WATCH: ‘They Call Us Terrorists’: Inside the Palestinian Resistance Forces of Jenin, West Bank

Nov 13, 2023

“Why are so many Westerners reluctant to support armed resistance to defeat Zionism?
Answers on a postcard.“ —

–November 13, 2023, NoDealForNature, Twitter/X, ? #StopGreenColonialism #StopGenocide ? [Int’l campaign opposing a genocidal land grab (#NewDealforNature / #NaturePositive / #30×30) marketed as a $olution to “protecting and restoring nature”]

“The resistance will never be crushed… Any people under occupation have the right to resist. This is the case for all colonized people.”

“People in the West think we have no ambition. It’s not true. I was studying computer engineering and I had an invention. All Palestinians have been subjected to the injustice of occupation. We grew up with ambition. We grew up playing in the street. Children around the world may play ordinary games, like PlayStation. Here we are forced to play with stones. There are no conditions for life here. No life… We had ambitions to become scientists, doctors, and engineers, but the occupation opted for violence.”

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Israel continues to unleash hell upon the 22-by-5-mile concentrated area of Gaza, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, with relentless airstrikes and indiscriminate bombings of hospitals, residential buildings, schools, and other civilian sites. As besieged Palestinians shelter and flee and die within the walls of their cage in Gaza, Resistance forces are mobilizing to rise up against an Occupation that has presided over lives for 75 years.

Where there is occupation, there is resistance, and numerous Palestinian resistance groups exist across the Occupied Territories. These groups consist of occupied subjects turned freedom fighters—those who have been directly targeted by Israel, who have witnessed their friends and families die at the hands of occupying forces, and who have been labeled “terrorists” for resisting their slow extermination. In Jenin, a 1km square ghetto-like refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, and the target of numerous Israeli incursions, there are many who have chosen the path of armed resistance, and many who felt they had no other choice.

For those who suffer under the direct oppression and daily practices of apartheid—including the suspension of human and civil rights, military-imposed blockades and checkpoints restricting people’s movements, the demolition of homes and killing of family members—there comes a breaking point. Generations of Palestinians, born into Occupation and violence, do not live a life of dignity. As they describe, under these conditions, they have nothing to live for and nothing to lose, and they have everything to fight for.

In July of this year, before the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks and Israel’s genocidal retaliatory offensive in Gaza, The Real News Network spoke to members of the community in Jenin refugee camp about their lives under Occupation, the role of the Resistance there, and the fight for freedom.

Produced and edited by Ross Domoney. Filming by Ahmad Al Bazz . Writing, narration, and research by Nadia Péridot.

Oct 28

2023

newWKOGadnim

Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Algiers Arafat Fatah Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) NGO-isation Oslo Accords Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Palestinian Authority Palestinian National Movement (PNM)

Palestine Through the Lens of Frantz Fanon [2015]

Middle East Monitor

October 19, 2015

by Nick Rodrigo

Part 1: Why Fanon? The indispensability of thought and the urgency of action

Palestine is in the throes of revolt. It started with protests and demonstrations at the presence of Israeli “Temple Mount” activists (and their political benefactors) at the Noble Sanctuary of Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, the symbolic pillar of Palestinian spirituality and national redemption. The unrest then spread to other cities on both sides of the Green Line. From Nazareth to Nablus to Bethlehem, young Palestinians have taken to the streets to hurl stones and Molotov cocktails at an occupation which plunders their future and consigns their bodies to be broken on the wheels of a colonial machine. Individual acts of violence have also injected a sense of terror into the Israeli population, prompting a paranoid state to respond with unbridled brutality from its military, and unabated mob-driven lynching by its civilian population.

Unorganised, sporadic and youth-led, these Palestinian demonstrations and violent attacks do not appear to be tethered to any political party. The rejection of political factions as the incubator of rebellious actions by the “Children of Oslo” is perhaps the final indictment on the political malaise which has characterised Mahmoud Abbas’s tenure as Palestinian president; he has operated hand in glove with the Israelis, to protect a regime which safeguards the interests of his political class.

The Question of Palestine, as Edward Said framed it, has gone through numerous changes since 1948; through the Nakba of 1948 to the Sumud, which characterised the first intifada, to the compromise of Oslo and the current post-second intifada division and status quo. Throughout these phases, various normative discourses and institutions arose, which shifted the nature of the Palestinian national movement. However, the reality of Israeli colonialism has remained the same: violent, intransigent and unaccountable. In order to understand the current events in Palestine properly, it vital to look towards the writings of Martinican psychologist-cum-Algerian revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, whose divisive thoughts have contributed prodigiously to the field of postcolonial studies.

Rebel without a pause

1925 was a bumper year for Black revolutionaries. In the space of twelve months, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba and Frantz Fanon were born. It was the latter’s lyrical polemics and psychoanalytic inquiries which presented vast swathes of humanity with the framework for picking apart the layers of oppression which typified their lives under the yoke of colonialism. In his short life, Fanon developed a philosophy which provided colonised peoples with the blueprint for breaking out of their stupor, to create a “new man” and a new form of resistance to domination and oppression. Added to his literary panache and intellectual intrigue, he was able to interweave his subjective experiences into his works. By the time of his untimely death at thirty-six, Fanon had first-hand experiences of colonial society in a variety of contexts; through his youth in the French colonial department of Martinique; to his service for “Mother France” on the battlefield against Nazi Germany; to his academic training in Frances metropoles; and to his works with Algerian revolutionaries in the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN).

Black Skin, White Masks

In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon developed a sociogenic and psychoanalytic explanation of the anti-black racism inherent within colonial societies, drawing on his objective experiences. In this seminal text, Fanon passes the Hegelian phenomenological master/slave dialect under a black lens. In Hegel’s dialect, the slave is in pursuit of recognition and, through fear of the master, develops sentience, acquiring independent thought and consciousness of his essentiality and master’s dependence on him. However, when the slave is black, Fanon notes that, “What [the master] wants from the slave is not recognition but work.” The result was for the black person to aspire for “values secreted by his masters.” Fanon stays with Hegel when he acknowledges that mutual recognition is not achieved at the end of this dialect, yet departs from him in denying that the black slave necessarily achieves any independent consciousness: “But the black man does not know the price of freedom because he has never fought for it.” Echoing the words of Malcolm X, he wrote, “No one can give you freedom, if you are a man, you take it.” This ongoing struggle for recognition and freedom informed Fanon’s work and life.

Revolutionary therapy and the process of disalienation

In 1953 Fanon moved from colonial France to Blida, Algeria, where he developed a revolutionary approach to psychoanalysis, developing occupational therapy remedies with Algeria’s native communities with a direct effort to draw Arab and Islamic idiosyncrasies into his work. Fanon published 15 papers on psychiatric approaches throughout his career, and many of the findings were intertwined with his philosophical conclusions in Black Skin, White Masks. At the centre of Fanon’s psychoanalysis and “sociogenic” inquiries was a pursuit of disalienation from the social death caused by colonialism. In Marx’s Capital, alienation from labour is scrutinised, and through this process he lays bare the opposite of humanity within a capitalist society; a society freed from capital, able to pursue its own praxis. Fanon examined the way in which the human society under colonialism is alienated from its own cultural creativity; from this he wanted to create a way of breaking out of the colonial replications of that which is colonised. For Fanon, the colonised must pursue this process of disalienation actively.

Concerning revolutionary violence and the pitfalls of neo-colonialism

During his time in Algeria, Fanon was approached by the FLN to provide healthcare and a sanctum for their fighters in his clinic. He subsequently threw his weight behind their cause, writing for their publication El Moujahed and representing them at conferences in sub-Saharan Africa, where he forged ties with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. With them he developed the idea of an African Legion, to liberate African nations from colonialism, as well as opening up a southern arms route from Sub-Saharan Africa to Algeria. Fanon saw that the conclusion of the Algerian struggle would serve as the pace-setter for the trajectory of the postcolonial movements and newly-liberated nations throughout Africa.

With the publication of A Dying Colonialism he had moved considerably from the concept of negritude, towards revolution as the prime negative in his de-colonial framework. By the colonised finding themselves through revolutionary struggle, whilst at the same time realising the role played by national demands and racial particularities, a new humanity can be forged.

In 1962, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia, and started work on The Wretched of the Earth, which was to be completed within months of his diagnosis but only published posthumously. Written with furious energy, the text is as much a timeless field manual for postcolonial movements as it is a piece of historical literature. It is his treatise on violence which has often been misconstrued, by supporters and detractors alike. Fanon does not valorise violence, as some contend, but rather acknowledges that colonialism is a project, which is, in and of itself, violence manifested. This violence has shaped the social constitution of the colonial subject. His land, resources and life have been seized by a state of violence, and within the framework laid before him, the only route out is violence. With prescience, Fanon writes that unless this violence is checked, it can turn inwards on the colonised, leading to tribalism and internecine conflict. Out from this a neo-colonial project will emerge, where elites from the revolutionary movements will barter their political capital with the old colonialists, for political power and capital, granting the latter rapacious access to resources and economic wealth.

Before he died in 1963, Fanon sent a parting letter to his friend Roger Taïeb in which he wrote the following: “We are nothing on this earth if we do not first and foremost serve a cause, the cause of the people, the cause of freedom and justice. I want you to know that even when the doctors had lost all hope, I was still thinking, in a fog granted, but thinking nonetheless, of the Algerian people, of the people of the Third World, and if I managed to hold on, it was because of them.”

Israel’s occupation as a neo-colonial project

What Fanon implored us to do was to view the struggle of the oppressed as a struggle to create a new mode of being, a new form of humanity. Within the revolutionary struggles of the masses, he insisted, lie the seeds of a new humanity. The ongoing resistance in Palestine today is not a new phenomenon, but is rather the latest episode in a decades’ long struggle for freedom and what Hegel and Fanon both agree on, recognition. Not recognition to live within shrivelled little cantons and drip-fed subsistence, but recognition as a human being in the holistic sense of the term. The stone throwing, the stabbings and the bombings are a reaction to a colonial regime which denies this recognition.

Over the course of these essays, Fanon’s key works, as outlined briefly above, will be utilised to examine the Palestinian national movement since it broke away from the paternalist hold of the Arab world and began, in earnest, to seek recognition. Navigating this history, with one eye firmly on Fanon’s work, it will conclude with where the movement is today; largely rudderless, but still yearning. Through this process, it is hoped that the reader will not only think and empathise with the Palestinians, but also, in respect of Fanon’s work, act on these feelings in the spirit of a collective humanity.

Fanon in Palestine Part 2: From Sumud to Surrender

Last week, the life, times and writings of Frantz Fanon were examined, with specific focus on his concept of recognition. Fanon, with literary deftness and intellectual mastery, managed to save Hegel from his racialised self and utilise his master/slave dialect in a conceptual apparatus that explicates the pitfalls of the neocolonised mindset.

Fanon asserted that colonised populations tend to internalise the sneering images imposed on them, and thus as a result these images, along with structural relations, come to be recognised as natural. Settler colonialism operates through the elimination of indigenous people’s existence on the land. Without this reducible element, settler colonialism cannot operate. Settler colonialism it not interested in exploitating the natives, rather it attempts a totality though eradicating its negation, the existence of indigenous people, and reducing them to an invisible, a persona non grata. This is why the Palestinian-Israeli impasse should not be seen from the angle of a particular event, rather as a structure that operates on the elimination of indigenous Palestinians as an entity. The desire for recognition on its own terms of the overarching colonial structure can be seen as a form of misrecognition as it reinforces the dominance of the oppressor, seeking its legitimacy from the very source of the dilemma, making the coloniser appear to be the final redeemer: ‘’that is, I will compel the white man to acknowledge that I am human.”

