Ideology

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 21, 2021 11:54 am

US Blockade of Cuba Denies Right to Alternative Model

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"If the US wanted to take Cuba off that list it would. The Cuban and US peoples agree on the aspiration for a better relationship. Those who advocate letting Cuba choose its own path and stop punishing a whole nation because the U.S. doesn't like its government far outnumber the supporters of such policy." | Photo: Twitter @JohanaTablada

Published 17 June 2021

U.S. hostility against Cuba and other progressive projects denies peoples' right to build and develop an alternative model opposed to that imposed by dominant forces, a diplomatic source denounced today.


The United States deputy director of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, Johana Tablada, rejected the siege imposed by the northern nation against Havana and its resurgence in the midst of the pandemic.

"The policy of the United States against Cuba has been to put an end to the government using all kinds of aggressions: armed, economic, political and financing of internal subversion," Tablada said during a virtual meeting against the blockade called by the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP).

In the midst of the pandemic, when humanity concentrates on how to survive, it is surprising that solidarity with the largest of the Antilles has not been extinguished, she acknowledged. Tablada thanked on behalf of the island the rejection of the US siege and the support shown from all continents.


The diplomat described as monumental the challenge of the Cuban people against the United States, 'a power for which a sovereign, independent and socialist project is not acceptable,' she said.

'The most reactionary forces convinced Trump that the blockade of Cuba had not succeeded because it was not applied to its maximum capacity, and the policy was to do as much damage as possible in the shortest time possible,' she said.

However, she stressed, they did not win and they will not because the Cuban people have demonstrated their ability to resist.

The diplomat ratified the illegality and extraterritoriality of the siege by mentioning the banks that closed accounts in Cuba 'because the United States can fine them.' "No one imagined that six months after Joe Biden took office, the inhumane measures against Cuba implemented by his predecessor would be maintained," she remarked.

"On the contrary, these continued and the Caribbean nation was even included in a spurious list of countries that do not fight terrorism, a measure that serves as a cover for Washington to justify its aggressiveness against the Antillean nation", she stressed.

'If the United States were really concerned about human rights in Cuba, they would have have eliminated or at least, eased the blockade,' Tablada concluded.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0020.html

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Choice of political system internal matter of a country
By TOMISLAV NIKOLIC | China Daily | Updated: 2021-06-21 07:42

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MA XUEJING/CHINA DAILY
I know that in July, China will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Also, I know that you will discuss the role of political parties in governance in developing countries. I think that both are very inspiring occasions and can serve as a great opportunity to clarify many tailored or natural doubts about how to build the path to success while keeping the people of a country satisfied.

In today's European civilization, which also influenced the creation of new worlds, a stereotype is ingrained, which is explained by the strong belief that there can be no democracy and happiness for any social community if its organization is not established on the principle of "government and opposition".

I think that the connection between democracy and political parties cannot be a priori viewed as positive or negative. Instead, the function of political parties in a democracy should be viewed in terms of how much they contribute to the development of democracy and society.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, ideological conflicts remained on our continent, hence, many countries, although completely democratic, are classified as old-style countries which will lag behind in development. Many argue that it is possible for a period of better life to gradually emerge for European countries, with the understanding that there is no democracy without a government and an opposition.

However, the events of the past year and several months do not really confirm that. The COVID-19 pandemic cannot be called a bright spot for Europe considering the poor organized response of most European democracies. The organizations that have the most developed countries in Europe in their composition did not pass the exam either. There are many well-founded objections. Over time, the reasons for re-examining the functioning of these states and organizations, which in their response to the COVID-19 challenges were manifesting failures, have been increasing.

Therefore, the political "government-opposition" formula did not in itself help these countries and organizations to satisfactorily respond to the threats and challenges, which, I believe, deepened people's suspicions about power in many countries.

Fortunately, I would like to emphasize, that was not the case with Serbia, which worked out to indigenous solutions with its political experience, and with the help of China and other friendly countries such as Russia, it managed to set an example of how a country can gain success in difficult times. Maybe it's our destiny.

I've given Serbia's example to show that there is no authoritative book of instructions in the world on how a country should organize its political life and public sphere, develop its economy and promote its culture. There is no magic formula whose application provides good results in every sense in a given society. I believe that anyone who thinks differently is not essentially a democrat. And democracy in international relations should imply sincere respect for everyone who appears as a subject of those relations on the global stage.

How an individual state will regulate and organize its affairs should depend on the exclusive competence of that country and its people. The choice of each nation remains exclusively its internal matter. Those who take all the honors just for themselves, preaching others what is right and what is not, can be neither a beacon nor a moral role model. Especially when it is imposed by any and every means necessary.

Certainly, I do not want to deny the successes of the civilizational course of humanity as a whole, and I believe every society, for its own sake, should strive to achieve the highest goals. However, the path to complete freedom of an individual and an individual society as a whole should be paved with wisdom and the constant presence of that vision which countries should realize. It would be best if that was present in mutual relations as well. I don't just mean people but states as well.

According to many authors, the basic manifest functions of one or more political parties are the articulation of interests and the shaping of public opinion; nomination and election of holders of political and public office; directing and controlling the work of state bodies; political education; socialization and informing citizens.

The role of a party is also to discipline the elected representatives of the people. It first comes down to the chosen ones to protect themselves against greed to not buckle under the pressure of interest groups and individual interests, and fulfill the promises made during the elections.

In many ways, China contributes to and helps humanity as a whole. China's action is greatly welcomed in the numerous activities that the world is engaged in, especially in the United Nations.

I would like to emphasize that your behavior, with the realization of President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, has been met with the full approval of a large number of countries. It is increasingly understood that this is a project that has at its core the well-being of everyone, not just China and the Chinese people. Your understanding and respect for the priorities of the countries you work with has been increasingly praised. The most important thing is to continue in this way.

The author is former president of the Republic of Serbia.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... ca3a6.html

For capitalists 'good examples' are to be abhorred, denied and defamed, destroyed. Their existential fear for their regime of exploitation is well grounded and we should not at all be surprised at the mountains of wealth expended nor the crimes committed in their efforts to maintain dominance.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 25, 2021 12:05 pm

PENTAGON LABELS SOCIALISTS "TERRORISTS"
23 Jun 2021 , 5:44 am .

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Protesters supporting the program for socialized medicine demonstrate outside the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America headquarters on April 29, 2019, in Washington, DC (Photo: Getty Images)

Training documents come to light in the US Navy in which they refer to socialism as a "terrorist" ideology, equating it with neo-Nazis. The leak would be part of an operation against extremism in the interior of the country.

In the "Study Questions" section of the military training document one of the questions says "Do anarchists, socialists and neo-Nazis represent which ideological category terrorist?" A military source told The Intercept , which had access to the document, that the correct answer is "political terrorists."
The document, titled "Introduction to Terrorism / Terrorist Operations," is part of a more extensive training manual recently distributed by the Naval Education Command and Training Center for Navy Tactical Training in conjunction with the Security Forces Center. The training is designed for weapons masters, the Navy's internal police, the military source said.
The training documents would also be putting a black panther fist symbol in the same category of terrorist organizations as al Qaeda, the military source said.

In this way, the US Department of Defense appears to be shaping its institutions so that any group that protests over such essential things as health care, housing and food is considered a "terrorist".

The revelation may connect to other recent news about the fight against domestic terrorism. According to a White House official, President Joe Biden's Administration is working on a plan to allow Americans to denounce "radicalized" friends and family in government agencies, as a way to combat what they call domestic terrorism.

"We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address worrying or threatening behavior before violence occurs," the official said during a news conference.

According to the official, the administration believes that "violent domestic extremists, motivated by a variety of ideologies , pose a heightened threat to our country in 2021."

The Biden administration's claims about the alleged domestic terrorist threat are based on the violent escalation in the United States by white supremacists and far-right groups; however, it is becoming clear that the strategy will not differentiate in ideologies and will focus on neutralizing any group that opposes the established power in the United States.

In one of her investigations, journalist Whitney Webb shows that the war on domestic terrorism "targets primarily those who oppose the overreach of the United States government and those who oppose capitalism and / or globalization."

Webb reviewed the document "National Strategy to Combat Domestic Terrorism," released by the White House in June. There, "anti-government" or "anti-authoritarian" "extremists" are placed in the same category as white supremacists in terms of threat to national security.
(...) those who "violently oppose" "all forms of capitalism" or "corporate globalization" are listed in this less discussed category of "national terrorist." This highlights how people on the left, many of whom have called for capitalism to be dismantled or replaced in the United States in recent years, could easily be targeted by this new "war" that many self-proclaimed leftists currently support. Similarly, "environmentally motivated extremists" are also included.
That the plan is being carried by the Biden Administration can be seen as something paradoxical, considering that his candidacy was supported by progressive political groups in the United States that would now be at risk of being labeled as terrorists, but it makes sense if it is remembered that, years before the attacks of September 11, 2001, Biden wrote the Patriot Act, which ended up reducing civil liberties in the country in the name of national security.

https://misionverdad.com/pentagono-etiq ... erroristas

Google Translator

No surprises here, and no paradoxes either. Trump's prototype, PT Barnum, summed it up, "There's a sucker born every minute." So then, progressives, which side are you on?

They say that the hardest thing is to convince a person that they are being lied to and I find this to be the case. How much weight of fact does it take to break the hold of cognitive dissonance?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 21, 2021 2:00 pm

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How not to unite a class: a response to DSA’s Class Unity caucus
Originally published: Tempest by Felipe Bascuñán (July 16, 2021 ) | - Posted Jul 21, 2021
Felipe Bascuñán responds to a debate on the Left about the relationship between oppression and class and why getting the answer right is essential to forging a united class struggle.
A year after the racist police murder of George Floyd triggered the largest mass uprising in U.S. history, socialists are still debating whether antiracism is compatible with class politics. Some on the Left believe that building a universal class politics is counterposed to a focus on the particularities of race, gender, ability, and other categories that may be imprecisely grouped together through the language of identity. Though this debate has taken many forms, its most recent iteration in DSA is being led by vociferous members of the Class Unity caucus who claim to be defending “Marxist class politics” from “liberal antipolitics.”

The core of my disagreement with the Class Unity caucus is fundamentally about what it would take to make the working class into a real political force. Class Unity argues that the main obstacle to, well, class unity is what they call “identity politics,” a term used so broadly that it seems to encompass virtually any kind of struggle against oppression that is not organized around “universal” economic demands like universal health care and rent control. For them, the presence of “identity politics” in DSA is the main barrier to rooting the organization in the working class and expanding beyond what they see as its primarily middle-class base.

While I do not contest that economic demands are important, it is precisely because various forms of oppression divide the working class against itself that popular movements against oppression constitute vital moments for unifying the working class into a political force with the power to challenge capital. Furthermore, understanding the way chauvinistic ideas pervade society is vital to being able to speak to the majority of the working class who experience sexism, racism, transphobia, ableism, and other bigotries in their everyday lives.

It’s Not About Identity Politics

“Identity politics” is a term that has meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but when CU uses it, they tend to collapse all its meanings into a particular kind of liberal identity politics. Not only are the Lori Lightfoots and Hillary Clintons of the world guilty of weaponizing identity to diffuse working class struggle, but even those Marxists who carve out some role for antiracist politics within a class struggle strategy are themselves representatives of a professional-managerial strata, and thus, “wildly out of touch” with the working class. In their most recent provocation, they accuse Chicago DSA of “uncritically adopting the movement’s predominant liberal-identitarian framework” following the George Floyd uprising, saying police and prison abolition “are popular among HR managers and “radical” academics but broadly unpopular among the working class (of any color). ”

While many commentators on “identity politics” draw a contrast between movements against specific forms of oppression versus the elite liberal co-optation of those movements, the central claim for CU is that both are essentially the same.

Liberal deployments of identity do indeed serve the ideological purpose of diverting radical energies into a ruling class hegemonic project without fundamentally challenging their power. As the civil rights movements of the 60s and 70s declined, a Black elite was integrated into the ruling class, and that representation was used to diffuse the movement’s more radical demands, leaving the material circumstances of the vast majority of working class Black people unchanged or even worse.

That being said, it would be deeply misleading to attribute the decline of those movements primarily to liberal co-optation. The social movements of the 60s and 70s declined for a lot of reasons, including their own internal disunity (often exacerbated by racism and sexism in movement organizations), strategic dead ends, the end of the post-war boom, state repression, and the reactionary backlash that engulfed society as a whole with the turn to neoliberalism. Co-optation was frequently the result, not the cause, of the decline of popular movements.

But the argument isn’t really about whether or not liberal politicians cynically deploy rhetoric initially produced by social movements to diffuse challenges to the power of capital. Of course they do. Capital has always integrated the rhetoric of popular movements into their self-justifications. Bourgeois politicians also appeal to the working class and labor in order to get votes or to justify their support for fossil fuel infrastructure projects. And the vast majority of the trade union bureaucracy is only too happy to oblige them, repeating the same nationalistic talking points and integrating most trade unions into the Democratic Party.

This line of critique has been most extensively developed by Asad Haider in his response to a similar argument from Adolph Reed. He points out,

Capital has long celebrated the “dignity of labor” and working-class identity, because it requires the working class for its processes of production and accumulation … Nevertheless, few critics of antiracism argue that because politicians and corporations make tokenizing celebrations of essential workers, the demands and struggles of essential workers are inherently compatible with capitalism.

In the rest of this piece, I want to zero in on what I see as the most troubling implication of this political tendency, which seems to be gaining steam in parts of DSA: do movements against oppression matter? And more than that, is any specific focus on oppression counterposed to winning economic demands?

Because that’s really what’s at stake here. Not whether or not liberal politicians and corporate CEOs use appeals to identity to co-opt popular movements, but whether popular movements against racism, sexism, transphobia and other forms of oppression that are not exclusively framed in economic terms are worth building into our socialist strategy at all.

Marxists Should Be Fighting Racism, Actually

Class Unity may sometimes grant that there exists something called “racism,” but there’s relatively little evidence from anything they’ve written that they understand what racism actually is.

Perhaps the most revealing example of their basic misunderstanding comes in an editorial called “Race, Class, and Police Violence.” In it, the editorial committee comes tantalizingly close to understanding how racism structures the lived reality of class before swerving away dramatically to argue that police violence should be tackled solely as a class issue.

The first part of the article establishes that racial disparities in police violence and economic inequality persist even when you account for socioeconomic status. And they pose the natural question: why? The answer they come up with:

Given that the injustices perpetrated by police occur almost entirely in poor communities, a reasonable explanation seems to be that police in American society function primarily to protect wealth and property from a surplus population that has been made redundant to capitalist exploitation, and whose labor is no longer needed for accumulation.

It is certainly the case that the police do protect wealth and property from a relative “surplus population.” And it is also the case that the police are the class enemy of the entire working class, and they defend property against all challenges from below of any race. But all that still begs the question: why is the surplus population so disproportionately non-white?

There follows a half-hearted attempt to account for racism.

This is not to deny that there is a racist element to policing–there is—but this racist element is explainable by political economy that leaves ‘white supremacy’ out.

The article goes on to talk about the racist ideology that emerged from the plantation economy and was further reified through Jim Crow. They grant that under Jim Crow, racism played a role in keeping poor Black and white workers divided and wages down. Immediately following this historical detour, they leap to the present day. “What is particularly interesting about our current moment is that overall wealth inequality as well as racial wealth disparities continue to broaden despite the fact that racial disparities in police brutality are actually decreasing.”

One is left with the distinct impression that racism today is something of an anachronism, an inscrutable mystery hanging on from another era. The article never again returns to try to explain the persistence of racism; the only conclusion is that the police are a tool of capital that protects private property. Perfectly true, but it still begs the question.

In order to confront the class nature of society, it’s not sufficient to limit ourselves to talking about economic demands. Rather, the fragmentation and disaggregation of the working class can only be overcome by confronting head on the forms of oppression that maintain that fragmentation.
Let me be very clear: I am not arguing that race and class are totally autonomous tracks of oppression that need to be fought separately. Rather, the political economy of the United States does not make sense if you don’t take into account the structuring power of racism from the very beginning. And because of the deep imbrication of racism into the class structure of society, because of the way class is racialized, movements against racism necessarily have to confront the class structure of society.

But the opposite is also true. In order to confront the class nature of society, it’s not sufficient to limit ourselves to talking about economic demands. Rather, the fragmentation and disaggregation of the working class can only be overcome by confronting head on the forms of oppression that maintain that fragmentation. Racism is one of them (the only one that CU mentions at all), but it’s not the only one. Oppression based on differences in gender, ability, immigration status, age, and so on all work with and through economic and extra-economic means of coercion to fragment and divide the working class and to prevent it from seeing itself as a class with a common interest.

We sometimes use words like “white supremacy” or “patriarchy” to denote complexes of ideology, group differentiation, and exposure to violence which play historically specific roles in the reproduction of capitalist social relations and bourgeois hegemony. These words can be used by liberals to denote transhistorical forces with their own autonomous logics separate from capitalism. But there’s no reason they have to be used that way, and in fact they’re often used by Marxists as a way to describe complex social phenomena that are part and parcel of the reproduction of capitalism.

To illustrate this point, look at the ongoing material legacy of decisions made by real estate agents, banks, and politicians during the New Deal, which simultaneously promoted many of the kinds of economic reforms CU supports, while further entrenching the prevailing regime of racial apartheid. More than half a century after the end of legal segregation, cities in the U.S. are still shockingly segregated along the same redlines that were drawn by banks in the 1930s. Schools also remain segregated, and in a country that funds public education by local property taxes, the reproduction of disparate life outcomes along racialized class lines unfolds without needing overtly racist legislation. And that’s not to mention the racism baked into the housing market after the end of legal housing discrimination or the vast racial disparities in access to healthcare, treatment, and exposure in the context of COVID-19.

As for the police, until the 1960s, they explicitly enforced apartheid conditions as part of their jobs. After the 60s, they did much the same, only under the aegis of the War of Drugs. The turn to the War on Drugs as the main justification for racist policing also underwrote a massive expansion of the prison system, mandatory minimum sentences that disproportionately targeted drugs associated with poor Black people, like crack, and the full militarization of the police such that they came to be known as an occupying army in working class Black neighborhoods. It’s true that police don’t need to be personally racist to maintain a racist order for capital, but the reality is the culture of policing in the United States reproduces white supremacist ideas among police on a system-wide scale. It’s been well established by now that police forces are teeming with overt fascists and white supremacists, many of whom belong to actual far-right organizations.

