NYT Op-Ed

Feeling Too Down to Rise Up

Love is the Movement

I spend my days reading dense academic literature that analyzes the world problems, dissecting every known region of human endeavor, criticizing greed and racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and a million other of the bad things that humans do. Yet, in 200 years of academic social science, we know, to the most minute level, about the problems, yet, we have shown little progress in developing any ideas that actually work to solve them. Many still claim that socialism is the answer, the "system" that will work, but I find this somewhat absurd. It is a great theory, but the practice has had very mixed results.

But, what is most disturbing about social science, in general, is its lack of attention to the human endeavor called love. Love in the English language tends to have some problematic connotations, that is, everyone equates love with sexuality, so when I speak of love, I mean agape love - the desire to create a beautiful world with one's human brother or sister. And yet, this is a concrete social relation, not unlike capital, race, patriarchy, etc., etc., etc. It would seem that human freedom, if that is actually the goal for which we are working, must be predicated on the value of love.

Human systems produces values which guide peoples desires. Capital embodies value in the dollar, race and patriarchy embody value as exclusion of other ways of being, other ways of seeing the world. Each of these, the sort of big three of social science, has come into being as a result of institutional bodies which set the context for their values to gain traction in shaping how humans act in the world. These values must operate in a context where they seem natural, as the correct mode of action. Yet, love actually is natural; it requires no institutional context, no government, nothing. Indeed, it would seem that love functions in spite of these things, as these things and the values they emit are anathema to love. Capital is based on greed which is based on fear, race and patriarchy are based on greed and fear. Love cannot be greedy or fearful; if it is, it is no longer love.

And maybe, I am Pollyana, and so be it; I choose to be. On some level, be it implicitly or explicity, people have chosen to value wealth over their sibling's stomach, skin color over their sibling's creativity, and reproductive apparatus over their sibling's gifts, and all that it would take is for people to choose otherwise, to choose love. It really is that simple.

In 1980, Lee Atwater said this as a description of the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party.

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Some would read this as the Republican's attempt to couch their racism in an apolitical, economic language. However, I submit that the change in strategy outlined by Atwater was precipitated by the successes of the Civil Rigthts Movement. Indeed, the de-racialization of the Republican strategy reveals very specifically how capitalism actually works - it exploits for profit, and this structure underpinned racism from slavery and colonization to Jim Crow.

As American capitalism developed and private property became a dominant institution, the emergence of a particularly black slavery also became written into the law. In this way, American culture became divided with black skin serving as a signifier for the lower, working class, and white skin serving as a signifier for the American bougeoisie, and over the years as black skin has slowly been stripped of its negative meaning, though not completely, the economic central nervous system that produced and reproduced class-based subjectivities serving under the signifier of skin-color has slowly transformed through the demystification of race into an economic central nervous system more technicalized, or more along the lines of Atwater's political vision (It must me noted that this fits with the trend of late capitalism in which capital removes all social markers from racialization to subsidies for education and healthcare). And while capital increasingly functions in a global and post-racial way, the residuals of past-racialized paradigms still permeates the everyday reality of many, allowing capital to be nominally race neutral while benefiting from a working class divided by race and ethnicity. Indeed, Atwater's dream, particularly, but not exclusively, in the American South seems to have come true. Because of this, it is imperative for the construction of a sort of commons of subjectivity where those occupying and constructing forgotten places can develop post racial identities and solidarities which can be deployed to secure material commons - such as universal healthcare, affordable housing, public space, decent school systems, collective ownership of productive properties, and real political voice.

Article by Dylan Rodriguez

The Dreadful Genius of the Obama Moment

I'm not a fan of Rodriguez's tone or his rather erudite diction, but his point is poignant and supports my argument in previous posts.

Capital is Post-Racial and Post-Gender

Massimo de Angelis's profound work, The Beginning of History highlights one of capital's successes, "Capital does not have a problem acknowledging diversity and difference, as long as it is diversity that finds its common centre of articulation within capitalist markets." What he means is that within the bounds of global territory or spaces, skin color, gender identity, or sexual orientation are readily acceptable so long as these diverse subjectivities are constructed on the basis of the value of capital, on the value of a competitive world - all versus all. This is a pluralistic homogenization creating a spectacle of multiculturalism subject to the discipline of global capitalist markets, a one-size fits all identity available to everyone.

