CONIFA - The Guerrilla Alternative

[Pictured: Barawa celebrate scoring against Tamil Eelam in the CONIFA World Football Cup (Courtesy of Con Chronis/CONIFA)]

By Brendan S.

Taking a look at the connection between politics and football, one may find that just beyond the immediate realm of international political power, there is international sports. A normative conductor often playing a direly underestimated role in connecting civil society and the general population to political phenomena. With the existence of a national team on an international stage, soft power runs wild and unleashed for the nation or state it represents. Whether it be diplomacy of internationally recognized actors or unrecognized actors, relations between states, nations, and actors in all levels of society can be shaped and shifted when the interests of many of the world’s actors are all brought together in a stadium. However, the most popular international sports organizations such as the Olympics and FIFA often only cater to the world’s ruling classes, accepting only national teams from states which are internationally recognized. Some sports organizations outside of the mainstream have emerged from this dilemma, created with the purpose of including teams from nations and regions that are unrecognized. These organizations shall be referred to as ‘guerrilla sports organizations,’ alluding to their radical and parallel nature. In football, the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, or CONIFA, holds a very important stake in the world of unrecognized international sports competition.

Channels of Sports Hegemony

In many international sports organizations where national teams compete, there is a rather blatant common factor which can be observed virtually across the board. That factor is, the exclusive participation of internationally recognized nation-states and their dependent territories. In football, the two most anticipated international competitions are the Olympics and FIFA. Taking a look at the member national teams of both organizations, there is scarcely a single nation represented that holds partial or no international recognition. Behold Article 30 of the Olympic Charter:

“1. In the Olympic Charter, the expression ‘country’ means an independent State recognised by the international community.

2. The name of an NOC (Natl. Olympic Committee) must reflect the territorial extent and tradition of its country and shall be subject to the approval of the IOC (Intl. Olympic Committee) Executive Board” (Intl. Olympic Committee).

Now, behold Statute 11 of the FIFA Statutes: “An association in a region which has not yet gained independence may, with the authorisation of the member association in the country on which it is dependent, also apply for admission to FIFA.” (FIFA)

It is explicitly mentioned in both the Olympics and FIFA guidelines that in order to have national team membership, the national team must either represent an internationally recognized state or be a dependent territory which gets permission from the ruling state’s team. For example, the Faroe Islands national football team is a FIFA member because it has been granted permission by the Denmark national football team. However, Tamil Eelam national football team is not a member association because it has not been granted permission from the Sri Lanka national football team to join FIFA.

To understand the reasons for why this culturally-hegemonic dynamic is codified, one needs to find how the organizations in question interpret a nation and a state. According to German sociologist Gunther Teubner, a nation-state is distinguished by the “collective identity of a social system.” (Duval, 248). According to his understanding, the nation is inherently attached to the state, and thus there cannot be more than one nation within a state. This understanding of the nation and the state is widely accepted in liberal and realist theory. However, the term ‘nation’ shall be defined in this paper from a less dehumanizing lens, as a group of people with a distinct identity and homeland, regardless of the internationally recognized nation-state they live within the borders of.

So, how exactly are a nation and a state interpreted from the lens of the Olympics and FIFA? Reading the guidelines, it appears they interpret them in a near identical manner to Teubner’s definition, hoping to avert as much condemnation from the hegemonies of internationally recognized states as possible. To the Olympics and FIFA, there is no difference between a nation and a state. The nation-state is a collective identity, even when its borders may make little sense, and even when there are multiple nations within a state, all deserving of self-determination; even when said nations are oppressed under the ruling class of the hegemony nation. Like water, both organizations follow the easiest path of least resistance---to powerful ruling classes. This path is rather obviously quite unethical, dehumanizing groups across the world who fight for their self-determination within nation-states that oppress them and certainly do not represent their identity. Following this interpretation of the state, Olympic and FIFA law intend to intersect with the accepted hegemonic laws of internationally recognized states whenever possible. With the complete absence of sub-state interests, states take advantage of this dynamic to make international sports a culturally hegemonic phenomenon. (Mestre, 101)

Observing the diplomatic significance of FIFA and the Olympics with this in mind, the two organizations have been utilized by states to exercise soft power in what is deemed ‘mega-events literature.’ In essence, mega-events literature is the language of ruling classes in conveying their state’s prestige to the world during international competitions, and also a tool for ruling classes to communicate with other states in building relations. In other words, it is a form of soft power whereby the state utilizes the national team to appear competent and insubordinate to other powers on the world stage, but also a method of diplomacy. Mega-events literature is unique in that it almost solely utilizes international sports competitions such as the Olympics and FIFA. While it can consolidate a global perception of power for large states, it can also be a beneficial tool for small states in acting as a direct funnel for soft power and diplomacy. For instance, the lack of attention that Tuvalu or Bhutan are plagued with in international political institutions such as the United Nations can be at least partially made up for via mega-events literature, where they have equal opportunity to make their prestige and diplomacy recognized through international competition (Grix, 17).

However, a dilemma presents itself in the ‘mega-events’ portion of ‘mega-events literature,’ making a full circle back to the Olympics and FIFA interpretation of the nation and the state. Mega-events literature, while benefiting (or harming) ties between states through soft power, structurally excludes marginalized interests, such as that of unrecognized nations within states. In this, mega-events literature reinforces the international legitimacy of oppressive ruling classes across the world. The nation-state national team is inherently projected as a collective entity, where the existence of self-determination among marginalized groups is completely dependent on whether the ruling class allows for it. Uncritical of the nation-state status quo, international competitions can thus be indirectly abused by those in power. Any soft power gained from the international competition can be diverted inward, against marginalized groups.

A Response to Sports Hegemony

Enter CONIFA (Confederation of Independent Football Associations), an international guerrilla football organization with national teams representing 166 million people in unrecognized nations across the world (Rookwood, 8). While players with backgrounds in unrecognized nations can switch between member associations in FIFA that represent internationally recognized states, they cannot play for their actual home nation, since it is unrecognized. They can, however, transfer to CONIFA, which is likely to have their home nation as a member association (Nance). Established in 2013 to consolidate preceding guerrilla football organizations, CONIFA is the first international guerrilla sports organization to holistically represent any and all unrecognized nations which desire to have a national football team, from Tamil Eelam to Tibet. With frequent matches across the world, the league holds a world championship every two years, consisting of teams which have won their respective continental championships. CONIFA’s four primary principles are to: “(1) strengthen people, (2) strengthen identity of people, for nations, minorities, and isolated territories, (3) respect differences, (4) contribute to world peace” (Utomo, 27).

While mega-events literature holds traditional diplomacy, or “the practice of intermediary service on behalf of a sovereign state in relation to other sovereign states under international law,” CONIFA breeds two forms of diplomacy which are generally separate from the recognized international system (Ganohariti and Dijxhoorn, 331). Mega-events literature is replaced by the sub-state modes of diplomacy: protodiplomacy and paradiplomacy. While some scholars claim the two terms are interchangeable, there appears to be a clear nuance in their usage. As defined by Ramesh Ganohariti and Ernst Dijxhoorn, protodiplomacy is “efforts to promote claims of political independence or autonomy by a people or political subunit,” while paradiplomacy is understood as “the involvement of subnational government external affairs in international relations,” whether by interaction with recognized or unrecognized entities. These definitions are generally accepted among scholars (Ganohariti and Dijxhoorn, 333)(Utomo, 30). In the words of scholar Ario Utomo: “Horizontally, CONIFA has the ability to become a supra-structure for the members to communicate and build a sense of intersubjectivity among each other. Vertically, CONIFA is benefitted by their specific focus so that they can help the members project the ‘sports countries’ image which might develop the members’ diplomatic statures” (Utomo, 33). The horizontal illustration explains paradiplomacy, while the vertical illustration explains protodiplomacy. With these distinctive diplomatic powers offered with membership in CONIFA, unrecognized nations are granted a platform to seek relations and support one another in their common fight against state cultural hegemony and ‘collective identity.’

In an example of protodiplomacy in CONIFA, the confederation utilizes high-profile sponsorships to the benefit of international attention toward the national teams, which in turn funnel toward the unrecognized nation it represents. For example, Irish betting firm Paddy Power is a major sponsor, creating a link from the national teams directly into civil society. In a more direct example of the organization’s protodiplomacy, CONIFA founded a youth exchange in 2013 intended to promote intercultural communication and educating, with a ‘cultural village’ that contains presentations, discussions, and exhibitions from representatives of the national teams (Utomo, 28). While this youth exchange is aimed at providing the unrecognized nations a chance to promote their self-determination, the national teams intermingle and improve relations with one another as they hold meaningful dialogue.

Another instance of CONIFA protodiplomacy uniting unrecognized nations was the 2016 championship, eagerly hosted by Abkhazia. To Abkhazia’s surprise, the Kabylian national team closely befriended the Abkhazian national team following their match. According to an observer during the last event, “the Kabylians sat on the roof…and watched the final in the rain with their new Abkhazian friends. The flags of both nations fluttered side by side in the wet breeze, a fraternity forged on the football field, immortalized by circumstances.”  This subsequently led to increased ties between Abkhazian and Kabylian civil societies aided by the newfound popular support of friendship between the two nations (Martyn-Hemphill, Ganohariti and Dijxhoorn 345).