One implication in much of what Class Unity writes is developed more explicitly in the recent writing of their thought leader, Adolph Reed. The idea is that race is merely an appearance, a “halo” obscuring material realities underneath. It’s perfectly true that essentialist understandings of race as something biological and transhistorical are ideological mystifications, but it does not follow that, even in its capacity as ideology, race has no material impact or that it’s only an appearance hiding the truth of class. As Barbara Fields points out in her essay Slavery, Race, and Ideology, “An ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if it is not, it dies, even though it may seem to be safely embodied in a form that can be handed down.”

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Chicago Teachers on strike for fully-funded schools and racial justice. (Photo by sarah-ji.)

Racist ideology persists because it describes something real about social life. Even as it’s true that there are no biological or innate differences between supposed “racial groups,” racism is an absolutely real material force that reproduces disparate life circumstances and outcomes across all classes of society, but to a much higher degree within the working class. Race, then, comes to exist not as a biological category, but as a social category, one with as much reality as gender or private property.

Studying and combating the specific ways racism works to divide the working class should be especially important for those who want to forge class unity. To name one famous example, when Reagan launched his broadside against social services in the 1980s, his ideological prop was the figure of the “welfare queen.” The subsequent slashing of welfare had a disproportionate impact on the Black working class because of the existing disproportionate poverty, but it also increased poverty among the white working class at the same time. Far from making fighting racism as such irrelevant, this episode illustrates the way that racism peels off sections of the working class and incorporates them into a reactionary ruling class political project against their own class. Racism is then revealed to be an integral part of capitalist hegemony, which is to say, the process by which sections of the working class are won over to actively participate in the maintenance of capitalist class rule.

Class Unity tends to dismiss movements that use antiracism as a rallying point as nothing but liberal identity politics, representing nobody but professionals and academics and their cultural predilections. Ironically, actual movements against racism tend to have no trouble understanding the deep links between economics and racial disparity. After all, the single most important demand to come out of the 2020 summer uprising against racist police violence was the demand to defund police and fund working class Black and brown communities, which is quite literally an economic demand.

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Healthcare workers rally for Black lives in June 2020. (Photo by sarah-ji.)

Talking about racism means, necessarily, talking about the economic and political forms through which racial differentiation and oppression is reproduced. There’s a reason that when Dr. King came to Chicago, he joined the housing movement. Far from distracting from or obscuring the economic dimension, organizing around racism clarifies the kinds of economic demands we need to be fighting around and, among other things, lays the groundwork for a more militant labor movement infused with the energy of social movements.

The Particular and the Universal

As far as I know, no piece of writing by anyone associated with Class Unity has ever explicitly mentioned trans people, but we can guess at what they might think about the rise of Trans Marxism. In the introduction to Transgender Marxism, editors Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke take aim at what they call “middlebrow Marxists” who counterpose a singular focus on a class divide based on uneven control of the means of production to identity politics with its focus on particularities and differentiation.

They point out, correctly, that:

…from Marx’s earliest communist writings onwards, we see a sharp concern with questions of social particularity. From his writings on the American Civil War to the question of anti-Semitism, Marx refused to set aside the fate of minority groups from the structuring of society as a whole.

As early as “On The Jewish Question,” we can see Marx wrestling with the contradictions of the liberal state, which proclaims equality before the law while systematically reproducing group differentiation on the basis of birth, occupation, property, and so forth.

On the basis of Marx’s mature work in Capital, we can go even further to look at the way that competition between capitalists and between workers reproduces group differentiation within the working class.

In his book Persistent Inequalities, Marxist economist Howard Botwinick develops a theoretical and empirical foundation for understanding the reproduction of differentiation within the working class. The racialization and gendering of certain jobs not only makes it easier to justify more exploitative conditions and lower wages in those sectors, but puts a downward pressure on wages for the entire working class. The particular historical forms that this process takes varies across time and space, but the thing that remains constant is that, even as capitalism homogenizes sections of the working class, it simultaneously fragments the class and drives certain specially oppressed sectors into the lowest paying jobs and disproportionately represents them among the reserve army of labor (which is to say, the unemployed, or what CU called the “surplus population” above).

Botwinick writes:

Indeed, Marx was very well aware of the fact that the ongoing forces of capitalist competition and accumulation would repeatedly tend to generate serious divisions within the working class. He also understood that capital would continually attempt to find other political and social devices to intensify these divisions among workers.

On the level of concrete class struggles, we could also talk about the mobilization of bigotry to thwart unionization campaigns or the long history of racism and sexism in the labor movement, both of which contributed to the flight of manufacturing industries from densely unionized Northern cities to rural areas, especially in the South, where pervasive racism has historically made unionization extremely difficult.

Workers don’t struggle against an abstract social relation, they struggle against oppression.
Far from being a distraction from “real” class politics, any Marxism worthy of the emancipatory spirit of Marx’s life work must begin from the real conditions of oppression that keep the working class disorganized and disempowered as a social force. After all, it was Marx who said,

Labor in white skin cannot emancipate itself where the Black skin is branded.

As for liberal identity politics, it is certainly the case that a singular focus on race (or gender, or ability, etc.) as an isolated issue of disparity, with the goal of redress within a capitalist system, is a dead end for any socialist project, or indeed, for addressing the social relations which reproduce and require those forms of oppression and disparity. But that doesn’t mean disparities are irrelevant or that they should be ignored until socialism is achieved.

Like the struggle for reforms in general under capitalism, the fight to make life better for the working class and all oppressed people should be our bread and butter, the day in, day out content of our struggle. But in those fights, the point of a Marxist analysis and a socialist political project should be to show how these different experiences of oppression are each linked back to a capitalist system that dominates and exploits us all. The goal is to unify all struggles against specific forms of oppression into a political project that aims not just at ending this or that disparity, or even simply improving the situation of the working class as such, but at ending all oppression and domination for good.

Workers don’t struggle against an abstract social relation, they struggle against oppression. It’s the experience of discrimination, of unequal treatment, of violence, of low wages and despotic workplaces, of living hard lives in intolerable conditions that move people to struggle to change the circumstances in which they find themselves. This is the real, living class struggle.

A true universalist politics cannot run roughshod over the many divisions that structure the working class, or presume that there already exists an objective “class interest” that makes those divisions irrelevant. For it to mean anything at all, universal emancipation must mean emancipation for everyone from every kind of oppression.

The Left will never be able to achieve its goal of transforming the working class from an inert relation of production into a real political force if it does not take seriously the specific modalities through which class is lived. Practically, that means left groups cannot afford to ignore the interpersonal side of oppression, as the presence of transphobic, racist, sexist, and other chauvinistic attitudes on the Left makes it much harder to attract the majority of the working class who experience these attitudes everywhere else in society.

Class Unity has repeatedly demonstrated that they think taking any action at all to account for chauvinism on the Left is basically the same as liberal corporate diversity politics. They say as much in their deeply unpersuasive and mean-spirited attack on a proposal by Chicago DSA members to increase transparency and accountability in the organization. The overwhelming sense of the piece is that any attempt to make the organization more welcoming for people who experience various forms of oppression constitutes an “adventure in liberal antipolitics.”

The Class Unity strategy is a recipe for building a DSA that actively repels the sections of the working class that are the most oppressed under capitalism. Low-wage workers are disproportionately non-white, agricultural workers are disproportionately migrants, care workers are disproportionately not men. To talk about disparity and difference is to talk about the real working class in its concrete conditions of life.

Class Unity takes up some of the most politically unhelpful and reductive readings of Marx’s unfinished class theory to advocate a strategy that sidelines questions of difference within the working class in order to “unify” around purely economic issues. In the process, they abstract away from class as it’s actually lived, so much so that it’s hard to know exactly what working class they’re even talking about.

Felipe Bascuñán is an organizer with the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America.

https://mronline.org/2021/07/21/how-not ... ty-caucus/

Despite this work focusing upon the despicable DSA the arguments are very relevant. That there is an argument at all is, for one thing, is a manifestation of American style 'big-tent ism' which assembles a voting block by not having a clear ideology. In this the DSA apes the Democratic Party whose ass is the receptacle of the DSA's head.

These are Marxists who reject Lenin(and therefore revolution) as their defining quality.Historically speaking, 'ya can't get there from here'...And speaking of history, it is apparent that the CU faction must consider it irrelevant, which renders their analysis equally irrelevant, because if we ain't historical materialists then we ain't jack.

To be sure, full spectrum tokenism is the order of the day for the bosses but this 'economist' argument is only relevant in the realm of idealism and like such idealism only serves the bosses' purposes because people know and feel the relevance of their particular oppression and you'll not make friends by pissing on their leg and telling them it's raining.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Tue Aug 03, 2021 1:28 pm

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Prashad to Harvey: “You Live on the Other Side of Imperialism”
August 2, 2021

The following video contains three short speeches by Viyay Prashad, a Marxist historian and director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. https://thetricontinental.org/

Taken together, these form a devastating critique of world renowned Marxist David Harvey’s insistence that the concept and theory of imperialism is not relevant to understand today’s world.

While the world is divided between a small handful of rich nations and a large majority of poor ones, Professor Harvey, who lives and worked in the United States, finds it “too easy” to describe the contemporary world system using the term “imperialism”. In this 2013 book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism Harvey did not rank imperialism even among capitalism’s top seventeen contradictions. In that book Harvey asserted, without any attempt to justify the claim, that:

“The net drain of wealth from East to West that had prevailed for over two centuries has been reversed as East Asia in particular has risen to prominence as a powerhouse in the global economy.”

Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and The End of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2014), p170.

The problem with this statement is obvious. If it were true, and wealth had indeed beginning shifting from “West” to “East” (and by this Harvey principally means China), how could it be possible that the “East” remains far, far poorer?

Obviously for people living in, say, China – which has a per capita income around twenty percent of the USA and Australia, or India, where per capita income is around five percent, this unsubstantiated assertion by a First World based academic who presents himself as “Marxist” was taken by many to be quite offensive.

Harvey had every opportunity to respond to Prashad’s critique in the forum. To the extent that he does, it is available here.

Prashad does not attack Harvey, as such. As an invited guest to a forum to launch Harvey’s latest book launch, he recommends the book to his audience… as the best introduction to the views of David Harvey if you are not familiar with them. With entertaining flair, Prashad outlines – from his own point of view – what is arguably a devasting demolition of Harvey’s view.

The video is embedded below or visit the YouTube page version.



https://orinocotribune.com/prashad-to-h ... perialism/

Imperialist competition has been on a back burner since the end of WWII as the US economy was the 'last man standing' among the imperial powers. Perhaps that confuses those who equate imperialism with overt military campaigns, old school colonialism and militarist competition among those powers. But as Thomas Sankara noted, indebtedness is just another form of colonialism and every former African colony of Europe has been saddled with increasing debt since "independence". Imperialism is about exploitation in whatever form brings in the big bucks, or the capitalist wouldn't bother with it. In this form it is as relevant as the sun rising.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Sat Aug 07, 2021 2:17 pm

The globalized neoliberal paradise
One of the favorite instruments to camouflage the perversity of neoliberalism have been the "electoral processes" intoxicated by bourgeois democracy.

Author: Fernando Buen Abad | internet@granma.cu

August 5, 2021 11:08:31 PM

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The explosive mix of neoliberalism, fake news and electoral processes is a highly sophisticated industry of social destruction. Illustration: Pawel Kuczynski

It is a huge mistake to assume that neoliberalism is just a bourgeois scoundrel exclusive to the economic-financial field. It is a serious error that, if it exists in this way in some heads, must be corrected immediately. Neoliberalism is pathetically an ideological ambush (in the sense of the "false consciousness" that Marx explained) developed to challenge and impose the "common sense" of certain capitalist interests in their imperial phase. For example: it is a crushing machine for acquired social rights; a demolishing humanist principles of solidarity; a "human meat grinder" in work, educational and health centers; it is a steamroller of institutions and a phenomenal machine of humiliations, depressions and demoralization ... all this at the service of a sector dangerously unhinged by usury, the most toxic individualism and the supremacist meritocracy of the masters in alliance with their accomplices. A hell of corruption and crime that must be classified as a historical stage "against humanity." The explosive mix of neoliberalism, fake news and electoral processes is a highly sophisticated industry of social destruction.

One of the favorite instruments to camouflage the perversity of neoliberalism have been the "electoral processes" intoxicated by bourgeois democracy. Laws, institutions, and officials have been mercenary-formatted to make the illegitimate "legal" and to sell it as a leap of modernity decorated with Chicago boys and girls, recurrently, trained for administrative and banking gadgets but without the minimum endowment of elementary general culture. Poor intelligence for huckster efficiency. They call them "technocrats" and pride themselves. Not a few are born in expressly created universities.

That functional pattern to neoliberalism is laced with generous layers of supermarket bad taste and a whole inventory of fetishized merchandise turned into ethical, moral and aesthetic values ​​in the religion of junk consumerism for junk mentalities. To all this, beaten with greed and scoundrels, they call success. And they want that, in addition to meekly financing them, we envy them, applaud them and pass them on to our offspring as if it were "a great treasure." They want the proletariat to become executor, accomplice of the police and executioner of itself and from a distance. Big data.

With this format they manufacture their repressive, multipurpose managers, who serve the same purpose to "manage" a larger or smaller business, as to train them as "political candidates." And we have had to suffer aberrant versions, (with antecedents, in military versions and their "civilian" accomplices) proto-neoliberal of the Condor Plan, embodying the monstrous list of snouts such as Salinas de Gortari, Menem, Fujimori ... and a no less monstrous list of intellectuals kneeling before the crumbs that their masters have given them, for example: Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa, Krause and their multiple packs of "journalists" who are a rented "companion fauna". We must have swallowed this up as "political normality" since the dictatorship of the "Washington Consensus" was imposed. In a period that has left us infiltrated by all kinds of reformist, opportunist, careerist and traitorous vermin that must be permanently characterized and denounced for defense reasons; life or death.

One of the most refined and sought-after jewels, in the globalized neoliberal paradise, is the massive operations of deception: weapons of mass distortion that have proliferated with great speed and ubiquity. They move globally with protection, discursive one-sidedness, the null trenches of replication and the masses of coripheans who repeat, simultaneously, any fiction that disguises them as news. Fake news at all times, with different modalities, at discriminatory hours and profitable effects. With the blessing of the neoliberal governments and a not small public anesthetized under the pleasures of deception that save the trouble of thinking and become involved in morbid and morbid emotions.

And in the meantime, when the peoples have found the forces and ways to defeat neoliberalism, its corporate and governmental engenders, its ideological war machines disguised as "communication media," we are overwhelmed by a planetary pandemic that has been profitably exploited by neoliberalism and that it does not stop in the bourgeois mistreatment against humanity. Never has the greed of the financial sewers lashed out with such racist fury as they have done with vaccines and medical instruments to care for the billions of infected or deceased people. Capitalism exhibiting neoliberal nausea. Without mitigating.

How to order the exit of the human species from this overwhelming and multifaceted hell? How to regain strength and organized confidence to articulate the forces that the situation demands in the current phase of the class struggle? At this time the road indicates that it is below. From the roots and the bases. With an organizational project that surpasses the sclerotic formats of those intoxicated parties and social movements of reformist bureaucracy and isolations filled with intermediary leadership. Stop.

The organizational capacities of the revolutionary leadership that is constantly being born in the heat of social struggles are under examination. But a Revolution of Consciousness is urgently needed simultaneously with the modification of the ideological and economic order on bourgeois private property. Organize so as not to remain on the margins again, gaining only peripheral powers, but without touching a hair to the industry, the banks or the churches converted to neoliberal scramble by the work and grace of the "devil's dung." Here we are. What to do?

It is necessary to make transparent (auditing of the peoples) the financing of neoliberalism, of all electoral processes in which its interests have infiltrated. Investigating the fortunes of all his henchmen and thoroughly making transparent the financing of fake news, of the owners of the (misnamed) "media" and of the intellectual suppliers of ideological scrap organized in "foundations", NGOs, forums and congresses constituted in neoliberal cathedrals of stupidity. And this is urgent.

http://www.granma.cu/pensar-en-qr/2021- ... 1-23-08-31

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 16, 2021 1:28 pm

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From Orwell to Chomsky to Contrapoints, ‘Anti-Stalinists’ Kill Class Consciousness

August 15, 2021
By Rainer Shea – Aug 12, 2021

Michael Parenti warned about the leftists who decry “Stalinism.” He wrote that “What they all have in common is an obsessional anti-communism, a dedication to fighting imaginary hordes of ‘Stalinists’ whom they see everywhere, and with denouncing existing communist nations and parties. In this they resemble many centrists, social democrats, and liberals.” The impact that these “anti-Stalinist” ideological factions have is to keep the masses demobilized in the face of ever-worsening inequality, repression, environmental destruction, and imperialist military buildup.

As the imperialists have intensified their cold war against China, this contingency of anti-communist “socialists” has increasingly expanded into anti-“Dengism,” which specifically targets modern China’s embrace of global markets to reduce poverty. What these “anti-Dengists” have in common with the “anti-Castroists” and the detractors of Korea’s Juche is the notion that all the world’s existing socialist projects — i.e. the Marxist-Leninist states — are masquerading as socialist. Despite Juche indeed being based around Marxism-Leninism, “Castroism” simply being workers democracy as applied to Latin America, and Deng’s economic theory actually representing a more practical improvement upon Mao’s dogmatic approach, these projects are dismissed as a “revisionist” affront to Marxism.

