A weird law in New York forbids the use of electric microphones in public space so the only way for the speaker's voices to get through was for the front rows of the crowd to loudly repeat each of their sentences. The resulting litany resembled a kind of postmodern ritual. These speeches were then rapidly posted on YouTube.This of course is not the first time committed intellectuals have spoken in support of a movement of occupation. The Zucotti Park scene recalls a famous speech given by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre at the Renault automobile plant, at Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, in 1970. Perched on a cask, Sartre addresses the workers on strike, and tells them that the alliance between intellectuals and the working class that once existed should be rebuilt. These were times of revolutionary upheaval, in France and elsewhere, and intellectuals were urged to take sides.
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Žižek, Butler and West, moreover, spoke not in front of an occupied factory, as Sartre did, but in a public place. The occupation of public places is a trademark of these new movements, and the difference is crucial. If occupying public spaces is a matter of "reclaiming the street", or of demanding a "right to the city", then it is simultaneously a symptom of their not knowing what else to occupy.
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A final difference between these two scenes is that Sartre was not an academic. He was so distrustful of bourgeois institutions that he refused the Nobel prize for literature in 1964 (as Guy Debord said at the time, refusing the Nobel prize is nothing, the problem is having deserved it).
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Exceptions may be found, such as Bolivian vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera, who is one of Latin America's finest philosophers and sociologists. But today, the production of influential critical ideas is more and more the monopoly of academics.
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For the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the purpose of a political party of the working classes is not only to organise collective action, but also to organise collective thought and knowledge. And such serious thinking takes time. It requires permanent organisation, and not only "temporary autonomous zones", to quote a widespread slogan in today's movements. It also requires "mediating" institutions that permit theory and political practice to interact. What else has been the purpose of the worker's daily paper, the cadre training school, the radical publishing house, or the theoretical journal?Each epoch comes up with its own forms of collective intellectuality, its own original mediating institutions. What will these look like in the 21st century?
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One should start by acknowledging that, despite all the fuss about the internet, Facebook, Twitter, and "horizontality", all recent interesting ideas coming from the left have been elaborated in rather old-fashioned journals, such The New Left Review, the Socialist Register, Historical Materialism and their equivalents in other countries. These now come with websites and social media accounts. But this has in no way altered the content and style (for instance, the length) of their articles
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But when it comes to elaborating relevant ideas by way of the new media, much remains to be done. One pioneering initiative has been that of David Harvey, the British radical geographer based in New York, who recorded his classes about Marx's Capital and posted them on his website, where they have been seen by thousands around the world. More of this is needed.
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This is not to say that the teaching only goes one way. The ongoing social movements have produced and will produce in the years to come innovative knowledge and political knowhow. One striking example is the question of "gratuity" – the claim for free access to public services, such as parks in Turkey or public transportation in Brazil, has been central to these movements. Yet there exists no serious theory of gratuity in critical theories today, which would provide a history of this demand, or analyse its anti-capitalist potential. Hence, more than ever, intellectuals should learn from the movements from below. This means not only supporting them "from outside" once they have occurred, as many have done, but conceiving of one's intellectual activity as part and parcel of a collective intellectuality. Only then will the monopoly of academics on the production of influential critical theories be broken.
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While notable exceptions exist, the overall tendency of most accounts has been to compartmentalize and classify. Middle-Eastern resistance to dictatorship, Northern Mediterranean unrest against externally enforced austerity measures, and an Anglo-American revolt against the tyranny of the financial sector, have been analyzed as discrete cases each with their own structural and contingent dynamics. The results of this compartmentalization are all too predictable. Two years on, instead of a single image of global rebellion, we are left with fractured portraits of localized discontent.
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Rather than view these uprisings within the recently sanitized history of revolution and an increasingly ineffectual grammar of social movements, it is high time to call the global occupations of public space what they are: social arrests.
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The uprisings against authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Egypt were uniformly proclaimed as “expressing the will of the people”, while the strikingly similar manifestations of their Spanish, Greek, and American counterparts were all but ignored. This bifurcation in Western responses, one equally evident in governments and the mainstream media, is indicative of how we have come to perceive the role of mass political protest in the first decade of the 21st century. In the tradition of the French Revolution, uprisings against authoritarian rule are signified as acts of popular sovereignty — legitimate manifestations of a people unable to express their will through alternate channels — whereas similar protests within liberal representative democracies are marginalized as the acts of a raucous minority.
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these responses are the latest manifestation of a silent yet powerful recalibration of the terms democracy and revolution within our collective imaginations, a recalibration that has been ongoing since 1989. The revolutions of 1989 and their afterlives inaugurated a historical taming of the term, a taming that has carried over into the 21st century. This historical taming consists of two interrelated “police operations” conducted by Western liberal democracies: the first involving a particular way of talking about non-democratic revolutions, the second consisting of a conservative periodization of their own foundational pasts.
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From a 21st century perspective, these revolutions are increasingly being judged not by what they achieved (the overthrow of the previous socio-political order) but by the new regime’s convergence or divergence from a free-market liberal democratic state.
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The mass political uprisings that occurred after the establishment of democracy have, by this same narrative, been interpreted in a markedly different light. In the new American Republic, the crushing of the Whiskey and Shay’s Rebellions have been seen as the (necessary) assertion of federal power and sovereignty, while in France the continued intrusions of the will of the French people into the National Assembly after 1789 are commonly cited as causes of the descent of the French Revolution into demagoguery and terror.
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To get an idea of what differentiates the 2011 uprisings from previous forms of popular political struggle, let’s start with a short vignette from a protest action that typified the expression of extra-parliamentary discontent with governments before the 2011 uprisings.
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But this anecdote underscores, albeit in hyperbolic fashion, the effective crisis in the theory and practice of social movements that defined the closing decades of the 20th century — a crisis linked to the very category of motion itself. It was the death rattle of a type of politics which — from the calls to abolish world slavery to the struggle for gender equality, from communism to civil rights — has defined contentious political struggle over the past 200 years through the category of movement. Instead of asking what kind of movement the new uprisings of the 21st century represent, the time has come to review the relevance and efficacy of the term itself. To do so we need to reconsider, both epistemologically and in praxis, the kinetics of contentious political struggle.
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Althusser’s image of the hailing of the police officer speaks of a state apparatus (and a correlative subjectivity) that is premised on the idea of arrest. The policeman’s shout essentially stops whoever hears it in his/her tracks, freezes the comings and goings of people.
