liturgy of resistance
All those people — mostly white, Republican, Southern, born-again Christians — were on their feet reciting a “Liturgy of Resistance” [I changed that… it was “litany”. _SG] It was the end of a long sermon/lecture by Shane at at the Catalyst Conference in Georgia last year. The litany lasted about ten minutes (you can watch the whole thing here). Here’s one very short clip from it:
With governments that kill…
…we will not comply.
With the theology of empire…
…we will not comply.
With the business of militarism…
…we will not comply.
With the hoarding of riches
…we will not comply.
With the dissemination of fear
…we will not comply.
But today we pledge our allegiance to the kingdom of God…
…we pledge allegiance.
To the peace that is not like Rome’s…
…we pledge allegiance.
To the Gospel of enemy love
…we pledge allegiance.
To the poor and the broken…
…we pledge allegiance….
Pay attention to the pic.
Note that Claiborne looks like a refugee from an anarchosydicalist commune.
Does this fit our categtories of left-to-right? This is a gathering of the demographic of power… of Suburbia, being led away from the justification of The Dark Enemy. I call that breathing space.
Liturgy means “the people’s work.”
skol:
Wow
25 March 2008, 5:54 pmI think we need to reprioritize our cynicism
Kim Alphandary:
This is just amazing. Thanx so much for posting this!
What a concept — Christians that I can totally relate to. Dressed in a way that signifies to me: I am in a place where I can feel safe, I can say radical things and enjoy some serious conversation about how to walk on this earth.
This reconfirms a weird theory that I’ve been developing — basically, it does not matter one iota whether a government/people are left, right, or center. What matters is how the words are transfered into reality. REALITY is what matters.
How inspiring, in the non-religious sense, to see a huge crowd dedicating themselves to such a wonderful set of ideals.
27 March 2008, 1:00 pmDeAnander:
I was thinking how very difficult these ideals are to put into practise. we will not comply is a hard talk to walk… paying our taxes is complicity, for a start. how do we “not comply” with the dissemination of fear? certainly by refusing to repeat the mindless newspeak of the Murdoch empire around the office cooler — and yet, just standing around the office cooler is complicity…
our complicity is so deep — our daily dependency on the wealth produced by extortion and murder is so profound — that refusing to comply is a project so radical (literally, from the roots) that it would uproot a whole life, be a lifetime’s work. which, of course, is one of the messages of the gospels… give all that you have to the poor, and follow me is the logical end point of a sincere intention to stop complying….
at any rate, the litany here is moving and inspiring, and yet also so daunting in the magnitude and weight of the task undertaken that it worries me a little — or perhaps itches at my own sense of continuing complicity even as I try, consciously, to downsize, live “low on the hog and below the radar”, join the Briar Patch Society…
we will not comply
refusez d’obéir
yes, but… we all obey, every time we handle money, pay interest, work for wages, hoard our private possessions, drive a car, burn fossil fuels, use plastic (I mean both credit cards and tupperware/baggies here)… our obedience is structured into the economy and the economy only functions on our obedience. it takes a profound effort of will, and a chunk of good luck, to disengage from the machineries of death…
28 March 2008, 1:07 pmCharles:
The Next American Revolution
by Grace Lee Boggs ( 90 years young)
Left Forum Closing Plenary, Cooper Union, New York, March 16, 2008
I have decided to talk about the next American Revolution because I believe it is not only the key to global survival but also the most important step we can take in this period to build a new, more human and more socially and ecologically responsible nation that all of us, in every walk of life, whatever our race, ethnicity, gender, faith or national origin, will be proud to call our own.
I also feel that it would be a shame if we left this historic gathering in this Great Hall, at this pivotal time in our country’s history—when the power structure is obviously unable to resolve the twin crises of global wars and global warming, when millions are losing their jobs and homes, when Obama’s call for change is energizing so many young people and independents, and when white workers in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania are reacting like victims—without discussing the next American revolution.
Since it is hard to struggle for something which you haven’t struggled to define and name, my aim this evening, quite frankly, is to initiate impassioned discussions about the next American revolution everywhere, in groups, small and large.
I begin with some history. Forty years ago my late husband, Jimmy Boggs and I started Conversations in Maine with our old friends and comrades, Freddy and Lyman Paine, to explore how a revolution in our time in our country would differ from the many revolutions that took place around the world in the early and mid-20th century.
We four had been members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a tiny group inside the Workers Party and the Socialist Workers Party, led by C.L.R.James and Raya Dunayevskaya. Lyman, an architect, and Freddy, a worker and organizer, had been in the radical movement since the 1930s. Jimmy, an African American born and raised in the deep agricultural South, had worked on the line at Chrysler for 28 years and was a labor and community activist and writer.
I was an Asian American intellectual who had been inspired by the 1941 March on Washington movement to become a movement activist, and after spending ten years in New York studying Marx and Lenin with CLR and Raya, had moved to Detroit in 1953, married Jimmy Boggs and became involved in the struggles organically developing in the Detroit community.
Our mantra in the Johnson-Forest Tendency had been the famous paragraph in Capital where Marx celebrates “the revolt of the working class always increasing in numbers and united, organized and disciplined by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production.”
In the early 60s when the working class was decreasing rather than increasing under the impact of what we then called “automation,” we separated from CLR when he opposed our decision to rethink Marxism. Our separation freed us to recognize unequivocally that we were coming to the end of the relatively short industrial epoch on which Marx’s epic analysis had been based.
We could see clearly that the United States was in the process of transitioning to a new mode of production, based on new informational technologies, and that this transitioning was not only epoch-ending but epoch-opening, with cultural and political ramifications as far-reaching as those involved in the transition from Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture or from Agriculture to Industry.
As movement activists and theoreticians in the tumultuous year of 1968, we were also acutely conscious that in the wake of the civil rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the exploding anti-Vietnam war and women’s movements, new and more profound questions of our relationships with one another, with nature, and with other countries were being raised with a centrality unthinkable in earlier revolutions.
Hence, as our conversations continued, we became increasingly convinced that our revolution in our country in the late 20th century had to be radically different from the revolutions that had taken place in pre-or-non-industrialized countries like Russia, Cuba, China or Vietnam. Those revolutions had been made not only to correct injustices but to achieve rapid economic growth.
By contrast, as citizens of a nation which had achieved its rapid economic growth and prosperity at the expense of African Americans, Native Americans, other people of color, and peoples all over the world, our priority had to be correcting the injustices and backwardness of our relationships with one another, with other countries and with the earth.
In other words, our revolution had to be for the purpose of accelerating our evolution to a higher plateau of humanity. That’s why we called our philosophy “Dialectical Humanism” as contrasted with the “Dialectical Materialism” of Marxism. Six years later the practical implications of this somewhat abstract concept of an American revolution were spelled out by Jimmy in the chapter entitled “Dialectics and Revolution” in Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century (Monthly Review Press, 1974).
Full
footnote
28 March 2008, 2:58 pmMark:
I think it’s very funny that the voting block (Evangelicals) that the republicans have so thoroughly captured with the twin issues of gay rights and abortion is now developing a break-away ideological offshoot. I don’t, however, hold out much hope for this really amounting to much within the evangelical movement. There have been such offshoots before and they are always in the minority.
Religion, especially the christian religion, is essentially an exercise in make-believe. Ultimately material interests will prevail. If this movement aquires enough momentum it may perhaps have the power to effect the tight voting patterns of evangelicals in the short term. I imagine there are some republican strategists that have their thinking caps on.
30 March 2008, 7:00 pmStan:
I’m sorry, but this is simultaneously so categorical, so ignorant, and so arrogant that I cannot let it go. You haven’t the foggiest notion what you are talking about; and yet you presume to present this outrageous and completely superficial generalization.
Would you like to know what the most dangerous and pervasive bit of make-believe it is that has hold of the stupified collective consciousness of US culture?
“Money grows.”
Meanwhile, I’ll wager that any religious person who is working in a homeless shelter, on a Christian Peacemaker Team in a war zone, or in a prison is far more removed from the world of make-believe than 99% of self-proclaimed “secular” Americans who are filling their idle hours with voyeurism and celebrity worship.
What will prevail if this is left uncorrected is the exact opposite of the material interests of almost all of us.
The other secular make-believe I hear inferred here is that we can solve our problems with elections.
Conflating the biblical inerrency of so-called fundamentalists with all practices of religion is the same as conflating the left with the Spartacist League. It is unfair; but more importantly, it is inaccurate.
Reflexive anti-religion reminds me for all the world of how people without military experience feel perfectly entitled and empowered to spout off about everything military, when most don’t know an operations order from a rifle platoon. They think that what little they do actually know is more than sufficient… because they have convinced themselves that, having simplified a subject out of their own intellectual laziness, the subject is simple.