In the second part of this essay series, I will trace the socio-historical development of the Palestinian National Movement and its quest for recognition. By picking apart various tactics for recognition, I expose the source of the symbolic capital of the current intifada, and where the failure of the current Palestinian leadership has presented more obstacles to the fundamentals of Palestinian recognition.

Sumud

In English, sumud can refer to steadfastness, but it can be manifested as different practices and ideas. For instance, many refugees refer to their existence as “resistance”, or a manifestation of sumud when discussing their forced exile after 1948. Tracing Sumud within the PLO’s (Palestine Liberation Organization) discourse help demonstrate how the change in political strategy from resistance to the recognition of Israel affected the discourse from within the PLO, which in turn has affected the whole of the PNM. Such a framework highlights the ways Palestinians were involved in anticolonial struggle how they were able to construct a Palestinian political history through speech, and how it was constrained after recognising Israel and seeking recognition of statehood from Israel and the international community.

Sumud: The 60s and 70s

The grassroots nature of the Palestinian movement that emerged in 1959 gained traction after the successive failures of pan-Arabism and the emergence of a distinct national Palestinian agenda which centred around the concept of armed struggle. The national struggle was formulated around being exiled in the diaspora and the life of the Fedayeen in the refugee camps, who were represented as the archetypal Palestinian. The idea of the militant-fedai as a national and a cultural hero was utilised by Fatah to galvanize support in the refugee camps. Where previously there was no unified and collective Palestinian struggle, this represented a rupture and change in Palestinian discourse and identity, profoundly demonstrated in Ghassan-Kanafani’s novels.

Arafat seized on such imagery, mirroring it in his discourse, most notably In his speech to the United Nations in 1974. Appearing at the UN general assembly, dressed in the garb of the Fedayeen, Arafat emphasised the right to armed resistance, placing the Palestinian struggle within a wider global struggle against racism, imperialism and colonialism. This speech would serve to gain much legitimacy and recognition for his cause. Although the PLO, of which Fatah was the dominant faction, was eventually recognised as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestine people by the international community, it failed to achieve any results on the ground. This, coupled with the exile of the PLO from Jordan and Lebanon, created a sense of disillusionment in the OPT (occupied Palestinian territory), leading to the rise of grassroots activism which surprised a detached leadership.

The Intifada: Shaking off the occupation

Palestinian resistance in the OPT’s reached a zenith during the first intifada through large-scale confrontation with the Israeli army, mass demonstrations and civil disobedience such as strikes and refusal to pay taxes – a direct attempt to extract Palestinians from the structures of colonialism. The Intifada differed from Fatah’s operations as it was led by community councils and a united national leadership of the uprising (UNLU) with very limited control from Fatah and the PLO. The uprising was eventually steered by Fatah, leading to the Madrid peace conference of 1991, in effect paving the way for the Oslo process and the establishment of the Palestinian National Aassembly (PNA) in 1994. With the intifada and the influence of the PLO, there was a change in the discourse from the liberation of mandate Palestine to one of state building which marked recognition and diplomacy as a new political strategy.

Surrender

The Madrid Conference, which was the marking point for the initiation of the peace process, failed to bring about any real outcomes apart from ending the Intifada. This was due to Palestinian refusal to postpone key issues, and the efforts by Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir to delay the negotiations. This tactic of delay, whilst altering the facts on the ground through the entrenchment of the occupation, has been a central theme of all Israeli–Palestinian negotiations within the peace process framework. The Madrid process failed to consider the central issues of refugees and land loss that was insisted upon by the Palestinian delegation, it was the marking point for the beginning of the end, setting the precedent of future peace negotiations to come. Oslo would serve to provide the institutions to sustain this “differed agreement”, with the establishment of structure bent on constructing a state within the international legal sovereign model. However for the first time there was a tangent narrative of the PNM, that of the institutionalisation of Zionist-ideology and practices, hence the postponement of core issues.

Institutionalisation of the status quo

Through seeking recognition, the PLO had to engage in the language of the international community and the colonial power – Israel – therefore ensuring the maintenance of the status quo, i.e. not challenging the colonial structure of violence. Throughout the Oslo peace process the PLO de-facto acknowledged two Zionist-practices and ideas which characterise the discourse in Palestinian-Israeli relations; ethnic cleansing and land maximisation. The Oslo agreements make no reference to the exile of Palestinians during 1948, something that continues to govern the rules of negotiation in the Palestinian-Israeli relations. Although-the refugees were referenced, there was no explicit responsibility placed on Israel that acknowledged the forced exile of Palestinians. Alongside transfer was land maximisation, a strategy employed since Zionism’s inception. Today similar practices can be seen in Jerusalem, and the West Bank – the Naqba’s constant land maximisation is ongoing.

The sacrificing of key components If the Palestinian struggle on the alter of recognition and according to the terms of the coloniser was done in pursuit of of the hegemonic Eurocentric ideal of statehood. As Azmi Bishara predicted in 1999, if the PNA declares a Palestinian state, the issue will shift to recognition of such state, while there will be talks on settlements and refugees, the real focus and political strategy will turn toward seeking recognition for that state. Thus the PNA’s internal strategy becomes reducing any possibility of confrontation as Palestinians are forced to direct their energy on securing recognition and the survival of the pseudo state. The pursuit of recognition for this state has resulted in a whole range of PA actions, such as cooperative security with the Israelis, entrenchment within the international finance system, and the bureacratisation of occupation management. These very neocolonial practices will be scrutinised in more detail in the third party of this series, “The Economics of Capitulation”.

The development from sumud to surrender, which has characterised the PLO’s attitude towards Israel, demonstrates what Fanon called the “racist epidermalisaton of the oppressed”, where the PNA has became a product of the internalisation of what the oppressor thinks they must become. Through negating its own history and accomplishments, the PNA attempted to present a new image of the Palestinians as peaceful and civilised, and therefore worthy of their own state. Thus, as a result of seeking recognition overall, the focus of struggling and resisting shifted towards recognition of this new Palestinian image rather than addressing the overall structure of settler colonialism which created the need for such recognition in the first place. As Fanon found, the-colonised become obsessed with attention from the white man, where there is a strong desire to demonstrate to the white man that he is wrong about the black man.

Fanon wrote feverishly that it was the masses who “stormed the heavens” and in the process overcame their inferiority complex in the face of the colonial oppressor. What has occurred during the era of “Sumud” was a leadership and people who understood the transformative possibilities of engaging in a revolutionary process that creates “a new man”. Fanon was not a slave to nationalism, but understood that the particularities of race and nationness are indispensible in mobilising the people. The crude reduction of the Palestinian Authority’s claims that they are acting in the national interest is symbolic of the collapse of the revolutionary components of Palestinian nationalism. In the next part of these essays, the institutions which have emerged out of the neocolonial capitulation, will be scrutinised.

Fanon in Palestine part 3: The institutions of capitulation

In part two, the historical development of the Palestinian National Movement (PNM) was traced, from its break with the paternalist hold of the Arab world, through the years of Sumud, to the historic compromise of the Oslo Accords. Through recognising Israel at the Madrid Conference, the PNM had achieved recognition, but on behalf of its colonial oppressor and the broader hegemonic ideals of the contemporary international system. Through recognising Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) had also granted tacit approval to the former’s founding principles of ethnic cleansing and land maximisation. Oslo and its accompanying Paris Protocols entrenched the socioeconomic dynamics of a settler-colonial project, enshrining the Palestinian Authority (PA) as its outsourced management. In order to conceptualise how Oslo birthed the institutions of capitulation which play a large role in upholding the infrastructure of occupation, land expropriation and displacement, it is important to turn again to how Frantz Fanon forewarned about the development of neo-colonialism after independence.

Fanon’s prophesy

By 1958 Charles De Gaulle had increased France’s military presence in Algeria whilst coaxing former colonies away from the unfolding drama in Algeria through membership of the Francophone community; this tactic placed diplomatic and military pressures on the National Liberation Front (FLN). During this time, Fanon’s critique of the national bourgeoisie as an impediment to the development of a truly de-colonial revolutionary praxis began to crystallise into a coherent polemic. Some of his thoughts were laid down in “A Dying Colonialism”, but it was “The Wretched of the Earth”, published posthumously, that became Fanon’s political testament. This incendiary text is a field manual for indigenous guerrilla movements as well as an exposé of the particular spirit which drove the de-colonial movements of the sixties. Fanon’s examination of the emergent bourgeois leadership in Africa, and his relentless broadsides against their betrayals, echo loudly when paralleled with the post-Oslo Palestinian leadership.

Fanon notes that a revolution differed by a myopic conception of nationhood can lead to “the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood.” The development towards recognition folds revolutionary components of nationalism in on its particularities, stymying the development of a truly revolutionary dialect. In the bid to gain recognition, the national leadership will take up the positions vacated by the departing coloniser, and becoming “not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature”. This caricature, for Fanon, is defined by a rapacious desire to line pockets, and attract economic power from the former colonial overlords and the world powers. With razor sharp clarity, Fanon notes how the economic programme of the post-independence leadership attracts foreign investment for industrial projects, which are built from the “tête-a-tête” negotiations leading up to the withdrawal of the coloniser. Hedonistic projects are developed to mask the leaks in their economic plans, which do little to develop the nation, and before long, the national bourgeoisie become mere managers and intermediaries of foreign investment.

Fanon’s polemic draws up three institutions which seem applicable to the Palestinian context:

The party: A political machine emptied of its revolutionary potential, merely a symbolic and bureaucratic mechanism of the neo-colonial system.
A national bourgeoisie of capital managers and bureaucrats.
A foreign-advised army, called on increasingly to step in when the contradictions of post-independence solicit widespread protest.

Fatah and the PA

Founded by Yasser Arafat in 1959, Fatah was once uncompromising on the merits of armed resistance popularising the re-conquest of Palestine through the deployment of sophisticated and popular imagery and execution of armed actions. It’s dominance within the PLO and popularity within the refugee camps endowed it with authority over all other factions after 1967. However, by the time of the first intifada (uprising) in 1987, the once revolutionary zeal of Fatah was subsumed by the Palestinian committees and grassroots organisations. Finding itself surplus to requirements, the Fatah-dominated PLO accepted the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, sidelining the popular appeal of mass movements of the intifada.

Fanon notes that the party’s mission after independence changes to give the people instructions “from the summit”, with party branches “completely demobilised”. Instead of a dialogue between the people and the party, from the bottom up, the party becomes a block between the masses and the leader. Fatah’s rallies and political meetings, emptied of any praxis or tactic, vindicate Fanon’s warnings of the lethargy which demobilises the party. Mahmoud Abbas’s amassing of political power, and embedding of Fatah into the institutional framework of the Palestinian state institutions, is also telling. Once the vehicle of the revolution, Fatah is now caught between its revolutionary phantoms of yesteryear, and maintenance of a status quo which benefits its apparatchiks and party bureaucrats. The result has been a divided party, reactionary towards rivals, sporadically condemning the occupation but on the terms of the international system.

The Palestinian bourgeoisie and the international community

The Palestinian national bourgeoisie has become an intermediary for global capitalism, but in a way that supports the infiltration of western “humanitarian capital” facilitating a humanitarian structure which buttresses the human rights and development regime of the west. The Oslo Accords created a system in which its “logic” informed the development of institutions engineered for “statehood”. The conflict was dramatically reframed after Oslo, from an ongoing anti-colonial struggle to a depoliticised development-orientated industry of “capacity building”. Capacity building would usher in the development of an NGO sector which would forge institutions for “statehood” whilst managing the material impacts of the occupation.