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In its place, as another French political theorist, Jacques Rancière, has pointed out, has come an altogether different policing function, one encapsulated by the police officer urging bystanders to “move along!”, that “there is nothing to see here.” While the former is predicated on disruption, the latter above all ensures the constant circulation of people, goods, and services: “The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation.”
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all of these sites and banners of contentious politics are directed not at a static state structure that arrests movement but are themselves in fact about stopping or arresting an unbridled and accelerating capitalist system. In this light, the very names given to struggle — the environmental movement, the anti-globalization movement, the slow food movement — become at best oxymoronic and at worst open to co-optation by the very forces they oppose (green-washing, the fair trade industry, etc.). We need to ask ourselves: why do we — and should we — still use the term movement to characterize contentious politics? What political conceptions and practices does this term privilege? What forms and histories of resistance has it obfuscated?
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The police conception of revolution and the crisis in the theory and practice of social “movements” form the dual backdrops for the global uprisings of 2011. Beginning in January of that year, a new form of revolt emerged in North Africa and spread, within months, around many parts of the globe. What actually took place at the sites of these revolts, in Zuccotti and Gezi Park, in the squares of Tahrir, Puerta del Sol and Syntagma, offered a seismic challenge to both the police conception of revolution and the theory and practice of political struggle. What happened in these squares was not movement but arrest, not dispersal but permanent occupation.
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Alain Badiou once wrote, “In the midst of a revolutionary event, the people is made up of those who know how to solve the problems that the event imposes on them.” The people of Tahrir organized and orchestrated their own security, dealt with human and regular waste, and opened and operated a kindergarten so that mothers with small children could come to the square. They converted a Hardees restaurant into a free kitchen, a Kentucky Fried Chicken into a free clinic, organized networks for digital and print information, set up a pharmacy, handled hired agitators, and protected each other’s religious practices.
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It became, through the life of the occupation, the stage on which the new Egyptian society was performed and presented. In their generosity, their tolerance, their humor, camaraderie, and song, the Egyptian people asserted their values and boundaries both to themselves and the whole world.
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There is as much attention devoted to how political and social life should be structured in the square — the ban on party and union insignia, the drawing of lots and time limits governing speech in the assembly, the coordination of meetings with public transit to assure greater participation, etc. — as there is to the what: articulating political manifestos and the position of the Assembly to its outside (whether in relation to the protests in the upper square or to Greek society more broadly).
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n the first week of June 2013, the actions taken by a coalition of activists against the destruction of a public park in central Istanbul spread to more than 60 cities and provinces, bringing several million people onto the streets. By June 8, the police had withdrawn from Taksim Square, leaving it at least temporarily in the hands of protesters. The protesters erected networks of makeshift barricades at 50 meter intervals along all major routes leading to the square. Within a week, Taksim and the adjacent Gezi Park became a “liberated zone”, a fragile oasis amidst the ongoing and increasingly violent clashes with police forces throughout much of Turkey.
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There is no doubt that the Greeks, Egyptians, Americans, Spaniards, Tunisians, and Turks first occupied the public spaces of their urban centers to voice political opposition. They came, as Stathis Gourgouris has pointed out, to “withdraw their consent” from the forces governing their lives. As the days passed, however, people had to figure out how to live and act together inside a square in order to sustain a revolt outside of it. In these sometimes very quotidian decisions, they came to define themselves by how they occupied and existed together.
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The 800+ plus murders committed by the Egyptian security forces unfortunately paled in comparison to the atrocities later carried out in Libya and Syria, respectively, by Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad. Overt police brutality, by contrast, is usually the last resort of well-functioning liberal democratic regimes. It appears when the movies, the football rivalries, and the soul-deadening holiday music no longer suffice. Its entrance into the mainstream spotlight, in the United States, in Turkey, Greece, and Spain, is an indication that the urban occupations pose a fundamental challenge to representative democratic states and the clearest signal that its “soft” ideological apparatus is malfunctioning.
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Yet, within two months of the birth of OWS and over 1.000 sister occupations throughout the US, the federal government coordinated a collective assault on these democratic spaces. The FBI and the Bureau of Homeland Security, in conjunction with the mayors and police departments of over 18 cities, forcibly evicted every major occupation throughout the US.
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That the monitoring and entrapment of non-violent dissidents has been funded and conducted under the banner of counter-terrorism task forces is an even greater cause for alarm. These signs of an emergent police state within liberal democratic regimes (or more aptly: its passage from shadowed ghettos to front-page visibility) are the strongest testament to the novelty and latent strength of the 2011 uprisings.
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Yet there is also no denying that almost all of these uprisings have ended in failure. The urban occupations have been dismantled and the aims of the occupiers have either been largely ignored (representative democracies), brutally suppressed (Libya, Syria), or their victories shown to be premature (Egypt).
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Contacts between the global occupations, formed during the height of the uprisings, have persisted after their evictions. The common form of these occupations has allowed participants not only the opportunity to escape their individual isolation by talking and acting collectively, but more importantly, to draw connections across national grammars of discontent.
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The internalisation of whiteness by the Irish workers broke the solidarity in the ranks of the working people. Consequently, sections of the Irish workers became part of the most rabid racists in some parts of the USA. But the realities of the moment have shown that capitalists’ oppression against the working class people knows no borders. There are already projections that the financial crisis will induce a new mass emigration from Ireland. Progressives in Ireland must intensify the ideological and political work inside Ireland to educate these potential émigrés against joining the wave of counter-revolution and racism that is now sweeping North America. It is in this context that we call for an international resistance that transcends national borders and racial categorisation. It is such resistance that is needed to save our common humanity from dehumanisation and plunder by the capitalist class, whose drive for exponential profits is pathological.
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These austerity measures and the consequent resistance bring home to the Western workers what the African peoples have been enduring for more than 30 years of neoliberal plunder. It was the African workers that have been at the forefront of the delegitimisation of the IMF structural adjustment programmes. In Africa, the intellectuals have exposed the capitalist interests that dismantle popular social programmes of access to health and education and strip wealth from workers, placing profits before and above human beings.