Paradiplomacy in CONIFA, on the other hand, often more discreetly takes the form of direct dialogue between self-determination struggles. For instance, when the Mapuche and Aymara national teams (both Chilean indigenous groups) have met in matches, they display mutual solidarity in their common struggle against the oppressive policies of the Chilean state. Diplomatic dialogue can take place between the two communities’ representatives who are brought along to sustain relations between the Mapuche and Aymara struggles that would otherwise be difficult to attain under Chilean state surveillance. If the Mapuche or Aymara national teams were to face the Rapa Nui national team in the future, which is likely to occur, it would be another opportunity for paradiplomacy in solidarity against the Chilean state, which is rather difficult to otherwise achieve in-person as the Rapa Nui live 2,300 miles off the coast of the Chilean mainland (Jockel). Even if representatives of the movements are not available or prohibited in a venue, any communication which takes place can be relayed back to the movements and communities. As the matches often take place outside of the jurisdiction of the state hegemonies in question, CONIFA is a floating transnational refuge of unifying paradiplomacy between unrecognized nations, and recognized states can hardly do anything about it.

In the strange case of Chile, the Chilean Sports Ministry has actually funded the matches between indigenous nations in an attempt to make the Chilean state appear pro-indigenous (Jockel). Not all teams have enjoyed this unexpected sponsorship of states, however. The Sri Lankan state has banned the Tamil Eelam national team from entering the country, the Algerian state has sent threats to the families of the Kabylia national team, the Chinese state has blackmailed sponsors of the Tibetan national team, and the Ukrainian state has adamantly accused the Karpatalya national team of “sporting separatism” (Martyn-Hemphill, Utomo, 29).

While the unique perks of proto and paradiplomacy have helped unite national teams of unrecognized nations, one could argue, however, that CONIFA in fact sews more hatred than cooperation between struggles of self-determination. The Northern Cyprus national team’s behavior can be cited as an example of this. Since 2006, the Northern Cyprus national team, under pressure from the Northern Cyprus government, has attempted to bar various national teams from playing in its arenas on the basis of ethnic strife (Menary). However, CONIFA and its predecessor organizations cracked down on this behavior by stripping it of hosting world cups. One of CONIFA’s many commitments, according to the organization, is “fair play and the eradication of racism” (Rookwood, 8). Generally, associations which oppose each other on the basis of ethnic strife simply do not communicate nor play one another, and the confederation strictly prevents associations from coercing others in any way. In the cases they do play each other, while football matches between bitterly opposed nations may be particularly competitive, there is no material action of diplomacy which harms relations any further.

All in all, when observing the subsurface dynamic of the most prominent international guerrilla football organization in the world, it becomes evident that CONIFA is simple football on the surface level, but more importantly a source of sub-state diplomacy for unrecognized nations which yearn to seek ties with other movements or promote their own self-determination struggles. Certainly, the competition of football does not detract from the relations which already exist, but rather brings together the representatives of each unrecognized nation who seek solidarity in a somewhat nascent arena of proto and paradiplomacy. While the Olympics and FIFA only allow the membership of internationally recognized nation-states, refusing to separate the nation from the state in their official understanding, CONIFA has emerged to solve this problem, representing a myriad of unrecognized nations across the world while providing them the added perks of diplomacy that would otherwise be illegal. Through CONIFA, the guerrilla alternative, unrecognized nations have found a new forum of unprecedented unity and cooperation.

Bibliography

Duval, Antoine. "The Olympic Charter: A Transnational Constitution Without a State?." Journal

of Law and Society 45 (2018): S245-S269.

FIFA. “FIFA Statutes 2016.” Fédération Internationale de Football Association (2016): 4-80.

Ganohariti, Ramesh, and Ernst Dijxhoorn. "Para-and Proto-Sports Diplomacy of Contested

Territories: CONIFA as a Platform for Football Diplomacy." The Hague Journal of

Diplomacy 1.aop (2020): 329-354.

Grix, Jonathan. "Sport politics and the Olympics." Political studies review 11.1 (2013): 15-25.

International Olympic Committee. “Olympic Charter 2020.” International Olympic Committee

(2020): 8-103.

Jockel, Jens. “Signing of Team Aymara – Chile-Trip of our South America Director: Jens

Jockel.” conifa.org (2015).

Martyn-Hemphill, Richards. “In Alternative World Cup for Would-be Nations, Karpatalya Beats

North Cyprus.” New York Times (2018).

Menary, Steve. “Worlds apart." World Soccer Magazine (2006): p. 105.

Mestre, Alexandre. "The legal basis of the Olympic Charter." INTERNATIONAL SPORTS LAW

JOURNAL 1 (2008): 100.

Nance, Frederick. “‘Football’s Coming Home’... but to which country? FIFA’s National Team

Eligibility Rules Explained.” The National Law Review (2019).

Rookwood, Joel. "The politics of ConIFA: Organising and managing international football

events for unrecognised countries." Managing Sport and Leisure 25.1-2 (2020): 6-20.

Utomo, Ario Bimo. "The Paradiplomatic Role of the ConIFA in Promoting Self-Determination

 of Marginalised Entities." Global Strategis 13.1 (2019): 25-36.

Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men

[Pieter Bruegel the Elder : The Harvesters (oil painting from 1565)]

By Ian Angus

Republished from Climate & Capitalism.

“I must needs threaten everlasting damnation unto them, whether they be gentlemen or whatsoever they be, which never cease to join house to house, and land to land, as though they alone ought to purchase and inhabit the earth.”

—Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1550[1]

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”

—Karl Marx, 1867[2]

The privatization of land has been justly described as “perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors.”[3]

Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.

The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that greed is inherent in human nature, the shift from commons-based to private-profit-based farming was not accepted easily — in fact, it was denounced and resisted as an assault of the laws of God and the needs of humanity.

Henry VIII died in 1547, succeeded as king by Edward VI, then only nine years old. For the next six years, actual political power rested with a regency council, headed by the Duke of Somerset until 1549, and by the Duke of Northumberland from late 1549 until Edward’s death in 1553.

Somerset and Northumberland were strong protestants who wanted the English church to move farther from catholic doctrine and practices than Henry had allowed. To promote that, the law outlawing heresy was repealed and censorship was relaxed, beginning a period that has been called “the first great era in the history of English public discussion.”[4]

Liberal protestants took advantage of that opening to campaign vigorously, not just for religious reform, but against sin and corruption in society at large, particularly the erosion of traditional economic values. Their powerful condemnations of greedy landlords and merchants circulated both as books and sermons addressed to the wealthy, and as inexpensive pamphlets and broadsides that were sold in city streets.

They don’t seem to have acted as an organized group, but their speeches and writings clearly reveal the presence of a strong current of anti-capitalist opinion in England in the mid-1500s. Because they focused on the common weal — common good — historians have labelled them the commonwealth men.

Cormorants and greedy gulls

R.H. Tawney’s 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism remains the best account of the complex connections between social and religious criticism in Tudor England.

“It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence.

“In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and licence which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine.”[5]

The great sin they condemned was covetousness — the desire to accumulate ever more wealth. Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, condemned landlords’ greed in general, and enclosure in particular, in a sermon preached before the King and other worthies.

“You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possessions yearly too much. For what here before went for twenty or forty pound by year, (which is an honest portion to be had gratis in one lordship of another man’s sweat and labour) now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by year. … Too much, which these rich men have, causes such dearth, that poor men, which live of their labour, cannot with the sweat of their face have a living …

“These graziers, enclosers and rent-raisers, are hinderers of the King’s honour. For where as have been a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.”[6]

Those views found support in the country’s top ruling circles. The Book of Private Prayer, prepared by Archbishop Cranmer and other officials of the established church in 1553, included a prayer “For Landlords.”

“We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of those that possess the grounds and pastures of the earth, that they remembering themselves to be Thy tenants may not rack nor stretch out the rents of their lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines. … Give them grace also … that they … may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house and land to land, to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their lands, tenements and pastures that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[7]

One of the most vehement critics of greed and exploitation was the London-based printer and poet Robert Crowley, who offered this explanation for the 1549 peasant rebellions.

“If I should demand of the poor man of the country what thing he thinks to be the cause of Sedition, I know his answer. He would tell me that the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I can not tell who; men that have no name because they are doers of all things that any gain hangs upon. Men without conscience. Men utterly devoid of God’s fear. Yea, men that live as though there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands; men that would leave nothing for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that be never satisfied.

“Cormorants, greedy gulls; yea, men that would eat up men, women, & children, are the causes of Sedition! They take our houses over our heads, they buy our lands out of our hands, they raise our rents, they levy great (yea unreasonable) fines, they enclose our commons! No custom, no law or statute can keep them from oppressing us in such sort, that we know not which way to turn so as to live.”[8]

Condemning “lease mongers that cancel leases on land in order to lease it again for double or triple the rent,” Crowley argued that landlords should “consider themselves to be but stewards, and not Lords over their possessions.”

“But so long as this persuasion sticks in their minds — ‘It is my own; who shall stop me from doing as I like with my own as I wish?’ — it shall not be possible to have any redress at all. For if I may do with my own as I wish, then I may suffer my brother, his wife, and his children toil in the street, unless he will give me more rent for my house than he shall ever be able to pay. Then may I take his goods for that he owes me, and keep his body in prison, turning out his wife and children to perish, if God will not move some man’s heart to pity them, and yet keep my coffers full of gold and silver.”[9]

Back to the feudal

While no one can doubt the sincerity of their criticism of the rich, the commonwealth men were also “united in denouncing the rebels, whose sin could never be justified even if their grievances could.”[10]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose denunciation of wealth accumulation is quoted at the beginning of this article, also, in the same sermon, condemned “unlawful assemblies and tumults,” and people who “confound all things upsy down with seditious uproars and unquietness.” “God in his scriptures expressly forbids all private revenging, and had made this order in commonwealths, that there should be kings and governors to whom he has willed all men to be subject and obedient.”[11]

Speaking of the 1549 rebellions, Latimer declared that “all ireful, rebellious persons, all quarrelers and wranglers, all blood-shedders, do the will of the devil, and not God’s will.” Disobedience to one’s superiors was a major sin, even if the superiors were themselves violating God’s laws. “What laws soever they make as concerning outward things we ought to obey, and in no wise to rebel, although they be never so hard, noisome and hurtful.”[12]

Immediately after condemning landlords as cormorants and greedy gulls, Crowley told the 1549 rebels that they had been misled by the devil: “to revenge wrongs is, in a subject, to take an usurp the office of a king, and, consequently, the office of God.” The poor should suffer in silence, awaiting royal or divine intervention.