Since Oslo, the Palestinian economy has been dependent overwhelmingly on foreign aid, which is transferred through a complex web of NGOs. Staffing these organisations are the Palestinian leadership, intimately wedded to the Palestinian Authority, often with ties to Fatah as well. The “NGO-isation” of Palestinian politics has spawned a complex bureaucracy which works hand-in-hand with the PA to develop institutions which do little to enhance an economy stricken by the detrimental effects of Israel’s military occupation. A Gulf-based transnational capitalist class joins these intermediaries of neoliberal state funding logic. This class controls major banks, industrial and manufacturing companies and telecommunications firms, and facilitates the regional dominance of Gulf conglomerates. The Palestinian economy has developed through NGO funding and direct investment into the economy from the Gulf, but this has had little trickle-down impact on ordinary Palestinians. Instead, it has given birth to an out of touch NGO/transnational capitalist class whose members reap huge benefits from investment into an economy which only seems to service a select few.

Collaborative security

Fanon parallels the poverty and stagnation of the post-independence nation with the growing dependence of its leadership on a foreign advised and funded military. However, in Palestine it is not an army which has grown to become one of the largest post-Oslo institutions, but the cooperative paramilitary security establishment, the actions of which the PA coordinates with Israel’s Shin Bet internal security agency.

As the Palestinian economy has faltered and the Israeli occupation increases its disregard for the rights of the Palestinians, the Palestinian security sector has stepped in, clamping down on popular protest and pre-empting resistance activity through coordinated preventative measures with the Israelis. This cooperative security nexus enjoys international support with a budget of more than $8 million each year from the EU Police Mission for the Palestinian Territories. Meanwhile, Britain has allocated £76 million to the PA for security reform, much of which has been channelled towards the Presidential Guard intelligence service and the Preventive Security Force, both of which are headed by Fatah strongmen. Many of these institutions, trained indirectly by the US, follow what is known as the Dayton doctrine, in which an obedient “esprit de corps” is installed throughout the chain of command. They have been found complicit in the torture of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, as well as the arbitrary detention of protestors. Former PM Salam Fayyad championed the collaborative security system as a key institution to assist with the development of a “Palestinian state”.

This posture echo’s Fanon’s understanding of the pitfalls of national consciousness when it is pegged to recognition on the terms of the coloniser. The security sector is not protecting the nation, but a specific bourgeois model of it, which benefits the class and bureaucratic privileges of the bourgeois elites. Perhaps the most candid representation of this was in 2007 when a faction within Fatah, with Israeli and western backing, attempted to launch a coup d’état in the Gaza Strip to dislodge the Hamas-led Palestinian government after it won the 2006 legislative election.

The institutions of capitulation in Palestine are laid deep, and many are rooted in a number of international structural factors external to the control of the current leadership. Furthermore, the political stagnation, economic strangulation and general immobility with regards to the “Question of Palestine” begins and ends with an intransigent, unaccountable Israeli occupation. However, the Palestinian leadership, once intertwined cognitively with the broader Palestinian people, especially those in forced exile, have narrowed the horizons of the PNM dramatically. Part of this is due to their pursuit of recognition, but they are also emulating the rapacious attitudes of their coloniser. This has led to institutions which obfuscate the asymmetric power of the current occupation, placing legitimacy in a political project which has failed, and serves no one but a tiny clique.

[Nick Rodrigo is a research associate at the Afro-Middle East Centre in Johannesburg; his writing has appeared in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.]

Oct 16

2023

newWKOGadnim

Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Capitalism Colonialism Communism Critical Thought Palestine Resistance Socialism Solidarity

“Historical Forces” – Stokely Carmichael Lecture at the University of Georgia

Parts 1 & 2

University of Georgia Media Archives

February 1, 1979

“It’s the historical forces.

Once it comes, you have only two alternatives.

Either you are with the people, or you are against the people.

It’s very simple.”

–Stokely Carmichael

Aug 24

2023

newWKOGadnim

Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Angola Burkina Faso Colonialism Frantz Fanon Guinea-Bissau Imperialism Liberia Mozambique Pacifism as Patholgy Palestine Self Defense Tanzania ZIMBABWE

WATCH: Concerning Violence

Black Rooted

Nine Scenes From the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense

Black Rooted review, 2018: “Göran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning Violence is the first major film to grapple with the work of the influential Martinican author and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon since Isaac Julien’s biographical documentary Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995). Whereas the earlier film took a holistic, if esoteric, approach to appraising Fanon’s life and ideas (including his upbringing in Martinique, education in France and work in Algeria), the punchy Concerning Violence focuses on a specific sliver: the opening chapter of Fanon’s classic text The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which the author posits the act of one nation colonising another as a form of pure, subjugating violence. Fanon also discusses violence – in the context of uprising and rebellion – as a means of liberation and physical, spiritual catharsis for the oppressed.

When Fanon’s book was initially published in France, it was banned almost immediately by the authorities, who saw it as a recklessly incendiary glorification of violence. This negative view was only burnished by the book’s preface, written by Fanon supporter Jean-Paul Sartre, which wholeheartedly endorsed the thesis of violence as a cleansing act and, according to Fanon biographer David Macey, overshadowed the actual work. However, as the academic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains in the brief, informative contextual preface that begins Olsson’s film, such a reading fails to appreciate Fanon’s nuance; specifically, it neglects to address his anguish – rooted in the realities of his experiences in French-ruled Algeria – at the cyclical, decidedly non-glamorous tragedy of the very poorest people being reduced, and subjected, to violence.

Concerning Violence, then, represents a welcome attempt to reframe and interrogate an influential but highly contested historical text. As in his previous film, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011), Swedish director Olsson has raided the TV news archives of his home country and emerged with a fount of grainy, absorbing footage, presumably hitherto forgotten. He structures the material into nine chapters of varying length (the film’s subtitle is Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense), and each focuses on a specific struggle for liberation in one of a number of African countries, including Angola, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso; the footage dates from the mid-1960s up to the late 1980s.

Though at first glance Concerning Violence may seem almost utilitarian in its stark, unfussy formalism, Olsson puts his personal stamp on Fanon’s work. Complementary passages from the text are narrated over the images by singer and activist Lauryn Hill, whose delivery – throaty and languid, but also somehow urgent and incantatory – seems designed to evoke the alacrity of the book’s writing: Fanon was terminally ill with leukemia when he set to work, and he composed and dictated it to his wife Josie in a remarkable ten-week spell.

For a further rhetorical, stylishly pedagogical flourish, much of the text is simultaneously imposed on screen in a white serif font. At this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Olsson mentioned that this device was inspired by the music video for Prince’s state-of-the-nation anthem Sign o’ the Times (1987). Also notable is Neo Muyanga’s subtle score of roiling, percussive jazz, augmented by peals of muted trumpet that ring out like warning clarions. This forceful stylistic unity, added to the binding agent of Fanon’s torrentially persuasive and poetic language, ensures that Concerning Violence resounds as a far more cohesive statement than The Black Power Mixtape.

Olsson and his editing team structure Concerning Violence so that the archival passages comment on each other even as they are in dialogue with Fanon’s text. Consider two back-to-back segments near the start. With Fanon’s words, delivered by Hill (“For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists”), ringing in our ears, the film picks up with a black journalist, newly released from a five-year jail spell in Rhodesia. He speaks calmly of his realisation that, from slavery to colonialism, and up to the institutionalised racism and state-sanctioned torture in the country that would become Zimbabwe, the “black man is at the bottom of everything”; torture, he says, made him “feel indifferent”.

This disturbing, layered film is mercifully free of pat attempts to bring things up to date: chronologically speaking, it concludes in 1987. Yet there’s no doubt that its final passage – in which Europe is described as “literally the creation of the third world”, and America as a “monstrous” colonial power – is intended to give the viewer plenty to process with regard to contemporary nations still suffering the pronounced after-effects of colonisation. In many cases, Fanon’s astringent words seem as relevant today as ever.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yeiGFZBbeA

Aug 31

2022

newWKOGadnim

Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering

Activism Capitalism class consciousness Communism fascism film Heinrich Heine pragmatism Social Engineering trade unions

‘Our Defeats’ Review: A striking Post-Mortem of the Revolutionary Dream

Far Out Magazine

September 8, 2021

By Swapnil Dhruv Bose

“I realized after the shooting, and some discussions with them, that it was the first time they had discussed politics.”

— filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot [Source]

French filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot, who received international acclaim for his 2015 documentary A German Youth, is back with another fascinating work called Our Defeats. Featuring a group of high school film students from the Lycée Romain Rolland in Ivry-sur-Seine who work as cast and crew, Our Defeats is a comparative study between the charged sociopolitical climate of France in the late 1960s and the prevailing attitude of modern students.

More than anything else, Our Defeats is an intellectual exercise in political thought which constantly refers to the revolutionary works of auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Alain Tanner among others. As a part of the film’s explorations, Périot makes the students recreate pivotal scenes from the vastly influential French political masterpieces from that period before asking them about trade unions, capitalism and the revolution.

In an interview, Périot explained that he wants his films to challenge the audience. “For me, cinema is first of all a place to feel,” the filmmaker said. “I like music for the same reason. But cinema is also, at least for me, as audience or filmmaker, a place to think. I do not like films where everything is clear, obvious or underlined, [whether we] talk about fictions or documentaries. I like films with contradictions, lacks, and questions.”

The powerful scenes that are enacted by the students are immediately deconstructed by the follow-up questions posed by Périot. A student quotes Chairman Mao with deadly conviction, preaching to us that “a revolution is not a dinner party… A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” However, he falters and hesitates when he is asked about his own opinions regarding capitalism and the revolution that has been indefinitely deferred.

This becomes a recurring theme, with many students voicing their disapproval of police brutality and societal oppression but not being able to appropriately address questions about the subjective definitions of abstract topics like politics in general as well as objective descriptions of important things like trade unions. As a result of the restrictive curriculum of the Ideological State Apparatus that is the school, we are confronted with the brutal reality. The people in power systematically and silently quashed the revolution before it ever began by not providing proper education to the next generation.The greatest achievement of Our Defeatsis that Périot does not pass his judgement. As a documentarian, his job is to chronicle the condition and that’s exactly what he does. The outcome is stiflingly tragic, a harrowing analysis of young school students whose vocabularies are being stripped off ideas like communism and workers’ rights. Périot starts a dialogue between the past and the present by confronting the future of the revolution that has been laid to rest by youthful cynicism, censorship and the bourgeois constructs of modernity.

[Swapnil is a Kolkata-based columnist who specialises in film history, global cinema and media studies. He is deeply interested in the dynamic frameworks of contemporary media culture and their impact on sociopolitical structures.]

