10 Comments

1. Stan:

   I wrote this recently in a totally different context:

   Elections come and go, and each time they come, it seems, everything else we are doing long term, gets put on the back-burner in the deathless hope that we will somehow be saved by a process that operates completely beyond our control. One of the problems that reproduces this dynamic is that people are trapped in all the categories of the system and they can’t see any alternatives. The roots of this problem are far deeper than proposing alternative policies, then making yet another vain search for an elected (electable) champion to make them real, whereupon our own visions are coopted and deranged beyond recognition.

   We can’t even see what the elections are, in reality, because we are inside the building we want to tear down, and we have no idea what it looks like from the outside. Movements come and go with flavor-of-the-day crises, which the dominant class can throw at us faster than we can field them… we are not dealing with what is possible. Possibility is just equilibrium. Big changes come, as the best evolutionists tell us, when we puncutate that equilibrium with what is considered beyond possibility.

   **********

   Now, having said that, which was a response to the idea that we should expend a creative effort at mass communication in thinly-veiled electioneering (a terrible waste and mistake), the elections are important.

   Saying they are not is like telling a guerrillera with an M-16 that she can’t defend herself with that gun because it was manufactured by imperialists.

   I hear Steve on what he (wisely, perhaps) avoids abbreviating as ultra-lefitsm and right-deviationism… but I have to agree with Louis Proyect’s observation that the reason the left continually defaults to sectarianism is because we issue competing lines in a scramble for a tiny membership. Competing for market share does notlead us to emphasize our commonalities, but our differences.

   Our problems are too intractible to be merely aberrant individual behavior. The crisis of the left in the US has always been our small size and lack of mass appeal. Even in the heydey, we never came close to power… and the best we could claim was to have influenced FDR… perhaps the shrewdest *capitalist* political leader in history. While we slaughtered untold numbers of trees to peddle line-papers on street corners, campuses, and mass events, we have watched out influence diminish steadily… and we cling to the same tropes, the same language, the same outdated theory (theory that does not substantially change inevitably becomes doctrine), the same DC organizational models, the same prediliction for suspicion that every disagreement is a scratch about to turn into gangrene, the same macho style of debate, the same failure to come to terms with feminism, the same recurrent productionist fallacies, the same technological optimism… much of this in the face of a preponderance of evidence to the contrary…

   …and so we have made ourselve, oftentimes, into a caricature of The Communist.

   There is a huge population — inside this particular aand difficult core nation, the capitol of the world system now reliquishing its crisis-wracked hegemony for naked violence… the surest sign of all that the structures of power are rotting out from under the edifice — a huge population to whom we don’t bother to explain what our vision of socialism is, or even what it means (they still think it is the Soviet Union), and even a large contingent of independent socialists who are out there, not to mention the sea of feminists who cannot abide the recalcitrant masculinism of our organizaitons, who would happily join a programmatic movement if we’d (1) abandon the phony democracy of actually-existing “democratic centralism”, and (2) lead some efforts that might not get the raw numbers of a DC demo, but that could not be ignored by those in power.

   One day of practical work around a program is worth one year of passingout competing newspapers at ralies where each grouplet pretends it is THE vanguard of the revolution when their entire national membership would fit into a medium sized hotel.

   The efforts to weld together these grouplets as the basis of “refoundation” of a viable left strikes me as — and this is just an army term with no direct analogs implied — trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. The grouplets, and their litmus-test lines, and their fealty to Zinoviev-style autocracy masquerading as “democratic” centralism, are NOT the ones who will make this happen. Hell, I’ve listed most of them on my links, because they do produce good analysis from time to time, and they work their asses off.

   Steve’s term hits it on the head. We do not need a Party right now. The conditions do NOT NOT NOT exist in the US. It’s the organizing equivalent of trying to get a drink out of a fire hose. We need a *movement of movements*, united around practical work… and any left grouplet that tries to monopolize or colonize that work to engage in recruiting competitions needs to be ruthlessly marginalized.

   In this case, the issue is imperialism, which is in trouble and therefore extremely dangerous. The US attack dog, Israel, possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons. The US lost the war in Iraq the day they crosses the ine of departure. Moscow is seting up its onw oil bourse.