Like the nineteenth century “feudal socialists” who Marx and Engels criticized three centuries later, the commonwealth men were literally reactionary — they wanted “to roll back the wheel of history.” “From the ills of present-day society this group draws the conclusion that feudal and patriarchal society should be restored because it was free from these ills.”[13]

As historian Michael Bush says, the commonwealth men “showed concern for the poor, but accepted the need for poverty.”

“Without exception they subscribed to the traditional ideal of the state as a body politic in which every social group had its place, function and desert. … They pleaded with rulers to reform society, and proposed various means, but not by changing its structure. Their thinking was paternalistic and conservative. Although they censured the nobility, it was for malpractices, not for being ruling class.”[14]

English protestant reformers in the mid-1500s “inherited the social idea of medieval Christianity pretty much in its entirety,” so their views were “especially antithetical to the acquisitive spirit that animated the emerging society of capitalism.”[15]

In the 1500s, Tawney wrote, “the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages.”[16] What shocked and frightened the commonwealth men was not just poverty, but the growth of a worldview that repudiated “the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves.”

“That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority.”

The wolf-pack creed they were fighting, Tawney commented ironically, was “the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.”[17]

A Losing Battle

The commonwealth men were eloquent and persuasive, but they were fighting a losing battle. The aristocrats who owned most of England’s farmland and controlled the government could tolerate public criticism and ineffective laws, but not anything that actually threatened their wealth and power. They blamed the 1549 rebellions on the critics, and quickly ousted the Duke of Somerset, the only member of the regency council who seemed to favor enforcing the anti-enclosure laws.

What remained of the commonwealth campaign collapsed after 1553, when the catholic Mary Tudor became queen and launched a vicious reign  of terror against protestants. Some 300 “heretics,” including Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake, and hundreds more fled to protestant countries on the continent.

Capitalist practices already had a strong foothold in the countryside in the 1540s, and they spread rapidly in the rest of the century, without regard to what Christian preachers might say. “Forms of economic behavior which had appeared novel and aberrant in the 1540s were becoming normalized virtually to the point of being taken for granted.”[18]

For landowners who wanted to preserve their estates, that shift wasn’t a choice. It was forced on them by changes beyond their control.

“Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and 1640 prices, particularly of foodstuffs, rose approximately sixfold. … [This] put an unusual premium on energy and adaptability and turned conservatism from a force making for stability into a quick way to economic disaster. Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were, and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”[19]

As a result, the trends that Latimer and his co-thinkers opposed actually accelerated, and their vision of a reborn feudal paternalism was replaced in ruling class thought by what historian C.B. MacPherson calls “possessive individualism” — the view that society is a collection of market relations between people who have an absolute right to do as they wish with their property.[20] That view has remained central to all variants of capitalist ideology, down to the present.

Parliament never passed another anti-enclosure bill after 1597, and the Stuart kings who succeeded the Tudors in 1603 only gave lip-service to protecting the poor from enclosure. “Commissions were issued from time to time for the discovery of offenders, but their crimes were pardoned on payment of a money fine. The punishment of enclosers had degenerated into a revenue-raising device and little else.”[21]

As Christopher Hill writes, in the century before the English Revolution, ruling class attitudes toward the land changed radically. “No government after 1640 seriously tried either to prevent enclosures, or even to make money by fining enclosers.”[22]

But only the rich had decided that land privatization was a good idea. The poor continued to resist that weird undertaking, and for some, the objective now was communism.

To be continued …

Notes

I have modernized spelling, and occasionally grammar and vocabulary, in quotations from 16th and 17th century authors.

[1] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 196. The date 1550 is approximate.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 742.

[3] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 2001), 178.

[4] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), xiii.

[5] Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Angelico Press, 2021 [1926]), 140-41.

[6] Hugh Latimer, “The First Sermon Preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549,” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

[7] Quoted in Thomas Edward Scruton, Commons and Common Fields (Batoche Books, 2003 [1887]), 81-2.

[8] Robert Crowley, “The Way to Wealth,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 132-3.

[9] Robert Crowley, “An information and petition against the oppressors of the poor commons of this realm,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 162, 157.

[10] Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester Univ. Press, 2002), 159.

[11] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 192, 193

[12] Hugh Latimer, “The Fourth Sermon upon the Lord’s Prayer (1552)” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) https://ccel.org/ccel/latimer/sermons/

[13] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, (International Publishers, 1976) 494, 355.

[14] M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Edward Arnold, 1975), 61.

[15] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), 248.

[16] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 135.

[17] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 146-7.

[18] Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2000), 202.

[19] Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1965), 188, 189-90.

[20] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962).

[21] Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500-1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice 1500-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.

[22] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 51.

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

By J. Richard Marra

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

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

The libertarian commentator George Will understands:[2]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Three Characteristics of Historical Fascism

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

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

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

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

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

Governance: The Leader Principle

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

Economy: The "Third Way"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideology: The Nasty Superman

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

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

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

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

Futurism speaks: [12]

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

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

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

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

Mussolini the futurist:[13]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And for Adolph Hitler: [19]

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

The Three Characteristics of American Fascism

Governance: The Fascist Presidency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[13] Le Van Baumer, op. cit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[28] Will, op. cit.

[29] Ibid.

Teaching Politically and the Problem of Afropessimism

[Protesters at the Open Housing March, Chicago. Getty Images/Chicago History Museum]

By Nino Brown and Derek Ford

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

As teachers, we’re tasked with educating our students, students who are increasingly, like their teachers, becoming politically conscious and called to act. Yet the dominant political theories and forms of action are inadequate for real revolutionary transformation. In other words, the schools and universities in capitalist society are all too ready to accommodate and guide this consciousness and energy into forms it can accommodate. This is not a new phenomenon, but one that’s accelerated since the 1960s in particular.

For example, Charisse Burden-Stelly documents how Black Studies emerged in the 1960s “to fundamentally challenge the statist, imperialist, racist, and Eurocentric underpinnings of the traditional disciplines in westernized universities,” but that it was soon “more or less fully incorporated into the westernized university.”[1] What facilitated this absorption was the erasure of political and economic critique and action with cultural and literary analysis, which “reify the abstraction of Blackness” and divorce it from political struggle, not even questioning its relationship to and basis in the material conditions and struggles of the people.[2] As we wrestle with political pedagogy, then, our guiding orientation has to be one that resists such subsumption within capital.

Yet it’s not only that the “scholastic ideological apparatus” provides its own official pathways for “resistance” and “transformation,” from reading groups to Diversity and Equity Initiatives and intergroup dialogues. Perhaps a more fundamental problem for us--as our students participate in protest movements--are the academic theories and politics that they encounter there and often unconsciously absorb. We regularly hear students say “anti-Blackness” and, when we ask them what it means and what political orientation it comes from and reproduces, they’re not sure. Or we hear students say in regards to protests against particular forms of oppression that we have to “listen to and follow” the people who face that oppression. White and non-white students alike believe they have to “follow and listen to Black leaders” at protests against racist police terror and white supremacy. We’re told to cite Black scholars. In either case, the question of politics is completely effaced, as there’s almost a prohibition against asking: “which Black people?” Yet this is not a defect but a feature of Afropessimism, a feature that opens the arms of white supremacist imperialism.

The happy marriage of capitalism, Afropessimism, and liberal identity politics

We and our students want radical transformation, and so many often jump to the latest and seemingly most radical sounding phrases, slogans, and theories. In education, as in so many other disciplines, one of the increasingly dominant phrases is “anti-Blackness” and the theory of Afropessimism. The two foundational theorists here are Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton. For Wilderson, Afro-pessimism contends that “Blackness cannot be separated from slavery,” and that “the Slave’s relationship to violence is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint,” whereas “the human’s relationship to violence is always contingent.”[3]

There are crucial problems with this framework that make it perfectly acceptable to capitalism and perfectly antithetical to those who want to change the world. For one, they are completely Eurocentric in that Africa and the African diaspora are flattened into “Blackness” as a condition of the “human.” As Greg Thomas notes, this is “the [B]lackness and humanism of white Americanism, specifically and restrictively, an isolationist or exceptionalist Americanism.”[4] In other words, Afropessimism takes aim at a civil society and takes refuge in a Blackness that are both uniquely American. The U.S. historical and political experience is transformed into a transcendent, static, and universal ontological status or structure. More specifically, the theories of academics in highly prestigious and exclusive institutions in the U.S. are presented as ahistorical and global realities.

As identities, Black and Blackness are, in the U.S., fairly recent developments. The earliest recorded appearances are in Richard Wright’s 1954, Black Power and in 1966 as the first words spoken by Black Panther Stokely Carmichael when he left his jail cell after imprisonment for registering voters. White and whiteness are older but still relatively recent. Theodore Allen writes that he “found no instance of the official use of the word ‘white’ as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691, referring to ‘English or other white women.’”[5] The point here, as Eugene Puryear observes, “is that the ideology of white supremacy emerged not because of timeless antagonisms based on phenotype differences, but in a precise historical context related to the development of racial slavery.”[6] This is precisely the historical context that Afropessimism erases and precisely the phenotypes they use to define Blackness.

