Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/dupont.html

A Dirty Dupont Secret---Again?
The du Pont Company

By Richard Sanders, Editor, Press for Conversion!

In the 1930s, the du Pont and Morgan family empires dominated the American corporate elite and their representatives were central figures in organizing and funding the American Liberty League. The du Pont family was so complicit in this fascist organization that James Farley, FDR's postmaster general and one of his closest advisors, said the American Liberty League "ought to be called the American Cellophane League" because "first it's a Du Pont product and second, you can see right through it'" (Donald R. McCoy, Coming of Age). Gerard Colby, in his book DuPont Dynasty, outlines the family's pivotal role in creating and funding the League. (Click here for an excerpt.) The Dickstein-McCormack Committee learned that weapons and equipment for the fascist plotters’ Croix de feu-like superarmy “could be obtained from the Remington Arms Co., on credit through the Du Ponts.” Du Pont had acquired control of the arms company in 1932.

The du Pont Co., formed in 1802 by Elèuthere Irénée du Pont de Nemours, dominated U.S. gunpowder sales for more than a century. Elèuthere I. du Pont’s father, Pierre Samuel, a French economist, politician and publisher had helped negotiate the Paris Treaty to end America’s revolution. His rightwing views made French radicals very suspicious and they sentenced him to the guillotine. Somehow, he and his son, Elèuthere, were released and escaped to America, where they arrived January 1, 1800, with a vast fortune.

To challenge England’s domination of the global gunpowder trade, Napoleon helped E.I. du Pont establish an American gunpowder business in 1802. Pierre returned to France and negotiated the French sale of about a million square miles of land to America (Louisiana Purchase, 1803). Meanwhile, his son made his first gunpowder sales to a close family friend, President Thomas Jefferson.

Du Pont produced only gunpowder. They were the main supplier of this product during many wars, including:

* War of 1812 (supplying the U.S. against Britain/Canada)

* South American wars (supplying both Spain and Bolivar’s republics)

* Mexican-American War, 1846 (supplying the U.S.)

* Indian Wars, 1827-1896 (supplying Manifest Destiny’s genocidal westward expansion)

* Crimean War, 1854 (supplying both England and Russia)

* U.S. Civil war, 1861-1865 (supplying the Northern states)

* Spanish-American War, 1898 (supplying the U.S.)

* WWI, 1914-1918 (supplied all U.S. orders; 40% of the Allies’ needs)

In 1897, when they agreed with European competitors to divide up the world, du Pont got exclusive control of gunpowder sales in the Americas. By 1905, du Pont had assets of 60 million and controlled all U.S. government orders. Du Pont bought out 100 of its American competitors and closed most of them down (1903-1907). In 1907, U.S. anti-Trust laws created two competitors for du Pont and in 1912 the government ordered du Pont to divest from some explosives production. Du Pont then diversified into newspaper publishing, chemicals, paints, varnishes, cellophane and rayon. WWI was particularly profitable. Du Pont, the world’s largest producer of dynamite and smokeless gunpowder, made unheard-of net profits of $250 million.

Between the wars, du Pont was the world’s top manufacturer of explosives, the world’s leading chemical company and the top producer of cars and synthetic rubber, another strategic war material. By the 1930s, it owned Mexican and Chilean explosive companies and a Canadian chemical company. Although still the top U.S. gunpowder supplier, this product represented only 2% of its total production.

Du Pont’s General Motors Co. funded a vigilante/terrorist organization to stop unionization in its Midwestern factories. Called the “Black Legion,” its members wore black robes decorated with a white skull and crossbones. Concealed behind their slitted hoods, this KKK-like network of white-supremacist thugs threw bombs into union halls, set fire to labor activists’ homes, tortured union organizers and killed at least 50 in Detroit alone. Many of their victims were Blacks lured North by tales of good auto-plant jobs. One of their victims, Rev. Earl Little, was murdered in 1931. His son, later called Malcolm X, was then six. An earlier memory, his first, was a night-time raid in 1929 when the Legion burnt down their house. Gerard Colby had this to say about the Black Legion in his book Dupont Dynasty (1984):

"But corporate executives did not give up the tactic of vigilante groups, and on June 1, 1936, Cowdrick wrote Harry Anderson, G.M's labor relations director, to ask his opinion of the Sentinels of the Republic. Anderson was apparently unaware of Irénée du Pont's support of this organization, but offered his own home-brew alternative. "With reference to your letter of June 1 regarding the Sentinels of the Republic," he replied a few days later, "I have never heard of the organization. Maybe you could use a little Black Legion down in your country. It might help."