Elena Lopèz Riera, Visions du Réel, 2019: “Jean-Gabriel Périot asked students of a Parisian high school to participate in an experiment on the militant filmmaking of May 68. These students will constitute the film’s technical crew and they will also be its actors, performative bodies through which the subject of politics today will be articulated. They will re-enact legendary scenes from the films of Tanner, the Groupe Medvedkine or Godard. But in the voice of these young people, the instructions of May 68 resonate poorly with regard to the contemporary world, noting that in terms of political wording there are still more doubts than certainties. What is the working class? What is capitalism? What is a trade union? Through these questions addressed to the high school students, Périot tackles a new generation, without judgement, in an attempt to answer the essential question of the film: have we failed? Thus, some of the concepts that have marked the history of 20th century ideologies, such as communism, fascism or class consciousness, are called into question by a youth that claims the right to their own voice. A film about the urgency of reformulating political debate.” [Source]

Also showing at Mubi, A German Youth. SYNOPSIS: “Germany, late 60s. The post-war generation revolts against their parents, disillusioned by anti-communist capitalism and a state in which they see fascist tendencies. This film follows the rise of The Red Army Faction, revolutionary terrorist group founded by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. OUR TAKE: “A film that opens with Godard and closes with Fassbinder can only have a combative soul. Bravely refusing audio narration, Périot’s collage of stunning archival footage from post-war Germany’s political unrest is a superb, enthralling meditation on radicalization that is of utmost relevance today.”

Apr 08

2022

newWKOGadnim

Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Canadian Labour Congress Class war. Imperialsm Lockdowns Teamsters Truckers Protest Vaccine Mandates Working Class

Why Many Progressives Misrepresented and Condemned the Ottawa Trucker Protest

Chicago ALBA Solidarity

March 27, 2022

By Stansfield Smith

“Mothers hold the line.” – Photo: Cory Morningstar, Twitter, February 18, 2022, Ottawa Truckers Protest

Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” began with protesting rules implemented in January by the Canadian and later the US governments requiring truck drivers to be fully vaccinated to enter their country. It snowballed into a demonstration against dysfunctional coronavirus restrictions. The Ottawa trucker protesters demanded: No Lockdowns, No Mandates, No Vaccine Passports, and if not, that Trudeau resign.

Working people are increasingly angry at the failures of the neoliberal regimes in Canada and the US to meet our needs. Unfortunately, we on the left are not positioned to effectively utilize this sentiment and grow our forces, leaving an open field for leaders with rightwing solutions to fill the vacuum. They played on public resentment to advocate getting the state off our backs rather than our demand that the state prioritize our well-being.

Working class activists should participate and build these protests, bring working class solutions to the problems we confront and lead the people in fighting back. Instead, many on the left condemned the trucker convoy, or sat on the sidelines, seeing themselves as mere critics, not leaders in this class struggle.

Liberal Party Prime Minister Trudeau called the truckers “a few people shouting and waving swastikas,” a “fringe minority” conspiracy theorists “with the tinfoil hats.” They “don’t believe in science.” He threatened, “Do we tolerate these people?” These elitist anti-working class statements echo Hillary Clinton’s dubbing Trump supporters “deplorables.” The hysteria led by Trudeau and the corporate media even reached the point where a Member of Parliament absurdly declared trucker honking of horns meant Heil Hitler. Trudeau’s Big Business dictated covid policies even denied visas to vaccinated Cubans because they had Cuban, not Big Pharma vaccines.

Anti-trucker Leftists Repeat Trudeau’s Smears

Many left criticisms of the truckers follow the rulers’ talking points. For instance, they spread a corporate media cartoon smear, Bryan Palmer’s condemnation of the truckers as a “lumpen” alt-right petty bourgeois protest, as well as anti-war activist Stephen Gowans’ early attack on the Ottawa occupation as “a far-right movement of racists, evangelicals, union-haters, and conspiracy-minded lunatics, inspired and supported by the likes of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Elon Musk.” Gowans complained the Ottawa police had “done nothing to liberate the city” from what were peaceful protesters.

Rather than refuting the rulers’ smears, many either repeated them or remained silent in face of the onslaught. They, in effect, allied with the imperial state’s attacks on the truckers and their working-class allies. They compounded their error by making only mild objections to the central rightwing feature of the Ottawa occupation: Trudeau using martial law measures to crush peaceful protests – measures which could be used against leftists in the future if we become a social force.

What were some of the distortions so many disseminated in their unwitting role as transmission belts for ruling class propaganda against the truckers?

That the protesters were racists and fascists was repeated over and over. Enough evidence shows this was not a racist protest (and here), It was claimed, with scant evidence, that the protest contained numerous Nazi and Confederate flags. A photo showed a man with a Nazi flag and another one or two with a Confederate flag. One man had the Nazi flag on a long pole underneath a sign on top saying “F*ck Trudeau,” which could mean he was equating Trudeau with Nazis. The person holding a Confederate flag was considered to be a provocateur made to leave the protest. Government agent provocateurs have played a role in other Canadian protests.

Benjamin Dichter, who is Jewish, and key spokesperson for the protest, said “Let’s assume there were guys there who did have a Confederate flag. They believe in the Confederacy of states’ rights in a foreign nation? I don’t care. I’m not here to police people’s ideas.” In a swipe at Trudeau, Dichter added “I want to hear unacceptable opinions because I want to challenge them.”

Another Freedom Convoy leader was Metis, Tamara Lich. Pat King, a fanatic racist in the Nazi mold, was portrayed as convoy leader, but this was denied by the actual leaders (and here).

That the right funded the trucker protest became a key charge. Republicans do fund popular protests to further their aims. So do the Democrats, as the women’s marches testify. A protest bringing out masses of people likely involves corporate political party funding. It is a political mistake to condemn or boycott movements, MeToo, Black Lives Matter, anti-vaccine mandate, or climate change protests because they had corporate donors. To condemn a protest funded by Republican corporate donors, but not those funded by Democratic ones, given these donors serve the same ruling class owners of the US, is a double standard. To do so suggests aligning ourselves with the Democratic (or Liberal) Party faction of the ruling class.

Reports on big rightwing funders of the trucker convoy failed to establish significant dollar contributions. PressProgress gave “a round up of some of the big money donors.” The corporate donors listed contributed merely $67,300 of the $10 million raised. That amounts to less than 1% of the total, showing corporate donors gave very minor support.

GiveSendGo raised another $8.6 million for the protesters. The largest, $215,000 came from an anonymous donor, $90,000 from billionaire Thomas M. Siebel, and $75,000 from another anonymous donor. Even if we assume these three are by big rightwing donors, that amounts to $380,000, 4.4% of the total.

A Washington Post article on donors noted, “Only a handful of contributors gave more than $10,000 apiece,” which does not substantiate corporate and billionaire funding of the protests.

It seems these donations do not include seed money for the Freedom Convoy, but they do show it was no “fringe,” but gained broad support.

The GoFundMe platform raised $10 million dollars for the convoy before being shut down. The reason given was for “violating the platform’s Terms of Service prohibiting the ‘promotion of violence and harassment.’” Yet no protester had been charged with violence. Defenders of civil liberties should have condemned that repression, not approve of it.

That the trucker convoy represented a social fringe is belied simply by some news reports, such as this or this.
Many falsely claimed the Freedom Convoy protesters were anti-vaxxers, pointing out that 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. However, the protesters were united against vaccine mandates, not against vaccines. Benjamin Dichter and Chris Barber, two convoy leaders, said they were not anti-vaxxers but fully vaccinated.
Some asserted the truckers were petty bourgeois owner-operators, therefore not working class, because they owned their instruments of production. Even assuming some of the truckers are in the petty bourgeoisie, that in itself is no reason to condemn a petty bourgeois movement in struggle with the big bourgeoisie.

Aren’t owner-operators among the millions of workers who companies “contract out” to cut labor expenses and increase their profits? Are Uber drivers also middle-class owner operators? Or any worker hired by a business as an “independent contractor”? This new category of atomized workers is a product of the long neoliberal offensive to weaken solidarity among workers.

Many used Trump’s support for the truckers as another reason to condemn it. That makes no more sense than saying if Biden or Trudeau opposes the protest, we should too. This liberal-left fear and loathing of Trump ignores a number of commendable statements he made on issues anti-imperialists advocate for.
Some bolstered their attacks on the truckers by referring to the Teamsters and Canadian Labour Congress. The Canadian Teamsters condemned the trucker convoy as a “despicable display of hate lead by the political Right,” but provided no evidence to back that up. The statement said nothing against the central demands of the protest. The Teamsters represent only 15,000 long haul truck drivers of the 300,000 long haul drivers in Canada.

The Canadian Labour Congress condemned the protest but was also silent on vaccine mandates. “This is not a protest, it is an occupation by an angry mob trying to disguise itself as a peaceful protest.” Of course protesters are angry, otherwise they do not protest. Being angry does not mean you are not peaceful. The CLC adds “This occupation of Ottawa streets…is having a devastating effect on the livelihood of already struggling workers and businesses.” Such statements could be used against the Occupy Movement in 2011, or against Black Lives Matter protests, as Trump did. “Frontline workers, from retail to health workers, have been bullied and harassed.” Yet so was at least one pro-trucker Ottawa store owner bullied and harassed for simply donating to the protest.

True, the Freedom Convoy had no working class demands for government action to ease the hardships workers face. Neither did the CLC or Teamsters, actual workers class organizations with the social and economic weight to have their demands met.

Many followed Trudeau and claimed the convoy organizers were violent and extremists. However, the police reported no physical violence, and none of the protest leaders were arrested for violent acts.

Tamara Lich was charged with ‘counselling for the offense of committing Mischief,” convoy leader Chris Barber for the same charge, plus “counselling to commit the offense of Disobey a Police Order” and “counselling to commit the offense of Obstruct Police.” Pat King was charged with mischief, counselling to commit the offence of mischief, counselling to commit the offence of disobey court order, and counselling to commit the offence of obstruct police.

Many had claimed they were guilty of violence, sedition, and attempting to overthrow a “democratic” government. Here they are, charged with “counseling” mischief (interfering with or destroying someone’s property), telling people to defy a court order or police order. What activists have ever been innocent of these charges?

It was claimed the police had treated the protesters with kid gloves. Maybe. Yet, once the police cracked down, they used horses to trample some protesters. When the 2011 union protesters in Madison Wisconsin seized the Capitol building – not for a day but for weeks – the police were not only letting us enter and exit, but periodically joined the protest (and here). That was no sign that the Madison protests were rightwing, nor did leftists object to their solidarity.

As Caleb Maupin pointed out, liberals and leftists took the Fox News playbook to denounce the Black Lives Matter movement and used the same methods to attack the trucker protest. Those who support Black Lives Matter suddenly were okay with police repression of the Ottawa protests. By favoring government crackdown on peaceful protests, we gave the ruling class rope to hang ourselves with.

Working Class and Rightwing Programs towards Covid and Health care

Being vaccinated protects you from getting very sick if you have underlying conditions but does not protect you from being infected or infecting others. People know that, so resent government vaccine requirements.

Mandates work when applied by governments that put the protection of citizens over the protection of corporate profits – not the case in the United States or Canada. Targeted lockdowns once covid makes its appearance, constant testing of the population, combined with a wide array of public health measures neither Canada nor the US ever instituted, has enabled China to almost eliminate deaths from covid.

China contained covid long before their vaccine was even developed. China provided house to house care for those locked down, constant and widespread testing, as well as relatively free health care for all. As a result, China has had three covid related deaths since January 2021, while the US has had one million.

Nicaragua, which has a free, universal preventive health care system, has by far the lowest covid death rate per million inhabitants of all the Americas, yet never instituted any sort of mandate or lockdown, beyond wearing a mask inside public buildings.

Participate in the Ottawa Protests with Working Class Demands

While the demands of the trucker protest had some merit, the Freedom Convoy leaders were ideologically rightwing. Their view of health care as an individual responsibility does not conflict with the neoliberal model. This benefits those with the privileges and financial resources to handle it.