Afropessimism addresses an apparent radical omission in the primary theory that oppressed people have utilized for liberation: Marxism. Wilderson’s work, however, is based on a fundamental misreading of Marxism, such as his contention that in “Marxist discourse” (whatever that is) “racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of political economy.”[7] To be sure, there’s an unfortunate history of some Marxist groupings asserting “class first” politics, but Marx and Engels, and Lenin, together with the history of the international communist movement, always asserted the primacy of race.  Marx’s theory of class was a theory of race and colonialism, as was his communist organizing. As a historical-materialist, Marx understood that the base and superstructure of society change over time and are context-dependent. Neither the base nor superstructure are unified, static, or ahistorical. The relations of production in the U.S. are neither unified nor even strictly economic in the sense that they’re structured and divided by hierarchies of race, nationality, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and other divisions.In an 1894 letter, Engels clarifies yet again the base-superstructure model, what it entails, how it works, and exactly what it’s supposed to do. First, he says that “economic conditions… ultimately determines historical development. But race itself is an economic factor.”[8]

Marx not only supported anti-colonial uprisings in India and China but even said that they might ignite the revolution in Britain. “It may seem a very strange, and very paradoxical assertion,” Marx wrote about the 1850-53 Taiping Rebellion in China, “that the next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican freedom and economy of government, may depend more probably on what is now passing in the Celestial Empire.”[9]

Marx fought ruthlessly against racism and national chauvinism, particularly as he experienced the deep-seated racism of English workers against the Irish. He “argued that an English workers' party, representing workers from an oppressor nation, had the duty to support an oppressed nation’s self-determination and independence” and that “English workers could never attain liberation as long as the Irish continued to be oppressed.”[10] He recognized that the fate of Black slaves, Black workers, and white workers were bound together when he wrote in Capital that “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the [B]lack it is branded.”[11] Marx even organized workers to support the abolitionist struggle by galvanizing them to oppose a British intervention in the U.S. Civil War on behalf of the slaveocracy, an intervention that, because the British had the largest Navy in the world, could have altered the war drastically.[12]

Perhaps the real problem is that Marx treats race as a dynamic and contingent social production rather than a fixed and abstract ontological category. Black people face particular forms of oppression in the U.S. and elsewhere, as do other oppressed and exploited peoples. These change over time and are in a dialectical relationship with the overal social totality. Iyko Day got it right by equating economic reductionism to Afro-pessimism, insofar as it “frames racial slavery as a base for a colonial superstructure” and “fails to take into account the dialectics of settler colonial capitalism.”[13]

Why the neoliberal university loves Afropessimism

The reason anti-Blackness critique is welcome in schools is because it is devoid of praxis and politics, or, to be more precise, because it celebrates its lack of politics. The impossibility of praxis and the rejection of organizing are fundamental tenets for two reasons. The first is that there is no answer to the question “what is to be done?” and the second is that the mass movements necessary for transformation are “from the jump, an anti-black formation,” as Wilderson told IMIXWHATILIKE.[14] Of course, the only thing to do is to condemn every attempt at fighting oppression and improving material conditions. For example, when a student group at one of our schools staged a protest when Condoleeza Rice came to speak, they were denounced as “anti-Black.” There was no political criteria for such a denouncement, no defense of Rice, and likely no knowledge of the reasons behind the protest. It didn’t matter that Rice was a key figure of the white supremacist imperialist power structure, or that she played a major role in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the torture of thousands of Arab and African people.

Examples of “anti-Blackness” that often come up in organizing are that non-Black people of color are to be met with suspicion when organizing on issues that sharply affect Black people. One such issue is immigration. In the struggle for immigrant rights, which is often overcoded as a “Latinx” issue, some Black activists and organizers point to the fact that 44% of those caged by ICE, for example, are Haitians. Instead of directing their ire towards the racist state that holds many Black immigrants in horrendous conditions, the focus then becomes the irrevocable anti-Blackness that exists in Latinx communities. Ideologies like Afro Pessimism have working class people of color (Black people included) fighting amongst each other, with the same framework as liberal identity politics. They both reduce solidarity to checking one’s privilege and fashioning oneself as the consummate ally of Black people and their liberation. So, instead of building a united front against the racist state, the lack of corporate/mainstream media focus on the fact that there are many Black immigrants, and immigration is a “Black issue” unnecessarily shifts attention to other workers who are subjected to the same “anti-Black” ideology of the ruling class and it’s media apparatuses. Instead of calling out the “Latinx community” for their “anti-Blackness” a revolutionary perspective frames the issue as not one stemming from any said community, but from the ruling class which oppresses the vast majority of immigrants in this country.

Capital in these instances are let off the hook. The problem is no longer that the ruling class owns the means of production and thus the means of ideological production that reinforce anti-working class ideologies such as racism. The problem is the “anti-Blackness”--and the often posited “inherent” anti-Blackness--of non-Black communities. It’s a structural feature of society, but apparently one that can’t be changed. As a result, there’s no need to do anything except critique.

No wonder, then, that Afropessimism is so welcome in the neoliberal university and the increasingly corporatized public school system in the U.S. It’s incredibly easy to call something anti-Black, to condemn anti-Blackness, and to play more-radical-than-thou. It’s more than easy, it’s what academia is about. Moreover, and this is related to the Rice protest mentioned earlier, when “Black faces” do appear in “high places,” they’re immunized from any possible critique from any group that isn’t Black (enough). It doesn’t matter if the head of a school, corporation, or any other entity has the same politics as the imperialist and racist power structure, because they’re black and so to critique or challenge them would be an act of anti-Blackness.

This last reason is why white people love Afropessimism so much. The vague calls to “follow Black people'' not only fulfill racist tropes that all Black people are the same (in, for example, their unruliness and “threat” to society) but moreover let white people off the hook for doing any real political investigation and work. The real response to “Follow Black people'' is: “Which Black people?” Should Derek follow his comrade Nino or John McWhorter? Should he go to the police protest organized by the local Black Lives Matter group or the one organized by the local Congress of Racial Equality? Should he get his racial politics from Barack Obama or Glen Ford? He certainly shouldn’t get his politics--or take his lessons in class struggle--from today’s Afropessimists.

None of this is to devalue Black leadership in the Black liberation movement, to be clear. Black people have and will lead the Black struggle and the broader class struggle. Nor is it to claim that random white people should show up to a Black Lives Matter protest and grab the microphone. Then again, how much of a problem is that really? Shouldn’t we forget the myth that we can learn all the proper rules before we struggle and instead just go out and struggle? And as we struggle, be conscientious of our actions and how they could be perceived; know that we’ll make mistakes and own up to them; and most importantly build with those whom this racist society has segregated us from so we can unite against a common enemy. Black people will lead the Black struggle and the class struggle. So too will Asian Americans, Indigenous people, and Latino/a/xs. So too will the child of an African immigrant and a Filipino domestic worker. So too will some white people. The key ingredients are unity, political clarity, and strategic proficiency.

Such a recipe entails a necessary risk in that, first, politics are divisive and draw lines between friends and enemies and that, second, achieving unity and strategic proficiency takes hard work without any guarantees of success. Educators who are or want to be radical, however, have no choice but to accept this risk. We need to be rooted in movements and resist incorporation into neoliberal structures, refusing to allow them to guide our political decisions. Only if we have hope and faith in the power of the masses to change the world does it make sense to struggle at all. We choose to struggle! And we hope our students do too.

Nino Brown is a public school educator and labor activist in Boston. He is also an organizer with the ANSWER coalition, the Jericho Movement and the Boston Liberation Center. He's a member of the Liberation School Collective and is an editor of the forthcoming book on Marxist pedagogy, Revolutionary Education: Theory and Practice for Socialist Organizers (2021).

Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University, where he teaches and researches at the nexus of pedagogy and political movements. He’s written six books, the latest of which is Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (2021). He’s also the lead editor of Liberation School’s “Reading Capital with Comrades ” podcast series.

Notes

[1] Charisse Burden-Stelly. “Black studies in the westernized university,” in Unsettling eurocentrism in the westernized university, ed. J. Cupples and R. Grosfoguel, pp. 73-86 (New York: Routledge, 2019), 73.

[2] Ibid., 74.

[3] Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020), 217, 216.

[4] Greg Thomas, “Afro-Blue Notes: The Death of Afro-pessimism (2.0)? Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 291.

[5] Theodor Allen, The Invention of the White Race (vol. 2): The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997), 161-62.

[6] Eugene Puryear, “The U.S. State and the U.S. Revolution,” Liberation School, November 01, 2018. Available at: https://liberationschool.org/the-u-s-state-and-the-u-s-revolution/.

[7] Frank WIlderson III. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225.

[8] Friedrich Engels, “Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau.” In Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (New York: Progress Publishers, 1894/1965), 441

[9] Karl Marx, “Revolution in China and Europe,” in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected works (vol. 12), 93-100 (London: Lawrence & Wisehart, 1979), 93.

[10] Gloria La Riva, “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World, ed. J. Cutter (pp. 75-83) (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2017), 76, 77.

[11] Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): The process of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 284.

[12] ​​See Gerald Runkle, “Karl Marx and the American Civil War,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6, no. 2 (1964): 117-141.

[13] Iyko Day, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and settler colonial critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 112.

[14] Frank B. WIlderson III, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, ed. M. Gržinić and A. Stojnić (New York: Palgrave, 2018), 55.

Spectacular Death and the Histrionics of Loss

By Michael Templeton

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

[2] Ibid., p. 5

[3] Ibid., pp. 5-6

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

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

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

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

[8] Ibid. 12

[9] Ibid. 18

[10] Ibid. 18

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

[12] Ibid. p. 162

[13] Ibid. p. 163

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the US Government Stokes Racial Tensions in Cuba and Around the World

By Alan Macleod

Republished from Mint Press News.