30 March 2008, 8:19 pmDeAnander:
this is imho another case of Taint — a very important concept, to which my attention was drawn by one M A Gannon, a successful but otherwise not-very-famous feminist lawyer (and a very lucid and original thinker). Taint operates in a number of ways, but basically it’s coterminous with Unclean and (if we dig deeper) with Kapu. let’s backtrack a little…
Taint is a more academic way of saying “cooties”, which itself is a reference to insect infestation and hence absolutely rich with class overtones. something — a person, a meme, a concept — is Tainted if it has been marked “unclean” or Kapu, so that it must be shunned. [cue stock footage of Hollywood version of lepers walking through mediaeval world ringing bell and calling out “Unclean, Unclean” as the mob scrambles away from them in semi-panic]
here’s an example of Taint: for generations, country people believed that if a pedigreed female beast — a prize bitch, let’s say — “got out” and mated with a mutt, her offspring forever after were Tainted, likely to turn out impure or crossbred. this is the agrarian view of a superstition as old as patriarchy, that once “foreign” seed has “infected” a woman, she is no longer “clean” (i.e. securely the property of her male controllers). hence the “death penalty” for escaped bitches, and stoning for “unfaithful” or “loose” women; the fear is a biophobic one of uncontrolled, unlicensed biotic invasion of a controlled space. naive racists to this day believe something similar about so-called “miscegenation” — that once a White woman has borne a mixed-race child her womb is Tainted and all her children will be “mixed” or “mongrel”. there is of course zero biological reality behind this theory — it’s a kind of patriarchal Lysenkoism.
but the notion of Taint is very powerful, very linked to Kapu in all cultures. a person who has done certain prohibited things can be Tainted, so that association with that person is forbidden (because Kapu is transitive — right! — [to paraphrase Tom Lehrer’s ‘New Math’]). Taint is transitive and infectious (the biophobic or epidemiological metaphor again), in a model we also call “guilt by association,” very powerful during periods of the mass expiation or purgation behaviour we call “witch hunting”, such as the McCarthy putsch or the various purges of the Stalinist era. merely associating with a suspect person — tolerating them, being in the same room with them — was sufficient to transfer the Taint of “disloyalty” or “subversion”.
so, hanging on to this concept with both hands for a moment, let’s consider how it works in a more abstract realm, the realm of ideas and cultural patterns. certain cultural ideas and symbols become Tainted because of their association with Kapu-breaking behaviour. for example the Nazi swastika is a Tainted symbol for most Western people — it is immediately associated with abhorrent behaviour from which any decent person would wish to dissassociate. I don’t suggest that all kapu are irrational or useless — the kapu against genocide for example is a very good idea. for USian people with an antiracist commitment, the Confederate Flag is a Tainted symbol of slavery and racism — it is not possible to see it as other than the sigil of an abhorrent belief system and its tragic results.
now, off to the contested ground. for many people, the horrors of the Stalinist era in the FSU or the Red Guard era in China constitute a Taint that adheres to Communism, or even to any form of Socialism. the entire body of theory, literature, etc, is Tainted for such people, it is Kapu, it has meaning only as a symbol of abhorrence. for others, the horrors of e.g. the Inquisition, or various fundamentalist excesses in the modern era, constitute a Taint so powerful that Christianity — or any religious praxis at all — is interpretable only as symbols of abhorrent events.
reflexive anti-religion, like reflexive anti-Communism, is a Kapu or Taint mechanism at work. how useful this mechanism is, is debatable. on the one hand, it is useful to recall the downside of any belief system because it equips us with a valuable skepticism, i.e. makes us less easy marks for demagogues and despots. OTOH, it is also a broad-brush rejection that prevents us from gleaning anything useful from the large literature of e.g. Marxist theory or theology. if we condemn all religious persons because of the Taint of (to name just a couple of talking points) paedophilia in an established priesthood, embezzlement and malfeasance in televangelism, or the role of Rapturista thinking in the warmongering Bush regime — then we condemn out of hand also the activists of the radical tradition like D Day, I Illich, O Romero and many more. we also discount the role of hypocrisy in human affairs, i.e. the ability of bad actors to mouth the verbal forms of potentially liberating theories.
on this type of Taint-model we should loathe the idea of Democracy because of the manifest crimes committed by e.g. the US over the last couple of generations, all committed while spouting grand rhetoric about Democracy… and we should loathe the idea of race and gender justice because of the Maggie Thatchers and Clarence Thomases. we should loathe the idea of science entirely because of the many and egregious corruptions and evils wrought under the banner of scientific inquiry (such as Japanese whaling, or bioweapons research, or corporate pseudoscience).
imho to have a useful toolbox of memes with which to deconstruct oppressive power, we need to abandon the Taint/Kapu model to some extent and adopt a scavenger/recycler model, picking over the notorious “trash heap of history” for whatever is useful or practical in belief systems and meme-caches, and trying to avoid the hypocrisies or literal-mindedness or overgeneralisations that carried those ideas into the realm of doctrinaire “isms” and hence into fossilisation and the establishment of Establishments. somewhere in our meme-toolbox we need to keep the swiss army knife that reminds us that versatility is a more powerful strategy than specialisation, that one size does not fit all, and that the germ or core of good ideas can be perverted — regardless of the source of the good idea — by good ol’ human wickedness and power-lust into an oppressive structure.
there is nothing wrong with the idea of sexual liberation or freedom; there is everything wrong with a glut of commercial pornography and institutionalised prostitution. there is nothing wrong with the ideals of socialism (remarkably similar at core to the ideals of the Gospels); there is everything wrong with the totalitarian Stalinist state, and with the hierarchies and control-freakery of an Established Church. there is nothing wrong with the ideals of anticolonialism and self-determination, and everything wrong with with the brutal torture and murder of “undesirable” ethnic groups in the name of national unity. and so on. to be able to grasp the distinction between a good idea and an imperfect implementation, and a good idea and an hypocritical opportunistic misappropriation of that idea, seems to me an increasingly important tool in a world where almost every good idea is now associated with more than one spectacular horror.
the only other alternative is to assume that no one has ever, before us, had any good ideas at all, and that any idea in order to be good must never have been thought of before. given the duration of our existence as cultural beings, this leaves a very small idea-space in which to operate. we need, I think, greater license to pick over and reconsider the vast midden of human ideas — that so-called “trash heap of history” — in order to sieve out the valuable from the silly, and the inherently bogus from the misappropriated.
30 March 2008, 10:10 pmMark:
“Reflexive anti-religion reminds me for all the world of how people without military experience feel perfectly entitled and empowered to spout off about everything military, when most don’t know an operations order from a rifle platoon.”
I’m guessing by this analogy that you assume I have no direct experience with religion. Without going into detail about my personal background let me assure you that your assumption is false. My atheism does not stem from ignorance.
Also you said “The other secular make-believe I hear inferred here is that we can solve our problems with elections.”
This inference to which you refer was not my intention. I was simply offering my take on what would be the likely outcome of this Claiborn “phenomenon” on the upcoming presidential elections. Not that all “problems” are solved by elections.
I was deeply involved in the evangelical movement for many years and saw a few of these “progressive” luminaries (Prophets, if you will) become fairly popular from time to time. (Tony Campolo, comes to mind) While courageous and admirable, I’ve never seen them able to stand up to the money machine that is modern christianity and mount a christian progressive movement that can compete with PTL or TBN or ORU.
For every Tony Campolo or Claiborn there seems to be twenty Robertsons, Falwells and Hagees. Maybe this “Liturgy of Resistance” will prove me wrong. If I ever join a movement of such a nature (For political reasons, obviously) I promise I’ll try to hold my arrogant atheistic comments in check…..
30 March 2008, 10:16 pmDeAnander:
BTW, as to “make-believe”, I heartily recommend D Jensen’s The Culture of Make-Believe for another take on this concept.
30 March 2008, 10:21 pmStan:
Mark, your experience with one church or denomination does not entitle you to pain religious people with a broad brush. When you do so, and when you make categorical statements in the process, you are already wrong. More specifically, the term “make-believe” suggests a form of philosophical objectivism that is mired in scientistic modernism. That is, only the empirically provable is “true.” We can have that conversation here, even in this thread; and I think it would be valuable.
As to numbers, the (Christian) categories evangelical, prophetic, and eccuminical are not even descriptive enough to justify your sub-generalization. Among Baptists, there are many species, some evangelical, some (Black) arguably prophetic.
One of the most politically active and “on our side” churches here in Raleigh is Pullen Memorial Baptist. It has 800 members. If you can find me a secular lefty organization in the entire Southeastern United States with 800 members, I’ll eat your hat.
Also in Raleigh are the offices of the North Carolina Council of Churches, which includes conference and congregational member churches from around the state, total human numbers I don’t know. Check their “areas of work” list and see where they stand on issues.
When I worked with IVAW, the office was a free space contributed by the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers). The AFSC is a highly effective, well-funded, international organization that provides more and better public education material on a host of issues than any I know.
Looking at it through the long arc of history, even the Catholic Church is embroiled in a decades-long internal struggle between the church of the masses (Romero, Aristide, Gutierrez) and the church of the Vatican; as well as a powerful current inside the church to change its ways on gender.
My own church — which does not have what I consider a perfect program embodied in its Book of Resolutions — the United Methodist Church, lists George W. Bush as a member. You can’t keep people out, and when you have gravity, these people will technically join. He joined (some say because Laura Bush was raised Methodist), I think, because it is the second largest protestant denomination in the country (over 8 million members).
It’s mission — which would rankle Dubya no end — is to “make disciples,” who show a love of God (what Tillich calls the “ground of being,” or Being-Itself) through loving (a practice, not just a feeling) one’s neighbor, ie, ” * strangers; * prisoners; * people who mistreat us (who are our enemies); * people from other cultural and ethnic backgrounds; * people from different religious traditions; * people who irritate us and push the boundaries of our patience (I’m working on loving you now, Mark).
At our little 70-something start-up this past Sunday, Associate Pastor Laura Fine Ledford deomonstrated how to do “narrative theology,” in telling the story of Thomas’ doubt a week after the crucifixion.
In the story, Jesus comes to the door to demonstrate his resurrection to Thomas, who has asked God for a sign. But Jesus still has his wounds; and Thomas proceeds to put his fingers in the wounds, whereupon he kissed the wounds. Thomas was there once before, when the other disciples were telling Jesus not to go into enemy territory to raise Lazarus. But it was Thomas, the tough contrary one, who said, if this guy is going, then we need to go with him, and if he dies, then we die with him.
Laura explained this as the reason she loves Thomas. He says things that other people are thinking but are afraid to say. But once said, he will risk death, put his fingers into bloody wounds, and kiss them.
Her wind-up was to challenge the congregation to think of when the knock comes to their own door (because Jesus said what you do to the least of us you do to me), how do you respond to the wounds of others, the beaten woman, the immigrant, the homeless… do you invite them in and kiss their wounds.
Does this sound like make-believe?