The basis for this ideological impulse that Parenti described, where every socialist revolution that succeeds inevitably gets derided as “authoritarian” or “social imperialist” or “state capitalist,” stems from the alliance that “anti-Stalinist” sectarian leftists have had with reactionaries since the first workers state was created in 1917. As Marxist Jay Tharappel has written, anti-communists established a dichotomy where Euro-American colonialism was portrayed as representing “freedom” while socialism was “totalitarian,” allowing for opportunists like Leon Trotsky to use a new rhetorical weapon:

This contrived dichotomy driven by Anglo — American interests during the Cold War has strong roots in Left Anti-Stalinism. The word ‘totalitarian’ was originally used by Mussolini favourably in 1925 to describe the fascist order he wanted to build in Italy, so how did it end up becoming an Anti-Stalinist curse word to attack the USSR and Stalin? In 1936 Leon Trotsky used the word three times in his book ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ to attack the Soviet Union which made it a household invective in the Anti-Stalinist ideological arsenal from then on. Two years later in 1938 Winston Churchill used the term “totalitarian state” in referring to “a Communist or a Nazi tyranny.”

By posing as the champions of “liberty” as opposed to the “totalitarian” Marxist-Leninist villains, these anti-communist leftists spun literal mythologies designed to make themselves look like heroic truth-tellers. George Orwell, who can be considered a literary Trotskyist in that his writings consistently portrayed the Soviet Union as an undemocratic perversion of socialism, effectively wrote a volume of theory for the “anti-Stalinist” view of socialism. Within the text of 1984, he included a fictional book titled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which explained the historical developments that had led to 1984’s dystopian tyranny.

It stated that this totally unfree fictional future had come about because “by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation.” The implication being that the USSR wasn’t the first workers state at all, but merely another manifestation of this “authoritarian” trend. This was pseudo-theory, based in perceptions of Stalin’s supposedly dictatorial policies that came from Nazi propagandists, imperialist Hitler-aligned newspapers, and opportunistic saboteurs like Trotsky who were known to promote lies to advance their interests.

This was the framework with which Orwell told us to understand political theory: that the logical conclusion of the “Stalinist” approach to socialism is a world completely (and according to 1984 perhaps permanently) lacking in liberty. This nightmarish warning, along with the more explicitly anti-“Stalinist” message from Orwell’s Animal Farm, has been drilled into the head of every student in the Western world who’s been mandated to read these two novels.

And Orwell’s ideological descendants have been eager not to just keep repeating these Trotskyist notions of the Russian revolution being corrupted by “Stalinism,” but to expand upon them. Foremost among these newer ultra-lefts has been Noam Chomsky, whose portrayals of the Soviet Union and the modern socialist countries have all come from the twisted perspective on Leninism that’s been described by Dash the Internet Marxist (see their article “the anti-Chomskÿng”):

Somehow, Noam Chomsky’s takes on Lenin and the Soviet Union are exponentially worse than his takes on Marx. Whereas Marx, to Chomsky, is a kind and confused unremarkable old man who may had inadvertently stumbled across a clever notion or two about history, Lenin (despite spending his entire life’s work devoted to further developing Marxism and socialism) was actually a big mean sinister trickster, actually right wing, who then saw the opportunity and seized all the power for himself to become the evil self-serving dictator of Russia (I’m embellishing, but not by a noticeable amount). [Chomsky’s speech on Leninism] is widely circulated among the libertarian left — often as their primary source when rejecting Lenin (or even offered as excuse for refusing to read Lenin!) — and it is both ill-informed and damaging.

In the video, Chomsky distorts the history of the Bolsheviks by claiming that Lenin represented a right-wing deviation, by making up an idea about vanguardism being a ploy for radical intelligentsia to “exploit” popular movements, and by claiming Lenin autocratically manipulated the fate of the Soviet Union when in actuality the democratic Soviets were the ones with the power. This aspect of the anti-communist mythology, where Lenin is absurdly charged with committing some kind of original sin where he selfishly corrupted the class struggle, creates the rationale for all the other lies that the ultra-lefts promote about socialist revolutions.

If Lenin and Stalin, the formulators of the theory which pertained to Marxism’s first practical application, were power-hungry liars, the countries following their theory must be evil as well and their words must not even be worth reading.

Such is the perverse view of history and theory that’s gone behind Chomsky’s statement that “The North Korean dictatorship may well win the prize for brutality and repression.” The complete absence of video or photographic evidence for the DPRK’s alleged human rights abuses, and the regime change think tank money that’s behind the story of every DPRK defector who’s put forth atrocity charges, aren’t worth considering under this worldview. Nor is the fact that Kim Jong Un isn’t a dictator at all, but a recallable official with one vote in his party who was elected by a transparent and non-coercive voting process.

Such is the bias which has also driven Chomsky’s claim that China “views its indigenous populations as an obstacle to developing its vision for this future critical center of international commercial networks.” He bases this accusation off of the narrative that China is committing a genocide against Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, which comes from the deeply skewed “research” of far-right Christian propagandist Adrian Zenz. As well as from Uyghurs who’ve been paid to promote fabricated atrocity stories in the same vein as the north Korean defectors who’ve told similar lies. These legitimations of imperialist anti-Chinese propaganda from ultra-left intellectuals like Chomsky has justified further demagoguery from “socialist” commentators like Nick Pemberton of Counterpunch, who’s proclaimed that “Chomsky is one to know that denying concentration camps is embracing simplistic prescriptions.”

All of this — the distortions of historical facts, the self-righteous stance against “authoritarianism” that ignores dialects, the embrace of CIA disinformation for the sake of scoring ideological points, the fork-tongued claims about how vilifying socialist countries is somehow beneficial for socialism — have produced the recent instance of ultra-left demagoguery from the “leftist” commentator Contrapoints. In a long-winded video titled “Envy,” Contrapoints gave a rant that might as well have come from someone like Ben Shapiro:

Utopian ideology instead promises relief from some general malaise, “alienation.” And so ironically it can have the same opiate effect that Marx ascribed to religion. But relief from the general anguish of human existence is not a political goal. There’s been so many revolutions in the last few centuries, but so far zero utopias. Resentment, envy, and hunger for that matter are not satiated by the downfall of the old regime. When the people have no bread they eat the rich. And when the rich are gone they eat each other. And because of the proximity effect, envy may actually increase after the revolution. You may be more envious of a favored comrade…a kulak…than you ever were of the aristocrats. So envy gets paranoid and imaginative…and the accusations start flying. That citizen is conspiring against the revolution! That peasant is hoarding grain! So the guillotine starts slicing thousands of heads off, the gulags fill up. Or an authoritarian strongman takes over, only to announce another revolution two decades later…and for what?…Socialism with Chinese Characteristics?

This rant has the same ring to it as Orwell’s claims about the Soviet Union representing some cruelly ironic new innovation in tyranny, or Chomsky’s implication that China is committing the same types of profit-motivated crimes as Euro-American colonialism. They come from the perspective that to tear down history’s socialist experiments, and to call China just another capitalist empire, is to articulate some essential truth which the “Stalinists” and “Dengists” lack the honesty to admit to. As a consequence of this smug mindset, Contrapoints has felt comfortable with totally ignoring an essential aspect of Marxism — its rejection of utopianism — to spin an additional narrative about how Marxists falsely promise a paradise. It’s pseudo-history that’s based in pseudo-dialectics, born from an evident lack of interest in studying the theory of the movement that Contrapoints so confidently talks about.

These kinds of statements help ultra-lefts feel morally superior, but they do nothing except kill genuine class consciousness by obfuscating the Marxist-Leninist route the masses must take to achieve liberation.

https://orinocotribune.com/from-orwell- ... ciousness/

" born from an evident lack of interest in studying the theory "

Indeed, there ain't no materialism there, from that hustler Trotsky to Manhattan Maoists, though motivations vary. Leon was a butt-hurt egoist of some ability while today's crop simply paste cartoon Marxism over their petty bourgeois idealism.
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Aug 30, 2021 1:32 pm

Amílcar Cabral: Liberator, theorist, and educator
By Curry Malott - January 20, 2021 6527

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Amílcar Cabral painting in Bafatá. Source: Wikicommons.

Introduction

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was born September 12, 1924 in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau, one of Portugal’s African colonies. On January 20, 1973–48 years ago today–Cabral was murdered by fascist Portuguese assassins just months before the national liberation movement in which he played a central role won the independence of Guinea-Bissau.

This particular struggle was waged for the liberation of not just one country–Guinea-Bissau, where the fighting took place–but also for another geographically-separate region, the archipelago Cape Verde. Cabral and the other leaders of the movement understood that they were fighting in a larger anti-colonial struggle and global class war and, as such, that their immediate enemies were not only the colonial governments of particular countries, but Portuguese colonialism in general. For 500 years, Portuguese colonialism was built upon the slave trade and the systematic pillaging of its African colonies: Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome e Principe, Angola, and Cape Verde.

Despite the worldwide focus on the struggle in Vietnam at the time, the inspiring dynamism of the campaign waged in Guinea-Bissau–together with the figure of Cabral–captured international attention. In the introduction to an early collection of Cabral’s writings and speeches, Basil Davidson (1979) describes Cabral as someone who expressed a genuine “enduring interest in everyone and everything that came his way” (x).

Like so many revolutionary leaders Cabral was “loved as well as followed” because “he was big hearted” and “devoted to his peoples’ progress” (xi). Due to his leadership and brilliance, “governments asked his advice” and “the United Nations gave him its platform.” However deserved it was, Cabral never indulged in this praise, and instead focused solely on his commitment to the liberation and self-determination of the world’s working-class and oppressed.

The Portuguese colonization of Guinea-Bissau was backed by Spain, South Africa, the United States, and NATO. Summarizing the pooled imperialist power wielded by Portugal in a report on the status of their struggle Cabral (1968a) elaborates:

“In the basic fields of economics, finance and arms, which determine and condition the real political and moral behavior of states, the Portuguese government is able to count more than ever on the effective aid of the NATO allies and others. Anyone familiar with the relations between Portugal and its allies, namely the USA, Federal Germany and other Western powers, can see that this assistance (economic, financial and in war material) is constantly increasing, in the most diverse forms, overt and covert. By skillfully playing on the contingencies of the cold war, in particular on the strategic importance of its own geographical position and that of the Azores islands, by granting military bases to the USA and Federal Germany, by flying high the false banner of the defense of Western and Christian civilization in Africa, and by further subjecting the natural resources of the colonies and the Portuguese economy itself to the big financial monopolies, the Portuguese government has managed to guarantee for as long as necessary the assistance which it receives from the Western powers and from its racist allies in Southern Africa.”

Despite the immense power of their enemies, the struggle led by the relatively small population in Guinea-Bissau prevailed, remaining a beacon of inspiration to this day.

As a result of his role as a national liberation movement leader for roughly 15 years, Cabral had become a widely influential theorist of decolonization and non-deterministic, creatively applied re-Africanization. World-renowned critical educator Paulo Freire (2020), in a 1985 presentation about his experiences in liberated Guinea-Bissau as a sort of militant consultant, concludes that Cabral, along with Ché Guevara, represent “two of the greatest expressions of the twentieth century” (171). Freire describes Cabral as “a very good Marxist, who undertook an African reading of Marx” (178). Cabral, for Freire, “fully lived the subjectivity of the struggle. For that reason, he theorized” as he led (179).

Although not fully acknowledged in the field of education Cabral’s decolonial theory and practice also sharpened and influenced the trajectory of Freire’s (1921-1997) thought. Through the revolutionary process led by Cabral, Guinea-Bissau became a world-leader in decolonial forms of education, which moved Freire deeply.

That is, because of the villainous process of Portuguese colonialism, which included centuries of de-Africanization, re-Africanization, through decolonial forms of education, was a central feature of the anti-colonial struggle for self-determination.

Cabral’s dialectical unity, building the Party, and the “Weapon of Theory”

Cabral knew that the people must not only abstractly understand the interaction of forces behind the development of society, but they must forge an anti-colonial practice that concretely, collectively, and creatively see themselves as one of those forces. To do so, however, the masses had to be organized into and represented by a Party.

In 1956, Cabral helped found the African Party for Independence (PAI), which later became The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The PAIGC was the first ever communist party in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and its founding was a monumental and inspiring feat.

In The Weapon of Theory, a 1966 address in Havana, Cabral articulated the inseparability of national liberation and socialism, telling the attendees that “in our present historical situation — elimination of imperialism which uses every means to perpetuate its domination over our peoples, and consolidation of socialism throughout a large part of the world — there are only two possible paths for an independent nation: to return to imperialist domination (neo-colonialism, capitalism, state capitalism), or to take the way of socialism.”

Cabral had to build the party and its indispensable culture of militant discipline from the ground up. Cabral’s ability to meet the new party members where they were at as co-learners speaks to his role as a pedagogue of the revolution. Delivered as a series of nine lectures to PAIGC members in 1969, Cabral (1979) covers the basics of the revolution, including its organization. He describes the PAIGC as a party in the Leninist tradition by referring to it as “an instrument of struggle” comprised of those who “share a given idea, a given aim, on a given path” (85).

Of course, revolutionary crises do not emerge from the correctness of ideas alone, but are driven by deteriorating economic conditions, and a crisis in the legitimacy of the state and its ability to meet the peoples’ needs. In the 1940s there were several droughts that left tens of thousands of Cape Verdeans dead. Portugal’s barbarism and indifferent response, situated in the context of the mounting poverty and suffering within its African colonies, began to alienate even the most privileged strata of the colonial state.

What made Cabral one of history’s great communist leaders, outside of the larger historical moment that provided an outlet for his talents, was his theoretically-informed tactical flexibility, which was essential for a constantly shifting balance of forces. In-the-midst-of-struggle decision-making, in other words, is enhanced by theory and organization, which enables the ability to quickly grasp the immediate and long-term implications of the shifting calculus of power.

For example, in 1957 in Paris, Cabral and two Angolans formed the Movimento Anti-Colonista of Africans from the Portuguese colonies during the Algerian War. The three, in Angola, would go on to form the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. What developed was one of the toughest anti-colonial fights in Africa.

It is only fitting that in his opening remarks in the first of the nine 1969 presentations to party members Cabral would choose as his place of departure an explanation of PAIGC’s “motto” or “theme,” the phrase “unity and struggle” (28). Defining the concept of unity dialectically, Cabral insists that “whatever might be the existing differences” within the people, “we must be one, an entirety, to achieve a given aim. This means that in our principle, unity is taken in a dynamic sense, in motion” (28-29).

The idea that unity is a movement and process of composition means that it is “a means, not an end. We might have struggled a little for unity, but if we achieve it, that does not mean the struggle is over” (31). The Party’s role here “is not necessary to unite the whole population to struggle in a country. Are we sure that all the population are united? No, a certain degree of unity is enough. Once we have reached it, then we can struggle” (31).

To explain struggle, Cabral likens it to the tension between centrifugal force and gravity. As a concrete example Cabral notes that for a spaceship to leave the Earth it must overcome the force of gravity. Cabral then characterizes Portuguese colonialism as an external force imposed upon the people and only through the combined force of the people united can the force of colonialism be overcome.

In the address, Cabral theorized the dialectical nature of movement and change focusing specifically on how the anti-imperialist struggle must emerge from the concrete conditions of each national liberation movement.

“We know that the development of a phenomenon in movement, whatever its external appearance, depends mainly on its internal characteristics. We also know that on the political level our own reality — however fine and attractive the reality of others may be — can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts, by our own sacrifices. It is useful to recall in this Tricontinental gathering, so rich in experience and example, that however great the similarity between our various cases and however identical our enemies, national liberation and social revolution are not exportable commodities; they are, and increasingly so every day, the outcome of local and national elaboration, more or less influenced by external factors (be they favorable or unfavorable) but essentially determined and formed by the historical reality of each people, and carried to success by the overcoming or correct solution of the internal contradictions between the various categories characterizing this reality.”

Cabral knew that to defeat Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau, the liberation struggle could not merely reproduce the tactics of struggles from other contexts, like Cuba. Rather, every particular struggle has to base its tactics on an analysis of the specifics of its own context. For example, while acknowledging the value of the general principles Guevara outlined in his Guerilla Warfare, Cabral (1968b) commented that “nobody commits the error, in general, of blindly applying the experience of others to his own country. To determine the tactics for the struggle in our country, we had to take into account the geographical, historical, economic, and social conditions of our own country, both in Guinea and in Cabo [Cape] Verde.”

Responding to Guevara’s argument, based on the experience of Cuba, that revolutionary struggles go through three predetermined phases or stages, Cabral stated:

“In general, we have certain reservations about the systematization of phenomena. In reality the phenomena don’t always develop in practice according to the established schemes. We greatly admire the scheme established by Che Guevara essentially on the basis of the struggle of the Cuban people and other experiences, and we are convinced that a profound analysis of that scheme can have a certain application to our struggle. However, we are not completely certain that, in fact, the scheme is absolutely adaptable to our conditions.”

Cabral’s assessment was also informed by the dialectical insight that the conditions in any one country do not develop in a vacuum unaffected by external forces. Not only were deteriorating conditions in Portugal, the imperial mother country, shifting the balance of forces in favor of national liberation movements in its African colonies, but the emergence of these struggles coincided with the successful revolution in China in 1949.

Conscious of this larger dialectical totality, which points to the interconnection between seemingly separate, unrelated parts, Cabral consciously fostered solidarity with Portugal’s working-class. Representing the colonized Indigenous peoples of Guinea-Bissau Cabral successfully reached out to the oppressed of Portugal in solidarity against their common class enemy, the fascistic Portuguese capitalist/colonialist class.

With dialectical theory and the spirit of anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist unity the revolutionary forces in Guinea-Bissau routinely freed Portuguese prisoners of war. Cabral (1968c) used such occasions to make public statements designed to educate and win over Portugal’s persecuted working-class to shift the balance of power away from Portugal’s fascist state.

Cabral spoke directly to the 20,000 Portuguese conscripts urging them to consider their class interests above and beyond the national chauvinism their ruling class fed them.

“In the framework of our struggle for national independence, peace and progress for our people in Guinea and the Cabo Verde Islands, the freeing of Portuguese soldiers captured by our armed forces was both necessary and predictable. This humanitarian gesture, whose political significance will escape nobody, is the corollary of a fundamental principle of our party and of our struggle. We are not fighting against the Portuguese people, against Portuguese individuals or families. Without ever confusing the Portuguese people with colonialism, we have had to take up arms to wipe out from our homeland the shameful domination of Portuguese colonialism.”