“A Black uprising is shaking Cuba’s Communist regime,” read The Washington Post ’sheadline on the recent unrest on the Caribbean island. “Afro-Cubans Come Out In Droves To Protest Government,” wrote NPR .Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal went with “Cuba’s Black Communities Bear the Brunt of Regime’s Crackdown” as a title.

These were examples of a slew of coverage in the nation’s top outlets, which presented what amounted to one day of U.S.-backed protests in July as a nationwide insurrection led by the country’s Black population — in effect, Cuba’s Black Lives Matter moment.

Apart from dramatically playing up the size and scope of the demonstrations, the coverage tended to rely on Cuban emigres or other similarly biased sources. One noteworthy example of this was Slate ,which interviewed a political exile turned Ivy League professor presenting herself as a spokesperson for young Black working class Cubans. Professor Amalia Dache explicitly linked the struggles of people in Ferguson, Missouri with that of Black Cuban groups. “We’re silenced and we’re erased on both fronts, in Cuba and the United States, across racial lines, across political lines,” she said.

Dache’s academic work — including “Rise Up! Activism as Education” and “Ferguson’s Black radical imagination and the cyborgs of community-student resistance,” — shows how seemingly radical academic work can be made to dovetail with naked U.S. imperialism. From her social media postings ,Dache appears to believe there is an impending genocide in Cuba. Slate even had the gall to title the article “Fear of a Black Cuban Planet” — a reference to the militant hip-hop band Public Enemy, even though its leader, Chuck D, has made many statements critical of U.S. intervention in Cuba.

Perhaps more worryingly, the line of selling a U.S.-backed color revolution as a progressive event even permeated more radical leftist publications. NACLA — the North American Congress on Latin America, an academic journal dedicated, in its own words, to ensuring “the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from oppression and injustice, and enjoy a relationship with the United States based on mutual respect, free from economic and political subordination” — published a number of highly questionable articles on the subject.

One, written by Bryan Campbell Romero, was entitled “Have You Heard, Comrade? The Socialist Revolution Is Racist Too,” and described the protests as “the anger, legitimate dissatisfaction, and cry for freedom of many in Cuba,” against a “racist and homophobic” government that is unquestionably “the most conservative force in Cuban society.”

Campbell Romero described the government’s response as a “ruthless … crackdown” that “displayed an uncommon disdain for life on July 11.” The only evidence he gave for what he termed “brutal repression” was a link to a Miami-based CBS affiliate, which merely stated that, “Cuban police forcibly detained dozens of protesters. Video captured police beating demonstrators,” although, again, it did not provide evidence for this.

Campbell Romero excoriated American racial justice organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Black Alliance for Peace that sympathized with the Cuban government, demanding they support “the people in Cuba who are fighting for the same things they’re fighting for in the United States.”

“Those of us who are the oppressed working-class in the actual Global South — colonized people building the socialist project that others like to brag about — feel lonely when our natural allies prioritize domestic political fights instead of showing basic moral support,” he added. Campbell Romero is a market research and risk analyst who works for The Economist. Moreover, this oppressed working class Cuban proudly notes that his career development has been financially sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Cuban government critic Bryan Campbell Romero proudly touts his US State Department-funded education

Unfortunately, the blatant gaslighting of U.S. progressives did not end there. The journal also translated and printed the essay of an academic living in Mexico that lamented that the all-powerful “Cuban media machine” had contributed to “the Left’s ongoing voluntary blindness.” Lionizing U.S.-funded groups like the San Isidro movement and explicitly downplaying the U.S. blockade, the author again appointed herself a spokesperson for her island, noting “we, as Cubans” are ruled over by a “military bourgeoisie” that has “criminaliz[ed] dissent.” Such radical, even Marxist rhetoric is odd for someone who is perhaps best known for their role as a consultant to a Danish school for entrepreneurship.

NACLA’s reporting received harsh criticism from some. “This absurd propaganda at coup-supporting website NACLA shows how imperialists cynically weaponize identity politics against the left,” reacted Nicaragua-based journalist Ben Norton .“This anti-Cuba disinfo was written by a right-wing corporate consultant who does ‘market research’ for corporations and was cultivated by U.S. NGOs,” he continued, noting the journal’s less than stellar record of opposing recent coups and American regime change operations in the region. In fairness to NACLA, it also published far more nuanced opinions on Cuba — including some that openly criticized previous articles — and has a long track record of publishing valuable research.

“The radlib academics at @NACLA supported the violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, numerous US coup attempts in Venezuela, and now a US regime-change operation in Cuba.

NACLA is basically an arm of the US State Department https://t.co/xxFvxMemxo”

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 12, 2021

BLM Refuses to Play Ball

The framing of the protests as a Black uprising against a conservative, authoritarian, racist government was dealt a serious blow by Black Lives Matter itself, which quickly released a statement in solidarity with Cuba, presenting the demonstrations as a consequence of U.S. aggression. As the organization wrote:

The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination. United States leaders have tried to crush this Revolution for decades.

Such a big and important organization coming out in unqualified defense of the Cuban government seriously undermined the case that was being whipped up, and the fact that Black Lives Matter would not toe Washington’s line sparked outrage among the U.S. elite, leading to a storm of condemnation in corporate media. “Cubans can’t breathe either. Black Cuban lives also matter; the freedom of all Cubans should matter,” The Atlantic seethed. Meanwhile, Fox News contributor and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, Marc A. Thiessen claimed in The Washington Post that “Black Lives Matter is supporting the exploitation of Cuban workers” by supporting a “brutal regime” that enslaves its population, repeating the dubious Trump administration claim that Cuban doctors who travel the world are actually slaves being trafficked.

Despite the gaslighting, BLM stood firm, and other Black organizations joined them, effectively ending any hopes for a credible shot at intersectional imperialist intervention. “The moral hypocrisy and historic myopia of U.S. liberals and conservatives, who have unfairly attacked BLM’s statement on Cuba, is breathtaking,” read a statement from the Black Alliance for Peace.

Trying to Create a Cuban BLM

What none of the articles lauding the anti-government Afro-Cubans mention is that for decades the U.S. government has been actively stoking racial resentment on the island, pouring tens of millions of dollars into astroturfed organizations promoting regime change under the banner of racial justice.

Reading through the grants databases for Cuba from U.S. government organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, it immediately becomes clear that Washington has for years chosen to target young people, particularly Afro-Cubans, and exploit real racial inequalities on the island, turning them into a wedge issue to spark unrest, and, ultimately, an insurrection.

For instance, a 2020 NED project,  entitled “Promoting Inclusion of Marginalized Populations in Cuba,” notes that the U.S. is attempting to “strengthen a network of on-island partners” and help them to interact and organize with one another.

A second mission,  this time from 2016, was called “promoting racial integration.” But even from the short blurb publicly advertising what it was doing, it is clear that the intent was the opposite. The NED sought to “promote greater discussion about the challenges minorities face in Cuba,” and publish media about the issues affecting youth, Afro-Cubans and the LGBTI community in an attempt to foster unrest.

A 2016 NED grant targets hides hawkish US policy goals behind altruistic language like “promoting racial integration”

Meanwhile, at the time of the protests, USAID was offering $2 million worth of funding to organizations that could “strengthen and facilitate the creation of issue-based and cross-sectoral networks to support marginalized and vulnerable populations, including but not limited to youth, women, LGBTQI+, religious leaders, artists, musicians, and individuals of Afro-Cuban descent.” The document proudly asserts that the United States stands with “Afro-Cubans demand[ing] better living conditions in their communities,” and makes clear it sees their future as one without a Communist government.

The document also explicitly references the song “Patria y Vida,” by the San Isidro movement and Cuban emigre rapper Yotuel, as a touchstone it would like to see more of. Although the U.S. never discloses who exactly it is funding and what they are doing with the money, it seems extremely likely that San Isidro and Yotuel are on their payroll.

“Such an interesting look at the new generation of young people in #Cuba & how they are pushing back against govt repression. A group of artists channeled their frustrations into a wildly popular new song that the government is now desperate to suppress.” https://t.co/47RGc9ORuR

— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) February 24, 2021

Only days after “Patria y Vida” was released, there appeared to be a concerted effort among high American officials to promote the track, with powerful figures such as head of USAID Samantha Power sharing it on social media. Yotuel participates in public Zoom calls with U.S. government officials while San Isidro members fly into Washington to glad-hand with senior politicians or pose for photos with American marines inside the U.S. Embassy in Havana. One San Isidro member said he would “give [his] life for Trump” and beseeched him to tighten the blockade of his island, an illegal action that has already cost Cuba well over $1 trillion,  according to the United Nations. Almost immediately after the protests began, San Isidro and Yotuel appointed themselves leaders of the demonstrations, the latter heading a large sympathy demonstration in Miami.

“The whole point of the San Isidro movement and the artists around it is to reframe those protests as a cry for freedom and to make inroads into progressive circles in the U.S.,” said Max Blumenthal, a journalist who has investigated the group’s background.

Rap As A Weapon

From its origins in the 1970s, hip hop was always a political medium. Early acts like Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, KRS One, and Public Enemy spoke about the effect of drugs on Black communities, police violence, and building movements to challenge power.

By the late 1990s, hip hop as an art form was gaining traction in Cuba as well, as local Black artists helped bring to the fore many previously under-discussed topics, such as structural racism.