31 March 2008, 7:23 amStan:
btw, I just booted “Razzumov” who posted a long and poisonous screed that managed to pack his reflexive anti-religion in with macho left-adventurism and homophobia. We “Jesus freaks” are just too too “mushy” for him (as are young anarchists, who he managed to take a shot at), and he is disapointed that I am not playing the role of leftist alpha-male. He will not be back. You may be able to find him on more masculine sites.
31 March 2008, 7:57 amCharles:
Kapu is taboo ?
31 March 2008, 1:31 pmCharles:
Now that’s a keeper from DeAnander
31 March 2008, 1:36 pmCharles:
Huckabee Defends Rev. Jeremiah Wright
Huffington Post | March 19, 2008 12:22 PM
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/19/huckabee-defends-rev-jer_n_92346.html
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Read More: Huckabee Defends Wright, Huckabee Jeremiah Wright, Huckabee Obama, Huckabee Wright, Jeremiah Wright, Obama Jeremiah Wright, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Video, Breaking Politics News
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Buzz up!on Yahoo!Via Ben Smith:
An assist from an unexpected quarter:
“[Y]ou can’t hold the candidate responsible for everything that people around him may say or do,” Huckabee says. “It’s interesting to me that there are some people on the left who are having to be very uncomfortable with what … Wright said, when they all were all over a Jerry Falwell, or anyone on the right who said things that they found very awkward and uncomfortable, years ago. Many times those were statements lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say ‘Well, I didn’t mean to say it quite like that.’”
Later, he defended Wright’s anger, too:
“As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say ‘That’s a terrible statement!’ … I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names…”
comment on the site:
31 March 2008, 1:42 pmWatch this video again, and see how the interviewers want to draw Huckabee out to say something controversial about Wright. Instead of playing along, Huckabee talks about growing up in the segregated South, and says had he been treated the way Blacks were treated, he would be angry too, and maybe even angrier, so let’s not throw stones. Look how his response changed the interviewers’ demeanor, and dissipated the atmosphere of attack that had prevailed a moment ago. I wish I would have the courage, wisdom and eloquence to say something like that in a similar situation. In fact, I think Americans of good will on either side of the political divide wish more of our public life were in the hands of people who behave in this manner, whether overtly religious or not.
Charles:
the only other alternative is to assume that no one has ever, before us, had any good ideas at all, and that any idea in order to be good must never have been thought of before. given the duration of our existence as cultural beings, this leaves a very small idea-space in which to operate. we need, I think, greater license to pick over and reconsider the vast midden of human ideas — that so-called “trash heap of history” — in order to sieve out the valuable from the silly, and the inherently bogus from the misappropriated.
^^^^
31 March 2008, 1:52 pmCB: This is what it is all about for revolutionary thinkers. And the test of thinking/theory is practical-critical activity.
audrey:
Mark, I hope this doesn’t come off as contributing to a pile-on here, but I do want to make a couple of points.
You may be entirely right that this liturgy of resistance will be a minority group among evangelical movements, and that others in the past have attempted to rise up and have fallen into obscurity. I can’t argue with that. I think that’s the case though in our society at large. Most people are not serious activists committed to change. That’s a function of our national culture, not of religion.
That was brought home to me last summer, when my friend called me in to do an intervention with her boyfriend, an immigrant from Poland, who decided to make the switch - as so many people do (?) from professional ballet dancer to US Army Ranger. We watched The Ground Truth together, and half way through, from underneath his newly shorn buzzcut of pre-enlistment anticipation, he said, “I don’t get it, why don’t all the troops just turn against the president and overthrow the government? They have guns, they have the training.” The best answer I had in the moment was “This is America, not Poland. We don’t do that sort of thing here.” Maybe not the best answer. Or maybe it was, I don’t know. But I am fairly sure the reason we aren’t rebelling isn’t so much that we’re listening to church leaders as it is that we haven’t got time for a revolution right now because our favorite tv show is about to start (if we are successful enough to have leisure time) or because we are heading off to our second job (if our primary job doesn’t pay a living wage).
What I’m trying to say is that if we are going to dismiss American churches because most of their followers are not committed activists in leftist movements, you may as well dismiss the rest of America as well.
Beyond that, your post left me sad, both because I know I have sounded like that in my past, and because of the people I am friends with, working with or in contact with now. Our counter-recruitment group meets in a Quaker house because a couple of members belong there. Before that, we met in a Unitarian Church, where we had a member. Lutheran Social Services here is assisting the Iraqi refugees who are resettling in this area, and I know the coordinator for that. An Episcopal Church in Detroit hosted a recent talk by an IVAW member. The pastor of that church, Bill Wylie-Kellermann, is actually a Methodist, and the last time I saw him he was in some legal trouble for overstaying his welcome at a local recruitment office. A local friend here is trying to wage an impossible battle against the National Guard for medication and surgery after a back injury that occurred while on duty, and his main advocate is an Archbishop (a Vietnam vet, and author of The Gay Face of God.)
As a life-long atheist, I could point to any one of those people, I guess, and accuse them of believing in things I don’t believe in, and I could phrase that in any number of hurtful ways. But what they all have in common, which to me is far more important than a difference in gods, is a belief in social justice that runs all the way through them. Their commitment to action eclipses my own by orders of magnitude, and it’s very hard to feel superior to them under the circumstances.
31 March 2008, 11:41 pmjack:
i wasn’t going to comment on this particular post, but seeing how the comments have continued up to last night i might as well add my 2 cents. being raised quaker, having gone through my angry atheist phase and now coming back to a more comfortable agnosticism/spiritualism found within the frame work of the society of friends, yet also coming from “anarcho-kid” politic of the anti-globalization mobilizations, i have one reservation about the vast majority of “liberation/progressive” theology as it is practiced by most white folks here in the united states. having read through most of the posts stan has put up and seeing his points about jeasus’ teachings on the creativity of resistance, i personally have seen very little creativity coming out of these movements beyond the street corner candle vigles, showing up to the odd protest with peace signs, maybe culminating with crossing the “line” at the SOA protest and maybe getting arrested.
when i look at the history of christian resistance in this country to oppression, i feel much more inspired when reading about the meetings and actions of the abolitionists. they had a pacifist wing, but more importantly to me, a small but significant militant wing that were not above regularly breaking the law, armed self defense, and even in the case of kansas, fighting a mini civil war to keep the state from falling in the hands of slavery. my home town was founded by such people and on one occasion when slave catchers abducted a resident (they called it returning lost property) the entire town grabbed their rifles and forcibly freed the man in the next town over and had him on the next boat to canada that night. (to play the pointless what if game) i truly believe that had lincon not been assassinated and reconstruction (in my mind a second american revolution) not been defanged this country would be a much different place.
to me i look at much of the activism coming out of christian progressives today, and i see very little risk taking, a lot of privilege, and a little hipocracy (as stan has pointed out in his books, supporting good revolutionaries, providing support work for third world revolutions but shunning real revolutionary action here in the states ( not to give the impression that i think america is a bomb away from a revolution, or that the only revolutionary action that is valid is violent). if christianity as practiced today in white america could encompass a minority, even a small minority composed of principled pacifists and out and out fighters, revolutionaries and reformers (from douglas, to garrison, to brown) against capitalism, empire, white supremacy and patriarchy, i would jump into it with both feet. until then i will continue to sit quietly in my meeting grumbling quietly at rallies and keep my not so pacifist comments to myself and my more secular friends.
1 April 2008, 10:59 amjack:
oh just an asside, a story to pass on that informs my own views on white Christians as revolutionaries, one of my friends was at a candle vigil held by the local peace church during the start of the current wars of empire, and one of the women there with white hair, recounted how she had been coming to vigils such as this since the korean war, and how every one she attended to gave her hope.
her personal hopefulness aside, from my point of view, 50 years of ineffective candle light vigils is not what jesus had in mind. this goes more to my feelings that for 60 years the white american left has been stuck in some unending pacifist coma, and asside from a few stirings here and there has been atrophying away in a comfortable hospital bed of meetings, ineffective, ordered and marshaled mass actions, and private hand wringing. even when less than one percent is willing to apply the “lesson of rocks” not to people but to bank windows, the 99.5 percent cries foul and runs away screaming. sorry if this offends i just have to say this to someone.
1 April 2008, 11:14 amStan:
Protesting and getting arrested are important forms of resistance, no?
In SoCal, there is now something called a Congress of Vigils.
I am looking at the clock to head to work, and am torn because I have a lot to say here.
(1) The forms of resistance you contrast and imply are not merely an expression of one faith community; they are part of the general social context. In the 60s, history presented us with a culture of resistance via a series of open social struggles. That is not happening now; and the “lesson of the rocks” (my own formulation, based on Haiti and Palestine) can be expressed prematurely, even counter-productively. Direct disruption of power can not be an end in itself, but the means to an end… my critique of Derrick Jensen, et al, and the idea of “blowing up dams.” If the result will be a crackdown, that may be okay (Ghandi, King, etc). But if the result is to drive allies away and reduce popular support, then disruption can be an extremely bad idea… even bringing in greater degrees of repression that are welcomed by the masses. That is a setback, even a defeat.
(2) There is a strong hint of masculinity about this… those sissy activists doing vigils instead of (what?) going head to head with the cops, committing sabotage? What? Anyone attending a weekly vigil is showing more concern than 99% of the people… they are part of an “advanced” sector, in the mass-line idiom. This is not 1859; and it is not the right time for a John Brown.
(3) On my own books, writings, etc, these ideas are in a constant state of revision. Some of them were written under the influence of organizational affiliations that I have let go. In this evolution, where people like De and Audrey and James kept company and led along some new paths, we have formed a pretty strong critique of direct confrontation as “the highest form of struggle,” and of this kind of schematic thinking in general.
(4) There is an important distinction to be made between potentiality and actuality. Looking only at what religious activists do now doesn’t tell the whole story any more than looking at an acorn tells us what an oak tree will look like later on. But we know something about it, and we also know that that potentiality will be actualized in a specific form based on the conditions of soil, water, and light… not only on the potential residing in the DNA of the acorn.