   We live in the heart of this system, and therefore bear a very special responsibility to the future, not just of creating a non-alienated society (socialism), but preventing an unthinkable catastrophe (which already exists for around 2 billion human beings).

   That responsibility begins with the practical work of public pedagogy… not merely on the facts, but taking out the whole dominant gender/class epistemological being by its roots.

   But it also means not missing this appointment with history, lest our grandchildren learn to despise us in retrospect as “good Germans.”

   There is plenty more to be said about this, but I am on a medicated rant now, so I’ll retire.

   26 July 2006, 9:57 pm

2. Stan:

   Farward from Steve:

   The Nightmare Returns

   Laurie King Diaries from Lebanon Electronic Lebanon

   26 July 2006

   “History is the nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.”

   – James Joyce (“Ulysses”)

   It cannot be happening again: the destruction of Lebanon, children ripped to ribbons of seared flesh, aged men and women looking lost and small in the dark corners of temporary shelters, mothers shrieking and crying over their dead babies, grown men covering their faces in shock and sorrow, powerless to protect their families. Tall apartment blocks pancaked into ruins, buildings riddled with holes, their edges missing, resembling large blocks of cheese that have been nibbled by monstrous rats.

   It cannot be happening again: massive infrastructural damage, the cut-off of water, electricity, and state services for weeks, months, maybe years. The hospitals crowded with casualties, the floors slick with blood; the smell of corpses wafting from the jumble of concrete, wires and glass that encase their desecrated bodies.

   It cannot be happening again: Israel committing war crimes with impunity, defending its insane actions as “necessary measures against terror,” repeatedly insisting its attacks are moral and characterized by surgical precision while American journalists nod like sheep, unable to ask a single critical question.

   It cannot be happening again: American leaders and politicians running blindly and mindlessly to Israel’s defense. Rational and much needed ublic debate quashed as the mid-term elections approach, senators and congressmen scurrying to toe the line of the pro-Israel Lobby, which again deforms discourse and narrows narratives, claiming that its massive, high-tech, nuclear-armed military is existentially threatened by a technologically disadvantaged militia, which it describes, predictably, as “evil,” “vipers,” and “a cancer.”

   It cannot be happening again: A UN observer post in South Lebanon deliberately targeted by the IDF. And, like clockwork, Israeli outrage at the world’s anger at such illegal actions.

   But of course, it is happening again; a recurring nightmare from which I cannot awaken. The Lebanon I last visited in 2003 has suddenly been transformed into the Lebanon of 1983. Israel made good on its promise to “bomb Lebanon back 20 or 30 years into the past.” In just two weeks, the death toll is four times as high as the number of those killed in Israel’s 16-day “Operation: Grapes of Wrath” of 1996.

   It has taken two full weeks for the sorrow, horror, rage and exhaustion of the war in Lebanon to suffuse my mind, heart and soul.

   I lived in Lebanon from 1993 until 1998, not as a tourist, a researcher or a journalist, but as a naturalized citizen who planned to make that war damaged country my home. My former husband and I visited his family in Beirut soon after our marriage during Christmas in 1991, staying at his mother’s battle-scarred house in the hills above Antelias, not far from the US Embassy. The first few nights there, I had nightmares that the war was still happening and that we were all in mortal danger. I woke up screaming the second night there.

   My brother in law laughed and told me not to worry so much. “Beirut has been destroyed five or six times in its long history, but it always bounces back.” I asked him later what the origin of the name “Beirut” was. He smiled mischeviously and said “Takes a licking, but keeps on ticking!”

   My ex-husband, George, had not been in his hometown, Beirut, for nearly a decade. The day before Christmas, his younger brother, Kamil, took us on a tour of the Greenline that divided largely Christian East Beirut from largely Muslim West Beirut. At Martyr’s Square, I saw George cry for the first and only time. “Why did they destroy this? Why did they take away all our memories?”

