Gangs of the State: Police & the Hierarchy of Violence

By Frank Castro

Hierarchy of Violence: A system of oppression in which those with power, existing above those without, enact and enforce a monopoly of violence upon those lower on the hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is normal and is accepted as the order of things. When violence is attempted by those lower on the hierarchy upon those higher, it is met with swift and brutal repression.

December 15th, after the killings of Officers Liu and Ramos of the NYPD , New York City mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted "When police officers are murdered, it tears at the foundation of our society. This heinous attack was an attack on our entire city." On July 18th, the day after Eric Garner, a longtime New Yorker and father of six, was choked to death by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, the mayor of of the Big Apple had only this to say: "On behalf of all New Yorkers, I extend my deepest condolences to the family of Eric Garner."

In his condolences there was no mention of a " heinous attack" against the actual people of New York City. There was no mention of the "tearing at the foundation of our society" either. Still further, in the case for the police officers, de Blasio went as far as to use the word "murdered" long before a shred of evidence was provided. Yet in the face of video footage (that pesky thing called evidence) of Eric Garner's actual murder at the literal hands of an NYPD officer, de Blasio showed no "outrage", only platitudinous sentiment.

Such reactions are typical, but there is nothing shocking about them when we understand that our society operates on a clearly defined, yet often unarticulated, hierarchy of violence, and that the function of politicians and police is to normalize and enforce that violence. Thus, as an institution, police act as state-sanctioned gangs charged with the task of upholding the violent, racist hierarchy of white supremacist capitalism and, whenever possible, furthering a monopoly of power where all violence from/by those higher on the hierarchy upon those lower can be normalized into business as usual.

Any deviation from this business as usual, any resistance - the threat of force displayed in massive protests after Garner's death, or any displacement of state power whatsoever - by those lower on the hierarchy upon those higher is met with brutal repression. This is why cops are always present at protests. It is NOT to "Keep the peace." We have seen their "peace" - tear gas, rubber and wooden bullets, mace, riot gear, sound cannons, and thousands of brutal cops leaving dead bodies. They are not there for peace, but rather to maintain at all times the explicit reminder of America's power hierarchy through the brutalization of black and brown bodies above all others.

This is why de Blasio offered worthless platitudes to Eric Garner's family instead of outrage or solidarity. To him, as heinous as choking an unarmed black person to death is, it was business as usual.

Normalizing the Hierarchy of Violence

By framing this power dynamic as business as usual or "just how things are", it follows that the deployment of violence by police is always justified or necessary. This framing takes a myriad of forms almost always working in tandem to control how we think about the violence enacted by the state and its domestic enforcers, the police. Below are just a few of the tactics employed 24/7, 365 days a year.

Cop Worship & the Criminalization of Blackness. In this hierarchy of violence a cop's life matters infinitely more than a black person's life, and Americans, like NYC mayor Bill de Blasio, are expected to demonstrate sympathy with the lives of police officers. By contrast, Americans are encouraged to scrutinize and question the humanity of black and brown people murdered by police before questioning the lethal force used in otherwise non-lethal situations. This social reality illustrates how power is coordinated and wielded unilaterally, directed against the masses by a specialized minority within the population.

Police repression is framed in the mainstream media in such a way that when police commit violence against black and brown communities, it appears to white Americans as if they simply are protecting white communities from black criminality. This is the active dissemination of white supremacy. From it police accrue social capital and power within a conception of black bodies that perpetuates their dehumanization and murder. Completing the cycle, racist white Americans, after participating in the process of dehumanizing black people slain by police, then offer their sympathy, material support, and privilege to killer cops.

For example: George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson received over a million dollars for their legal defense funds. Both were either acquitted or not indicted by majority white juries. Officers Liu and Ramos of the NYPD, their families' mortgages are being paid. And thousands of other (white) officers are awarded paid time off (vacation) and non-indictments for what would otherwise be brutal crimes.

Ultimately, cops are praised because they enforce violence on behalf of the moneyed class. They protect existing power, wealth, and the right to exploit for profit, while simultaneously appearing to exist primarily for public safety. Straddling this paradoxical position, cops are worshiped because they are explicitly and implicitly attached to the rewards of privilege under capitalism.

Victim Blaming (Lynching the Dead). Seeking to justify hierarchical violence, the police collude directly with the mainstream media to exalt those who "uphold the law," while eroding the humanity of those whom have had their lives stolen by the police. Most often in the extrajudicial killings of black and brown people this has happened through a process of character assassination, or the process by which authorities and the media dredge up every possible occurrence of a "bad deed" of the victim's to discredit their innocence. It is effective considering dead people cannot defend themselves.

Erasure & Decontextualization. Time and time again police and the mainstream media will attempt to divert attention from the violence of the state by focusing on the retaliation of an oppressed group. This purposeful refocusing is a method of erasing the previous violence visited upon oppressed peoples in order to delegitimize any resistance to police domination. If those higher on the hierarchy can erase the history of those lower on the hierarchy, they effectively erase the oppression they themselves committed and make invisible the power they obtain from it.

We have seen this in the establishment's constant prioritization of defending private property over black and brown lives. As an example, after Mike Brown was slayed in the street by killer cop Darren Wilson the media headlined stories about "looting" instead of the fact that an unarmed 18 year old child's life was snuffed out. The role of "looting" rhetoric served to remove the context of a white supremacist power structure, its history, and to allow for a game of moral equivalence to be played - one where property damage was as heinous as killing a black child.

In addition it served to usurp the fact that America's justice system has always been and continues to be racist. From its racist policing built on profiling, to its war on drugs which dis-proportionally incarcerates black (and brown) people , to its sentencing laws that increase in severity if you are black, to the fact that a black person is killed by cops or vigilantes every 28 hours . It is murderous and racist to its core, but the neither the mainstream media nor the state will ever admit it.

Narrative Restriction. To build off what Peter Gelderloos said in his piece The Nature of Police, the Role of the Left , discussions in America operate by fixing the terms of debate firmly outside any solutions to the problem. This happens by first establishing "fierce polemics between two acceptable "opposites" that are so close they are almost touching". Surrounding the national "discussion" about police terror, this has manifested as a polemic between "good cops" versus "bad cops". Second, encourage participants toward lively debate, and to third "either ignore or criminalize anyone who stakes an independent position, especially one that throws into question the fundamental tenets that are naturalized and reinforced by both sides in the official debate."

By creating a limited spectrum of discourse an ideological foundation is created for the hierarchy of violence. The end result is a set of normalized choices (reforms) which restrict or repress any competition an actual solution to the problem might bring. What is valued as acceptable within this limited spectrum then is only that which reflects the range of needs of those higher on the hierarchy of violence (reforms which gut radical resistance in order to maintain status quo power structures) and nothing more. In the current "discussion", the prevailing and unapproachable axiom is that the police represent protection and justice, and therefore they are a legitimate presence in our lives. Anyone who says otherwise is an agent of chaos.

This narrowing of the discourse never allows us to deconstruct the fact that policing in our society has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with punishment.

As Against Hired Guns put it, "Regardless of laws that claim we are all innocent until proven guilty, the results of wrongdoing and office referral, investigation and trial, always start and end in punishment. Our society takes this punishment as justice, and even though it is the nature of this system to attempt to prevent crime by deferment regardless of circumstance, many of us still cling to the idea that at its core the system means well. Many of us think to ourselves that aberrations of this are merely "bad apples" and we must expunge or punish them, but the reality is that this is not a unilateral system of justice at all. The police enforce a steady system of punishment on our streets, and punishment is specifically and intentionally directed at Black or Brown people."

The Law & the (In)Justice System. Institutions designed exclusively for punishment, primarily the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), expose the inability of a penal system to produce justice and the conditions for liberation. Here, the deliberately narrowed discourse concerned only with crime and punishment fabricates a perceived necessity for police that appears undeniable. This is an exploitative deception obscuring the socio-economic conditions that produce poverty and suffering within oppressed communities. On its own terms, the mechanisms of hierarchical violence fail to provide the resources and opportunities necessary for assimilation into a white supremacist capitalism. The ultimate limitation of capitalism is that it will always need an exploitable class of people to produce profit for an insignificantly small wealthy population.

The System Isn't Broken, It Was Built This Way

Since its formative days as an institution of slavery, policing in America has always been about the maintenance of this country's racist power structure. The major difference today has been an increased technological and military capacity for politicians, the media, and the police to march locked in step with each other in controlling the narrative we see. Politicians like Bill de Blasio still make laws informed by white supremacy. The police still enforce them through the same hierarchy of violence. The media still kowtows to the powered elite's depiction of violent oppression. And we the oppressed are still fighting for our liberation. Thus by now we ought to know that police, as the Gangs of the State tasked with the preservation of white supremacy and capitalism, can only be abolished by a movement which has correctly identified and been equipped with the tools to dismantle the hierarchy of violence.

Editor's Note: This piece was the first of a series written in collaboration with PraxisandCapital. We hope to continue deconstructing the hierarchy of violence in the future. Suggestions for clarification in later installments will be useful, so please, inbox either of us and we will make notes.

A Captured or Dead Assata Wouldn't Be To Silence Her: It Would be to Silence Us

By Frank Castro

"For centuries, nothing has so stirred up American fury like the escape of a slave. That ain't just distant history. For daring to slip her bonds and escape from brutal and unjust bondage, the Empire now labels her a terrorist. That's because to them, nothing is more terrifying than resistance to their imperial will."

- Mumia Abu-Jamal on Assata Shakur

When it comes to "capturing" "terrorists" or America's political fugitives, the same litmus test applies: What makes less noise, a prisoner or a corpse?

With the United States and Cuba resuming diplomatic ties, there has been a lot of speculation about what will happen to Assata Shakur, a 67 year old black liberationist and political fugitive. Almost immediately after President Obama announced resurrecting ties between the two nations, the New Jersey State Police (NJSP) started scheming to get their hands on her.

According to the NJSP's Facebook page, Colonel Rick Fuentes, Superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, issued the following statement:

"We continue to work closely with the FBI towards the capture of Joanne Chesimard [Assata Shakur], a convicted felon and fugitive who escaped from jail in 1979 and remains on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist List, as well as New Jersey's Most Wanted List. We view any changes in relations with Cuba as an opportunity to bring her back to the United States to finish her sentence for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973. We stand by the reward money and hope that the total of two million dollars will prompt fresh information in the light of this altered international relationship."

But of course that's the state sponsored narrative of whom she is and why she is wanted by US authorities. This is the only propaganda you are supposed to unquestionably swallow as you rally behind the most racist nation in the world to go lynch yet another life in the name of "justice".

In reality Assata was a prominent female member of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. She became a member of the Black Power movement at a time when many activists were galvanized following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. And she experienced firsthand the authentic history of a nation built on genocide and slavery, something which stands in stark contrast to the whitewashed beacon of exceptionalism that mainstream America propagates today.

That experience was cemented as Shakur was targeted and framed by the FBI's COINTELPRO program, a series of illegal practices and entities formed precisely for the purpose of domestic political repression.

As David Love elaborated in a recent article for the Grio:

"The baby of J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO was designed to monitor, infiltrate and destroy social justice movements seen as a threat to national security, including civil rights and antiwar groups, the Black Power movement, [the American Indian Movement], and the Young Lords. Some of the stated goals of the program in an FBI memo were to "prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups," to "Prevent the RISE OF A 'MESSIAH' who could unify…the militant black nationalist movement," to "Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to…both the responsible community and to liberals who have vestiges of sympathy…," and to "prevent the long-range GROWTH of militant black organizations, especially among youth."

As a result, black leadership was decimated, either assassinated… or thrown in prison with the key thrown away. Assata Shakur, who fled to Cuba, was the last woman standing, so to speak. And apparently that is embarrassing to someone in the FBI, so they want to make an example of her as a so-called "domestic terrorist." That is why last year, 40 years after the shooting, the FBI made thepolitically-motivated move of placing Shakur on their Ten Most Wanted Terrorists list, making her the first woman and second U.S. citizen on that list. If you listen to the FBI, you'd think the ten most dangerous people on Earth are essentially nine Al Qaeda operatives and-Assata Shakur."

Yet still, to peoples struggling against American oppression she remains a prominent figure in the fight for liberation, and that's the REAL problem. To put it how Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin might, a former political prisoner himself, the reason that the US government is still after Assata is not because they fear that she will engage in violence or to just punish her, but rather because they fear her effects upon the oppressed, who see in her the inspiration to fight - and more importantly, the strength to win.

Primarily it is for this reason that the US government is unlikely to seek extradition of Shakur. Further still, bringing her back stateside in the midst of a social movement like BlackLivesMatter, the likes of which has not mobilized since her last years in America, would only add fuel to the flame of public outrage over police terror in our communities.

There are more logistical reasons she is unlikely to be extradited anytime soon though.

These include, but are not limited to 1) because her (alleged) crime and acceptance into Cuba was political in nature she is not subject to extradition per the un-revoked 1905 extradition treaty between the US and Cuba; 2) if Shakur is a Cuban citizen, this would prevent extradition; 3) there are precedents for U.S.-friendly nations that have refused to extradite American fugitives who have fled the U.S. whom fear political repression upon returning; 4) it would take a decision by Obama or the DOJ to order it in the first place; and 5) any renegotiated treaty would have to go through the Senate first.

But if we know anything about the United States' treatment of political dissidents, extraditions are low on the priority list.