(5) At the beginning of the post, I alluded to the one issue about white Suburbia that I’ve been carping on for a minute now: Suburbia is where the greatest potentiality for danger resides in the coming period. There is an acorn of “backwardness” (again, the mass-line lingo), that is, a latent reactionary tendency, in that demographic, alongside an acorn of transformation. In an ideal world, this sector will join the rev and transform itself into a new utopia… but in the real world, what is urgent is that this sector not be mobilized as the popular basis of a deeply reactionary epoch in response to the coming crises. I’d rather have them doing vigils than bashing immigrants.
The secular left does not have the normative tools to deliver that message. The last basis of a moral imperative to side with the underdog — in this society — that even has a chnce of being accepted as authoritative, is religion. Even the secular left, as we have decried here again and again on the issue of sexuality and porn, has copped to acquisitive individualism in the form of consumer culture. (Theologian Ivan Illich noted that consumer culture makes us two kinds of prisoners: prisoners of addiction and prisoners of envy.)
(6) The lament we hear over and over — and not just in response to religioius communities — is that there is a lack of creativity among movements. But there are few suggestions about why that is, and what are the more creative alternatives. These alternatives are no use to us, however, if they are disembodied from actual conditions, including potentiality. But if I may risk a metaphor, the old orthodoxies and the culture that expressed them is like an exhausted soil. Our capacity is not to make acorns; but we do have the capacity to rehabilitate that cultural soil.
2 April 2008, 6:02 amJosiah:
“The secular left does not have the normative tools to deliver that message. The last basis of a moral imperative to side with the underdog — in this society — that even has a chnce of being accepted as authoritative, is religion.”
This is a strong argument. I have a certain resistance to it, and yet I have a hard time thinking of a good reason not to embrace the idiom and community base of religion and, in the U.S., Christianity. I think the objections to this approach stem from a) the equation many people make between religion as such and the ugly, pathogenic mutations of religion they have been exposed to, and b) the belief that doctrinal purity comes before practicality when it comes to organizing. On the latter point, I think the traditional (industrialist?) left is thinking in structural metaphors, and they believe that things that don’t begin with the right foundation will crumble. Stan and Deanander have made this point before, i.e., that we need to be willing to be as adaptive as effective participants in a natural ecosystem.
But it’s one thing to theorize and something else to actually do this stuff. That probably requires instinctive and learned social skills (which are feminized and thus devalued under patriarchy) more than immaculate theory.
2 April 2008, 9:11 amJames M:
I’d always heard that metaphor of “being swept along with the tide,” but until recently it was nothing more than a mental picture and a handy turn-of-phrase. Then I went to Central America and did some swimming in the Pacific, and got a sense of the real kinesthetic reality behind that metaphor. Trying with everything I had to hold my ground against a giant wave, but nevertheless being rendered helpless and picked up and violently thrown a dozen feet or so … again and again … well, I feel like it imprinted a certain deeper humility in me about our plight as activists.
I can’t deny the evidence that violence under the right conditions can advance a cause; Stan sent around a paper a while back that compared Vietnam-era congressional actions during times of peaceful protest and times where rioting, etc. were prevalent. The paper showed that congressional actions were more substantive in moving to end the war after violent protests … which would tend to advocate for moving out of the realm of ordinary peaceful protest and “civil dis” and into more rock-throwing kinds of activities. But one thing nagged at me, the more I thought about it: This isn’t the Vietnam Era. It seemed then (I’m saying this as someone born after these events) that the tide was more in our favor, that the movement of “our kind” was the unstoppable force. I don’t think this is the case now.
Back then, you were throwing rocks with your neighbors, classmates, etc. Now if you’re doing it, you’re part of a relatively tiny, isolated cadre of “advanced revolutionaries.” It may be admirable in some senses, but is it really effective? I don’t think there’s some one-size-fits-all answer for every historical period and every set of political conditions. I think it’s highly situational.
I agree with D. Jensen in the sense that it is utterly heartbreaking to see the land, forests, rivers, and so forth around you being destroyed. And it is only natural to want to defend them however you can, and once you’ve seen your legal appeals and your tree-sits fail, what are you to do? The same thinking can apply to this horrible war. But then again, what do these kinds of lone-wolf, male-adventurist blowing-up-dams-type actions achieve in the long run? Do they serve to expand the base of the environmental / anti-war movement? Or do they marginalize it further? Do they amount to much more than a single person trying to stand up against a giant ocean wave?
And I don’t deny an individual’s ability to create a tipping point … some people are more successful at that than others — Cindy Sheehan comes to mind. But she was / is a charismatic figure around whom people could unite; she created a tide of unity around her. Most of us, however, should disabuse ourselves of such fantasies.
The notion of humility is appealing to me much more these days: The kind of humility that has us reaching out, and brings us into contact with people we never would’ve thought of engaging with before … such people as are contained within houses of worship, PTA meetings, neighborhood associations, and gardening clubs. The trend toward consumerist atomization has reached an advanced phase, and I think it’s brought us to a sense of utter helplessness, and hand-wringing, and desperation … but I think we can move forward with greater confidence of success if we become the tide instead of trying to stand against it.
Concurrently, the trend toward Fox News-style political polarization (and emphasis on trivialities) has seemed to ramp up as well … but I am continually amazed at what I’m able to get my Republican relatives to admit to when I don’t reflexively start sniping at the mention of GWB or Rush, or whomever … and when I don’t mention Hillary or Obama or whomever. They’ll say things like, “The U.S. is a bully,” or “We don’t belong in Iraq.” Wow … people’s common sense and appreciation of the self-evident is greater than one tends to think, when the red-vs.-blue, us-vs.-them instinct isn’t so wound up. I wish I knew how more how to sidestep this ego-identification with political personalities, and just get people talking like I’ve been able to do with my relatives. I know it starts with humility on my part, though … which seems to give them permission to be humble, too. I’m not saying we can magically get everyone to hold hands and sing “Kum Ba Yah” together, as the joke goes … but we can do better than we’re doing.
Anyway, these are the thoughts running through my head since returning from Central America. Much gratitude to the custodians of this site for providing a space to articulate them, and to all the posters for helping inspire them.
2 April 2008, 12:43 pmDeAnander:
I’m still torn on the issue of direct action (confrontation, structure hits, “vandalism” like TIA signage alteration, trespass, tree sits, occupying offices, a wide spectrum from most to least “scary”) vs mycelial subversion.
Direct action can be very effective if the time is right and it catches the public’s attention at the right angle — the Tiananmen Square moment for example, Gandhi’s brilliant public acts of civil disobedience. I think that disobedience, i.e. refusing to obey orders that are corrupt and wicked, is more effective in the long term than “transgression,” i.e. an aggressive pre-emptive violation of the law. So hmmm — refusing to go to war, simply refusing, seems more effective than e.g. burning a draft board office.
This is a very vexed issue for all activists — there are so many confounding factors. The macho adventurism to which Stan refers muddies the waters endlessly — accusations of “cowardice” so often translate into gender anxiety, actions touted as maximally effective may be far more effective as a masculinist rite of passage than they are as organising or transformative tools.
My sense today is that when we disobey by being kinder than we are allowed to be — when we disobey to be compassionate with those we are not allowed to care about, when we refuse to commit cruelties that we are commanded to commit, when we refuse to shut up about dirty secrets that are supposed to stay hidden, persistently advocate for the un-persons in our midst, then our disobedience is very effective; it not only expresses defiance of oppressive power, it also strengthens the humanity and solidarity of others and ourselves. It builds community/robustness as well as rejecting oppressive powers.
If we disobey in ways that involve cruelty — kidnapping and terrorising the family of a notorious CEO, say, committing acts of random terror in urban areas — our rage and defiance of authority are expressed, but in a way that undermines community and blunts the sense of compassion and solidarity in ourselves and others.
Somewhere on the borderlands are the acts of meme warfare — satire, grafitti, mockery, nonviolent action, traffic disruption, political theatre — which may be somewhat cruelly sarcastic to their targets — or which may destroy property, ‘cost money’ for the targeted institution, and inflict tedious make-work on the low-rent labour they use to clean up after the incident — but involve no physical harm. These kinds of actions fall in a disputed realm: they can work very well indeed, or they can backfire.
So hmmm. “Helping people” (the Hamas model) seems to work all the time — it’s a win-win-win strategy. People get actual tangible help that they need, the organisation builds support among the people, and defiance of the oppressor is expressed. Moreover, the society that experiences this solidarity and gift-economy moment is stronger and better able to continue defying the oppressor.
“Attacking people” seems to be a loser in the long run. It can result in temporary gains, as in hostage negotiations where authorities are forced to back down, or painful standoffs which last for decades until finally the colonial power comes to the table and makes a settlement; but in the process (just mho) it fosters macho adventurism, callousness and cruelty, and movements which commit to open or covert warfare seem to become hypermasculinised and develop the same contempt (over time) for basics like food, childcare, shelter, kindness, community, that fuels the oppressor’s ideology. They are then ill-equipped ideologically to deal with the needs of the people if they ever do “win” and take over state power.
“Attacking property” is in the fuzzy zone. It can work brilliantly when the David/Goliath nature of the conflict is very clear, and when it’s obvious that no cruelty to people or other animals is involved (”clean hands” operations). It can also backfire, particularly in a culture like our own where property is so weirdly absorbed into the sense of self. F’rexample I found that even people on a car-free activist mailing list were outraged and horrified when some black bloc anarchoboys torched a few SUVs at dealerships in the western US. Despite the belief of the list members that SUVs are evil and represent all that is worst about consumer culture and motorhead madness, they were deeply outraged that the boyz had destroyed private property — “valuable” brand new cars — that they had trespassed, etc. The sanctity of property is so entrenched in the culture that attacks on property are almost as unacceptable as attacks on persons.