Afro-Cubans certainly are at a financial disadvantage. Because the large majority of Cubans who have left the island are white, those receiving hard currency in the form of remittances are also white, meaning that they enjoy far greater purchasing power. Afro-Cubans are also often overlooked for jobs in the lucrative tourism industry, as there is a belief that foreigners prefer to interact with those with lighter skin. This means that their access to foreign currency in the cash-poor Caribbean nation is severely hampered. Blacks are also underrepresented in influential positions in business or education and more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts. In recent times, the government has tried to take an activist position, passing a number of anti-racism laws. Nevertheless, common attitudes about what constitutes beauty and inter-racial relationships prove that the society is far from a racially egalitarian one where Black people face little or no discrimination.

The new blockade on remittances, married with the pandemic-induced crash in tourism, has hit the local economy extremely hard, with unemployment especially high and new shortages of some basic goods. Thus, it is certainly plausible that the nationwide demonstrations that started in a small town on the west side of the island were entirely organic to begin with. However, they were also unquestionably signal-boosted by Cuban expats, celebrities and politicians in the United States, who all encouraged people out on the streets, insisting that they enjoyed the full support of the world’s only superpower.

However, it should be remembered that Cuba as a nation was crucial in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa, sending tens of thousands of troops to Africa to defeat the racist apartheid forces, a move that spelled the end for the system. To the last day, the U.S. government backed the white government.

Washington saw local rappers’ biting critiques of inequality as a wedge issue they could exploit, and attempted to recruit them into their ranks, although it is far from clear how far they got in this endeavor, as their idea of change rarely aligned with what rappers wanted for their country.

Sujatha Fernandes, a sociologist at the University of Sydney and an expert in Cuban hip hop told MintPress:

"For many years, under the banner of regime change, organizations like USAID have tried to infiltrate Cuban rap groups and fund covert operations to provoke youth protests. These programs have involved a frightening level of manipulation of Cuban artists, have put Cubans at risk, and threatened a closure of the critical spaces of artistic dialogue many worked hard to build.”

In 2009, the U.S. government paid for a project whereby it sent music promoter and color-revolution expert Rajko Bozic to the island. Bozic set about establishing contacts with local rappers, attempting to bribe them into joining his project. The Serbian found a handful of artists willing to participate in the project and immediately began aggressively promoting them, using his employers’ influence to get their music played on radio stations. He also paid big Latino music stars to allow the rappers to open up for them at their gigs, thus buying them extra credibility and exposure. The project only ended after it was uncovered, leading to a USAID official being caught and jailed inside Cuba.

Despite the bad publicity and many missteps, U.S. infiltration of Cuban hip hop continues to this day. A 2020 NED project entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society” states that its goal is to “promote citizen participation and social change” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Many more target the wider artistic community. For instance, a recent scheme called “Promoting Freedom of Expression of Cuba’s Independent Artists” claimed that it was “empower[ing] independent Cuban artists to promote democratic values.”

Of course, for the U.S. government, “democracy” in Cuba is synonymous with regime change. The latest House Appropriations Bill allocates $20 million to the island, but explicitly stipulates that “none of the funds made available under such paragraph may be used for assistance for the Government of Cuba.” The U.S. Agency for Global Media has also allotted between $20 and $25 million for media projects this year targeting Cubans.

BLM For Me, Not For Thee

What is especially ironic about the situation is that many of the same organizations promoting the protests in Cuba as a grassroots expression of discontent displayed a profound hostility towards the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, attempting to defame genuine racial justice activists as pawns of a foreign power, namely the Kremlin.

In 2017, for example, CNN released a story claiming that Russia had bought Facebook ads targeting Ferguson and Baltimore, insinuating that the uproar over police murders of Black men was largely fueled by Moscow, and was not a genuine expression of anger. NPR-affiliate WABE smeared black activist Anoa Changa for merely appearing on a Russian-owned radio station. Even Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that the hullabaloo around Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest was largely cooked up in foreign lands.

Meanwhile, at the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020, The New York Times asked Republican Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed called “Send in the Troops,” in which he asserted that “an overwhelming show of force” was necessary to quell “anarchy” from “criminal elements” on our streets.

Going further back, Black leaders of the Civil Rights era, such as Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, were continually painted as in bed with Russia, in an attempt to delegitimize their movements. In 1961, Alabama Attorney General MacDonald Gallion said ,“It’s the communists who were behind this integration mess.” During his life, Dr. King was constantly challenged on the idea that his movement was little more than a communist Trojan Horse. On Meet the Press in 1965, for instance, he was asked whether “moderate Negro leaders have feared to point out the degree of communist infiltration in the Civil Rights movement.”

Nicaragua

The U.S. has also been attempting to heighten tensions between the government of Nicaragua and the large population of Miskito people who live primarily on the country’s Atlantic coast. In the 1980s, the U.S. recruited the indigenous group to help in its dirty war against the Sandinistas, who returned to power in 2006. In 2018, the U.S. government designated Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as belonging to a “troika of tyranny” — a clear reference to the second Bush administration’s Axis of Evil pronouncement.

Washington has both stoked and exaggerated tensions between the Sandinistas and the Miskito, its agencies helping to create a phony hysteria over supposed “conflict beef” — a scandal that seriously hurt the Nicaraguan economy.

The NED and USAID have been active in Nicaragua as well, attempting to animate racial tensions in the Central American nation. For instance, a recent 2020 NED project ,entitled “Defending the Human Rights of Marginalized Communities in Nicaragua,” claims to work with oppressed groups (i.e., the Miskito), attempting to build up “independent media” to highlight human rights violations.

To further understand this phenomenon, MintPress spoke to John Perry, a journalist based in Nicaragua. “What is perhaps unclear is the extent to which the U.S. has been engaged,” he said, continuing:

"There is definitely some engagement because they have funded some of the so-called human rights bodies that exist on the Atlantic coast [where the Miskito live]. Basically, they — the U.S.-funded NGOs — are trying to foment this idea that the indigenous communities in the Atlantic coast are subjected to genocide, which is completely absurd.”

In 2018, the U.S. backed a wave of violent demonstrations across the country aimed at dislodging the Sandinistas from power. The leadership of the Central American color revolution attempted to mobilize the population around any issue they could, including race and gender rights. However, they were hamstrung from the start, as Perry noted:

"The problem the opposition had was that it mobilized young people who had been trained by these U.S.-backed NGOs and they then enrolled younger people disenchanted with the government more generally. To some extent they mobilized on gay rights issues, even though these are not contentious in Nicaragua. But they were compromised because one of their main allies, indeed, one of the main leaders of the opposition movement was the Catholic Church, which is very traditional here.”

U.S. agencies are relatively open that their goal is regime change. NED grants handed out in 2020 discuss the need to “promote greater freedom of expression and strategic thinking and analysis about Nicaragua’s prospects for a democratic transition” and to “strengthen the capacity of pro-democracy players to advocate more effectively for a democratic transition” under the guise of “greater promot[ion of] inclusion and representation” and “strengthen[ing] coordination and dialogue amongst different pro-democracy groups.” Meanwhile, USAID projects are aimed at getting “humanitarian assistance to victims of political repression,” and “provid[ing] institutional support to Nicaraguan groups in exile to strengthen their pro-democracy efforts.” That polls show a large majority of the country supporting the Sandinista government, which is on course for a historic landslide in the November election, does not appear to dampen American convictions that they are on the side of democracy. Perry estimates that the U.S. has trained over 8,000 Nicaraguans in projects designed to ultimately overthrow the Sandinistas.

In Bolivia and Venezuela, however, the U.S. government has opted for exactly the opposite technique; backing the country’s traditional white elite. In both countries, the ruling socialist parties are so associated with their indigenous and/or Black populations and the conservative elite with white nationalism that Washington has apparently deemed the project doomed from the start.

China

Stoking racial and ethnic tension appears to be a ubiquitous U.S. tactic in enemy nations. In China, the Free Tibet movement is being kept alive with a flood of American cash. There have been 66 large NED grants to Tibetan organizations since 2016 alone. The project titles and summaries bear a distinct similarity to Cuban and Nicaraguan undertakings, highlighting the need to train a new generation of leaders to participate in society and bring the country towards a democratic transition, which would necessarily mean a loss of Chinese sovereignty.

Likewise, the NED and other organizations have been pouring money into Hong Kong separatist groups (generally described in corporate media as “pro-democracy activists”). This money encourages tensions between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese with the goal of weakening Beijing’s influence in Asia and around the world. The NED has also been sending millions to Uyghur nationalist groups.

Intersectional Empire

In Washington’s eyes, the point of funding Black, indigenous, LGBT or other minority groups in enemy countries is not simply to promote tensions there; it is also to create a narrative that will be more likely to convince liberals and leftists in the United States to support American intervention.

Some degree of buy-in, or at least silence, is needed from America’s more anti-war half in order to make things run smoothly. Framing interventions as wars for women’s rights and coup attempts as minority-led protests has this effect. This new intersectional imperialism attempts to manufacture consent for regime change, war or sanctions on foreign countries among progressive audiences who would normally be skeptical of such practices. This is done through adopting the language of liberation and identity politics as window dressing for domestic audiences, although the actual objectives — naked imperialism — remain the same as they ever were.

The irony is that the U.S. government is skeptical, if not openly hostile, to Black liberation at home. The Trump administration made no effort to disguise its opposition to Black Lives Matter and the unprecedented wave of protests in 2020. But the Biden administration’s position is not altogether dissimilar, offering symbolic reforms only. Biden himself merely suggested that police officers shoot their victims in the leg, rather than in the chest.