There is a reason Osama bin Laden was brought back dead rather than alive. The U.S. government didn't want to try him. They didn't want bin Laden, a former partner of the CIA, to recall in intimate detail the U.S. sponsored terrorism in the Middle East that has killed millions . They didn't want to remember that before the Taliban they funded, trained, andpart nered with the Mujahideen and countless other militias in proxy wars with the USSR, devastating and destabilizing entire regions in the process. LEAST of all did the U.S. government want a lesson in historical accuracy to rally the victims of U.S. oppression around the fact that AmeriKKKa has never given a shit about brown bodies - not here, not anywhere.

Nope. They didn't want any of that. What the U.S. government DID want was a trophy for U.S. imperialism. They wanted to hang a dead body in the public square. They wanted a dead body because dead bodies don't talk.

This is why Fred Hampton never spoke again. Why Dr. King never spoke again. Why Malcolm X never spoke again. Why Huey P. Newton never spoke again. Why George Jackson, John Huggins, Bunchy Carter, Sylvester Bell, and so many others never spoke again. Any threat to the hegemony of AmeriKKKa's narrative that it is the benevolent land of milk and honey - of democracy and freedom - MUST be dealt with.

It is why if we understand the current options available to the U.S. government, and if we remember its history, the danger of Assata's U.S.-sponsored assassination is now more menacing than ever. AmeriKKKa doesn't want to bring her to "trial". That was done already and it was a farce. This government wants her shut up, out of sight, or dead. And a re-established U.S. embassy in Havana would make it that much easier. It would put agents of repression closer to Shakur than they may have ever been in the past 40 years.

So now is the time to renew our conviction to Hands Off Assata. Now is the time to remind our oppressive government that we are here, we are watching, and we will fight for Assata no matter where she is. This is the time to remember, in the powerful words of Dr. King, that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, because any effort to silence Assata Shakur is an effort to silence us.

The Brutes in Blue: From Ferguson to Freedom

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

The protests resulting from events in Ferguson and New York have spurred a nation-wide anti-police brutality and social justice movement. This movement is addressing issues related to the realities of institutional racism in the United States, a colonial legacy born of slavery. Policing itself has a history and institutional function that is relevant to current events. This part in the series, 'From Ferguson to Freedom' examines the institution of policing and 'law enforcement', designed to protect the powerful from the people, to punish the poor and enforce injustice.

A Primer on Policing

Many social divisions erupt when it comes to discussing the issues of police and policing. Many accept the police and state-propagated view of police as being there 'to serve and protect', and that the 'dangerous' jobs of ensuring 'peace' and 'safety' are deserving of respect and admiration. Others view police as oppressors and thugs, violent and abusive, the enforcers of injustice. Here, as with the issue of racism itself, we come to the dichotomy of individual and institutional actions and functions.

As individuals, there are many police who may act admirably, who may 'serve and protect', who serve a social function which is beneficial to the community in which they operate. But, as with the issue of racism, individual acts do not erase institutional functions. The reality is that as an institution, policing is fundamentally about control, with cops acting as agents of 'law and order'. They enforce the law and punish its detractors (primarily among the poor), they 'serve and protect' the powerful (and their interests) from the people.

When individuals in poor black neighborhoods are caught with illegal substances, such as drugs, the police are there to arrest them and send them into the criminal justice system for judgment and punishment. When Wall Street banks launder billions in drug money, police are nowhere to be seen, the law is ignored, justice is evaded, and the rich and powerful remain untouched. Crime is subject to class divides. Crimes such as mass murder, crimes against humanity, war crimes, slavery, ethnic cleansing, money laundering, mass corruption, plundering and destruction are typically committed (or decided) by those who hold the power, have the money and own the property. These crimes largely go unpunished, and very often are even rewarded.

Crimes committed by the poor, the oppressed, and especially those which take place in communities of colour are the main focus of the criminal injustice system. It is the poor and exploited who are policed and repressed, punished and sentenced, beaten and executed. The criminal rich and powerful are largely untouchable. The police enforce the law, so far as it applies to the poor, and are primarily there to serve the interests of the powerful. This is not new.

Like with all institutions, to understand their functions, one must turn to their origins and evolution through the years. In the United States, the history of 'policing' pre-dates the formation of the country itself, when it was a collection of European colonial possessions. From the late 1600s onward, just as racism was itself becoming institutionalized in the slave system, the social concept of policing increasingly emerged. The European colonial system was dependent upon the exploitation of slave labour, which since the late 1600s had become increasingly defined along racial lines.

In the 1700s, colonial societies began forming "slave patrols" to keep the slaves in line, to capture escapees, and to maintain "law and order" in an inherently unjust and exploitative social system of domination. As black slaves increasingly outnumbered the local white colonists, paranoia increased (especially in the wake of slave rebellions), and so the "slave patrols" and other locally organized 'vigilante' groups would be formed to protect the white colonizers against the local indigenous populations and the enslaved black African population.

The slave patrols defined the early formation of the modern " law enforcement" institution in the United States, which extended into the 19th century, up until the Civil War. The slave patrols also had other functions within the communities they operated, but first and foremost, their primary purpose was "to act as the first line of defense against a slave rebellion."

Following the processes of industrialization and urbanization, cities became crowded, immigrants became plenty, and poverty was rampant as the rich few became ever more powerful. Thus, throughout the 19th century, the slave patrols began evolving into official "police forces," with their concern for "order" and "control", largely via the policing of poor communities of colour.

The evolution of policing in America since the 19th century has largely maintained its focus on the policing of the poor, acting as soldiers in the "war against crime" (which J. Edgar Hoover declared in the 1930s), though, of course, this applies almost exclusively to crime committed by the poor, by immigrants and 'minority' groups, as the rich and powerful are able to continue plundering and stealing wealth, waging wars and killing great masses of people, engaging in institutional corruption and even participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity, almost always with impunity and beyond the reach of police or justice.

In the past few decades, police forces across America have become increasingly militarized, with the rise of what has been called the " warrior cop." Police forces get military equipment, tanks, rocket launchers, and even wear military outfits and get military training. Militaries are of course designed to be institutions of force, to kill, to destroy, to occupy and oppress. They are fundamentally, and institutionally, imperial. So as police forces become increasingly militarized, their function becomes increasingly aligned with that of the military. While the military secures the interests of the rich and powerful abroad, the police secure the interests of the rich and powerful at home. The domestic population is treated increasingly like an "enemy population," with poor communities (especially poor black, Hispanic and indigenous communities) treated like occupied populations.

The origins of the modern police force began as a distinctly colonial structure, to enforce the injustice of slavery, to protect the colonizers as they expanded their territories and committed genocide against the indigenous population. Colonization, ethnic cleansing, slavery and genocide are inherently wrong and unjust. As such, these policies must be protected by force. The legal system has always been far more concerned with the protection of property (belonging to rich white men) than it has been with the protection of the population from the abuses of an inherently unjust social system. In a slave society, human beings become property. The law protects private property, but does so often through the oppression of populations. Property becomes more important than people, even when peopleare property.

The Global Reality of the Brutes in Blue

Think, for a brief moment, of the images, videos and realities of protests, revolutions, resistance movements and rebellions around the world in the past several years. From the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, to Indigenous movements in Canada and Latin America and Africa, to the peasant and labour unrest across Asia, to the anti-austerity movements across Europe, with social unrest reaching enormous heights in Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, from the Indignados to Occupy Wall Street, to the student movements in Quebec, the UK, Chile, Mexico and Hong Kong, to the urban rebellions in Turkey and Brazil, and now to the civil unrest in the US sparked by Ferguson. What do you see, in all of these cases?

In each and every case, there are large or significant segments of populations who are rising up in resistance to oppressive structures, against dictatorships, state violence and repression, against poverty, racism and exploitation. In each case, there are populations struggling for dignity and opportunity, for freedom and democracy, for justice and equality. These populations, those who protest and resist, those who struggle and strive for the realization of democracy and justice, are historically the main reason why society has in any meaningful way ever been able to advance, to civilize itself, for rights and freedoms to be won and realized. Progress for people as a whole has always been accompanied by mass struggle and resistance against the forces of oppression and to upset the 'stability' of the status quo.

And, both historically and presently, without exception, the struggle and resistance of populations at home and abroad has always been met with the blunt, brute force of police, there to beat the people back down into subservience and to maintain "law and order." In the youth-led rebellions from Egypt to Spain to Indonesia, from Brazil to Mexico to Quebec, from Hong Kong to Turkey to Ferguson, Missouri, the police are there with batons, pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, real bullets, beatings and brutality, mass arrests and murder, all in the name of preserving 'stability'.

This is the true institutional function of the police. It cares not whether there are good or decent individuals within police forces, no more than the institutional reality of militaries cares whether individual soldiers are good or decent. Their job is to protect the powerful, police the poor, and punish those who threaten the stability of this unjust system. This is an institutional function which has been a lived reality for the black community in the United States since the origins of slavery and policing. The protests resulting from Ferguson are a reflection of this reality, regardless of the opinions of white people who have been largely spared the blunt truth of batons and bullets wielded and shot by the Brutes in Blue.

Black and Blue

According to a study published in 2012, every 28 hours in the United States, a black man, woman or child is murdered by a law enforcement official, security guard or "vigilante." In 2011, murder was listed as the number one cause of death for black males between the ages of 15 and 34 . In the month prior to Michael Brown's murder, three other unarmed black men were killed by police, with data from police forces across the country revealing that black males are far more likely to be shot and killed by police than any other demographic group.

According to data from the Department of Justice, between 2003 and 2009, roughly 4,813 people were killed in the process of being arrested or while in the custody of police officers. In 2012 alone, 410 people were killed by police in the United States. Between 1968 and 2011, data from the CDC reveals, black Americans were between two and eight times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. On average, black Americans were 4.2 times more likely to be murdered by police than whites.

Between the murder of Michael Brown in August and the delivery of the verdict in November of 2014, police in the United States killed roughly 14 other teenagers, at least six of them black. Two days before the Darren Wilson verdict was reached, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was murdered by police in Cleveland, Ohio, for holding a BB gun.

In late December, however, a mentally ill man in New York shot and killed two NYPD police officers in Brooklyn, after which he shot and killed himself. New York mayor Bill de Blasio, who has attempted to navigate between placating protesters and police, has made himself hated by many in the NYPD, who view anything but absolute and unquestionable loyalty as unforgivable betrayal. The head of the NYPD's union commented on the two killed cops, saying that many had "blood on their hands", which " starts on the steps of City Hall , in the office of the major."

Attempting to placate the police, mayor de Blasio called for the protests to end until the funerals for the two cops had passed, saying, "It's time for everyone to put aside political debates, put aside protests, put aside all of the things that we will talk about in due time." Of course, this and other statements made by de Blasio are designed to keep his own police force under his control; however, the hypocrisy of the statement should not go unnoticed. After all, hundreds of unarmed black Americans are murdered by police every year, and now, people have had enough, have reacted, taking to the streets to protest. Yet, when two cops are killed, the mayor calls for the protests to end out of some misplaced form of 'respect' for the police. Clearly, murdered black Americans are not given the same type of respect, even if it is guided by political pandering. That should speak volumes.

The backlash against the protesters and the emerging social justice movement has been palpable, and the police have been (as they often are) on the front lines of social regression. There was even a small protest in New York held in support of the NYPD, attended mostly by white men (and cops), some wearing shirts declaring, "I canbreathe," mocking the final words of Eric Garner as he was choked to death by a NYPD officer, repeating, "I can't breathe." At the same time, there was a counter protest on the other side of the street, attended largely by black and Hispanic New Yorkers, chanting, "Whose streets? Our streets!" with the pro-NYPD crowd responding, "Whose jails? Your jails!" When the crowd chanted "hands up, don't shoot!" the pro-police crowd chanted, "Hands up, don't loot!" The pro-NYPD protest was largely made up of retired or off-duty police officers and their supporters, which along with the assembled on-duty police, media and counter-protesters, did not amount to more than 200 people.

Following the shooting deaths of the two NYPD officers, the head of an NYPD union declared that, "we have, for the first time in a number of years, become a 'wartime' police department. We will act accordingly." So the NYPD has declared 'war', but against who? Well, they place the blame for the two deaths not only on the mayor, but more so on the protesters and the anti-police brutality movement itself. Thus, the largest police force in the United States, made up of 35,000 people, has essentially declared 'war' on a significant part of the population. It's worth remembering that the previous New York mayor, billionaire oligarch Michael Bloomberg, once declared during a press conference, " I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world."

In light of the two killed cops, many who had previously been pleading for people to respect the police and remember 'that they are there to protect us' and have 'dangerous jobs' suddenly feel vindicated. However, as theWashington Post reported back in October of 2014, " policing has been getting safer for 20 years ," with 2013 being the safest year for police since the end of World War II. Indeed, as the Post noted, "You're more likely to be murdered simply by living in about half of the largest cities in America than you are while working as a police officer." According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, policing is not even on the list of the top ten most dangerous jobs in America. Some of the jobs which appear on the top ten list include loggers, fishermen, pilots, garbage collectors, truck drivers, farmers and ranchers.

However, it IS dangerous to be an unarmed black man, woman or child in America. And while the NYPD union boss has declared a "war" on the people, the realities of that war have been felt and suffered by black and Hispanic Americans for years and decades.