Similar attitudes render grafitti and “defacement” of corporate propaganda or badguy HQs a tricky proposition. One brilliant group (UK I think) got around this by doing their political grafitti in removable painter’s tape (comes in bright colours!). But it requires much more time to apply than spray paint. Freeway overpass signage against the Iraq occupation has been a pretty good tool for public subversion — the signs are removable and the messages are often clever. People seem more forgiving of public meme warfare that makes them laugh.
Anyway, I don’t have answers. There is the depressing result from the last 4 decades of political struggle: that those struggles in which the rebels used violent tactics were more likely to result in legislative relief or other responses from the State, and those which stayed nonviolent were effectively ignored. However, I have to ask myself to what extent legislative acknowledgement is relevant; we have had many ‘civil rights” legislative concessions since Jim Crow days, and yet a larger percentage of Black people in America are now incarcerated than ever before, Black and working-class communities are abused with impunity, etc. If — and I say this knowing well that “coulda-shoulda” is a chump’s pastime — all that effort had gone into strengthening communities from within — into food security, land acquisition, debt reduction — might the Black communities of the US be less vulnerable to the types of harassment and occupation practised by the state — as it seems the Amish are, by living under the radar and practising self-sufficiency at the community level?
It’s a haunting question. It makes me wonder whether the State and the ruling class have not tricked us, all these generations, into playing the game of “struggle for power” on their turf, with a set of rules that guarantees we cannot achieve the outcomes we hope to achieve. Just as classical Marxism founds its belief system on an industrial/extractive praxis that can’t be sustained w/o the immiseration and accumulation that Marxism wanted to remedy… perhaps the struggle for power, practised w/in the dominator culture, can only endlessly replicate abusive power. Perhaps the most subversive assault on private property is to give some away rather than to destroy some to “punish” the wealthy for their selfishness. I really don’t know. I still want to destroy dams and let the salmon people live. I still cheer when someone torches an SUV. But I’m not sure any more whether this is a real advance or just a brief cathartic moment, a tantrum in which we get to relieve our futile, thwarted rage and despair.
2 April 2008, 12:47 pmRequired:
Agree with with De’s points but would like to raise one issue of contention re: “inflict tedious make-work on the low-rent labor they use to clean up after the incident.” I think this is inaccurate although it may be how it is percieved by the broader public. If your job is to do tedious make-work for shitty pay, it’s the same whether what you are cleaning up or repairing was dirtied or damaged by dissidents or nature. You’re just cleaning shit, what it happens to be is kind of irrelevant. So the graffiti doesn’t create extra work for the individual. The person was going to work that day regardless, they would have just been doing something else. It’s not like the bosses would have said, “have a paid day off, there’s no graffiti today.”
3 April 2008, 8:55 amr graves:
excellent, thoughtful post, De, thanks.
3 April 2008, 9:16 amDeAnander:
@required, good point. tedious make-work is tedious make-work.
unless of course the person cleaning up disagrees with the politics of those who created the “mess” [and hafta say it does make me slightly crazy to hear car-driving, factory-food-eating, hyperconsuming yuppies in suits sneering down their noses at tree-sitters or anarkiddies who have taken a crap in the woods or broken a window, claiming they are “hooligans and vandals making a mess” — wth do they think is the end result of all the industrial processes that support their cushy lifestyles? mess, that’s what — mountains and mountains of toxic, disastrous, possibly civilisation-crashing Mess… but I digress as always]…
for example I remember hearing a campus groundsman complaining about protesting students bitterly, furiously, because he had to clean up litter after their protest. maybe in his case, as a gardener/groundsman, part of his anger was that he was directed to do work that was “beneath him”, i.e. cleaning up people-mess (as opposed to cleaning up disaster mess as in the aftermath of fire, storm, earthquake) is a women’s/nieblanke’s job, and he was a white man and therefore should not have been assigned to it. but it was vented as rage at the “goddamn hooligans, they oughta kick all of them out of school, who do they think they are, what a bunch of pig slobs, well they certainly are making sure no one in his right mind would ever support their BS,” etc.
anyway, he was the guy in my anecdotal memory as I was thinking about angry cleanup crews, but your point is well taken. lower on the totem pole than this irate individual are the real grunt/stoop labourers for whom 8 hours of crappy boring unpleasant work is 8 hours, doesn’t really matter what specific thing is happening unless it’s even stinkier or more dangerous than last week.
3 April 2008, 2:07 pmCharles:
Concurrently, the trend toward Fox News-style political polarization (and emphasis on trivialities) has seemed to ramp up as well … but I am continually amazed at what I’m able to get my Republican relatives to admit to when I don’t reflexively start sniping at the mention of GWB or Rush, or whomever … and when I don’t mention Hillary or Obama or whomever. They’ll say things like, “The U.S. is a bully,” or “We don’t belong in Iraq.” Wow … people’s common sense and appreciation of the self-evident is greater than one tends to think, when the red-vs.-blue, us-vs.-them instinct isn’t so wound up. I wish I knew how more how to sidestep this ego-identification with political personalities, and just get people talking like I’ve been able to do with my relatives. I know it starts with humility on my part, though … which seems to give them permission to be humble, too. I’m not saying we can magically get everyone to hold hands and sing “Kum Ba Yah” together, as the joke goes … but we can do better than we’re doing.
^^^^^
3 April 2008, 3:43 pmCB: When I read this paragraph, it made me think of the sort of ethos of Obama’s approach. By reaching out to white people, by his forgiving posture on racism, Obama is getting a very positive response on racial unity. I say that as one who tends toward militant anti-racist rhetoric , myself.
Charles:
In reading DeAnander’s post, thought of how the Civil Rights/Black Power movement of the 1960’s had both non-violent direct action and violent action of urban rebellions.
I guess whenever I think of tactics in the US, I think that America is so armed to the teeth, that trying to take over with armed struggle would just turnout as a holocaust, not to mention that the rightwing would probably win and it would end up fascism. I don’t know that DeAnander included taking the “violent” side that far. But I don’t see anarchist symbolically violent acts changing people’s minds through “wakeup” or whatever. The urban rebellion violence was spontaneous rage, not premeditated , brainy action.
3 April 2008, 4:00 pmpeggy:
I agree with De and the general direction of this thread. If you reject everything “tainted” you end up with nothing at all. Skepticism and even cynicism have their places in this world, but if you really want to get something done, you will be willing to spend time with and befriend people whose ways of life are generally scorned, as Jesus did.
Human beings are capable of massive revolutions. Every revolution brings new suffering and new negatives to deal with. I think about think about the Neolithic Revolution. Everybody knows the damage wrought by the decision to cultivate the soil on a community-wide, civilization-wide, and ultimately world-wide scale. But back then, certain people had a choice, either to continue with infanticide and warfare in, the struggle to have enough food for everyone, or to grow food to feed more people.
In the end, warfare came up bigger, and so did massive starvation. But just for then, just for there, just for a while, certain fundamental problems were solved.
Now, humanity has much bigger problems to solve. We have to think, we have to work hard, we have to give up a lot, and, yeah, we have to have faith that we can do this, and that it is worth it
3 April 2008, 7:48 pmStan:
When I taught tactics (of a very specific kind), one of the things “students” were always pressing for was a formula. And one of their most pointless and ceaseless games was what-if-ing… posing one incomplete hypothetical situation after another. Any time I was asked what one should do, I said, “METT-T.”
That’s an acronym for “mission, enemy situation, troops available, terrain and weather, and time.” The acronym is a brief situation-analysis.
It maddened some when I just repeated that every time they asked the question(s). They wanted the formula, dammit, The Solution.
We are — as human beings — utterly incapable of imagining anything that matches the dynamic complexity of even the simplest actual situation. That’s why we rely on multiple intelligences, developed through experience, that converge in something we call — in semantic shorthand — “intuition.” The gradient between terms of experience and efficacy of intuition depend on (1) the familiarity of the situation, (2) where the interpretive faculties are positioned along a continuum between conditioned reflex and creativity, and (3) care.
Do we know what is going on… fully?
Are we flexible enough in understanding and ability?
How much do we really give a shit… about what is happening, and about what our actions might create?
3 April 2008, 7:58 pmpeggy:
One more thing. Violence is quick, easy, and ego-gratifying. As far as I can tell, it almost never solves any problems, and it almost always makes things worse.
There is such a thing as non-violent direct action. It takes a fair amount of courage to do. You could die from violent reprisal. On a massive level it can make an impression, and thereby have an effect. Some people think it is silly and useless. But I think it is less silly and useless than just lashing out from anger.
3 April 2008, 8:09 pmskol:
“[…]it can make an impression, and thereby have an effect.”
Openings in protest, role-model needed. Requirements: being bold, taking flak, working things out; cool head and basic civility. Potential for upward mobility (or lateral, at any rate; damn it, it’s a pun). Apply anywhere.
Removed “massive” because it has to start somewhere.
3 April 2008, 10:57 pmxenia:
just as a side note with its fair dose of cynicism:
i love how many liberals in the us and western europe can reconcile the ideology of non-violence and the praxis of humanitarian military action at the same time (of course, the former being practiced by the oppressed and the latter by the oppressor). within that framework, there are strange preferences: tibetans can be forgiven if they become violent, but armed iraqis are just savages.
more seriously, i’m wondering if non-violent resistance is only practicable when you have a very large mass of population which can’t be exterminated (india, blacks in the us being the case in point). somehow i doubt that the native americans or the aborigines in australia could have reached much through non-violent resistance.
4 April 2008, 1:44 amxenia:
…of course, my own liberal cowardice being such that i avoid most demonstrations which could turn violent, justifying it through being a person with a foreign name, memories of war and someone who couldn’t afford to pay even a 2000 bucks bail.
4 April 2008, 1:50 amStan:
Those are more than excuses, xenia. They sound like pretty rational considerations to me… especially nowadays with the xenophobia being ratcheted up (no pun intended).