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In Ireland itself, international capitalists such as Peter Sutherland established intellectual institutes within Trinity College Dublin to divert attention from the kind of research that could expose the speculative bubbles that were being heralded as the success story of Ireland. Mainstream economists accepted the propaganda about unbridled capitalist globalisation while proclaiming Ireland as the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Ireland was presented in textbooks all over the world as the example of the benefits of foreign direct investments and capitalist globalisation.
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In Europe, students have joined the rank of demonstrators against the attempt to mortgage their future. Worker–student alliances in France and in England are intensifying the struggle against the capitalists. In particular, British students exposed the activities of the Vodafone companies that avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes. The students have been at the forefront of using new tools of education to bypass the mainstream media to alert workers
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Even a capitalist such as Warren Buffet has called on other capitalists to pay their fair share of taxes. Buffet said that the US government should tax the rich more, saying ‘people at the high end, people like myself should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.’
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The crisis of capitalism is not simply a question of taxes. Restructuring taxation is only one manifestation of the systematic change to the economic, political and ideological structures that came into being as a result of financialisation. This financialisation hollowed out the real production economy in the US and elsewhere. And in Ireland, the bankers from Frankfurt, London and New York descended on the Irish workers to sweep out the real economy that had been built by the Irish working people.
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Africans must pay close attention to the capitalist events surrounding the economic depression because the same IMF and World Bank are going into African societies promoting fianancialisation and the destruction of trade unions. This is especially the case in countries such as South Africa, Ghana, Angola, Nigeria and Kenya, where the efforts are geared towards scooping up surpluses in the real economy in order to consolidate the neoliberal stranglehold. The same alliance between African workers and African intellectuals which delegitimised the IMF must be strengthened to undermine the alliance between African capitalists and Western capitalists who are bent on introducing the speculative economy. All over Africa, there have been bank bailouts to save capitalists in the face of reductions in spending on health, education and other social services.
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This new mode of struggle substituted the notion of armed struggle with that of popular struggle. It stopped thinking of struggle as something waged by professional fighters, guerrillas, with the people cheering from the stands, but as a movement with ordinary people as its key participants. The potential of popular struggle lay in sheer numbers, guided by a new imagination and new methods of struggle.
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Around that same time, another event occurred. It too signaled a fresh opening. This was the Palestinian Intifada. What is known as the First Intifada had a Soweto-like potential. Like the children of Soweto, Palestinian children too dared to face bullets with no more than stones. Faced with feuding liberation movements, each claiming to be a sole representative of the oppressed, the youth of the Intifada called for a wider unity. Even though the Egyptian Revolution has come more than three decades after Soweto, it evokes the memory of Soweto in a powerful way. This is for at least two reasons.
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Tahrir Square innovated a new politics. It shed the language of religion in politics, but it did so without embracing a militant secularism that would totally outlaw religion in the public sphere. It thus called for a broader tolerance of cultural identities in the public sphere, one that would include both secular and religious tendencies.
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Dubbed by mainstream media the Arab Spring (though it started in December), the wave of protests started in Tunisia spread like wildfire through Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and on to Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia (briefly, or so it seems) Syria and Libya. The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and the ousting of their dictators have given a distinctive flavour of exhilaration and hope to the latest World Social Forum held in Dakar from 6 to 11 February.
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Thirty-four civil society and movements activists from 13 countries and three continents joined the conveners of the African Social Forum. We were hosted by the Union Générale de Travailleurs de Tunisie (UGTT), the largest Tunisian trade union, whose role was instrumental in the success of the Tunisian intifada. What follows are some reflections inspired by my participation in the solidarity caravan.
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The demonstration that passed in front of the National Theatre paraded in front of us and continued towards the Kasbah where it settled into what became the Kasbah 3 sit-in. It followed the successful Kasbah 1 and 2 that called for the change of the interim governments that followed president Ben Ali’s departure still tainted by members of the previous regime. As I write critical reflections are being developed of the disappointing outcome of Kasbah 3 which demanded the exclusion of the current Interior Minister from the provisional government.
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Those receding images of the demonstration, commented by the Tunisian friend with us on the bus, told an important story, despite differences, challenges and the titanic tasks demanding fulfilment, the utmost joy felt by all in Tunisia is that talking politics is indeed fine, that expressing one’s ideas, negotiating them, discussing them, and demonstrating for them is not repressed any more.
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The humiliated dignity of a vegetable seller whose livelihood was destroyed by abusive public officials, was every youth’s and then every Tunisian’s humiliated dignity. His pain was everyone’s pain and the irresistible empathy that his tragic protest generated produced the final outburst which escalated and could not be stopped. The repeated violation of the youth’s sense of autonomy, self-respect and integrity sparked the revolution. When such horizons of personal representations are denied and when lying to oneself about the real conditions of one’s existence becomes impossible the trauma is such that even dying is acceptable and burning oneself up a viable protest.
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We also discussed the role of media and technology in supporting activists. Facebook was in everyone’s mouth, Al Jazeera’s journalists were praised for their courage and dedication (though, some told us, ‘in the long run we can’t forget they are islamists’). But while nobody denied the supportive role of new social media, the general understanding was that though they helped they were certainly not the determining factors pace the international media (perhaps too eager to stress how western technology democratizes the world). Activists in Sidi Bouzid told us something else. They explained to us their sophisticated street strategy. They used cellphones to create zones of pressure and release in lightening-fast succession to disorient the police who ended up running around the town like headless chicken. It was the knowledge of the town down to its tiniest alleyways that won the control of the city, no Facebook or other social media could have been fast enough, they stress, or provided the strength and the courage necessary.
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A key challenge encountered by many in representing the Tunisian revolution (and more broadly the unrest sweeping through the whole region) has been constituted by banal stereotyping and versions of negative and positive Orientalism. The awed surprise that welcomed the events of Tunisia, and soon after Egypt and the others, was constructed on the widespread misconception about the inability of the people of the MENA region to affect real change and be agent of their own emancipation from oppressive rule. Such misrepresentation is based on limited knowledge and preconceptions, political propaganda, Orientalism and outright racism.
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Freedom from the dictator, from oppressive and exploitative political and economic systems, from ideological hegemonies, from shrewd political manipulations, from the embodiment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality. There are other ways in which their demands are framed, other discourses, other semantic horizons in which their aspirations are articulated. There is one for each interlocutor and context (as it is the case in complex revolutionary networks of ideas, actors and values).