For over a decade, New York City has implemented a "stop and frisk" policy whereby police are given the illegal 'authority' to stop and frisk citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause, an obvious violation of constitutional rights. Between 2004 and 2012, New York City cops conducted 4.4 million 'stops', with 88% resulting in no further action (arrest or court summons). In roughly 83% of 'stop and frisk' cases, those stopped by the police were either black or Hispanic.

A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2014 revealed that young men who were subjected to stop and frisk by police, particularly young black men, "show higher rates of feelings of stress, anxiety and trauma." In over 5 million stop and frisks that took place during the 12-year tenure of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire oligarch, young black men accounted for a total of 25% of those targeted , yet accounted for 1.9% of the city's population, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. In over 5 million stops, police found a gun in less than 0.02% of the cases.

In late 2014, with a new mayor (de Blasio) and following increased public outrage against the policy as well as legal rulings against it, the 'stop and frisk' policy declined in its implementation. However, as the New York Times noted, "police officers today remain ever-present in the projects," with a "new strategy" for policing the projects slowly forming. Police stand at posts on the perimeters of housing blocks, "officers park their cars on the sidewalk and turn on the flashing roof lights," and, at night, "the blue beams illuminate the brick of the projects for hours on end, projecting both a sense of emergency and control."

Black communities remain under 'military' occupation by the Brutes in Blue, the modern manifestation of the 'slave patrols'. The rich and powerful are protected and served, the poor are punished, the descendants of African slaves are slain, their communities under 'control,' as the police walk their beat, and beat black lives back down. From Eric Garner and Michael Brown, to the mass protests and civil unrest, the institutional function of the police is, as always, about maintaining stability and order in an inherently unjust social system.

The institutionalization of racism, slavery, and policing predates the formation of the United States itself. And while these things have evolved and changed over the years, decades and centuries, they remain relevant and present. If they are not addressed in a meaningful or substantial way, the America that many imagine or believe in will fade away, leaving only racism, slavery and repression here to stay.

The Hunger Gamerization of American Police and the Community

[PHOTO CREDIT: VIOREL FLORESCU/North Jersey/Landov]

By Jason Michael Williams

On December 20th, 2014 in the late afternoon social media and television news stations were flooded with reports regarding the execution of two NYPD officers . Later into the day Mayor de Blasio held a press conference where NYPD officers protested his presence by turning their backs to him. One lesson that stems from this atrocity is that all lives should matter, including both officers and innocent civilians. As a result of conflict, both sides (police and community) have had to taste the unnecessary flavor of premature death, and for what? In response to the shooting of the two NYPD officers,Charlotte Schnook made a compelling argument on Facebook:

“Marxist gate keeper theory: police are the enforcers of the hierarchy, and the more abusive the hierarchy gets, the more abusive the police will get, thus the conflict between the proletariat and the law enforcement will snow ball.

You take a job in which you maim, execute and abuse working people, eventually one will treat you the same. Is it horrific? Yep, but revenge has never been pretty…

The police can either stop this abuse of people, or EXPECT this to become more common because folks aren’t sitting ducks forever. “

Although some may take issue with the argument being made by Charlotte, I believe she is making a profound point. Charlotte is, in effect, describing the extent to which American policing to many communities of color and increasingly others have become tyrannical and hyper-repressive. There had been other op-ed articles on the illegitimacy of policing, however, what these articles fail to take into account is the extent to which police illegitimacy has long been a factor in the Black community. This tumultuous relationship between police and Blacks does not exist in a vacuum like so many are painting it out be. In fact, according to many criminologists and police scholars, American policing began in the South with the slave patrols (Balko, 2014), and yet like then, today, the response to the outcries of Blacks on this issue is non-acknowledgement and condemnation-on par with the story line of “The Hunger Games,” no?

The sole duty of the slave patrols was to maintain white supremacy to the detriment of the Africans who were enslaved and denied their humanity- point blank! If a discussion is to take place regarding the tumultuous relationship between Blacks and the police, it must begin there. It must start with the fact that much as not changed-that, in fact, when police officers are in communities of color the feeling is still very much like the slave patrol. Moreover, today police resources and power are still disproportionately situated within communities of color; meanwhile criminals in Washington, D.C., on Wall Street, and other corporate criminals go unnoticed and unaffected by justice. This unwillingness to focus police resources on other areas of crime is also observed via the FBI uniform crime report which seems to purposely focus solely on what may be considered street crime-not white collar or political crime, the crimes of which do the most harm to the public (see also, Friedrichs, 2003).

This concentration of police power within communities of color is on par with the theme of “The Hunger Games” in the sense that these repressed communities see the cops as the gatekeepers of the elite. They do not recognize the police as a legitimate force there for their protection, and their viewpoints ought to be acknowledged. Thus, the police officer’s job (to them) is to enforce often racist and classist laws (among others) for the sole purpose of maintaining the alignment. The results from these practices are further used to legitimize the subordination of the affected groups at the behest of the ruling class which subsequently maintains superiority (see Giuliani’s remarks on Black crime).

In fact, this is the primary reason why victims of state violence are immediately vilified and made to appear as if death was deserved (e.g., as in the case of Brown, Myers, Garner and countless others). Official statistics are rarely used to address crime problems forthrightly, but are rather used as mechanisms of justification for majoritarian trickery that masquerades as justice for all. Meanwhile, communities of color are being torn apart by a “justice system” that is obsessed with delivering rigid and unremitting punishment more than anything even remotely related to the word justice. One can walk into any American inner-city and see these results for himself.

Surprisingly after the Ferguson decision there seem to have been an uprising in consciousness surrounding the nearly tyrannical power of American police in communities of color and the near illegitimacy and outright silliness of the American justice system. People from all walks of life are protesting in defense of the notion that #BlackLivesMatter and these protests are disrupting business as usual. These protests have angered police unions across the nation, thus sending the message that certain people have not the right to protest and exclaim freely in America that they too matter, that the continued murdering of innocent Black lives at the hands of the state should be unacceptable in a free society. Hunger Games-like?

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the murdering and brutalization of Black bodies with impunity is as American as apple pie. America has a history of tolerating such brutality, and this history has yet to be confronted because the ruling elite has decided that it does not matter. This devaluation of people’s feelings and experiences is what gives rise to Katniss Everdeens (the victor in The Hunger Games). The systematic exclusion of the repressed will almost always lead to conflicts and catastrophe on both sides as witnessed with the shooting of the two NYPD officers. The question is how does a civilized society respond to this?

Additionally, Charlotte’s argument is rooted in histories of physical violence against the marginalized and the utter reckless indifference of the ruling class against excluded communities since the beginning of American civilization. This hegemonic destruction of marginalized experiences, bodies, and voices disguised as justice and fact is unhealthy and an affront to democracy and basic human decency. The current conflict is symbolic of the bottom having had enough. The bottom is reacting to an authoritarian body in ways that describe their lack of hope. Case in point: The gentlemen who decided to kill the two NYPD officers was not only acting in his lonesome, but clearly he was a young man without hope, and one affected by police violence. Society should focus on what created his hopelessness. Or perhaps society should wrestle with the fact that a Black is killed by an officer every 28 hours. Or that since 911, there have been more police killings of civilians than soldiers killed in the Iraq War. Hunger Games?

The question that lingers now is whether or not society will respond in a manner on par with the ruling elite in The Hunger Games or a manner consistent with democratic values. The test of America sits before us right now as the world watches in disbelief while American exceptionalism is steadily torn to pieces due to socially manufactured poisons that this nation has yet to confront. The shooting of the two NYPD officers should be condemned, but it should not hinder the change needed in the American criminal justice system, otherwise there will likely be more casualties. Both sides have much to lose, and with that said a change must come if the legitimacy of law enforcement and justice is ever to existfor all in this nation.

A version of this article was published on Truthout. Permission to reprint granted by author.

Works Cited

Friedrichs, D. (2003). Trust criminals: White collar crime in contemporary society, 2nd ed. Beverly Hills: Wadsworth.

The Universal and the Particular: Chomsky, Foucault, and Post-New Left Political Discourse

By Derek Ide

Postmodern theory was a relatively recent intellectual phenomenon in 1971 when Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault sat down to discuss a wide range of topics, including the nature of justice, power, and intellectual inquiry. At one point Chomsky, who Peter Novick suggests as an example of left-wing empiricism in post-war academia, engages the concrete issue of social activism and invokes the notion of "justice," to which Foucault asks poignantly: "When, in the United States, you commit an illegal act, do you justify it in terms of justice or of a superior legality, or do you justify it by the necessity of the class struggle, which is at the present time essential for the proletariat in their struggle against the ruling class?" After a brief period he quickly reiterates the question again: "Are you committing this act in virtue of an ideal justice, or because the class struggle makes it useful and necessary?" Chomsky attempts to situate a notion of justice within international law, to which Foucault replies: "I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this… the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power… And in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice." In other words, for Foucault justice is only intelligible within a relative framework of class antagonisms. Meanings of justice may differ, but they are only understandable vis-à-vis certain class positions. Chomsky responds: "Well, here I really disagree. I think there is some sort of an absolute basis--if you press me too hard I'll be in trouble, because I can't sketch it out-ultimately residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a 'real' notion of justice is grounded."[1]

Foucault's position appears correct, at least on the surface, because it is deeply rooted in the recognition of class-based power, hegemony, and contestation. Chomsky, on the other hand, has trouble sketching out any "pure form" or "absolute basis" of justice. Instead, it appears to be an abstraction to which he has some, perhaps understandably, visceral attachment. Yet, Foucault's position seems at odds with the stance that Patricia O'Brien attributes to him when she explains that, for Foucault, "culture is studied through technologies of power-not class, not progress, not the indomitability of the human spirit. Power cannot be apprehended through the study of conflict, struggle, and resistance… Power is not characteristic of a class (the bourgeoisie) or a ruling elite, nor is it attributable to one… Power does not originate in either the economy or politics, and it is not grounded there."[2] Instead, it is an "infinitely complex network of 'micro-powers,' of power relations that permeate every aspect of social life."[3]

In one way, the adoption by "critical" leftists (the proliferation of critical race theory, whiteness studies, etc. may be a reflection of this) of this notion that power is an "infinitely complex network of micro-powers" may help to explain the rise of the post-New Left vocabulary and the political orientation of those who engage in privilege discourse. Thus, institutional "oppression" as a "pattern of persistent and systematic disadvantage imposed on large groups of people" becomes sublimated by "privilege," where the criticism is centered on "set of unearned benefits that some individuals enjoy (and others are denied) in their everyday lives." Likewise, "liberation," referring to ultimate victory against systems of exploitation and oppression, is abandoned in favor of fighting for "safe spaces," where "the attempt to create occasions or locations wherein the adverse effects of privilege on marginalized people are minimized in everyday interpersonal interactions."[4] Thus, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob characterize postmodernists as "deeply disillusioned intellectuals who denounce en masse Marxism and liberal humanism, communism and capitalism, and all expectations of liberation."[5] The persistence of postmodernist intellectual parameters on the post-New Left political discourse could not be clearer.

What O'Brien says is "most challenging of all is the realization that power creates truth and hence its own legitimation," [6] a position which seemingly aligns with Foucault's comment to Chomsky that justice is an "invented idea...put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power." The notion that "power is not characteristic of a class" or that it "does not originate in either the economy or politics" seems far from the position Foucault takes when discussing the issue of justice and class power with Chomsky. Thus, at best one finds a level of disconnect between Foucault's position a la O'Brien and the position he seemed to be articulating vis-à-vis Chomsky. At times it seems that Foucault is even at odds with himself. Contradictions aside, others such as Daniel Zamora have posited that the very questions Foucault asks are incorrect, and have "disoriented the left." The problem for Zamora is "not that [Foucault] seeks to 'move beyond' the welfare state, but that he actively contributed to its destruction, and that he did so in a way that was entirely in step with the neoliberal critiques of the moment."[7]

Despite such contradiction and critique, one of the most recognizable transitions in history that occurred with the advent of postmodernism was the so-called "linguistic turn." Thus, as O'Brien explains, "one of Foucault's recognized contributions, which a wide variety of the new cultural historians embrace, lie in the importance he attributed to language/discourse as a means of apprehending change."[8] Clifford Geertz, albeit in a very different way, also posited the importance of linguistic and textual interpretation. For Geertz, "materialism of any kind" was "an implicit target."[9] Conversely, action is text and "the real is as imagined as the imaginary."[10] Thus, "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he has himself spun." [11] In many ways, language and discourse came to dominate and displace discussions of power and oppression for postmodernists. This "interpretative turn," as Aletta Biersack refers to it, is a sort of hyper-hermeneutics, where etymology in essence becomes epistemology.

This linguistic turn may also have some relevance to the post-New Left discourse as well. As the radical left retreated into academia, and in the absence of social movements in the first world on a large scale, power become viewed as an infinitely complex web of micro-powers which permeate everyday life. Likewise, the political-linguistic discourse reflected a by now largely alienated intellectual leftist community. Thus, for critical postmodern left-wing academics language and every-day, small scale interactions sublimate material reality and large-scale, institutional structures.