Your remarks on NVR are also well taken. Wouldn’t have worked in the Warsaw Ghetto, eg. And while lynching was the response to any whiff of Black autonomy in the 1920s US South, the Cold War — with its emerging global bipolar competition for influence and legitimacy in the underdeveloped world — framed the Civil Rights Movement era of the Black Freedom Struggle.
My issue with much of the left critique of NVR is that it is, somehow, “sissified.” They want to hear that you are ready and eager to kill some Enemies; and they do not want to hear that the Enemies are human, too.
That last part was what set the Freedom Riders and the Ghandi movement apart… an open invitation to the other side to return to a state of community. Somewhere in the scheme of things — if we succeed to any degree — there must be a mechanism for forgiveness and reconciliation… a reset button for community. The South African T&R Commission was brilliant in this regard. The option is to set the rules of any decisive struggle in advance, as “no quarter given or expected.”
When the Sadrists recently defended themselves from the Badrists, it was clear that individuals with the Badrists who wanted to defect to the Sadrists could do so and be accepted with open arms. There were, in light of this unspoken rule, massive defections, and they contributed very signficantly to the Sadrist victory.
There is an important lesson there, not only about how we linguisitically frame our struggles, but about separating the individual from the system by making redemption a key feature of what we do.
4 April 2008, 5:52 amRequired:
In D. Jensen’s EndGame vol.2 there are several chapters which are essentially conversation between him and unidentified hackers and another with an ex-special ops soldier regarding how to crash US society. I’ve always thought that both the anonymous conversations read too much like how I imagine his fantasy of those conversations would play out. Whether they were fabricated/embellished or not, they seem uncomfortably unrealistic. Although I’m a fan (I’ve bought 4+ of his titles), I always feel shitty and helpless after reading his books.
4 April 2008, 6:22 amxenia:
“When the Sadrists recently defended themselves from the Badrists, it was clear that individuals with the Badrists who wanted to defect to the Sadrists could do so and be accepted with open arms. There were, in light of this unspoken rule, massive defections, and they contributed very signficantly to the Sadrist victory.”
Agreed — it’s a very practical issue…a lot of people fighting on any side, in any war, are basically confused schmucks — they are there because of circumstances, not convictions and some room should be there for them. On the other hand, it’s much harder to integrate occupying forces who may be culturally alien and too deeply convinced of their own superiority: not that many Nazis joined the French or the Yugoslav resistance against them. But if we did not have the power of mass media in the 20th-21st century, at least some Germans and Americans probably would have wavered after several years of war, and would have switched sides, as people always have done. As early as the beginnings of the Spanish colonization of the Americas, you can find some Spanish who joined the indigenous people and fought on their side…
But this may be ultimately what makes the most notable difference between the radical left and the extreme right: the extreme right fights for only one kind of people and always asserts a hierarchical domination. The left, at least in its ideals, strives to be universalist. Its successes and its failures are very different than those of the right, even when they seem to be similar.
For that reason, I shudder whenever those who are *supposedly* in the golden middle of the spectrum cluster the left and the right together as extremist. (Such people, if educated, often like to quote Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism, but they forget that it took her a very long time to grasp and criticize the nature of segregation in the US-American South, because it did not fit within her neat democracy vs totalitarianism scheme of things.)
4 April 2008, 10:03 amxenia:
yes — tough macho “leftists”…i remember one of them, a high school teacher of mine. we had to stand up and salute him on official holidays, and he failed me once because i wore big earrings and makeup and was therefore not a proper socialist girl who could hold a gun and shoot an enemy. of course, he was slightly different than a doctrinaire us-leftist, because he followed the letter of the official and dominant law, but the essence of male righteousness was similar.
4 April 2008, 10:13 amCharles:
And while lynching was the response to any whiff of Black
^^^
Gotta mention I saw an ed television documentary on Ida B. Wells last night. Wells was the great anti-lynching crusader. In Memphis there was horrendous racist killing of three Black store owners ( If you get the details of the story , you will feel the horror). In that concrete situation, Wells editorialized and initiated a mass exodus of Black people from Memphis, 6,000 people, a sort of strike. It had a big economic impact. That was a tactic used in that situation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells
“During her participation in women’s suffrage parades, her refusal to stand in the back because she was black resulted in the beginning of her media publicity. In 1889, she became co-owner and editor of Free Speech, an anti-segregationist newspaper based in Memphis on Beale Street. In 1892, however, she was forced to leave the city because her editorials in the paper were seen as too agitating. In one of her articles, written after three of her friends who owned a grocery store were attacked and then lynched because they were taking business away from white competitors, she encouraged blacks to leave Memphis, saying, “there is …. only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” Many African-Americans did leave, and others organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. As a result of this and other investigative reporting, Wells’ newspaper office was ransacked, and Wells herself had to leave for Chicago.”
Of course, many years later MLKing was assassinated in Memphis, on April 4, 1968, 40 years ago today.
4 April 2008, 4:49 pmCharles:
The unique aspect of Obama’s candidacy is that, like MLKing, he is risking his life , ’cause the ghost of jim crow ain’t entirely dead yet. Or maybe it is ? Obama is testing the American soul. The media isn’t saying that, but most Black people feel it. Obama like King is using a non-violent tactic.
King said judge by the content of character, not color of skin. Today, anti-affirmative action people claim we should be “colorblind” , that we don’t need affirmative action. Obama says, ok , judge me colorblindly, by the content of my character, not the color of my skin. I am not raising race.
His character includes the courage to risk his life.
4 April 2008, 4:56 pmStan:
Comparing Obama to King is ludicrous.
“We’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.”
-Barack Obama
“There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qa’eda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
-Barack Obama
* * *
“And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
“Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?” “Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people,” they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live…
“…This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers…
“…Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours…
“…When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…
“…A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
* * *
Now, to expand on that.
Clearly, Barack Obama is a different kind of leader in a different time than MLK, Charles’ sophsitic comparisons notwithstanding.
These kinds of arguments are the stuff of my own past tenure at CPUSA, where once a decision was made (usually to “support Democrats” as a way to “fight the right” with a “center-left coalition”), the troops had to press forward by any means necessary to support that position… and recruit into the Party by constantly insisting that everything worthy of being thought about had been explained by Marx & Engels. It’s pretty easy to do, because M&E were prolific writers who pontificated on everything under the sun (in the 19C), so quote-mongering them incessantly makes that particular kind of sophistry fairly easy… and habitual. In this case, the apparency/illogic (sophistry) is that whatever was said generally by M&E in 18-whatever is suggested as a proof that their proclamations apply to a situation we are encountering here/today. It is a suggestive fallacy, designed to recruit to the Party (it is also incredibly ineffective… the CPUSA has miniscule numbers that it fights to keep, and that it inflates at every opportunity), whereupon recruits are trained to “support Democrats” as a way to “fight the right” with a “center-left coalition.” (The CP now hangs around the antiwar movement– trying to recruit — without putting any effort into an out-now position, because they think it will jeapordize Demcorats in the 2008 elections. The CPUSA “position” on Iraq? The safe one, for Dems: “End the War.”)
In the case of Obama and King, King was reluctantly thrust into his leadership during the Montgomery bus boycott, and was the articulation of a massive social struggle that was already bursting at the seams. Obama has individually fought his way to the top — driven by personal ambition; and the movement is not about an issue, but about Obama himself. It is a personality-cult movement.
That is not to say that this is the whole story. Because within Black America there is a popular dynamic in motion as well, that I cannot dismiss as cavalierly as I do the King/Obama comparison. Charles alludes to that, but his CP-ish tendency to polemicize for a result minimizes the most important aspect of the Obama candidacy imho.
African America won its last great struggles on two counts: voting, and equal access to consumer spaces. There is no struggle now for (1) the Black Nation, (2) socialism, (3) anti-imperialism… The social conflict that is being expressed as more and more overwhelmingly Black support for Obama is the experience of “inequality” in US society by Black folk. I say that in that way, even as I am on record saying “inequality” is a dead-end theory. We can know that this “inequality” is structural, even that it is colonial, but this theoretical standpoint is not shared broadly by anyone. The entire edifice of white bourgeois patriarchal social relations, and the ideological facade of that edifice, is by and large accepted even by those who are structurally oppressed within it. The invisibility of familiarity.
Black support for Obama is an expression of resistance against Black subordination; and it is not merely symbolic. We all know that there are more unwritten laws in society than written ones. That’s why Clinton’s campaign suggestions about Obama’s inexperience are connecting with certain sectors. She is pushing the button that says “Blacks are incapable of governance.” White people know that this trope is there and operative to this day. Black people do, too.
So Obama cannot be judged simply as an individual. The Obama Campaign — opportunistic as it may be — has effectively positioned itself to be an expression of resistance against this “black-incapacity” meme. The phenom makes a crappy myth, because the actors cannot be separated into good guys and bad guys; but it is a fait acompli. I think it is dishonest to ignore the question it calls (like, if Obama wins the nomination, will we hold ideological noses, and vote alongside Black America… to whom this is a very important moment, for real reasons). I’m mulling that one over; but regardless of what I decide for myself on that one, it is equally dishonest to engage in the CP/Democrat practice of demonizing opponents and hagiographing those we support… that is the slipperiest slope of all.
I cannot be dismissive of African America as a whole as an aspect of the Obama candidacy; nor am I dismissive of the fact that — for some — the Clinton candidacy is the same thing for some women… though I don’t see the same mass movement forming under her candidacy. Her record is too transparently toxic.
Just wanted to elaborate on that a bit, and seek the thoughts of others.
4 April 2008, 6:27 pmStan:
-Cornell West
5 April 2008, 10:26 amkathy miriam:
“Black support for Obama is an expression of resistance against Black subordination; and it is not merely symbolic. ”
Stan, your distinction between MLK and Obama is powerfully thought out and seems to contest the above claim. There were concrete social struggles that pushed MLK into leadership. In that sense, we can talk about that being a time of mass movement.