Central to this message Cabral (1968c) offered insights regarding the awful treatment of not only prisoners of war in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, but of the civilian population as well:

“Members of our armed forces captured by the colonial troops are generally given a summary execution. Others are tortured and forced to make declarations which the colonial authorities use in their propaganda. In their vain but none­theless criminal attempt at genocide, the Portuguese colonial­ists carry out daily acts of terrorism against the peaceful inhabitants of our liberated areas, particularly against women, children and old people; they bomb and machine-gun our people, reducing our villages to ashes and destroying our crops, using bombs of every type, and in particular fragmentation bombs, napalm and white phosphor bombs.”

The liberation of the Portuguese was connected to the liberation of Portugal’s African colonies. If the Portuguese ruling class began losing control in Africa, it could also fall in Portugal, and if it fell in Portugal, it would fall in Africa.

Rather than a theoretical position worked out abstractly in isolation, it was formulated practically. It had serious and determinant results. Portuguese officers refused orders to fight in Africa, and some formed an Armed Forces Movement that supported the demands for independence.

The Portugeuese soldiers led a rebellion against fascism at home, which ended more than 40 years of fascist rule. It opened the door to a popular upsurge that nearly claimed power for the Portuguese workers. These social convulsions in the imperial center in turn facilitated the independence of Portugal’s African colonies.

De-Africanization and anti-colonial resistance

The small region in West Africa that the Portuguese would claim as Guinea-Bissau contained more than a dozen distinct ethnic groups. Slavers worked tirelessly to sew divisions between them. These divisions enabled slavers to enlist one group to facilitate in the enslavement of others. This anti-African divisiveness would lay the foundation for centuries of de-Africanization.

Describing the role of colonial education in this epistemic violence Walter Rodney (1972/2018), in his classic text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, explains that, “the Portuguese…had always shown contempt for African language and religion” (304). Whereas secondary schools were established for colonists, education beyond two or three years of elementary school for Africans was rare. Consequently:

“Schools of kindergarten and primary level for Africans in Portuguese colonies were nothing but agencies for the spread of the Portuguese language…[T]he small amount of education given to Africans was based on eliminating the use of local languages.” (304)

The devastation of such practices reflects reports that European colonists with smaller African colonial holdings like Portugal were amongst the most desperate and thus cruelest in their efforts at maintaining their occupations. Consequently, Indigenous resistance to Portuguese colonialism was so widespread for so many centuries that colonial rule was always limited to specific regions. In other words, colonial forces were never completely able to conquer what amounts to the state power of indigeneity.

It is therefore not surprising that the Portuguese were not able to rely merely on state violence for social control, but required intensive ideological manipulation as well. The attempt to eradicate Indigenous languages and cultures was crucial. Toward these ends, the colonial authorities propagated a hypocritical discourse that claimed their colonies were integral to the metropolis or mainland while simultaneously brutally exploiting them.

Fascist Portugal and the struggle

The brutality in which the Portuguese ruling-class managed its African colonies would eventually be directed at its own working-class with a fascist turn in 1926. Rodney (1972/2018) explains that “when the fascist dictatorship was inaugurated in Portugal in 1926, it drew inspiration from Portugal’s colonial past” (244).

The decline of Portuguese capitalism that gave way to Portuguese fascism would only deteriorate with the global capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Consequently, the desperation of Portugal’s capitalist class intensified. For example, when Salazar became the dictator of Portugal in 1932, he declared that the “new” Portuguese state would be built off of the exploitation of “inferior peoples” (quoted in Rodney, 244).

Whereas the French ruling class had moved to neocolonialism by 1960, Portugal’s decline had rendered it still largely backward and feudalistic. Out of desperation, Portugal became even more dependent on ruthlessly exploiting peoples not just in its colonial holdings, but within its own national territory.

Fascist Portuguese leaders, therefore, employing increasingly violent forms of social control, rejected African demands for self-determination. In response to the growing wave of national liberation movements in their African colonies, the Portuguese establishment sent armed forces to repress the struggle. Rather than cower in the face of Portuguese fascism and overall deteriorating conditions, national liberation movements grew and spread.

Relations with China

Following the establishment of the PAIGC, Cabral settled in Guinea’s capital, Conakry. Cabral immediately reached out to China’s Guinean embassy in 1960.

Since the emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, China had established a clear commitment to the anti-colonial movements in Africa. For example, in 1955 at the Bandung Conference, in which 29 African countries participated, China established foreign policy principles based upon supporting oppressed nations’ right to self-determination. In 1957, China organized the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference and in 1960 founded the Chinese-African Peoples’ Friendship Association, in which Cabral enthusiastically participated.

Cabral and other leaders of PAIGC became regular guests at the Chinese embassy in Conakry. In 1960, the PAIGC received an invitation from the Chinese Committee for Afro-Asian Solidarity to visit China. A delegation from the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was invited as well. During this visit, China agreed to use their military academies to train combatants from both the PAIGC and the MPLA.

Training included instruction in guerilla warfare, the history of the Chinese Revolution and agrarian revolution, and socialist theory. The first group trained in China would serve as the PAIGC’s embryonic core fighting cadre.

As a result of Cabral’s leadership and diplomacy, China would emerge as one of Guinea-Bissau’s first supporters in the early stage of its struggle for independence. China provided the PAIGC with a great diversity of support, from weaponry to assistance broadcasting radio messages denouncing the regular, horrific crimes of the Portuguese military in Guinea-Bissau. With support from China on one hand, and Portuguese brutality on the other, the anti-colonial struggle intensified between 1963 and 1974.

Anti-colonialism and decoloniality

An important part of carrying out the national liberation movement entailed knowing what issues to organize around.

Based on his intimate understanding of the uniqueness of the agricultural situation in his country, Cabral knew that the primary economic issue the majority peasant population faced was not access to land, as was the case in other colonies. Rather, the issue was unsustainable trade deals that were particularly devastating given the colonial insistence on not farming for sustenance but for export through single-crop production.

The demand for cultural and political rights in the face of fascistic Portuguese colonialism was another demand that resonated widely.

Cabral focused on the political developments required for building a united movement for national liberation. In his formulations, he argued that the armed struggle was intimately interconnected with the political struggle, which were both part of a larger cultural struggle.

Cabral’s Marxist formulations on culture were important for the larger struggle and for resisting colonial education. He acknowledged that fascists and imperialists were well aware “of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination,” which provided a framework for understanding that subjugation can only be maintained “by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people” (1979, 139).

Resistance, for Cabral, is also a cultural expression. What this means is that “as long as part of that people can have a cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation.” In this situation then, “at a given moment, depending on internal and external factors…cultural resistance…may take on new (political, economic, and armed) forms, in order…to contest foreign domination” (140). In practice, the still living Indigenous cultures that led centuries of anti-colonial resistance would organically merge with, and emerge from within, the political and national liberation and socialist movements.

In practice, Cabral promoted the development of the cultural life of the people. Written as a directive to PAIGC cadre in 1965, Cabral encouraged not only a more intensified military effort against the Portuguese, but a more intensified educational effort in liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau. Again, while the national liberation/anti-colonial movement and the educational process of decolonizing knowledge are often falsely posed as distinct or even antagonistic, Cabral conceptualized them as dialectically interrelated:

“Create schools and spread education in all liberated areas. Select young people between 14 and 20, those who have at least completed their fourth year, for further training. Oppose without violence all prejudicial customs, the negative aspects of the beliefs and traditions of our people. Oblige every responsible and educated member of our Party to work daily for the improvement of their cultural formation.”

A central part of developing this revolutionary consciousness was the process of re-Africanization. This was not meant as a call to return to the past, but a way to reclaim self-determination and build a new future in the country.

“Oppose among the young, especially those over 20, the mania for leaving the country so as to study elsewhere, the blind ambition to acquire a degree, the complex of inferiority and the mistaken idea which leads to the belief that those who study or take courses will thereby become privileged in our country tomorrow.”

At the same time, Cabral opposed fostering ill will toward those who had studied or who desired to study abroad. Rather, Cabral encouraged a pedagogy of patience and understanding as the correct approach to winning people over and strengthening the movement.

This is one reason why Freire (1978) describes Cabral as one of those “leaders always with the people, teaching and learning mutually in the liberation struggle” (18). As a pedagogue of the revolution, for Freire, Cabral’s “constant concern” was the “patient impatience with which he invariably gave himself to the political and ideological formation of militants” (19).

This commitment to the people’s cultural development as part of the wider struggle for liberation informed his educational work in the liberated zones. Freire writes that it also informed “the tenderness he showed when, before going into battle, he visited the children in the little schools, sharing in their games and always having just the right word to say to them. He called them the ‘flowers of our revolution’” (19).

Victory before Victory

Even though Cabral was murdered before victory, the ultimate fate of Portuguese colonialism had already been sealed years before his death, and he knew it. For example, in a communique released on January 8, 1973, a mere 12 days before he was assassinated, Cabral (1979) concludes that the situation in Guinea-Bissau “since 1968… is comparable to that of an independent state” (277). Cabral reports that after dozens of international observers had visited Guinea-Bissau, including a United Nations Special Mission, the international legitimacy of their PAIGC-led struggle was mounting. It had become irrefutable that:

“Vast areas have been liberated from the colonial yoke and a new political, administrative, economic, social and cultural life is developing in these areas, while the patriotic forces, supported by the population, are fighting successfully against the colonialists to complete the liberation of the country.” (277)

With this knowledge Cabral, again, denounces the “the criminal obstinacy of the Lisbon Government, which intensifies its genocidal colonial war against the legitimate rights of our people to self-determination, independence and progress” (277). Making the case for the formation of a new internationally-recognized state, Cabral argues that the people of Guinea-Bissau, through the leadership of the PAIGC, were already functioning as such:

“While our people have for years now possessed political, administrative, judicial, military, social and cultural institutions—hence a state—and are free and sovereign over more than two-thirds of the national territory, they do not have a juridical personality at the international level. Moreover the functioning of such institutions in the framework of the new life developing in the liberated areas demands a broader participation by the people, through their representatives, not only in the study and solution of the problems of the country and the struggle, but also in the effective control of the activities of the Party which leads them” (278)

To begin resolving this contradiction, in 1971 the Party voted to hold general elections in the liberated areas “for the constitution of the first People’s National Assembly” in Guinea-Bissau. After eight months of debate, discussion and outreach, elections were successfully held in 1972 in all of the liberated zones.

Several months after the election, Cabral (1979) issued another statement referring to the creation of the People’s National Assembly as “an epoch-making victory for the difficult but glorious struggle of our people for independence” (288). Underscoring how this was a collective achievement of unity and struggle Cabral offered his “warmest congratulations to our people” (289).

He reminded the people that “a national assembly, like any organ in any living body, must be able to function in order to justify its existence. For this reason, we have a greater task to fulfill in the framework of our struggle” (289).

Cabral then announced that the PAIGC would be calling its first National Assembly to formalize their constitution thereby proclaiming to the world they exist and are “irrevocably determined to march forward to independence without waiting for the consent of the Portuguese colonists” (289).

Yes, Cabral was killed before the final expulsion of Portuguese colonialism, but, in a very real sense, he still ushered in a new, independent state.

Freire and Cabral’s decolonial education in a liberated Guinea-Bissau

As a pedagogue of the revolution Basil Davidson (1979) refers to Cabral as “a supreme educator in the widest sense of the word” (x).

The importance of education was elevated to new heights by Cabral and PAIGC leadership at every opportunity. It therefore made sense for the Commission on Education of the recently liberated Guinea-Bissau to invite the world’s leading expert on decolonial approaches to education, Paulo Freire, to participate in further developing their system of education.

Freire was part of a team from the Institute for Cultural Action of the Department of Education within the World Council of Churches. Their task was to help uproot the colonial residue that remained as a result of generations of colonial education designed to de-Africanize the people. Just as the capitalist model of education will have to be replaced or severely remade, the colonial model of education had to be dismantled and rebuilt anew.

“The inherited colonial education had as one if its principal objectives the de-Africanization of nationals. It was discriminatory, mediocre, and based on verbalism. It could not contribute anything to national reconstruction because it was not constituted for this purpose” (Freire 1978, 13).

The colonial model of education was designed to foster a sense of inferiority in the youth. Colonial education with predetermined outcomes seeks to dominate learners by treating them as if they were passive objects. Part of this process was negating the history, culture, and languages of the people. In the most cynical and wicked way then colonial schooling sent the message that the history of the colonized really only began “with the civilizing presence of the colonizers” (14).

In preparation for their visit Freire and his team studied Cabral’s works and learned as much as possible about the context. Reflecting on some of what he had learned from Cabral, despite never having met him, Freire (2020) offers the following:

“In Cabral, I learned a great many things…But I learned one thing that is a necessity for the progressive educator and for the revolutionary educator. I make a distinction between the two: For me, a progressive educator is one who works within the bourgeois classed society such as ours, and whose dream goes beyond just making schools better, which needs to be done. And goes beyond because what [they] dream of is the radical transformation of a bourgeois classed society into a socialist society. For me this is a progressive educator. Whereas a revolutionary educator, in my view, is one who already finds [themselves] situated at a much more advanced level both socially and historically within a society in process” (170).

For Freire, Cabral was certainly an advanced revolutionary educator. Rejecting predetermination and dogmatism, Freire’s team did not construct lesson plans or programs before coming to Guinea-Bissau to be imposed upon the people.

Upon arrival Freire and his colleagues continued to listen and discuss learning from the people. Only by learning about the revolutionary government’s educational work could they assess it and make recommendations. Decolonial guidance, that is, cannot be offered outside of the concrete reality of the people and their struggle. Such knowledge cannot be known or constructed without the active participation of the learners as a collective.

Freire (1978) was aware that the education that was being created could not be done “mechanically,” but must be informed by “the plan for the society to be created” (14). Although Cabral had been assassinated, his writings and leadership had helped in the creation of a force with the political clarity needed to counter the resistance emerging from those who still carried the old ideology.

Through their process revolutionary leaders would encounter teachers “captured” by the old ideology who consciously worked to undermine the new decolonial practice. Others, however, also conscious that they are captured by the old ideology, nevertheless strive to free themselves of it. Cabral’s work on the need for the middle-class, including teachers, to commit class suicide, was instructive. The middle-class had two choices: betray the revolution or commit class suicide. This choice remains true today, even in the US.

The work for a reconstituted system of education had already been underway during the war in liberated zones. The post-independence challenge was to improve upon all that had been accomplished in areas that had been liberated before the wars end. In these liberated areas, Freire (1978) concluded, workers, organized through the Party, “had taken the matter of education into their own hands” and created, “a work school, closely linked to production and dedicated to the political education of the learners” (17).

Describing the education in the liberated zones Freire says it “not only expressed the climate of solidarity induced by the struggle itself, but also deepened it. Incarnating the dramatic presence of the war, it both searched for the authentic past of the people and offered itself for their present” (17).

After the war the revolutionary government chose not to simply shut down the remaining colonial schools while a new system was being created. Rather, they “introduced…some fundamental reforms capable of accelerating…radical transformation” (20). For example, the curricula that was saturated in colonialist ideology was replaced. Students would therefore no longer learn history from the perspective of the colonizers. The history of the liberation struggle as told by the formerly colonized was a fundamental addition.

However, a revolutionary education is not content with simply replacing the content to be passively consumed. Rather, learners must have an opportunity to critically reflect on their own thought process in relation to the new ideas. For Freire, this is the path through which the passive objects of colonial indoctrination begin to become active subjects of decoloniality.

Assessment here could not have been more significant. What was potentially at stake was the success of the revolution and the lives of millions. This is a lesson relevant to all revolutionaries who must continually assess their work, always striving for improvement. In this way it was clear to Freire that they must not express “uncontained euphoria in the face of good work nor negativity regarding…mistakes” (27).

From their assessment then Freire and his team sought, “to see what was really happening under the limited material conditions we knew existed.” The clear objective was therefore “to discover what could be done better under these conditions and, if this were not possible, to consider ways to improve the conditions themselves” (27).

What Freire and his team concluded was that “the learners and workers were engaged in an effort that was preponderantly creative” (28) despite the many challenges and limited material resources. At the same time, they characterized “the most obvious errors” they observed as the result of “the impatience of some of the workers that led them to create the words instead of challenging the learners to do so for themselves” (28).

From the foundation Cabral played such a central role in building, and through this process of assessment, what was good in the schools was made better, and what was in error was corrected. As a pedagogue of the revolution Cabral “learned” with the people and “taught them in the revolutionary praxis” (33).

Conclusion

Freire’s work and practice have inspired what has become a worldwide critical pedagogy movement. Cabral is a centrally-important, yet mostly unacknowledged, influence of this movement. The attention to decoloniality occupies one of critical education’s most exciting and relatively recent cutting edges, which demands a more thorough return to Cabral.

Reflecting on Cabral’s contributions to decolonial theory and practice a decade after his time in Guinea-Bissau, Freire (1985), like Cabral before his death, continued to insist that, “we need to decolonize the mind because if we do not, our thinking will be in conflict with the new context evolving from the struggle for freedom” (187).

In the last prepared book before his death, subtitled Letters to Those who Dare Teach, Cabral’s influence on Freire (1997) seems to have remained central, as he insisted that “it is important to fight against the colonial traditions we bring with us” (64).

As the socialist and anti-racist movement in the US continues to grow in size and political sophistication, the educational lessons from the era of anti-colonial socialist struggles will also grow in relevance.

References
Cabral, A. (1965). Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.
Cabral, A. (1966). The Weapon of Theory.
Cabral, A. (1968a). The development of the struggle.
Cabral, A. (1968b). Practical Problems and tactics.
Cabral, A. (1968c). On freeing Portuguese soldiers.
Cabral, A. (1979). Unity and struggle: Speeches and writings of Amílcar Cabral. New York Monthly Review.
Davidson, B. Introduction. In Amílcar Cabral (Au). Unity and struggle: Speeches and writings of Amílcar Cabral, pp. ix-xvii. New York: Monthly Review.
Freire, P. (1978). Pedagogy in process: The letters to Guinea-Bissau. New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power and liberation. London: Bergin & Garvey.
Freire, P. (1997). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Freire, P. (2020). South African freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral: Pedagogue of the revolution. In Sheila Macrine (Ed.), Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibility, pp. 159-181. New York: Palgrave.
Rodney, W. (1972/2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. New York: Verso.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 08, 2021 2:03 pm

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Bolivarianism & Marxism—Commitment to the impossible in defense of utopia
Posted Sep 07, 2021 by Jesús Santrich, W. T. Whitney, Jr.


