Death, the Crisis of Meaning, and Capitalism

By Carlos L. Garrido

Republished in modified form from Midwestern Marx.

The Moving finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

- The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Death as the Nexus for the Possibility of Meaning in Human Life

In This Life, philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that:

To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost.

Homer’s The Odyssey presents us with a similar message in Book Five. The situation Odysseus (the central character) is thrust into on Calypso’s Island reflects the meaninglessness of eternal life (Calypso is a beautiful female deity who detains Odysseus for seven years). On the Island, Odysseus is guaranteed immortality and all the bodily pleasures he can imagine. However, when the character’s stay on the Island is introduced to the reader, Odysseus is weeping, missing his family, and longing to return to them. 

In our contemporary logic of shallow hedonism (or non-Epicurean hedonism) [1], where the satisfaction of desires and pleasures has raised itself into an ethical imperative, Odysseus’s actions reflect those of a madman. Within this contemporary logic, Odysseus’s actions are as unfathomable as Abraham’s killing of his son, Isaac, on God’s orders. Abraham’s action, as the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard notes, is beyond the limits of comprehension, it is absurd and cannot be grasped as a “distinction among others embraced by understanding.” 

Within the logic of contemporary bourgeois society, our dominant mode of experience is having. We are what we have and what we consume. In our capitalist hyper-consumerist societies, the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is turned into cōnsūmere, ergo sum (I consume, therefore I am). The world presents itself as a big “theater of consumption,” where meaningless enjoyment — whose real and well-hidden telos [2] is the realization of profit obtained in the consumed commodities — becomes life’s prime want. An island of infinite pleasure would seem, within the confines of this mode of relationality and irrational rationality, the purest form of good — a heavenly island. 

But it isn’t enough for Odysseus. Why? 

Well, not only are there things that matter more than pleasure (if you wish, think of a hierarchy of values, some of the higher ones which are inaccessible in Calypso’s Island), such as honor, loyalty, family, etc., but the possibility of anything mattering at all within the confines of immortality is impossible. Odysseus’s life on the Island might have been pleasureful, but — insofar as it was sustained within conditions of immortality — it would have also been meaningless.

Only when the ever-present reality of our finitude is the background of all our actions can life obtain meaning. Death, that which Martin Heidegger called “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all,” is the nexus through which meaning can emerge in our life. It is the fragile character of our lives which functions as the conditions for the possibility of meaning.

Odysseus’s struggle to leave the Island is a struggle for life, for family and honor, but most importantly, for a return to the finitude which underlays our being-in-the-world and provides us with the conditions for living meaningful, truly human lives.

As Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) in Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 masterpiece Troy says: “The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.”

The Crisis of Meaning and Bourgeois Finitude 

While it is our finitude which grounds our ability to lead meaningful lives, an awareness of our finitude does not guarantee that we’ll find, or create, meaning in our lives. An awareness of our mortality, therefore, while necessary, is not in itself sufficient.

We know we are not immortal. In fact, in our hyper-consumerist societies, the primacy of shallow hedonism is often rooted in a deep sense of our mortality. For instance, just a few years ago, the acronym that grasped the American zeitgeist was “YOLO,” which stood for “you only live once”. Under this motto, pleasure-centered licentiousness [3] was legitimized. After all, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself to the fullest if I only live once?  

But this sense of mortality has not, and (under the conditions in which it exists) cannot, provide the fertile ground needed for us to create meaning in our lives. We live in societies riddled with depression, anxiety, stress, etc. As the young Karl Marx had already observed by 1844, capitalism systematically alienates us from our labor, its product, our fellow human beings, nature, and from our species-essence (gattungswesen, by which he meant our ability to creatively objectify ourselves onto nature through our labor) [4]. These are profound crises at the human level (crisis comes from one of the Greek words for separation, krísis), and pervade our lebenswelt (life-world) or forms of being-in-the-world under our current capitalist-imperialist mode of life.

In many ways, a lot of these social-psychological ills have been normalized. Even things like chronic illness, which we often take to be a result of genetics or some other form of a “bad luck of the draw,” are in many cases traceable to stress patterns formed out of the habits people are thrusted into by the dominant order. As Dr. Gabor Mate shows in The Myth of Normal, these illnesses are anything but arbitrary and normal. In fact, they are “profoundly abnormal” in just about every way possible. For instance, a 2019 study in Cancer Research found that “women with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were found to have twice the risk of ovarian cancer as women with no known trauma exposure.” Trauma (both its big T and small t iterations) is essentially rooted, as Dr. Mate notes, in a “fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world.” This is, in essence, another way of describing the same crises Marxism has explained, condemned, and combatted since the middle of the 19th century. It is a crisis precisely because it is not “normal,” it is a separation rooted in our historically constituted mode of life. 

In the midst of our alienated, exploited, and oppressed mode of existence, the form of life we live in must, in order to successfully finish the cycle of capital accumulation for which we were exploited in the first place, bombard us with advertisements destined to make us Homo consumericus [5] in those few hours of the days were — although feeling the lingering effects of the work day – we are not directly getting exploited. The consumption of advertisements — which studies have shown take up, on average, four years of our lives — is a form of consumption which proliferates our desires to consume. It is the equivalent of drinking Coca-Cola, a drink shown to dehydrate us further, in order to quench our thirst. 

Additionally, since we often can’t afford this (wages have stayed low, prices and job precarity have risen), we are forced to turn to borrowing to pay for what we consume. The American working class is undoubtedly among the most indebted in history. This debt slavery, which characterizes the lives of the modern American proletariat and reproletariat (i.e., the section of the last century’s middle classes which have fallen back to precarity and instability), is a form of what Marx calls in Capital III the “secondary exploitation… which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself.” This has ushered into world-history a new form of super-exploitation within the metropole itself, where its working masses are not only exploited (direct, primary exploitation) but cripplingly indebted (secondary exploitation), and therefore, doubly, or, super-exploited.

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How can any meaning arise in lives plagued by alienated work and meaningless consumption? It is not enough to show that we are dealing, as a society, with a deep crisis of meaning. Viktor Frankl, for instance, already described in the middle of the last century through many widely read and celebrated books the universal character of meaninglessness in modern bourgeois society. But is this recognition enough? Must we not inquire as to its origins? Must we not explain, and not just describe, these crises?  

A scientific explanation of these pervasive social-psychological ills would have, as Dr. Mate notes, “revolutionary implications.” The question would be, can the sciences in these fields (especially its mainstream trends), be able to overcome what the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have called their “Cartesian reductionism?” Can they move away from bourgeois philosophical assumptions which divide mind and body, individual and society, which observe things as dead and static entities, and which reify them from the larger totalities whose existence they presuppose? In short, can these sciences adopt — either consciously or not — the materialist dialectic and its focus on universal motion, interconnection, contradiction, totality analysis, etc.? These are the foundations through which we may reproduce the concrete concretely in thought, and hence, understand the world in all its complexities.

A central obstacle in this task is not only the bourgeois character of the institutions the sciences are forced to operate through, but, as an ideological reflection of this, their adoption of the view that they are (and this is especially true in the “hard” sciences) somehow above ideology and philosophy. What an ideologically loaded sentiment! We are back to Plato’s cave, back to prisoners who take the conditions of their particular enchainment to be the whole of reality itself. The truth is, while the sciences often fancy themselves to be “above” philosophy and ideology, “in most cases,” as Friedrich Engels had noted, they are “slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies.” 

“Nothing evokes as much hostility” in scientists, Levins and Lewontin write, “as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science.” A regrounding of the mainstream sciences in a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, along with the uprooting of the profit motive that dictates its telos in our mode of life, would readily provide a richer, more comprehensive, and — necessarily — a more revolutionary understanding of our crisis of meaning and what overcoming it entails [6]. 

Finding Meaning in the Struggle for a New World 

The crisis of meaning we are experiencing is systematically rooted in the capitalist mode of life. This is something which can, and has, been scientifically proven. It is not simply a question of “culture” or “individual accountability.” While the crisis manifests itself in our culture and individual lives, its existence there reflects the forces at play in the economic base of society. The crisis in our culture and in our individual lives is a product of the heightening of the contradictions at the foundation of a moribund capitalist-imperialist order. 

This is where a lot of the commentary (especially critical in character) on the crisis of meaninglessness misses the mark. Most of it merely describes the way the crisis looks by the time it gets to the social-psychological level, remaining “cultural” in its critique through and through, never explaining the underpinning motion and contradictions producing that which they critique. The superiority of the Marxist outlook (i.e., dialectical materialism) is found in its ability to do precisely this — to explain and not just describe, to show the underlying foundations producing movement at the surface, and not simply taking that surface for the whole of reality. 

It is important to note, however, that our contemporary crisis of meaning doesn’t necessarily entail that meaningful lives are impossible. On the fringes of quotidian society, there are still people who, like Odysseus, find meaning in tending to familial duties. There are also, like Odysseus, people who may be rooted in a strong sense of honor, in a deep drive for greatness in their respective fields. This is certainly a reality for many athletes, whose striving within their sports provides a source of meaning in their lives.

However, no greater meaning can be derived than that which arises from fighting against the system that produces these crises of meaning. The greatest and most memorable human beings in history have been those, like Socrates, Jesus, Simón Bolívar, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Marx and Engels, José Martí, Vladimir Lenin, Mao, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and many more, who have found their life’s purpose in the struggle to move humanity forward into a more rational and free world. There is, therefore, tremendous meaning to be found in the struggle against a world governed by exploitation, alienation, and oppression. A capitalist-imperialist order that has murdered tens of millions (four million in the Muslim world in the last two decades alone) and that is threatening humanity with nuclear Armageddon to sustain its hegemony, is worth making the object we commit our lives to destroying. 

But a purposeful and meaningful life does not have as its only end destruction. We seek to destroy this order, not so that we can dance on the rubble, but so that the fetters it has set on humanity are destroyed. We seek to destroy not for destruction’s sake, but because what we destroy is itself a system, as the British Marxist William Morris called, of waste and destruction. We destroy, in other words, so that we may construct a future free of poverty, exploitation, plunder, war, oppression, alienation, meaninglessness, bigotry, etc. We destroy so that we may construct a world in which humanity can flourish, where people of all creeds may, as Che Guevara hoped, achieve their “full realization as a human creature.”

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, Director at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024).

Footnotes

[1] Epicurus’s hedonism has little to do with how we understand the concept today. Today, the hedonist is understood to be the person who concerns themselves with the basest pleasures of the body. The image of someone in a bubble bath, drinking sparkling wine, eating chocolate-covered strawberries usually comes to mind. However, for the Epicurean school of hedonism, pleasures and pains are of different kinds. There are natural, necessary, and vain pleasures we encounter. The goal of the enlightened pleasure seeker is to distinguish amongst these — to avoid those immediate pleasures that cause pain in the long run (e.g., drugs, unhealthy food, etc.), to contain the natural desires to a rational limit (e.g., sex, while natural, if not taken in moderation can lead to sex addictions, and this takes this natural pleasure to the point of ‘“pain”), and to recognize those immediate forms of pain that might actually lead to pleasure in the long run (e.g., exercise, medicine, etc.). All in all, the Epicurean enlightened hedonist will, in their actions, look a whole lot more like they’re following an Aristotelian virtue ethic than the base hedonism we encounter today.

[2] Its end, goal, purpose, highest good, etc.

[3] This term is not limited to its sexual connotation but refers to any notion of liberty” that operates through the abandonment of necessity — a state of lawlessness, an absence of social rules.

[4] For more on the development of the concept of alienation through Marx’s work, see my review article.

[5] A neologism that describes the turning of human beings into “consumerist animals” in modern bourgeois society.

[6] I have shown elsewhere how this poverty of outlook, conjoined with the material incentives of capitalism, has led to the utter failure of the sciences (the mainstream ones; there’s always good folks doing work that goes against the grain) to understand social-psychological ills such as depression (see: “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis”)

On the Concept of "Time Poverty"

[Photo credit: Marisa9 / iStock / Getty Images Plus]

By Rugveda Sawant

“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”

-Karl Marx

There is a considerable amount of literature on “time-poverty” concocted by researchers and policy-makers. The term is used to denote lack of time an individual experiences to devote to personal and social activities which ends up negatively impacting their well-being.

Apart from the already established definition of the term, a fresh deconstruction of it may lead one to observe that if poverty is understood as a lack of (financial) resources, time-poverty may be understood as a lack of (financial) resources to purchase time rather than lack of time itself. The worker who does not own any means of production and has nothing but his labour-power to sell in order to sustain himself, must do so by lending it out for a certain duration of time to the capitalist who purchases it in order to extract surplus value. However, it becomes important to note that what is being sold and purchased here is not time, but labour-power. Time is not a commodity- it can be a measure of value but has no value in itself; it cannot be produced or purchased. Defining “time-poverty” as “lack of time” helps mask this simple contradiction; we are stuck with a term that fails to delineate the exact relationship between time and poverty, leading to the proposal of flawed solutions for a legitimate issue.

Even though a more liberal understanding is that people, no matter what their financial status, can experience “time-poverty”, a more sophisticated argument observes that it is an issue more relevant to and persistent amongst the income-poor. [1] To avoid ambiguity, let us replace “poor” with the working class and “rich” with the capitalist class. The working class earns its money through ‘wages’ while the capitalist class earns it through ‘profits’. The following illustration by Engels will help us understand how ‘wages’ and ‘profits’ are earned:

“The capitalist takes the labourer into his workshop or factory, where all the articles required for the work can be found – raw materials, auxiliary materials (coal, dyestuffs, etc.), tools, and machines. Here, the worker begins to work. His daily wages are, as above, 3 shillings, and it makes no difference whether he earns them as day-wages or piece-wages. We again assume that in 12 hours the worker adds by his labour a new value of 6 shillings to the value of the raw materials consumed, which new value the capitalist realizes by the sale of the finished piece of work. Out of this new value, he pays the worker his 3 shillings, and the remaining 3 shillings he keeps for himself. If, now, the labourer creates in 12 hours a value of 6 shillings, in 6 hours he creates a value of 3 shillings. Consequently, after working 6 hours for the capitalist, the labourer has returned to him the equivalent of the 3 shillings received as wages. After 6 hours’ work, both are quits, neither one owing a penny to the other.

“Hold on there!” now cries out the capitalist. “I have hired the labourer for a whole day, for 12 hours. But 6 hours are only half-a-day. So work along lively there until the other 6 hours are at an end – only then will we be even.” And, in fact, the labourer has to submit to the conditions of the contract upon which he entered of “his own free will", and according to which he bound himself to work 12 whole hours for a product of labour which cost only 6 hours’ labour.

