Avenge the Martyrs القصاص القصاص .. ضربوا ولادنا بالرصاص
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الاصابات بالرصاص الحي فجر الاثنين ١٩ ديسمبر
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The Proletariat and the “Creation of Class”
On my blog The Excerpt Mill I post a quote from an essay on Mao Zeodong’s philosophical thought by Richard Johnson:
Because, relative to that of the Communist, the socioeconomic persona of the proletariat is limited–and, give the empirical existence of political vicissitudes, may remain so indefinitely–the chance that from such a basis alone will be launched a coherent, direct, and enlightened politics, is slight. Understandable then, in this light, is the enigmatic logic of the Manifesto, where, inscribed among the historic character of communists, is the task of the “formation of the proletariat into a class.” The apparent paradox that an entity that is already a class, must be made to become a class, is comprehensible when it is remembered that the historical process of consciousness is not identical to the consciousness of the historical process; that, moreover, “ideological forms” have a historical depth related to, but not immediately determined by, material development. It is thus by this logic that the qualitative transformation of empirical, perhaps sporadic, political action into direct, and conscious, class-based political programs exists within the historical scope of an organizing medium led by a group of enlightened elites, vis Communists).
Four Days of Intense Clashes in Cairo
Click on the pic for full and timely updates by Hossam el-Hamalawy (Photo by Moises Saman)
قاطعوا التيليفزيون المصري الكذاب
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Logocentrism in 19th Century European Thought
Over at my blog The Excerpt Mill I quote philosopher Jacques Derrida on the idea of logocentrism within European philosophical thought:
Within this age of metaphysics, between Descartes and Hegel, Rousseau is undoubtedly the only one or the first one to make a theme or a system of the reduction of writing profoundly implied by the entire age. He repeats the inaugural movement of the Phaedurs and of De interpretatione but starts from a new model of presence: the subject’s self-presence within consciousness or feeling. What he excluded more violently than others must, of course, have fascinated and tormented him more than it did others. Descartes had driven out the sign–and particularly the written sign–from the cogito and from clear and distinct evidence; the latter being the very presence of the idea of the soul, the sign was an accessory abandoned in the region of the senses and the imagination. Hegel reappropriates the sensible sign to the movement of the Idea. He criticizes Leibniz and praises phonetic writing within the horizon of an absolutely self-present logos, remaining close t itself within the unity of its speech and its concept. But neither Descartes nor Hegel grappled with the problem of writing. The place of this combat and crisis is called the eighteenth century. Not only because it restores the rights of sensibility, the imagination, and the sign, but because attempts of the Leibnizian type had opened a breach within logocentric security. We must bring to light what it was that, right from the start, within these attempts at a universal characteristic, limited the power and extent of the breakthrough. Before Hegel and in explicit terms, Rousseau condemned the universal characteristic; not because of the theological foundation which ordained its possibility for the infinite understanding of logos of God, but because it seemed to suspend the voice. ”Through” this condemnation can be read the most energetic eighteenth-century reaction organizing the defense of phonologism and of logocentric metaphysics. What threatens is indeed writing. It is not an accidental and haphazard threat; it reconciles within a single historical system the projects of pasigraphy, the discovery of non-European scripts, or at any rate the massive progress of the techniques and deciphering, and finally the idea of a general science of language and writing. Against all of these prussures, a battle is then declared. ”Hegelianism” will be its finest scar.
Occupy Wall Street
Image from Lenin's Tomb
While I have a lot to write on about the Occupy Wall Street actions that have been going on all over the United States I will leave it to the venerable blogger Richard Seymour as he more or less puts the whole thing into perspective. One thing I will be watching out for is how the emerging leading sections of Occupy Wall Street treat the question of monopoly capitalism as being tied to US imperialism and how to focus on taking the system of US imperialism down instead of solely focusing on financial institutions.
Richard blogs:
Where does Occupy Wall Street fit into this? It is not my objective to pigeon-hole it as either a revolutionary or reformist strategy – it is neither, in fact. To put it in what will sound like uncharitable terms, it is baby-steps, the experimental form of a movement in its infancy, not yet sufficiently developed theoretically or politically to be anything else. There is a sort of loose autonomism informing its tactics, while its focus on participatory democracy is redolent of the SDS wing and the Sixties ‘New Left’, but it is not yet definite enough to be reducible to any dominant strategy or perspective. It is, however, potentially the nucleus of a mass movement, and how it relates to the problems addressed by both reformists and revolutionaries now will make all the difference in the future. At a certain point, the severity of the state’s response to it will force a theoretical and political clarification on its (official or unofficial) leadership. Recall how the high watermark of Sixties radicalism in 1968 was also the moment at which the state got serious in its repression. This was the year in which the term “police riot” was invented to describe Chicago cops’ response to protesters outside the Democratic convention, where police mercilessly assaulted protesters and bystanders alike, while students chanted “The whole world is watching”. This was the year in which the FBI murdered several black leaders. It was in the years that followed that the movement was forced to crystalise politically, to become a much more grim undertaking – though with the unfortunate drawback that many of the leaders were drawn into the most ultra-Stalinist politics while others simply took their ‘community organising’ schtick into the Democratic fold. So, I would say that if a mass movement emerges from this, the early orientation of Wall Street occupiers to the major strategic questions will make a big difference.