This has been explored in detail by Steve D'Arcy's "The Rise of Post New-Left Political Discourse," which asks the poignant question of whether activists from the New Left era would even find the discourse of today's left intelligible. Juxtaposing words like "oppression" vs. "privilege," "exploitation" vs. "classism," "alliances" vs. "being an ally" (a fundamental distinction!), and "consciousness-raising" vs. "calling out," D'Arcy explicates upon the seismic shift that has gripped leftist discourse.[12] Strategic alliances between oppressed groups or blocs are replaced with hyper-individualized conceptions of being an ally, economic and structural analyses associated with words like exploitation are replaced with "classism," suggesting personal prejudice against members of certain economic backgrounds, etc. This "post-New Left" lexicon is fundamentally different than the language utilized by groups and organizations spanning the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, or even the old left of the 1930s and before. It is also a language keenly peculiar to the first world, and in particular North America and a few European states. The implications of this shift are contentious, but however one views the linguistic transition it is clear that both the political goals and results have been restructured with its advent.

More generally, poststructuralists have put forward a "theoretical critique of the assumptions of modernity found in philosophy, art, and criticism since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."[13] They "argue against the possibility of any certain knowledge… [and] question the superiority of the present and the usefulness of general worldviews, whether Christian, Marxist, or liberal… there is no truth outside ideology."[14] For them "no reality can possibly transcend the discourse in which it is expressed" and while scientists or empiricists may think certain practices "bring them closer to reality… they are simply privileging the language that they speak, the technologies of their own self-fashioning."[15] Thus, historical truth, objectivity, and the narrative form of history have all been targets of the postmodernist critique. Jacques Derrida, for instance, advocated deconstruction "to show how all texts repressed as much as they expressed in order to maintain the fundamental Western conceit of 'logocentrism,' the (erroneous) idea that words expressed truth in reality."[16] Since "texts could be interested in multiple, if not infinite, ways because signifiers had no essential connection to what they were signified."[17] In this way, language was a barrier to truth and precluded human capacity to know truth.

The effect this has had on history is complex. For instance, "the history of what postmodernists called 'subaltern' groups-workers, immigrants, women, slaves, and gays-in fact proved difficult to integrate into the story of one American nation."[18] Partha Chatterjee, for instance, is one of the intellectual founders and banner holders for postcolonial and subaltern studies. Chatterjee, in his study of the "nationalist imagination" in Asia and Africa, The Nation and Its Fragments, cites Foucault as helping him recognize how "power is meant not to prohibit but to facilitate, to produce."[19] For Chatterjee, colonial rule created "a social order that bore striking resemblance to its own caricature of 'traditional India': late colonial society was 'nearer to the ideal-type of Asiatic Despotism than anything South Asia had seen before.'"[20]Specifically referring to search for pre-European capitalism in India, Chatterjee asserts that the "development of industrial capital in… Western Europe or North America, was the result of a very specific history. It is the perversity of Eurocentric historical theories that has led to the search for similar developments everywhere else in the world." [21] Thus, for postcolonial scholars, and implicit in the subset of subaltern studies, totalizing and universal theories are an intellectual and historical impossibility.

This has not permeated all of academia, however. There has been a spirited defense of the radical Enlightenment tradition, especially from the left, as the heated exchanges between Vivek Chibber and Partha Chatterjee have shown. Chibber, in his magnum opus Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, demonstrates the intellectual inconsistences and failures of subaltern studies and offers a comprehensive critique of postcolonial theory. His argument is that it is possible, indeed necessary, to posit a totalizing, universal theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism (economic or otherwise). In his work he takes to task Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee, three scholars who he considers emblematic of postcolonial theory. Thus, the battle was pitched between Chatterjee, who rejects universal discourses, and Chibber, who asserts a nuanced and sophisticated Marxist analysis. Chatterjee laid out the battlefield in his response, suggesting that Chibber implores a "plea for continued faith in the universal values of European Enlightenment." He acknowledges that "the debate between universalism and its critics continues and will not be resolved in a hurry. The choice between the two sides at this time is indeed political." Indeed, while he claims the "greatest strength of the universalist position is the assurance it provides of predictability and control over uncertain outcomes," he argues that the critics of universalism, a category he places himself in, "argue that the outcomes are unknown, indeterminate, and hence unpredictable. They accept the challenge of risky political choices, based on provisional, contingent and corrigible historical knowledge." His main contention, then, is that "the working classes of Europe and North America and their ideologues can no longer act as the designated avant-garde in the struggles of subaltern classes in other parts of the world… Historians of Subaltern Studies have only attempted to interpret a small part of these struggles. And changing the world, needless to say, is a job that cannot be entrusted to historians."[22]

In response, Chibber argues in favor of universalizing categories when applicable, suggesting that the "motivation for my intervention was to examine a common charge that postcolonial theory levels at the Enlightenment tradition, that its universalizing categories obliterate all historical difference. They do so, we are told, because they homogenize the diversity of social experience by subsuming it under highly abstract, one-dimensional categories." Here he cites the example of Marx's concept of abstract labor, which he argues postcolonial theories have simply misunderstood. Therefore, "while it is certainly true that some universalizing categories might be problematic, it is sheer folly to insist that this is a necessary flaw in all such categories. Postcolonial theory's broadside against Enlightenment universalisms is vastly overdrawn." Instead, he argues postcolonial and subaltern studies have been an immense failure both intellectually, in understanding the actual conditions of their subjects, and politically, not only by failing to facilitate radical change in any direction but by actually constraining and enervating radical analysis and transformation of society.

Indeed, Chibber proclaims that "Chatterjee's essay [against Chibber's book] is designed to allay any anxieties that his followers might have about the foundations of their project... It is a palliative, a balm, to soothe their nerves." Not only was this meant to boost morale in the wake of political failure, however, it was also meant to be an attack on the radical Enlightenment tradition, particularly Marxism: "Subaltern Studies was not just supposed to offer a rival framework for interpreting colonial modernity; it was also supposed to have internalized whatever was worth retaining from the Marxian tradition, thereby inheriting the mantle of radical critique. For years, the Subalternists have focused just about everything they have written on the irredeemable flaws of Marxism and the Enlightenment -- how they are implicated in imperialism, their reductionism, essentialism, etc." [23] Thus, the battle between postmodernism, of which postcolonial theory and subaltern studies are intellectual legacies, and modernity are not over. This is particularly true in the realm of history, where the debate between Chatterjee and Chibber is only the most recent manifestation.

For leftists, this battle is of immense importance. The words we utilize, the discourse we construct, and the movements which both manifest from and shape our language are at stake. The political implications of these choices are dire, especially at a time when the forces of reaction are winning everywhere across the world. Yet, there are perhaps few places on Earth where the left is weaker than the first world. This is particularly true where post-modern discourse and post-new left political vocabulary has emerged victorious. Without ignoring the insights of the particular, and without exaggerating the past victories and potential of the universal, it would appear that post-new left political discourse has left our side stranded. It has failed to facilitate growth and shown itself incapable of capturing the masses, all the while forcing us to feed upon ourselves, augmenting isolation and alienation from each other. Perhaps the time for a renegotiation of this development is in order; perhaps the left requires a discourse rooted more in the universal and less in the particular.

Notes

[1] "Human Nature: Justice versus Power, Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault" (1971), accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm.

[2] Patricia O'Brien, "Michel Foucault's History of Culture," The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: Univerisity of California Press, 1989), 34.

[3] O'Brien, "Michel Foucault's History of Culture," 35.

[4] Stephen D'Arcy, The Public Autonomy Project, "The Rise of the Post-New Left Political Vocabulary." Last modified January 27, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://publicautonomy.org/2014/01/27/the-rise-of-the-post-new-left-political-vocabulary/.

[5] Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 206.

[6] O'Brien, "Michel Foucault's History of Culture," 35.

[7] Daniel Zamora, "Foucault's Responsibility," https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/michel-foucault-responsibility-socialist/

[8] Ibid., 44.

[9] Aletta Biersack, "Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond," The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: Univerisity of California Press, 1989), 75.

[10] Biersack, "Local Knowledge, Local History," 78.

[11] Ibid., 80.

[12] Steve D'Arcy, "The Rise of Post-New Left Political Discourse." http://publicautonomy.org/2014/01/27/the-rise-of-the-post-new-left-political-vocabulary/

[13] Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, 201.

[14] Ibid., 202-3.

[15] Ibid., 204.

[16] Ibid., 215.

[17] Ibid., 215.

[18] Ibid., 217.

[19] Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 15.

[20] Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 32.

[21] Ibid., 30.

[22] Chatterjee Partha, "Subaltern Studies and Capital," Economic and Political Review Weekly, XLVIII, no. 37 (2013), http://www.epw.in/notes/subaltern-studies-and-capital.html (accessed March 15, 2014).

[23] Vivek Chibber, Verso Books, "Subaltern Studies Revisited: Vivek Chibber's Response to Partha Chatterjee." Last modified February 25, 2014. Accessed March 15, 2014. http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1529-subaltern-studies-revisited-vivek-chibber-s-response-to-partha-chatterjee.

Zombie Apocalypse and the Politics of Artificial Scarcity

By Colin Jenkins

Dystopian narratives have long been an alluring and thought-provoking form of entertainment, especially for those who take an interest in studying social and political structures. From classics like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World to the current hit, The Hunger Games, these stories play on our fears while simultaneously serving as warning signs for the future.

Their attractiveness within American society is not surprising. Our lives are driven by fear. Fear leads us to spend and consume; fear leads us to withdraw from our communities; and fear leads us to apathy regarding our own social and political processes. This fear is conditioned as much as it is natural. The ruling-class handbook, Machiavelli's The Prince, made it clear: "Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved."

The idea of apocalypse is a central tenet of human society. We've been taught about Armageddon, Kali Yuga, Judgement Day, Yawm ad-Dīn, nuclear holocaust, the end times, the four horsemen, and the Sermon of the Seven Suns. Hierarchical societal arrangements leave us feeling powerless. Exploitative systems like capitalism leave us feeling hopeless. And the widespread deployment of fear ultimately keeps us in our place, and out of the business of those who own our worlds.

The last half-century has brought us the zombie apocalypse - a fictional world where the human race has largely been transformed into a brainless, subhuman horde of flesh-eaters, with only a few random survivors left to carve out any semblance of life they can find in a barren landscape. The emergence and immense popularity of the TV show The Walking Dead is the latest, and perhaps most influential, piece in a long line of narratives centered within themes of survival, human interaction, and scarcity.

Human Nature and Interaction

Behind all political battles, social critiques, and theoretical inquiries lies the most fundamental question: when left to our own accord, how will we interact with one another? How one answers this question usually goes a long way to how one perceives the world, and how issues are viewed and opinions are formed. To our dismay, potential answers are typically presented in dualities. Are we good or evil? Competitive or cooperative? Generous or greedy? Violent or peaceful?

A common theme among religion has been that human beings are "born into sin" and heavily influenced by "evil forces" to do harmful things. One who embraces this theme will tend to have less faith in humanity than one who does not. For, if we really are engaging in a daily struggle to resist the powers of evil, it is reasonable to assume that evil will take hold of many. How can we trust anyone who, at a moment's notice, could potentially lose the ability to act on their own conscience? The common theme of our dominant economic system - capitalism - is that human beings are inherently competitive and self-centered. When combined, it is easy to see how such ideologies may create intensely authoritative and hierarchical systems. After all, people who are influenced by strong and evil metaphysical forces while also being drawn toward callous, self-interest certainly cannot be trusted with free will.

This lesson is drilled deep into our psyches with each episode of The Walking Dead, where the potential threat of flesh-eating zombie hordes become an afterthought to the clear and present danger of "evil" humans who are out to get one another. Whether it's a sadistic governor charming an entire town with violent gladiator events, an outlaw gang with the obligatory pedophile, or a pack of hipster cannibals salivating at the thought of eating their next visitor, the intended theme is clear - human beings are not capable of co-existing, even in a world where they rarely interact.

But is this idea accurate? Are we really drawn toward conflict? Must we compete with one another to survive? Is it appropriate to apply Darwin's evolutionary theories in a social sense where the "fit" are meant to gain wealth and power over the "weak"? Or are we, as Peter Kropotkin theorized in his classic Mutual Aid, more inclined to mimic most other species on Earth, which have been observed over the course of centuries to exhibit "Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution?"

There is ample evidence that we are drawn to cooperation. "Caring about others is part of our mammalian heritage, and humans take this ability to a high level," explains neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt. "Helping other people seems to be our default approach, in the sense that we're more likely to do it when we don't have time to think a situation through before acting. After a conflict, we and other primates-including our famously aggressive relatives, the chimpanzees-have many ways to reconcile and repair relationships." Studies have shown that in the first year of life, infants exhibit empathy toward others in distress. Evolutionary Anthropologist Michael Tomasello has put "the concept of cooperation as an evolutionary imperative to the test with very young children, to see if it holds for our nature and not just our nurture. Drop something in front of a two-year-old, he finds, and she is likely to pick it up for you. This is not just learned behavior, he argues. Young children are naturally cooperative."

So, if we are truly inclined to cooperate with one another, why is there so much division and turmoil in the world? The answer to this question may be found by assessing not only the mechanisms of capitalism, but more importantly in the creation of artificial scarcity as a means to maintain hierarchies.

Capitalism and Artificial Scarcity

It is no secret that capitalism thrives off exploitation. It needs a large majority of people to be completely reliant on their labor power. It needs private property to be accessible to only a few, so that they may utilize it as a social relationship where the rented majority can labor and create value. It needs capital to be accessible to only a few, so that they may regenerate and reinvest said capital in a perpetual manner. And it needs a considerable population of the impoverished and unemployed - "a reserve army of labor," as Marx put it - in order to create a "demand" for labor and thus make such exploitative positions "competitive" to those who need to partake in them to merely survive. It needs these things in order to stay intact - something that is desirable to the 85 richest people in the world who own more than half of the world's entire population (3.6 billion people).