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Some suggested that the youth in Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid are less politically wise than the youth in Tunis. Some suggested that decades of marginalisation from the rest of the country and economic and political privileges in the capital have generated profound social and human imbalances. One consequence of these imbalances, it is alleged by some of our Tunisian interlocutors, is that the youth in the most deprived areas are easier to manipulate and subject to launch themselves in unrealistic and unsophisticated political actions, like the hunger strike demanding immediate jobs to all unemployed the chances of success of which are nil beyond the actual will of local and national authorities. Others observed that the revolution has to avoid reproducing among allies the marginalisation and the elitism of wider society in order to avoid creating an unbridgeable gap between activists on the basis of alleged political and cultural sophistication defined in exclusive terms.
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While the youth in Kasserine stressed repeatedly they did not want to be implicated in political battles played on their behalf by people who they did not trust, in Tunis a member of the student union said instead that they were struggling to ignite a ‘deep social transition’ aimed at ushering ‘a world devoid of capitalism and classism’. He added ‘we revolted against an economic pattern because we want Tunisia for all Tunisians’.
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A member of the student union in Tunis regarding practices of change commented that as union ‘we distinguish political work from union work.’ Further, he said ‘We want to have a political party for the working class’, it would be one of the 51 registered political parties in Tunisia.
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The role of women in developing, articulating and practising methodologies of change has been greatly influential in the revolution. An activist in Tunis expressed in the following way her take on change and practices of transformation ‘we are for the internationalisation of the revolutions to fight against savage capitalism’.
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According to some activists, the international agents and institutions of capitalism and imperialism are trying to destroy the Tunisian revolution and set back the advances it has inspired in Tunisia and in the whole MENA region.
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There are also internal challenges to the revolutionary movement. There exist tensions between those who want to go back to normality and those who want to fight for a full victory of the revolution and the achievement of a larger set of victories. Their opponents suggest instead that the time has come to revert to representative politics through free and fair elections and the work of the constituent assembly.
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This question raises issues of global solidarity, development and political models and sets the ground for the cooperation between activists from the four corners of the planet. The joint Secretary General of the UGTT, told us in Tunis about the vision and values of the UGTT: ‘UGTT’s cultural tradition is European and socialist which we influence with new blood.’ He further said that to achieve the international goals of Tunisian workers it is important to establish stronger ties with the international union movement and with unions in South America, South Africa and elsewhere in the global South.
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Messy as such trial and error is, complex as the shifting allegiances and alliances, chaotic as the multiplication of strategies, ideologies, ideas, visions, desires, aspirations, this is what democracy looks like and this process promises the most inspiring outcomes.
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At the same time younger activists than the seasoned unionists and human rights activists are developing visions of better futures and are learning politics the hard way after decades of silencing, terror, repression, fear and hopelessness. They submit their demands to mistrusted government institutions, they understand their failure in generating economic development and political accountability, they scale up, down, sideways their demands and their strategies, they win and lose and they go back to the drawing board.
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While listening to the praises many articulate of Bourguiba’s policies on education, one had the impression that Tunisian learning achievements are now entering a new phase outside of the classrooms of indoctrination and pedantic learning of useless ‘knowledge’, as doubtlessly illustrated by the high unemployment rate of graduates, and into the streets of relations and struggles, negotiations, differences, mediations. Knowledge, politics, culture, religion, dignity and aspirations, eventually met in the streets, emancipated by schools like jail, freed of the hopelessness of trust in something that is handed by a gracious government and empowered by success and failure, by action and thought, by deliberation and struggle, by trial and error by knowledge as it is, messy, dirty and bloody at times, rather than the sanitized and delusional knowledge imparted by any (more or less) tyrannical regime.
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While heartfelt feelings about the issues addressed are here out of the question, the knowledge of the conflicts at stake might be both limited and oversimplified in symbolic codes that are not more than projections of the foreign observer which are then reproduced in a solipsistic space that while pretending dialogue, indeed reproduces a monologue of images that are selected on the basis of specific interests and emotional sensibilities fully rooted in the eyes of the beholder.
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Of course, this might well be one further projection in which the assumption is the imbalance of power between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which I think, though, is illustrated if by nothing else by the fact that after the encounters ‘they’ went back to their lives of unemployed or bereaved family members and friends and ‘we’ moved on to our plush hotel and to our drinks by the poolside.
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Participating in a solidarity tour to Tunisia, Amanda Sebestyen finds a country of dedicated organisers, heights of suffering and generosity, and a dangerous neglect of the deprived heartlands where the uprising was born.
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Our solidarity tour – organised for the World Social Forum and hosted by the Tunisian League of Human Rights and the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) – arrived in Tunisia midway between Stephen Twigg and Angelina Jolie. The MP was travelling (tourist class, I was pleased to note) with a delegation from the Westminster Foundation for Democracy; the actor, with her entourage, went to the refugee camps on the Libyan border, of which the Tunisian people are immensely – and so justly – proud.
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When refugees from Libya arrived in the south of Tunisia there was such an immense burst of solidarity that there are still shortages of medicines and staple foods because people bought them to send south when they heard the refugees needed them. Each refugee that arrived – and there were 140,000 in the first week – was greeted by local people with a bottle of water, some bread and some coffee , giving them dignity. The International Red Cross said they had never seen anything like it.'
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In return, when Tunisians travel to Europe (not fleeing their revolution but taking up one of its new freedoms, escaping the draconian restrictions imposed by Ben Ali and Ghaddafi in return for bribes from Fortress Europe), the response of the EU is to threaten repatriation.
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A new Tunisian Party of Labour aims to build democracy without falling into neoliberalism or religious bigotry.
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On the second night, young people initiated rolling protests though the different parts of town. A new tactic was to use mobile phones to call on their friends to make a distraction, and draw police away when they got too heavy in any one place. On the third day the governor fled. For 13 days the uprising was in Sidi Bou Zid alone, then it spread through the region via our union branches: Bouzeyen, Regueb, Jilma; and then over to the town of Kasserine.'
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'I don't actually agree that the Internet was the heart of the revolution. The heart of the revolution was the willpower of all the Tunisian people, not just the young.'
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Someone looking like an El Greco painting, tall and thin with huge eyes, makes his way with grace on crutches to the stage. His leg has been lost... Why are British soldiers being given the best prosthetics and medical help, when these nonviolent heroes – of a democracy we all claim to support – are being left to cope on their own?