   There was no answer. We proceded on to Hamra, the famous shopping district of West Beirut, which was decked out in bright decor for Christmas and flooded with happy shoppers, Muslim and Christian alike. The Lebanese are nothing if not resilient; their reputation for joie de vivre is legendary and well-deserved.

   When the long war in Lebanon began in 1975, I was in high school and knew little of Lebanon or the Middle East. I remember watching the evening news and seeing the aerial pictures of Beirut’s tall buildings billowing smoke as thick and dark as the steel mills of my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I wondered how people could endure such a situation.

   The year after I graduated from college, the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon and put Beirut to siege. I viewed this a bit differently than most of my family and friends. I had spent the previous summer on an archaeological dig at an early Bronze Age site not far from the Dead Sea in Jordan, and had visited Jerusalem, Haifa, the West Bank, then Damascus before returning to Pittsburgh.

   At the dig site, I learned Arabic from the technical assistants from the Jordanian Ministry of Antiquities. At least once a week the subdued sounds of digging and dusting at our site, an ancient kitchen, would be interrupted by the sonic booms of Israeli Air Force jets breaking the sound barrier along the border. My Jordanian colleagues would just sigh and shake their heads. Among the first Arabic phrases I learned on the dig was “hadha wad`a sa`ab” (“this is a difficult situation”), a reference to the overall regional political situation. Looking back, that simple phrase sums up all that I have learned and experienced about the tortured Middle East in the intervening 25 years.

   A month after I began graduate school, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon culminated in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which approximately 1500 unarmed men, women, and children lost their lives as the IDF sent its allies, the Christian Phalange militia, into the refugee camps to clean out alleged “nests of terrorists.” I learned to mistrust that word and its evil uses then and there. As I watch US television news coverage of Lebanon’s current sufferings, my mistrust and anger grow. Who, indeed, are the terrorists in this situation?

   I went to graduate school to study ethnomusicology and anthropology of dance. The political events of the 1980s, however — hostage takings in Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war, the first Palestinian Intifada, the last horrific spasms of the war in Lebanon, which saw Christians slaughtering Christians, Shi’a slaughtering Shi’a, and further permutations of murderous violence against Palestinian refugees — drew my attention away from popular culture and towards politics, identity, conflict resolution, and law.

   I never imagined, as a graduate student in the 1980s, that nearly two decades later I would find myself deeply involved in a legal effort to heal some of the deep political and psychic wounds of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in the framework of a court case brought by survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in the Supreme Court of Brussels in 2001. That attempt to use law to end impunity and bring closure to those who had suffered seemed the closest thing to “awakening from the nightmare of history.” The case brought hope to many in the Middle East, as well as those in the West eager to strengthen and expand the reach of international law and global justice.

   But the old nightmare had staying power: in June 2003 US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a veritable factory of nightmares, crushed all possibility of progress in this case by threatening the Belgian Parliament that the US would see to it that NATO Headquarters would be relocated to Warsaw unless Belgium rescinded its universal jurisdiction (anti- atrocity) laws. The Belgians chose the nightmare over the dream, and the survivors- turned-plaintiffs were robbed of justice.

   It was my own personal nightmare to visit the plaintiffs in Shatila in September 2003 and remind them that they’d made legal history, even if those responsible for their devastating losses and ongoing suffering would not have a day in court. I left feeling I’d just amplified and deepened their nightmares by giving them hopes that were then cruelly snatched away. Soon after, I fell into a deep depression.

   Never did I imagine, though, that the people of Shatila and the residents of Beirut would be subjected to another massive Israeli assault and its inevitable war crimes. Nor did I imagine that the media would still be able to spin the story as a war against the forces of good (i.e., the US and Israel) against the forces of darkness, evil and terror (i.e., Arabs and Muslims).

   For five years, one third of my married life, I watched Lebanon get back on its feet again. When I first moved to Beirut in 1993, I often doubted it was possible to clean up the detritus and damage of 16 years of brutal urban warfare, to patch up the torn fabric of social ties, to put Lebanon on the map again as a beautiful, fun, enticing place to visit, work and live.

   But a lot of time, energy, effort and logistics over 15 years did indeed resurrect Lebanon. As a professor, a social activist, and a journalist, I experienced personally how hard and daunting that process was, and knew well how far it had yet to go.