The "Black Legion" Anderson referred to was indeed a great help to General Motors in its struggle to prevent auto workers from unionizing. With members wearing black robes and slitted hoods adorned with white skull and crossbones, the Black Legion was the terror of Michigan and Ohio auto flelds, riding like Klansmen through the night in car caravans, bombing union halls, burning down homes of labor militants, and flogging and murdering union organizers. The organization was divided into arson squads, bombing squads, execution squads, and anti-communist squads, and membership discipline on pain of torture or death was strictly enforced. Legion cells filled G.M. factories, terrorizing workers and recruiting Ku Klux Klansmen.

Since 1933 the Black Legion's power had permeated police departments."

The Legion, claiming 200,000 members in Michigan, was divided into distinct squads, each focused on a different aspect of their work for du Pont: arson, bombing, execution and anti-communism. The Legion’s cells within GM factories intimidated workers, targeted Jews and recruited for the KKK. They worked together to stop Reds and unions that demanded their labour rights.

Thanks to a Senate Munitions Investigating Committee (1934-1936) that examined criminal, warprofit-eering practices of arms companies during WWI, the public learned that du Pont had led munitions companies in sabotaging a League of Nations’ disarmament conference in Geneva. The committee’s chair, Gerald Nye, said that once “the munitions people of the world had made the treaty a satisfactory one to themselves,...Colonel Simons [of Du Pont] is reporting that even the State Department realized, in effect, who controlled the Nation.”

The du Ponts fought back against widespread public condemnation that rightly labeled them “merchants of death.” They claimed that communists were behind the Senate hearings, and blamed the Committee for undermining U.S. military power. In response, Chairman Nye, a Republican from North Dakota, pointing out that du Pont had made six times as many millions of dollars during WWI than during the preceding four years “so naturally Mr. du Pont sees red when he sees these profits attacked by international peace.”

The du Pont Co., and particularly GM, was a major contributor to Nazi military efforts to wipe communism off the map of Europe. In 1929, GM bought Adam Opel, Germany’s largest car manufacturer. In 1974, a Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly heard evidence from researcher Bradford Snell proving that that in 1935, GM opened an Opel factory to supply the Nazi’s with “Blitz” military trucks. In appreciation, for this help, Adolf Hitler awarded GM’s chief executive for overseas operations, James Mooney, with the Order of the German Eagle (first class). Besides military trucks, Germany’s GM workers also producing armored cars, tanks and bomber engines.



Du Pont’s GM and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey collaborated with I.G. Farben, the Nazi chemical cartel, to form Ethyl GmbH. This subsidiary, now called Ethyl Inc., built German factories to give the Nazis leaded gas fuel (synthetic tetraethyl fuel) for their military vehicles (1936-1939). Snell quotes from German records captured during the war:

"The fact that since the beginning of the war we could produce lead-tetraethyl is entirely due to the circumstances that, shortly before, the Americans [Du Pont, GM and Standard Oil] had presented us with the production plants complete with experimental knowledge. Without lead-tetraethyl the present method of warfare would be unthinkable."

Since WWII, du Pont has continued to be an instrument of U.S. government weapons production. Besides supplying plastics, rubber and textiles to military contractors, it invented various new forms of explosives and rocket propellants, manufactured numerous chemical weapons and was instrumental in building the world’s first plutonium production plant for the atomic bomb. It pumped out Agent Orange and Napalm, thus destroying millions of lives, livelihoods and whole ecosystems in Southeast Asia.