In contrast, history lives in forgotten places, and the spectre of old grudges, of past wrongs, and of cooperations and beauties worth celebrating live on in a myriad of available subjectivities - some oppressive, some liberatory. The failure of anti-capitalist politics is to construct spaces, to reclaim commons, in which this multitude of subjectivities can articulate, both healing past grudges, and forging a being-in-common that could challenge the being-in-competition of global spaces. The post-modern project, or the identity politics that it produced, has more or less developed the homogenized multiculturalism of global spaces, giving an implicit pass to the capitalist oppressors. By divorcing differing forms of oppression and setting them up as autonomous contests, and by relegating class, the standard issue of the left, post-modernism merely reshaped global capital in a multicultural way, something Rodriguez called "White Neoliberal Multiculturalism."

This is not to deny the very real effects of identity politics and the post-modern movement. Race and gender are in everyone's lexicon, but the project now is to facilitate a true political class formation while not forgetting the lessons of identity. The story of history, as always, is the story of class struggle, and the lack of a unified political class has allowed capital to stretch its reach and domination to levels never thought possible and never before seen. A new capitalism will emerge from this crisis, but activists must use this crisis as an opportunity to reclaim as much of the commons as possible, to renew forgotten places through the collectivization of their resources and the use of these resources by those in forgotten places. The goal is not to defeat capital all at once through a revolutionary movement, but to whittle away at capital's spaces by many, but unified, revolutionary movements.

Global Spaces, Forgotten Places

In the months I spent in the Bay Area, I became intimately aware of its status as a Global Space. Activism focuses on issues a hemisphere away, the research at Berkeley is bent towards uniquely global problems, and economic production is geared towards producing and facilitating the production of global commodities. In the age of globalization, capitalism and modernity articulate as tightly as ever and work to produce the phenomena called globality. The markers of globality are the dominance of linear (as opposed to cyclical) time, identities produced and sustained through the values of capital, and the spatial resonance and destruction of distance between geographically distant global spaces, found mostly in the cities of the world. One can think of so-called global banks, the practices of Washington Mutual in Berkeley, CA are the same as the practices of Washington Mutual in Birmingham, AL in spite of the starkly different socionatural contexts. Both are global spaces, and fit together in the phenomena of globality, spaces sterilized from the particularities of place and conforming to a set of global practices which seemingly float, rootless in the global milieu.

In contrast to global spaces are forgotten places. Forgotten places, while still subjected to the linear time of capital, are primarily defined by cyclical time. The difference between cyclical time and linear time is that linear time seeks ever increasing production - to add to an ever increasing bottom line, while cyclical time merely seeks reproduction - to survive in a global world in which it is forgotten. Forgotten places still have culture, religion, and cultural/racial prejudice, in a phrase, forgotten places have true difference, sometimes manifest in a repressive way. However, these other than capital value practices are more pronounced if merely as a result of being forgotten. Quite simply, forgotten places, which are often poor, are rooted in the socionatural and sociohistorical context, but struggle to maintain or develop identities which can be recognized and validated by capital and its nation-state/global-facilitators. Forgotten places can be found in urban areas (sections of Oakland, CA) or rural areas (The Black Belt; Appalachia), and generally are spaces of marginalization, poverty, drug abuse, crime, and generally malaise.

In my next post, I will explore more deeply the types of subjectivities produced in global spaces and forgotten places and explore why certain identities are incompatible with the subjectivities produced by each.

The Grey Rider

The Grey Rider of Shee

I've opened this blog with a poem that describes who I am.  I run, I run from fear, but it lurks just around the corner.  I fear my madness, the wraith inside me, the creative demon that is both beautiful and terrible.  I cannot control it, so I take lithium, and it takes my creative madness, bottles it, makes it manageable, but blunted, no longer a sharp edge that cuts reality to pieces, but a butter knife that spreads a more cookie cutter creativity as outlet, but not transformative.  I wish I could be Bill Hicks or Hunter S. Thompson, I wish I could bleed onto paper for the world to experience, but I cannot, I haven't the strength to control the terrible and beautiful demon.  Instead, I choose life, normalcy, acceptance, a 9 to 5, something to hush the terrible demon, a routine of mundanity instead of the chaos of the sublime.  Basically, I quit trying to change the world, and choose merely to live in it, to struggle daily with my neighbors and family.

The revolution drove me mad, but to loose the madness is certainly a loss.  Madness and genius are fine lines, and the madness devoured the genius and defecated a broken and lost human, a dead human.  I no longer want to be a genius, or at least, I will try to tell myself that.  As a part of my identity, it became, but it broke me, set my soul aflame with a consuming fire that began to infect the rest of my body.  Where shall I go from here?  Back to Alabama to work on the work of living, and to fill my own corner of the world with love and kindness; I go back to become a real person.  The world is not perfect and never will be, but love makes the unperfect more bearable.  For now, the Grey Rider of Shee has tamed the wild terror that drove the genius to madness.