Tag: US Politics
4th March 2019 Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes
Should the American Left unite behind Bernie Sanders?
With responses from: Doug Henwood; Judith Butler; Charlie Post; Bill Fletcher Jr; Zillah Eisenstein; Eric Mann; Lester Spence; Marina Sitrin; Eric Blanc; Juan Cruz Ferre; Eljeer Hawkins; John Bachtell; Rand Wilson and Peter Olney.
Doug Henwood
Can we go mostly out for Bernie Sanders instead of all?
I completely understand the temptation to put all our eggs in the Bernie basket. With his 2016 campaign, he almost single-handedly introduced a seriously social democratic programme into American political discourse, and even made the word 'socialism' charming, no mean feat in this reactionary political culture. He inspired thousands of mostly young people to enter politics and caused the membership of the formerly moribund Democratic Socialists of America to soar. He forced mainstream Democrats to admit just how wedded to the corporate agenda they are.
Without his candidacy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – who was largely responsible for getting people to talk about a Green New Deal and a top tax rate of 70% almost overnight – wouldn't be in Congress, neither would her colleagues Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Ditto many fresh faces in state legislatures. Thanks to all these campaigns, there's a serious left campaign infrastructure operating across the US – not merely around elections, but a variety of issues, from housing to wages to police brutality. For someone who matured in politics like me, when a meeting of the Left consisted of seven weirdos in a ramshackle space, the transformation feels other-worldly.
So, I completely understand the draw of trying to do it again. A second Sanders campaign could bring even more people into left politics, deepen the organising infrastructure for the future, and offer rich opportunities for political education. All true. But it still worries me.
It worries me for several reasons. One is that there's a bit of a repetition compulsion about it – the Bernie campaign worked so well last time, why won't it again? But things are quite different this time. He's not coming out of nowhere, surprising an unprepared establishment. He's running against a small army of other candidates, not just one who was a perfect symbol of a discredited status quo. Were he by some fluke to win, he would face a hostile Congress and ruling elite, who would frustrate him at every turn. It might be better to build strength from below, in city councils and state legislatures, and maybe even a governorship or two, before scaling the summit. It feels like people on the Left are looking to Sanders as some sort of magic, almost redemptive figure.
Which isn't to say one shouldn't work on Bernie's behalf. It is to say, keep some powder dry. READ MORE
The Political Theology of Neoliberalism
24th September 2018 Jon Bailes
Neoliberalism is primarily considered an economic logic which promotes ideals of 'free trade', and reduces the role of government to a facilitator of deregulation and privatisation. But accompanying the economics has always been a particular worldview or ideology, and neoliberalism in fact relies on a whole social system of support and legitimation.
In his new book, Neoliberalism's Demons, theologian and social theorist Adam Kotsko considers neoliberalism as a form of political theology, to understand how it functions in societies not only as a mode of economics, but also politically and culturally as a moral order. In this interview, I discuss with him some of the core ideas in the book.
Adam Kotsko teaches in the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College. He is the author, most recently, of Neoliberalism's Demons (Stanford University, 2018) and The Prince of This World (Stanford University, 2016), and the translator of many works by Giorgio Agamben. Visit his professional site for more information about his work, including links to articles and interviews.
In your book, you approach neoliberalism from the perspective of political theology. What does political theology bring to the analysis of neoliberalism?
Adam Kotsko: Political theology has meant many things since the term was coined in the early 1920s by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, and so I was aware going into this project that I was at the risk of trying to explain the unknown by the unknown. In the book, I try to define the term in a way that is faithful to the intentions of earlier political theologians like Schmitt, while also making it more broadly useful. Ultimately, I view political theology as the study of the structures and sources of legitimacy – of the ways that people attempt to answer the question of who should be in charge and why.
A lot of times, people think of political theology as a discipline that points out parallels between theological and political structures – for instance, the sovereignty of the executive branch bears comparison with the sovereignty of God – but I think that the focus on legitimacy allows us to account for why those parallels exist: namely, because both the theological and the political orders are asking for our trust, for our faith. Neoliberalism is no exception to that, though most analyses of neoliberalism as a system do no foreground those questions of how the system legitimates itself. READ MORE
23rd May 2018 Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes
This month, to mark the 50th anniversary of the events of May 1968, we ask:
How Should We Remember 1968?
With responses from: Lewis Gordon; Rachel Harrison; Françoise Vergès; Daniel A Gordon; Max Elbaum; Robyn C Spencer; Gabriel Rockhill; Stephen Milder; Sarah Lincoln; Eric Mann; Ron Jacobs; Nadia Yala Kisukidi; R A Judy; Leo Zeilig; Catherine Samary; Stephen D'arcy.
Lewis Gordon
We should combat the hegemonic, whitewashed historical misrepresentation of 1968. That year was one of upheavals across the globe, yet dominant discussions are of white college students taking over universities and mostly white people protesting against the Vietnam War.
Understanding 1968 as part of a period from 1966 whose arc reached into the mid-1970s, we should remember Indigenous people's struggles, new formulations of Black Power, poor people's campaigns, women's liberation and queer movements, and, beyond North America and Europe, we should remember uprisings and ongoing practices of decolonisation across the African continent, Asia, Australasia, and Latin America.