Our working class view sees the state as the protector of public health, since health is a public issue, not simply a “free” individual’s responsibility.

We missed an opportunity to participate in the Ottawa occupation and organize working class solidarity with our message: government should meet the health and economic needs of the people affected by the pandemic; the government protects big business and big pharma super profits during the pandemic while our standard of living suffers; health care is a community issue and should be a human right. It should focus on prevention, with continuous education of the public, and establish clinics in every neighborhood, cultivating regular interaction between the health workers and the community.

If we fail to help lead workers and popular struggles, we leave the field open for middle class or rightwing leaders. Even the sometimes liberal Nation recognized, “the far-right origins of the protest shouldn’t be an excuse for ignoring the fact it is attracting the support of a segment of the population that doesn’t identify with the far right but does feel economically marginalized and hurt by a pandemic now entering its third year…Those who have sympathy for the convoy tend to be poorer, younger, and less educated.”

Some activists did stand for the working class approach to the Ottawa occupation. Dust James, a trucker, encouraged the left to join the protesters and explain to them that all truckers share a common problem with others: small businesses and workers are being crushed by the larger monopolies, big banks are ripping off all of us.

Richard Wolff said leftists made a serious error by not actively participating in and solidarizing with the trucker protest, showing workers how to use their power to achieve their demands. A struggle to push back against mandates that don’t work can ignite actions against other policies that don’t serve people’s interests. Struggles often begin as a fight against a specific injustice, eventually opening the door to struggles on more fundamental issues.

Leila Mechoui and Max Blumenthal applauded actions by working class people to improve their situation and resist impositions by private and public authorities. The truckers protest scared the rulers because they fear losing their control over who determines how society is run. They don’t want workers thinking they should have some say in societal decision-making. They don’t want workers to start thinking “why should we do what the bosses tell us to do if it doesn’t make sense.”

Richard Wolff and Jimmy Dore emphasized we should be and can be everywhere workers are struggling. “The left should not put itself in a situation where the protesters can lump them together with the authorities as enemies of their struggle, which is the case now.” Here, the left isolated themselves from the working class by attacking the movement as a whole.

Why Many Repeated Ruling Class Liberal Smears of the Truckers

Being an anti-war writer like Stephen Gowans does not mean you have close connections with working class struggles at home. Likewise, many working class fighters do not possess an anti-imperialist outlook. Unfortunately, working class and anti-war fighters often operate in distinct social and political milieus.

Many have made critiques of the convoy and Ottawa occupation, such as a recent webinar by left intellectuals. Yet the problem we face is that the function of a working class leftwing goes beyond evaluating a movement. Our function should be to create a plan of action to participate in and help lead social struggles in a working class direction through demands that benefit the working classes as a whole. We are not there, nor are we making headway in building the army of working class activists needed to carry it out.

At present, far too many critics of the truckers feel in their heart of hearts that our white working class is full of “deplorables.” That illustrates the current disconnect of leftists from the white working class. Too many feel the working class may be the force that will overthrow capitalism and build a just society, but not with the working class we have. This white working class today is too ignorant, bigoted, backwards, bought-off, too white privileged. If it is not kept in check, things could only get worse.

So, where do they turn for a social power to rotate around for building progressive social change? Often it means to the more enlightened intelligentsia, the more progressive politicians. That leads to the Democratic Party or the Canadian versions: pressure them from the left and build support for them in their struggle against Trumpers. This approach became pronounced as fear of Trumpism grew.

This may explain why many on the left repeated Trudeau’s smears and may be why they – who normally support workers – sided with the government against working people when they organized and protested. Such an approach, if not corrected, leads to more police state repression and an increasingly divided working class confused over where to turn to solve their problems.

Nov 24

2021

newWKOGadnim

Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Class Analysis COVID-19 Ethics neoliberalism Vaccine Passports

The Left’s Covid Failure

Unherd

November 24, 2021

By Toby Green and Thomas Fazi

Antonio Berni, Manifestación, 1934

Amplifying the crisis is no way to rebuild trust

Throughout the various phases of the global pandemic, people’s preferences in terms of epidemiological strategies have tended to overlap closely with their political orientation. Ever since Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro expressed doubts as to the wisdom of a lockdown strategy in March 2020, liberals and those on the Left of the Western political spectrum, including most socialists, have fallen over themselves to adhere in public to the lockdown strategy of pandemic mitigation — and lately to the logic of vaccine passports. Now as countries across Europe experiment with tighter restrictions of the unvaccinated, Left-wing commentators — usually so vocal in the defence of minorities suffering from discrimination — are notable for their silence.

As writers who have always positioned ourselves on the Left, we are disturbed at this turn of events. Is there really no progressive criticism to be made about the quarantining of healthy individuals, when the latest research suggests there is a vanishingly small difference in terms of transmission between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? The Left’s response to Covid now appears as part of a broader crisis in Left-wing politics and thought — one which has been going on for three decades at least. So it’s important to identify the process through which this has taken shape.

In the first phase of the pandemic — the lockdowns phase — it was those leaning towards the cultural and economic right who were more likely to emphasise the social, economic and psychological damage resulting from lockdowns. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s initial lockdown scepticism made this position untenable for most of those leaning towards the cultural and economic Left. Social media algorithms then further fuelled this polarisation. Very quickly, therefore, Western leftists embraced lockdown, seen as a “pro-life” and “pro-collective” choice — a policy that, in theory, championed public health or the collective right to health. Meanwhile any criticism of the lockdowns was excoriated as a “right-wing”, “pro-economy” and “pro-individual” approach, accused of prioritising “profit” and “business as usual” over people’s lives.

In sum, decades of political polarisation instantly politicised a public health issue, without allowing any discussion as to what a coherent Left response would be. At the same time, the Left’s position distanced it from any kind of working-class base, since low-income workers were the most severely affected by the socio-economic impacts of continued lockdown policies, and were also those most likely to be out working while the laptop class benefitted from Zoom. These same political fault lines emerged during the vaccine roll-out, and now during the Covid passports phase. Resistance associates with the Right, while those on the mainstream Left are generally supportive of both measures. Opposition is demonised as a confused mixture of anti-science irrationalism and individualistic libertarianism.

But why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures? How did such a simplistic view of the relationship between health and the economy emerge, one which makes a mockery of decades of (Left-leaning) social science research showing just how closely wealth and health outcomes are connected? Why did the Left ignore the massive increase in inequalities, the attack on the poor, on poor countries, on women and children, the cruel treatment of the elderly, and the huge increase in wealth for the richest individuals and corporations resulting from these policies? How, in relation to the development and roll-out of vaccines, did the Left end up ridiculing the very notion that, given the money at stake, and when BioNTech, Moderna and Pfizer currently make between them over US$1,000 per second from the Covid vaccines, there might be motivations from the vaccine manufacturers other than “the public good” at play? And how is it possible that the Left, often on the receiving end of state repression, today seems oblivious to the worrying ethical and political implications of Covid passports?

While the Cold War coincided with the era of decolonisation and the rise of a global anti-racist politics, the end of the Cold War – alongside the symbolic triumph of decolonisation politics with the end of apartheid – ushered in an existential crisis for Left-wing politics. The rise of neoliberal economic hegemony, globalisation, and corporate trans-nationalism, have all undermined the Left’s historic view of the state as an engine of redistribution. Combined with this is the realisation that, as the Brazilian theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger has argued, the Left has always prospered most at times of great crisis — the Russian Revolution benefited from the World War One, and welfare capitalism from the aftermath of the World War Two. This history may partly explain the Left’s positioning today: amplifying the crisis and prolonging it through never-ending restrictions may be seen by some as a way to rebuild Left politics after decades of existential crisis.

The Left’s flawed understanding of the nature of neoliberalism may also have affected its response to the crisis. Most people on the Left believe that neoliberalism has involved a “retreat” or “hollowing out” of the state in favour of the market. Thus, they interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing neoliberalism’s allegedly anti-statist project. The problem with this argument, even accepting its dubious logic, is that neoliberalism hasn’t entailed a withering away of the state. On the contrary, the size of the state as a percentage of GDP has continued to rise throughout the neoliberal era.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neoliberalism relies on extensive state intervention just as much as “Keynesianism” did, except that the state now intervenes almost exclusively to further the interests of big capital – to police the working classes, bail out large banks and firms that would otherwise go bankrupt, etc. Indeed, in many ways, capital today is more dependent on the state than ever. As Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan note: “[A]s capitalism develops, governments and large corporations become increasingly intertwined. … The capitalist mode of power and the dominant-capital coalitions that rule it do not require small governments. In fact, in many respects, they need larger ones”. Neoliberalism today is more akin to a form of state-monopoly capitalism – or corporatocracy – than the kind of small-state free-market capitalism that it often claims to be. This helps explain why it has produced increasingly powerful, interventionist, and even authoritarian state apparatuses.

This in itself makes the Left’s cheering at a non-existent “return of the state” embarrassingly naïve. And the worst part is that it has made this mistake before. Even in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, many on the Left hailed large government deficits as “the return of Keynes” – when, in fact, those measures had very little to do with Keynes, who counselled the use of government spending to reach full employment, and instead were aimed at bolstering the culprits of the crisis, the big banks. They were also followed by an unprecedented attack on welfare systems and workers’ rights across Europe.

Something similar is happening today, as state contracts for Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies are parcelled out to transnational corporations (often through shady deals that reek of cronyism). Meanwhile, citizens are having their lives and livelihoods upended by “the new normal”. That the Left seems completely oblivious to this is particularly puzzling. After all, the idea that governments tend to exploit crises to further entrench the neoliberal agenda has been a staple of much recent Left-wing literature. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, for example, have argued that under neoliberalism, crisis has become a “method of government”. More famously, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explored the idea of “disaster capitalism”. Her central thesis is that in moments of public fear and disorientation it is easier to re-engineer societies: dramatic changes to the existing economic order, which would normally be politically impossible, are imposed in rapid-fire succession before the public has had time to understand what is happening.

There’s a similar dynamic at play today. Take, for example, the high-tech surveillance measures, digital IDs, crackdown on public demonstrations and fast-tracking of laws introduced by governments to combat the coronavirus outbreak. If recent history is anything to go by, governments will surely find a way to make many of the emergency rules permanent – just as they did with much post-9/11 anti-terrorist legislation. As Edward Snowden noted: “When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky. The emergency tends to be expanded”. This confirms, too, the ideas on the “state of exception” posited by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has nonetheless been vilified by the mainstream Left for his anti-lockdown position.

Ultimately, any form of government action should be judged for what it actually stands for. We support government intervention if it serves to further the rights of workers and minorities, to create full employment, to provide crucial public services, to rein in corporate power, to correct the dysfunctionalities of markets, to take control of crucial industries in the public interest. But in the past 18 months we have witnessed the exact opposite: an unparalleled strengthening of transnational corporate behemoths and their oligarchs at the expense of workers and local businesses. A report last month based on Forbes data showed that America’s billionaires alone have seen their wealth increase by US$2 trillion during the pandemic.

Another Left-wing fantasy that has been shuttered by reality is the notion that the pandemic would usher in a new sense of collective spirit, capable of overcoming decades of neoliberal individualism. On the contrary, the pandemic has fractured societies even more – between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, between those who can reap the benefits of smart working and those who can’t. Moreover, a demos made up of traumatised individuals, torn apart from their loved ones, made to fear one another as a potential vectors of disease, terrified of physical contact – is hardly a good breeding ground for collective solidarity.