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Importantly, 80 per cent of development funds for this year are now to be allocated to the long-forgotten interior regions. Unfortunately at Kasserine the ministers stayed for only three hours, spending part of their time with officials from the former regime.
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policemen have virtually disappeared since local people stopped paying bribes. Yet I walked around many times at night and the town was utterly safe; a taxi driver explained how everyone looks out for everyone else. People are more philosophical here. 'The new policemen we can trust are still in the barracks being trained, and it takes time to track down the bad old ones and put them in prison.'
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'In the course of this revolution I've discovered my country. I've travelled from the mountains to the desert, I've seen parts of my own home town Tunis which I never knew existed... We're discovering our culture; we're discovering the picturesque beaches and extraordinary landscapes which were reserved either for tourists or for "a certain person"....'
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Sovereignty is the relation of the state to other states, to external powers, whereas self‐determination is an internal relation of the state to the people. In a democratic context, self‐determination should be seen as the prerequisite to sovereignty.
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The result of the referendum could not have been in doubt. It would have been clear to anyone with a historical understanding of the issues involved, and of the experience of the process leading to Eritrean independence, that the referendum would lead to an overwhelming popular vote for an independent state in the South. Why then did the power in the North agree to a referendum? My answer is: the agreement to hold a referendum deferred a head-on confrontation with US power.
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It brought to an end a thousand-year history of Christian states in the North. Sinnar demolished Christian states in the North and inaugurated the political history of Islam in Sudan. Given the conventional understanding that equates Islam with the North and Christianity with the South, I would like us to remember that political power in the North, in Nubia and Beja, was Christian – and that the royal family of the first Muslim state in Sudan came from the South, not the North. In contrast, Islam came to the North in the form of refugees and merchants, not royals or soldiers.
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The migrations that we know of better were forced migrations, slavery. The South plundered for slaves from the 17th century onwards with the formation of the Sultanate of the Funj along the Nile and the Sultanate of Darfur in the west. But the slave trade became intense only in the late 18th century when the Caribbean plantation economy was transplanted to Indian Ocean islands.
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Nonetheless, most of those enslaved in the South stayed in Darfur and Sinnar as slave‐soldiers. Most of those in Darfur became Fur. Most of those in Sinnar became Arab. They were culturally assimilated – mostly by consent, but the kind of consent that is manufactured through relations of force. For a parallel, think of how African slaves in North America became English‐speaking Westerners – thereby taking on the cultural identity of their masters.
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The point of this historical survey of relations between North and South is to underline one single fact: this is not a one‐dimensional history of Northern oppression of the South. True, Northern domination is the main story, especially after independence. But there was a subsidiary story: the story of joint North–South struggle against that domination.
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The SPLA was a movement with a strong leader – the weaker the organisation, the more difference does the death of one individual make. The history of liberation movements in this region testifies to this fact. It should also remind us that it has not been unusual for strong leaders to be eliminated towards the close of an armed struggle. Remember ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) and the killing of Tongogara on the eve of victory; the ANC (African National Congress) and the assassination of Chris Hani also on the eve of victory; and the SPLA and the death of Garang soon after return to Khartoum.
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The CPA was built on the lessons of 1972. The key lesson was that power‐sharing had been too narrow. As a result, the CPA called for a broader sharing, ranging from political power to wealth to arms. Still, it remained sharing of power, power‐sharing, between elites, between two ruling groups, the NCP (National Congress Party) and the SPLA. It left out the opposition in both the North and the South. It was power‐sharing without democratisation!
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All these cases have one thing in common. All have reformed the central state by introducing elections and a multi‐party system. But elections seem to lead to violence rather than stability. Why? For a clue, I suggest we look at another similarity between these cases of internal violence. None have managed to reform the local state – the local authority – the district authority that the British used to call the native authority.
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Colonialism transformed tribe from a cultural identity to an administrative identity that claimed to be based on descent, not just culture. It became a blood identity. Tribe became a sub‐set of race
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In sum then, there are two major sources of political violence after independence. Possible violence between North and South has three likely sources: border populations, IDPs and peasants and pastoralists with shared livelihoods.
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While many have criticized this earlier discourse as Orientalist and lacking in analytical rigour, its seamless replacement dubbed as the ‘Arab Awakening’, is being constructed on the very same bases of representation.
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In the case of Egypt, the recent uprising is constructed as a youth-led, non-violent revolution in which social media (especially Facebook and Twitter) are champions. The underlying message here is that these ‘middle-class’ and educated youth (read: modern) are not ‘terrorists’ - they hold the same values as ‘us’ (the democratic West) and, finally, use the same tools (Facebook and Twitter) that ‘we’ invented and use in our daily-lives. They are just like ‘us’ and hence they deserve celebration. These constructions are clear from a quick look at CNN, Time, Vanity Fair and others and their representations of the so-called leaders or icons of this revolution.
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According to the BBC, Dr Gene Sharp - the author of the ‘Non-Violent Revolution Rulebook’ is ‘the man now credited with the strategy behind the toppling of the Egyptian government’ through activists ‘trained in Sharp’s work’. This same profile of young people similarly monopolised television talk shows in Egypt. And while many of these individuals did take part in the uprising - in different capacities - their status as icons of the ‘revolution’ in which the majority of those who participated were of the subaltern classes is both disturbing and telling. This majority have never heard of Sharp or Freedom House, never studied at the American University in Cairo and never worked for Google. More profoundly, they are antagonistic about ‘Western’ influence and presence in Egypt. Thus the class composition of dissent has been cloaked by a new imaginary homogenous construct called ‘youth’.
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There is no doubt that the anti-regime demonstrations were non-violent, compared to the state-security use of ammunition. However, by 28 January all National Democratic Party headquarters and most police stations were set on fire. This was a clear reaction to the state’s systematic violence against subaltern classes, those who bore the brunt of the regime’s daily torture and humiliation precisely because of their position within the neo-liberal class matrix in Egypt.
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Even Côte d'Ivoire was at one point was rightly dubbed 'the forgotten war'. It did not fit the media template of a sexy, tech-savvy, populist revolution, as that which had been constructed of Egypt. Instead Côte d'Ivoire had the uncomfortable but familiar look and feel of a Rwanda genocide-lite. It was a messy, bloody struggle for power between rebel and patriot factions in a country most educated people outside of Africa would struggle to find on a map.