Translator’s introduction
Colombian troops killed Jesús Santrich in Venezuela on May 17, 2021. Santrich was a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and spokesperson for the FARC’s negotiating team during peace talks with the Colombian government that ended in 2016. In this essay from March of 2009, Santrich as political theoretician explores the interrelations of Marxist and Bolivarian thought and the effects on both of utopian longings, political feasibilities, and the reach of history.


This English language version of Santrich’s essay from is incomplete in that some segments of the author’s lengthy quotations from various sources are omitted and sections of two long descriptive commentaries are summarized rather than translated. All translation notes are bracketed in line with the text. Editorial notes are indicated as endnotes. Thanks are due to Professor John Womack for kindly reviewing this translation. Please find additional notes on the translation at the end of the essay.


—W.T. Whitney, Jr.



Dedication: In defense of utopia, as homage to Comandante Manuel Marulanda Vélez, the Insurgent hero of Bolivar’s Colombia, on the anniversary of his journey to eternity. The impossible is what we have to do, because others take care of the possible every day! (Bolivar)


Utopia on the level of praxis


Socialist revolution throughout the world, looking to the horizon of the communist utopia, will have to collide with worldwide capitalism for that phenomenon to be overcome definitively. Socialist revolution surely will be breaking the imperialists’ chain at its weakest link, as Lenin would have said.


In any case, Marxism must be nurtured from reality, our own history, and prevailing circumstances, as we ceaselessly search out every corner of time and space to visualize the march of society—and to influence and transform society without waiting for the right conditions to fall from the heavens.


Utopia is of the essence for Marxists just as is selective research into “significant structures” and as is the rescuing for social science and revolutionary practice of insights to be gained from a vigorous, all-encompassing overview during the transition period, with its unknown destination and constant renewal. As a guide to method and action, such research will have to look into the nature and logic of the Marxists’ movement, while understanding that no category, not even a law of social development, is self-evident. No truth of any kind is in everyone’s head automatically, no matter how brilliant he or she may be.


If we look at things dialectically, the truth is there in the depths, on the surfaces, or on externalizations of phenomena as a whole. In other words, we examine human relations in society as a whole as it evolves in a rhythm of contradictions.


Marxists must keep utopia foremost in their consciousness. It drives mass actions. They must assume that a revolutionary movement, whatever its origins, doesn’t qualify as such if it lacks that component manifesting as irrepressible effort towards change categorized as “impossible.” But utopia must always take off from a basis in realty. We humans have the duty to regard the world we want as another world That is possible. Paraphrasing Bolívar, we are looking for the “impossible,” while leaving the possible up to everyone else, every day.


The object is always to make the “impossible” possible and never have history stop, and we don’t insist on a perfect ending for all time. Even so, in the here and now, humankind has to be looking endlessly for new and better horizons.


One of the fundamental values of Bolivar as a revolutionary protagonist prior to Marx, and of Bolivarism as a current compendium of his ideas, is exactly that: commitment to the “impossible.” The essence of the Bolivarian project manifested in its customary persistence in total war against the Spanish oppressors and against all oppressors. In his role as theoretician and day-to-day protagonist of emancipation, Bolivar was a combatant not only for political autonomy, as were many of his contemporaries, but also as the champion of continental revolution. He was the father of ideas put forth but never realized—and needed now more than ever. These are the utopian ones: achievement of the Great Homeland and of the hemispheric republic, and assuring the equilibrium of the universe, etc.


The father of our Colombian nationality, Bolivar the revolutionary, the insurgent, the visionary, was seeking the total destruction of colonialism but was also attending to that which was beyond the possibilities of his time, the possibilities of the “impossible.” He foresaw the construction of a global society under conditions of equality, justice, and true democracy. From this perspective, he warned us of the danger of Yankee imperialism.


Conscious of the historical process he was part of, Bolivar knew then that he had to act with transformative determination, without voluntarism.1 On the march, he characteristically was analyzing concrete conditions and immediate possibilities. He focused on what could actually be achieved under the circumstances of his present. He always remembered that the people were the true protagonists of history, and that he, Bolivar, was but a “weak straw,” buffeted by the revolutionary hurricane. With his continental, even universal, vision—and never restricting himself to the confines of each “tiny republic”—the Liberator knew that while the Spaniards continued to oppress peoples on the continent, implementation of his ideas would be inconclusive. In that way, he was Colombian.


The reach of his Colombian dream went even beyond desire to decapitate the European thieves who rule over the universe. The utopia of the Liberator, ultimately, as with any true utopia, was preparing for “the impossible” at the level of praxis, from a base of actual circumstances.


Marxism, Bolivarianism and Utopia


To declare oneself Bolivarian and, as such, declare oneself a revolutionary on the Marxist path implies lifelong motivation derived from the hope of transforming society and finding justice. This is a constant and is strong enough with its broad vision as to point to utopia as a characteristic of political consciousness and the natural result of rational belief.


In that regard, utopia is a higher goal of commitment. That is so in any case relative to its appearance on presentation when the matter of possibility or impossibility is already uncertain, something that depends on extreme difficulties that may arise. It is relative also in terms of purpose inasmuch as the historical implementation of utopia evolves, but doesn’t end, like history itself.


In the hopeful quest for realization of the “impossible,” the process calls upon a mixture of illusions, realism, magic, and love for the people as a reason for life. Utopia ultimately epitomizes all of these together: love, dreams, admiration, rootedness in history, a vision of the future, and full experience of all stages of time and space as necessity, duty, and humanizing desire. The essential interest of the utopian is preservation of humans and nature in absolute equilibrium, thus displaying the potentials of historical memory, faith, dignity, and our identity as vital factors for existence.


Confronting oppression and marching on the path of utopia, the revolutionary sheds resignation. He or she is unconditionally, permanently, and creatively committed to the poor people of the world.


Let’s say then that the Marxist-Bolivarian idea of a revolutionary is of someone who fixes on an ideology that, while encompassing reality, is not yet solidified and is perhaps uncertain. The goal is set of becoming absolutely convinced that this reality will be fulfilled, “impossible” though it may seem. In an ostensibly reckless statement, the Liberator suggested That is what we are supposed to do, “because everyone else, every day, takes care of that which is possible.”


For example, that was Bolivar’s frame of mind as he undertook a mission improbable for almost anyone else, that of climbing over the grey hairs [canas] of the Andes to liberate New Granada. That was Marx’s attitude too when he wrote in support of the Paris Commune [of 1871], expressing certainty that the duty of all revolutionaries is to “storm the heavens.” They do so, urged on by their demanding sense of ethics and motivated to free themselves from oppression. In the process they enhance all values of human experience built into history.


The author of the Communist Manifesto, appealing to selfless purpose, was calling for struggle offering the possibility of risks. Projects were taken on that perhaps looked absurd—what well-reasoned nonsense!—or unfeasible. Marx was calling for action needing to pass a test of fire in the face of historical commitment prompted by circumstances, even at the risk of death. He was clarifying a concept of living, whose own ethics intermeshed with the dialectics of reality that was moving, but always toward the future. That is how the course of historical development proceeds with high levels of noble altruism and with unbreakable determination to confront every obstacle imposed by exploitation of man by man.


It is a matter of the possibility that is being disputed interacting with the ideal, and the ideal seeking to be established as reality, and all of it ultimately breaking apart as a “realistic utopia,” according to the revolutionary’s yardstick. But as occurred in France in May 1968, realism is magical also, especially when events move beyond what seems merely to be feasible on to something favorable to human potential: “We are realists, we do the impossible” was the great slogan. It expressed the determination of fired-up students who wanted change. They were rising up against an established order in France that was unjust.


This definition of commitment to the “impossible,” which marks the highest commitment to utopia, delineates a concept, revolutionary of course, in which the vision of possibility, even at the level of the improbable, derives from convictions as to purpose, and from feelings and reasons favoring risk that go beyond what’s strictly rational.


His “crazy little army” liked to call Augusto Cesar Sandino the “General of Free Men”. That guerrilla force of his bravely took on Yankee marines invading his country [Nicaragua].


They fought because their search for truth on the complicated road of anti-imperialist struggle and emancipation not only demanded attention to meticulous planning, but called for daring and heroism too. The man’s audacity and valor, reflecting spirituality guided by faith, went far beyond factual awareness of the physical circumstances.


Here, then, are the “reasons” for utopia, that of “doing of the impossible because all the others every day take care of the possible” or that of “being realistic by doing the impossible,” or of “storming the heavens.” This kind of thinking envisions Marxists and Bolivarians alike as rising up, in our world, to the level of magical realism. And why not? Magical realism goes beyond mere rationalism. We have symbols, imagination, and creativity—all based on rich traditions rooted in indigenous experience in the Americas. It is founded also on the syncretism of our mixed and oppressed mestizo peoples. Playing out, this proposition looks toward installing social justice, that is to say, accomplishes what is ideal for the benefit of humankind.


Utopia: transcendence and the means for its achievement


One of the most important aspects of Bolivar’s and Marx’s ideas about a higher and more humanizing state of being is that they are inexhaustible. That is so, because inspiration also derives from a continuous source of creation. Their boundless imaginations conceived of an ideology in which duty serves the human collective and transcends to glory in the sense of satisfaction through fulfillment of duty. Moreover, as action is underway, a vision of purpose is being projected. It is a vision of what has to be, and goes beyond what now is. Visualized also is the highest social stage in which virtue becomes the common characteristic of humanity.


In thought and action these revolutionaries living their lives seemed to ignore any incongruence, whether obvious or merely suggested, between their purpose, which is about the “impossible,” and the means for its achievement. That is the true frame of reference for revolutionaries.


As regards utopia, the possibility is announced of hope-engendering change, even if the road to its achievement is ill-defined. That was so with the utopia of Mariátegui. Although he may have lacked really specific designs for how to get there, what plans he did propose for implementing his proposals always derived from great inspiration. It is unfair to disqualify them on grounds of action that was ineffective or of excess intellectualism inasmuch as no revolution ever anticipates the revolution that is bound to follow.


Otherwise, it does makes sense that no true version of Marxism would reject or abandon what amounts to a project of emancipation simply because it lacks clarity or certainty. Nor would the true Marxist avoid attempts to reach an explanation of capitalism and of class struggle while undertaking to confront them. And by no means would Marxism abandon utopia as a proposal for creating a humanely human world, as if to humanize the world beforehand for the sake of struggle to come.


The Bolivarian utopia


Without entering into details about content or aspects of ideology, we can say of the Bolivarian utopia that, as it appears, the social order outlined there as part of liberating transformation may indeed coexist with oppression. Fully-realized socialism is by no means imminent. And so, quite definitely, strong foundations of justice may be established within the context of the most perverse and inhuman systems of colonialist exploitation, even those sustained over the course of centuries with the whip and, infamously, by segregation. The Bolivarian utopia does respond to the lacerated shoulders of indigenous servants, to the enslavement of Africans and Afro-descendants.


Bolivar’s ideology served the construction of a new society without the oppression and cruelty of the old system, which even the most “advanced” liberalism of that era accepted as natural and necessary. That was evident, for example, in Philadelphia with provisions of the [U.S.] Constitution that defended the “sacred right to property,” which included the possession of and control over enslaved people. The Liberator was horrified: “One man owned by another! Man as property!”


Property, slavery, racism, individualism, and utilitarianism were the key aspects of “advanced” U. S. liberalism of that era. Nor was provision made for the independence of indigenous peoples. Later on, the Liberator noted that “Washington’s code” is not democracy, because we cannot conceive of democracy without freedom; “You know that one cannot be free and a slave at the same time without violating natural laws, political laws, and civil law.”


[Santrich here devotes several paragraphs to documenting Simón Bolivar’s thinking and struggles over the course of decades. He describes the context of Bolivar’s military operations and political proposals, particularly in reaction to strong opposition from conservatives headed by Francisco de Paula Santander.2 He also refers to lessons learned from “The Spirit of the Laws” by Montesquieu (1748) and from the teachings of philosopher and pedagogue Simón Rodríguez, Simon Bolivar’s mentor in Europe and later in America. He offers unfavorable comments about the young United States. His narrative continues:]
All in all, the main aspect of Bolivar’s social project of justice and equality was the abolition of indigenous servitude and of slavery. In his writings, markers of such thinking are very clear. For example, in 1816, a time of great uncertainty about the destiny of the emancipation struggle, a time when adversities were constant and pressing, he writes:


Considering that justice, politics and homeland imperiously claim the indispensable rights of nature, I have come to decree the absolute freedom of the slaves who have groaned under the Spanish yoke in the last three centuries.


With great determination, the Liberator was now nourishing his struggle for emancipation with truly revolutionary and profound social content aimed at destroying the main economic institutions of the Iberian colonial system. This initiative of his guerrilla struggle in the East would soon appear in his memorable speech to the Congress of Angostura (1819). He was proposing a constitutional principle:


Nature, justice and politics call for the emancipation of slaves. I leave to your sovereign decision the reform or revocation of all my statutes and decrees, but I beg for the confirmation of absolute freedom for enslaved people, as I would beg for my own life and life itself.


Referring to “The poor indigenous people,” Bolivar “resolved to do everything possible for them, first, for the good of humanity, and second, they have basic rights.” To achieve this purpose was an essential part of his utopia.


Utopia and epochal change




Now the question of “the end of utopia” is posed to us in the sense of its altruistic purpose being fulfilled or, alternatively, culminating in the death of hope. Also, we may envision finalization as per Marcuse, for whom the situation may be such that purposes claimed to be altruistic are now favored by objective and subjective conditions that are absolutely feasible.


This circumstance in one way or another implies movement of an epoch, a change in characteristics of the time in which one is living, a “new period,” or a transition or abrupt change in regard to previous historical circumstances. We can embrace change as a valuable tradition to be looked upon as enabling us to face the future with optimism. This involves break-up or renovation in the sense either of total rejection of what is old and of substitution the new, or of radical change that may call for throwing out the old but not doing so as an absolute. Rescue means gathering up the richest part of the past as experience.


For the revolutionary, the past doesn’t have to disappear from creative vision. We accumulate experience to help build the new. The idea of simply changing “the old for the new” is an absolute fallacy, typical of absurd conclusions associated with Modernity, such as, for example, the idea that we can’t find in earlier times those norms we need for direction.


The past cannot be undervalued simply because it is the past. To the extent that social constructions have historical meaning, the past contains normative principles drawn from experience that enable future creation. To the extent that history is the vision of humanity’s movement as a whole, in every temporal and spatial dimension, the revolutionary surely sees experience of the past as movement that is inevitably linked to the projection of new goals for the future. That means that history and utopia go together, one with the other. They are interrelated, or, if you like, they form a unit.


We can say without fear of being mistaken that no revolutionary spirit exists that hasn’t necessarily been touched by the magic of historical consciousness. That is so in the sense of our being quite aware that historical consciousness necessarily touches upon “the old” and contains a craving for utopia. One is balanced with the other along that path we call hope.


Utopia, “realism” and history


It has long been assumed that Marxist thought was critical of “utopia” especially in reference to “utopian socialism.” “Scientific socialism” was proposed in opposition to utopian socialism on grounds that the latter offers a better future only in the abstract. The idea gained currency that that utopia is an unrealizable dream, an illusion, or something converted into pure fiction. Its advocates and followers are assumed to be imagining an unworldly, pretty place called paradise. Supposedly, they aren’t actually thinking about how to create an alternative world.


For the “realist” or “dialectical-historical materialist, “utopia” thus becomes an empty idea. These thinkers are looking for “concrete analysis of a concrete situation;” they assume “utopia” to be an “unsubstantial idea,” For them, possibility is not enough, dynamic though it may be. To fulfill the transformative role prescribed by Marxist philosophy, one does have to define means and methods. But this critique isn’t enough, in our view, without the addition of a clear design of alternative possibilities.


And, what about the impossible?


It is worth specifying that, in the Bolivarian view of things, building something is not a matter of fantasy, but is founded on real foundations. And not only that: we offer the incentive of projecting what we do into the future so that, with utopia and history now interwoven, the project takes on a dimension of ceaselessness as it proceeds always toward newer and higher horizons. The issue remains despite the opinion of Marxists that Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, Fourier, or Proudhon is disqualified by virtue of his identification as a utopian socialist.


Our suggestion is, rather, that revolutionaries think of utopianism as something more than a fantasy or, similarly, more than trying to build the future, as it may seem, without firm foundations. It is now clear that socialism designated as utopian has been and continues to represent an irreplaceable contribution to Marxism. Many of those who emphasize a supposed “scientific socialism” or the “science” of an often distorted “materialism” tend to forget this. Utopian socialism is also a fundamental source of assumptions that feed into the Bolivarism of today. There too, as with Marxism, to make a utopia makes no sense apart from the action involved and the consequences of what is being theorized.


According to Guevara, the revolutionary must, in effect, be “a man who acts as he thinks.” That was how it was with Bolivar, especially as he searched for the “impossible,” or what seemed to be such. Utopia is programed to be an alternative proposition for life, one that at a given time is either possible or “impossible.” Nevertheless, utopia does serve as a factor in sustaining the perspective of constant movement toward new stages of humanizing social development.


As regards history, then, utopia is the pull for its development. And in the search for what may look to be impossible, it preserves the condition of ceaselessness and, consequently, is a factor that is not used up as energy in the process of change.

(long...continued on following post.)
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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 08, 2021 2:05 pm

Bolivarianism & Marxism—Commitment to the impossible in defense of utopia...continued from previous post



Bolivarism and Marxism: utopia as vision of the future

With Bolivar first and then with Marx, a vision of the future was presented as a constant. Their perspective was that of history not being used up in the era at hand, when lives are being lived. They envisioned history as a matter of action going beyond and transcending, even if circumstances appear unfavorable for success in the long term. But Bolivar and Marx conceptualized immediate horizons too. For them, these were stages to be breached on their road of searching for horizons of the future. Out there, they anticipated fertile societies rising over a terrain of democracy and equality.

The case of the Liberator, he of the great, ever-expanding continental homeland, he who sought not to subjugate but to liberate, is one example: “Flying through and among the coming ages, my imagination is fixed on future centuries. With admiration and fear, I observe the prosperity and splendor of life in this vast region….”