But wealth accumulation through alienation and exploitation is not enough in itself. The system also needs to create scarcity where it does not already exist. Even Marx admitted that capitalism has given us the productive capacity to provide all that is needed for the global population. In other words, capitalism has proven that scarcity does not exist. And, over the years, technology has confirmed this. But, in order for capitalism to survive, scarcity must exist, even if through artificial means. This is a necessary component on multiple fronts, including the pricing of commodities, the enhancement of wealth, and the need to inject a high degree of competition among people (who are naturally inclined to cooperation).

Since capitalism is based in the buying and selling of commodities, its lifeblood is production. And since production in a capitalist system is not based on need, but rather on demand, it has the tendency to produce more than it can sell. This is called overproduction. Michael Roberts explains:

Overproduction is when capitalists produce too much compared to the demand for things or services. Suddenly capitalists build up stocks of things they cannot sell, they have factories with too much capacity compared to demand and they have too many workers than they need. So they close down plant, slash the workforce and even just liquidate the whole business. That is a capitalist crisis.

When overproduction occurs, it must be addressed. There are multiple ways to do this. Marx addressed three options: "On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones." Another is through the destruction of excess capital and commodities. Whichever measure is taken, it is paramount that the economy must emerge from a starting point that is different from the ending point where the crisis began. This is accomplished through creating scarcity, whether in regards to labor, production capacity, or commodities and basic needs.

Maintaining scarcity is also necessary for wealth enhancement. It is not enough that accumulation flows to a very small section of the population, but more so that a considerable portion of the population is faced with the inherent struggles related to inaccessibility. For example, if millions of people are unable to access basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare, the commodification of those needs becomes all the more effective. On the flip side, the mere presence of accessibility - or wealth - which is enjoyed by the elite becomes all the more valuable because it is highly sought after.

In this sense, it is not the accumulation of personal wealth that creates advantageous positions on the socioeconomic ladder; it's the impoverishment of the majority. Allowing human beings access to basic necessities would essentially destroy the allure (and thus, power) of wealth and the coercive nature of forced participation. This effect is maintained through artificial scarcity - the coordinated withholding of basic needs from the majority. These measures also seek to create a predatory landscape - something akin to a post-apocalyptic, zombie-filled world where manufactured scarcity pits poor against poor and worker against worker, all the while pulling attention away from the zombie threat.

Control through Commodification

A crucial part of this process is commodification - the "transformation of goods and services, as well as ideas or other entities that normally may not be considered goods, into commodities" that can be bought, sold, used and discarded. The most important transformation is that of the working-class majority who, without the means to sustain on their own, are left with a choice between (1) laboring to create wealth for a small minority and accepting whatever "wages" are provided, or (2) starving.

In The Socioeconomic Guardians of Scarcity, Philip Richlin tells us that:

"When society deprives any community or individual of the necessities of life, there is a form of violence happening. When society commodifies the bare necessities of life, they are commodifying human beings, whose labor can be bought and sold. Underneath the pseudo-philosophical rationalizations for capitalism is a defense of wage slavery. For, if your labor is for sale, then you are for sale."

We are for sale, and we sell ourselves everyday - in the hopes of acquiring a wage that allows us to eat, sleep, and feed our families. In the United States, the 46 million people living in poverty haven't been so lucky. The 2.5 million who have defaulted on their student loans have been discarded. The 49 million who suffer from food insecurity have lost hope. The 3.5 million homeless are mocked by 18.6 million vacant homes. And the 22 million who are unemployed or underemployed have been deemed "unfit commodities" and relegated to the reserve army of labor.

The control aspect of the commodification of labor comes in its dehumanizing effect - an effect that was commonly recognized among 18th and 19th century thinkers. One of those thinkers, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, when referring to the role of a wage laborer, explained "as whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness, suggesting that "we may admire what he (the laborer) does, but we despise what he is," because he is essentially not human.

The worker, in her or his role in the capital-labor relationship, exists in a position of constant degeneration. This is especially true with the onset of mass production lines and the division of labor - both of which are inevitable elements within this system. "As the division of labor increases, labor is simplified," Marx tells us. "The special skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple, monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense bodily or intellectual faculties. His labor becomes a labor that anyone can perform." As automation and technology progress, such specialized task-mastering even seeps into what was once considered "skilled" labor, thus broadening its reach.

In this role, workers are firmly placed into positions of control within a highly authoritative and hierarchical system.

A World beyond Profit

Dystopian narratives are no longer fiction. From birth, we are corralled into a system that scoffs at free will, stymies our creative and productive capacities, and leaves us little room to carve our own paths. The constructs directed from above are designed to strip us of our inclination to care and cooperate, and make us accept the need to step over one another to get ahead. This is not our nature. Whether we're talking about Kropotkin's studies in "the wild" or Tomasello's experience with children, observable evidence tells us we've been duped.

Another world is not just possible; it is inevitable if we are to exist in the long-term. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin offers a glimpse into this world not constructed on labor, profit, and artificial scarcity:

"It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when a rationally organized economy could automatically manufacture small "packaged" factories without human labor; parts could be produced with so little effort that most maintenance tasks would be reduced to the simple act of removing a defective unit from a machine and replacing it by another-a job no more difficult than pulling out and putting in a tray. Machines would make and repair most of the machines required to maintain such a highly industrialized economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely toward human needs and freed from all consideration of profit and loss, would eliminate the pain of want and toil-the penalty, inflicted in the form of denial, suffering and inhumanity, exacted by a society based on scarcity and labor."

The barren landscape for which we've been placed has a future beyond Hershel's overrun farm, the confines of a prison, the Governor's creepy town of Woodbury, and the trap known as Terminus. It has a future beyond the artificial constructs of capitalism and hierarchy. Human nature is talking to us… and we're starting to listen.

In Defense of Looting: Turning the White-Supremacist Narrative Upside Down

By Willie Osterweil

Originally published at New Inquiry.

As protests in Ferguson continued unabated one week after the police killing of Michael Brown, Jr., zones of Twitter and the left media predominantly sympathetic to the protesters began angrily criticizing looters. Some claimed that white protesters were the ones doing all of the looting and property destruction, while others worried about the stereotypical and damaging media representation that would emerge. It also seems that there were as many protesters (if not more) in the streets of Ferguson working to prevent looting as there were people going about it. While I disagree with this tactic, I understand that they acted out of care for the struggle, and I want to honor all the brave and inspiring actions they've taken over the last weeks.

Some politicians on the ground in Ferguson, like alderman Antonio French and members of the New Black Panther Party, block looting specifically in order to maintain leadership for themselves and dampen resistance, but there are many more who do so out of a commitment to advancing the ethical and politically advantageous position. It is in solidarity with these latter protesters-along with those who loot-and against politicians and de-escalators everywhere that I offer this critique, as a way of invigorating discussion amongst those engaged in anti-oppression struggle, in Ferguson and anywhere else the police violently perpetuate white supremacy and settler colonialism. In other words, anywhere in America.

The dominant media is itself a tool of white supremacy: it repeats what the police deliver nearly verbatim and uncritically, even when the police story changes upwards of nine times, as it has thus far in the Brown killing. The media use phrases like "officer-involved shooting" and will switch to passive voice when a black man is shot by a white vigilante or a police officer ("shots were fired"). Journalists claim that "you have to hear both sides" in order to privilege the obfuscating reports of the state over the clear voices and testimony of an entire community, members of which witnessed the police murder a teenager in cold blood. The media are more respectful to white serial killers and mass murderers than to unarmed black victims of murder.

And yet, many of the people who perform this critique day-in, day-out can get jammed up by media perceptions of protesters. They want to correct the media's assertion that protesters were all looters for good reason: the idea of black people looting a store is one of the most racially charged images in the white imaginary. When protesters proclaim that "not all protesters were looters, in fact, most of the looters weren't part of the protest!" or words to that effect, they are trying to fight a horrifically racist history of black people depicted in American culture as robbers and thieves: Precisely the image that the Ferguson police tried to evoke to assassinate Michael Brown's character and justify his killing post facto. It is a completely righteous and understandable position.

However, in trying to correct this media image-in making a strong division between Good Protesters and Bad Rioters, or between ethical non-violence practitioners and supposedly violent looters-the narrative of the criminalization of black youth is reproduced. This time it delineates certain kinds of black youth-those who loot versus those who protest. The effect of this discourse is hardening a permanent category of criminality on black subjects who produce a supposed crime within the context of a protest. It reproduces racist and white supremacist ideologies (including the tactic of divide-and-conquer), deeming some unworthy of our solidarity and protection, marking them, subtly, as legitimate targets of police violence. These days, the police, whose public-facing racism is much more manicured, if no less virulent, argue that "outside agitators" engage in rioting and looting. Meanwhile, police will consistently praise "non-violent" demonstrators, and claim that they want to keep those demonstrators safe.

In working to correct the white-supremacist media narrative we can end up reproducing police tactics of isolating the individuals who attack property at protests. Despite the fact that if it were not for those individuals the media might pay no attention at all. If protesters hadn't looted and burnt down that QuikTrip on the second day of protests, would Ferguson be a point of worldwide attention? It's impossible to know, but all the non-violent protests against police killings across the country that go unreported seem to indicate the answer is no. It was the looting of a Duane Reade after a vigil that brought widespread attention to the murder of Kimani Gray in New York City. The media's own warped procedure instructs that riots and looting are more effective at attracting attention to a cause.

But of course, the goal is not merely the attention of dominant media. Nor is the goal a certain kind of media attention: no matter how peaceful and well-behaved a protest is, the dominant media will always push the police talking points and the white-supremacist agenda. The goal is justice. Here, we have to briefly grapple with the legacy of social justice being won in America: namely that of non-violence and the civil rights movement. And that means correcting a more pervasive and totalizing media and historical narrative about the civil rights movement: that it was non-violent, that it claimed significant wins because it was non-violent, and that it overcame racial injustice altogether.

In the 400 years of barbaric, white supremacist, colonial and genocidal history known as the United States, the civil rights movement stands out as a bright, beautiful, all-too-brief moment of hope and struggle. We still live in the shadow of the leaders, theory, and images that emerged from those years, and any struggle in America that overlooks the work (both philosophical and organizational) produced in those decades does so at its own peril. However, why is it drilled into our heads, from grade school onward, in every single venue, by presidents, professors and police chiefs alike, that the civil rights movement was victorious because it was non-violent? Surely we should be suspicious of any narrative that the entire white establishment agrees is of the utmost importance.

The civil rights movement was not purely non-violent. Some of its bravest, most inspiring activists worked within the framework of disciplined non-violence. Many of its bravest, most inspiring activists did not. It took months of largely non-violent campaigning in Birmingham, Alabama to force JFK to give his speech calling for a civil rights act. But in the month before he did so, the campaign in Birmingham had become decidedly not-non-violent [1]: protesters had started fighting back against the police and Eugene "Bull" Conner, throwing rocks, and breaking windows. Robert Kennedy, afraid that the increasingly riotous atmosphere in Birmingham would spread across Alabama and the South, convinced John to deliver the famous speech and begin moving towards civil rights legislation.

This would have been impossible without the previous months of courageous and tireless non-violent activism. But it is also the emergent threat of rioting that forced JFK's hand. Both Malcolm X and MLK had armed bodyguards. Throughout the civil rights era, massive non-violent civil disobedience campaigns were matched with massive riots. The most famous of these was the Watts rebellion of 1965 but they occurred in dozens of cities across the country. To argue that the movement achieved what it did in spite of rather than as a result of the mixture of not-non-violent and non-violent action is spurious at best. And, lest we forget, Martin Luther King Jr., the man who embodied the respectable non-violent voice that the white power structure claims they would listen to today, was murdered by that same white power structure anyway.

Though the Civil Rights movement won many battles, it lost the war. Mass incarceration, the fact that black wealth and black-white inequality are at the same place they were at the start of the civil rights movement, that many US cities are more segregated now than they were in the sixties: no matter what "colorblind" liberals would say, racial justice has not been won, white supremacy has not been overturned, racism is not over. In fact, anti-black racism remains the foundational organizing principle of this country. That is because this country is built on the right to property, and there is no property, no wealth in the USA without the exploitation, appropriation, murder, and enslavement of black people.

As Raven Rakia puts it, "In America, property is racial. It always has been." Indeed, the idea of blackness was invented simultaneously with American conceptions of property: via slavery. In the early days of colonial America, chattel slavery was much less common than indentured servitude-though the difference between the two was not always significant-and there were Irish, French, German and English immigrants among these populations. But while there had always been and continued to be some black freedmen, over the course of the 17th century light-skinned European people stopped being indentured servants and slaves. This is partially because production exploded in the colonies much faster than a working population could form to do the work-either from reproduction or voluntary immigration-and so the cost of hired labor went through the roof. Even a very poor and desperate European became much more expensive than an African bought from the increasingly rationalized transatlantic slave trade.