It is significant that 1968 and now 2018 call for reflections on the lives of freedom fighters. This year Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx would have been 200. Nelson Mandela would have been 100. We lost such fighters as Mamma Winnie Madikizela-Mandela of Azania/South Africa, the Black Liberation Theologian James Cone, the great physicist Stephen Hawking, the Corsican liberationist Ghjuvan'Teramu Rocchi, the revolutionary jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, and so many more in the first half of 2018.
We should reflect on the global demand for freedom, marked by struggles for liberation and social justice. This requires also thinking through mistakes of what is generally called 'the left'. While 'the right' unabashedly pursued power in their counter-revolutionary endeavours, an unfortunate development since the late 1960s is the left's seeming allergy to power. This has had a catastrophic effect of the right seeking and acquiring rule with the left locked in a pattern of reaction in the form of protest as the primary expression of political life.
Power is the ability with access to the means to make things happen. It is crucial to understand that protest without power is ineffective. A both-and approach is needed. Disempowering fascism, new forms of colonisation, and unbridled capitalism, whose reach now threatens the ecological welfare of life on our planet, requires embracing positive power – empowering – through the building of institutions conducive to dignity, intelligence, and material conditions of freedom. READ MORE
Lewis R. Gordon
Revisiting Frantz Fanon's The Damned of the Earth
22nd April 2018 Cihan Aksan
Written at the height of the Algerian war of independence, The Damned of the Earth (1961) is a controversial book. This is because its author, Frantz Fanon (originally from Martinique but later based in Algeria, where he worked as a psychiatrist and developed close ties with the Front Libération Nationale, FLN), unapologetically says what a Black man is not expected to say: the degradation inflicted upon native populations by colonialism can only be overcome by anti-colonial violence. Here I discuss with Lewis R. Gordon the multiple layers of this anti-colonial violence which has been (sometimes wilfully) misrepresented by (mostly white) critics. Beyond the colonial context, we also talk about the impact of Fanon's ideas on oppressed people around the world, particularly Black Americans (starting with the Black Panthers, who called The Damned of the Earth 'the handbook of the Revolution') fighting racism and injustice.
Lewis R. Gordon is a philosopher, musician, and global political intellectual. He is Professor of Philosophy with affiliation in Jewish Studies, Caribbean and Latin American Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, and International Studies at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Honorary Professor at the Unit of the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa; and the Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair in the Faculty for Economics at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He also is the drummer for the band ThreeGenerations and a variety of jazz and blues bands in the New England area. His recent books include What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (NY: Fordham UP; London: Hurst, 2016) and the forthcoming Fear of a Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA and Penguin Books in the UK). He edits the American Philosophical Association blog series Black Issues in Philosophy and co-edits the UK's Rowman & Littlefield International book series Global Critical Caribbean Thought.
Fanon's Les Damnés de la terre (1961) is popularly known as The Wretched of the Earth, but you prefer to translate it as The Damned of the Earth. Apart from being the literal translation of 'damnés', does the word 'damned' give you more insight into the text?
Lewis Gordon: The word 'damned' is not only appropriate but also offers insight into the text. The standard response to my objection is to appeal to the English translation of L'Internationale, Eugène Pottier's 1871 poem that concludes with the line: 'Debout, les damnés de la terre!' The well-known translation is, 'Arise, the wretched of the earth!' It could also be translated: 'Arise, the damned of the earth!' The preceding two lines (my translation) are: 'The International / Will be humankind'.
Fanon, however, was referring to the Haitian poet Jacques Roumain's 'Sales nègres' ('Dirty nègres') from his collection Bois-d'ébène ('Ebony Wood'). Fanon referred to this work in the fifth chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs ('Black Skin, White Masks', 1952). The reference point here is not 'The International' but in fact the Haitian Revolution and its connection to revolution in the Third World or, in today's parlance, the Global South. Roumain concludes his poem with a long list of subjects struggling against the days of being called 'dirty nègres' to 'dirty Indians', 'dirty Hindus', 'dirty Indo-Chinese', 'dirty Arabs,' 'dirty Malaysians', 'dirty Jews', 'dirty proletarians', and concludes with 'And there we stand / all the damned of the earth'.
Now, dissecting both poems, we see an immediate difference between the role of the international as humankind and a list of humankind and the connection to 'dirt'. The word 'human' is from the Latin word homo, whose origin relates to the word humus, which means 'dirt' or 'clay'. Words such as 'humility' and 'humble' reveal the obvious connection of coming down to earth. This connection with earth and dirt reveals an influence or relationship with ancient African conceptions as found in, for example, the Hebrew language, where the word for human is adamah. It, too, is connected to the ground or earth. It specifically refers to red clay akin to what happens when animals are slaughtered in a kosher way, with the blood flowing into the soil. It's the origin of the name Adam, which literally means 'red' as well as 'human'. A more radical archaeolinguistic effort points to the precursor of the Hebraic forms in ancient Kmt ('Egypt') to the god Atum (think of the possible pronunciation of the t as the English d), the god who created himself out of a mound of earth arising from Nun (the primordial Nothing or dark waters).