Similarly with piece-wages. Let us suppose that in 12 hours our worker makes 12 commodities. Each of these costs a shilling in raw materials and wear-and-tear, and is sold for 2.5 shillings. On our former assumption, the capitalist gives the labourer .25 of a shilling for each piece, which makes a total of 3 shillings for 12 pieces. To earn this, the worker requires 12 hours. The capitalist receives 30 shillings for the 12 pieces; deducting 24 shillings for raw materials and wear-and-tear, there remains 6 shillings, of which he pays 3 shillings in wages and pockets the remaining 3. Just as before! Here, also, the worker labours 6 hours for himself – i.e., to replace his wages (half-an-hour in each of the 12 hours), and 6 hours for the capitalist.” (Frederick Engels, Wage Labour and Capital, 1891)

Profits are earned by appropriating unpaid labour of the working class. Profit constitutes the amount of time that the worker has spent in producing value that does not belong to him. The magnitude of profits can be increased by increasing intensity of labour, productiveness of the labour or by increasing the length of the working day. But no matter how these three variables shift, (relative) wages and profits remain in inverse proportion to each other. [2] Lower the wages, more the profit. More the labour-time that remains unpaid, more the capitalist gains. Once this is clear, one can start to see how “lack of time” that one class of the society faces is a gain for the other. The issue of “lack of time” devoid of class analysis leads to vague rhetorics [3] and empty solutions. All sincere critique must elucidate how the “lack of time” that the “poor” face and which affects their “well-being” is an inevitability under capitalist production. [4]

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It is argued that women are the most “time-poor” since they are ones who usually perform domestic and household work which (widely) remains unrecognized and unpaid. The burden of performing these tasks leaves them with very little time for themselves. Recognition, remuneration and provision of alternative arrangements of such work will lead to diminution of the time deficit that women face. Researchers by employing the methodology of time-use surveys have made proclamations like “rich women work harder than poor men”. [5] Such statements are as contrived as the terms “rich” and “poor” are abstruse. Women unarguably are burdened with domestic and household work, which to a very large extent remains gendered. However the premise that it is “unpaid” is false. Even though this work may not be remunerated directly, it is accounted for in the wages earned by the worker:

“The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour…In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.

Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.”  (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1847) 

Therefore, even if household and domestic work was to be paid for separately, it would lead to a relative decrease in wages, not leading to any sort of substantive improvement in the life of the working class. The gendered nature of the oppressive burden of household work can be understood as an effect of the patriarchal system but the cause of it lies in the exploitative nature of class relations under capitalism. The patriarchal system itself, at the outset, is a result of the historical division of labour within a class society. The condition of women being domestic slaves to their husbands will not be made better, in any real sense, by demanding for household work to be remunerated.[6] According to the calculations of the capitalist, it is already recognised and paid for in the wages of the worker. As explained above, the impoverished status of the working class is directly linked to the prosperity of the capitalist. Therefore, any demands for alternative arrangement or socialisation of domestic work that might emancipate women from their current state of slavery and proposals about providing free goods and services via public policy, remain incompatible with and a utopia under the capitalist mode of production.

The burden of “unpaid work” that leads individuals to face a “lack of time” is a legit issue. However, it cannot be understood in isolation from the process of production of which it is a part. Marx writes:

“All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.” (Karl Marx, Vol 1., Capital, 1887)

It is this very phenomenon that can so easily lead one to think of household work (domestic slavery of women) as unpaid while overlooking the exploitative nature of class relations within the capitalist mode of production. The concept of “time-poverty“, which wrongly posits time as a commodity, furthers the concealment of the worker’s unpaid labour. The worker appears to be selling his time and not the value creating source that is his labour-power. It becomes easier then, for the price of this “time” to be detached from and determined independently of the value created by him. Terms like “time-poverty” when undisguised reveal themselves as nothing but plain, old poverty. Averse to the dilution and deviation that this term begets, one must not lose sight of the fact that the fight for personal and leisure time is inextricably tied with the fight for socialism.

Notes

[1] “...time-poverty among the better off accounts for very little of the total, and that genuine time poverty is more than a qualitative loss resulting from individual choices. Rather, most people who are time-poor are also income-poor and suffer from other (often multiple) deprivations.” Ghosh, “Time Poverty and the Poverty of Economics,” 2.

[2] “The share of (profit) increases in the same proportion in which the share of labour (wages) falls, and vice versa. Profit rises in the same degree in which wages fall; it falls in the same degree in which wages rise.” Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 37.

[3] “Though it is difficult to say how much leisure or free time a person needs, one can say that a person who does not get enough leisure is under time stress.” Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 28.

[4] “Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.” Marx, Vol. 1. Capital, 406.

[5] Ultra-poor women rank at the bottom in terms of burden of total work. They spend 32.74 per cent of their total time (53.42 hours) on work. They are followed by non-poor women (and not by ultra-poor men) who spend 31.66 per cent of their time (53.18 hours) on work. That is, rich women work much harder than ultra-poor men in terms of the time put into work. Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 35. Also quoted by Jayati Ghosh in “Time poverty and the poverty of economics” with an addition that “This partly reflects the lack of paid work for poor men as well as the greater burden of unpaid work borne by women in their own households.”

[6] “Payment for the housewife’s “reproductive labour” in the house, i.e. for domestic slavery, in addition to keeping the working family’s standard of living the same, and consequently the level of the housewife’s freedom on the same level as before, is something that would serve to perpetuate the idea of the housewife as the beast of burden that bears on her back all the social pressure exerted on working-class homes (including psychological and physical abuse). It would keep her away from social life, imprisoned within the four walls of her house, making her numb with chores that mangle her body and dull her mind.” Rey, Is housework an “unpaid” job?

Songs About Che

By Louis Brehony

Republished from Monthly Review.

Commodification of the iconic image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara has failed to dim the revolutionary light that burned on after his CIA assassination on 9 October 1967. Heralded worldwide by liberation fighters, activists and working classes as the heroic guerrilla of the Cuban revolution, a leader of its first socialist government and a relentless Marxist thinker, Che became a central figure of leftist culture in Latin America and beyond. Embedding his principles of duty and aspiration to fight for the future, school children under Cuban socialism pledge daily, “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.” In Hasta Siempre, Commandante, Cuban songwriter Carlos Puebla (1917-89) prophesied:

Your revolutionary love is taking you to new places,

where they await the strength of your arms in liberation.[1]

These words would be sung and translated worldwide, while musicians pledging to carry Che’s torch wrote their own songs to his life, death and the struggles he would inspire in future. From Havana to Santiago, Cairo to Bethlehem, singing about Che Guevara has unsettled elites, ruffled bourgeois feathers and kindled the flame of revolutionary tradition.

Written by Puebla in 1965, as Che parted Cuba to take part in revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America, Hasta Siempre was, according to its author, “a song of farewell, not death,” and musical representation of Che’s relationship to Fidel Castro. Reading out Che’s parting letter to the Cuban people at the Chaplin Theatre in Havana, Fidel delivered the words written months earlier with characteristic poeticism:

I carry to new battlefronts the faith that you taught me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of fulfilling the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever it may be. [2]

The audience was in raptures and Puebla, once a target of the pre-revolution Batista regime, [3] was moved to pick up his guitar: “On the unforgettable night when Fidel read out Che’s farewell letter—that same night I wrote the song, Hasta Siempre, Comandante.” [4]

Over the years Hasta Siempre would be emblematic of a society building from the ashes of colonial exploitation and imperialist domination, and came to be sung by Cubans at revolutionary mobilizations, concerts, social occasions, and even at international sporting events. The simplicity of its bolero composition and clarity of identification with the revolutionary movement made Hasta Siempre a grassroots hit with many outside the country. In the Costa-Gavras film State of Siege (1972), Uruguayan police hunting Tupamaros guerrillas fail to silence student loudspeakers while the song blares out proudly during a demonstration. Dozens of cover versions span Buena Vista Social Club, jazz versions by Charlie Haden and Robert Wyatt, French leftist band Zebda and Venezuelan vocalist Soledad Bravo. A pop version recorded by Nathalie Cardone hit number 2 in the mainstream French charts in 1997, helping her to sell over 750,000 albums in the country alone.

Hasta Siempre would not be the only song Carlos Puebla would dedicate to Che. In Lo Eterno, the singer ascends the martyred guerrilla into immortality:

How you were more than a man

A light and example

You will live forever

In the heart of the people.

To Žižek, the words of Puebla wrap Che in Christian mythology, as a “sacred figure where the “normal” criteria of actual achievements no longer matter”. Distanced from Cuban socialism, which Žižek virulently opposes, [5] Che “had to die a miserable death in order to become the cult figure that he is.” [6] Yet those who embraced Che in life and death did so with awareness of the “actual achievements” that his journey of sacrifice and commitment enabled, not least in Cuba. Recorded in 1968, Silvio Rodríguez’ Fusil Contra Fusil (Rifle Against Rifle) predicted that, “All of the Third World will tell of his pain,” through the armed, anti-colonial struggle, with Che’s name collectivized for humanity.

That this process had begun before Che’s martyrdom was evident in 1967’s El Aparecido (The Apparition), as Chilean songwriter Victor Jara (1932-73) captured the relentlessness of a CIA-led manhunt for Che while he remained free among the socialist fighters in the Bolivian mountains. The song, which encapsulated renewed pride in indigenous instruments by Latin American progressives, features a breathless chorus of “córrele, córrele, córrela,” or “run, run, run,” while the overwhelming odds of Che’s mission are starkly put:

Over his head circle,

ravens with talons of gold

How he has been crucified

by the fury of the powerful.

Son of rebellion

he is pursued by battalions.

Because he offers life

they want his death. [7]

In a sign of how Che’s position would divide revolutionaries from social democrats, the song led Jara into criticism from the Chilean Communist Party, angered by emphasis on armed struggle over what it saw as the democratic road to socialism. Decades on from his own torture and murder at the hands of the Pinochet coup, Jara’s works remain popular.

With comparable status to Jara in another key region of anti-imperialist struggle, Egyptian resistance singer Sheikh Imam (1918-1995) was frequently pictured wearing Che Guevara insignia while he played oud and sang an intensely political repertoire. With lyricist Ahmed Fu’ad Negm (1929-2013), Imam offered stinging critiques of a supposedly postcolonial society. Coming both in the wake of Che’s murder and of the June 1967 defeat of Nasser’s Arab alliance by Zionist colonization, their song Gifara Mat (Guevara’s Dead) was dirge-like:

Guevara died, Guevara’s dead, on the radio that’s what they said.

On the street that’s all the news, and in the mosques and in the pews. [8]

The Imam-Negm alliance upset the balance for those apparently committed to keeping radical politics out of Egyptian music. Among these, composer Sayyed Mikkawi hit out at Imam’s stated commitment to “the path of revolution” as an “artist of the people,” asking whether the embrace of Guevara meant that Egypt had “abandoned its own heroes.” [9] Sheikh Imam had attacked the bourgeois pageantry of Mikkawi’s socialite existence and famously lived an austere life among the working class.

Sheikh Imam would be a direct influence on a new generation of Egyptian musical revolutionaries and appeared regularly in the 1980s household of a young Hazem Shaheen, [10] later to become a leading oud virtuoso and songwriter. During the period of struggle against the Mubarak dictatorship, Shaheen’s Iskanderella group took on Guevarist symbolism; Sheikh Imam covers were central to their development. They would sing Nagm’s lyrics a half-century after their composition:

So my dear slaves, here is the lesson. Guevara’s cry is always the same and your choices are but one.

There’s nothing for you to do, but to declaim, prepare for war or be done.

With the reemergence of the Palestinian revolution after 1967, many children in refugee camps in Lebanon and Gaza were adorned with the Arabized name “Gifara,” alongside other names referencing steadfastness and liberation. Speaking to Lena Meari, a former PFLP leader remembered that, “We were fascinated with the Guevarian path and it affected our thinking.” [11] Palestinians would sing for Che too. Among the Palestinian songs to Che included re-writing of national liberation anthems like Bektob Ismik Ya Biladi (I Write Your Name, My Country), with melodies set to new lyrics on Che and sung by communists in Bethlehem, and vocalist Amal Murkus’ Thawri ka-Che Guevara (Revolutionary, As Che Guevara), based on Puebla’s Hasta Siempre. 

This tradition continued with new, 21st Century intifadas. In 2002, Manhal al-Falastini and the Baladna group [12] of Lebanon-based Palestinian refugee musicians sang the lyrics of martyred fighter Abu Ali Talal, in Ughniyat Gifara (Guevara song):

Write your name, Guevara

with a red rose

Its body will become yours, Guevara

and make a revolution.

Following the mass uprising across Palestine in May 2021, the figure of Che appeared in Sawtoka Ya Shaabi (Your Voice, My People), a Palestinianized arrangement of Italian workers’ anthem Bella Ciao, by Palestinian artist Sanaa Moussa. In the song, the cry of patria o muerte, or “homeland or death,” appears between verses of My People Are Alive, by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim.

Che was a constant presence in the performing activism of Turkish revolutionary band Grup Yorum, whose vocalists sang Puebla’s Hasta Siempre with both Spanish and Turkish poetry. Before the banning of the group’s performances in 2016 and imprisonment of its members by the Erdoğan government, the musicians played concerts to tens of thousands of mostly leftist supporters. Among those who had sung for Che, leading members Helin Bölek and Ibrahim Gökçek were martyred in death fasts in April and May 2020 respectively. Intensifying repression for their commitment to socialist politics, the prosecution of Grup Yorum had been accompanied by right wing commentators suggesting that their fans’ wearing of Che Guevara-inspired clothing was proof of the musicians’ support for “terrorism.”

In the flash points of struggle against oppression and exploitation, Che remains present. Both a tenacious, enduring voice for the oppressed, and a reminder of the depths to which imperialism and reaction will sink to silence it. As in the songs and music of bygone and living revolutions, singing brings people together in common melody in the fight for a new future. Che once wrote,

The basic clay of our work is the youth; we place our hope in it and prepare it to take the banner from our hands. [13]

Carlos Puebla—Lo Eterno
https://youtu.be/7gXiYuGkNXg

Silvio Rodriguez—Fusil Contra Fusil
https://youtu.be/yEWO3lR99QQ

Sheikh Imam—Gifara Mat
https://youtu.be/tqnyhP7N0rs

Grup Yorum—Hasta Siempre
https://youtu.be/O3FmmnJX-VE

Notes

1. Translation taken from Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p121.

2. Che Guevara, “Farewell letter to Fidel Castro”, 1 April 1965. Marxist Internet Archive.

3. Robin D. Moore, Music & Revolution (University of California Press, 2006), p53.

4. Sue Steward, Musica!: The Rhythm of Latin America, (Diane Pub Co, 1999), p81.

5. Slavoj Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek on Castro’s death,” 27 November 2016. Author website.

6. Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), p180.