The distinction between white and black was thus eventually forged as a way of distinguishing between who could be enslaved and who could not. The earliest working definition of blackness may well have been "those who could be property". Someone who organized a mob to violently free slaves, then, would surely be considered a looter (had the word come into common usage by then, John Brown and Nat Turner would have been slandered with it). This is not to draw some absurd ethical equivalence between freeing a slave and grabbing a flat screen in a riot. The point, rather, is that for most of America's history, one of the most righteous anti-white supremacist tactics available was looting. The specter of slaves freeing themselves could be seen as American history's first image of black looters.

On Twitter, a tongue-in-cheek political hashtag sprang up, #suspectedlooters, which was filled with images of colonial Europeans, slave owners, cowboys and white cultural appropriators. Similarly, many have pointed out that, had Africa not been looted, there wouldn't even be any black people in America. These are powerful correctives to arguments around looting, and the rhetorical point-that when people of color loot a store, they are taking back a miniscule proportion of what has been historically stolen from them, from their ancestral history and language to the basic safety of their children on the street today-is absolutely essential. But purely for the purposes of this argument-because I agree wholeheartedly with the political project of these campaigns-I want to claim that what white settlers and slave traders did wasn't mere looting.

It was genocide, theft, and barbarism of the lowest order. But part of how slavery and colonialism functioned was to introduce new territories and categories to the purview of ownership, of property. Not only did they steal the land from native peoples, but they also produced a system under which the land itself could be stolen, owned by legal fiat through force of arms. Not only did they take away Africans' lives, history, culture, and freedom, but they also transformed people into property and labor-power into a saleable commodity. Chattel slavery is the most barbaric and violent form of work coercion-but as the last 150 years has shown, you can dominate an entire people through law, violence, and wages pretty well.

Recently an Instagram video circulated of a Ferguson protester discussing the looting and burning of the QuikTrip convenience store. He retorts the all too common accusation thrown at rioters: "People wanna say we destroying our own neighborhoods. We don't own nothing out here!" This is the crux of the matter, and could be said of most majority black neighborhoods in America, which have much higher concentrations of chain stores and fast food restaurants than non-black neighborhoods. The average per capita income in Ferguson, MO is less than $21,000, and that number almost certainly gets lower if you remove the 35% white population of Ferguson from the equation. How could the average Ferguson resident really say it's "our QuikTrip"? Indeed, although you might hang out in it, how can a chain convenience store or corporate restaurant earnestly be part of anyone's neighborhood? The same white liberals who inveigh against corporations for destroying local communities are aghast when rioters take their critique to its actual material conclusion.

The mystifying ideological claim that looting is violent and non-political is one that has been carefully produced by the ruling class because it is precisely the violent maintenance of property which is both the basis and end of their power. Looting is extremely dangerous to the rich (and most white people) because it reveals, with an immediacy that has to be moralized away, that the idea of private property is just that: an idea, a tenuous and contingent structure of consent, backed up by the lethal force of the state. When rioters take territory and loot, they are revealing precisely how, in a space without cops, property relations can be destroyed and things can be had for free.

On a less abstract level there is a practical and tactical benefit to looting. Whenever people worry about looting, there is an implicit sense that the looter must necessarily be acting selfishly, "opportunistically," and in excess. But why is it bad to grab an opportunity to improve well-being, to make life better, easier, or more comfortable? Or, as Hannah Black put it on Twitter: "Cops exist so people can't loot ie have nice things for free so idk why it's so confusing that people loot when they protest against cops" [sic]. Only if you believe that having nice things for free is amoral, if you believe, in short, that the current (white-supremacist, settler-colonialist) regime of property is just, can you believe that looting is amoral in itself.

White people deploy the idea of looting in a way that implies people of color are greedy and lazy, but it is just the opposite: looting is a hard-won and dangerous act with potentially terrible consequences, and looters are only stealing from the rich owners' profit margins. Those owners, meanwhile, especially if they own a chain like QuikTrip, steal forty hours every week from thousands of employees who in return get the privilege of not dying for another seven days.

And the further assumption that the looter isn't sharing her loot is just as racist and ideological. We know that poor communities and communities of color practice more mutual aid and support than do wealthy white communities-partially because they have to. The person looting might be someone who has to hustle everyday to get by, someone who, by grabbing something of value, can afford to spend the rest of the week "non-violently" protesting. They might be feeding their family, or older people in their community who barely survive on Social Security and can't work (or loot) themselves. They might just be expropriating what they would otherwise buy-liquor, for example-but it still represents a material way that riots and protests help the community: by providing a way for people to solve some of the immediate problems of poverty and by creating a space for people to freely reproduce their lives rather than doing so through wage labor.

Modern American police forces evolved out of fugitive slave patrols, working to literally keep property from escaping its owners. The history of the police in America is the history of black people being violently prevented from threatening white people's property rights. When, in the midst of an anti-police protest movement, people loot, they aren't acting non-politically, they aren't distracting from the issue of police violence and domination, nor are they fanning the flames of an always-already racist media discourse. Instead, they are getting straight to the heart of the problem of the police, property, and white supremacy.

Solidarity with all Ferguson rebels! Justice for Mike Brown!

Notes

[1] I use the rather clunky phrase not-non-violent purposely. For some non-violence ideologues breaking windows, lighting trash on fire or even building barricades in the street is "violent". I once watched a group of black teens chanting "Fuck the Police" get shouted at for "being violent" by a white protester. Though there are more forms of violence than just literal physical blows to a human body, I don't believe a conception of "violence" which encompasses both throwing trash in the street and the murder of Michael Brown is remotely helpful. Frustratingly, in protest situations violence tends to be defined as "whatever the nearest cop or non-violence practitioner says it is." Calling breaking a window "violent" reproduces this useless definition and places the whole argument within the rhetorical structure of non-violence ideology. Not-non-violent, then, becomes the more useful term.

Imperialist Feminism and Liberalism

By Deepa Kumar

In a recent CNN interview, religion scholar Reza Aslan was asked by journalist Alisyn Camerota if Islam is violent given the "primitive treatment in Muslim countries of women and other minorities." Aslan responded by stating that the conditions for women in Muslim majority countries vary. While women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia, elsewhere in various Muslim majority countries, women have been elected heads of states 7 times. But, before he could finish his sentence pointing out that the US is yet to elect a woman as president, he was interrupted by co-host Don Lemon who declared: "Be honest though, Reza, for the most part it is not a free and open society for women in those states."

How is it that people like Camerota and Lemon, who very likely have never travelled to "free and open" Turkey, Lebanon or Bangladesh, or read the scholarship on women's rights struggles in Morocco, Iran and Egypt, seem to know with complete certainty that women are treated "primitively" in "Muslim countries"? On what basis does Lemon believe that he has the authority to call Aslan out for supposed dishonesty? How is it that with little or no empirical evidence on women's rights in Muslim majority countries (which vary widely based on country, regions within a country, social class, the history and nature of national liberation movements, the part played by Islam in political movements etc.) Western commentators routinely make such proclamations about women and Islam?

The answer lies in a ubiquitous, taken-for-granted ideological framework that has been developed over two centuries in the West. This framework, referred to by scholars as colonial feminism, is based on the appropriation of women's rights in the service of empire. Birthed in the nineteenth century in the context of European colonialism, it rests on the construction of a barbaric, misogynistic "Muslim world" that must be civilized by a liberal, enlightened West; a rhetoric also known as gendered Orientalism.

Colonial/imperialist feminism has taken new and old forms in the US. The immediate context for a resurgence of imperialist feminism in the US is the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Borrowing a trope from Britain in India and Egypt, and France in Algeria, the US argued that it was going to liberate Afghan women. Liberals and feminists in the US, going against the wishes of Afghan feminist organizations such as RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) who opposed US intervention, linked arms with the Bush administration and supported the Afghan war.

In the Obama era, liberalism became even more intertwined with empire. Despite mountains of evidence to show that the US/NATO occupation had done little for women's rights, Amnesty-USA conducted a campaign in support of the continued occupation of Afghanistan. In 2012, ads appeared in public places of Afghan women in burqas with the caption: "Nato: Keep the Progress Going!" Amnesty further organized a summit that rearticulated through the voices of powerful women, such as Madeline Albright, imperialist feminist justifications for war.

What explains this tendency among liberals to take positions that go against the interests of Muslim women and women of color? While there are numerous factors, two are worth noting-racism and empire.

As several Third World Feminists have argued, a historical weakness of liberal feminism in the West has been its racist, patronizing attitude towards women of color who have been seen less as allies/agents and more as victims in need of rescue. This attitude prevails both in relation to women of color within Western nation states, as well as women in the global South. This is what allows figures such as Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton to be viewed as feminist saviors even while both, in their roles as Secretary of State, have advanced US imperialism. It is liberalisms understanding of the state as a neutral body, rather than as a coercive apparatus used to advance capitalism and empire, which is at the root of such perspectives.

In the cultural sphere, TV shows such as Homeland reproduce imperialist feminism not only through its plot line and female lead character (Carrie Mathison), but also through its ad campaigns. In the lead up to Season 4, the publicity campaign featured Mathison "far from home" fighting the righteous war. Mathison's red hood, blue gown and white face stand in for the American nation against a sea of Eastern darkness. Her unique clothing and her active posture mark her as the embodiment of liberal individualism in contrast to the passive, indistinguishable Muslim women in black. The larger narrative is the construction of "us" as a society that values women and their agency, and of them as misogynistic in a classic reproduction of the "clash of civilizations" colonial argument.

Yet, imperialist feminism has not been the province only of white elites in the West; comprador intellectuals in the global South have always played a productive role. Today, in the "post-racial" era, it is not only white liberals and feminists that have bolstered imperialist feminism, middle and ruling class brown and black women in the West and the global South have actively contributed to the articulation of new forms and new agents of imperialist feminism.

One recent example of how imperialist feminism can occasionally incorporate Muslim female agency is the widespread media attention in the West focused on the UAE female pilot Maryam al-Mansouri. Widely praised by liberals and conservatives in the US (not withstanding the "boobs on the ground" comment), al-Mansouri became a means by which to paper over the gulf monarchies' atrocious human rights record. Even while the image of a Muslim female pilot served to disrupt the standard victim imagery, the larger narrative was one which cast the US as savior leading a coalition of "good Muslims" in a righteous war against ISIS. In place of T. E. Lawrence, we have Barack Obama.

Liberal feminism has routinely viewed women's participation in the military as positive. In 1991, after the first Gulf war, feminist Naomi Wolf praised US female soldiers for eliciting "respect and even fear" and for taking the struggle for women's rights forward. What she failed to discuss is the over 200,000 Iraqis, men, women and children, who were killed in that war. US women cannot achieve their liberation on the bodies of the victims of empire any more than Arab women can by raining bombs on Syrians. Empire does not liberate, it subjugates.

Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of media studies and Middle Eastern studies at Rutgers University (New Jersey). She is the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire and Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike.

This article was originally published at Open Democracy

The Great Recession, Six Years Later: Uneven Recovery, Flawed Indicators, and a Struggling Working Class

By Colin Jenkins

In July of this year, Barack Obama boasted of an impressive recovery the US has undertaken since the Great Recession of 2008, proclaiming, "We've recovered faster and come farther than almost any other advanced country on Earth." To support this claim, the White House released a report showing that, out of 12 countries identified as "advanced" (France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States), the United States is "one of only two (the other being Germany) that experienced systemic financial crises in 2007 and 2008 but have seen real (gross domestic product) per working-age person return to pre-crisis levels."

Reports such as these have become commonplace in 2014, not only from those in the White House, but also from multiple media sources. Within mainstream circles, the recovery has generally been lauded by the Democratic wing of the media (MSNBC, Huffington Post, and of course reports from the White House) and questioned by the Republican wing (Fox News, the Wall Street Journal). Since the reports stemming from these sources are almost always politically-charged, they have a tendency to be misleading in at least some manner. In the rare instance where genuine information or analysis leaks from the mainstream, it is usually the unintended result of a media spin.

Ultimately, the intended purpose of these reports are reduced to either showing Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in a good light (by focusing on seemingly positive statistics) or showing Obama and the Democrats in a bad light (by focusing on seemingly negative statistics). Often times, the same statistics may be used; however, spun differently. Neither side is interested in formulating meaningful analysis, but rather in swaying voters one way or the other. Still, in this media tug-o-war, facts are sometimes used to support political arguments, and thus may be useful from time to time if one is able to pick them out of the fray. But, even when we catch a glimpse of fairly reliable statistics, how do we cut through the politically-charged spins to give them meaning?

Take Obama's July statement for instance. It suggests that the US has experienced a strong recovery since the 2008 economic crisis, right? Well, not necessarily. What it says is that the US has experienced a better recovery than 11 out of 12 of its "advanced" counterparts that "experienced systemic crises," which (it's important to note) were handpicked by the White House. According to the International Monetary Fund, there are actually 36 countries that are considered to have "advanced economies." And considering the global nature of the economy, it's difficult to claim that 67% of them avoided systemic crisis. When compared to the 36, the US ranks 12th in GDP growth and 9th in unemployment rate recovery. Not necessarily bad, but certainly not as good as suggested.

Which brings us to some other questions: How accurate are GDP and unemployment rates when assessing the overall economic well-being of a country? Why are such macroeconomic indicators used so frequently in mainstream analyses? Do they accurately represent the well-being of the working-class majority, or do they simply represent convenient fodder used to supplement political spins? Let's take a look.

Gross Domestic Product and the Dow Jones Industrial Average

Two major indicators used to determine the overall health of the economy are the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).