[Santrich continues with excerpts taken from Simon Bolivar’s speech at the Congress of Angostura in 1819. They are not translated here.]
Neither Bolivar nor Marx was pessimistic about the future. They may have experienced disillusion and setbacks in their own time, as issues were settled in one way or another, but not as regards the future.

Perhaps one of the most fateful legacies for revolutionaries is apprehension on facing the danger that imperialism poses for the very existence of the planet with its catastrophic kind of developmentalism. In the face of great challenges, great resolve is necessary, really a triple boldness: action that overcomes determinism; recovery of the role of subjectivity, passion, audacity, and recklessness; and faith in the initiative of the masses, as they face the immediate prospect of “defeat.” In such circumstances, uncertainty and silence are worth nothing.

What audacity implies, even for the true revolutionary, is to not let defeat become capitulation to domestication, submission, and regret of purpose. This is what the class enemy is attempting to do in reproaching us for the fall of many socialist projects—or those claimed as such—in order to sow pessimism within the left. They’ve succeeded in doing so in regard to many former revolutionary groups and especially among the so-called progressive intelligentsia.

Those elements have long been ready to perform their nauseating role of apostates. They’ve built upon the deceptive notion that we are confronting a universe radically different from decades back and that, therefore, we need new coordinates for action and new ways of thinking. Consequently, we see abandonment of analysis and political action typical of our “post-modern” era. Therefore, we are supposed to say goodbye to Marxism and that “chimera” that is socialism, and in the same breath say, “with good reason.” It would be farewell also to “outmoded” thinking represented by Bolivarism and its ideal of the Great Homeland.

In the realm of revolutionary consciousness, this is unthinkable. If we are true Marxists and Bolivarians, our utopias of socialism and the Great Homeland must show the greatest moral strength, even in the worst of circumstances. They would be as unbreakable as the morality of Bolivar of 1812, who, having been defeated in Puerto Cabello, reemerges in the “Admirable Campaign.”3 This is the Bolivar who, after each of his failures in struggle to expel the Spanish empire from Our America, emerges from every adversity “like the sun, sending rays everywhere.”

To understand the sublime morality of a revolutionary utopian in the face of setbacks, we remember Bolivar. We recall that extremely difficult time in Peru when the counter-revolution found new strength as the result of treason, when Torre Tagle and Riva Agüero, supported fully by the oligarchy, betrayed the independence cause and delivered troops and arms to the Spanish army, which at the time was almost moribund in Pativilca.

In those unfavorable circumstances, Sucre himself, the hero of Ayacucho, whom the Liberator considered to be his most valued officer, advised Bolivar “to evacuate Peru” for the sake of “preserving the most precious part of our sacrifice [Colombia].” We gain clarity, however from the description Pablo Morillo provided of his encounter with the Liberator in Pativilca [in 1823]. The Spanish diplomat, on his way to Chile on a diplomatic mission, interviewed Bolivar, who was in appalling circumstances—“so thin and exhausted.” Seeing him in that pitiful situation, Mosquera asked him, “’And what are you going to do now?” Then Bolivar, his hollow eyes coming to life, answered: “I will triumph.” Bolivar’s faith in victory was absolute.

It was under those same terrible circumstances that Bolivar announced, “My watchword is to win or die in Peru.” The latter didn’t happen, and in the year 1825, the army of the Liberator, with its infantry, calvary, artillery, and navy again fully mobilized, was the foremost military power of America.

As regards Marx and Marxism, the meaning of utopia was on display in Marx’s vindication of utopia in the concrete situation of the Parisian workers in 1871 and in Lenin’s reflections on the situation of the Russian revolutionaries of 1905. In the first instance, Marx takes the example of the Paris Commune to propose that actions there varied in essential ways from views he put forth in the Communist Manifesto. The rising of 1871 gained Marx’s enormous admiration in several ways such as, for example, “the destruction of the parasitic state.” This sought-after outcome he identified as the essence of the program and objectives of those Paris revolutionaries.

Lenin also justifies utopia in his criticism of Plekhanov who complained of those daring to rise up that, “they didn’t really have to take up arms.” But in well-taken advocacy, Lenin rescues the role of subjectivity, of romanticism, if you will. He denounces a misunderstood or mistaken version of “materialism” that ends up disqualifying those who risked everything for the option of dignity. Lenin claims that the revolutionaries of 1905 would have gained Marx’s admiration no less than did the Paris communards in their attempt to “storm the heavens.” Like Marx, Lenin takes the side of the Commune of Paris despite its supposed failure and everything else. He also views the “defeat” of the rising of 1905 to have been positive and exemplifying.

These instances recall Che in La Higuera [in Bolivia] as he was informing his captors that even this, his defeat, would play a role in stimulating the Bolivian people’s awareness. We realize that the example of an individual’s selfless action can lay the foundation for moving toward a better future. As for the Paris Commune, Marx had written that, “the bourgeois canaille of Versailles pushed the Parisians to choose between ending their struggle after a fight or succumbing to oppression with no fight. The demoralization of the working class in the latter case would have represented an enormously greater disgrace than the fall of any number of their ‘chiefs’.”

These words reaffirm our absolute confidence that the example of these revolutionaries can be an impetus for “storming heaven,” or at least trying to do so. This approach represents a break from whatever kind of sterile orthodoxy, or useless “objectivity.” Ultimately, “being realists and doing the impossible” wins out, against all odds. That was the case with Bolivar’s determination to ascend the Andes, which was a matter of “doing the impossible because every day everyone else takes care of the possible.”

Denial of Utopia

Where is the satisfaction in denying utopia? Who gains when dreams and energies are fenced in? These are the very dreams and energies that are already aroused and pushing us to create a society with no exploiters, a society of dignity, justice, and happiness? The future of humanity requires the strengthening of utopia, and today more than ever. That is because imperialism poses imminent danger to our survival.

To deny utopia is to reject creative possibilities for humanity and—even more—to deny individuals the possibility of revolutionary transformation. Today, the eradication of humanity itself is well within all scientific possibilities. Such a vision of disaster was once unimaginable. But we who refuse to believe that man is by nature a wolf in human form are duty-bound to struggle for utopia and sustain it. Our utopia is about human existence and nature, and about collaboration, mutual aid, and happiness—the highest state of being. Therefore, the essence of the problem is fully revealed now, in our own time: Communism or chaos!

What’s in play is the very survival of the human species, of life, of nature in general, all put at risk through the destructive power of capitalism. But we will not idle around patiently waiting for an automatic end to capitalism and for a communist alternative automatically to flourish. Humanity’s conscious intervention is necessary. It is our immediate duty. Revolutionaries must connect utopia with liberation practice, at whatever cost.

For FARC revolutionaries, the utopia of Marxism and the Utopia of Bolivarism coincide fundamentally in that enduring purpose of social justice within a context of freedom and dignity.

Nevertheless, the essential Bolivarian line of thinking may not fit with a strict definition of socialism, as usually conveyed. But, calling for the development of emancipatory, continental unification, it surely provides the necessary foundation for the construction of socialism within an Indio-American perspective. It. We are convinced that its realization depends exclusively on humanity itself, but above all on revolutionaries, on the Quixotes, or, better said, on people as they ought to be.

This is not “man as he is”, man dominated by the ephemeral, man of a transitional reality, man of the kind alluded to by the dying Bolivar in Santa Marta, according to Gil Blas. We need, in short, people who are given to dreaming, to making a utopia of the possible and impossible. They are ready to seize the ideal with craziness, if need be. This is creative, instructive and paradigmatic craziness, the kind practiced by the Liberator himself. He is one who—as the distinguished Colombian poet and historian Juvenal Herrera Torres might have said—“leads our people, that multitude of Sancho Panzas, in the style of Don Quijote. He merges them into a whole and they blend into a single epochal gallop toward the conquest of utopia. What craziness! This is the craziness we need so that humanity may advance, although the common wisdom has us vegetating passively like slaves and servants. But then again, they always say that anything out of the ordinary is crazy.”

Furthermore, according to this idea, It is the revolutionary who combines thought and action, who thinks and then acts to redeem utopia. Or as exemplified by the Liberator, he is like Christ, Don Quixote, or Bolivar himself—in other words, history’s fools and triflers. That is to say: there is man as man ought to be, the one who, now facing the imminence of capitalist chaos, confronts oppression in order to contribute to the forging of a different world, even if he won’t be enjoying it for himself.

This is no easy task, because those vociferating about the end of history and the death of ideologies have always sought to finish off utopia, finish off redemptive dreams of being human. They try to persuade us that the installation of capitalism would be a superior state of human development. They would convert us into an immense flock of passive consumers and placid militants, nihilistic and fatalistic. It turns out, however, that the journey of the true revolutionary—who above all, is a builder of the future—is defined by optimism as a condition for history’s march.

Historical meaning of utopia

We will have to fight every day so that productive forces are not converted into the means for destroying the planet. We will show that as long as revolutionary conscience exists, the possibility of “should be” requires that all utopian energy created for us by our historical consciousness be released. The object is to transition without fail to a society without exploiters or exploited.

Within this framework of ideas, to anticipate an end-point that is a specific or particular type of utopia is in no way admissible. That is simply because, as we’ve suggested, utopia may manifest throughout history with diverse characteristics at various times. It operates on the assumption of new stages of humanizing development, new dimensions, and no finalization.

To admit the end of utopia would be like admitting the possibility of the end of history.

We propose to go beyond the ideology of the utopian socialists, as Marxist critique tried to do, but also to go beyond and not deny. We propose to go beyond the purposes and goals of scientific socialism, or, more straightforwardly, beyond the ideals and goals of really-existing socialism, which largely failed. Or we could continue advocating for the society of labor as utopia, or stay with the idea, along with Marcuse in the 1960s, that humanity’s big purpose is no longer reflected in a “utopian dream.” Marcuse concluded that the historical moment had arrived when It is now possible to construct a free society because the development of productive forces has reached a level allowing for the eradication of hunger and misery.

Attending to this last idea, we might then say that a non-repressive civilization maybe can be built because the conditions are right. From that point on, we have Marcuse’s argument that utopia is ending, and the message is taken “that the new possibilities of a human society and of its surrounding world are a given, but are not within the same historical continuum with respect to the previous society.” (Marcuse. “The End of Utopia” Barcelona 1986)

But in the revolutionary sense, both Bolivarian and Marxist, utopia does exist in its own continuum of dialectical change and, for all of its breakup and radical change, it does entail connection with the past. It can’t be a static concept, but is imbued with changing propositions that, all along, remain separate from unavoidable experiences, in particular, the failings of really-existing socialism. The implication is that we improve things by seizing upon the positives of different experiences.

In conclusion, the historical sense of utopia and of “making the impossible” relates to ideals of social transformation which, in a given situation, may lack subjective and objective factors in their favor. We suggest they haven’t reached conditions of maturity, a prime example being Bolivar’s life-project of building the Great Homeland, or that of the Paris Commune with the appearance of communism, or even in the twentieth century with attempts at creating models of socialism. Many such conditions failed to crystalize in an outcome that would satisfy genuine Marxist ideals, or come close, or that might have allowed for movement to superior stages. But in no way is utopia anti-nature or anti-history. There’s nothing telling us, for example, that the utopia of socialism and of the Great Homeland, that Bolivarian and Marxist synthesis in our own time, stands in opposition to nature or history.

That Utopia Called “Our America”

For revolutionaries to return to “doing the impossible,” in the radical sense, temporarily, even at the level of extreme difficulty implies “not staying seated in front of the house waiting for the dead body of imperialism to pass by.” That well- known adage from the Second Declaration of Havana means that there’s no waiting around for subjective and objective conditions to ripen before action is taken, but rather, they exist and action catalyzes them.

In that respect, it wasn’t generally appreciated, when Cuban revolutionaries decided to attack the Moncada Barracks, or when later they undertook the voyage of the Granma, that an insurrectional rising would be forged against capitalist exploitation and in favor of socialism. But the material conditions for rebellion against capitalism were indeed present in Cuba, and with daring, valor and conviction, rebels undertook to “storm the heavens.” The rest of the history is well-known.

It was precisely with the unfolding of the Marxian utopia in practice—that initially didn’t lead to Batista’s overthrow—that did strengthen aspirations to higher altruistic purposes. After a heroic armed insurrection and after taking power, those comrades did raise their voices against imperialism and did defend the most deeply-felt concerns of the exploited peoples of the world.

They did so in that magnificent document titled “The First Declaration of Havana.”

It emerged in reply to the so-called “Declaration of San José de Costa Rica”, which was nothing more than anti-communist scribbling directed against Cuba by that plague-ridden sewer called the OAS (Organization of the American States).

On September 2, 1960, evoking that constellation of Our America’s conscience that is José Martí, the First Declaration of Havana condemned an imperialism “that with miserable submission of traitorous governments has, over the course of 100 years, converted Our America into a zone of exploitation, into a backyard of financial imperialism and Yankee politics. This is the America that Bolívar, Hidalgo, Juárez, San Martín, O’Higgins, Tiradentes, Sucre, and Martí, wanted to be free.” The Declaration set forth a “liberating Latin Americanism” in opposition “to pan-Americanism which represents only the domination of Yankee monopolies over the interests of our peoples.” It condemned “attempts to reinstate the Monroe Doctrine, utilized until now, as José Martí anticipated, ‘to extend dominion in America’ on behalf of voracious imperialists so they could ‘better inject the venom of loans, canals, and railroads.’”

That valiant declaration closes by reaffirming that, “Latin America will soon march forward, united and victorious, free from bonds that turn its economies into accumulated wealth handed over to U.S. imperialism and that prevent its true voice from being heard in meetings where tamed foreign ministers notoriously parrot the line of their despotic master”.… [Santrich then quotes at length from the Second Declaration of Havana which was issued in Havana on February 4, 1962 in response to the OAS’s expulsion of Cuba.]

Many revolutionaries on the continent were convinced that “They did not have to sit back and watch the corpse of imperialism pass by.” With great determination, they and others set out on that path for human redemption which is the struggle for socialism. They took into account the example of the Cuban revolution, whose premises nurtured Marxist ideology with the life-affirming vitality of Latin American thought, that of Jose Martí in particular.

In Colombia, for example, Communists carried out armed resistance for more than a decade and then, around 1964, they achieved greater cohesion by forming the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). They did so under the guidance of legendary guerrilla leader Manuel Marulanda Vélez. Even before its symbolic founding date of May 27th, this nascent revolutionary army proclaimed its Agrarian Program. That happened amid the clamor and confusion of fighting that erupted in response to the government’s military aggression against Marquetalia [the revolutionary farmers’ small settlement].

The central aspect of this document was its proposal for “revolutionary agrarian reform.” The idea emerged there of building a “People’s United Front” in order to destroy Colombia’s well-ensconced system of big-parcel landowning and establish a government of “national liberation.” The seventh point of the statement says:

This program proposes as a vital necessity struggle for forging of a single and very broad front of all the democratic, progressive and revolutionary forces of the country. Until the land issue is settled, the front will engage in unceasing combat with this government in thrall to Yankee imperialists who impede the Colombian people’s successful realization of their desires.

For that reason, we call out to all peasants, all workers, all employees, all students, all artisans, all small manufacturers, all workers, all democratic and revolutionary intellectuals, all of the national bourgeoisie ready to fight against imperialism, all political parties of the left-center who want progressive change. We invite one and all to a great revolutionary and patriotic struggle for a Colombia for Colombians, for a democratic government of national liberation and for the triumph of the revolution.


The Agrarian Program was endorsed by guerrillas heading the resistance and by a thousand or so small farmers. Two years later, at their Constitutive Conference, Marulanda’s insurgents adopted the name Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. In the Political Declaration of that event, which took place between April 25 and May 5, 1966. Participants denounced imperialist aggressions against the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, against the Yankee occupation of Santo Domingo and the devastation afflicting Viet Nam. The Declaration highlighted the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, [which met in January,1966], as a space for solidarity action “undertaken by the democratic world against imperialist aggressors…”

[Santrich quotes from various statements within the FARC’s Declaration that are in line with positions taken at the Havana conference. That Declaration presented by what is also known as the Southern Bloc Guerrilla Conference concludes with the following paragraph:]

We, the guerrilla detachments of the Southern Bloc, have joined together in this Conference and formed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which will initiate a new stage of unified struggle of all revolutionaries of our country, by all workers, peasants, students and intellectuals, with all of our people, in order to further mass struggle towards popular insurrection and the seizure of power for the people.


Marulanda fought for 42 more years. Neither the enemy nor the greatest adversities could make him surrender. For more than half a century he traipsed through the mountains in search of his utopia, like no other revolutionary of the continent. He offered his life every day in a war of resistance to achieve that ideal of a New Colombia. His thinking on the development of praxis would turn into careful reflections and initiatives that he converted into programs reflecting Marxist and Bolivarian ideology. His struggle passed from a claim on a plot of land to participation in Colombia’s revolution. It took up the cause also of continental emancipation and the founding of socialism in Our America, that great and unified homeland Bolivar dreamed about.

Through thick and thin and with his rifle in hand until the last moment of his life, Marulanda marched to eternity on March 28, 2008, convinced that the building of communism was unquestionably the only route toward human redemption. He left us persuaded of the validity, legitimacy, and necessity of armed insurrection in the struggle to establish a better world without exploiters and exploited. We observe that marvelous self-denial and ask ourselves, with Bolivar: “What better way is there to achieve freedom than to fight for it?”

Evidently, in the minds of revolutionaries of Marulanda’s stature, there’s no waiting around for the right conditions for revolution. Rather, they determine to fight to create them.

We may say also that they are committed subjectively to creating those conditions. That is because, according to such criteria, entirely correct, consciousness can exert real influence over structure. Indeed, as Bolivar taught, unity is being forged while emancipation is accomplished, and emancipation takes place while unity forms. And the future begins now:

What does it matter to us if Spain sells slaves to Bonaparte or keeps them, as long as we ourselves are resolved to be free? These uncertainties are the sad effects of ancient chains. They actually counsel us to stay calm as we do big things. That is strange: 300 years of calmness are not enough? … Let us fearlessly lay the cornerstone of South American freedom: to vacillate is to lose ourselves. (Simón Bolívar speech, July 4, 1811)

Bolivar was lashing out at those who claim that conditions still weren’t right for proclaiming independence, this at a time when he was seeing unification and liberation of all America, not just Venezuela, as urgent. Our homeland is America! And America is the equilibrium of the world, disposed toward service for humanity. That is the utopia full of internationalism, solidarity, and the deep humanism of Bolivarian thinking for which Manuel Marulanda Vélez fought, and around which he formed his army.