7. Translation by Aliki Andris-Michalaros for the Inti Illimani 2 album, La Nueva Canción Chilena, 1974.

8. Lyric translation by Elliot Colla.

9. Andrew Simon, Media of the Masses, (Stanford University Press, 2022), p143.

10. Conversation with the author, 20 June 2022.

11. Lena Meari, “Reading Che in Colonized Palestina,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 50:1, 49-55, 2018.

12. Not to be confused with the Jordan-based Palestinian band of the same name.

13. Che Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” March 1965. Marxist Internet Archive.

Anti-Ableist Teaching Strategies and Disability Life Photography

[Cover Photo: Steve Darby. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.]

By Sarah Pfohl

The following text is from an invited talk shared at ‘Currents’, the 2022 Midwest Society for Photographic Education (MWSPE) Regional Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA on Friday, October 7, 2022.    

Welcome, folks. Thanks very much for being here this afternoon and to the conference organizers for creating space for these ideas and the artistic and pedagogical work I’m making inspired by ideas about ability, legibility, and representation. 

I’m a proudly dis/abled, chronically ill artist and teacher and about 15 years ago, as a graduate student studying education, I came into contact with ideas from disability liberation that completely turned inside out my thinking about myself as a sick person. Over time, these ideas have become foundational to me as both an artist and a teacher. I’ll share a few of those ideas with you, offer some ways you might bring them into your own work with people (in teaching or beyond), if you don’t already, and then talk about the photographic work I’ve been making inspired by the anti-ableist movement that is disability liberation. I’ll move in a couple different directions — teaching, theory, identity, artistic work. In my body-mind, life, and work, it’s all intertwined.

A few final contextualizing notes by way of introduction: 

First, notes on language. In this talk, I’ll refer to ableism, which is oppression based on real or perceived aspects of a person or group’s ability. The language I’ll use throughout this talk is specific and intentional, it may sometimes meet you as surprising. Next, I’ll draw ideas from lots of different arenas of thinking and action including disability studies, disability rights, and disability justice. This talk will provide a really quick, condensed introduction to a few pieces of a huge, rich terrain. I’m skating across the surface, please check out the resource guide for more information, if you’re so inclined, or reach out, I’m happy to chat further. 

I’m one person among so many within the disability community. Data estimate 1 in 4 U.S. adults under the of 65 manages a diagnosis. In other words, the disability community is huge, there are almost certainly disabled people in your midst, whether you realize it or not. The community encompasses billions of people worldwide. I’ll speak here through the lens of my own experiences and on behalf of myself, not on behalf of an entire group of incredibly diverse of people. 

Finally, a ‘why should you care’ note. Taken as a whole, the concepts I offer here mean to invite, increase, and normalize meaningful participation in our world from a huge group of individuals positioned as less than, a huge group of individuals whose separation from the non-disabled world is deeply rationalized, dominantly framed as humane, and in many cases currently legal. Disabled people deserve humane treatment, full participation, and have incredibly valuable perspectives and knowledge to contribute to our world. 

Anti-ableist teaching strategies 

First, I’ll cover three concepts in contemporary disability liberation that might be of use in teaching and learning contexts and beyond. I’ll define each one, or, in one case, paired set, and then talk a little bit about practical implications.

I’ll talk first about the intertwined concepts of the medical model of disability and the social model of disability.

The medical model and social model construct disability in 2 diametrically opposed ways, in particular they locate the origins of disability in 2 very different places. Taken together, the medical and social models can point toward ways in which contexts disable people.

Image source: FutureLearn (n. d.). Models of Disability. [cartoon]. Inclusive Education: Essential Knowledge for Success – Queensland University of Technology. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/inclusive-education

Accessed via https://inclusiveeducation123.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/breaking-barriers/ on September 15, 2022.

The image above embodies one traditional way of introducing the medical and social models. We see in the center of the image a frowning person using a mobility assistive device (the crutch) and a prosthetic next to a step. On the left-hand side of the image, a medical professional says, “Your impairment is a problem we need to fix.” This speech bubble is labeled as ‘medical model’ On the right-hand side of the image a person using a wheelchair says in reference to the step, “This barrier is a problem we need to fix.” The speech bubble there is labeled as ‘social model’. A few things I want to activate your attention toward in this little cartoon:

Within the medical model perspective, we see disability defined as an impairement—through this it is referred to in deficit-centric, negative terms. This positioning of disability as a limitation, a disorder, a disadvantage is a key characteristic of the medical model. Additionally in the medical model perspective, disability is defined as a condition rooted within an individual, it’s a problem, located first and foremost within a person. By extension, the diagnosed person becomes the problem, especially if they can’t be “fixed”.

The social model perspective provides a counterpoint arguing that disability is not always and only located within the individual, rather it is socially agreed upon and produced out of the interaction between people and the world around them. Within the context of the social model of disability, inflexible, rigid, beliefs, attitudes, and physical structures produce what we call disability through the pathological unwillingness of those forces to shift or change such that they may accommodate a wider range of human diversity.

The social model doesn’t position the disabled person as a problem or as in need of fixing. Rather, it provides a perspective that normalizes human difference as a fact of human life, rather than pathologizing certain ways of being in favor of upholding existing, oftentimes-ableist social norms.

In dominant culture the medical model is normative, you probably have extensive experience with it just by being alive in the world, while the social model of disability reframes thinking and conversations about ability fundamentally. For the purposes of teaching, the paired models provide a number of possibly useful implications:

• Remember that there are a growing number of disabled people who view disability as a part of their identity that connects them to a rich, important, diverse culture with an exciting history and future. Disability pride is a real thing.

• Expect diversity in conceptualizing your teaching. Folks interested in realizing more ability-inclusive teaching moves might check out the Universal Design for Learning framework for suggestions. UDL encourages educators to provide multiple pathways into content engagement alongside multiple means of content representation and learning expression. Within a teaching context, flexibility can be a powerful anti-ableist teaching move. 

• Be thoughtful about the elements of your teaching practice designed to socialize students into an existing normative framework. If you are socializing students toward something, what is the lineage behind that something? I bring this up because when I’ve led PD on these topics previously, one of the most common pieces of push back I get is — but it’s my job to socialize my students even if that’s ability exclusive. Some teachers resist the social model lens because part of their mission is conforming their students into productivity relative to the existing social order. You might be mindful of this, as it can be ability-exclusive given the intense ableism present in our existing social order.  

A few critical notes here:

• The social model of disability, when present in public discourse, is poorly understood and often completely misconstrued. I strongly encourage you not to Google it, because the results bear little relation to the actuality of the concept. Check out the Rethinking Disability book I cite on the resource guide (see below for guide) for reliable information if you want to learn more.

• The social model doesn’t argue against medical intervention. It is not saying that one should stop going to the doctor or that medical support is a bad thing. It does argue that disability-related expertise can be located in many places, within and beyond medical practitioners.

• Finally, the social model doesn’t argue that disabled people must embrace, love, be happy about being disabled. It does challenge the idea that disability is always and only a negative thing, but doesn’t prescribe the feelings disabled people “should” have about themselves.

I’ll close this section with 2 quotes from disability liberation heroes that underscore the value of shifts in thinking connected to the social model construction of disability (both quotes pulled from this NYTimes article).

The first is from disability rights activist Judy Heumann: “The way society thinks about disability needs to evolve, as too many people view disability as something to loathe or fear. By changing that mentality, by recognizing how disabled people enrich our communities, we can all be empowered to make sure disabled people are included.”

The second is from disability justice activist, writer, author, and founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, Alice Wong: “We [disabled people] should not have to assimilate to a standard of “normal” to gain acceptance.”

The next concept I wanted to bring into the room is much narrower in scope—I wanted to talk about presuming competence as a mindset and lens. I first encountered this concept in Kathleen Collins’ great book Ability Profiling and School Failure: One Child’s Struggle to Be Seen as Competent.

The simple yet revolutionary argument embedded within presuming competence is that disabled people have capacity. Disabled people are often always and only framed around what they can’t do, especially educationally, and the list of can’t dos becomes the center column of that individual’s identity for others. We see this happen educationally especially when the terms of someone’s accommodation rub up against the teaching norms already in place in a particular instructor’s teaching and learning context/teaching practice. Years ago, I worked with an art history professor who very emphatically didn’t allow students to have screens of any kind in their classes but received, during the first week of school, an accommodation letter from a student indicating that they required the use of a laptop for note-taking during class meetings. Of course, an ADA accommodation is a legally-binding document and violating the terms of an accommodation is a violation of the student’s federally-mandated civil rights under the ADA. The student became “the student who can’t write their own notes by hand” and instead of finding a creative solution the professor pushed the student out of the class. They told the student to either stop using the screen or sit in the back of the classroom so that they didn’t “distract” their peers with the screen. The student dropped the class in response. 

Disabled people can do a lot of things! We carry so much capacity. Finding creative ways to align existing circumstances with an individual’s existing capacities to in turn promote more full participation can produce more ability-based inclusion for all. An argument for teaching from disability liberation is to keep the learning goals the same, but increase the pathways toward them. A couple years ago I worked with a sculpture professor who had a project that included chop saw use. He knew several incoming students would not be able to use the chop saw as it was installed in the wood shop. In conversation, it turned out that the primary project learning goal was centered around creating a modular object, so in that particular case increasing the number of materials with which students could work, allowing students to work with both wood and paper, increased accessibility while maintaining the project objectives. 

The last concept that I want to talk about is language associated with disability. Here the literature has a couple different suggestions. The first suggestion has to do with ability-related identifiers people use. Here’s a list of preferred ability-identifiers of some of my friends: 

disabled, dis/abled, Disabled, sick, crip, Mad, neurodivergent, chronically ill, ability non-normative, disabled person, person with a disability, physically ill, mentally ill, Sick

Which ones are right? There are no monolithically correct identifiers that I know of at this time. 

Don’t most of these words mean the same thing? No, they don’t. Disability as an identity and cultural category is incredibly diverse, one person’s relationship to a particular identifier may be totally different than another person’s relationship to the same word. 

Here’s what I can offer: People’s identifiers are highly specific and personal, use the language offered by individuals as they offer it. In the same way that you wouldn’t correct a student on the spelling of their name or pronoun use, don’t correct someone’s ability-related identifiers—accept what they tell you. Different identifiers do connect to different movements and spheres of thinking within disability liberation. Assume people use the language with which they identify themselves intentionally and honor it. SLIDE

In my own case, I use dis/abled and chronically ill. I use the word disabled to name the social conditions under which I live my life. What I mean by that is that I live in a world that constantly, tens of times each day, reminds me that I don’t belong here and I should normalize or get out because the diversity I embody isn’t important.

I write dis/abled with a back slash between dis and abled to connect myself back explicitly back to disability studies. Dis/abled is how some folks in disability studies write disabled to underscore the socially constructed nature of disability at a formal, linguistic level and that resonates for me, so I use it. Disability studies is also where I first encountered ideas that fundamentally reframed my thinking about ability and illness, so my use of a term anchored there as an identifier does honor to others’ works and points toward my affiliations. 

I say ‘chronically ill’ to hold up and foreground my biological reality as a person engaged in the constant labor and care associated with managing multiple, incurable diagnoses. 

And all of these will grow and change as the movement grows and changes, which is a beautiful thing.

Second, relative to disability-related language I wanted to be sure to identify the distinction between person-first and identity-first language. Many folks have heard of person-first language as it pertains to ability. To summarize, the idea is that one says ‘individual with a disability’ or ‘person with [insert diagnosis]’ foregrounding the person first and ability status second, rather than the inverse—foregrounding the ability status first and the person second. Folks who prescribe to person-first linguistic patterns argue that by naming first the individual, the individual becomes less defined by their ability status. 

Identity-first language turns that around and argues that linguistically foregrounding ability-related identity by saying ‘disabled person’ promotes disability pride and de-stigmatizes oftentimes-negative preconceptions of the word disabled. Some proponents of identity-first language also argue that in using that language pattern they name disabled people’s life experiences as they more truly are—an ableist world reminds disabled people that they do not belong. A common argument against person-first language from a disabled person is, “I’ll use person-first language when I start getting treated like a person.” As you may have noticed, I’m using identity-first language throughout this presentation.

For a long time person-first language (person with a disability) was far more common and that linguistic norm is very present in many fields, especially medical and educational spheres. It isn’t a bad approach, especially if you’re non-disabled and talking about disability or you find yourself in the position of having to choose one or the other. In those moments, person-first works great. 

However, if you encounter someone, like a student, who is disabled and uses identity-first language honor that. Again, use the identifiers someone supplies you and assume identifiers used are used intentionally. Resist the urge to teach a disabled person who identifies as a disabled person about person-first language.

The final perspective from the intersections between language and ability I wanted to offer into this space is an invitation to use and model anti-ableist language. 

Ableist slurs are quite common and often used unintentionally. They might emerge as language patterns that position a diagnosis category or way of being in general in a negative light or from a deficit standpoint. A few examples and how they would be corrected: 

• I was engaged in a blind struggle to move forward. — I was engaged in a careless struggle to move forward. 

• He’s stuck in a wheelchair. — He uses a wheelchair.

• That’s a lame excuse. — That’s an inadequate excuse.

It seems subtle, but it’s a big deal. I find that more and more of my students know this content and read the world around them, looking for mentors and allyship, informed by the subtle hints provided by the gatekeepers in their lives. Lots of disabled young people in higher education don’t and won’t disclose but need help and actively decreasing ableist slur use helps vulnerable students find folks who can provide critical support. Again, the tip of a huge iceberg but a brief outline of ideas I’ve come into contact with that have been useful to me as a teacher.

As I mentioned, statistically 1 in 4 U.S. adults under the age of 65 fall into the category of disabled. Which would mean, if, for example, you’re a teacher in higher education, that in a class of 20 students you should statistically receive 5 accommodation letters. Of course, there are many reasons people don’t self-identify formally through disability services. I share these numbers to underscore that ability-related non-normativity may be far more present in the spaces within which you move than you realize. These ideas, aimed at promoting the humanity and humane treatment of people historically treated terribly (Google ‘Willowbrook’ for more information) can have a big impact even if you think they might not pertain to you.