US GDP growth rates over the past six years suggest a strong recovery. Since falling more than 16 percent during the Great Recession of 2008-09, the GDP has experienced growth in 19 out of 21 financial quarters.

2013 was especially successful in terms of GDP growth, averaging over 3 percent for the first time since the recession. 2014 started out slow, dropping a little over 2% in the first quarter (Q1 2014); however, this was written off as an irregularity by analysts, including PNC Senior Economist Gus Faucher, who attributed the drop to " bad weather " that "was a significant drag on the economy, disrupting production, construction, and shipments, and deterring home and auto sales." Since that time, the GDP has been growing at a rate of 4.1% over the past six months.

The DJIA has shown even bigger signs of recovery. After being cut in half between September 2007 (15,865) and February 2009 (7,923), the DJIA has experienced an almost unfathomable boom.

It hit its highest point ever in November 2013, nearly five years after the recession, at 16,429, and has been breaking records ever since. Heading into November of 2014, it stands at 17, 390 - the highest point in its 128-year history.

Corporate Profits

Not surprisingly, the cumulative amount of corporate profits in the United States have paralleled the success of the stock market. American Enterprise Institute economist Mark J. Perry has illustrated a sharp correlation between the S & P 500 Index and after-tax corporate profits in the chart below:

Perry explains this phenomenon:

"Starting about 2009, a one-to-one relationship between stock prices and after-tax corporate profits has once again re-emerged, and both the S&P 500 and corporate profits have increased by the exact same 119% at the end of 2013 from their cyclical, recessionary lows. The all-time record highs for the S&P 500 Index in 2013 were being driven by record-high corporate profits as the chart shows, and it's almost certain that the ongoing bull market rally in 2014 continues to be supported by record-high corporate profits."

The corporate landscape has rarely been as conducive to generating profit as it is right now. As a result, the post-recession years have been dubbed "a golden age of corporate profits" by those in both mainstream and alternate media. Specifically, "corporate earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1 percent since the end of 2008." As a percentage of national income, "corporate profits stood at 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, the largest share at any time since 1950."

To put the significance of this growth in perspective, at the end of 2008, during the peak of the recession, US corporate after-tax profits totaled $671.40 Billion. At the end of June 2014, that total has nearly tripled to $1.842 Trillion.

Unemployment Rate and Job Growth

Another major indicator used to gauge the state of the economy is the unemployment rate. In October of 2009, after the residual effects of the recession had settled, the US unemployment rate officially hit 10% for only the second time since 1940 (10.8% in 1982). After hovering around 9% through 2011, the rate has steadily decreased over the past few years, dropping below 6% in September of 2014 - a level untouched since July of 2008.

This new 6-year low in the rate includes 1.9 million people dropping from the ranks of the unemployed, and the number of "long-term unemployed" falling 1.2 million over the past year.

According to the US Department of Labor, "employers added 248,000 jobs in September (2014)" and "payrolls have expanded an average 227,000 a month this year, putting 2014 on track to be the strongest year of job growth since the late 1990s." The job growth rate in 2014 included a 300,000+ jump in April. And much of this expansion has been fueled by the private sector, which "has now added 10.3 million jobs over 55 straight months of growth" since the recession.

Flawed Indicators

Based on assessments which focus on macroeconomic indicators like the GDP, DJIA, and Unemployment Rate, one could reasonably come to the conclusion that not only has the US fully recovered from the "Great Recession," but it has actually surpassed pre-recession levels in economic well-being. However, this begs the question: whose well-being? And a closer examination uncovers plenty of contradictions.

The contradictions that arise from such assessments are largely due to the inherent flaws of these indicators. According to the New Economy Working Group, "Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has many deficiencies as a measure of economic well-being. Most often noted is the fact that it can only add, which means it makes no distinction between beneficial and harmful economic activity." Also, GDP analyses focus solely on total growth, and do not attempt to assess levels of wealth distribution:

"There could be complete income equality with everyone's purchasing power growing equally. Or the society may be divided between a small minority of the extremely affluent and a majority of the extremely destitute - or anything in between. GDP gives no clue one way or the other. Growth in the incomes of a few billionaires can produce impressive growth in GDP even as a majority of people starve."

In fact, during the past half-century, the DJIA has lost almost all of its credibility as a reliable indicator of economic well-being. And since the rise of globalization in the late-1990s, it has become increasingly irrelevant to economic activity on a national level. "The Dow's biggest flaw, perhaps, is that it doesn't help us to make sense of an increasingly interconnected global economy - one in which what's good for GM isn't always good for the country," explains Adam Davidson. "GE, IBM and Intel, for example, all make more than half their profits in other countries. And while this may be great for their shareholders, it means little for most Americans."

The ever-increasing gap between corporate profit and workers income has also served as a death knell to the DJIA indicator. "In the postwar boom of the 1950s, the economy was growing so fast, and the benefits were so widely shared (throughout the socioeconomic ladder), that following 30 large American companies was a solid measure of most everyone's personal economy," Davidson adds. Back then, "what was good for GM really was good for the country." In a modern economic environment that rewards CEOs 331 times more than the average worker, and 774 times more than minimum wage workers, this is no longer the case. (In 1983, this ratio was 46 to 1)

Historically, the unemployment rate has been considered a fairly weak indicator of economic well-being, and for good reason. Its two major flaws lie in its failure to gauge levels of income, and its inability to consider things like "underemployment" and "hidden unemployment."

These lost categories include "people who have given up looking for jobs or work part time because they can't find full-time position." In 2014, as unemployment statistics suggest a vast improvement in labor participation, "more than 9 million Americans still fit into these categories, about 60 percent - or 3.5 million - above prerecession levels, according to the Labor Department."

Evan Horowitz explains:

"Let's say there are 100 people either working or looking for work. If 94 of those people have jobs, and six are seeking jobs, then the unemployment rate is 6 percent.

Notice that a lot hinges on people 'working or looking for work.' Say you want to work, but the job market is bad and you decide to put off the search until conditions get better. You're still unemployed, just not counted as unemployed by the government.

To return to the example, if three of those six people looking for work get discouraged and give up, the unemployment rate would fall to about 3 percent."

Furthermore, the unemployment rate completely ignores income. In other words, even rates that are considered to represent "full employment" (4-5%) essentially mean nothing if a considerable number of jobs pay poverty wages.

State of the Working Class

Because macro-indicators like the DJIA, GDP, and unemployment rates are severely flawed in their ability to reflect standards of living and economic well-being for a population, it is important to evaluate how the majority is fairing in this so-called recovery.

Since the US population throughout is largely driven by consumerism, a telling statistic is the market-based core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, a measurement used to determine the amount of expendable income the average consumer possesses at a given time. According to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, "the market-based price index for core PCE (i.e., excluding food and energy) rose just 1.3% over the past year, well below the Fed's 2% inflation target." This supports further evidence that impressive gains in GDP and corporate profits are simply not reaching (or trickling down to) a majority of Americans.

Despite recent and steady job growth, there are still 1.4 million fewer full-time jobs in the US today than there was in 2008. A recent survey conducted at Rutgers University reports that more than 20 percent of all workers that have been laid off in the past five years still have not found a new job.

When considering workers who have given up on job searches, the unemployment rate is estimated at more than 12 percent.

A more accurate indicator than the unemployment rate may be the actual employment rate. When looking at this, we see that roughly 80 percent of " prime-age workers " (those between 25 and 54) had jobs in 2007. "That bottomed out at around 75 percent during the worst of the downturn, but has risen to only 76.7 percent since."

Despite steady job growth, new jobs simply do not stack up to the jobs that were lost. In sectors that experienced severe job losses due to the recession, workers are earning 23% less today. The average annual salary in the manufacturing and construction sectors - a particularly hard hit area - was $61,637 in 2008. It has now plummeted to $47,171 in 2014. Similar adjustments to income levels imply that $93 billion in lower wage income has been created during the recovery - meaning workers, across the board, are receiving a much smaller share than they were before 2009.

A report by the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) also showed that "the majority of metro areas - 73 percent - had households earning salaries of less than $35,000 a year," hardly a living wage for families facing ever-rising commodity prices.

Despite increased productivity and corporate profits, most workers' wages have actually fallen. Biven reports, "From the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014, real hourly wages fell for all deciles, except for a miniscule two-cent increase at the 10th percentile. Underlying this exception to the general trend at the 10th percentile is a set of state-level minimum-wage increases in the first half of 2014 in states where 40 percent of U.S. workers reside."

"As a percentage of national income, corporate profits stood at 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, the largest share at any time since 1950, while the portion of income that went to employees was 61.7 percent, near its lowest point since 1966,"reported Nelson Schwartz in 2013. Dean Maki, chief US economist at Barclay's reports that "corporate earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1 percent since the end of 2008, but disposable income inched ahead by 1.4 percent annually over the same period, after adjusting for inflation," adding that "there hasn't been a period in the last 50 years where these trends have been so pronounced."

In the midst of impressive GDP growth, the US working class is experiencing a legitimate hunger crisis that does not seem to slowing down. "As of 2012,49 million Americans suffer from food insecurity, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as lack of access to 'enough food for an active, healthy life.' Nearly one-third of the afflicted are children. And millions of them don't even have access to food stamps, according to a new report from the anti-hunger organization Feeding America."

In May of 2014, there were 46.2 million Americans on food stamps, a slight decrease from a record 47.8 million in December 2012. According to the US Department of Agriculture, 14.8% of the US population is currently on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Prior to the recession, the percentage of the population requiring such assistance hovered between 8 and 11 percent.

According to the US Census Bureau, "in 2013, there were 45.3 million people living in poverty" and "for the third consecutive year, the number of people in poverty at the national level was not statistically different from the previous year's estimate." The official poverty rate is at 14.5 percent.

Conclusion

Between 2008 and 2013, the number of US households with a net worth of $1 million or more increased dramatically, from 6.7 million to 9.6 million. Households with a net worth of $5 million and $25 million respectively also increased. "There were 1.24 million households with a net worth of $5 million or more last year, up from 840,000 in 2008. Those with $25 million and above climbed to 132,000 in 2013, up from 84,000 in 2008."

The US government, or more specifically, the Federal Reserve, has been instrumental in this uneven recovery that has been characterized by massive corporate profits and booming millionaires on one side (a small minority), and falling wages, increased poverty, and frequent reliance on food stamps on the other side (a large majority).

According to a September 2014 study by the Harvard Business School, the widening gap between America's wealthiest and its middle and lower classes is "unsustainable," and "is unlikely to improve any time soon." The study points the finger at "shortsighted executives" who are "satisfied with an American economy whose firms win in global markets without lifting US living standards" for American workers, and therefore create an extremely polarized population where a majority of workers are disenfrachised from the business world.

The practice of quantitative easing (QE) - "An unconventional monetary policy in which a central bank purchases government securities or other securities from the market in order to lower interest rates and increase the money supply" - has become common during the recovery. Essentially, this practice "increases the money supply by flooding financial institutions with capital in an effort to promote increased lending and liquidity." After three bouts of QE, all occurring since the recession, the Federal Reserve has acquired $4.5 trillion in assets , while adding at least $2.3 trillion of additional currency into the economy.

Robert D. Auerbach - an economist with the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee for eleven years, assisting with oversight of the Federal Reserve, and now Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin - estimates that 81.5% of this money has not been used to "stimulate the economy," but rather " sits idle as excess reserve in private banks."

Others have reported that, rather than sitting idle as Auerbach suggests, the money has actually funneled through to major corporate players, creating massive personal wealth for a select few. CNBC's Robert Frank reported just last week that "the world's billionaires are holding an average of $600 million in cash each - greater than the gross domestic product of Dominica," which "marks a jump of $60 million from a year ago and translates into billionaires' holding an average of 19 percent of their net worth in cash."

When considering the top-heavy recovery numbers, and increased misery for the working class, this comes as no surprise. And it certainly comes as no surprise to political economist Doug Henwood, who reported such trends back in 2012:

"Despite the strong recovery in cash flow, to record-breaking levels, firms are investing at levels typically seen at cyclical lows, not highs. Some cash flow is going abroad, in the form of direct investment, but still you'd think returns like these would encourage investment. Instead, they've been shipping out gobs to shareholder. Here's a graph of what I call shareholder transfers (dividends plus stock buybacks plus proceeds of mergers and acquisitions) over time:

Though not at the preposterously elevated levels of the late 1990s and mid-2000s, transfers are at the high end of their historical range. Instead of serving the textbook role of raising capital for productive investment, the stock market has become a conduit for shoveling money out of the 'real' sector and into the pockets of shareholders, who besides buying other securities, pay themselves nice bonuses they transform into Jaguars and houses in Southampton."

The Great Recession - like the 2001 recession before it, the 1990-91 recession before that, the 1981-82 recession before that, the 1973-75 recession before that, and so on - was the result of deeper systemic deficiencies. While the emergence of financialization opened the door for manipulative and predatory finance tricks (credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, NINJA loans, etc...) and helped to construct an impressively profitable house of cards, it is only part of the story. Ultimately, it is the boom & bust, cyclical nature of capitalism, along with its perpetually falling rates of profit (not cumulative profit), that are truly responsible, though almost always ignored.