   Living in Beirut for five years, teaching college students who had spent more time in bomb shelters than in libraries, and getting to know the situation in the refugee camps at first hand, I knew I was living in a wounded, haunted place. The lingering nightmare could not be denied. Everyday I maneuvered through a post-war society peopled by men, women, and children scarred visibly and invisibly by cruelty, violence, death, betrayal, injustice, and neglect.

   Sometimes it was hard to breathe thinking of the extent and depth of the damage done to so many people for so many years. It was overwhelming to imagine what would be required to begin healing that wounded country. It felt like being deep under water. But the healing happened. It took years, but the country rose again from the dust and debris. How long it took to rebuild. How quickly it was all destroyed again.

   When I first moved to Lebanon in 1993, I had nightmares of tanks ramming our apartment, bombs falling in the garden, bodies rotting in the street. All of these things had, as it turned out, happened in that neighborhood of East Beirut where we first lived. My neighbor Francine told me her war stories as we sat on the roof of our building watching the sunset over the Mediterranean.

   Lighting cigarette after cigarette, she related her shock–which had not yet subsided nearly two decades later–at watching Phalangist militia men dragging bodies of Palestinian refugees killed in Dbaye camp to be burned in a bonfire in the parking lot of the supermarket where we shopped each week for groceries.

   She related that the Christian militamen checked to see which of the corpses had been circumcised. These were assumed to be Muslims, and into the fire they went. Christian corpses, Francine surmised, must have gotten the “honor” of a mass grave burial, maybe not far from our apartment building.

   One day she described the smell of smoke, garbage, and rotting bodies wafting through the streets on a hot summer evening in the summer of 1982. She reached out, lightly scratched the back of my hand with her polished fingernails and said, “That is how deep civilization is, that is how thick. Scratch just a little and it comes right off. Once you know that, it’s hard to function anymore!”

   But Francine did function–wonderfully. She was funny, thoughtful, kind, and lively. She was a great hostess, a devoted mother and a loving wife. And she helped me descend into the wreck that was Beirut and survive some of the knowledge that I found there, as did so many other women like her whom I came to know, love, and respect during my years in Lebanon.

   Everyday I receive diary entries and updates for this site from friends and relatives in Lebanon that convey anger, fear, disbelief and desperation. My guilt at being far away and safe while they suffer in anxiety eats away at my stomach lining. My anger at the irresponsible and sloppy journalistic coverage of events in Lebanon and Israel corrodes my heart. My outrage and indignation at the impunity of the United States and Israel, and the general destruction of the Middle East over the last five years, prevents me from sitting still for more than fifteen minutes. I pace, check websites, curse at FoxNews, and feel nauseated by reports that many of my fellow Americans view events in Lebanon as a sign that the “End Time” and the Apocalypse are nigh.

   I am incredulous at the utter and obscene narcissism of the 20 percent of the American public that believes “the Rapture” is near and which actually prays for further conflagration, death and destruction in Lebanon and Israel. And I note with chagrin that the same percentage of the US public still believes in the leadership of George W. Bush, possibly the most dangerous president America has ever known. So just where do deranged religious extremists live?

   The nightmare is here, whether you are in Beirut, Haifa, Baghdad, New York City, or Washington DC.

   When will we awaken — or is it already too late?

   – Laurie King is a social anthropologist and a co-founder of Electronic Lebanon and Electronic Intifada. From 2001-2003 she served as North American Coordinator for the International Campaign for Justice for the Victims of Sabra and Shatila.

   26 July 2006, 10:05 pm

3. Doyle Saylor:

   Stan writes; [Inserted moderator's note... this was Steve, not Stan, writing. -SG]
   Fragmentation and small group mentality are impediments to our historical challenge.

   Doyle;
   There are many aspects to organizing groups. I’m not sure what you mean by small group mentality. What one does need to know though is a way to analyze a group process to see how it can be scaled up.

   One way to go about that is to ask more clearly what is a working class woman? In asking certain questions it gets past the class abstraction of all workers are equivalent.