Imaging what’s wrong with me

I’ll shift now to the artistic work I’ve been making precipitated by the ideas I just shared and start with some facts about my body. 

The primary biological diagnosis with which I was born is currently called osteogenesis imperfecta, abbreviated as OI. As a diagnosis category, OI is characterized by the OI Foundation, the primary US-based advocacy body associated with it, as “complicated, variable, and rare” in appearance. Statistically, worldwide, around 1 in every 15,000-20,000 people lives with osteogenesis imperfecta. Within the context of my own life, I’ve never knowingly met in person someone else with OI. 

With OI, which is incurable, I have less of a particular protein in my body than deemed medically normal and within that, the smaller amount of that protein I do have is designated, in medical terms, as “qualitatively abnormal”, which is one of the many fun things I get to hear medical professionals I’ve just met call me—“qualitatively abnormal”. 

More specifically, parts of my body—my bones, heart, lungs, eyes, and ears—work differently than most other people’s. My bones break, sometimes for little or no discernible reason. I’ve broken bones in my legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers, and toes, I’ve fractured my pelvis, my skull, and both clavicles. I can have trouble with the mechanics of my body, my ability to walk ebbs and flows.

I also manage now OI’s offshoots and degenerative progressions, as a diagnosis it proliferates over time. I manage Deaf gain (referred to as hearing loss in hearing culture), early-onset osteoporosis, anxiety, depression. So that’s a brief description of the nature of my body-mind from a medicalized, biological, diagnosis-label perspective.

I share this not in an attempt to evoke sympathy or pity, but to outline what counts as normal within the context of my own experience. As a site, my body requires constant management and care. I share information also to cure any deniers—I don’t usually read as disabled and chronically ill, it’s common for people to question me on that, so specifics and disclosing can help build my credibly. 

As a dis/abled, chronically ill artist coming into contact with ideas from disability liberation, I started to wonder what implications they might have for my artistic work. As I worked to shift my consciousness away from medical model thinking and toward social model interpretations of the world around me, I began to notice and become more critical of the negative representational tropes associated with illness and disability that permeated the world around me. Experiences of disability are incredibly diverse but, due to ableism, the visual language commonly associated with disability was narrow and unimaginative.

As I started to photograph toward my own representation of disability, I wanted to visually push back against these norms. A question I started to chew on often was, “Can I make a representation of disability that feels true to my lived experience, that doesn’t include the body, and that goes beyond the common, deficit-centric narrative?”

I looked around for some inspiration. I started to notice also that the representations of disability that presented the most complex, nuanced portraits of diagnosis management and ability non-normative life were first-person. By ‘first-person’ I mean they were crafted by an individual with first-hand experience of diagnosis management. I had been reading within the field of disability life writing, an approach to writing that argues for the value of diverse narratives about disability written by disabled people, and started to look for examples of disability life photography. 

Through the lens of the social model of disability, a disabled person is positioned as the primary expert on their own life and body-mind. A disabled person is, through the social model lens, a knowledgeable authority on what it is to be sick. This social model perspective overturns dominant medical model thinking which locates disability-related expertise in basically anyone expect the disabled individual. For example, it’s quite common for a medical professional’s perspective on an illness they have never experienced to be held in higher regard than the perspective of an individual in medical care literally experiencing that particular illness; an insidious norm that extends historical positioning of the disabled person as helpless and wholly reliant when in reality, of course, the person who knows the most about a particular body is the one living within it.

Within photography, I came into contact with work by artists like Jaklin Romine, Megan Bent, Sara J. Winston, and Frances Bukovsky. I gained so much inspiration from this work, and it really gave me the steam and permission I needed to believe first-person ability-related representations were both critical and far more rare than ideal.

With a bit of visual footing, I moved forward. As a diagnosis management strategy, I am prescribed daily walks. I walk often in a forested, public park near my home in Indianapolis and I began to take my camera with me and photograph botanical forms during my walk.

I work very intuitively and started to photograph in the forest without any particular ambition for the images in mind. Strategically, I did want to photograph while walking to combine two necessary tasks in my life—these prescribed walks, as required by my doctor, and producing artistic work, as required by my job and spirit.

Being disabled and chronically ill, my time is structured toward preserving my life in a very specific, calculated way. I spend a lot of time on diagnosis management and care each day, stewarding my body, and then far more time dealing with the MIC, the medical industrial complex—spending my precious time engaged in tasks like the following: on the phone with healthcare providers, driving to appointments, engaged in appointments, on the phone with co-pay programs and my health insurance, trying to recover emotionally from the ups and downs of medical news and receiving surprise medical bills to the tune of thousands of dollars. 

Folding diagnosis management and making together, pairing 2 things I had to do, helped me feel more in control of my time and body. I also wanted to take a demand from and limitation of my diagnosed body, it’s need for these walks, and reframe it as a generative space by building photographing into the ritual practice of care rooted in these walks. 

As I reviewed the work I made in the park, I found myself most drawn to the blurry, indistinct backgrounds in the images and I began to lean into that. Again and again, as I looked through the photographs, paying closer attention to the blurred out components over the sharp ones the phrase, “That looks like me.” popped unbidden into my mind. Over time, the phrase grew into a conviction and I’ve found that for me, one of the most important parts of growing into an artist has been learning to take seriously and interrogate the weird, unexplainable truths my body-mind unbidden offers. 

As I investigated my identification with blurry botanical forms, I realized my photographs contained visual continuities with the medical imagining I encountered in my daily life. They looked like microscopic versions of medical evidence related to my diagnoses. 

They looked like x-ray enlargements, the thready-ness of bone, the haziness of tissue. 

Over the course of my life as a multiply-diagnosed person I have likely been medically- and diagnostically-imaged more than I have been photographed for memory’s sake. Put another way, I think there are probably more representations of me in the form of diagnostic evidence like x-rays than there are pictures of me traveling, with friends, at parties, etc. This isn’t to say I don’t go out, it is to underline that my experience as patient in medical settings is extensive and life-long.

I found tremendous power in creating my own weird version of diagnostic-ish imagery. I can’t underline that enough. After years as subject to medicalized imaging practices, for the first time I was the person making the x-ray, taking the scan, in effect pressing the shutter release from within my radiation-protected bubble rather than the individual lying prone and covered with lead on a cold plastic table while a device circled my body as it emitted a series of beeps.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 45

Visually, I think of the work as messy, a resolved but wild tangle that flickers between clarity and ambiguity. Born into a body that carries multiple non-visible diagnoses, my external appearance and my internal reality rarely coincide, especially within the world of the general public imagination. In other words, I don’t look like one of the most foundational aspects of who and what I am, I pass for fine but am pretty sick, and that tends to trip people up. I continued to think into that phrase, “That looks like me.” and realized the flora I trained my lens toward and then intentionally rendered out through the camera as disorienting, messy thickets punctuated by moments of clarity aligned with the illegibility foundational to my lived experience of non-visible illness.

On one hand, I can say my visible appearance misdirects, a symbol for lived experiences I have never known and will never know. My external body feels like a costume that doesn’t fit or a deception. On the other hand, common ideas of what disability looks like bear very little relationship to the hugely diverse ways in which disability actually presents. Though this, I become clear in flashes.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 97

Being read and socially positioned as non-disabled is, of course, at times a privilege but in some circumstances can be incredibly dangerous. My life has been put in danger many times because people assumed I wasn’t sick and ascribed abilities to me I didn’t have or expected performance from me I could not provide. In these moments of illegibility my choice is disclosure or danger.

Additionally, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve disclosed in an attempt to pull myself out of danger but have been denied (literally told things like “That’s not possible.”, “No, you don’t.”) because I don’t live up to someone else’s version of what a disabled person looks like. It’s this strange struggle to be seen and I found image-making processes that I could use to render visually these feelings. The anti-ableist teaching implications here are to two-fold: 1) trust what people tell you about their circumstances, even if they don’t/can’t provide medical documentation, 2) don’t forget that interior and exterior circumstances don’t always align

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 76

I started to think of the work as my body without my body, as non-traditional self-portraits. A piece of useful context here is that I grew up in rural New York, 2 miles outside of a village of about 650 people. I spent my first 18 years surrounded by far more plants and trees than people and, this isn’t a joke, my first best friends were the wild grasses and greenery around my parents’ house. That, within the context of this particular body of work, I’ve located botanical forms as a stand-in for my innermost physical realities and psychological experiences aligns with the deep flora connections I witnessed and cultivated within the rural culture I know best.

I don’t prescribe to the medical model idea of disability as a monolithically bad thing. Like many folks in the disability liberation community, I wouldn’t take a cure were I offered one, and I locate some of the aspects of my personality that have become the most valuable to me as originating in and inseparable from my lived experiences as a disabled person. My incurable body is my superpower and in spite of powerful, oftentimes-eugenic societal messages to the contrary it has never served me to believe I’m less-than, that there’s something “wrong with me” because of the diagnoses I manage. I wanted to make a representation of disability that contained moments of beauty to honor the power and value of disability as I know it.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 5

The last framing note I’ll share relative to this on-going work—many disabled, chronically ill people maintain a dossier of critical medical information. This dossier might include hundreds of pages of content like care information and instructions, health insurance documents (if one has health insurance), diagnoses, or emergency information. My dossier is a 3-inch, blue, 3-ring binder that I take with me to medical facilities to prove myself and direct my care, especially in emergency situations. Because the primary diagnosis I manage is rare and medical professionals are taught that common diagnoses are common (when you hear hooves think horses, not zebras) I often have to tell the people taking care of me what to do. Sometimes, I am the first person with OI a medical professional I’m working with has ever met in person.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 55

Taken together the images in this ongoing project operate as a slant dossier. They are my models of my lived experiences of rare, non-visible diagnoses. They are evidence of my internal genetic reality as I imagine it models of my social experiences of sickness in a deeply ableist world. Sometimes I wonder what would happen it I could take my pictures to a medical professional and be like, “Here, this is my version of what’s wrong with me. Diagnosis this.” Finally, I will just mention quickly, my idea right now is for the project to include, in its final form, 206 individual images, one for each bone in most adult human bodies.

Sarah Pfohl is a dis/abled, chronically ill artist and teacher, currently serving as Assistant Professor of Photography and Art Education Coordinator in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Indianapolis. You can read more about her and her work here.

Resource guide

Some very good books:

Rethinking disability: A disability studies approach to inclusive practices, Jan W. Valle and David J. Connor, 2019 (2nd ed.), Routledge (disability studies)

Any text by Eli Clare. A great starting point: Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure, Eli Clare, 2017, Duke University Press (disability justice)

Being Heumann: An unrepentant memoir of a disability rights activist, Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner, 2021, Beacon Press (disability rights)

Disability visibility: First-person stories from the twenty-first century, Alice Wong (Ed.), 2020, Knopf Doubleday (disability justice)

Academic ableism: Disability and higher education, Jay Timothy Dolmage, 2017, University of Michigan Press (disability studies)

Ability profiling and school failure: One child’s struggle to be seen as competent, Kathleen M. Collins, 2012 (2nd ed.), Routledge (disability studies)

Disability and difference in global contexts: Enabling a transformative body politic, Nirmala Erevelles, 2011, Palgrave Macmillian

What can a body do? How we meet the built world, Sara Hendren, 2020, Riverhead Books

Academic journal articles:

Collins, K. & Ferri, B. (2016). Literacy education and disability studies:

Reenvisioning struggling students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy,

60(1), 7-12.

Ferri, B. A. & Connor, D. J. (2005). Tools of exclusion: Race, disability, and

(re)segregated education. Teachers College Record, 107(3), 453-74.

Netflix: Special, Crip Camp

YouTube:

Mia Mingus, opening keynote, 2018 Disability Intersectionality Summit

Substack:

CripNews by Kevin Gotkin

Instructional strategy:

Universal Design for Learning

Assata Shakur: The making of a revolutionary woman

By Rachel Domond

Republished from Liberation School.

In commemorating Black August, we commemorate the struggle of those who have fought before us and faced violent repercussions from the state. We uplift the revolutionary history of the Black working class and its fundamental position in forging and leading the struggle for liberation for all. And we recommit ourselves to the struggle for Black Liberation and for the freedom of all political prisoners.

When I think of political prisoners, and when I think of those who have relentlessly committed themselves to Black Liberation, I always think of Assata Shakur.

From Assata’s story, we are able to learn what it means to be motivated by a deep love for the people and the struggle for freedom—and what it means to embody a determined and unbreakable spirit in the face of crackdowns and government repression designed to stifle and destroy the movement. Account after account from Assata’s comrades and fellow revolutionaries describe Assata as a light, a positive spirit who remained disciplined and committed to the struggle despite incredible hardships.

‘I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle’

Born JoAnne Byron, and married as JoAnne Chesimard, Assata Shakur changed her name in order to fully identify with the revolutionary struggles of her African heritage, and to honor her comrade Zayd Malik Shakur, who was murdered by state forces in 1971. She writes in her autobiography:

“I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means ‘She who struggles,’ Olugbala means ‘Love for the people,’ and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means “the thankful” [1].

Just as she was not born Assata, Shakur was not born a revolutionary. There is much to learn from her political development, and from the making of Assata into a revolutionary.

Born in Queens, NY, Assata Shakur was raised by her school teacher mother, her grandparents, and her aunt Evelyn A. Williams, a civil rights worker. From an early age, Assata’s family struggled financially, forcing her to run away frequently, often staying with strangers and working for short periods of time. After earning her GED, Assata went on to community college, and later The City College of New York, where she began her involvement in political activism. She participated in sit-ins, civil rights protests, and activism against the Vietnam War, first getting arrested with a hundred others after chaining herself to a building in protest of a lack of Black faculty and Black studies programs at the age of 20.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, conditions were ripe with struggle on all fronts—from the Stonewall Rebellion to the Women’s Rights Movement to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements—conditions to politicize. After college, Assata moved to Oakland, CA, where she joined the Black Panther Party, participating in defense programs for the Black community. Some years later, she returned to NYC to lead the BPP in Harlem, coordinating programs like the famous Free Breakfast for Children program.

Assata studied the movements of oppressed and colonized people across the globe, and understood the common thread, as she elaborates on in her autobiography: that to rid the world of exploitation meant we must rid the world of capitalism. As she wrote about her radicalization:

“There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it” [2].