Antonio Berni, Juanito dormido

But perhaps the Left’s response can be better understood in individual rather than collective terms. Classic psychoanalytic theory has posited a clear connection between pleasure and authority: the experience of great pleasure (satiating the pleasure principle) can often be followed by a desire for renewed authority and control manifested by the ego or “reality principle”. This can indeed produce a subverted form of pleasure. The last two decades of globalisation have seen a huge expansion of the “pleasure of experience”, as shared by the increasingly transnational global liberal class – many of whom, somewhat curiously in historical terms, identified themselves as on the Left (and indeed increasingly usurped this position from the traditional working-class constituencies of the Left). This mass increase in pleasure and experience among the liberal class went with a growing secularism and lack of any recognised moral constraint or authority. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the support from this class for “Covid measures” is quite readily explained in these terms: as the desired appearance of a coterie of restrictive and authoritarian measures which can be imposed to curtail pleasure, within the strictures of a moral code which steps in where one had previously been lacking.

Another factor explaining the Left’s embrace of “Covid measures” is its blind faith in “science”. This has its roots in the Left’s traditional faith in rationalism. However, one thing is believing in the undeniable virtues of the scientific method – another is being completely oblivious to the way those in power exploit “science” to further their agenda. Being able to appeal to “hard scientific data” to justify one’s policy choices is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of governments – it is, in fact, the essence of technocracy. However, this means carefully selecting the “science” that is supportive of your agenda – and aggressively marginalising any alternative views, regardless of their scientific value.

This has been happening for years in the realm of economics. Is it really that hard to believe that such a corporate capture is happening today with regard to medical science? Not according to John P. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University. Ioannidis made headlines in early 2021 when he published, with some colleagues of his, a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. The backlash against the paper – and against Ioannidis in particular – was fierce, especially among his fellow scientists.

This explains his recent scathing denunciation of his own profession. In an article entitled “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Ioannidis notes that most people – especially on the Left — seem to think that science operates based on “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism”. But, alas, that is not how the scientific community actually operates, Ioannidis explains. With the pandemic, conflicts of corporate interest exploded – and yet talking about them became anathema. He continues: “Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science – and science lost”.

Ultimately, the Left’s blatant disregard and mockery of people’s legitimate concerns (over lockdowns, vaccines or Covid passports) is shameful. Not only are these concerns rooted in actual hardship but they also stem from an understandable distrust of governments and institutions that have been undeniably captured by corporate interests. Anyone who favours a truly progressive-interventionist state, as we do, needs to address these concerns – not dismiss them.

But where the Left’s response has been found most wanting is on the world stage, in terms of the relationship of Covid restrictions to deepening poverty in the Global South. Has it really nothing to say about the enormous increase in child marriage, the collapse in schooling, and the destruction of formal employment in Nigeria, where the State Statistics agency suggests 20% of people lost their jobs during the lockdowns? What about the reality that the country with the highest Covid mortality figures and excess death rate for 2020 was Peru – which had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns? On all this, it has been virtually silent. This position must be considered in relation to the pre-eminence of nationalist politics on the world stage: the electoral failure of Left internationalists such as Jeremy Corbyn meant that broader global issues had little traction when considering a broader Western Left response to Covid-19.

It is worth mentioning that there have been outliers on the Left – radical-left and socialist movements that have come out against the prevailing management of the pandemic. These include Black Lives Matter in New York, Left Lockdown Sceptics in the UK, the Chilean urban left, Wu Ming in Italy and not least the Social Democrat-Green alliance which currently governs Sweden. But the full spectrum of Left opinion was ignored, partly due to the small number of Left-wing media outlets, but also due to the marginalisation of dissenting opinions first and foremost by the mainstream Left.

Mainly, though, this has been a historic failure from the Left, which will have disastrous consequences. Any form of popular dissent is likely to be hegemonized once again by the (extreme) Right, poleaxing any chance the Left has of winning round the voters it needs to overturn Right-wing hegemony. Meanwhile, the Left holds on to a technocracy of experts severely undermined by what is proving to be a catastrophic handling of the pandemic in terms of social progressivism. As any kind of viable electable Left fades into the past, the discussion and dissent at the heart of any true democratic process is likely to fade with it.

[Toby Green is a professor of history at Kings College London. His latest book is The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (Hurst).]

[Thomas Fazi is a writer, journalist and translator. His latest book ‘Reclaiming the State’ is published by Pluto Press. @battleforeurope]

Mar 13

2021

newWKOGadnim

Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Coca-Cola Fourth Industrial Revolution Global Shapers Great Reset Greenpeace New Power Procter & Gamble Salesforce Saving Capitalism Social Engineering TIME Magazine UpLink World Economic Forum Youth Demographic

The Shapers of Slavery – A Global Project of the World Economic Forum [Winter Oak Series]

Winter Oak

January, 2021

“The Shapers of Slavery”. A 5-part investigation of the World Economic Forum’s “Global Shapers” initiative – by Winter Oak.

“Over 900 Global Shapers joined World Economic Forum Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab for talks on the Great Reset initiative. Putting the world back on a path towards inclusive and sustainable development will require more than a global recovery. It will require a Great Reset that places all citizens, especially young people, at the heart of social and economic systems.” — Global Shapers Community Annual Report 2019–2020

Source: http://killercoke.org/

Part I, January 9, 2021:

Shapers of slavery: the plan

Excerpt:

“But, in fact, Schwab’s Great Reset is not just rhetoric: he and his corporate accomplices have been busy, for many years, building up a massive networks of collaborators to spring their heist.

One of these is the Global Shapers Community, set up by Schwab in 2011, registered in Geneva, Switzerland, and based at the World Economic Forum offices.”

Global Shapers – The Foundation Board

Part II, January 10, 2021:

Shapers of slavery: the leadership

Excerpt:

“A democratic society shapes itself – by means of the participation of its citizens in discussing and deciding how things should be organised and to what ends.

But, as even their name reveals, the Global Shapers want to “shape” society from above and in their own interests.”

Part III, January 11, 2021:

Shapers of slavery: the empire

Excerpt:

“This is a world of “social impact investing”, of lucrative human and natural “capital”, a world of blockchain, robotics and AI, of equity funds and pharmaceutical businesses, a world of exponential profit and exploitation hidden behind a rhetoric of “inclusivity”, “sustainability” and “systemic change”.

World Economic Forum Electoral Candidates, British Columbia, Canada, 2020

Part IV, January 12, 2021:

Shapers of slavery: the virus

Excerpt:

“As the pandemic awakened the collective to long-standing system gaps, we mobilized a global community to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”

March 19, 2020, Twitter: Global Shapers Response to COVID-19

“As the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation, the World Economic Forum, acting as partner to the World Health Organization, is mobilizing all stakeholders to protect lives and livelihoods.”

Part V, January 13, 2021:

Shapers of slavery: the awakening

Excerpt:

“We would encourage everyone to explore and expose the identity and activities of hubs in their own area, starting with the information the Global Shapers have so helpfully provided for us.

We would also encourage you to seek out your local Global Shapers and confront them with questions, whether via social media or in the real world.”

#WeSeeEqual – a Procter & Gamble’s (P&G’s) Gender-Equality Corporate Branding Campaign

Mar 11

2021

newWKOGadnim

Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Capitalism Class Warfare Faux Left Imperialism Social Engineering The "Great Reset"

The Mechanism of Invisible Hand, Invisible Cage, and Invisible Empire over Humanity and Nature

Dissident Voice

February 9, 2021

By Hiroyuki Hamada

When the whole society becomes a theater of absurdity, the puppeteers become kings and queens of insanity. The society loses its logic, history, facts, honesty, sincerity, creativity and imagination, as the monstrous imaginations of the deranged ruling class devour humanity and nature.

The invisible cage of authoritarianism comes in the shape of a bottomless pyramid. Fear and hopelessness fill the dimly lit bottom layers. Layers and layers separate us, alienate us and dehumanize us. The? pain of “others” becomes your gain. The power of oppressors becomes your safety: The safety of living in the dangerous imaginations of the kings and queens.

But? such a thought vanishes as quickly as our minds get flooded back with the numbing noises of the insane theater, while our remaining logic, seriousness and honesty are ridiculed and attacked by fearful fellow humans with cynicism, hopelessness and cowardliness.

The world doesn’t look like that at all for those who belong to the club of kings and queens. The unruly mass with no understanding of the righteous path of “humanity” has been inherently expendable for them. This has been shown over and over: colonization of natives by Europeans, enslavement of African people, genocides of many sorts.

But one also sees the same blunt inhumanity embedded among us today: homelessness, deaths by treatable diseases, hunger, deaths by substance abuse, suicide, poverty, refugees, mass incarceration, state violence, the psychological torture of alienation. The kings and queens don’t recognize those as issues to be solved with their resources. Instead those issues represent forms of punishment for those who fail to secure viable positions within the capitalist hierarchy. The fear of the punishment and the fear of the authority work together to lock us in positions in the hierarchy, forcing us to protect our positions which systemically and structurally threaten our well-being 24/7; we live in a system of structural extortion.

As we have become free-range people in the “divine farm” of modern-day kings and queens, we have lost our access to the fundamental material reality. A sterile cage with screens, mandatory injections, electronic tracking within the invisible fence; human mice for profits, feed for data harvesting, an ever greater degree of spiritual death. It is not hard to start connecting the dots to see how things can lead into a grim future.

But what does such a fear do to the population, which has tolerated an assortment of abuses as their “punishment”? To those who manage to ignore their fellow humans living on the streets as invisible beings or fail to feel the pain of those being cornered into substance use and desperate acts of self-destruction?

Would they believe the words of those who question, or the words of the ruling class promising a glorious future of AI, green capitalism, genetic engineering, digitization and financialization?

And before we ask such a question, one must wonder if such a question is even allowed when the socioeconomic/political trajectory of the empire has been firmly within the imperial framework of the two capitalist political parties.

The capitalist hierarchy absorbs what it needs by allocating special positions within it: Natural resources, narratives, facts, history, people, political ideologies or anything that sits in time and space. The kings and queens monopolize them— material resources as well as people with skills and knowledge are captured to serve. Once monopolized, the valued items are commodified, to be distributed in ways that benefit those same kings and queens.

Meanwhile such a process occurs in layers and layers, projecting myths, exploitative narratives, false history and erroneous facts onto our collective consciousness—a fake reality which covers our eyes while we push our mortal bodies around in the real world.

The images projected onto our psyche vary according to our positions in the hierarchy. Each narrative validates and justifies our positions in the hierarchy. Kings and queens find themselves to be worthy rulers of the universe, while the masses see themselves as freedom loving people who do their best in a world of opportunities.

In such an equation authoritarianism presents itself as a swinging pendulum between fascism and social democracy as it moves forward on the capitalist path in space and time. The carrot and stick carefully manage projected images to stay within the capitalist framework of acceptable ideas. Corporate politics and corporate activism play crucial roles in making the pendulum swing, therefore ensuring that the capitalist interests always go forward while appearing to be “democratic”.

Those who rely on terrorist tactics of various sorts attempt to resist the system by attacking the valuable, captured elements that work for the system. The damage compromises social dynamics in ways that deprive those who are already deprived, while dividing the population that should be uniting to dismantle the oppressive system.

Guided by agent provocateurs and corporate NGOs, righteous anger against oppressors turns into a justification for draconian measures, destruction of communities for urban renewal, and a catalyst for new projects of exploitation.