   I’ll give some examples from the disabled rights movement where I have spent some time. Let’s take someone with ‘face blindness’. That means they can’t recognize someone. In more extreme cases they can’t know their mother by looking at the face, or for that matter know it is their own face when they look in the mirror.

   So that reveals an assumption in making a group that everyone can recognize other faces. That groups are made from using a face that way. That is a work process. So for example communist units, branches, whatever the jargon is based upon that sort of knowledge work process.

   So if recognition is so central what does that imply?

   A face blind person often cannot look at a woman and know that is a woman apart from men. So a working class woman is who she is because the organization can ‘see’ her. This is not the same sort of argument one sees about how the law in the U.S. is ‘color’ blind. What I am saying it for a group to function it must recognize or see its members.

   I’ll give a concrete example. Angela Davis has said she is homosexual. There are very few examples of major communists saying that. It is in my view a sign that communist organization is not able to incorporate ‘recognition’ based upon intimate relations into the process of group formation. On the one hand intimacy is ignored in terms of how comrades pair up, that is ‘private’. On the other hand these intimate relationships are the foundation for social structure in the system. So fundamentally at the core face recognition is not acknowledged as a work process that matters in terms of organization of the group.

   This sort of knowledge work, is left unspoken and unsaid. And it is one major aspect of sectarian social relations in groups.

   Stan writes;
   Hizzbollah, and Hamas while reactionary in some ways still are mass and popular forms that reflect both the demise of a secular left and a human desire to resist repression.

   Doyle;
   So let’s take this sort of social example and give the above observation some analytical application to Islam. The veil of women to cover their face does what? It regulates recognition. It implies that a woman’s group is the ‘family’. It regulates by the face.

   That is a work process for group formation is built around face recognition in which social structure is highly segregated. In that sense we know social equality is denied to women. The knowledge work process is denied to women in public. That effectively limits how much public influence they can have.

   Suppose we are in a party branch where equality is being practiced. The room contains the branch members. Usually branches are not hundreds in the meeting. Why not? Knowing people by face, doing the work to know many people is too much. I look at your face and know you are mad at me. But I look at her and I can’t tell how she feels. I’m face blind because I don’t know her.

   In this way I’ve shown how to understand ‘seeing’ women in a socialist organization can be understood as a knowledge work process dependent upon the face knowledge work.

   This is a start in re-building the left to see ‘women’.
   Thanks,
   Doyle Saylor

   27 July 2006, 3:32 pm

4. Steve:

   The whole point of the letter I wrote was that left groups think in terms of thier narrow interests, not in terms of the needs of social movements.Being involved with a number of movements over the last 35 years it strikes me that often times left groups put out positions that are exercises in parsing words. The point is to recruit members,reinforcing ones own market share, not building movements. A political outfit is not the same as a movement. We need a political culture and we need organization in the broadest sense of the term to make it happen.
   Sadly, we don`t have either here in the US, like say Bolivia. Right now, Lebanon is being blown to bits, Palestine is being starved and killed. The Gulf coast is being subjected to appropriation by displacement, as are most of our cities, and Iraq bleeds. I think we are getting a wake up call,I was writing to other socialists not folks from other standpoints.

   27 July 2006, 11:30 pm

5. Doyle Saylor:

   I’m sorry Steve. I agree these times are a wake up call. I won’t argue with you if you feel we are distinctly different. I’m a socialist though. I’m not interested in being right here though.
   thanks,
   Doyle

   28 July 2006, 9:46 am

6. Stan:

   Steve, what you describe is not only an anchor on the progress of social movements, it is a horse latitude. (De may appreciate my feeble maritime metaphor.) Every time the social movements take off in their most spontaneous (and therefore organic) guise, these groups who have small numbers but vast collective experience at organizing move in like competing winds and cancel one another out. There are no doubt many other dynamics at work, monocausation being a rather linear thought process, but this is signficant.

   That is precisely why there needs to be some semblance of an organization that is devoted primarily to exploring new ways to think about all this. Marxism-Leninism, an appellation still used by many of our groups, is waiting in the wings when the advanced of any social movement begin to look more deeply into the organized left — out of a desire to advance the struggle — and that’s when 95% of them turn away.