Assata knew that the internalized narrative that we, as oppressed peoples, and particularly Black people, just had to “make it” or “climb the ladder” could not and cannot be the basis of our total liberation as a people, because “anytime you’re talking about a ladder, you’re talking about a top and a bottom, an upper class and a lower class, a rich class and a poor class,” and “as long as you’ve got a system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to wind up at the bottom” [3].

Assata knew we cannot elect or reform our way to freedom. She teaches us that in order to win our freedom, we would need to fight in the same way people across the globe have fought throughout history—through a socialist revolution. A revolution in which the power is held in the hands of the majority, the workers who create the wealth of society, in order to create a world in which the needs and well-being of the people are planned for and prioritized.

Assata Shakur: Guilty of fighting for freedom

COINTELPRO, the government counterintelligence program of the 60s and beyond, was created with the intention to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize” Black nationalist and Black liberation organizations and their leaders [4]. It is now absolutely clear from FBI documents that since at least 1971, the FBI, in cooperation with the state and local law enforcement, conducted a campaign to specifically criminalize, defame, harass and intimidate Assata Shakur. The U.S. government saw Assata’s dedication to the cause and leadership within the Black sovereignty movement as a threat to the internal security of the United States.

In 1971, Assata and her two comrades Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Shakur were pulled over by state troopers for a faulty tail light. The state troopers quickly escalated the situation, likely because they knew exactly who they were pulling over, drawing their guns and pointing. With her hands up, Assata was shot in the stomach. A shootout ensued, and the night ended with Assata’s comrade Zayd Shakur and one of the state troopers dead.

While forensic evidence backed up her account, Assata Shakur was sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison for the murder of a police officer, a crime she didn’t commit. Her trial and conviction were a result of the government conspiracy to destroy Black freedom fighters and the movement for liberation from capitalism. Along with her comrade Sundiata Acoli, Assata was thrown into prison—a men’s prison—where she faced, according to her attorney, the worst conditions that a woman prisoner had ever faced in the history of New Jersey. To this day, Acoli remains a political prisoner. The next time he’s eligible for parole he’ll be 94 years old.

Assata’s revolutionary spirit was not broken. She ultimately escaped from prison, and today lives in exile under the protection of socialist Cuba. The government crackdown on Assata Shakur and others who struggle for liberation makes clear one of the hardest lessons necessary for revolutionaries to learn: the revolutionary struggle must be scientific, rather than emotional. This does not mean decisions can’t be influenced by love or anger; Assata and others were guided by a deep love for the people. Rather, our struggle must be based on the objective conditions, rooted in analysis of the historical and contemporary contexts.

Assata taught me, Assata taught we

Assata learned that no one has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to their oppressor; she learned that our oppressors are never going to give us the education needed to overthrow them. She learned that socialism isn’t just a white man’s concoction, because she studied the works of African revolutionaries and the goals of African liberation movements, as well as those of other colonized places. She learned that socialism was not an evil ideal designed to strip us of our freedoms, as we are told; because Assata knew that under capitalism, we don’t have any freedoms but to starve, to be homeless, or to be thrown in jail for being poor. Assata teaches us all that socialism can and will be achieved when the oppressed peoples of the world join together in struggle for a future free of exploitation.

This Black August, we are challenged to honor, learn from and continue the work of those who have struggled before us. In order to win, as Assata taught us, we must understand the role of discipline, the role of organization, and the need to stay in the streets to demand and fight for the society we want to see. As Assata herself said

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains” [5].

References

[1] Shakur, Assata. (1987/2001).Assata: An autobiography(New York: Lawrence & Hill), 186.
[2] Ibid., 190. For other related excerpts in her autobiography curated by the blogInvent the Future, see Liberation Staff. (2016). Assata Shakur on capitalism, socialism and anti-communism,Liberation News,16 January. Availablehere.
[3] Shakur,Assata, 190.
[4] Flint, Taylor G. (2013). How the FBI conspired to destroy the Black Panther Party,In These Times, 04 December. Availablehere.
[5] Shakur,Assata, 52.

The Pseudo-Cyclical Time of Non-Events

Art by Mimmo Rotella (1960)

By Michael Templeton

A man walked into a local bank, right in the symbolic center of the city itself, and randomly opened fire on anyone he saw in the bank. He killed three people. This was one of numerous events just like it around the United States. Random shootings occur with such frequency that they pass with barely a notice. People react with a modicum of shock. Public officials make their pronouncements of sympathy and outrage. By now, there are internet memes mocking the obligatory “thoughts and prayers” offered by political leaders. Then there are symbolic calls for gun legislation. The defenders of the second amendment push back. All the same bullshit gets exchanged. It is a dull round that disappears from memory almost as soon as it happens.

Soon after this happened, everything went back to normal. The events of the day consisted of local crimes, a nod to the “important events of the nation,” and sports and weather. After devoting hours of airtime to the event, images of the event went to their websites where it stayed for months. Scroll through the day’s events and at the bottom of the page you find a replay of the horrible shooting. The event simultaneously disappears and remains suspended in perpetual image-time. The event of the horrible shooting faded quickly, but the images of the event remained suspended in cyber-time—remained suspended in a space that has no space and a time that is disconnected from the passing of real human time. The usual vapid feel-good stories of children who survive cancer and local churches doing great things for the community, etc. But the fact is, people forgot about the shooting. And yet, images of the shooting persisted on social media for weeks. The event was instantly superseded by the rush of other events, and the relative significance of events did not matter. Or rather, the significance of events was and is weighted according to criteria which may or may not have anything to do with the humane value of events or the impact events may have on everyday life. The event of the shooting simply got washed away in the flood of new events. However, the images persist online and on various other electronic media.

The time of events is fleeting. The time in which individuals can engage images of the event is different. There are two forms of time: the synchronic time of the image which remains constant, and diachronic time of everyday life which changes from day to day—even moment to moment. The synchronic time of the image is the time available for exchange; diachronic time belongs to individuals and has no exchange value. Yet, in both cases, the events are mediated by images. There is image-time in the present, and there is perpetual, or cyclical image-time. The immediacy of the event is unknowable except for a few people. Participation and consumption of images of the event unfolds in two different strata of time.

Shootings like this occur with regularity in the United States, and the fallout is precisely the same in just about every case. There is the event, the momentary media signification of the event—this includes the pollical stage-show, and then instant forgetting except for the images of the event which replay forever. Any and all knowledge of events is mediated by images. Symbolic participation happens via images. Immediacy is instantaneously overtaken and subsumed by mediation, and the force of events are instantaneously overtaken by the dislocated isolation of time that has no duration. Situating a mediated presence into the past of real events, individuals remove themselves from actual life. Mediation and consumption of the image become supplements to lived experience. Hashtags serve to insinuate words into online mediated participation and remove any and all substance. “#grief” takes the place of grief as a signifier for the complex set of lived emotions which constitute grief. Life becomes a system of empty signifiers in the no-time of mediated images of things which no longer exist.

Our modern experience of time is one in which everything takes place on an abstract plane of continuous play. The time of immediate events is immediately lost. Even those who lived the experience and horror of a random shooting are forgotten. The time of abstraction in the form of endless images remains eternal. The only thing which has meaning is the eternal time of the images of events. Like the abstract space of the highway, we live in the abstract time of the stream of images. We are no longer even contained by the images of a day; we now participate in an eternity of images in cyber-time where the images of the events can and do play on forever. Since few of us will ever experience the horror of a random shooting, but everyone needs to know that they are participants in such events. The masses are able to insinuate themselves into the spectaculum of the events via consumption of the images. We are now able to transform consumption into an interactive pseudo-experience with the use of hashtags on social media. The shooting in Cincinnati led to #cincinnatistrong. Sympathy and support are provided by proxy with the use of the hashtag. When others use or search the hashtag, those who used it will be recognized via their images as participants in the horrifying event. The event exists in image-time and individual participation in the event is created through the hashtag and places individual images into the image-time of the event. The hashtag guarantees that once we insert our own image-participation, it will become part of the grand flow of other image-participations.

At the same time, the insertion of signifiers into the stream of images guarantees eternal separation from actual events. I gain access to the stream of images which signify the event, and I am able to remove myself to a space of non-existence. I do not even need to be a real person in order to insinuate my participation in the stream of images which constitute my image-participation. “I” exist in the eternal time of separation and isolation. The mediation of the consumable of event forecloses any real contact between real people. Participation by proxy in the image-time of the event is paid for with complete isolation in the world of physical lived experience. Image-time is the time of the commodity. Images are commodities exchanged endlessly in the market of commodities. This is a time outside of time. It unfolds without regard for everyday life. Image-time takes place in the heaven of the commodity where exchange follows the cyclical time of eternity. Everything always comes back to where it was. Like the cyclical time of the pre-modern world in which time was nothing more than the endless cycles of nature and God, the time of commodities and the time of the image endlessly comes back to an eternal present tense so that each new day offers the same exchangeable image of the event.

This all comes to the schiz between human time, the time that is lived by bodies in the world, and pseudo-cyclical time, time-as-commodity. Lived time, the time of everyday life, has no value, has no meaning unless it is entered into the ledgers of exchange. The time of people’s lives is meaningless until it takes on the false form of objectification in spectacular form. Experience must be projected onto the screen of the spectacle in order to take on meaning and value. Time only has meaning and value to the extent that time has exchange value, to be precise. There is no time unless it can be exchangeable for either more time or something else of value. What I do is meaningless and insignificant-- remains unsignified-- except insofar as that time enters into the system of exchange as a commodity like all other commodities. Time measured by a clock which is calibrated against all other clocks, churning out regulated blocks of time each of which carries a specific value measured against other units of value, forever amen—this is the only time that is substantial. The great irony is that this “substantial” time is nothing but abstraction. The time of living bodies is material. It cannot be measured against any other standard other than itself. Time-as-commodity can be measured, quantified, and valued. It has no substance, but it is all that can be known. Time-as-commodity takes on the appearance of cyclical time because it is experienced as perpetually renewing itself with every new day the market finds value in the representations of time. It is pseudo-cyclical time to the extent that it “is in fact merely the consumable disguise of the time-as-commodity of the production system, and it exhibits the essential traits of time: homogeneous exchangeable units, and the suppression of any qualitative dimension” (Debord, 110). While the time of image-participation unfolds in the seemingly infinite duration of cyclical time, it is in fact discreetly measured units of time. The perception of a cyclical or eternal presence of the representation of events persists only as long as replaying these events constitutes marketable, consumable, and profitable units of time. We who experience this pseudo-cyclical time forfeit our lived experience in favor of participation in image-time, the time of the image which exists in pseudo-cyclical time. Isolation and separation become the fate of individuals as we hand over our experience to image-participation in pseudo-cyclical time. In the end, our failure to commit to time as commodity will de-value representations. At which point, representations of events and our vicarious position as participants will dissolve. We and the event will fade back into the anonymity of the unsignified, unknowable, and irrelevant ephemera.

As the time of lived experience fades into the illegible under the eternal time of time-as-commodity, the time marked by image-participation, lived experience becomes another commodity. Our real lived experience pales in comparison to the experience we gain by those experiences prescribed and offered by the spectacle. Waiting for experiences to be signified by the generators of images of experience, we simply find our external space of experience and insinuate ourselves into it. We become apparitions taking possession of the outward forms of experience, and lived experience is devalued and denatured:

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, 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. It imposes there a radical schism between the insignificance of everyday life, called “private”, where nothing happens, and the transcendence of a history frozen in a sphere called “public”, to which no one has access. (Theory of the Bloom, 48)

Everyday life, private life—this is where nothing ever happens because “real” experience cannot be known or understood outside the performances constructed by the spectacle. Image time is constructed according to algorithms, SEO analysis, “hits” on social media accounts—these are the metrics of experience, and we are left behind in the day to day which takes place in a void. Time is an abstract formal eternity in the infinite space of the image-sphere.

Lived experience takes its meaning from an other scene, as it were. Something of an unconscious provide meaning for lived experience, but this unconscious is not within individual minds. It is now the projection of experience into the spectacular realm of image-time, or pseudo-cyclical time. The world of images is not subject to the passage of time. All images are simultaneous. All are old and new at the same time. Freud said that the unconscious has no time; it is always present, and every feature of the unconscious is always present. Our present world projects this into the heaven of images, and our own inner life and inner world withers from inanity. Everyday life is now the impoverished and banal content which exists to reveal the latent content of images. What is my life if I do not have followers on Instagram? And the Real of my life is of no consequence in comparison to the images which stand in for me. Everyday life is now an illusion.

Even as an event as horrifying as a mass shooting, a mass shooting at school, even—nothing can merit the status of a real event until it has been evacuated of its interior substance and rendered as a timeless event in the world of images, in the world that is the spectacle. My individual forgetting of the event, anyone’s individual forgetting of the event is perfectly acceptable because there is an external form of the internal memory in the form of image-time which remembers for us in the manner of a prayer wheel. We do not need to send thoughts and prayers, the heaven of images is perpetually sending thoughts and prayers for us.

The medieval Great Chain of Being sutured everyone to a specific place in the cosmos. At the center and circumference of everything, there was God. The orders of being descended from heaven to earth and the King occupied the place of God’s vice-regent in this fallen world which included the passage of time. At the level of the individual, nothing mattered because one’s place was ordained and guaranteed by this divine order. The passage of time was marked by the passage of the seasons and the days. What happened on one day was only distinguishable from what happened on another day to the extent that the events were either present or past. There was no causality to events because causality was in the hands of God. The cycles of time were performed in the holy offices of the Church and at local festivals which marked the passing of one season to the next. But all time would cycle back to the same thing. Time was cyclical. Knowledge of the passing of time was projected outward onto the heavens which directed the passing of time.

In the pseudo-cyclical time of the spectacle, time once again belongs elsewhere. The passing of time and the significance of time are marked by spectacular performances. The cycle is sustained in the manner of pre-modern cyclical time by spectacular performances which mark the passing of events. But pseudo-cyclical time, the time of images, lacks the guarantee of God and the Great Chain of Being. Its eternal status is sustained by the fact that it is eternally consumable. Every image is just as consumable as every other image and in precisely the same way. You can download Bach’s St. John Passion as easily as you can download a digital cum shot. So it is that the consumable images of the shooting at the bank take on the eternal cycle of cyclical time. All mass shootings take on this cyclical disguise, when in fact they are nothing more than consumable images generated for the sole purpose of being consumed. As we consume them, our sense that we are participating in the Great Chain of Modern Events allows us to extract ourselves from real events and remain in our isolated pockets of emptiness. Like the medieval serfs whose lives were immaterial non-events in pre-modern culture, we have taken an analogous position of insignificant peasants under the heaven of image-time.