The nature of this latest recovery suggests that the final nail in the working-class coffin, whose construction has been underway since the birth of neoliberalism, has been secured into place. Despite desperate measures used to pump massive amounts of currency into the economy through QE, virtually none has trickled down to the 99%. It's like déjà vu, all over again. And again… And again…

Lessons from The Brothers Karamazov: Doubt, Freedom, and the Organic Nature of Religious Truth

By Ali Ahmed

If you have read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, you will agree that it is one of a select few treasure-houses of literature. A classic novel of ideas, it is singular in that unlike many classics, Dostoevsky's magnum opus has only one group of readers: admirers. (There might admittedly be some dissidents here and there but, to me, they have not really read the novel) It is certainly one of the most powerful works I have ever read. While it is not as long as Tolstoy's War and Peace, it is still however good and lengthy. And if you haven't read it, yet, then in this two-part series, by exploring a little of the profound depths of the novel and drawing out some of its lessons, I intend to persuade you that you are worth it.

In abbreviations of the book, the novel is often boiled down to the infamous section of the Grand Inquisitor, which says a lot about the novel as that particular section does not really, at least in my estimation, move the plot. Nevertheless, readers might agree that it forms perhaps the most gripping part of the novel. By focusing on this particular chapter, we'll get a sense of Dostoevsky's understanding of the place and purpose of religion, and how he envisions the real liberation of man vis-à-vis religion.

Without getting into too much detail about the plot, allow me to briefly preface our discussion by saying that the novel is about the return of the three Karamazov brothers to their birthplace, their father's home in the town of Skotoprigonevsk. In the days that follow, their father is murdered and one of the brothers is accused with the crime. Essentially, as far as plot is concerned, the novel is a whodunit, but as we've mentioned, The Brothers Karamazov being a novel of ideas, Dostoevsky is infinitely more intrigued by the intricate subtleties of thought and emotion, the hundred indecisions and the hundred visions and revisions, than he is with solving the crime. Now, each of the three brothers-Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha, in that order-are quite different from one another and that's part of the dynamic of the story. In the chapter of the Grand Inquisitor, which takes place before the murder scene, the two younger Karamazov brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, meet at a local tavern and catch up. It's been years since they've had a chance to speak to each other. Ivan, the elder, has since been through several years of schooling, including University, and has thus become somewhat of a recognized intellectual. Alyosha, the youngest brother, chooses the path of spiritual training and has joined the monastery to become a monk. After many years of separation, the two younger brothers meet-earlier in the novel-and in this chapter, Ivan presents his thesis, his "what I believe" to Alyosha.

Ivan relates to his brother a philosophical "poem" he has written, set during the severest days of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century. A large crowd has gathered outside of a cathedral in Seville, just a day after a hundred heretics were burned at the stake by the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor in an auto-da-fe. The people are a scattered, miserable sight, and it is in the midst of this misery that Jesus reappears, not in the form of the spiritual lion that vanquishes falsehood at the end of times - as is prophesied - but in the same human image in which he walked on the earth fifteen centuries ago. He says nothing but the people know it is him; there is a healing power even in the touch of his garments. He cures an old man of his blindness and witnesses a funeral procession leading out of the cathedral. The mother of the dead child wails and begs him for his help. With the same words with which he had brought back the dead all those years ago, he brings the little girl back to life. She sits up in the coffin, still holding the flowers in her hand, and looks around in amazement. By this point, the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, who had been eyeing the situation from a distance, has had enough. He is enraged at what he has seen and orders his guards to take away the meddling intruder. The people not only don't intervene, but they have been made so utterly submissive to the aged Inquisitor that they, as one body, bow down to him as Jesus is taken away to prison. In his sermon on the Dostoevsky Brothers, Robert M. Price makes a noteworthy point when he says, about Jesus, "after all, wasn't he, and doesn't he remain, the greatest of heretics?" That is indeed a common oversight, the fact that all prophets are, by virtue of their task, rebels against the status quo. But more on that another time.

"Why, then, have you come to interfere with us?" asks the Grand Inquisitor of Jesus in the cell. "Anything you proclaim anew will encroach upon the freedom of men's faith, for it will come as a miracle, and the freedom of their faith was the dearest of all things to you, even then, one and a half thousand years ago. Was it not you who so often said then: 'I want to make you free'? But now you have seen these 'free' men…this work has cost us dearly…but we have finally finished this work in your name. For fifteen hundred years we have been at pains over this freedom, but now it is finished, and well finished…these people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet." What exactly is the aged Inquisitor babbling about? Well, Jesus had made it his priority to inspire faith freely. The faith that he demanded was born of constant thought and personal reflection in the face of doubt and disarray. "Such an experience of faith," writes Simon Critchley in his piece in the New York Times, "is not certainty, but is only gained by going into the proverbial desert and undergoing diabolical temptation and radical doubt…doubt is not the enemy of faith. On the contrary, it is certainty." The truth that sets you free is a difficult truth because it is predicated upon the constant dialectical process between certainty and doubt. Contrary to popular opinion, which is of course based on an easy and widely accepted interpretation of faith, religion does not demand a surrender of contemplation, but rather exactly the opposite. Religion is not a manual for life, as some might like to declare, with an extensive index that conveniently leads you to the solution for every situation. Those that think that religion is just that, a manual, compromise the organicism that is at the heart of faith and reduce the grand design of the human subject to the machinations of an operating system. It is only in understanding and accepting faith as a living, organic process that addresses each individual subject's search for truth in a world of "diabolical temptation" that one exercises the freedom Jesus required from the faithful.

Returning to the Grand Inquisitor, we note again, to emphasize his point, what he tells Jesus: "Was it not you who so often said then: 'I want to make you free?'…For fifteen hundred years we have been at pains over this freedom, but now it is finished." The freedom of faith that we've been discussing; the organic, dialectical process - born of contemplation - navigating between the waters of doubt and certainty, all that is finished. It is finished because this freedom has been a burden on humanity, says the Grand Inquisitor, who accuses Jesus of mistakenly believing it to be strong enough and thus demanding more than it can handle. The Grand Inquisitor says that the Church has replaced this dialectical process with the fixity of certainty (and the Inquisition-the burning of "heretics"-itself both actuates and demonstrates this shift), for that is more conducive to the happiness of mankind than the burden of free thought and free choice. So how has the Church accomplished this? "You were warned," says the Inquisitor to Jesus in the prison cell. "You had no lack of warnings and indications, but you did not heed the warnings, you rejected the only way of arranging for human happiness…" That course of "arranging for human happiness" was offered to Jesus by the devil in the account of the three temptations which, exhorts the Inquisitor, was the real miracle. But Jesus rejects each of these temptations precisely because they sacrifice human freedom. "Decide yourself who was right: you or the one who questioned you then?" asks the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor. The Church has effectively re-written the narration and thus defeated the entire trajectory of faith that Jesus had envisioned.

After a 40-day fast in the desert, Jesus is met by the devil, whose temptations come in the form of three questions. Each of these temptations the Grand Inquisitor identifies with a single word. In the first, the devil tells Jesus to convert stones into bread, not so much for his own sake, but for the benefit of the people who will, struck by the miracle, immediately follow him thereafter. Man cannot live on bread alone, replies Jesus, but rather on the word of God. This Palestinian Prophet has in mind something other than the contentment offered by a material appetite; he envisages a spiritual satiation. In the next question, the devil tempts Jesus to throw himself off from the top of the temple. If he is really the son of God as he claims, says the devil, he will be propped up by angels who will keep him from falling onto the ground. Not only will this prove his devotion to God, but it will force the people into faith. They will have no option but to believe, incapable as they will be of processing the mystery. In the final temptation, the devil takes Jesus to the top of a mountain, offering him a vista of humanity and heaven, and promises him a combined package of eternal and temporal power under one singular authority. All kingdoms of all peoples would answer to one single sovereign. This would ensure the happiness of humankind through unity. Dissent is a result of difference. In this new scheme, humanity would be homogenized; it would be composed of a factory-line of people. Each individual would thus be exactly like the other, hence not an individual at all. A familiar scene out of so many science fiction movies we all know. Jesus is well aware of this and thus simply rejects the final offer.

"In this you acted proudly and magnificently, like God," says the Inquisitor to his prisoner, "but mankind, that weak, rebellious tribe-are they gods? ...could you possibly have assumed…that mankind, too, would be strong enough for such a temptation? Is that how human nature was created-to reject the miracle, and in those terrible moments of life, the moments of the most terrible, essential, and tormenting questions of the soul, to remain only with the free decisions of the heart?" He accuses Jesus of setting unachievable goals for humankind, that "weak, rebellious tribe." The freedom that he wanted for them is of no consolation in the face of existential despair; hence they themselves give up their freedom for happiness. "We corrected your deed and based it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep, and that at last such a terrible gift, which had brought them so much suffering, had been taken from their hearts." Finally, the Inquisitor reveals that the Church, though working in the name of Christ, is actually in cahoots with the devil. "Exactly eight centuries ago, we took from him what you so indignantly rejected, that last gift he offered you when he showed you all the kingdoms of the earth." It is in working with the devil that they have "corrected" the work of Jesus and thus rewritten the entire flight plan of the human spirit that he had envisioned. "Why did you reject that last gift? Had you accepted that third counsel of the might spirit, you would have furnished all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, and incontestable anthill". This is the Grand Inquisitor's ultimate assessment of humanity: a pathetic, rebellious band of weaklings who cannot bear the burden of a conscience and thus collectively seek a higher being to fall down in front of. A higher being that can dictate their lives and free them of any accountability. They find comfort in this collective unconsciousness and hate being told that things could be arranged differently. It is out of pity for what it believes to be the human condition that the Church sets out to rewrite religion, of which it has a rather bleak view.

In rejecting miracle, mystery, and authority, Jesus had desired faith freely given, faith that was, as we've mentioned before, born of a process. The two opposing poles of doubt and certainty charge and propel man towards truth, living life in the middle-path that is faith. "If faith becomes certainty," writes Critchley, "then we have become seduced by the temptations of miracle, mystery, and authority. We have become diabolical. There are no guarantees in faith. It is defined by an essential insecurity, tempered by doubt and defined by a radical experience in freedom." This radical freedom does not make easy the most terrible moments of life, nor is it any fun to live a life tempered by doubt. The insecurity that is at the heart of faith is terribly demanding and it takes its toll on even the most mentally adept; hence the daily, new converts to the Church of certainty, the religion of the Inquisitor. And it is only the ones who are certain of themselves and their faith that can pass judgement on others - who are either coerced into conviction or annihilated if found wanting. This is why certainty demands homogeneity, for it cannot tolerate difference. Those who follow this creed have not really dealt with their internal insecurity; they have merely covered it with the blanket of blind faith. And in the darkness, their insecurity silently spreads like a plague. A toxin of the mind and soul. While Jesus founded his teachings on spiritual precepts (Man shall not live on bread alone…), the Church has effectively recalibrated it on materialistic principles, hence the emphasis on the physicality of the three temptations. It is materialistic precisely because the Church has sought power by subverting the transcendent principle of religion. As Gabriel Marcel notes in Man and Mass Society, "even the authentic religions may become similarly degraded in their very principle of being. They too can degenerate into idolatries; especially where the will to power is waiting to corrupt them; and this, alas, is almost invariably the case when the Church becomes endowed with temporal authority". The will to power, the ego, chokes the organicism of religion and thus do we see multiple, temporal authorities reigning and disputing over fragments of a shattered spirit. More and more splinter groups that invoke heaven with more zealousness than those before them.

"You hoped that, following you, man, too, would remain with God, having no need of miracles" says the Inquisitor. "But you did not know that as soon as man rejects miracles, he will at once reject God as well, for man seeks not so much God as miracles. And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself, his own miracles this time…" The miracles man makes himself are the miracles of technology; the manipulation of matter. And since man had invested in faith for the sake of miracles to begin with, mastery over matter leads him to believe that he no longer needs God. As Dostoevsky himself says in the novel, commending Alyosha, for the realist, faith does not spring from miracles, but miracles from faith. Modern man belongs to the Church of White Coats, investing his faith in the idea that Physics alone reveals all; nothing stands outside of the frontiers of Physics. And Metaphysics, if it still exists, is an increasingly diminishing field as Science grows to encompass more of that which it did not know before. That is thus another reason why I believe that the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor is the prophet of materialism because a materialistic universe is essentially deterministic; the future is merely the result of all the physical data-the atoms-present in the universe. Human free will is an illusion. "It is very important for us to recognize," says Marcel, "that a materialistic conception of the universe is radically incompatible with the idea of a free man: more precisely, that, in a society ruled by materialistic principles, freedom is transmuted into its opposite, or becomes merely the most treacherous and deceptive of empty slogans." Marcel goes on to say that freedom in a society run on materialistic principles would be evanescent, it would consist of "rendering oneself sufficiently insignificant to escape the attention of the men in power…from the point of view of the individual in such a society, there is no conceivable way out at all: private life, as such, does not exist any more".

While real religion is predicated upon a self-willed process between certainty and doubt, and this process is an expression of human liberty as one chooses to face their personal insecurities and the despair of the human condition, the religion of materialism quietly rids you of your autonomy to afford you happiness. And it does this under the banner of making you free, convincing you that you've been a captive under religion. It sells you "freedom" in bulk; and what is more comforting than the freedom of certainty-freedom from self-doubt. The Church of Materialism has become so pervasive in so short a time that its principles have corrupted religions with principles of transcendence, religions that, under the increasing pressure of a secular, materialistic conception of the universe, have - unfortunately - lost ground in their "radical experience of freedom."