Thus, the policy of promoting minority rights in enemy countries appears to be little more than a case of “Black Lives Matter for thee, but not for me.” Nonetheless, Cuba, Nicaragua, China and the other targets of this propaganda will have to do more to address their very real problems on these issues in order to dilute the effectiveness of such U.S. attacks.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

A Marxist Argument for Stupidity: A Review of Derek R. Ford's 'Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy'

[“Kansas City Library” by calebdzahnd is licensed under CC BY 2.0]

By Bradley J. Porfilio

The most provocative books are those that don’t seek subversive theses for the sake of shock, but in order to reveal that which is most taken for granted and, in the process of questioning these underlying assumptions, reveal just how limiting they are. The most useful books for the communist tradition, in turn, are those that don’t only denounce or critique the present but actually imagine, develop, and propose alternatives as a result. Derek R. Ford’s latest book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy accomplishes each of these tasks. What’s more, it deals with more academic theories in an accessible way, refusing the opposition between designating them as totally useless to the struggle or as the key insights we’ve been missing.

The book’s primary object of intervention is the “knowledge economy,” a term he uses reluctantly for a few reasons. One is that it’s popular parlance, but the second, and more substantive reason, is that doing so helps him identify what he calls a “troubling consensus” on the right and the left. The consensus is certainty not political, as the right and left wings differ greatly on their conception of knowledge, the conditions of its production, distribution, and consumption, and the political ends that should guide it. He doesn’t dismiss these and acknowledges that “how we understand capital’s relation to knowledge and the potential of the knowledge economy will matter a great deal in the political, social, and economic struggles ahead” (p. 57). Instead, the consensus amongst the most neoliberal and radical groupings is an unremarked pedagogy, which he calls the pedagogy of learning, realization, and grasping. In the introduction, he shows how these reinforce colonialist, ableist, and capitalist social relations.

Derek R. Ford’s Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (Palgrave, 2021)

He begins by assessing the different “takes” on the knowledge economy, accessibly and innovatively reading international policy documents from the OECD and WBI, their popular expressions in Richard Florida, as well as social democratic responses (like Andy Merrifield and Roberto Mangabeira Unger) and marxist critiques and responses, particularly those of the Italian marxist tradition (like Paolo Virno, Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, and others). This leads him into a deeper discussion of the role of the general intellect in the transition to post-Fordism and the knowledge economy.

Here, Ford not only synthesizes these transitions but, importantly, emphasizes how they were part of a struggle to define and participate in the general intellect of society—or part of the global class war. The general story concerns the limits to Fordist accumulation and the rebellions in the imperial core. But Ford highlights how “in the formerly colonized world, movements (some of which now had state power) linked the epistemological and political as they fought against imperialist economic and political domination,” (p. 45), citing Thomas Sankara’s praxis of fighting imperialist development alongside imperialist knowledge regimes as a paradigmatic example. Post-Fordism not only incorporated the demands of the imperial core but also absorbed the oppositional knowledges from the liberatory struggles of the world.

The educational consensus

He finds that the right wing pays the most explicit attention to education and the pedagogy of learning, which he links with the colonial grasping drive that positions every opacity as new potential knowledge to animate the accumulation of capital. Documenting the oppressive results of such a drive—including the perpetuation of ableism and colonialism—he shows that left projects ultimately rest upon the same pedagogical logic. He shows how contemporary marxist theorists naturalize learning and even locate it as an innate feature of “human nature,” such as in the conception of cognitive capitalism, which exploits the “desire… for learning.”

Yet whereas the right wants to control knowledge production to harness it to capital accumulation, the left wants to utilize knowledge to institute a new mode of production. “In this way,” he writes, “the left one-ups the right: ‘You want to tap into the infinite reserve of knowledge, but your small-minded thinking prevents you from understanding just how we can do that!” (p. 64). Capital is, simply, a fetter on knowledge production, one that actually inhibits the “natural” drive to learn. Thus, the Marxists end up reinforcing capital’s desire for knowledge and, as a result, the oppressive realities that follow from it. As one example, he turns to disability studies and, in particular autism. Citing Anne McGuire’s research on the flexible categories of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), he shows that the manual keeps getting more flexible and lengthier.

While the move away from the normal/abnormal binary might be progressive in some senses, it ends up reproduces the endless spiral of the knowledge economy. Ford links this with the workerist thesis of the primacy of labor over capital. Reading Mario Tronti, for example, “Even as it demystifies capital’s command and power, the workerist thesis, by privileging labor over capital, celebrates the limitless (and naturalized) productivism of labor and thus of learning” (p. 72). Ford’s book is the first to challenge the assumption that we should always be learning and that we should never stop learning. It poses the question: what if resistance and revolution demand an immersion in stupor?

An alternative pedagogy for an alternative mode of production

The most innovative and surprising proposal is to develop an alternative pedagogical logic that resists realization and the grasping drive. For Ford, this is the pedagogy of stupidity. He distinguishes stupidity from ignorance, in that ignorance can be addressed through learning whereas stupidity is intractable. He also distinguishes it from arrogance in that arrogance always has an answer, even if it’s wrong or faculty. “Stupidity, by contrast,” he writes, “never has an answer precisely because it undermines the question asked. When we’re in a state of stupor, we’re not even sure what the reference points for any discussion are” (p. 81). Ignorance and arrogance can produce knowledge for capital to enclose and expropriate, but stupidity, as he writes, is an anti-value, one that is infinitely unproductive.

Not content to remain at this level of abstraction, he provides different educational practices of stupid reading. He does so not to privilege stupidity at the expense of knowledge, but rather to introduce a necessary dialectical logic to learning. “The stupid life is a place for thought that endures without transforming into tacit or codified knowledge, or thinking the limits of thought” (p. 101). The concluding chapter presents an example of blocking these disparate yet related pedagogies together through an examination of Althusser and Negri’s marxism, which he argues are not so far apart once we consider the neglected pedagogical dimension to their different readings of Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital. In an unorthodox move, he presents this dialectic through the lens of Lyotard’s “general line,” arguing that we have to maintain a line between both pedagogies, and defend stupor from learnings attempts to annihilate it. Stefano Harney concludes his brilliant preface to the book with a quote that encapsulates the uncomfortable yet necessary argument advanced: “as Derek Ford sums it up perfectly: “there is always the noise from which knowledge emerges and to which it returns” (x).

It’s a necessary book for our moment, as organizers increasingly recognize the importance of educational processes to revolutionary transformation. In this sense, Ford’s book is a crucial offering to these movements.

Bradley Profilio, Professor and Director of the Ed.D. Leadership Program at the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San José State University, is a transformative scholar who brings insights from several intellectual disciplines, such as history, sociology, leadership studies, and social studies education, to examine the sociocultural and historical forces behind unjust educational outcomes and institutional forms of oppression. His intellectual work also unearths what policies, pedagogies, practices, and social movements hold the potential to humanize educational institutions, to eliminate educational disparities and to build an equalitarian society. As a result, his research has a broad appeal to scholars, leaders, and educators. As a leading scholar in critical pedagogy, he’s published dozens of books and articles about liberatory education. Most recently co-directed a documentary titled, We’re Still Here: Indigenous Hip Hop and Canada, which you can see here.

Gentrification and the End of Black Communities

[Pictured: Court Street in Cobble Hill (Brooklyn, NY). Photo by Susan De Vries]

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Brooklyn, New York is the epicenter of gentrification, the displacement of Black people from cities in this country. Recently released census data shows that neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant , which was nearly all Black for decades, no longer has a Black majority. Bedford-Stuyvesant’s white population rose by 30,000 from 2010 to 2020 while its Black population decreased by 22,000.

The devastation has been wrought by finance capital, which has once again upended life for Black people. Money was taken out of the cities in the 1950s and 1960s, creating what was known as “white flight” to the suburbs. Now the same forces have reversed themselves and are putting money back into the cities, and Black people are the losers. Neighborhoods that were once afterthoughts and the butt of jokes are suddenly declared “hot” if real estate speculators target them for change.

The how-to of moving Black people out of a community isn’t difficult at all. The median price for a home anywhere in Brooklyn is now $900,000 . A well-kept brownstone in Crown Heights or Bedford-Stuyvesant can now fetch seven figures. Home purchases which once required living wage employment and thrifty habits now require a small fortune that Black people rarely have.

What is now called gentrification is the latest salvo in a long history of making the Black population disposable and dependent upon the whims of racist reaction and capitalism. Urban renewal, known as Nego removal, destroyed entire communities. Financial institutions used red lining to determine where a mortgage could be obtained. Often these rules were used to keep any Black person out, regardless of financial circumstances.

Those circumstances are usually tenuous. Living wage jobs are no longer plentiful, as the same finance capital interests sent manufacturing jobs to other countries, leaving nothing but low wage jobs or even so-called gig work, which guarantees nothing but the precarity that the system demands.

Gentrification even impacts the criminal justice system. An increasingly white jury pool in Brooklyn means that defendants, mostly people of color, are more likely to be convicted. Civil cases are less likely to be decided in favor of plaintiffs and awards are smaller as the borough’s income and education levels rise.

Generations of culture are being lost, families are dispersed, and even homesellers who can make the proverbial killing are saddened that their good fortune only accelerates the process of displacement. Everyone laments the process but they are silenced because their losses are rarely acknowledged. We are told that people have the right to live where they want. But that right exists only for those with access to lots of money. The average Black working person depends on a salary. Even those with higher incomes don’t have access to cash or to a family legacy of wealth, and they are automatically out of the running.

The problem of course is capitalism itself. Black people shouldn’t be blamed for not pulling themselves by imaginary bootstraps when the paths to success are closed to them by discrimination and when the rules they were told to follow are suddenly changed. Even a college education is no longer a ticket to success. Student loan debt is a burden to people who believed they were helping themselves when they took on what was once a key to success. Black college graduates now start off their lives deeply indebted while also relying on incomes that are less than those of their white counterparts. They are worse off than their parents’ generation and they will be left out of home ownership and other opportunities they thought they would have.