As our individual relations to actual events are overtaken by our solitary relations to the images of events, so our relations to each other have kept pace. The singular events of our lives are made real to the extent that they are linked to the events in image-time. Everyone who posted a photograph, a quotation from a great thinker, a prayer, a remembrance, etc. who also linked these things with the hashtag #cincinnatistrong became participants in the series of images which mark the event of the shooting. Anyone who did not use the hashtag remained completely isolated. And yet, the linkages of the hashtag are only made manifest to the extent that they are linked in image-time. The isolation of individual participants remains, and the hollowness of the sentiments becomes more pronounced as these words and images are pulled into the swirl of spectacular time and the logic of the spectacle. The endlessly exchangeable status of images and image-participation is ultimately subject to the same logic as any other image or any other commodity. Professions of faith, sympathy, and commitment rise into the ether of the image. A prayer is an image of a prayer is an image and only an image: a thing of nothing. Any images which may have taken on a life beyond the image-time of the event took its value entirely from its status as an object of exchange. The use-value of the prayer, if there is such a thing, is rendered ephemeral at best in its becoming a form of exchange-value. Individuals, in the beginning and the end, remains isolated monads delinked from the validity and reality of events and each other. The purported bond of the hashtag serves only to distance and isolate. Individual monads participate in isolation together.

The net result of the loss of real experience is the fission between individuals which is an overall dissolution of community. In the grand suburban existence that is contemporary America, a new metropolitan existence has come to define life. As experience is given over to the formal display of experience in the heaven of pseudo-cyclical time, the inevitable isolation among individuals takes on the form of experience rather than experience. The modern metropolis is a form without substance and experience consists of the images of substance without form. “At which point the loss of experience and the loss of community are one and the same” (The Bloom, 52). We live the supplement of life in the image. The throbbing metropolis is the dystopic non-place of empty space and timeless time: “In the metropolis, man purely undertakes the trial of his negative condition. Finitude, solitude and display, which are the three fundamental coordinates of that condition, weave the decor of the existence of each within the grand village. Not the fixed decor, but the moving decor, the combinational decor of the grand village, for which everybody endures the icy stench of their non-places” (The Bloom, 50). Image-time, pseudo-cyclical time, the non-space of the interstate—all of this serves the sprawling non-place of the modern metropolis where nothing is, where isolation offset by meaningless display define the emptiness of everyday life.

With this isolation and emptiness comes the outward display of false commitment and performances of substance. The more lived life becomes devoid of anything which could be construed as intrinsically meaningful, the more the performance of values and commitments becomes important. It is only the mass of isolated individuals living in self-imposed exile of unwilling anonymity which partakes of the empty image-participation which serves only to further their isolation. The image takes over for life as it is actually lived, and everyday life is devalued and rendered meaningless:

Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of the images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. (Debord, 12)

Images become the lie which stands in for real lived life, and the even the lie begins to believe itself. The reality of everyday life is supplanted by the image lodged in pseudo-cyclical time. In this way, the metropolis, or the suburban world in the United States, becomes the empty space of unreality where no meaningful connection can be established between individuals because the grid on which meaning and understanding can be established has been projected from the ground of life onto the non-life of the spectacle. Space and time no longer exist in the world of living individuals. Space and time are in the domain of images and commodity exchange. A projection of interior life which is in fact a performance of a pre-scripted form of life effectively negates interior life. The hashtags which constitute image-participation in the spectacular event of a mass shooting are the forms of belief which stand for an overall lack of belief. This is to say that individuals do not and cannot sustain real belief in anything like sympathy, grief, or even faith since these things have been evacuated of their content and replaced with images of sympathy, grief, and faith. Real people in the world cannot sustain these things in everyday life because everyday life has no content. Content is projected out into the formless spectacle, and the forms of life left to individuals have become devoid of content. It is under the dominance of image-time and the non-space created by the interstate that we arrive at our current state of contemporary life in the suburban metropolis where the logic of the Bloom takes shape:

The Bloom cannot take part in the world in an internal way.  It never enters there except in the exception of itself.  That is why it presents such a singular tendancy towards distraction, deja-vu, cliche, and above all, an atrophie of the memory which confines it inside an eternal present.  And that is why it is so exclusively sensitive to music, which alone can offer it abstract sensations -- it would here be necessary to evoke velocity and “friction coefficient”, which are also bloomesque pleasures, but this time it is abstraction itself which appears to them as sensation. (The Theory of the Bloom, 54)

It is only a people devoid of faith who feel the need to declare their faith with grotesque gestures and monuments. Thoughts and prayers for the victims of random shootings come from a population whose thoughts come in prescribed images and for whom prayers are histrionic performances of a total lack of faith. There are no more compelling atheists than those who do tricks in the service of faith. Creation theme parks, grotesque statues of Jesus Christ, religion.com, and professional Christians abound in this metropolis of emptiness. In this suburban metropolis devoid of substance where all that remains is the form of life, a diabolical inversion of belief takes the place of belief. Even as the heartfelt declarations of horror and sympathy poured out for the victims of the mass shooting, the individuals who authored these sentiments betray the fact that they no longer have access to the very conditions on which such sentiments can be formed. Isolation and contempt for everyone else are the only real attributes of the suburban metropolis.

He who cannot do anything but play with life needs the gesture, so that his life may become more real than a game adjustable in all directions.  In the world of merchandise, which is the world of generalized reversibility, where all things blend together and transform into one another, where everything is only ambiguity, transition, ephemerality and blending, only the gesture settles once and for all.  In the flash of its necessary brutality it cuts out the “after” that is insoluble in its “before”, which the ONE will regretfully have to recognize as definitive.

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, creative non-fiction, and poetry published in small independent publications. He currently works as a freelance writer providing articles for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.

References

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

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

COVID-19 and the Global Pandemic of Anti-Blackness

By Ewuare X. Osayande

Originally published at the author’s website.

The initial word was that Black folks couldn’t catch it. Rumors began spreading that Black people were immune to the virus. But what we have learned and continue to learn with each passing day as the global death toll rises is that Black life is quite susceptible to this virus. But not in a way that makes sense biologically. Black people are not genetically predisposed to this novel coronavirus. What we are is generationally predisposed to an anti-Black discrimination that has weakened our communal immune system leaving each of us vulnerable to this virus in ways people in other communities are not.

Wherever Black people are in this world, we exist mostly on the social margins, isolated and disproportionately impacted by policies and social practices rooted in notions of white supremacy that undermine our collective capacity for health, wealth and safety. Whether on the continent of Africa or throughout the Black Diaspora, our health and safety have been severely hampered by a global social order that has rested upon a racialized ranking that necessitates Black existence be fixed at its bottom to enable and justify whiteness to exist at its apex. Since the 1500s, this arrangement has had deadly implications for Black people. As the bodies pile in over-crowded morgues, hospital rooms and rented trailers in the US and in all the places where Black people live, this virus is exposing the pillars of that structure in ways that are as horrific as when European slave ships set sail from Africa to the Americas.

For the first month or so most of the news coverage in the United States addressed the issue without consideration of race. This was touted as a virus that was wreaking havoc on all segments of the population equally. Then Milwaukee happened. The first casualties in that predominantly white working-class city were all Black men. And when more Black people continued to die, the community there began to ask questions that forced a narrative change. Initial reports claimed that the upsurge in the Black community was due to Black people not heeding the warnings and precautions. Then as activists began to call out the contradictions in the news coverage, more honest reports emerged identifying racial disparities in all areas of life as the true underlying conditions that account for the sky rocketing rates of infection and death in Black communities.

Yet, scant attention had been paid to the impact that generations of discrimination in health care, housing, education, employment — the fundamental pillars of the society — has had on Black people’s overall health. Even less attention has been given to the need for strategies to redress the underlying social and economic constraints that continue to suffocate the life of Black possibilities and opportunity. That Black people in Flint are forced to tackle this pandemic without clean water is a telling indictment. Black communities have already been dealing with pandemic-like concerns for decades in the US. And as much as we would want to believe that money solves all problems, this virus is showing us that wealth or its lack is not much of a deciding factor.

Less than a week after Milwaukee, officials in the wealthiest predominantly Black county in the country, Prince George’s County in Maryland, were rushing to meet the surge in expected hospitalizations as a result of the virus spread. A few days later, the county had amassed the largest concentration of positive cases in the state.

These disparate conditions facing African Americans are further compounded by the everyday racism that puts Black life at risk. Despite the directives from all levels of government for every person to cover their nose and mouth when in public, video footage of Black people being accosted and harassed by police are seen with a regularity that is beyond baffling. Some show Black persons escorted out of grocery stores under claims of looking suspicious. In the videos we see them being followed by police as they exit stores as white customers enter wearing the exact same masks on their faces. The very racism that is responsible for the weakened immune systems of Black people due to stress and anxiety have not shown any signs of reprieve in this time of extreme grieving.

For most Black people, there is no sanctuary. There is no salvage from the turmoil of being turned away at the very places established to provide care. Each week new stories emerge on social media and national news outlets of Black people dying just days after being denied admission at hospitals despite showing symptoms of the virus.

At the time of this writing, the Black mortality rate from this Corona-virus is more than twice that of Latinos and Asians and almost three times the rate of white mortality in the US. According to the APM Research Lab, “in some places, the multiple between Black and White mortality rates greatly exceeds the 2.6 overall figure that we’ve constructed from all available data for the nation. In Kansas and Wisconsin, Black residents are 7 times more likely to die than White residents. In Washington D.C., the rate among Blacks is 6 times higher than Whites, while in Michigan and Missouri, it is 5 times greater. In Arkansas, Illinois, Louisiana, New York State, Oregon and South Carolina, Blacks are 3–4 times more likely to die of the virus than Whites.” This is incomprehensible.

African-Americans represent approximately 13 percent of the US population. In the UK, the Black population is less than 5 percent, yet the Black mortality rate from the coronavirus is running at more than three times the rate of whites there, far outdistancing other minority and immigrant groups in the process. The London-based Institute of Fiscal Studies has released a study that attempts to get at an explanation for these stark disparities. What the researchers are clear on is that Black workers in Britain are over-represented in “key worker roles,” what here in the US would be considered essential and front-line workers. What these studies have yet to get clear on is how anti-black racism, itself, is a key factor.

Britain’s own prime minister, Boris Johnson, whom many consider a Trump knock-off, recently recovered from a COVID-19 infection that had him on life-support. Yet, even his near-death experience has not led to the creation of a plan for the most impacted communities. In the land that not too long ago tried to remove its Black citizens, British leaders are lax in their concern for Black life.

Back here in the states, all concern for Black life has been overlooked as attention has been focused on the spectacle of armed white militias and white evangelicals storming Democratically-run state capitols demanding that their governors reopen the economy. Trump, for his part, calls these noose-wielding, swastika wearing, confederate flag waving Americans “very good people” and encourages governors to “give a little.” Yet Trump has not given much of any support to communities ransacked by this virus. In fact, the governor of Maryland has reportedly put the national guard on watch of essential PPE stockpiles to block Trump’s efforts at intercepting state supply. Re-opening state economies and public facilities en masse right now would amount to a national death sentence for Black America.

That death sentence has already been enacted unofficially in Brazil. In the country with the highest population of Black people in the diaspora, Black people are dying at rates that dwarf all other communities there. First brought to the country by the wealthy returning to major cities where Black people work in menial jobs and as house servants, the virus has now spread into the over-crowded favelas where residents live without running water and proper sanitation.

In many ways, the Brazilian government mirrors that of the US response. Both nations are led by capitalists who came to power with claims to clean up government corruption with campaigns mired in rightwing conservative rhetoric with winks to white nationalists and militia groups. Both nations have class-based economies that keep Black and Brown workers locked in poverty, discrimination, intimidation and violence, where police regularly engage in flagrant acts of brutality, assault and abuse. None of this coincidence. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro flaunt their friendship before the world. Their strategic alliance as political leaders are linked in a whiteness that revels in anti-black violence that is both rhetorical and real. Both men have dismissed the guidance of medical experts on how to reduce the spread in their respective countries. Touting a tough-guy image reminiscent of Mussolini, Bolsonaro has gone as far as making impromptu appearances in densely populated areas as public acts of disregard of the pandemic. But this is not about lack of understanding or ignorance. Both leaders were receiving briefs months before the virus’ arrival on their respective shores. These are malicious acts representative of a political class that seeks to coddle a Christian evangelical base that has long kept social distance from science as they await the return of their white savior. For them, this pandemic is prophecy fulfilled.

Yet, even science has not been the friend of Black people during this pandemic. At the height of the crisis, when governments were desperate to find potential cures, two French “medical experts” went on live TV with one, Dr. Jean-Paul Mira (who heads up an intensive care unit in a Paris hospital), saying, “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?” Although this was met with some criticism from various sectors, the fact that two esteemed doctors would casually call for experimenting on a population of people is more than revolting. It speaks to the kind of anti-blackness that has plagued African populations since France colonized most of the continent. It speaks to a world that is willing to promote experts and leaders willing to push the envelope of acceptable parameters of denigration of Black lives. It shows us how little progress has been made since the 1921 publication of René Maran’s classic anti-colonial novel, Batouala, in which the lead character says, “We are nothing but flesh out of which taxes may be ground. … The white men are killing us slowly.”

But perhaps nothing shows the inhumane levels of anti-blackness in this time of COVID-19 than the experiences of Africans in China.

Despite being the target of Trump’s racist campaigns that seek to deflect blame for his abysmal failures to curtail this virus’ impact onto the Chinese government, China has concocted its own racist narrative which has targeted Africans throughout China. Video footage of Africans kicked out of their places of residence onto the streets without any means of support from local or national agencies sent shock-waves of anger throughout Africa. In Guangzhou there have been cases of Africans having their passports taken by police further jeopardizing their safety. Conditions deteriorated so terribly that rumors began to spread of African officials planning to send planes to return their countrymen and women back home.

The African presence in China is a direct result of the strategic inroads the Chinese government has made with African countries such as Kenya and Nigeria. Since becoming Africa’s largest trade partner more than a decade ago, China has invested billions in infrastructure development with an emphasis on port and railroad construction. Yet, what is clear is that these investments will do little to change the excessive class-stratification and extreme levels of income disparity that exist throughout Africa.