   This term and notion do not need to have new life breathed into them. They need euthanasia. It is a doctrine posing as a science; and in its day it was stunningly effective… in societies that were predominantly peasants. We are not living in a peasant society; and the fact is the language and method of ML does not fail to gain a purchase solely because of the high level of anticommunism here (which is a big factor), but also because many smart people rightly intuit the presumption of claiming a doctrine is a science and the rigidity of thought that invariably accompanies doctrine.

   We sometimes behave as if we are still hiding from the tsarist secret police one minute, and the next we are claiming leadership of “the” movement, whatever the hell that is, if not directly via front organizations.

   It can be embarrassing, because the people who bother to check us out are actually the ones who are most accurately zeroing in on the bases of the problem — a social system that is analagous to cancer, fueled by male gender identities, homeostatic within the limits of racial-national oppression, with the attention span of a june bug.

   On the other hand, the existing “acceptable” structures have all the characteristics of social democratic opportunism (to use one of the accurate notions of ML).

   Something has to break us out of this impasse, and the most likely candidates for change — bringing our theory into the 21st Century, throwing out the whole “democratic” centralist organizational model, reassessing strategies based on “aiming the main blow,” and struggling to shift the episteme (what the right did FIRST to effect the capture fo state power!!!)… are precisely those things for which left organizations most fiercely resist any change at all.

   The way our left organizations behave, even the most principled and flexible (one of which Steve and I know very well), it sometimes appears that we are trying to do plastic surgery to be more hip, and to put on things such as (liberal) feminism and ecology like new apparel, without effecting any fundamental change to the inside, ie, philospohical assumptions, organizational dynamics, and methods. (I just read a document from a groups I very much respect, and they claimed that the most urgent issues women face are the attack on Roe and the reactionary right-wing. In the US, more than 2 million women a year [conservative estimate] get the shit beat out of them by intimates. More US women die each year from battery than do US soldiers in Iraq. More than a million women in the US each year are raped by someone they know [again, conservative]. The Bush administration ban against aid for family planning internationally has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of women. Sexual trafficking involves millions of women, and includes real-life slavery. Yet somehow, there is always a more important strategic emphasis… always, decade after decade. Women’s oppression gets compressed into Roe & the Right.)

   The fact that there has never been a social revolution inside an industrial metropole yet is trying to tell us something about this system and our response to it. As does the fact that we can’t attract more than a comparative handful of people.

   28 July 2006, 11:41 am

7. Doyle Saylor:

   To Stan,
   Well said. I mean your response.

   I would add that ML ought to be considered an historical process that arose from previous organizational experiences. E.P. Thompson’s history of the English Working class gives quite a bit to the idea that the early English working class organizing was started in the Methodist Churches, and they used those forms to hybridize the trade union movements.

   The main point about that is that organizing to produce social knowledge, essentially building the socialist person, arises out of certain sorts of organizational forms that we could submit to scrutiny that would reveal I think a lot about why women are not yet in power.

   That really doesn’t take a lot of resources. Just a willingness to ask fundamental questions of structures that worked well in some ways but still need a fundamental shift to start the ball rolling.
   thanks,
   Doyle Saylor

   28 July 2006, 3:59 pm

8. elaina:

   And to add to that, Stan, I think I’m meeting up lately with some of that 95% that you mentioned, in the form of most of my new co-workers.

   People who once might have dedicated themselves to a revolutionary movement had the “movement” parading itself as such here in Gringolandia not proven disenchanting.

   The thing is, the programs that actually work as programs and organize people effectively to do things- they are highly limited as to the “issues” they can deal with- take for example the “labor movement,” no? The model for organization is effective but those with the resources and power deem that we must use the model for only one thing. Or that those of us with very legitimate concerns with “outside issues” must, as you said, always, ALWAYS, wait until there’s more time or more support or a greater need. Nevermind that time’s always gonna be running out and that the need’s been more than great enough for a hundred years, so on and so forth.