Remember Political Prisoners Past & Present
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“The Marcos dictatorship was ended by people power more than 25 years ago but many essential remnants of fascism have remained, buttressed by the continuation of the same old, rotten semi-feudal and semi-colonial system and rule,” Jazmines said.
Karapatan’s Enriquez shares the same view, saying that the Aquino government continues the practice of arrest and detention of those who criticize the government’s inaction on soaring prices of basic commodities, unabated oil price increases, and the government policies and programs on land reform, urban poor housing, mining and budget cuts on basic services such as health and education.
“Beneath the Oplan Bayanihan’s slogan of ‘adherence to human rights and peace and development,’ political repression remains,” Enriquez declared, citing as example the killing of Rabenio Sungit, a member of the United Church of Christ of the Philippines (UCCP) on Sept. 5 in Quezon, Palawan, and the death of seven-year-old Sunshine Jabinez, on Sept. 2, due to indiscriminate firing of members of the 71st Infantry Battalion of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (IBPA).
Presidential Spokesman Lacierda said:” We frown on extralegal killings.” But under the Aquino administration, there are already 55 victims of extrajudicial killings and eight victims of enforced disappearances, based on Karapatan’s documentation.
Challenges With Building a Leftist City
Over at my other blog The Excerpt Mill I take a quote from Richard Edward DeLeon’s classic text, Left Coast City, on the challenges that left-winged “progressives” would have in being able to take control of the San Francisco government apparatus while still holding onto their progressive politics under a capitalist regime:
A…reality progressives must face is that a small business economy by itself is inadequate to support a progressive regime…[T]he city’s small businesses are not always beautiful, and its petty bourgeoisie will never be the economic vanguard of radicalism. Leftist arguments that romanticize small business and demonize big business fail to capture the diversity and complexity of San Francisco’s business community. In the city’s service economy, what most small service firms serve are big businesses. To discount the economic importance of large corporations or to view them simply as objects of expropriation is to validate claims that progressives are unable to think strategically about the city as a whole…
Yet the progressives are onto something in their love affair with small business. Their emphasis on preserving and promoting small firms and neighborhood shops follows logically from a slow-growth perspective on land use and physical development…
“How Was the Philippines?”
A worker toils along a line of bananas at a banana plantation packing plant in Compostella, Compostella Valley, Mindanao, Philippines (photo by Jack Stephens).
A current member of my former organization, League of Filipino Students-San Francisco State University Chapter, captures perfectly the experience of organizing, and going to, an exposure trip to the Philippines. I myself went on an exposure trip with Karapatan-Southern Mindanao Region (Karapatan is a human rights organization) and with the labor center Kilusang Mayo Uno while Lyle describes his trip with the student and youth organization League of Filipino Students:
The process of processing the trip takes a long time. That’s one thing I’ve learned from my past experience. If we created the program well enough, the exposurists will carry on the lessons and memories from the trip long after they exit LFS. And you will have at least one day where you cry uncontrollably.
I did. It was in the airplane bathroom on the ride back to the states. Not anything about the bathroom induced this, but everything I experienced finally hit me and I realized how much I was going to miss the feeling I had when I was in the Philippines (*cue Boston- More Than A Feeling).
It just happened to hit me when I was 30,000 feet in the air next to a metallic toilet that could suck me right out of the airplane.
Black Working Class Radicalism in Oakland
Black Panther Party members outside of a Safeway, in the East Bay, during the Safeway boycott (photo by Stephen Shames).
In my blog The Except Mill I quote historian Robert O. Self, in his book on geography, capitalism, and its affects on the Black population in the San Francisco East Bay, wrote:
In the workplaces and communities of midcentury West Oakland, African American residents forged a distinct laborite culture that blended class politics with civil rights. Based in the Brotherhod of Sleeping Car Porters and other black railroad unions, as well as the left wing of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) on the docks and the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCSU) on the ships, this culture extended its influence broadly through the East Bay…This culture extended its reach across time. Black longshoremen, veterans of the brutal class wars on the docks in the 1930s, articulated an internationalism that would, by the 1960s, influence Oaklanders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale as they founded the Black Panther Party. Black leaders from the railroad unions established political strategies in the 1940s that would guide a generation of activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From one decade to the next across the second half of the century, these neighborhoods were home to a rich range of laborite, community, civil rights, and eventually black liberation politics.