These recent events suggest a pattern of abuse all too familiar to African workers and migrants in search of a financial foothold in a global economy predicated on an exploitation that disregards their humanity to the point of death. The world may have shuttered when Trump compared countries in African to excrement, but shitty is a most accurate term to describe the response around the world to the Black COVID-19 mortality rate.

At the time of this writing, more Black people have now died in the US from this coronavirus than were lynched during segregation. Never in a white supremacist’s wildest dreams could they have imagined a plague that would wipe out thousands of Black lives in a matter of a couple of months. When the germs clear and the air is breathable again without fear, this moment in human history will be marked by the toll it has taken on Black life. It will reveal a turbulent world economic order crumbling on the backs of an essential Black labor pool kept at subsistence levels of health with no sufficient safeguards in place. Will all that may be uncertain and unknowable about our world right now, one thing is for sure — the pandemic of anti-blackness, its symptoms and effects, will remain long after the coronavirus COVID-19 has come and gone.

Ewuare X. Osayande is a writer and activist. The author of several books, his latest is a collection of poetry entitled Black Phoenix Uprising. Learn more about his work at Osayande.org.

Still Fighting for Korea’s Liberation: An Interview with Ahn Hak-sop

By Derek R. Ford

Editor’s Note: Ahn Hak-sop was an officer in the Korean People’s Army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) during the Korean War. In 1952, he was captured by the United States and its proxy forces while on his way to a meeting in the southern part of Korea. He served decades as an unconverted political prisoner before finally winning release in 1995. Today, he is still active as a peace and reunification activist in the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea). Liberation School interviewed Mr. Ahn in November 2019 at a peace church in the Civilian Control Zone just south of the 38th parallel that divides the Korean peninsula. This interview was conducted by Derek Ford, Hampton Institute’s Education Dept chair, for Liberation School.

Thank you so much for speaking with us today, Mr. Ahn. It’s wonderful to see you again. To begin, can you tell us about how you got involved with the Korean struggle for peace, independence, and reunification?

My birth town is Ganghwa Island. I was born in a poor household, in the era of Japanese imperialism. My family was Confuscianist. I went to elementary school and was taught an imperialist education. They didn’t teach me that Korea was a colony. I found that out in second grade. Through my experiences in the imperialist education, I found out that Korea was not independent, and since that time the feeling of anti-imperialism grew in my mind. At the time of liberation from Japanese imperialism, I was in hiding because of anti-imperialist activism, and that is where I met the resistance forces. On the afternoon of August 15, I knew that I was liberated from Japanese imperialism.

What was your understanding of US imperialism at that time?

At first, I thought the US Army was a liberation army. But soon General MacArthur referred to the US as an occupying army. There was no word of liberation, only occupation; so I was suspicious, but only partly so. Although I was young, the whole nation was full with division between the rule of the US and Soviets. In September of 1945, Koreans went out to greet the US Army, but the US Army shot at them. After the Moscow Committee, the US Army said explicitly that they were there to block the Soviet Union. But in 1948, the Soviet Union withdrew all of their troops. But the US Army didn’t withdraw.

In almost every town, there was a People’s Committee for self-rule, but the US Army crushed the People’s Committees with tanks and soldiers. There was a lot of resistance and revolt at that time.

On August 8, 1947, when I was returning home with a colleague from a meeting to prepare a celebration for the liberation, someone shot at us, and my colleague was wounded and arrested. I survived and ran away and went underground to Kaesong, which was in the northern part of the peninsula, although there was no 38th parallel at that time. While I was in Kaesong, I went to engineering school. The South Korean police went to school to arrest me, but the school protected me.

What happened after that, during the war?

During the war, I enlisted in the Korean People’s Army, but the school delayed my admittance. I was sick, and so I wasn’t able to fight when I finally joined. I served in intelligence gathering. The KPA sent me to the South in 1952 as an intelligence officer, where I was arrested. In early April of 1952, I was going to a meeting of the Workers’ Party in the district of Kangwondo. I was observed on my way there and arrested.

While I was in jail, I had a lot of obstacles to overcome. There was spying and torture for 42 years. There was pressure to convert from Juche ideology into capitalism beginning in 1956.

First they tried to make theoretical arguments against the DPRK. But they couldn’t defend their beliefs to me. After that, they tried to bribe me with property. After that, there was torture. There is a small place in the jail, and they would throw water in the room in the winter. They take all of your clothes and bedding. I tried to survive. So I ran and exercised to keep my body warm. But I couldn’t last forever. I became unconscious, and they dragged my body out to keep me alive. There were other forms of torture. I could overcome all of this. What was most painful was when the police brought my family, my mother and brother to the prison.

When and how were you finally released?

On August 15, 1995 I was released from jail. They didn’t want to do it, but they had to release me because of the Geneva Convention. They should have released me in 1953. At that time, I should have been sent to the DPRK, but the US and South Korea didn’t do that. They said I was a spy, and so I didn’t fall under the convention, which they said only applied to battleground soldiers, not information operatives.

I tried to litigate for many years, and the army and prison did everything they could do to block the law. I couldn’t send any letters or meet with anyone. I finally got one letter out, however, and human rights lawyers took up my case. The government was forced to justify my detention, and there was no justification. They had to release me.

Two other prisoners came out of jail with me. Two of them went to the DPRK in 2000 after the June 15 Declaration. Those comrades went to the North because they thought that shortly there would be free movement between the two states. They went to the North to study and thought they would come back later.

Why did you stay in the South?

I remained in the South by my own choice. There are three reasons. First, I thought it was a temporary situation. Second, there were young progressive people here in the South, and they asked me to stay. They said, “If the unconverted prisoners go the North, we will lose the center of the struggle.” It became very important for me to stay. The third reason is that Korea is now divided, and the US occupies the southern part. We have to keep struggling here for the withdrawal of US army, the peace treaty, and peaceful reunification. I decided to stay here to fight for these goals. In 1952, I came here to liberate the southern half of the peninsula, and I need to stay here and continue that struggle.

What has your life been like since release?

The government required me to have one guaranteed supervisor when I was released, so if there was any problem with me they could hold them accountable. I tore up the paper and said, “I will not give you a hostage.”

Still, there are security police who follow me. Whenever there is a problem with the North and South, they raid my house and stand guard outside my property. One time at a demonstration, conservative forces attacked me. The police did nothing to protect me.

I’d like to explain more about the Security Surveillance Act, which mandates that police watch former political prisoners. Every week or every other week, the police come to my house and ask about my activities, who has visited my house, and so on. Once every other month I need to report to them about what I did, who I met, and who visited me. Every two years I need to go to court. However, I don’t report to them or go to court. That is their law, and it’s unjust.

It’s not easy to continue fighting this law. I can’t leave the country. I can’t visit my hometown. But I’ve lived my whole life for reunification and anti-imperialism, and I’d like to live the rest of my life for that.

Sanctioning Syria

By Chris Ray

This was originally published at Monthly Review.

The United Nations was willing to pay for doors, windows and electrical wiring in Alaa Dahood’s apartment but not for repairs to her living room wall torn open by a mortar strike. That was deemed to be ‘reconstruction’—an aid category forbidden in Syria. “My mother and I used our savings to fix the wall ourselves,” Alaa, a primary school English teacher, told me.

Alaa lives with her widowed mother Walaa in Saif al-Dawla, a suburb of Aleppo that became a frontline between government troops and opposition forces in 2012. After their low-rise housing block came under sniper fire the family fled to a government-controlled sector of the city and, later, to the relative safety of Damascus.

“The stress was too much for my father; he was a nervous man and he died from a heart attack in 2013. My mother and I came home in 2017, when Aleppo was safe,” Alaa said as she served spiced coffee in the living room of her modest two-bedroom home.

More than 521,000 war-displaced Aleppans had returned home by the end of 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported. Very few found their properties undamaged. However, in all of Syria, only 42,000 residents got UN ‘rehabilitation’ aid—the assistance category that covered Alaa’s repairs. UN help was largely restricted to short-term emergency relief—the only aid category acceptable to major UN donors who oppose the continued rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Alaa got no help with her wall but her UN-financed windows are at least made of glass. In Hanano, a suburb of eastern Aleppo previously under rebel control, a young security guard, Mohamed, showed me his family apartment, which overlooks a football field crammed with the skeletons of burned-out buses and cars. Mohamed installed windows made of plastic sheeting last winter, when the temperature fell below freezing. He got the plastic in a UN-supplied Do-It-Yourself ‘shelter kit’ that included pinewood for window frames, fiberboard for doors, expansion foam, nails and tools.

“Plastic is no good for winter but it is better than nothing,” said Mohamed, who did not want his last name published. Despite a severe fuel shortage he managed to buy enough heating oil to warm the bedroom of his frail 13-year-old sister, Asma, for a couple of hours every night. Mohamed has replaced plastic with glass in one window and is putting aside money to do the rest.

Shelter kits come under the heading of short-term emergency aid. The UNHCR says the kits covered about 92,000 Syrians in 2018—more than twice the number who benefited from home rehabilitation. The UN values shelter kits at around US$500 but recipients often sell them for much less or burn the wood for fuel, according to Syrian agencies that implement internationally-funded programs.

One of the UN’s biggest Syrian partners, the Greek Orthodox aid agency Gopa-Derd, refuses to distribute the kits. “We won’t be a part of putting plastic sheets over window frames where there should be glass. Plastic sheets are not going to fix a hole in a wall or keep a family warm in winter,” said Sara Savva, Gopa-Derd’s deputy director.

Another UN partner, the Syria Trust for Development, which managed Alaa’s repairs, wants shelter kit money redirected to rehabilitation. “We did 1000 shelter kits in 2017 then decided no more. They are a waste of time and resources,” said the Trust’s Aleppo director, Jean Maghamez. He added, however, that the Trust’s rehabilitation program covered only 200 Aleppo apartments in 2019 due to UN funding cuts.

A March 2019 joint statement by the governments of the  U.S., UK, France and Germany reaffirmed their opposition to any reconstruction assistance in Syria until “a credible, substantive, and genuine political process is irreversibly underway.” The UN’s position was set out in a 2018 internal directive from its Office of Political Affairs, then headed by a  U.S. career diplomat, Jeffrey Feltman. “Only once there is a genuine and inclusive political transition negotiated by the parties, would the UN be ready to facilitate reconstruction,” it said.

A negotiated settlement remains distant, however. A UN-backed peace plan drawn up in 2012 is moribund. Separate talks overseen by Assad’s patrons Russia and Iran together with Turkey, which supports elements of the jihadist opposition have also made little progress.

Use of UN funds to rebuild the wall of Alaa Dahood’s apartment would have risked crossing what UN staff in Syria refer to as a “red line” between rehabilitation and reconstruction. Neither term is clearly defined but the line is zealously policed. UN staff in Damascus told me they frequently field questions from governments, other UN donors and “human rights monitors” alert to any infringement of the reconstruction ban.

A June report by New York-based Human Rights Watch wagged a disapproving finger at the UN Development Program (UNDP), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Oxfam and others for having rebuilt water sanitation networks and healthcare facilities in government-held Syria. Any project aimed at “rebuilding and sustainable restoration of infrastructure, services, housing, facilities, and livelihoods can carry risks of entanglement in serious human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch claimed.

To avoid breaching the reconstruction ban, the Syria Trust generally will not rebuild any apartment wall with a hole bigger than two square meters, its lead engineer in Aleppo, Ragheb Al Mudarres, told me. Gopa-Derd wants rehabilitation broadly interpreted to allow homes to be made safe for occupation. “If there is a hole in the wall we block it, if water drips from the ceiling we fix it, if there is no door or windows we install them. Some donors consider this to be reconstruction—we don’t,” Sara Savva said.

UN employees say they follow an unwritten guideline to avoid work on any public building with more than 30 percent structural damage. In one case, the reconstruction ban obliged agencies to reject a neighborhood committee’s plea for help to rebuild three schools. Funds were available, the proposal was technically sound, and the schools were in eastern Aleppo—once hailed by regime-change supporters as a bastion of revolution.

Across the country, 1.75 million children have no school to attend and the need in eastern Aleppo is particularly acute. However, its population apparently can expect little help from former foreign sponsors who walked away after the shooting stopped.

The UN describes Syria’s humanitarian needs as “staggering.” About 5.6 million people have gone abroad—about two thirds as refugees—and about 80 percent of the 18 million who remain need assistance. One third of the housing stock has been destroyed, leaving more than six million people without a permanent home.

Some 7.6 million suffer from an acute lack of clean drinking water and 4.3 million women and children are malnourished. Previously eradicated diseases like polio, typhoid, measles and rubella have returned and one in three children misses out on life-saving vaccines. About 1.5 million people live with permanent, conflict-related disabilities.

In this environment, restrictions on foreign aid are onerous but trade and financial sanctions are lethal. They have “contributed to the suffering of the Syrian people” by blocking imports of anti-cancer drugs, antibiotics and rotavirus vaccines, medical equipment, food, fuel, crop seeds, water pumps and other essentials, the UN Special Rapporteur on sanctions, Idriss Jazairy, reported in 2018. Jazairy called the sanctions “pernicious” and said they obstructed efforts to restore schools, hospitals, clean water, housing and employment.

U.S. measures are the most punitive of overlapping sanctions regimes also applied by the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. In the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, the U.S. is waging “economic war” to “strangle to death” Assad’s government. The casualties are the poor, the sick and children—not the political and business elite.

In Damascus, rebel rockets no longer fall on residential districts that have remained loyal to the government through almost nine years of war. However, rather than celebrating the relative safety, Syrians I meet are exhausted by prolonged and worsening economic hardship. “I lived with war every day for seven years and got used to it. I can’t get used to not being able to feed my family,” a state employee said.

EU and U.S. fuel embargoes have hit hard, with nationwide electricity shortages and long queues for rationed petrol and bottled gas. Pharmaceuticals are even harder to obtain than fuel. The World Health Organization says sanctions block the import of anti-cancer drugs, which were subsidized at low prices by the public health system before the war. Sara Savva said medicine for diabetes or heart disease, when available, could cost an average employee a month’s salary. “Forget about chemotherapy or cancer medication—that’s ridiculously expensive,” she said.

Medical equipment is obsolete because the health ministry can’t import parts or update software. Doctors at a major Damascus hospital told Reuters about 10 percent of patients suffering from kidney failure are dying due to the hospital’s inability to source parts for European-made dialysis machines.