Can you explain how you see black support for Obama (or women’s support for Clinton- but there are no pretensions to movement-making there) as an expression of resistance rather than of capitulation?
5 April 2008, 1:17 pmCharles:
Comparing Obama to King is ludicrous.
^^^^
5 April 2008, 3:57 pmIf you say so (smile)
Charles:
Key thing here is not so much Black people voting for O, though it is wise to follow the mass of Black people on political issues in the US in general. The “man bites dog” fact here is large numbers of _whites_ voting for O. That is in response to O’s uniting rhetoric, which is the point of comparison with King. O is not as all around progressive as King, but on the central issue of racial unity, he _is_comparable.
The other thing is to take the thinking of masses of Black people seriously, take leadership from it even.
As to political lines, I pretty much make my own lines. I know how to think on my own, and come up with up with big ideas. I don’t have to get a line from anybody else. I’m real smart ( smile).
5 April 2008, 4:07 pmStan:
I can try.
In order for it to be capitulation, the masses of people would have to understand their situation structurally, not simply experientially. Americans do not, neither white nor Black, have anything approaching a macroanalysis of their own experience. When the system is understood as “natural,” and racism is understood as a mere aberration, instead of centrally structural, then one cannot capitulate to a system that remains unrecognized.
Obama is capitulating. But the candidate is not the people, and the dominant impression among the people is racial marginalization, yet again! They are identifying with Obama as a Black man, and exercising resistance by supporting the Black man against white racism… all the rest aside.
Black folk sense correctly that Clinton has played race against Obama, because that underhanded racism is part of daily experience. When anyone is under attack for “being Black,” then the reaction of Black solidarity (self-defense) kicks in… as it did during the OJ trial, once the Furman tapes were released (another race-gender nightmare).
Every Black family in the country has had experience in one way or another with racist cops. White folk wanted to set that aside on the OJ case to “look at the evidence,” and the white rationalization became “Black paranoia.”
That’s why I am loathe to ignore the swelling Black support for Obama… it could be construed as a form of victim-blaming. That doesn’t mean I will give Obama a pass. It does mean we oughtn’t simplify this candidacy to some left-program litmus test.
But I am rambling again…
5 April 2008, 4:17 pmCharles:
I’ve heard people complain about Cornel West as opportunist and a sort of celebrity. I don’t make that criticism myself, and I pay attention to West, but I think independently from him, just like Stan thinks independently of the CP. Use of West as a sort of authority here mildly contradicts Stan’s complaint that the CP is a bunch of robots just following and authoritarian leader, a stereotype with some historical validity, but with some redbaiting demogogy in it too, a real righwing trope slipped over to the left.
Redbaiting is still a profoundly anti-people practice, objectively rightwing.
Self-serving assaults on other’s ability to think is a form of _ad hominem_
If Stan weren’t such a good comrade, I’d argue this thread even more radically.
But upon Obama’s lead, the goal here must be unity.
5 April 2008, 4:27 pmCharles:
Obama is capitulating. But the candidate is not the people, and the dominant impression among the people is racial marginalization, yet again! They are identifying with Obama as a Black man, and exercising resistance by supporting the Black man against white racism… all the rest aside.
^^^^
CB: Most Black people I know do not think Obama is capitulating.
I’m not sure this is a full analysis of how most Black people are thinking about Obama.
Is this what Black people are telling Stan ?
^^^^
Black folk sense correctly that Clinton has played race against Obama, because that underhanded racism is part of daily experience. When anyone is under attack for “being Black,” then the reaction of Black solidarity (self-defense) kicks in… as it did during the OJ trial, once the Furman tapes were released (another race-gender nightmare).
^^^
CB: I’d say Black people are voting for Obama because of the large white vote Obama is getting. It is affirmative, not defensive voting. Black people want to vote for a viable candidate, not a symboic vote just because he is Black.
I haven’t talked to any Black people who are voting for O because of racists attacks on him. They are upbeat and liked him before the racist attacks went down. The first burst of Black enthusiasm I heard was after he won Iowa, not after the racist assaults. I live in Detroit, and the population here is 90% Black.
Overall , I’m gonna take the leadership of the masses of Black people on this one . The CP is following the lead of Black people on this. In that, they are more correct than Stan, even if Stan had an experience with the CP as deadheads. The deadheads have got one up on you on this one.
Lots of Black people think O is risking his life, so for me, you can’t get away from the comparison to King in terms of courage.
All Power to the People !
5 April 2008, 4:38 pmCharles:
Black Womanist, Alice Walker compares Obama to King
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/01/barackobama.uselections2008
http://youtube.com/watch?v=W3-9gq_htUo
http://buzzfeed.com/link/Lit_Endorsements/alice_walker_calls_barack_obama_literary
5 April 2008, 5:48 pmStan:
Most Clinton voters don’t see her as capitulating. You can’t put an equal sign between those beliefs and the realities. When politicians capitulate, they are also obliged in this system to bewilder as many people as possible about what they are doing. And they largely succeed at it. At one point, 80% of the country was supporting an attack on Iraq.
Barack Obama’s lead began to stretch in front of Clinton in African America the minute Clinton tried to give LBJ credit for the Civil Rights Act, specificially elevating his importance over that of the Black movement that created the conditions for it. It was race-baiting; and the outcry was ferocious. Then, each time the Clintons suffered a setback, this process snowballed with more subliminal appeals to white fears, followed by greater alienation between Black voters and Clinton. Now Clinton is specifically trying to mobilize white working class voters on the basis of race, even as she remains disgustingly disingenuous about it.
As to what Black or white people say, that was not my point, and I said so pretty clearly. All Americans, with very few exceptions, lack the basic interpretive tools to see racism as structural instead of some kind of psychological disorder.
If we do not understand the system we live in, we also fail to fully appreciate our own motivations, in particular why and how we act collectively.
White folk are voting for Obama, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But they are voting for some bullshit called “change” that has not been explained to any of us. But a very significant chunk of the white vote that is going Clinton’s way is going that way because Clinton was successful at pushing their negrophobia buttons.
Those white folk won’t tell you that either, and many of them are not clearly aware of their motivation.
I love Alice Walker. That doesn’t mean she’s always right.
All references to the CP are based on my experience, not that of others. The CP is following the lead of the Democratic Party on this, just as they have for the last 70 years. In WWII, they even supported Roosevelt’s decision to put Japanese-Americans into concentration camps. I set them aside because of the open hostility within the party to feminism. Shall I quote members of the National Committee that I spoke with at various times on this issue?
5 April 2008, 9:08 pmJosiah:
I can see where both Charles and Stan are coming from here.
The issue of his support among the black masses is part of the reason why I can’t dismiss his candidacy (even while recognizing why Brezezinki, Anthony Lake, and Wall Street elites support him). A lot of young black folks I know, especially through the hip hop scene in Philly and on the West Coast, see him as a sort of crowbar, who will keep the door of the U.S. power structure open just a crack; and yet
Stan is right to question the very foundations of that structure, which for many of us is irredeemable and must collapse. I’m torn, but I will vote for him if he gets the nomination, WITHOUT fantasizing that he will not act as a fully socialized member of the U.S. ruling class, including military deployments, international trade, health care and criminal justice and environmental regulations, etc. With a nod toward the struggles of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s, popular activism in the U.S. seems to have historically flourished in an atmosphere of disillusionment with the corruption and lies of Democratic presidents, and withered into inactive cynicism under the corruption and lies of Republican presidents. Yes, both parties have an equally ugly track record (and certainly no Haitian or Vietnamese or Guatemalan or Angolan or Pakistani should have reasons for optimism about either party), but U.S. activists seems to have been historically responsive to the slight “opening of the door”.
…? Rambling myself here :).
6 April 2008, 4:09 ampeggy:
Maybe white folk and black folk are supporting Obama because they perceive him as the best candidate. Period. Not that race has nothing to do with it: of course it does. But race is not the only, or even primary, consideration here. Hillary’s campaign is a mess, and she has slipped up (to put it politely) again and again. The relationship between NAFTA and her chief campaign strategist is just the latest imbroglio. If she had not repeatedly revealed herself to be such a fool (again, to put it politely) she might well have won the nomination, and she still might. If she does, then I for one will really throw up my hands in disgust with the American people.
But Stan, when you say, “All Americans, with very few exceptions, lack the basic interpretive tools to see racism as structural instead of some kind of psychological disorder,” I am not sure that is true. African Americans must surely perceive it as structural and not just an individual psychological disorder, because they experience racism on the part of white people who are otherwise very nice and sane and intelligent. The O.J. case was a perfect example of this kind of thing happening. Other examples could be cited.
6 April 2008, 4:59 amkathy miriam:
I completely agree, Stan, that blacks who support Obama, similarly to women who vote for Clinton are acting out of a psychological interpretation of Obama. However, where I disagree is that this psychological interpretation is the expression of resistance. I disagree that capitulation assumes a structural understanding of racism or social reality as a whole. Take even Obama, he himself has an individualist, neoliberal analysis of social reality- though there are layers of contradiction, denial and/or duplicity in the process of not-knowing what one knows or what Sartre calls “bad faith.”
