated to another plane of existence. In effect, the religious mediation of death served the function of Freudian mourning. The finality of death is resolved in the sublation of this finality into a spiritual faith in something that transcends death. This step in the psycho-social confrontation with death depended on a qualitative change in one’s existence. The finality of death serves as the negation of our temporal existence. This negation is itself negated as the soul of the deceased is lifted into another plane of existence. In this, the full dialectic is resolved.

Death under the dominance of the spectacle provides no such resolution. Within the spectacle, death negates life. Rather than confronting this fact, the contemporary subject simply disavowals that which cannot be transformed into life.

There is no finality in consumer culture; only a new version of the commodity which is designed to fill the void that does not exist without consumer culture. The contemporary confrontation with death is manifest in the grave marker which is yet another consumer spectacle. It can be consumed endlessly, therefore there is no death. The gravestone stands in for an absence that is never properly experienced as an absence. The clutter of the stone creates presence. Contemporary understandings of death can find no resolution and subsequent sublation. What we have is a childish disavowal of the reality of death and a psychological return to our own ego. Cluttered and outlandish grave markers do not signify the deceased. They signify the living. These grave markers scream “me, me, me” and “I, I, I.” They are infantile demonstrations of impotence. There is no dialectical resolution since contemporary life does not allow for any qualitative differences as valid differences. We have only quantitative differences. Under a regime of knowledge that can admit nothing but quantity, there is no net gain from death. Therefore, death can only be disavowed with quantities of grief. More display equals more grief. The operative term is “more.”

Even the medical establishment disavows death. Even as science moves to endlessly split hairs on the medical definition of death, the mechanisms of medical science cannot find the precise moment or even conditions that constitute death. For centuries, death was defined as the moment the heart and breathing stopped. This was simple. When a body no longer showed basic vital signs, that body was dead. Beginning in 1959, a new definition of death began to emerge. With the medical classification of what is termed coma depasse, or overcoma, medical science began to take account of a body which was by all objective measures dead but would continue to show basic vital functions with the assistance of medical instruments that assist with breathing and feeding. [11] The living person was effectively dead, but they continued to live at the most basic biological level to the extent that organs continue to function with the help of machinery. Near the end of the Twentieth Century, medicine advanced the notion of brain death as the final determination of death. This meant that “(o)nce the adequate medical tests had been confirmed the death of the entire brain (not only of the neocortex but also of the brain stem), the patient was to be considered dead, even if, thanks to life-support technology, he continued breathing.” [12]

However, the definition of brain death was confirmed because brain death finally leads to the cessation of heart and respiratory functions. Brain death is confirmed with the definition of death that preceded it. This is to say that, “According to a clear logical inconsistency, heart failure—which was just rejected as a valid criterion of death—reappears to prove the exactness of the criterion that is to substitute for it.” [13] The moment of death is brain death, but brain death leads to heart failure which is the moment of death. All of this leads to a zone of indeterminacy wherein death occurs but does not occur at the same time. Agamben draws this problem out to further his theory of the state of exception which lies at the heart of contemporary biopolitics. For our purposes, it is enough to understand that death remains a fundamentally unreal thing, even in the realm of medical science.

Contemporary consumer culture depends on externalizing all real lived experience. Individual experience only takes on validity once it is sutured into the realm of consumable images and the commodities which give these images meaning. My “I” only exists to the extent that it enters the flow of other egos who participate in the systems of exchange. Whereas the individual was once a mystification within capitalism insofar as one’s individuality exists in relation to one’s participation as a working subject of capitalism, we have gone many steps further and one’s individual status as a human can only exist insofar as you have projected yourself into the realm of images and rendered yourself a meaningful participant in spectacular culture. All of this renders individual subjectivity a completely external feature of public consumption and the realm of interior life has no value or even any meaning.

Individual beliefs no longer exist because belief takes place elsewhere, in the realm of the image. Individual egos have no meaning other than as externalized performances of ego-ness. I demonstrate myself, therefore I am. Just as images circulate in a state of pseudo-eternity in image space and image time, in the realm of pseudo-cyclical time as we saw above, so the contemporary ego circulates forever in a consumerist limbo that will not admit death.

Medical determinations of death are left to systems of political power. Since doctors are only in the business of life, they have no obligation to offer a final determination of death that would serve in all cases. Death is a political question. It is not a medical or biological question. Death is not even a theological question, no matter the amount of biblical language you inscribe on a stone. Death is not, and the heterotopia of the cemetery serves the dual function of being a place for the dead, and yet another place to publicly perform yourself. No longer that other space where the city lays its dead adjacent to the city proper where people continue to live, the cemetery is now the other space where we wallow in our emptiness against one of the only things that cannot be commodified: the absolute finality of death.

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis and creative non-fiction. He is also the blog writer for the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Endnotes

[1] Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces," p. 4

[2] Ibid., p. 5

[3] Ibid., pp. 5-6

[4] Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” p. 246

[5] Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. p. 82

[6] The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom, pp. 47-48

[7] Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, p. 115

[8] Ibid. 12

[9] Ibid. 18

[10] Ibid. 18

[11] Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, p. 160

[12] Ibid. p. 162

[13] Ibid. p. 163

References

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and its Double. p. 82.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité. October, 1984; (“Des Espace Autres,” March 1967 Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec).

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” From The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV. Tr. and General Editor James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press.

The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom. Tr. Robert Hurley. Creative Commons. 2012.