Humanitarian exemptions from sanctions supposedly exist but are difficult and costly to obtain. In any case, financial sanctions have isolated the country from global banking and payment systems, which is why foreign ATM and credit cards are useless in Syria. Even international aid organizations are forced to carry cash across the Lebanese border in vehicles or use informal money traders. So tightly drawn is the noose that European banks have refused to open bank accounts for UN staff when the word “Syria” appeared in their job title.

The UN has not endorsed sanctions but their effect on humanitarian aid has been “chilling,” Jazairy said. Exporters, transport companies, and insurers have refused to do any business with Syria for fear of inadvertently violating U.S. sanctions, which are extraterritorial. They apply to any transaction which involves a U.S. connection, such as goods with more than 10 percent  U.S. content, or use of  U.S. dollars.

In one case, European manufacturers declined to tender for supply of wheelchairs to the UN in Syria. The market is potentially big—about 86,000 Syrians have reportedly lost limbs in the conflict—but not lucrative enough to justify the risk of losing access to  U.S. customers. In his 2018 report, Jazairy argued for the release of Syrian central bank assets “frozen” by the EU. His suggestion that the money be set aside to pay for wheat and animal fodder imports to meet the “urgent survival needs of the population” was ignored.

The UN says its Syrian operations merely complement the work of state bodies, which are primarily responsible for meeting the humanitarian emergency. However, the 2019 national budget was set at less than US$9 billion—half the 2011 level—and actual expenditure is almost certainly lower. In eight years of war, GDP has fallen by between one half and two thirds. During December 2019, the Syrian pound fell to around six percent of its pre-war value.

The government still subsidizes fuel, bread, rice and other staples, but, with ministry budgets shrinking, welfare services are increasingly delivered by local non-government organizations such as the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, Gopa-Derd and the Syria Trust. In the Aleppo suburb of Hanano, the Trust runs a UNHCR-funded community center housed in a former Islamic State prison. On the day I visited, a teacher was helping children to model the Earth’s relationship to the Sun with the use of globes and torches. Legal aid was on offer to divorced women seeking child custody and a female doctor was seeing patients.

The center also provides what its English teacher, Walaa Kanawati called a “psychological counselling service.” She said it was in high demand from parents worried about children’s behavior and women subjected to domestic violence. According to Kanawati, the center spends a lot of time trying to teach children and young adults how to disagree without fighting. “We role-play two individuals or two teams and help each side to defend their opinion,” she said. “We pose topics that come out of society, like early marriage, which is a big problem in this area. We’ve got mothers as young as 15.”

The Trust was also holding remedial English and math classes for children who missed years of school when living in rebel-held districts. Kanawati said those children struggle to keep up with lessons and often drop out of school.

Alaa Dahood, the primary school teacher from Saif al-Dawla also talked about the challenge of educating students from what she called “the other side.” “They are two, three and four years behind other children and I have to stay back after class to teach them to read and write,” she said. Some got no schooling in opposition-controlled zones while others were only given religious instruction. But, “parents from the other side usually appreciate education. They want their children to be as good as their classmates,” Alaa said.

In Damascus Gopa-Derd operates a UN-funded community center in the eastern suburb of Dweila. The area is an uneasy mix of residents subjected to years of mortar fire from neighboring Ghouta, a jihadist wartime stronghold, and Ghouta refugees who fled air strikes leading up to the army’s takeover in 2018.

Center staff try to promote integration by making services available to both groups. They also encourage boys and girls to attend classes together. Families displaced from opposition areas typically believe sexes should be segregated at a young age and “only boys are important,” said Remi Al Khouri, a Gopa-Derd manager. She said single-sex primary school classes were unknown in Syria before “the crisis,” adding: “We want to show that it is normal for boys and girls to go to class together and play together.”

In the nearby suburb of Kashkoul, another Gopa-Derd community center was focused on combatting sexual abuse of children. According to the center’s manager, Lina Saker, child abuse got worse during the war. I observed a class of boys and girls aged between five and ten engrossed in an exercise on “body safety and personal boundaries”; a female teacher used a wall chart to indicate the body’s “no touch” areas. “Some of these children are already victims and we want them to know it is unacceptable for people to touch certain parts of their body,” Saker said.

Getting children off the streets and into school would make them less vulnerable but displaced families often rely on sons and daughters to earn income. The center is trying to help children as young as nine who sell bread on the street, prepare shisha pipes in cafes, collect rubbish for recycling and help out on construction sites. It arranged medical treatment and schooling for a 14-year-old girl whose health suffered from her work in a charcoal factory.

While the body safety class was in session, the children’s mothers were in a nearby room talking about early marriage. Most had married before the legal age of 18 and a center employee was encouraging them to open up about the physical, emotional and material consequences. “We want to persuade them to stop their own daughters from marrying early and to give them a good education,” Saker said.

Learning from our Elders: Kwame Somburu and Scientific Socialism

By Colin Jenkins

A dear friend of mine passed away in 2016. He was a lifelong revolutionary activist and quite possibly the most interesting man in the world (sorry, Dos Equis guy). His name was Kwame Somburu, formerly Paul Boutelle.

I came into Kwame's life through chance when, after a journey that resembled more than a dozen lifetimes, his eclectic path led him to Albany, NY. It was 2012, and Kwame was well into his 70s when he entered the capital district activist scene. He was a bit of an enigma, presenting a uniquely powerful blend of principled conviction and carefree humor. Unlike many activists, he was immediately lovable; not bitter, not rancorous, not pushy, and not self-inflated. He was grizzled, yes, but in an old-school way, where you could almost see the wisdom oozing from his pores. He had every reason in the world to possess a runaway ego, but nonetheless carried a calm humility that could not be mistaken. In an oft-aimless world, he was the personification of guidance.

Kwame undoubtedly carried the emotional scars of growing up Black in America, as well as the spiritual exhaustion of being on the front lines of struggle for five decades. Yet he was bulletproof, unfazed by the cruel confines of American society, which he had long broken from in his push to lead a fierce and principled revolution against the roots of this society: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Kwame's list of achievements and experiences would require an entire book to do them justice. He had run for public office nine times throughout the 60s and 70s, once as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party. He spent these decades speaking on the street corners of Oakland and Harlem, giving lectures at Oxford and the London School of Economics, and appearing on numerous TV and radio shows, most notably partaking in a contentious debate with William F. Buckley in 1968 on Buckley's popular show, Firing Line.

Kwame was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (early 60s), participated in the 1963 March on Washington, co-founded Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam (1965), spoke at numerous Black Power Conferences through the 60s, and assisted in organizing 400,000 people from the Native Sioux, Puerto Rican, and African-American communities to rally at the United Nations in 1967.

In 1970, Kwame served as the chairman of the Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East, an organization that spoke out against the U.S.-supported crimes of the Israeli government. Representing an early voice in support of the Palestinian struggle, Kwame toured Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria as a guest of the General Union of Palestine Students. In 1993, Kwame engaged in a speaking tour throughout Europe to discuss Malcolm X, the film about his life, and in defense of Black Nationalism and Socialism.

Despite all of this, Kwame's most endearing quality was his ability to inject his principles into humor. After living a few years in upstate New York, he regularly joked that there was "only one kind of white supremacy that cannot be denied…snow." He always made a point to immediately correct someone's usage of "history" by responding with, "it's herstory…because you can't have man without womb-man." He talked about his nationally televised appearance-turned-debate with William F. Buckley like a pugilist would talk about an old street fight in their prime: "Buckley had no idea how to respond to historically-informed analysis…he was a mental midget."

Kwame was proud of his performance on Buckley's show [ watch the entire episode here -Eds.], and rightfully so. He would encourage folks to watch it whenever he had the chance. He did this not in a boastful or braggadocios manner, but in a way that was meant to empower those of us in the trenches-as if to say, "here I was, a Black man in the belly of the beast and from modest beginnings, largely self-taught, staring down an Ivy League-educated white man and conservative icon who came from one of the most privileged paths imaginable." On national television. And not only staring down, but bodying on all levels-intellectually, ideologically, logically, historically, and morally, ala Malcolm X at the Oxford debates.

He masterfully defended the Cuban revolution to Buckley, justifying the harsh treatment of Cuban reactionaries by explaining that if a people's revolution occurred in the US, "I'm sure there will be a lot of Mississippi sheriffs who would be put on trial." To counter Buckley's misrepresentation of socialism, Kwame accurately described his party as "a party which represents social forces that desire change" due to a deadly and exploitative capitalist system and its embryonic Native genocide and "500-year slave trade" that resulted in the deaths of "100 million black people." When pressured further about his beliefs, Kwame brilliantly flipped the script, telling Buckley, "What are you representing? You're representing George Washington, you're representing Custer, you're representing an imperialist, oppressive, racist system. So, don't attack socialism on the assumption that the system you represent-which is full of lies, hypocrisy, and murder-has been so perfect. The only thing capitalism has done is to provide opportunists like yourself with the opportunity to be parasites on the backs of oppressed people." When Buckley tried to shut Kwame down by claiming, "American Negroes are free," and that he would "get more Negro votes" if he ran, Kwame nailed the coffin by snapping, "I'm sure of one thing… if you went down to Mississippi and told Black people they were free, you would be running and it wouldn't be for office."

During our time together, Kwame described his ideological development in his own words: "In 1960, after a few years of independent study (from a scientific perspective) in many and varied historical/contemporary areas, but mainly African and African American history, the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and acquired knowledge from life experiences, I declared myself to be a Black Nationalist-class definition-and a Scientific Socialist." Within a multitude of wisdom and guidance, it dawned on me that this unassuming portion was perhaps his most important-scientific socialism.

Or maybe it wasn't so unassuming. When describing his political orientation, Kwame was intent on always including "scientific" before socialist. Whenever bluntly asked if he was a socialist, Kwame would quickly respond "scientific socialist," always with an emphasis on the scientific part. If engaged in a political or theoretical discussion, he would sometimes refer to socialism, only to quickly correct himself with a "that is, scientific socialism." He wanted folks to understand that socialism goes deeper than utopian idealism; that it is rooted in a scientific, materialist analysis. It's safe to say the commitment to this message was obsessive. So much so that it may have been easy for many to view it as a trivial quirk.

And while I always appreciated his relentless effort of being literal, I too underestimated the importance of the emphasis. That was until 2015, when Bernie Sanders emerged as a formidable candidate for president.

To those of us in radical circles, Bernie was always viewed as an interesting member of the entrenched political class-a man who spent his entire career as a U.S. Senator flopping back and forth between maintaining the imperialist state and serving as a thorn in the side of wealthy capitalists. Bernie was known for his Senate hearings, where he would routinely grill a CEO or financier, denounce economic inequality and poverty, and put on a valiant show in the name of morality. In a bit of a stretch and with some exaggeration, he could be given some credit for helping to spark the Occupy movement. However, not a whole lot beyond that. Despite his entertaining interludes, capitalism and its war machine always continued unabated, running roughshod over much of the world and many Americans.

Despite his predictable impotence while serving as a cog in a rotten machine, Bernie's emergence onto the national stage was beneficial in one way: It paved the way for the fateful return of the term "socialism." As a result, socialism has entered public discourse once again, millennials in droves are now referring to themselves as socialists, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have experienced historic swelling in their ranks, from 5,000 members in 2016 to 40,000 in 2018 , and it led The Guardian to ask the question, " Why are there suddenly millions of socialists in America ?" even several months before the 2016 election. This development also indirectly helped authentic socialist candidates, like the Socialist Party USA's (SP-USA) Mimi Soltysik, the Party for Socialism and Liberation's (PSL) Gloria La Riva, and the Workers World Party's (WWP) Monica Moorehead to gain more momentum in their abbreviated tours across the country.

However, along with this sudden resurgence has been a lot of backlash and confusion. The backlash has come in the form of sensationalist tactics that are undoubtedly the product of an intentionally dumbed-down society. Red-baiting is being deployed from both sides of mainstream politics-by conservatives through their typical anti-intellectual and ahistorical knee-jerk reactions, and by liberals through a bizarre and equally ahistorical conflation of Trump, Russia, and Communism, which has reached the absurd level of associating the hyper-capitalist boss, Trump, with the hammer and sickle, a symbol that stands for industrial and agricultural workers uniting in opposition to capitalist bosses. The latter development has led to the chronic overuse of the term "democratic socialism"-a redundancy born of red-scare and cold-war propaganda-by those who moonlight in liberal spaces.

The confusion has come in the form of hordes of young people embracing a term that they have not researched or read up on. If you ask a few dozen, newly-ordained "socialists" in the United States what socialism is, you may get a dozen different answers. Many will be sure to insist that "socialism is not communism!" out of a residual fear still emanating from corporate media. Many describe socialism as nothing more than New-Deal liberalism, a tame form of capitalism that includes stronger social safety nets - an explanation surely rooted in the Sanders candidacy and Bernie himself. Others may give half-baked answers, vaguely referring to Nordic countries, cooperative business models, and even Guaranteed Basic Incomes in an attempt to separate themselves from the confusion.

In coming full circle, the answer to this backlash and confusion is found in my late friend, Kwame Somburu, or more specifically in his unapologetic, principled, and informed embrace of scientific socialism: The use of scientific methods, rooted in the work of Karl Marx (a materialist conception of history and dialectical materialism), that adequately analyze both the structure and evolutionary functioning of the capitalist system to expose inherent contradictions, exploitative and alienating underpinnings, surplus value, and the laws of accumulation of capital.

In "plain, proletarian English," scientific socialism is genuine socialism-an accurate breakdown of capitalism and a realization that it must come to an end if we have any hopes of living in a just and sustainable world. It means a constant, deliberate focus on pinpointing and destroying all forms of oppression, or as Kwame succinctly put it, "analysis of capitalism/imperialism, fascism, racism, and colonialism" with the purpose of "worker's revolution, colonial revolution, self-determination for all peoples, and relevant contribution towards a working-class world revolution." This does not mean a tightly monitored form of capitalism; it means no more capitalism. It does not mean government control; it means worker control of the means of production. It does not mean guaranteed income for all; it means workers, families, and communities finally enjoying the fruits of our labor. It does not mean "bread lines"; it means reducing massive amounts of waste through community-run production and the de-commodification of basic human needs. It does not mean equality; it means justice.

Although he never waned, Kwame would be rejuvenated by recent developments. But he would also be praising the merits of scientific socialism like never before. In a time of confusion, let's follow Kwame.

This was originally published at Monthly Review .