Simón Rodríguez and the Utopia of Bolivarism

That utopia may become reality doesn’t imply its ending, but rather its transformation into higher aspirations. Qualitative mutation takes place. We say, similarly, that just as matter achieves higher forms of development, so too utopia evolves to the degree that It is fulfilled. And we reiterate this because there are many who may not want utopia to die, although by no means do they seek its evolution to vital permanence. Instead, they prefer that utopia not be fulfilled. Their kind of utopia follows the path of hope being annihilated.

As part of revolutionary consciousness, utopia serves as a goad for constant struggle as it reflects or projects goals for the future. As a duty, it moves goals from a plane of pure abstraction to one of fulfillment through action, at any cost, directed basically toward long-term emancipatory outcomes. With respect to the ideal of the Great Homeland, the American utopia, and Bolivar’s utopia, we recall the words of the Liberator’s teacher and “maestro”, Simón Rodríguez: “It is not a dream or delirium, but rather It is a philosophy of hope. It assumes that, if all people know their obligations and feel impelled to fulfil them, they will all remain faithful, because they will be striving to make good on principles. And where this happens won’t be imaginary, like the Utopia delineated by Thomas More. Their utopia, in reality, will be America.” Rodríguez locates utopia in a context framed by culture as the essential element for building a new democratic and republican social order in which the common good comes first.

Together with his teacher Simón Rodríguez, the Liberator harbored transformative notions applying to future ages. But his horizons were short-term also, applying to his own time. In other words, his aspirations could be viewed as a utopian scenario based on greater feasibility. But they did represent a step toward a higher-level utopia, for which conditions perhaps didn’t yet exist, but which were to be imposed as a supreme human duty.

Simón Rodríguez, who survived the Liberator, had a vision of the unique type of society Bolivar was projecting. Assigning a fundamental role to reason and calling for a new society without hang-overs from the past, his ideas would become part of Bolivarian ideology, to which he contributed in fundamental ways.…

[Santrich next details various aspects of Rodríguez’s thoughts, introducing quotations from the latter’s writings that highlight a message of human solidarity. Santrich maintains that Rodríguez was a more effective advocate for the common good and sharper critic of individualism than Jean-Jacque Rousseau. Santrich expands upon Rodríguez’s criticism of Jeremy Bentham, the British founder of the school of philosophical thought known as utilitarianism. Bentham is identified as a favorite of Colombia’s liberal anti-colonialists who opposed Bolivar. Santrich continues:]
While Benthamism signified a divorce from the Spanish ethos with its new pattern of ethical ideas, metaphysics, and theory of law and the state, it rendered judgments contradictory to Hispanic tradition. It represented, in essence, the ideals of a commercial and industrial middle class, pragmatic and rationalistic, that was determined still to maintain the colonialist regime’s slaves and servants, in harmony with the United States, which Bolivar detested.

We point out that Simón Rodríguez’s thinking entered into Bolivarian ideology as a fundamental component of its deepest conceptualization. Rodríguez is recognized as a prominent socialist thinker whose influence on the Liberator in this regard is well established. It is only natural that the impact of the teacher’s socialist ideas would influence the shaping of his disciple’s political consciousness.

Rodríguez is usually categorized as a proponent of utopian socialism. He is placed in that camp ultimately by virtue of the non-scientific character of his ideas and the contrast they represent with socialist ideas appearing after publication of the Communist Manifesto. That is the time-frame marking the emergence of scientific socialism, at least according to Marx’s evaluation as enshrined in the Anti-Dühring.4 There, Marx claims that earlier socialist theories correspond to a period marked by immaturity of both capitalist production and the proletariat.

Nevertheless, we reiterate that these theories anticipated and contributed to the Marxist approach. They contain ideas of enduring value and were of as much depth and maturity as ideas that, as in Rodríguez’s case, refer to the creative force of the whole people as the basis for social development and renovation of society. This was a line of thinking that Bolivar took up in practice with much conviction and that already encompassed internationalism and solidarity as fundamentals of social construction. Contained within was the theme of education as a space where intellectual activities and practical action come together as the basis for the new society.

Also involved was the Bolivarian concept of a “morals and enlightenment” campaign directed toward revolutionary transformation. The implication of these considerations at the very least is that of a scientific convergence with Robinsonian thought, which nurtured Bolivar, the Liberator, in his work. [Another name used by Simón Rodríguez was “Samuel Robinson.”] Clearly, the striking originality with which Bolivar’s teacher—whatever his name—affected him did not originate from a void. There was a thread connecting the teacher with socialist thought he encountered in Europe on his travels there. That thread also connected Bolivar and Rodríguez with the communitarian tradition of American Raizal communities which the latter admired and affirmed.5

Simón Rodríguez and Gracchus Babeuf—the socialist utopia

Simón Rodríguez had the opportunity of close exposure to the atmosphere of the Parisian revolutionaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. That is the basis for our being able to affirm that as a scholar and restless thinker, he must have gained access to the first French socialists, and especially the most radical ones, as indicated also by the very content of his proposals. At the time when Rodríguez was traveling through Europe, Babeuf was already manifesting a clear intent in his thinking to lead France toward an agrarian communism by means of a dictatorship of a revolutionary government. Babeuf was the organizer of “the conspiracy of the equals,” [a failed coup attempt in 1796], and Barbés and Blanquí followed him with similar tenets. These are taken up by Marx and Engels to delineate their idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the Communist Manifesto of 1848.

It is evident, then, that the guiding thread of socialist thought that went from Simón Rodríguez to Bolivar also connected with Marxism. Babeuf’s ideas did not disappear with his death which took place amid the terrible repression of 1797.His supporters were active until a few years after the death of Bolivar [in 1830] and his influence had such visibility that the name of Babeuf merited an appearance in the Communist Manifesto itself.

The radiant era of Babeuf coincided with the period preceding Rodríguez’s return to America in 1823, by which time the latter had already been become an authentic and thorough-going socialist. But apart from whether or not there was contact of an intellectual or temporal nature, it was to be expected that all the revolutionaries marching with them did coincide in their awareness and purposes. How could that have been otherwise as long as they were motivated by a profoundly human feeling of love for the people?

Rosa Luxemburg explained that “socialism, as an ideal of communist community, as an ideal of social order based on equality and fraternity of all men, is more than a thousand years old”. She added that, “among the first apostles of Christianity, among the religious sects of the Middle Ages, and in the Peasant Wars, the socialist ideal appeared as the most radical expression of revolution against [existing] society. But as an ideal we can support in any historical moment, socialism was [in earlier times] the beautiful vision of a few enthusiasts, a golden fantasy always out of the hand’s reach, like the ethereal image of a rainbow in the sky”. So then, how can we not admit the possibility that in an age of emancipation like Bolivar’s, such an ideal might not also have existed? But beyond that, there’s clear evidence that such was the case.

Precisely between 1820 and 1830, socialist thought exerts considerable impact, as represented by three great and universally-recognized thinkers: Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Fourier (1772-1830) in France, and Owen (1771-1858) in England. This is so even as we recognize that they did not outline a commitment to the revolutionary seizure of power to make their proposals real or to establish socialism. But we have to recognize their huge theoretical contribution as fundamental to the shaping of Marxist theory.

The case of Gracchus Babeuf is another matter. It must be said that this revolutionary was certainly set on taking power. Here we are undoubtedly dealing with a great advocate of the communist utopia, a true pioneer of bold action toward fulfillment of the “impossible,” a promotor of realizing the ideal, even risking his life for the cause. He is fully prepared for sacrifice as a true revolutionary, even rising to a plane that goes beyond that of paralyzing “rationality.” He is always ready to surmount the injustices of the bourgeois regime, but beyond those tasks, ready also to build a new order. Already he is proposing to establish a peoples’ dictatorship, quite similar to the one Marx and Engels revisited in the Communist Manifesto half a century after Babeuf’s death.

Contrary to what Rosa Luxemburg herself puts forth, Babeuf and “the power of his critique and the magic of his futuristic ideals and socialist ideas” exemplify aspects of his theory and practice that can only be seen as transcendent. That he was killed along with only “a handful of friends in the counter-revolutionary wave” and that he may not have achieved conditions and gathered followers such that his ideas might have been fulfilled does not mean that his trail, like that of the heroic Rosa Luxemburg herself, is not going to end up as “a luminous trail in the pages of revolutionary history”. Of course, That is so now, and then some.

For Gaius Gracchus Babeuf, pioneer communist fighter of the vanguard, action was the result of thought, aside from whether or not some of his basic ideas were correct. That fact alone, together with his aspirations to overthrow injustices of the existing social system and replace it with a communist one elevates him to the level of indispensability. Even standing before the court that sentenced him to death, Babeuf unflinchingly delineated his utopia. What Simón Rodríguez inherited from Babeuf nourished Bolivarism from its beginnings.

None of these efforts has achieved the purpose of installing socialism and, as now is the situation after several failed experiments of “socialist creation,” capitalist domination rages most savagely in the greater part of the planet. But neither those old attempts or the new ones can be considered as buried under the smoking rubble of the Parisian barricades, nor under the ruins of the Berlin Wall, nor under the destruction left by “smart missiles” launched by imperialism in its wars of re-colonization.

The Marxian ideology of social justice rises on the bedrock of hope, deeds, perseverance and resistance, even amid ruins and debris. It is strengthened with new experience that now has the grace of converging with the power of the Bolivarian project. And, may it be said in passing, this last cannot be considered as buried under the perfidy of Santander-like practices aimed not only at doing away with the image of the Liberator, but with the possibility of his emancipation project, and with his utopia.

The Bolivarian Marxist Utopia Now

It is undeniable that Marx explored the laws of capitalist anarchy more successfully than anyone else in his time. He began with deep study based on his own thinking and methods which drew upon the best contributions of universal thought. Marx revealed logic suggesting that the communist utopia was feasible. He explained in a fundamental way how the very laws regulating the economy of capitalism set the stage for its own fall. He showed, similarly, that the growing anarchy of capitalism becomes incompatible with the development of society and meanwhile generates true economic and political catastrophes. These add risk and even unsustainability to the very existence of humanity. Accordingly, the guarantee that society doesn’t perish in uncontrolled convulsions lies in transition to modes of production consciously organized by people themselves.

Even with negative socialist experiences, those that never materialized as an alternative to capitalism, It is more evident every day that our only alternative is socialism and that the communist utopia is required, both as a historical necessity and by the very laws of capitalist development. This is apparent from the growing devastation of the planet generated by predatory capitalism, from the enormity of the present world capitalist crisis, and from the desperation now of great financiers and devotees of the free markets as they beg the state for rescue.

From the continent of hope, as Bolivar called it, we revolutionaries of Our America must without hesitation make common cause with the revolutionaries of the world to propel and catalyze all the potential of utopia. We would take back the rich heritage of generations of revolutionaries who preceded us, whether as Bolivarians, as Marxists, or both. We would create from internationalism and solidarity the life-giving force of unified action. What’s required now at a time of urgency is struggle against oligarchies and imperialism, with no respite granted the reactionaries, and with all forms of struggle and all available means being applied. We rely on that spirit of sacrifice learned from our heroes, even though in this mission of “doing the impossible,” of “storming the heavens”, we may be called voluntarists, putschists, adventurers, even terrorists. Ultimately, for the revolutionary, utopia is no repository of ethereal reflections, but is a spur for action, for practical work fully oriented to the taking of power.

Now is no time for retreats or for learned reflections about whether or not this is a revolutionary situation—as if endless speculation were our only assigned task, as if conditions of misery and nonconformity were so lacking as to make us forget the oversaturation of exploitation and imperial humiliations. As Bolivar would say: “Those doubts are the sad effects of old chains. They tell us, ‘Calm down’ as we prepare great projects! Are not 300 years of calm enough?”

How necessary, then, are the Babeufs who don’t wait for developments, but who move toward them. And necessary too are those who dare to declare “War to the death” against the murderers attacking us every day. Equally indispensable are those who pursue their own “Admirable Campaign” in spite of warnings of failure. And we need those who raise their voices and who act on behalf of that new Manifesto reiterating that we need now to make the revolution, having nothing to lose but our chains, and have a whole world to win. It is imperative to look towards the torch of utopia, which, shining, lights the path to emancipation.

But It is worth saying: there will always be, to spare, gentlemen like Dühring, Santander, Bush. or Uribe Vélez, each one in his own time and own sauce, whose flag is the filthy rag of counter-revolution. They discredit and persecute those who dare dream of “the greatest possible happiness” for humanity. But surely, they will no longer call us “social alchemists”, or “firebrand of discord”, “fools” or “madmen,” “charlatans”, “pamphleteers” or “dinosaurs.” We will be called “terrorists,” or any of the other denigrating and unimaginable epithets within this “florilegium” of insults, as Engels would say (signifying “anthology”), that they’ve long used against us in their ideologic and obscene media wars.

Nevertheless, with such a combative Marxist and Bolivarian inheritance, not even the collapse of what in some countries was called socialism—or of what was taken for it—or the disastrous fascist wars waged by today’s oligarchs will convince us that we absolutely have to accept a reign of exploitation and humiliation imposed on mankind. Our leitmotif is hope, and so be it, or as Bertolt Brecht wrote: “today injustice walks with a firm step, and oppressors seek to rule for another ten thousand years. With their violence they ensure that ‘everything will stay the same.’ And many of the oppressed sorrowfully say, ‘We’ll never obtain what we need.’”

Now with Brecht, we must respond:

Whoever is still alive, do not say ‘never.’ What’s firm is not firm. Nothing stays the same. When rulers speak, the ruled talk back. Who dares say never? What does oppression rest on? On us! Whom do we depend on for it to end? On us, again! Let him rise who is down! Whoever is lost, let him fight! Who can hold back the one who knows his condition? For the vanquished of today are the victors of tomorrow. What’s ‘never’ becomes today.

Because utopia is not quietude, these thoughts go beyond “pure fantasies.” No one may condemn humanity to a course that is inevitably chaotic and unpredictable, cruel and unjust. We continue looking for that sought-after world that is different and better, the one that lets us leave prehistory behind. That is what Marx predicted when he said this will happen when a truly rational, just and equitable social system exists on earth. That is the necessary dream that for a revolutionary rationalizes existence. It may seem “impossible.” Some think the idea is useless and fantastical. They say utopia is to dream of “impossible” things, and they may be correct.

But as Bolivarian Marxists, all of that is precisely about us. We struggle for the “impossible,” but not within the time-frame of a single life. To gain what is obviously indispensable for the survival of the species and is attainable won’t fit within that time limit; maybe That is what they call “realism.” Our realism may be like that, but above all, It is also about “doing the impossible.” That is why there never will be lacking those of us with arms already raised who shout from every corner of America, “We are here!” We are resolved to build paradise here on earth. We are the ones with the unbending perseverance of combatants like the insurgent hero of the Colombia of Bolivar, Manuel Marulanda Vélez. We repeat his creed of love for the poor, as we amplify his voice and his teachings.

He says: “if they push us from the bank of the river, we cross to the other side of the river; if they push us from the mountain, we escape to the other mountain; if they push us out of a region, we look for another region.” He expands the experience and transforms the pattern to say:

if they push us from the bank of the river, we will be waiting for them on the other side; if they push us from the mountain, we will be waiting for them on the other mountain; if they push us out of one region, we will be waiting for them in another region.

Then adjusting the pattern, we elaborate a precise idea: “Now we go back and look for them on the bank of the river from which they one day pushed us out. We will go back and look for them on the mountain from which one day they made us flee. We will go back and look for them in the region from which one day they made us run.” (Quoted by Arturo Alape, The Lives of Pedro Antonio Marín, Manuel Marulanda Vélez, Tirofijo. Planeta Editores. 1989).

As with Marulanda, then, communist ideology will survive in each Bolivarian combatant and in the entire insurgent army that he founded. All the while, stories of his death and of his utopia are heard in the confines of the forest and mountains. These teachings from the insurgent hero of Bolivar’s Colombia, that outstanding expression of revolutionary militancy, allow us to say as combatants of the FARC that our organization is no place where Bolivarian or Marxist ideas frolic on the desks of clever ideologues who represent a glitzy kind of pacifism and the meek docility of postmodern intellectuals. The uncompromising thinking forged by Manuel Marulanda Vélez is no conceit.

Thus, with its Marxist, Bolivarian, utopian and Marulandista consciousness, the FARC, in confronting capitalism, crisis-ridden despite its huge military might, will modestly persevere and will by no means disregard the military aspect of the class struggle. That is something that those who are penitent, reformist, and resigned often hide with pacifist rhetoric stemming from cowardice and opportunism. We of the FARC repeatedly call attention to this tendency as we follow a road opened up by Comandante Manuel. He testified to its relevance with a whole life of dedication.

We repeat his words with more conviction than ever:

The efforts and sacrifices of 43 years of revolutionary action and confrontation by the commanders, guerrillas, leaders of the Clandestine Communist Party, civilian population, those fallen in combat, and those imprisoned in city and country now demonstrate to the ruling class of the traditional parties, and of the state, that revolutionary struggle is just and may no longer be postponed. Defeat is impossible, despite claims from previous governments and the present one. We say that those who govern will sooner or later find their solution to be in political negotiations with the insurgency—that is, if they don’t want to lose privileges accumulated over many years. (Manuel Marulanda Vélez: Letter to the combatants, December 2007)

Besides, It is impossible henceforth for us to be bewitched by the siren songs of self-defeating lackeys who call for disarmament. We have lived confronting each annihilation offensive of the oligarchic and imperial monster whom we knew from the inside out. “Our sling is that of David”! There is nothing more to say but the words of the unforgettable Julius Fucik, spoken against fascism.

In the name of the Bolivarian communist utopia:

When the struggle is to the death
Those who are faithful resist
The undecided ones give up
The cowards betray
The bourgeoisie despair
And the hero fights.