As a set of capitalist imperatives pushes the capitalist contradiction to the limit, completely depriving people’s ability to reconcile the false perceptions and the material reality, it is time for an urgent mobilization to change the trajectory of exploitation into a new field with a new set of rules. We are told that enemies are coming, a natural disaster is coming or a disease is coming, forcing us to mobilize ourselves to adjust to a new path of plundering for the kings and queens.

Any crisis, real or not, against the backdrop of a hierarchical structure imposes two sets of momentum that keep us within the capitalist farm. The first set has to do with fear of the authority, which keeps our frustration directed against ourselves, each other and oppressed “others”, while firmly gripping the destabilized psyche of the population—creating an ironic psychology of supporting oppressive authority against our own interests. The second set has to do with the material constraints imposed by the particular crisis—we become enemies to each other fighting amongst ourselves to survive. We are put in the capitalist cage. And we are forced to protect our cage, which is constructed with vertical strength to withstand fear of the authority, horizontal strength to withstand attacks by competitors, and a solid floor to prevent one from falling down from the position in the hierarchy. The whole structure is held together with violent force of exploitation and subjugation.

“The Great Reset”

“The Great Reset” is packaged as a “great solution”. Just like how the ruling class has marketed “green capitalism”—carbon trading, carbon capture, reforestation, and other resource exhausting green schemes and technologies for profit, it’s designed to prop up capitalism but it is also intended to transform capitalism to have more effective control of social relations while keeping the capitalist hierarchy intact. Capitalism is getting a new OS, and it needs to be restarted. Just as “green capitalism” has destroyed real environmentalism in the name of saving the planet, it is designed to destroy anti-capitalist activism in the name of “revolution”.

One of the prominent leftist tools under a capitalist framework has been grass roots activism to affect state regulations and state guidelines to contain momentums of exploitation and subjugation created by Wall Street as well as capitalist social institutions. The stock market guided economy (falsely advertised as the only system that works) allows the ruling class to dominate social policies according to their interests; it prioritizes ruling class wealth accumulation while sacrificing social relations among the general population; it is extremely inefficient, unstable and economically unjust. The capitalist state has been a great tool in ensuring the interests of the ruling class to be a priority. The socialist revolution takes over the capitalist state, it nationalizes corporate entities and sets up the economy, education and the rest of social institutions and social relations to be guided by people’s interests. Various incarnations of the above strategies to counter capitalist exploitation and encroaching imperial hegemony have attempted to do two major things. First, they have prioritized people’s interests by emphasizing projects that benefit the general population while providing social safety nets, infrastructure for the people, environmental regulations and so on. Second, they have allowed economic activities based on people’s needs which can grow organic community dynamics based on humanity and nature.

“The Great Reset,” on the other hand, is a project of the ruling class meant to take away those measures from the people and utilize them to further solidify their dominance over the people. Since the owners of the farm are plenty rich already, they won’t need a big farm. Their social engineering skills as well as the greater control over the economy will be put to a test in building a sustainable farming business with a smaller herd.

This is why it seems that all activism has turned into enforcing or defying the various virus lockdown measures which have been instrumental in enforcing the trajectory of “The Great Reset.” Remember how all environmental activism was swallowed by the single idea of reducing carbon emission? Fearmongering slogans of apocalyptic narratives involving climate change, strong NGO guided activism, and corporate science emphasizing the topic of global warming have created the huge snowballing momentum to fight climate change at all costs, sidelining and co-opting all other important environmental activism. This has also contributed to the idea that it is no longer relevant to insist on being a part of systematic efforts in dismantling the capitalist system and building an alternate system which allows humanity and nature to prevail in harmony; we are told that we don’t have time to build socialism anymore. We are encouraged to be a part of green solutions by the capitalists as a result.

We are being told that casino capitalism for profits must end to introduce “stakeholder capitalism”. But of course, since the notion is coming from the profiteers who have colonized, corporatized, militarized and financialized, we can presume that they are talking about ensuring their own interests by directly guiding the economic decisions instead of continuing the show called the economy by the “invisible hand.” We are told that we should be provided with universal basic income, free housing and other social services as long as we follow the regulations and policies of public-private partnership. What sort of conditioning will we be subjected to after being deprived of our inherent relationships to ourselves, to each other, to our communities and to nature, forced to be a part of destructive industrial farming, digitalization of everything with massive resource extraction, colonization of our communities with multinational franchises and enslavement of our souls in the invisible cage of indoctrination and propaganda? We already have such a system in the US—it’s called mass incarceration in the private prison system. We are being told that the economy must not be merely guided by growth and it must be replaced by a sustainable one. However, coming from those who have greatly restricted meaningful economic growth among the general population in order to subject livelihoods to the brutal capitalist framework, what they really mean is to restrict productive social relations among the people so that they must subsist with bare minimum requirements, eventually cornered to be a smaller herd, more manageable with less resources—an economic solution which can only be conceived by criminal minds. Who knows what role vaccines will play in it. Who knows what sort of living hell people will be subjected to as our lives are treated like numbers in high frequency trading, or our entire lives are put on hold by AI customer representatives.

Note how the policies will be designed to be achieved by co-opting leftist agendas. The invisible hand has been busy building a brand new invisible cage to perpetuate the violent reign of kings and queens in the name of “revolution”—a fascist revolution that is.

Now, I would like to emphasize that these trajectories are not set in stone. The problem is that those possibilities are highly unlikely to be examined by concerned people within the capitalist framework. There is a structural problem in the system. Let me go back to the pendulum. Just like any other capitalist social institution, the capitalist political institution serves the ruling class; it can serve as a crime laundering devise. As soon as a topic involving criminal activities is destined to be “political”—it dissociates itself from criminal elements and becomes “legitimate”. Various social institutions kick in to support such a view since they are all funded by the ruling class—media presents it as such, legislature codifies it as such, executive branch executes it as such, judicial branch judges it as such, academics support it as such, educational institution cements it as such and so on. It becomes normalized to be a part of social policies. Once the topic is on the political table embellished with a glorious history and myths of the nationhood of the United States of America, the topic becomes officially “political”, not criminal, and it is now safely and generously handled by the corporate entities.

The rendered topic floats in an artificial realm of political myths, tradition, and the gladiator battle culture of political authorities as a commodified symbol representing a fictitious version of the actual topic. Ordinary people can’t approach it coherently for what it is anymore unless they are rich and influential enough to access all moneyed social institutions. Moreover, all the criminal records of officials are discarded, forgiven and forgotten as a new regime comes in every four years.

This is how destructive foreign policies of colonialism, corporatism and militarism, and exploitative predatory domestic policies of all sorts have been implemented against people in the name of freedom, justice and humanity. This is how environmental concerns have turned into “green capitalism”. This is how we are being mobilized today under the guise of virus lockdowns.

People watch and cheer the pendulum swing between political extremes within the capitalist framework. Bits and pieces of awareness beyond the imperial framework can only be perceived with tools approved by the framework, effectively keeping those with the awareness within the ideas of the ruling class. If you hold a world view that does not fit in it, you end up being categorized as a supporter of a political villain or simply labeled as “fascist”, “communist” and so on. Needless to say those terms are solely defined by acceptable ideas, acceptable history and acceptable myths of the capitalist hegemony. The fact that the US government has supported fascist regimes across the globe while brutally intervening against socialist countries across the globe won’t be admitted for instance.

How Capitalist Hierarchy Shapes Ideas

If one holds a view that defies the prevalent narrative, the individual can become a target of the authority as well as a target of multiple political extremes within the capitalist hegemony. For instance, if you oppose Israeli war crimes from an anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist position, you can be persecuted as a dissident by the establishment, while being labeled as anti-Semitic by supporters of Israeli policies. (You may also be labeled a Zionist shill by those who believe that Jews are taking over the world and so on). The position that points out that Israel is a crucial part of the imperial structure, serving the imperial hierarchy while benefiting from its generous support, cannot be fully discussed due to how narratives are formed by the network of the imperial institutions.

The political pendulum doesn’t only create an illusion of “democracy”, it also defines what is acceptable while tearing communities apart. It utilizes its violence as a springboard to perpetuate and strengthen its grip on the exploited. That’s why the living hell for Palestinian people keeps functioning as a devise for imperialism—the more Palestinians suffer, the more anti-Semitic sentiment emerges, which in turn justifies Israeli violence, which in turn serves the imperial agendas. That’s why victims of Katarina had to be victimized by “urban renewal” after going through the gravely tragic event. Capitalist hegemony does not allow an honest discussion because imperialism is kept invisible by default, the capitalist cage is invisible and the guiding hand of capitalists is invisible. The capitalist framework simply corners people into having dead-end arguments. Period.

With the virus situation, we are told that there are good people who wear masks and stay home and bad people who selfishly defy the rules and spread “conspiracy theories”. The dynamics among acceptable narratives within the capitalist framework create the circular arguments of a screaming match. These dynamics exclude and belittle any understanding which goes beyond the artificial range of ideas created by the capitalist institutions: you are fake news, you are a denier, you are a conspiracy theorist, you are a grandma killer, communists are taking over and so on. Without recognizing this mechanism, any attempt to unify the momentums will result in a populism which emulates the existing social structure—another reactionary revolution at best, but more likely it will create more divisions and destabilization among the people, resulting in perpetuation of the capitalist hierarchy. This is why there is no discussion of accountability for the death and suffering created by lockdown measures and there is no discussion about the meaning of why we are going through a structural shift. And when the deaths and sufferings will be put on the political table, financial vultures will devour them in the emerging social impact bond markets (see studies by Wrench in the Gears).

The invisible hand that is supposed to guide us to freedom, justice and humanity has created an empire ruled by the unprecedented accumulation of power for the few. The invisible hand has created an invisible cage over us, and it has been blinding us and dividing us, allowing the ruling class to exploit us and subjugate us.

Now, it must be clearly stated that what we perceive as the dystopian future of The Fourth Industrial Revolution—AI, blockchain, digitalization, financialization, green capitalism and so on—can’t be separated from the invisible hand and the invisible cage. It cannot be allowed to be defined by capitalist institutions as a “legitimate political topic” instead of what it really is. The newly built cage hasn’t been built, but if we fail to see it for what it is in its context, we will simply be forced to embrace some version of it as one of the “legitimate” capitalist trajectories. That’s how it works when our society is a theater of absurdity.

I want to live a life that breaks open the invisible cage and firmly shake hands with nature and humanity. If you have stuck around this far with me, I trust that you feel the same…or not. Either way, we must start our conversations.

Further Readings

Wrong Kind of Green Website

John Steppling Website

Winter Oak Website

Wrench in the Gear Website

[Hiroyuki Hamada is an artist. He has exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe and is represented by Lori Bookstein Fine Art. He has been awarded various residencies including those at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Edward F. Albee Foundation/William Flanagan Memorial Creative Person’s Center, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the MacDowell Colony. In 1998 Hamada was the recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, and in 2009 he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives and works in New York.]

Jan 09

2021

newWKOGadnim

Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering

Amazon Apple California Teachers Association (CTA) Chan Zuckerberg Foundation Digital Austerity Education Fourth Industrial Revolution Global Education Coalition Google Great Reset HP Lenovo Michael Bloomberg Microsoft Silicon Valley T-Mobile Teachers Union

The Virtual Education Shock Doctrine

California’s online-schooling model is a glimpse into the future of digital austerity.