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On 20 February, in an industrial town called Koudougo, bigger than Sidi Bouzid, a student named Justin Zongo was taken into police custody after an alleged dispute with a female classmate. A few days later, Zongo was pronounced dead and according to official police reports, the cause of death was meningitis. His family and friends rejected this and claimed Zongo's death was due to police brutality.
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So far none of Compaoré's pleas to restore order have worked and the mutiny's snowball effect continues to grow. There are reports that, despite the soldiers' lawlessness in some cities, the youths and some traders have united with revolting army officers.
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True to dictator form, Compaoré, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, has blamed foreign conspiratorial forces for the unrest and he has gotten rid of everyone else, except the problem, himself and his corrupt system.
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All of the protests, from Cape to Cairo, with their own distinct set of local conditions, are linked to food security, economic instability and political dispossession – be it by ballot or dictatorship. There is a widespread feeling of continental discontent, but international and national pundits are so busy putting out possible fires of revolt in 'sub-Saharan Africa' with their analyses that the Burkina uprising has gone by largely unnoticed, and yet in two months mutineering soldiers and youth have stirred up serious trouble for the Compaoré regime – and possibly regionally too.
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In different ways, masses of people are mounting serious challenges to totalitarian hegemonies and the iniquity of global capital that may lead to a new political dispensation, in successful revolutions, and at the very least for all countries, uprisings, including unsuccessful ones, reshape the role of the citizen in a political landscape as an empowered figure.
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Some would be inclined to argue that Burkina Faso has been forgotten because the international media is biased towards representation of Africa south of the Sahara, and the ignoring or misrepresentation of the Rwanda genocide is the most cited example. But perhaps it is more complex than a simple Africa south of the Sahara bias; it's a bias against or in favour of certain African countries that has been constructed through namely, a country's geo-political and economic importance to the West and also through a history of colonial relations in which reader and viewer familiarity and association with former colonies is generated.
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For example, because of its relation to America and France, the attempted return of a former leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, exiled in South Africa, to return to the Caribbean island of Haiti was more widely covered than the same attempt, a month before by another former leader, Marc Ravalomanana, exiled in South Africa to return to the tropical island of Madagascar, off the south-eastern coast of Africa.
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Similar to Swaziland, the slightest hint of a fallout between the opposition and Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party in Zimbabwe is guaranteed widespread coverage and analysis, whereas the political musical chairs currently being played in Burkina by Compaoré in order to quell mutiny is of little interest to many major international media organisations, including South Africa.
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In the face of such fierce competition, taking a few moments in between protest broadcasts to ask the world to remember the 5.4 million (and rising) Congolese dead since 1998 or to take a serious look at Compaoré's megalomanic scheming in Burkina Faso wouldn't be a suicidal gamble with the ratings. Events in Africa and the Middle East shouldn't be placed in competition with each other; what's happening in Nigeria, Syria or Libya can share the spotlight with many other untold or under-reported stories. It’s a question of willingness to pluralise news stories and cover unfamiliar terrain.
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perhaps there is also a competition for dominance in coverage of the big revolution stories to present a more racy, more in-depth and more radical story than other media competitors.
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But in addition to that dream is a more crucial demand that can be sooner met, namely that existing international media genuinely commit itself to new ways of telling everyone's stories, all the time, rather than competing to duplicate or better the popular stories.
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President Isayas Afwerki remains firmly entrenched in the seat of power, claiming with alacrity to have foretold the groundswell overtaking his Arab neighbors while banning television coverage of the demonstrations and reorganising the military to pre-empt a possible coup.
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Eritrea spends a whopping 20 per cent of its national budget maintaining a military comprised of forced conscripts whose virtually unpaid labour is reinvested in further militarisation of the society and economy. The Constitution has been on ice since 1997, the promise of multi-party elections remains unfulfilled and even North Korea boasts greater freedom of the press. Civil society institutions and competing political parties exist only in exile.
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But human experience is what anthropologists are always after - how to put life and breath and flesh onto the cold bones of statistics; how to illustrate the concrete meanings of political violence and migration policies and practices as people live them. Among such human experiences are those of nineteen members of the elite Air Force of Eritrea who fled to Sudan a couple of years ago, risking the ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of the Eritrean government - as hundreds of others do every month - seeking to cross the nearest international border.
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Should the UNHCR take the situation seriously and realise these men need protection - an unlikely showing of concern for individuals by a bureaucracy whose esteemed reputation is outshined only by its impersonality, impenetrability, and unaccountability - they may be taken to a refugee camp, where they will still be subject to many of the same pressures, only in more concentrated form. This is glossed as ‘protection’, even a ‘solution’, though it is hardly that.
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In detention, they discover legal-dilemma redux: many of the same problems that stalled the refugee process in Sudan follow them to the United States. They are possibly terrorists, or implicated in persecution and human rights abuses; they are cowardly deserters of a sovereign state's military; and of course, they are always criminals for having the audacity to migrate illegally.
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It is not enough to simply address the human rights violations that lead people to become refugees at the source, crucial as that may be. All along the way, refugees face multiple and nested issues that are sometimes endemic and even actively produced or aggravated by the very systems designed to protect them.
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Although Carrilles was an anti-communist zealot, it was his training by the CIA and CIA finances that made him a lethal force.
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The strength of the recruitment of Osama bin Laden was that, unlike Posada, Osama provided some of his own money and helped raise millions from other wealthy anti-communist Arabs. Osama bin Laden then recruited hundreds of thousands for his jihad. Today, many countries in Africa are suffering the repercussions of this alliance between the CIA and Osama bin Laden
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Students in Africa who do not know the history of United States terrorism will need to study the country’s intricate plot to assassinate presidents and freedom fighters at home and abroad, in addition to understanding the relationship of some US law enforcement agencies to international terrorism.
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People that really care about Africa must question the credibility of AFRICOM against the background of the US tradition of training terrorists to fight for American interests while labelling freedom fighters as terrorists.
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Scholars and activists who write on low intensity wars have been highlighting the ways in which the government of the United States was the principal supporter of terrorism.
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The US Africa Command created a disinformation platform, Operation Objective Voice, to confuse Africans. One of the requirements of psychological warfare and information warfare is for some truth to serve as the basis of the information that is being peddled.