   The result of this combination of very valuable human resources, in terms of high levels of intellect and capability on the part of the people doing the organizing, while not a complete waste, is still what I see as a kind of misdirection.

   The question is how to get the resources needed for this type of people-moving, the sheer stuff needed to deal with the logistics, into the framework of really, real, revolutionary change- into the hands of people who will use it to change folks on those levels at which we are quite literally suffocating; such as turning the tables on sexual and national oppressions, in a very clear, very deliberate program set forth to do so.

   In theory, at any rate.

   The reason that it WILL take a lot of resources to get to this place is that the oppressed have to be able to live while they’re working on liberating themselves. And I mean, literally, live. To be able to eat and bathe and get their teeth fixed and be reasonably healthy and have a place to sleep and shit. Because many of them have never had whatever combination of many of those things.

   The thing that’s always vexed me about these “vanguard” groups of which y’all are now speaking, and with whom I do have some experience myself, is something that we actually talked about earlier, Stan, and that’s that they do a lot of preaching on how the oppressed have to run their own show, without acknowledging that in order for the oppressed to do that the folks in these groups with relative privilege need to start forking over more of the resources that they’re sitting on than they already are. They can do that, or they can do the grunt work their damn selves, and they can do it right and do it under the scrutiny of those “oppressed” folks that they’re trying so desperately to “save.”

   Jesus, God, I’m rambling on. But it does come down to a personal level, here, and it’s the meaning I take from the whole “we have to organize ourselves” statement. It starts at a very basic place, that at a glance doesn’t need too much in the way of “resources,” I guess you could say- by just making the decision to do stuff that counteracts imperialism and not doing stuff that supports it, on a personal level.

   But it’s easier, due to an overage of resources in certain places, for certain people to do that than it is for other people. And to get to a point where you can actually move others into that frame of thinking takes a lot more, exponentially more.

   I’ll quit rambling now.

   28 July 2006, 10:15 pm

9. Steve:

   One of the things I notice frequently is that race, class, and gender play out spatially. Cities are majority women and are imagined as female,la citta.I am very partial to the idea of the socio-spatial dialectic,particularly now since in a post fordist globalized economy urban areas have a different role than during other periods. It seems to me that the point of reproduction, not production is the locus of class struggle, the factory has been replaced by community as the flashpoint in the fight to expand the commons, increase the social wage, and overcome the mobility regime. What drills through the scales from global to the local is the logic of accumulation, by dispossesion and displacement.
   We can`t build a popular base capable of exerting power at the national level until we build it locally and regionally at key nodes in the structures of communications, distribution, and production. The DC region is one such area, with 5 million people many of whom are transnational with hybridized identities and second only to NYC in terms of media exposure-it is a key link between the national and global.
   Geographers think in terms of scales and the social construction of space. Economists and other social scientists don`t. Geographers find power embedded in the lived spaces of everyday life, in the face to face interactions between people where counter hegemonic practices are embodied. Space is not a neutral terrain where a social drama is acted out, but is produced politically, reflecting the balance of forces.
   The failure to seize, hold and expand spaces of resistance and empowerment in lived experience is obvious in DC. The failure to think of DC,MD, and VA as an integrated region with common interests across political boundaries is a key factor. Race, class, and gender are inscribed on the landscape, in the built environment-but we fail to see it. Narrative is linear, images are not-until folks see the landscape, understand place making and think strategically we will be endlessly marginalized.
   A viable opposition movement of movements linked organically to the micro politics of development,and land use would be the transmission belt to mobilize, just like in places outside the USA. Incidentally, Northern Virginia is home to many DoD contractors, Exxon, and such.
   Northern Virginia is also one of the largest centers of concentration for immigrants of West Asian Origin. Below is a map of Iranians-note they are not concentrated in urban nodes-three zonal areas exist, from other maps of income it appears there are class divisions- place is defined not by residence, but in imagined geographies of locations- stores, mosques, schools.etc. I think understanding Iranian america before the bombs drop is important.

   29 July 2006, 10:55 am

10. Steve:

    couldn`t paste the map…sorry
    steve

    29 July 2006, 10:59 am

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