…
Oakland provides an excellent vantage from which to launch an inquiry into this history. Best known as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party in 1966 and as a national fulcrum of black radicalism throughout the late 1960s, Oakland was also a major seat of African American influence in California politics beginning in the late 1940s and the home of an extensive tradition of black social advocacy and organizing. Indeed, the generation of black activists before the Panthers developed strategies, alliances, and sources of power that profoundly shaped the political terrain of race in both the East Bay and California as a whole. Recovering the story of that generation, men and women who achieved none of the national media exposure and fame of the Panthers and faced little of the state-sponsored harassment and investigations, allows us to appreciate both the surprising continuities as well as the jarring divergences between the activists of the 1940s and 1950s and those of the 1960s and 1970s…The long postwar black liberation movement in the East Bay featured a fluid political environment in which philosophies and strategies competed with and interpenetrated one another. Above all, in the decades after World War II, civil rights in Oakland stood less for civil rights than for economic rights, the foundation on which black American political demands had rested since the 1930s.
The Falsehood of Multiple Modernities
"On White" by Wassily Kandinsky
While talking to local San Francisco transnational feminist activist (and resident bad ass), Pia, she told me she really liked my blog The Excerpt Mill. So that got me thinking I need to start posting more stuff on their since I’ve been reading a lot of good material lately. So, here we go.
In his book The Parallax View Slavoj Žižek is seeking to restore certain edifices to the now maligned (but still relavent and constantly overlooked) Marxist theory of historical materialism. Part of the way he does this is to attack certain modes of poststructrual belief such as the idiotic claims of “multiple modernities” not connected to any type of universal aspect.
The significance of this critique reaches far beyond the case of modernity–it concerns the fundamental limitation of nominalist historicizing. The recourse to multiplication (“there is not one modernity with a fixed essence, there are multiple modernities, each of them irreducible to others…”) is false not because it does not recognize a unique fixed “essence” of modernity, but because multiplication functions as the disavowal of the antagonism that inheres to the notion of modernity as such: the falsity of multiplication resides in the fact that it frees the universal notion of modernity of its antagonism, of the way it is embedded in the capitalist system, by relegating this aspect to just one of the historical subspecieis…
Against the Grain Podcast for August 27th, 2011
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On this podcast I go over some audio I recorded for Bayan-USA’s podcast that didn’t end up getting used. The audio piece is from this year’s May 1st rally in San Francisco.
- Intro 00:00-02:55 (music by From Monuments to Masses)
- May 1st Rally podcast piece 02:56-17:02
- Music by Asin 17:03-20:02
Stand in Solidarity with Blogger and Activist Michael Nabil Sanad
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Protest and the Restrictions and “Role” of Social Media
A protester outside a San Francisco BART station is taken to the ground by San Francisco police during a recent protest overt the shutdown of cellphone service by BART authorities (photo by Adithya Sambamurthy)
As with the “Green Revolution” in Iran, the recent overthrow of Mubarak, the riots in London, and the protests against state sanctioned killings by the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police, the media (and a superfluity of idiotic bloggers) has gravitated toward the assumption that social media (Twitter, Facebook, Blackberry, etc.) has played a significant role in these events.
This assumption seems to be based upon the fact that the media (and politicians) seem to gravitate towards overly simplistic story lines that offer clear cut explanations as well as to the fact that it offers an exciting account of “new” and “innovative strategies” that “undermine” the current status quo.
Instead of pursuing the facts and offering a calm and balanced narrative as to what (if any) role social media has played in recent protests the media has tended to assume that social media is offering protesters, democracy advocates, and professional “rebel rousers” a new way to disrupt authority. As if Twitter has created a new gateway for the faceless masses to takes plans of action, assemble, and protest.
Pouncing on the media’s role in propagating this simplistic story line politicians and others in authority have either justified their actions in suppressing lines of communication or are trying to justify an expanded role in being able to shut down these lines of communication in the future.
Yet, much like with the “Green Revolution” in Iran and with the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt, social media (be it Twitter or Facebook) has actually had very little role in moving these protests and riots within England and the San Francisco Bay Area. A recent article on the role of Twitter in the recent riots in England has found:
that Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting.
And not as the actual platform to create and move the riots and looting.
The protests against BART also didn’t pick up until BART unilaterally shut down all cell phone service for nearly three hours in order to suppress lines of communication between protesters trying to exercise their civic right to free speech and to protest BART policies and killings.
Yet, because of the recent spat of articles claiming that social media served a big role in these types of protests those on the board of directors for BART have been seeking to justify shutting down lines of communication in the future in order to suppress further protests that “might harm” commuters. The same is being debated in Westminster in England.
Yet the fact remains that social media has played an extremely small (if close to nil) role in all of these protest movements over the past couple of years. Essentially the political debate, being picked up in the media by journalists who lack any serious analytical and investigative skills, is jumping off of the premise that social media (i.e., the right to communication) needs to be contained, corralled, and if possible shut down in order to put a damper on protest movements.
The myth of “Twitter revolutions” and “Facebook protests” is helping to propagate the very real threat of the State collecting massive amounts of power to prosecute free speech on social media and the unfettered ability to turn “on” and “off” networks of information and communication it deems a threat to its position within society.