The Bellows

October 4, 2020

By Alex Gutentag

(Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters)

In California, the nation’s most populous state, 90% of students started the school year entirely online. When schools closed in March, 50% of low-income California students lacked the necessary technology to access distance learning. Broader tech distribution was available for the 2020-21 school year thanks to donations from companies like HP, Lenovo, Amazon, Apple, T-Mobile, Microsoft, and Google. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey even personally donated $10 million to the city of Oakland’s tech initiative. With chromebooks and wifi hotspots now available for every student, California legislators and corporations congratulated themselves on closing the “digital divide.”

Despite their improved tech access, many students have more pressing material needs. Over 260,000 California students experience homelessness every year, and over 20% of California children live below the poverty line. The tech industry has not made massive donations to medical and therapy services, which low-income students often receive through community schools. Likewise, there is no private backing for the state’s free grab-and-go meals program.

Distance learning is a sleight of hand. Framed as a panacea, online education is actually the vehicle for a long-desired economic restructuring.

Online schooling will generate a treasure trove of data tech firms can buy and sell. Free meals will not. Silicon Valley boasts a yearly output of $275 billion and has a GDP similar to that of Qatar. Yet California, the world’s fifth largest economy, is currently withholding $11 billion from schools. Districts have been given IOUs for state funding and will not be reimbursed until next year. In contrast, California billionaires increased their net worth by over 25.5% ($175 billion) in the first three months of the pandemic.

Students throughout California are now stuck at home in hot, crowded rooms that occasionally fill with wildfire smoke. 19% of these students are English language learners and almost 13% of them have disabilities. Every day on Zoom they fall more and more behind both academically and socially. In Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district, students are receiving 90-170 minutes of daily live instruction (depending on their age), after which they are expected to do independent work. Compared to the traditional six- or seven-hour school day, online education is laughably inadequate.

In real time, teachers and families are watching important developmental windows close for vulnerable children. Meanwhile the California Democratic Party and its affiliates tout virtual schooling as a solution for mitigating COVID-19 transmission. This policy is the result of an alignment between the Democratic Party, corporate power, and a bureaucratic teachers’ union. The purpose of their alignment is to rationalize austerity and boost commercial profits. Distance learning is a sleight of hand. Framed as a panacea, online education is actually the vehicle for a long-desired economic restructuring.

School Closures: An Unscientific and Regressive Policy

The Dreambox mathematics application: “Within one minute of work, the program can collect, analyse and respond to more than 800 pieces of data about a student and how he or she learns, according to the organization.” [page 9]

California’s introduction of online schooling was driven by financial concerns, not medical or moral ones. Reopening safely would have required physical distancing plans, distribution of face shields or masks, sanitizing supplies, systems for daily health screenings, regular testing, widespread use of outdoor spaces, alternative schedules, smaller class sizes, and a massive hiring initiative. The primary reason these proposals were shot down was not rising COVID-19 cases as the governor, Gavin Newsom, asserted. California cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have been declining since August 1, but since then Newsom has only made reopening guidelines stricter.

The full prohibition on in-person learning directly contradicts the advice of medical and scientific experts. In June the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued recommendations for school re-openings, stating, “the AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school.” The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued similar guidance. Schools, the authors argue, provide essential services to students and families.

Only after large school districts decided to stay closed did the AAP revise its original guidance to fit a perceived political consensus. Many clinical studies and reviews supported their original conclusion, demonstrating that children are less likely to transmit COVID-19 than adults, and school closures are an ineffective method of disease control. Not only will these irrational closures deepen class disparities, the policy has also overruled some children’s civil right to public education—a right that became universal in federal law less than 50 years ago.

It was not until 1975 that people with disabilities won a “Free and Appropriate Public Education” through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Before IDEA people with intellectual disabilities were often put in underfunded and abusive state schools, such as the infamous Willowbrook state school in Staten Island. Similarly, discrimination against English language learners was allowed until the 1974 passage of the Equal Education Opportunity Act.

Dismantling these gains is apparently of no concern to the California Democrats and the California Teachers Association (CTA), the state teachers union. Virtual learning effectively limits educational access for high-need populations. Yet as public resources are funneled into online learning platforms, the CTA regularly claims to be fighting back against billionaires and politicians. In reality, the teachers union is acting as an astroturfing and financing arm of the tech industry and the Democratic Party. There is no real conflict between these entities because their interests are identical.

The Teachers Union as Controlled Opposition

The Global Education Coalition was launched on March 25, 2020, by UNESCO. Founding partners include the World Bank, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, the BBC, and the Global Business Coalition for Education.

The median teacher salary in California is $65,252. On average, California teachers pay $1,072 in dues, and the majority of dues do not go to local organizations—they go to the CTA. In 2018 at least twelve CTA officers and directors made six-figure salaries. The CTA president took home about $340,000, and the union’s Associate Executive Director over $1 million. It is extremely difficult for teachers to find out how much of their dues money goes to political activities, let alone which of these activities actually help secure better working conditions and wages for teachers.

However, some information is available. California teachers’ dues directly contribute to the CTA’s PAC. Although teachers can opt out from donating to the PAC, this option is only given when they sign the form to join the union. While there are limits to the CTA’s donations to individual candidates through its PAC, the CTA can donate greater amounts through independent expenditure committees. For example, the CTA’s PAC donated only $29,000 to Newsom’s election campaign in 2018, but its independent expenditure committee gave $1 million to “Education Organizations for Gavin Newsom for Governor 2018.”

The National Education Association, which the CTA is a part of, is likewise opaque about how much dues money is used for political activities and what those activities are. In 2018 the NEA contributed about $5.4 million to candidates and political campaigns and spent close to $2.9 million on lobbying. After endorsing Joe Biden in March, the NEA now invites teachers to become “Educators for Joe” through its website.

The relationship between the union and the California Democratic Party extends to the CTA’s organizing work for ballot initiatives. Most recently, local California unions have asked their members to collect signatures and join rallies for Prop 15, the Students and Communities First Initiative. The slogan for Prop 15 is “Tax the Rich,” but the tax will not be on wealthy individuals, or directly on the revenue of California’s largest industries (tech, agriculture, tourism, and entertainment). The tax will instead be on business properties exceeding $3 million in value. The initiative is backed by national politicians like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg. The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation has contributed over $6.3 million to support Prop 15.

Union members should be concerned about the fact that, according to the CTA’s own Prop 15 calculator, the plan will fund privately-operated charter schools in addition to public schools. Charter schools are property leasing schemes that exploit low-income communities for the benefit of investors. In using public school teachers to organize for this funding, the CTA has promoted an initiative that will allow investment capital to benefit from industrial property taxes, an expense that some worry will fall on small businesses in the form of increased rents. Given the level of mismanagement, cronyism, and anti-teacher animus plaguing the administrations of many California school districts, it is also worth wondering if Prop 15 money will go where it is truly needed (staffing), or whether it will be wasted on more tech products.

Ultimately, there is no real tension between the political project of the teachers union and that of the Democratic Party. Both are working toward the same outcomes. In the case of COVID-19, the desired outcome is the purchase of hardware, software, and online learning subscriptions on an enormous scale. This ploy relies on a politics of anti-solidarity in which teachers stay home on computers while risk is pushed onto lower-paid staff or contractors who lack union protection.

Woke Justifications for Academic Decline

January 2020, World Economic Forum: “The notion of an educator as the knowledge-holder who imparts wisdom to their pupils is no longer fit for the purpose of a 21st-century education.”

While low-income students and families struggle to adapt, many educators are willing to push rhetoric that presents virtual learning as liberation. In some cities, local union leaders, district administrators, and other organizations have entered into an endless competition to prove who is more woke and more pro-lockdown. Racialized social justice politics have created distractions that serve to rationalize and excuse the absence of public health infrastructure and other services.

In Oakland, for example, ongoing conflicts between professionals have done little to help communities in need, and disguise a de facto consensus around school closures. California’s online learning mandate was largely decided at the state level by the governor’s office. This did not stop the Oakland teachers’ union from holding a pro-closure demonstration in front of the Oakland schools superintendent’s home. The Oakland NAACP wrote a l e tter condemning the action for targeting the superintendent, who is a Black woman. The East Bay DSA responded in support of the union, citing the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black communities.

Virtual learning is training affluent students for a life of self-directed work at home. It is training low-income students for a life of no work at all.

Around the same time, elementary school principals in Oakland wrote a letter asking middle class parents to refrain from forming independently organized educational “pandemic pods,” arguing that this would be “exacerbating educational inequities.” Meanwhile, the Oakland teachers’ union was spending valuable time in reopening negotiations demanding a Black Reparations Fund. The union proposed that Local Control Funding Formula money for foster youth, English language learners, and low-income students be redirected to new “Black Sanctuary District” programs.

The woke posturing in Oakland demonstrates a pattern of California educators and other professionals wielding their cultural power to uphold tech profits while taking for granted the profound economic inequalities caused by the COVID-19 lockdown. The major stakeholders, while supposedly at odds, all supported government frugality as a science-based safety measure. With online learning now fully in place, social justice narratives contend that staring at screens is emancipation.

Various tech initiatives like the Modern Classrooms Project allege that online learning is progressive because it allows for self-pacing. The concept of virtual self-pacing is tied to declarations that some students are “thriving” through online education. School, proponents of distance learning claim, is perhaps too long, too demanding; the standards and expectations may be too high. Distance learning, they argue, allows kids to organize their own time, regardless of whether it is developmentally appropriate or not.

Similarly, education theories such as “Abolitionist Teaching” posit that white supremacy creates trauma for Black students at school. Therefore, the fundamental structures of school must be rethought. Intellectuals and writers who characterize school as inherently racist are assisting in a union-busting project. Abolitionist theorists even call on teachers’ unions themselves to demand curriculum and personnel changes, and scheduling that adheres to anti-racist thought.

The digitization of schools is an initial step toward digitization of society as a whole. Just as the school bell schedule was designed around the factory model, so the current model of virtual learning is training affluent students for a life of self-directed work at home. It is training low-income students for a life of no work at all.

Rejecting a Lockdown Future

“The long-term effects of school closures will define a generation. Children are facing increased rates of severe abuse and a mental health catastrophe. We’ve told children that their existence is harmful and their lives are unimportant. We abandoned them and they won’t forget it.”

“Greater income inequality, increased unemployment, growing dependence on government, and more mass migrations are a few of the most pressing problems that failing to train the next generation of workers for the digitally driven economy will bring.” [page 3]

Given this threat to the teaching profession, the CTA and local unions must divest from corporate interests that aim to dismantle labor. Bribing politicians can only get educators so far. Teachers can no longer give in to the mafia-style antics of the Democratic Party if they want to survive. Union dues should not be spent on Newsom’s reelection campaign, but on a state-wide strike fund. Charter school champions benefit when public schools lose enrollment because of systematic mismanagement. They will also benefit when the union starts hemorrhaging membership due to its corruption and negligence.Since March the American left has framed neoliberal lockdown policies as the only morally viable option for dealing with COVID-19. In doing so, they have fetishized teachers’ unions and used their labor negotiations as the prime example of worker support for lockdown. Now that the damage has been done and soaring unemployment has disempowered all workers, the left may begin to roll back its discredited justifications for lockdown. No matter what challenges arise, social services and public institutions should be non-negotiable for any socialist, populist, or pro-worker politics.

Schools are necessary for communal and individual well-being—they are just as essential as health care. In their education children do not only learn content; they also learn by example and through experience. It is our collective task to consider what message continued policies of school closure and austerity send to the younger generation. They will not forget it if we fail to develop alternatives.

[Alex Gutentag is a public school teacher in California and a former union representative. You can follow her on Twitter at @galexybrane]

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