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the criminal actions associated with killing 73 Caribbean youths are compounded by the economic terrorism unleashed by the US banking system and the forces that spread the doctrine of neo-liberal capitalism. Billions of dollars are scooped up from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America by the US financial oligarchy and these are the forces that benefit from all forms of terror.
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With Manuel as trade minister from 1994-96, liberalisation demolished the clothing, textile, footwear, appliance, electronics and other vulnerable manufacturing sectors, as he drove tariffs below what even the World Trade Organisation demanded.
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At that stage, with the world economy teetering, The Economist magazine named South Africa the most risky of the 17 main emerging markets, and the SA government released data conceding that the country was much more economically divided than in 1994, overtaking Brazil as the world’s most unequal major country.
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Ironically, said Manuel in his miserly 2004 budget speech, ‘The privilege we have in a democratic South Africa is that the poor are unbelievably tolerant.’ In 2008, when an opposition politician begged that food vouchers be made available, Manuel replied that there was no way to ensure ‘vouchers will be distributed and used for food only, and not to buy alcohol or other things.’
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Manuel’s leadership of the Green Climate Fund adds a new quantum of global-scale risk. His long history of collaboration with Washington-London raises prospects for ‘default’ by the industrialised North on payment of climate debt to the impoverished South.
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Diigo - macintyre2007_informed-consent_15d.pdf - 0 views
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Parity, along with food production quotas and environmentally regulated supply management is critical for green new deal
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In your important intervention you speak of increasing authoritarianism as a current condition. Should we not be as concerned about newly empowered transnational corporations, debt-driving inter-governmental organizations and hollowed-out states?
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Is there a recorded inflation rate for gold currency in the interior? How is gold exchange value determined.
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Roberto Meza, I am so grateful for your work. How have agribusiness, monocropping and unequal wealth distribution affected your ability to respond to food distribution issues.
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How do agricultural practices, especially agroecology versus pesticide-intensive GMO agribusiness, relate to issues of food sovereignty, collective support, local control, and race and gender equity?
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How can we reconcile the very different perspectives of cooperative and corporate farming, each of which have strong advocates?
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How might we revisit Fonlon's instruction and the focus on Aristotle, Plato and other imperial, or imperialized, philosophers?
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recalling the danger of firing squads that have been frequently used against political opponents (note to reader: remember the end of the Grenadian Revolution in 1983).
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The fundamentals of our differences come down to, how does one understand the question of the internationalism of the oppressed? In order to answer this, there are two basic principles we start with: (1)a concrete analysis of concrete conditions, and (2)the law and nature of contradictions. We will attempt to apply both in our reply.
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During this period, the so-called Cold War, where the USSR, China and several other countries were frequently identified with the cause of socialism and where, in many cases, workers and oppressed classes had succeeded in overthrowing formal capitalism and foreign domination, much of the Left fell into the fateful habit of deciding upon what stand to take on international matters not based on a substantive analysis but based largely on which countries fell on which sides of particular issues.
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Baraka is absolutely correct in emphasizing that there is a long and ignominious history of social chauvinism by much of the organized Left in the global North, to which I would add a history of social chauvinism by numerous otherwise progressive movements—beyond the Left—in the global North. The infection of imperial consciousness became clear even in the international Communist movement by the 1930s when many revolutionaries in the global South felt betrayed by the approach of communist parties in the global North (and by the USSR) when too many of those latter parties abandoned the struggle against colonialism in the name of building anti-fascist fronts against the Germans, Italians and, later, the Japanese. This sense of betrayal led to splits in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America and, in some cases, the creation of new revolutionary formations (with often complicated politics).
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The elimination of the Soviet bloc and the victory of neoliberal hegemony created challenges for countries in the global South which were following what the late Egyptian Marxist theorist Samir Amin would call “national populist projects.” By “national populist projects” Amin was referencing those regimes that had emerged out of anti-imperialist struggles but were not committed—in any serious/consistent way—to a socialist path, sometimes asserting themselves as non-aligned between the two superpowers, e.g., Egypt under Nasser. Many such regimes were able to survive through playing one superpower off again another, though this did not always succeed.
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the national populist projects which were already in crisis due to internal contradictions—including class struggle, women’s movements, ethnic contradictions, democratic governance challenges—fractured.
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With the collapse of the second superpower and the rise of neoliberal globalization, the national populist projects which were already in crisis due to internal contradictions—including class struggle, women’s movements, ethnic contradictions, democratic governance challenges—fractured
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The legitimacy crisis was not simply a public relations challenge. Struggle was breaking out within these states against the regimes. Sometimes led by forces to the left of the regime; other times by forces to the right of the regime (and sometimes both), these struggles were asserting that the regimes were abandoning their base; abandoning the people. One example of the ramifications of the legitimacy crisis unfolded in what came to be known as the Arab democratic uprisings or the “Arab Spring.” These insurrections, all beginning peacefully, were a challenge not only to pro-Western regimes, e.g., Egypt, but also to regimes that had emerged from the national populist projects, e.g., Syria.
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Silence. There is no reply other than to challenge the authenticity of those of us on the Left who argue for an anti-imperialist AND anti-dictatorial politics of emancipation.
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The question of solidarity of the globally oppressed must begin with a focus on the oppressed themselves. Baraka focuses on the struggle between governments. I start from a different standpoint: the question of the people. It is flowing from the question of the people that one can situate the larger context. In looking at Syria, for instance, what were the nature of the demands of the mass movement? Why was it that the response of the Assad regime was bloody repression? What does that response represent?
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This is highlighted because many in the US Left have abandoned the demands for any action by the USA government on the basis that there is nothing that the USA government can or should do (or worse, that we, on the Left, should demand nothing of the USA government other than to cease and desist). The irony here is that during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the US Left was actively in favor of the USA, Britain and France providing direct, military assistance to the Spanish government against the fascists. It is important to remember that even with the danger of fascism, a threat to humankind, the demand for US assistance to the Spanish government came while the USA was still perpetrating crimes against the people of Latin America. A demand for a change in USA policy vis a vis Spain was not inconsistent with opposing the USA role in Latin America.