Victory will be ours! Before the sacred altar of our dead, we have sworn to win, and we will win!

Mountains of Colombia, March, 2009

Source: The original Spanish-language version of the author’s essay is accessible at Rebelion.org or Cedema.

Additional Translation Notes
Regarding Santrich
Born in 1967 in Caribbean-facing Sucre department, and killed by units of the Colombian military on May 17, 2021 in Western Venezuela, Santrich was a leader of the Second Marquetalia, a dissident offshoot of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). He joined that force in 2019 due to the failure of the peace agreement between the FARC and Colombian signed in November 2016 and in response to attempts by Colombia’s government and US agents to extradite him to the United States. Santrich, a combatant of the original FARC for 30 years, and a leader, served as spokesperson for the FARC’s negotiating team in peace talks with Colombia’s government in Havana that ended in 2016.

Santrich studied law and philosophy at Barranquilla’s University of the Atlantic. He was severely sight-impaired as the result of Leber’s syndrome, a degenerative eye disease. Following deadly assaults from 1986 on against the left-leaning Patriotic Union electoral coalition, of which he was a member, Santrich joined the Communist Party’s youth organization. In 1990, when an attack directed at Santrich, then known as Seuxis Pausias Hernández Solarte, took the life of his friend Jesús Santrich, he adopted that friend’s name. A year later he joined the FARC.

Our purpose
We present Santrich’s essay in English to honor a fallen revolutionary who pursued social and political justice in a place that sorely needs justice. We also want to broaden awareness of the author’s creative political thought. Santrich applies ideology inherited from the European founders of Marxism to the political conditions of Latin America and the Caribbean. He documents Simon Bolivar’s exposure to early stirrings of the European socialist movement.

To the familiar fare of U.S. and European-based socialist analyses over many years, Santrich adds elements like struggle over land, indigenous peoples as victims, slavery, and national liberation. In broadening the arena of struggle and highlighting special characteristics of the Americas, he follows the lead of dissident ideologists like José Mariátegui and Ernesto Che Guevara, one with his “Indo-American Marxism” and “socialism as heroic creation” and the other with references to a “great feeling of love” and “moral incentives.”

More on sources
The essay of Santrich translated here appears also in The Social Thought of Jesús Santrich, an anthology of his writings and sketches published online in Spanish by Ediciones Espartaco in 2018 at the “Campus of New York University.” That 293-page work contains interviews, poems, stories from indigenous peoples, and other essays, among them “From Beethoven to Marulanda—the Romantic Roots of the FARC’s Marxism.” That edition is accessible at https://resistir.info.

Notes
↩ Voluntarism is a theory of philosophy emphasizing that willpower governs human affairs more than does understanding or reason.
↩ Francisco José de Paula Santander (1792–1840) was a military and political leader during Colombia’s 1810–1819 independence war and the new country’s acting president between 1819 and 1826. He was president from 1832 to 1837.
↩ The reference is to Bolivar’s campaign of 1813 in which his “small army of around 650 soldiers … set out from New Granada (present-day Colombia) on the ambitious, one might say ‘foolhardy,’ task of fighting [its] way to Caracas to liberate Venezuela from the Spaniards.”
↩ “Anti-Dühring” is the shorthand title for Frederick Engels’s book published in 1878 that, criticizing the socialist theorizing of the writer Eugen Dühring, did much to disseminate the ideas of Marx and Engels.
↩ The Raizals were and are Afro-Colombian people living on islands off Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

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Re: Ideology

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 13, 2021 12:57 pm

The Theory of Intersectionality Emerges out of Racist, Colonialist Ideology, Not Radical Politics—Rethinking the CRT Debate Part 3
Patrick D. Anderson 08 Sep 2021

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Rethinking the CRT Debate, Part 3

Recent debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been abysmally uninformed at best and utterly inaccurate at worst. From corporate media and right-wing rags to independent left media, almost everyone has misrepresented or misunderstood the origins, histories, and theories of what is today known as CRT. This three-part series corrects these misunderstandings. Part 1 provides an overview of works of Derrick Bell, the “father of critical race theory.” Part 2 provides a detailed intellectual history of CRT. Part 3 presents a critique of intersectionality as an idealist, liberal iteration of CRT.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/consp ... ate-part-1
https://blackagendareport.com/realism-i ... e-part-2-0

***

The Critical Race Theory (CRT) frenzy has been in full swing for months now, and in the rush to make sense of this intellectual tradition, corporate media have repeatedly flocked to one individual more than any other to provide their account of CRT with the cover of authority and rigor. That person is Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar who is recognized as one of the founding figures of CRT and who is credited with coining the very term “critical race theory.”

Before the recent controversy over CRT, Crenshaw was predominantly known as the scholar responsible for coining the term “intersectionality” and providing intellectual orientation to a type of feminist theory that sought to account for race and gender simultaneously rather than separately, as intersectionality theorists have accused other social theories of doing.

Yet when the scholarly origins of Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality are excavated, it becomes clear that it is rooted not only in philosophical idealism but also in racist and colonialist ideology.

The first step in understanding Crenshaw’s version of CRT and the intellectual origins of intersectionality is to understand her as part of the idealist strain of CRT. Unlike the realist theorists of CRT, such as Derrick Bell, who place racism in an economic context, approach the study of racial histories from an empirical perspective, and present anti-colonial and anti-imperial critiques of Amerikan society, idealists like Crenshaw argue that racism is largely a psychological issue, a problem with white consciousness that is best addressed through education and the evolution of language and symbols. Idealists also tend to be more reformist than radical, preferring to claim so-called “American Values” as their own, rather than fundamentally question the nation’s imperial history and present.

Such idealism and reformism are both present in Crenshaw’s work. In her 1988 essay “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law ,” a foundational text of the CRT tradition and one of Crenshaw’s earliest publications, Crenshaw unquestionably stakes out her political reformism and idealist methodological orientation. Much of the article is dedicated to criticizing the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholars of the day for neglecting the role of race in social oppression and for too quickly dismissing the utility of liberal legal reforms, including rights-based reforms, for Black people in the U.S.

As Crenshaw explains, CLS scholars wanted people to question the structure of society from the ground up, and according to the CLS writers, the only way to get people to question society in this way was to disabuse them of all the illusions of the liberal capitalist order. This process included disabusing the public of the idea that law is socially and politically neutral. For this generation of CLS scholars, if people continue to think that claiming rights is a viable strategy for liberation, then (as Crenshaw puts it) “the legitimacy of the entire order is never seriously questioned.”

According to Crenshaw, this radical demand to fundamentally question Amerikan society requires us to overlook “the transformative potential that liberalism offers.” Claiming that “People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging,” Crenshaw concludes that a “pragmatic use of liberal ideology” can help protesters and scholars resolve the racial contradictions of Amerikan society and advance the cause of Black freedom by winning and defending Black “rights.”

How would such a transformation commence? In Crenshaw’s view, it “must begin with beliefs about Blacks in American society, and how these beliefs legitimize racial coercion,” especially white race consciousness. She distinguishes between “symbolic subordination,” which denies Blacks social and political equality, and “material subordination,” which denies Black economic, health, and other material benefits of society. Importantly, in a direct inversion of the materialism of realist CRT scholars like Bell, Crenshaw says that the former causes the latter: “Symbolic subordination often created material disadvantage by reinforcing race consciousness in everything from employment to education.” In other words, if we change white people’s minds and rid them of anti-Black ideas, material change will necessarily follow.


In Crenshaw’s idealist worldview, then, CRT is about demanding that “America” become what is (supposedly) truly is: a diverse and inclusive democracy. And this goal is achieved by using law strategically and teaching white people not to be racist. It is from within this idealist, reformist context that intersectionality emerged.

Since Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” approximately three decades ago, it has become a lexical staple of much left, progressive, and liberal politics. For most such groups today, those who refuse to be “intersectional” have morally failed to be properly inclusive and have epistemically failed to adopt the most advanced social scientific paradigm.

But behind the progressive veneer of intersectionality lies an unquestionable racist and colonialist intellectual history, a history that is only beginning to be excavated and acknowledged.

Crenshaw originally developed the theory of intersectionality in two law papers. In the first, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics ” (1989), Crenshaw sets out to solve a very specific legal problem, namely, that “women” and “Black” are considered protected classes under anti-discrimination law, but “Black women” are not. In a review of relevant court decisions, Crenshaw observed that the courts rejected Black women’s claims of discrimination unless they could show that they were victims of more general discriminatory practices against “women” as such (including white women) or against “Blacks” as such (including Black men). So to the courts, if Black women claimed racial discrimination but Black men in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Likewise, if Black women claimed sex discrimination but white women in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Crenshaw’s solution was to “acknowledge” that Black women had been and could be discriminated against as Black women. To remedy the problem, the law should account for the “intersection” of race and sex and make Black women a protected class distinct of women of other races or men of the same race. As a reformist legal strategy, intersectionality is not only a clever solution to the problem it is meant to address, but it is also consistent with Crenshaw’s overall liberal philosophical perspective.

However, intersectionality become seriously problematic in her follow-up paper, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color ” (1991), where Crenshaw attempts to take intersectionality out of the realm of law and transform it into a generalized theory of society. The basic assumption of intersectionality is that all “previous” theories are “single-axis” that account for only one dimension of oppression at a time. Feminism accounts for sex or gender. Critical Race Theory (of the original realist school) accounts for race. And Marxism account for class. The innovation of intersectionality, as we are told, is that it brings together the insights of these theories to account for “race, gender, and class” simultaneously (though class is never present in so-called intersectional analyses). And notice the title: intersectionality is no longer about Black women; it is now about that ever-nebulous and ill-defined group “women of color.”

Notwithstanding the absurdity of the claim that Feminism, Marxism, and realist CRT are “single-axis” theories in the way that Crenshaw describes them, there are even more problematic aspects of intersectionality, problems that originate in the history of feminism. Drawing on the recent scholarship of philosopher Tommy Curry, we can trace out the racist and colonialist origins of intersectionality.

Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is derived from her reliance on the work of Catherine MacKinnon, a leading second wave feminist legal scholar who argued that the basic power dynamic of society is grounded in sex difference. This male dominance theory claimed that, in Amerikan society, (all) men had structure power over (all) women. This structure is usually called patriarchy. Crenshaw believed that MacKinnon’s male dominance theory provided a theory of sex domination similar to Derrick Bell’s realist CRT theory of racial domination, which posits that the basic power dynamic is white over Black, and perhaps other racial minorities. Even though the basic assumptions of MacKinnon and Bell’s respective theories are fundamentally contradictory, Crenshaw sought to combine them. This contradiction has never been resolved, which is why so many scholars and intellectual today claim that neither race nor gender is “foundational.” Such platitudes merely allow the speaker to leave the contradiction within intersectionality unresolved.

The interesting thing is that this theory of patriarchy, this idea that all men have power over all women, was invented by white women in the 1950s to claim that they were just as oppressed as Black men in a society run by white supremacy. In books and essays including Alva Myrdal’s “A Parallel to the Negro Problem” (1944), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and Helen Hacker’s “Women as a Minority Group” (1955), white women scholars observed the conditions of Black men under western colonialism and racism and said: white women should think of themselves as a similarly oppressed group. Before the essays, white women were seen primarily as members of the dominant race, even by white women themselves. In fact, even white feminists saw themselves in this way, as historian Louise Michelle Newman demonstrates in her book White Women Rights. Yet in the 1950s, white women began to claim that they were oppressed in a manner analogous to Black men.

For the idea that “women” as such constituted an oppressed class subjected to “men” as such to become the dominant paradigm, feminists needed to discard the kinship theory of patriarchy.
Even into the 1970s and 1980s, feminist anthropologists and sociologists adopted the classical social science view that patriarchy had a familial and generational aspect to it. However, while this kinship view was compatible with the earlier theories that saw white women as part of the dominant racial group, it was incompatible with the idea that women constitute a singular coherent class of oppressed people. Why? Because if patriarchy depends on family relations, and Black people (especially Black men) are prohibited from joining the family relations of whites, then Black men cannot be members of a generally patriarchal class of “men.” The paradigm text where this argument is made is Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), which was published in the very same intellectual milieu and shared the same assumptions as MacKinnon’s male dominance theory.

As Curry summarizes, “the white woman used the body and experience of the Negro, specifically the Black man, as the template by which she created the idea that she was in fact a minority group despite the power and violence she imparted on racial and ethnic groups such as Blacks and Jews.” Curry adds that “the definition of patriarchy that emerged from these debates were driven by the need white feminists had in constructing themselves as a class external to—and victimized by—white patriarchy. The feminist definition of patriarchy was constructed to protect feminist ideology, not to explain the oppression of various groups throughout history.”

Thus, Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality relies on a paradigm of feminist ideology that constructed by white women to minimize attention to their racial power and amplify attention to their sexual vulnerability. And to construct this view of patriarchy, they had to throw out decades of social scientific scholarship even though there was no empirical evidence that debunked that former scholarship.

As if this were not enough to question intersectionality, there are more problems with Crenshaw’s formulation of this now-popular theory. Like MacKinnon, Crenshaw argued that when power is based on biological sex, the sex in power—males—use sexual violence as a means of social control. To put it in no uncertain terms, men rape women as a means of perpetuating their control over women.

In her 1991 essay, Crenshaw states that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race.” Though she claims this fact is well established, she cites only Joyce Williams and Karen Holmes’ 1981 work The Second Assault: Rape and Public Attitudes. As with MacKinnon’s theory of patriarchy, however, we can trace the history of Williams and Holmes’ work back to fundamentally racist origins.

In their 1967 book The Subculture of Violence, Martin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti introduced the “subculture of violence” theory, which argues that subordinated groups, such as Black people in Amerika, had a distinct culture separate from mainstream white culture, and that this Black subculture was the cause of Black men and women’s supposed pathologically self-destructive behavior. Anyone familiar with right wing politics in the United States today should find this argument familiar, for the subculture of violence theory is the basis for all right-wing apologetics regarding police murders of Black people (“They are killing each other” etc.).

In 1971, Wolfgang’s student Menachem Amir expanded the subculture of violence theory in his book Patterns of Forcible Rape. According to Amir, Black men become rapists because “Negro culture” was pathological and the Black family structure was improper. Because Black fathers were absent, because Black mothers were unfit parents, and because Black culture prioritized sensual pleasures over civilized ones, Amir claimed that Black men developed a psychological need to overcompensate for their feminized self-image. Thus, they became rapists. If this also sounds like a contemporary right wing racist view, it’s because it is.

“White feminists adopted Amir’s view of Black masculinity throughout their texts,” Curry explains. In Against Our Will (1975), Susan Brownmiller insisted that “The single most important contribution of Amir's Philadelphia study was to place the rapist squarely within the subculture of violence.” This book is considered a classic and still-relevant feminist text today.

Interestingly, Amir rejected the 19th and early 20th century view that Black men primarily raped white women. Yet he replaced that view with a new theory which claimed that Black men primarily raped Black women. This transition from view Black men as inter-racial rapists to viewing them as intra-racial rapists is a key development in this racist history. Yet one more transformation in this feminist ideology was necessary.

In the mid-1970s, Lynn Curtis published several works, including the book Violence, Rape, and Culture, transforming the subculture of violence theory into a theory of Black male pathology. Unlike Amir, who argued that Black male rapists were the product of the savagery of Black culture, Curtis argued that Black male’s became rapists because in their quest for masculinity, the emulated white male patriarchy and the sexual violence such patriarchy relies upon. Unlike Amir’s theory, in which Black women play a role in transmitting the supposedly deficient values of Black culture, Curtis’ theory positions Black women as neutral or innocent bystanders to the brutality of pathological Black males trying desperately to join the patriarchy they have been excluded from. On this view, white male patriarchy is more sophisticated and Black male attempts at patriarchy are more savage—but they are fundamentally the same.

When Williams and Holmes wrote The Second Assault, they cited the work of Curtis and developed it further. In their own articulation, Williams and Holmes states that Black men became rapists not because Black culture is savage but because Black men imitate the patterns of white male patriarchy. The supposed sameness of Black males and white males (a male body) was thought to be the grounds for such imitative behavior, and the supposed sameness of Black women and white women (a female body) was thought to be the grounds for their respective vulnerability to sexual violence. Interestingly, The Second Assault was poorly received by scholars, with one reviewer noting that the quantitative data presented in the book did not support—nay, contradicted!—the conclusions presented.

Thus, when Crenshaw cites Williams and Holmes to claim that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race,” she is relying on a book that not only emerges directly out of white supremacist theories of Black life (perpetuating the myth the Black male rapist in a new form) but a book that presents conclusions in contradiction with its evidence.

Again, Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is not revolutionary, nor progressive—it is barley liberal. It is based in racist scholarship that was motivated by the political needs of elite white women rather than historical and sociological evidence. And it is only a few degrees away from the racist bile spewed by contemporary anti-Black right-wing pundits.

The racist, colonialist mentality embedded in Crenshaw’s intersectionality should not surprise us. Remember what she said in 1988: People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging. Because intersectionality was created to make change within racist and colonialist institutions, it is only fitting that intersectionality reflect that racist and colonialist logic. This is where idealist versions of CRT take us.

Intersectionality is not going away. Since their publication, Chrenshaw’s 1989 and 1991 articles have approximately 21,000 citations and 27,000 citations respectively. Now that intersectionality has been hitched to the current CRT wave of popularity, and given that Crenshaw is widely considered the foremost authority on CRT, we should expect calls for this theory of intersectionality to spread even more.

To be sure, almost no present-day proponent of intersectionality knows anything about the history of the term or the roots of the theory. Almost none of these self-described advocates of intersectionality knows how to perform an “intersectional analysis.” For most, the word “intersectionality” is—like “critical race theory” itself—an empty slogan used to signal that they have the right moral orientation; many people say “intersectionality” to prove they oppose racism, sexism, and so on. But when Black feminists of the 1990s are caught repackaging white supremacist ideas from the 1890s, we should probably reconsider not only the slogans we think are progressive but also the scholars we think are authorities on radical change.

This series on CRT is dedicated to Glen Ford, who was a deeply inspirational revolutionary thinker and who will always have my utmost admiration and appreciation. Thank you, Glen.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/theor ... rethinking
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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