The capitulation of someone like a candidate is of a different order than the more diffuse capitulation (maybe that’s just the wrong word) of groups masses of Americans who support this person as a symbol (yes a symbol) of what he does not represent beyond that of a black getting into the presidency- very powerful symbol, i guess. I can feel how the Obama symbol works on me psychologically- the little thrill I have, the small psychological pull I have towards his win- in the face of my critical analysis, and deeper passions about social justice etc…
I think that the psychological attachment to Obama is a distortion, channelling, one-dimensionalizing of desires for resistance rather than an expression of that resistance. It is how the “manufacture of consent” happens. We have to say yes, as well as no to power, in order for power to continue and this yes has many formations. It doesn’t make me hopeful anymore than the one million man march made me hopeful, or anymore than masses of (especially young) women attracted to new consumerized forms of sexualized individualist feminism do. Although both contain within them coopted forms of yearning for freedom in some fashion. Individualism, psychologizing, these are the way that “capitulation” happens…
6 April 2008, 7:03 amThe problem might be with the word “resistance”– People are always resisting structures of domination if it means that people are always showing that we are human thus acting on the system that acts on us, even if this “acting” means playing dead, or just warming and warming to the current system but calling that feeling of warmth “change”.. But this is not “resistance” in a hopeful way, that points to concerted, organized resistance–
Ok- i am writing a new, next post on a new topic of organized resistance.
Stan:
The basic American world-view is that there is no structure. There are only individuals guided by the invisible hand of the market, bla bla bla.
One of the best books I know is Race Against Empire, by Penny M. Von Eschen, wherein she demonstrates how the black freedom struggle was pried away from its embeddedness within a larger anti-colonial critique. The keystone of that effort (which resulted in the marginalization of personalities like the Huntons, Robeson, and DuBois, all of whom were almost jailed under the Smith Act) was the redefinition of white supremacy (the system) into racism (the personality disorder). Its was based on anticommunism, but the most successful and lasting legacy of this massive epistemological war was to make the strucural character of “racism” disappear from view, and thereby replace the demand for Black self-determination with one of “equality” … finally, of “equal opportunity.”
You can’t diagnose strep throat if you don’t know what a streptococcus is. You can’t “see” masculinity-defined-as-conquest if you consider this the natural order of things. And you won’t “see” the determinative effects of social structures if you believe that society is merely the sum of its Homo economicus individual decisions.
6 April 2008, 7:06 amkathy miriam:
ANOTHER TOPIC…so I thought I’d better write a separate post:
Since I started talking about concerted resistance, I figure you’ll all start with the myocellular stuff again (SMILE). so some of my thoughts….
I could be wrong, but I feel that Stan, De and maybe some others– you’re caught up in a false polarity between your model for resistance of myocellular activity and some notion of organized politics that has a bombastic program a la the CP..
There have been, historically, different models of mass organizing. My fear is that you’re conflating all of these with the bureaucratic, organized centralized model that I would call the death-bed of these other models. I keep on feeling, from what i grasp of your writing about the myocellular and dunbar number model (and i admit- see below –that i might not be grasping it)– that you have a notion of political change that is based on a certain spontaneity? that different small groups of people will be networking together to change modes of daily life, including food praxis, and that something big will burst out of this– or it will spontaneously spread and bring about the change needed?
I’m intrigued by your, stan, attraction to the Church– (it almost makes me want to join a temple or something, almost)– but I keep on thinking that you and De and others are conflating community-work on the one hand, with social movements- Social movements draw on community-work as a vital resource– but the community work in and of itself doesn’t constitute the social movement. The Church, and other community institutions, networks, were activated into political sites–sites of political action– and nurtured this political action (e.g. in civil rights era, voting registration drives, boycotts, sit-ins) as part of a larger strategy of change. Whatever else people are doing at a myocellular level — some kind of larger collective, concerted effort to strategize has to take place.
Let’s take the example of trafficking: how would a mycocellular work in terms of what is a global issue of freeing women from sexual slavery? Certainly work within communities is essential, but on some level there has to be a concerted level of networking on larger levels. I’m not talking about a bureaucratic centralized model– because I see the bureaucratic model has having been a major means of selling out –through the meager concessions brought about– movements..
And I can’t stand the way social movement studies has been disciplined in the academy, but these days- I feel like I have to go back to study this- in order to make sense of how this term, “movement building” has been completely dessicated and now thrown around –the O-phenomenon- as if it means something. (I’m in an argument with someone about this on the new Prog for Obama site).
Anyway- in hopefully offering your thoughts –can you talk about the myocellular and dunbar in the PLAINEST terms possible? I’m a pretty smart woman, and I persist in not really being able to understand what you’re talking about. I think that you are so facile with the codes of this discourse that you do not realize that you’re speaking in codes.. the talk seems sometimes too technical for me.
6 April 2008, 7:14 ampeggy:
Stan, you are assuming that sociology is scientific and objective statement of fact. This is a Marxist thing, I think, although Marx did not invent it. Whatever. The point is, I disagree with that assumption. Not that I think Eschen’s historical analysis isn’t brilliant. I do think it is. But it is not the same kind of thing as diagnosing streptococcus. With human events, there are multiple valid ways of seeing things. This doesn’t mean that there are not many wrong ways or seeing a given thing. But a single internally consistent way of seeing things is flawed for that very reason.
And the first two sentences of your most recent post above are kind of, like, you Stan Goff actually know (better than me or Charles or some other random American) what the basic American world-view actually is. Boo. Hiss. (Or as Hillary Clinton would say, “I’m ashamed of you”).
Be well.
6 April 2008, 8:59 ampeggy:
Here is just one very late at night thought. To follow up on what I said above re structural/social-systemic vs psychological/individual disorder:
One could go out and talk with or interview a disparate set of African American people. Interviews would be open-ended and would be as short or as long as the interviewee felt was desirable. It would start by you (interviewer, black or white, male or female) explaining to the interviewee that you were doing research on African American views on the causes of white American racism against African Americans. Explain that it will be taken as fact that such racism exists and is practiced in America. If the interviewee disagrees with that postulate, she or he should be encouraged to say what he or she thinks and should not be dismissed. In general, disagreement on the part of the inteviewee with the interviewer should be encouraged. Know that your own ethnicity, gender, et cetera, will influence the responses. Ethical and professional rules (websites provided upon request) will apply.
In other words, if you want to know what they think, ask them.
6 April 2008, 9:31 amkathy miriam:
“You can’t diagnose strep throat if you don’t know what a streptococcus is. You can’t “see” masculinity-defined-as-conquest if you consider this the natural order of things. And you won’t “see” the determinative effects of social structures if you believe that society is merely the sum of its Homo economicus individual decisions.”
No, you can not diagnose the current disorder if you think it is a psychological disorder and/or product of individual decisions, etc.But the experience of a social order as psychological is itself a symptom/catalyst of the current order of power. It is not the residual trace of resistance that is left once a structural analysis is stripped away and/or redefined. It is itself part of the current hegemony which involves always re-making “common sense” in a way that keeps power intact. So the point/question remains of how this psychologization is an expression of resistance rather than a sign of capitulation. Perhaps the word “capitulation” sounds too voluntarist–to willful and deliberate–
6 April 2008, 12:49 pmbut i’m trying to get at how the psychologization and individualism surrounding black and “progressive” support for Obama demonstrates the extent to which black politics, feminist politics, progressive politics, etc has been thoroughly- and i mean thoroughly–coopted.
Just another note: I myself am not immune to the thrill - or chill up the spine- at the prospect of Obama elected (not of HRC)– so I feel myself impacted by and critically interrogating my emotional reaction. I can UNDERSTAND the emotional reaction- this is why/how the O-phenomenon is so powerful.. Ok, onto reading about social movements as I promised myself.
Shaukat:
I agree fully with Kathy that the crystalization of black and progressive support around Obama signals, or is a symptom, of the cooptation of African American and left political struggles. However, there is a world of difference between the cooptation of a movement and the conscious capitulation by a subordinated group to the ruling class. In this respect, the work of Antonio Gramsci offers many valuable insights, and I think that much of Stan’s writings on social movements and community networks of resistance echo some of Gramsci’s pronouncements on this subject (though he can correct me if I’m mistaken). As Gramsci pointed out, in an advanced capitalist country rule by the dominant class is exercised in a complex fashion through the process of hegemony (the consent of the exploited classes to their own subordination), which is constantly played out and reinforced in the sphere of civil society, by the schools, churches, associations, etc. Thus, in this context a social class that attempted to seize power through direct political action prior to leading in civil society would almost certainly fail, as the ruling class would simply withdraw behind the trenches of this vast network and watch the challenge to their rule crumble. In other words, effective resistance requires a degree of community organizing and micro-processes up to a certain period before crystalizing into a full blown social movement, at least one capable of transforming the full institutional structure. In this sense, there can be no conflating the type of community work that Stan is advocating with effective social movements, as they must be understood in this context as a single whole.
6 April 2008, 3:12 pmxenia:
“And the first two sentences of your most recent post above are kind of, like, you Stan Goff actually know (better than me or Charles or some other random American) what the basic American world-view actually is. Boo. Hiss. (Or as Hillary Clinton would say, “I’m ashamed of you”).”
?? I’d appreciate a little more coherence. Especially the Hillary part.
6 April 2008, 4:46 pmLegume Sam:
Peggy says:
Not to judge Stan one way or another, but Kees van der Pijl has an online textbook which deals with the history of positivism and sociology in Chapter 3…
STAN: @ Peggy — Where did I even say the word, “sociology”?
6 April 2008, 4:49 pmStan:
I’d count myself far closer to the existentialists than the positivists. (:
I could (should) have emphasized the microscope more than the bacteria.
And I’m busted on Gramsci (add to that Luxemburg, Hornborg, Illich… and Prigogine).
I will also say this on the issue of the CP (on which I project my own experience overmuch… sorry, Charles). The CP — like all the left grouplets calling themselves Marxist-Leninist (a term invented by Stalin btw) — has the worst of both worlds. It has all the bureaucratic baggage of a structure and process inherited from Soviet war-communism when the Soviet party was trying to consolidate an actual state (there was the large scale that required top-down management), and the utter lack of any real popular base itself (the CPUSA, WWP, et al). So the grouplets are ineffectually small and bureaucratically encumbered.
Great combination, huh.
Louis Proyect has done a good job of explaining why grouplets are necessarily sectarian (they are competing for a small “market share” of new recruits, so they emphasize difference over similarity). Joaquin Bustelo has done an equally convincing job of explaining why that share is so small.