Of course Brooklyn and Harlem are less and less Black. Washington DC, once known as Chocolate City, is now more of a cafe au lait city as its Black population is no longer in the majority. The political system offers no solutions. Real estate interests are big political donors, and they decide who will and who will not be in office. Politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them and people who expected to get what they were promised if they played by the rules are left out of contention.

At the very least we can name and shame the bankers and the developers and the craven politicians. They are causing the deaths of communities and the destruction of a people. There should also be no hesitation in naming racism as the culprit of Black peoples problems. Capitalism and racism make one gigantic, two-headed monster behaving as it always has. No one should shrink from pointing out that fact.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents  . Her work can also be found at patreon.com/margaretkimberley. Ms. Kimberley can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com. 

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.

The Real Reason Why Socrates Was Killed and Why Class Society Must Whitewash His Death

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

The killing of Socrates left a stain on the fabric of Athenian society, a stain it nearly expanded 80 years later with similar threats of impiety towards an Aristotle determined not to let Athens “sin twice against philosophy.”[i] This original sin against philosophy has been immortalized in philosophy classrooms for millenniums to come – turning for philosophy the figure of Socrates what for Christian theology is the figure of Jesus. A variety of interpretations concerning the reasons for his sentencing have since arose. The most dominant, though, is that Socrates was killed because of impiety. This interpretation asserts that Socrates was corrupting the youth by shifting them away from the God’s of the state and towards new divinities and spiritualities. This hegemonic reading of his death relies almost exclusively on a reading of Socrates as solely a challenger of the existing forms of religious mysticism in Athens. This essay argues that this interpretation is synechdochal – it takes the part at the top layer to constitute the whole (as if one could explain pizza merely by talking about the cheese). Instead, the death of Socrates is political – he is killed because he challenges the valuative system necessary for the smooth reproduction of the existing social relations in Athens. This challenge, of course, includes the religious dimension, but is not reducible to it. Instead, as Plato has Socrates’ character assert in the Apology, the religious accusation – spearheaded by Meletus – will not be what brings about his destruction. 

Our access to the trial of Socrates (399 BCE) is limited to Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates to the Jury. Out of these two, Plato’s has remained the most read, in part because Xenophon was not in Athens the day of the trial (making his source secondary), and in part because of the immense prominence of Plato in the history of philosophy. To understand the death sentence, we must thus turn to Plato’s Apology.

The Apology is one of Plato’s early works and the second in the chronology of dialogues concerning Socrates’ final days: Euthyphro (pre-trial), Apology (trial), Crito (imprisonment), and Phaedo (pre-death). Out of the Apology arise some of the most prominent pronouncements in philosophy’s history; viz., “I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know” and “the life which is unexamined is not worth living.” Philosophy must thank this dialogue for the plethora of masterful idioms it has given us, but this dialogue must condemn philosophy for its unphilosophical castration of the radical meaning behind Socrates’ death.

In the dialogue Socrates divides his accusers into two groups – the old and the new. He affirms from the start that the more dangerous are the former, for they have been around long enough to socialize people into dogmatically believing their resentful defamation of Socrates. These old accusers, who Socrates states have “took possession of your minds with their falsehoods,” center their accusations around the following:

Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others.

Before Socrates explains what they specifically mean by this inversion of making the “worse appear the better,”  he goes through the story of how he came to make so many enemies in Athens. To do this he tells us of his friend Chaerephon’s trip to Delphi where he asks the Pythian Prophetess’ whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates – to which they respond, “there was no man wiser.” The humble but inquisitive Socrates sought out to prove he could not have been the wisest. He spoke to politicians, poets, and artisans and found each time that his superior wisdom lied in his modesty – insofar as he knew he did not know, he knew more than those who claimed they knew, but who proved themselves ignorant after being questioned. Thus, he concluded that,

Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know.

This continual questioning, which he considered his philosophical duty to the Gods, earned him the admiration of the youth who enjoyed watching his method at work and eventually took it upon themselves to do the same. But it also earned him the opposite of youthful admiration – the resentment of those socially-conceived-of wise men who were left in the puzzling states of aporia. His inquisitive quest, guided by an egalitarian pedagogy which freely (as opposed to the charging of the Sophists) taught everyone, “whether he be rich or poor,” earned him the admiration of many and the condemnation of those few who benefitted from having their unquestioned ‘knowledge’ remain unquestioned.

After explaining how his enemies arose, without yet addressing what the old accusations referred to by saying he made the “worse appear the better cause,” he addresses the accusation of Meletus, which spearheads the group of the new accusers. It is Meletus who condemns Socrates from the religious standpoint – first by claiming he shifts people away from the God’s of the state into “some other new divinities or spiritual agencies,” then, in contradiction with himself, by claiming that Socrates is a “complete atheist.” Caught in the web of the Socratic method, Socrates catches the “ingenious contradiction” behind Meletus’ accusations, noting that he might as well had shown up to the trial claiming that “Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, and yet of believing in them,” for, after a simple process of questioning, this is ultimately what Meletus’ charges amount to. Socrates thus asserts with confidence that his destruction will not be because of Meletus, Anytus, or any of these new accusers focusing on his atheism. Those which will bring about his destruction, those which from the start he asserted to be more dangerous, are those leaders of Athenian society whose hegemonic conception of the good, just, and virtuous he questioned into trembling.

Having annulled the reason for his death being the atheism charges of Meletus and the new enemies, what insight does he give us into the charges of the old, who claim he made the “worse appear the better cause?” He says,

Why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this?

This passage gets at the pith of his death sentence – he questions the values of accumulating money, power, and status which dominated an Athens whose ‘democracy’ had just recently been restored (403 BCE) after the previous year’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War (404 BCE). This ‘democracy,’ which was limited to adult male citizens, created splits between the citizens, women, children, foreigners, slaves, and semi-free laborers. Nonetheless, the citizen group was not homogenous – sharp class distinctions existed between the periokoi – small landowners who made up the overwhelming majority in the citizen group; the new wealthy business class which partook in “manufacturing, trade, and commerce” (basically an emerging bourgeois class); and the aristoi – a traditional aristocracy which owned most of the land and held most of the political offices.

The existing ruling ideas, determined by the interests and struggle of the aristocracy and emerging bourgeois class, considered the accumulation of money, power, and status to be morally good. These values, integral to the reproduction of the existing social relations of Athens, were being brought under question by Socrates. Socrates was conversing indiscriminately with all – demonstrating to rich, poor, citizen and non-citizen, that the life which pursues wealth, power, and status cannot bring about anything but a shallow ephemeral satisfaction. In contrast, Socrates would postulate that only a life dedicated to the improvement of the soul via the cultivation of virtue can bring about genuine meaning to human life. This is a complete transvaluation of values – the normative goodness in the prioritization of wealth, power, and status has been overturned by an anthropocentric conception of development, that is, a conception of growth centered around humans, not things.

Socrates, then, is not just killed because he questions religion – this is but one factor of many. Instead, Socrates is killed because he leaves nothing unexamined; because he questions the hegemonic values of Athenian society into demonstrating their shamefulness, and in-so-doing proposes a qualitatively new way of theoretically and practically approaching human life. He does not call for a revolutionary overthrow of the aristocracy and for the subsequent installation of a worker’s city-state in Athens, but he does question the root values which allow the Athenian aristocracy to sustain its position of power. Socrates was killed because, as Cornel West says of Jesus, he was “ running out the money changers.”

With this understanding of Socrates’ death sentence, we can also understand why it must be misunderstood. Socrates’ condemnation of Athenian society, if understood properly, would not limit itself to critiquing Athenian society. Instead, it would provide a general condemnation of the money-power driven social values that arise when human societies come into social forms of existence mediated by class antagonisms. Socrates is taught to have been killed for atheism because in a secularized world as ours doing so castrates his radical ethos. If we teach the real reason why Socrates died, we are giving people a profound moral argument, from one of the greatest minds in history, against a capitalist ethos which sustains intensified and modernized forms of the values Socrates condemns.  

In modern bourgeois society we are socialized into conceiving of ourselves as monadic individuals separated from nature, community, and our own bodies. There is an ego trapped in our body destined to find its “authentic” self in bourgeois society via the holy trinity of accumulating wealth, brand name commodities, or social media followers. Society provides little to no avenues for an enduring meaningful life – for, human life itself is affirmed only in the inhuman, in inanimate objects. Only in the ownership of lifeless objects does today value arise in human life. The magazine and newspaper stands do not put on their front covers the thousands of preventable deaths that take place around the world because of how the relations of production in capitalism necessarily turn into vastly unequal forms of distributions. Instead, the deaths of the rich and famous are the ones on the covers. Those lives had money, and thus they had meaning, the others did not have the former, and thus neither the latter.

Today Socrates is perhaps even more relevant than in 399 BCE Athenian society. As humanity goes through its most profound crisis of meaning, a philosophical attitude centered on the prioritization of cultivating human virtue, on the movement away from the forms of life which treat life itself as a means, significant only in its relation to commodities (whether as producer, i.e., commodified labor power or as consumer), is of dire necessity. Today we must affirm this Socratic transvaluation of values and sustain his unbreakable principled commitment to doing what is right, even when it implies death. The death of Socrates must be resurrected, for it was a revolutionary death at the hands of a state challenged by the counter-hegemony a 70-year-old was creating. Today the Socratic spirit belongs to the revolutionaries, not to a petty-bourgeois academia which has participated in the generational castration of the meaning  of a revolutionary martyr’s death.

  Notes

[i] Louise Ropes Loomis, “Introduction,” In Aristotle: On Man in the Universe. (Classics Club, 1971)., p. X.