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The main divide among anti-imperialists during the Cold War was rather caused by the attitude towards the USSR, which Communist Parties and their close allies regarded as the “fatherland of socialism”; they determined much of their own political positions by aligning with Moscow and the “socialist camp”—an attitude that was described as “campism.” This was facilitated by Moscow’s support for most struggles against Western imperialism in its global rivalry with Washington. As for Moscow’s intervention against workers’ and peoples’ revolts in its own European sphere of domination, the campists stood with the Kremlin, denigrating these revolts under the pretext that they were fomented by Washington.Those who believed that the defense of democratic rights is the paramount principle of the left supported the struggles against Western imperialism as well as popular revolts in Soviet-dominated countries against local dictatorial rule and Moscow’s hegemony. A third category was formed by the Maoists, who, starting from the 1960s, labeled the USSR “social-fascist,” describing it as worse than US imperialism and going so far to side with Washington in some instances, such as Beijing’s stance in Southern Africa.
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Benghazi’s population implored the world for protection, while emphasizing that they wanted no foreign boots on the ground. The League of Arab States supported this request. Accordingly, the UNSC adopted a resolution authorizing “the imposition of a NFZ” over Libya as well as “all necessary measures…to protect civilians…while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” Neither Moscow nor Beijing vetoed this resolution: Both abstained, unwilling to assume the responsibility for a massacre foretold.
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As the Western left has become more aligned with their imperialist bourgeoisie in the destabilization of the Global South, the radical Black tradition provides a clear approach to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism."
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The contradictory nature of that relationship has sharpened as a result of the current crisis of global capitalism and the U.S. led Western imperialist project fueled by two interconnected elements: the devastating social-economic conditions that workers and the laboring classes now face as result of monopoly capital’s neoliberal turn over the last forty years in both the imperialist center and global South; and the intensifying challenge to neoliberalism from states and social movements in the global South, with the corresponding response from U.S. and European capital that has ranged from economic sanctions meant to punish whole populations to direct and indirect political subversion and military interventions, all illegal and morally indefensible.
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While U.S. and Western innocence was always a component of the propaganda to justify colonialist aggression, the ideas of humanitarian intervention and its corollary, the responsibility to protect, emerged in the 1990s as one of the most innovative ideological weapons ever produced since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.
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Of course, as I have said on many occasions, the reality is much more complex, with neoliberalism actually representing a more dangerous threat to colonized and working-class peoples in the U.S. and globally. This is because within the context of the U.S., Democrats have been successful in perpetuating the myth that they represent “progressivism.” This perception usually leads to substantial demobilization and actual liberal – left alignment with neoliberalism objectively when Democrats occupy the Executive Branch.
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Restoring the historic alliance between the U.S. and Europe was announced by Biden as a major objective of his administration. His “America is Back” slogan was supposed to signify that the U.S. was ready to reassume its leadership of the Western alliance. Biden proudly identified himself as an “Atlanticist,” and indeed a number of the members of his foreign policy team were plunked from the “Atlantic Council.” Similar to the Council on foreign Affairs (CFA), the Atlantic Council is a neoliberal think tank that is funded by a cross-section of the ruling class but significantly by neoliberals associated with the democrat party.
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The Atlantic Council was a severe critic of the Trump administration, not because of any concerns about its “racism” but because the Council opposed Trump’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy and his dangerous ideas like pulling out of NATO, a desire to draw down U.S. troops and his insufficient hostility to Russia. Plus, the Council and the neoliberal ruling class never forgave Trump for his scuttling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership because it pulled the rug out from under the Trans-Atlantic Investment Partnership that was supposed to be the next agreement after TPP and would have solidified the hegemony of U.S. capital in Europe for next few decades.Biden and the Council believed that unity among the G-7 nations during the current global capitalist crisis was imperative. Consequently, Biden’s aggressive stance toward Russia, Venezuela, blind support for Israel and general hostility toward the progressive governments in Latin America signaled that belligerent U.S. policy would continue, but with an Obama-like smile.What has been response from the U.S. and Western left to Bourgeois Destabilization in Global South? Bolivian President, Evo Morales, faced a right-wing coup and instead of unrestrained mobilization the left engaged in a debate about the Bolivian process. In Europe, the liberal-left parliamentarians in the European Union awarded their Sakharav human rights prize to the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, an opposition known for burning alive dark-skinned Venezuelans assumed to be “Chavistas.” Bernie Sanders declares Hugo Chavez a “dead communist dictator” and most respectable liberal-left elements in the U.S. would not get caught dead at a pro-Venezuela demo as long as the new “authoritarian dictator,” Nicholas Maduro, is in power. Gaddafi deserved to die, Assad is a bloodthirsty tyrant, China is capitalist, and a human rights violator, and Haiti is a S…hole country that does not merit much thought or energy, let alone mobilization for.
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The anti-anti-imperialism of a Eurocentric armchair commentator like Gilbert Achcar neatly captures the inanity of this approach, dressed-up as nuanced and sophisticated analysis. Grounded in Western chauvinism and completely suspended from the contradictory structures and class forces in the specific, concrete realities of this historical moment, it condemns the left projects that don’t correspond to the imagery of Western leftists who see revolutionary change as some pristine project. These leftists do not seem to notice or don’t care that they are usually on the same side of an international issue as the international bourgeoisie.
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To counter the collaborationism and opportunism of the U.S. and Western left, Black revolutionaries must re-center the anti-colonial struggle that addresses the dialectics of the national and class issues produced by the colonial/capitalist system. This re-centering of anti-colonial struggle is not new. It has been the broad theoretical framework for African/Black radical tradition for decades — from Black socialists in Harlem like Hubert Harrison and the African Blood Brotherhood in the teens and the 1920’s to the revolutionary Pan African tradition. It was also reflected in the articulations of Lenin on the “National Question” and the assemblies of colonial peoples leading to the 1928 declaration on the right to self-determination on the part of colonized peoples and the declaration that Africans in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination.The radical Black tradition provides an invaluable approach for how a left should address its bourgeoisie. We say that concretely it means that authentic Western leftists must join us to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism.” Specifically for African revolutionaries in the U.S. we must build bottom-up organic black unity and an anti-colonial, pro-socialist movement anchored in the Black working class that must assert leadership of this movement and to the broader radical movement in the U.S.Biden and the neoliberal, neo-fascists are committed to countering the movements for national liberation and socialism by any means, including destroying the planet to maintain European imperialist power.The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be considered part of the enemy.
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we had not one conversation about how we economists induce harm and what ethical obligations follow from that fact.
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That is, one cannot do any positive work with the concept, such as determining whether harm has occurred or measuring its extent, without the careful moral reasoning that defining harm requires.