We now have the basis of stressing the importance of the word 'damned'. It's from the Latin damnum, which refers to harm, hurt, or injury. The connection between the words damnum and adamah reveal a story of emergence from the earth and damnation or condemnation as a form of being pushed back into it. The human being, as we know, is a creature, in existential terms, of emergence, a creature with feet on the ground while reaching for the skies. READ MORE
This month, to mark International Women's Day on March 8th, we asked a number of women academics:
What is the biggest challenge facing women today?
The response has been huge. Overall we have received 25 answers, and as such have split them into two parts. Part one can be found here. Please take the time to read through both.
Sara R. Farris
I think we should begin by acknowledging that not all women are the same and not all of them face the same challenges. The brutality of neoliberal capitalism in the last twenty years or so – with its anti-welfare agenda, its profound class inequalities and its intensification of racism – has deepened the divisions among women along class and racial lines in particular, but also along gender lines when we think of the exclusion that trans-women encounter in some feminist and women's circles.
While the women belonging to the wealthy 1% of the population – and I am thinking of course of the 'neoliberal feminists' à la Sheryl Sandberg – face the challenge of feeling in full control of the corporate boardrooms and making even more money, the large majority of women, or the 99%, have the problem of making ends meet. Migrant and ethnic minority women face additional challenges insofar as the racism ingrained in western labour markets and societies at large relegates them to the most precarious, low-paid and under-valued jobs in the socially reproductive sector (as cleaners, nannies, domestic workers and so forth). READ MORE
The response has been so great that we have split the answers into two parts. Please take the time to read through both.
Cinzia Arruzza
If I had to summarise in a slogan the greatest challenge women face today, I would say that 'taking feminism back' is the one. From the 1990s onwards, contrary to the past, in a number of countries formal gender equality and the recognition of formal rights for LGBTQ people has ceased to be a taboo. Even right-wing political forces have started to adopt some form of 'feminist' discourse to justify their policies. The most notable phenomena in this sense are those recently labelled as 'homonationalism' and 'femonationalism', that is, the mobilisation of ideas of gender and sexual equality stemming from feminism and gay liberation struggles in order to justify military aggressions.
This, of course, is not a novel phenomenon as women's bodies and 'liberation' have been instrumentalised by colonial forces already before. But neoliberal capitalism has managed to both exhume and greatly expand this practice. Besides this adoption of feminist slogans by nationalist and neoliberal forces, we have also witnessed an increasing capacity of right-wing or conservative parties to endorse women's leadership: Sarah Palin, Marine Le Pen, Theresa May, Angela Merkel and Giorgia Meloni are only some examples of this phenomenon, which shows all the limits of a formalistic approach to gender equality and the representation of women in elected institutions.
The candidature of Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election of 2016 also marked the impasse of the liberal feminist approach to gender equality. Hillary Clinton, in fact, embodied the kind of lean-in feminism that privileges the experience and aspirations of upper middle class women, while leaving the rest behind. Her candidature also symbolised the disconnection between women's representation in elected institutions and the improvement of the large majority of women's lives.
The challenge we face today is, therefore, to retrieve feminism as a force of social transformation for all women – starting from the liberation of working class, migrant, trans women and women of colour – and as a form of critique of social relations in their complexity, starting from capitalism and its effects on women's lives. Together with other feminist authors and activists I have labelled this anticapitalist and antiracist feminism as 'feminism for the 99%', by which we understand a class-based feminism capable of being a force of transformation not just for women, but also for what we understand by class struggle, and for the life on this planet as a whole. READ MORE
19th February 2018 Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes
This month, we ask:
Is democracy working?
Jeremy Gilbert
The question of whether democracy is working obviously depends on what we mean by 'democracy' and what we mean by 'working'. But let me answer the question as naively as possible. By 'democracy', let us mean the existing institutions of liberal representative multi-party democracy in most countries that have such institutions. By 'working' let us mean 'doing the thing that they are hypothetically supposed to do'. The definition of the latter is obviously itself contentious, but let us agree that if they are supposed to do anything, those institutions are supposed to translate the express wishes and desires of electorates (insofar as they can be measured) into the programmes enacted by their governments.
From this perspective, it is clear that they are not working and have not been, across much of the globe, since the 1970s. The general neoliberal programme has never enjoyed a clear majority mandate anywhere (except perhaps in parts of Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of state socialism).
It has been implemented by governments from the notional Right, elected by an electorate who believed that they would enact socially conservative measures that would slow down processes of social dislocation and cultural change; those governments may have passed some reactionary measures, but they slowed down nothing.
It has been enacted by governments from the notional left, elected by electorates who for the most part expected them to restore and extend post-war social democratic settlements; those governments may have passed some measures to ameliorate the worst effects of economic inequality, but they have rarely passed a measure that would have been recognised as social democratic by even the most right-wing members of their own parties just a decade or two previously.
Such a situation cannot be described as 'democracy' in any meaningful sense. READ MORE
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