With 2,000 brand names, 100,000 employees and annual sales of $25 billion in 1998, du Pont is one of the world’s biggest corporations. It’s 1939 slogan, “Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry,” belies a destructive legacy that will last thousands of generations. One of the globe’s worst polluters, it pioneered the creation, marketing and coverup of almost every dangerous chemical toxin ever known. It now faces countless lawsuits for the adverse health and environmental effects of its products, the unsafe working conditions in its factories and the foolhardy, disposal practices it flaunts as final solutions for its waste products. Here is a small sampling of du Pont’s gifts to the planet:

* Sulphur dioxide and lead paint
* CFCs: 25% of the world’s supply and almost 50% of the U.S. market.
* Herbicides and pesticides: brain damage, hormone system disruption.
* Formaldehyde: cancer and respiratory illnesses.
* Dioxins: Leading the way to create these carcinogens, du Pont then suppressed data on their deadly effects.
* Highly-processed, unnutritious products marketed as healthy food.
* Genetically modified foods and “Terminator”/“Killer seeds” threaten food security for 1.4 billion people who depend on farm-saved seeds.
* Patenting plant genes and stealing the Third World’s genetic resources.
* Using U.S. prison labour and factories in many oppressive regimes.
* Its oil subsidiary, Conoco, provided petrochemical raw materials and caused environmental devastation.
* Du Pont is one of the world’s biggest producers of green house gases.
* Sold for 33 years, the fungicide Benlate destroyed crops, shrimp farms and caused birth defects.
* Since the 1920s, du Pont produced leaded gas which is responsible for 80-90% of the world’s environmental lead contamination. Besides fueling Nazi war machines that rolled and flew across Europe killing tens of millions, this product’s legacy includes retarding children’s mental health and causing hypertension in adults. Du Pont’s helped stop the U.S. ban until 1996, and then increased its overseas sales.

References:

H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanigan, Merchants of Death, 1934

DuPont (E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co.)
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/profil ... upont4.htm

Gerard Colby, Du Pont Dynasty, 1984

Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, 1983.

Researchers Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, in their book, "Power Inc.,

The Elkhorn Manifesto Part II, U.S. CORPORATIONS AND THE NAZIS
http://www.wealth4freedom.com/Elkhorn2.html

"Explosives," Dupont website
http://heritage.dupont.com/floater/fl_e ... ater.shtml

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz "Malcolm X"
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Studios/2 ... colm2.html

Source: Press for Conversion! magazine, Issue # 53, "Facing the Corporate Roots of American Fascism," March 2004. Published by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade.

Order a Copy: Order a hard copy of this 54-page issue of Press for Conversion! on the fascist plot to overthrow President F.D.Roosevelt and the corporate leaders who planned and financed this failed coup.

Irénée du Pont (1876-1963)

By Charles Higham




Irénée, the most imposing and powerful member of the du Pont clan, was obsessed with Hitler’s principles. He keenly followed the future Fuhrer’s career in the 1920s. On Sept. 7, 1926, in a speech to the American Chemical Society, he advocated a race of supermen, to be achieved by injecting special drugs into them in boyhood to make their characters to order. He insisted his men reach physical standards equivalent to that of a Marine and have blood as pure as that in the veins of the Vikings. Despite the fact that he had Jewish blood in his own veins, his anti-Semitism matched that of Hitler.

In outright defiance of Roosevelt’s desire to improve working conditions for the average man, GM and the Du Ponts instituted the speedup systems. These forced men to work at terrifying speeds on the assembly lines. Many died of the heat and pressure, increased by fear of losing their jobs. Irénée paid almost $1 million from his own pocket for armed and gas-equipped storm troops modeled on the Gestapo to sweep through the plants and beat up anyone who proved rebellious. He hired the Pinkerton Agency to send its swarms of detectives through the whole [du Pont] chemicals, munitions and auto empire to spy on left-wingers or other malcontents.

Source: Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949, 1983.

[American Dream]

I think this is excerpted from the film The Corporation:

[American Dream]

Cross-posting to the Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS") thread:

Review of:

Vijay Prashad. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Current perceptions regarding South Asians in the United States are dominated by a multitude of stereotypes that collide and rebound against one another. South Asians are viewed as hardworking and potentially "productive" citizens but also as essentially different and distant from "American" life and culture. Although this form of othering may sound benign, it is part of a more complex form of racism that includes a portrait of the South Asian as a possible economic threat, willing to cheat honest Americans out of their livelihood (consider the depiction of Apu in The Simpsons).

Moreover, South Asian difference, though seemingly an innocent gesture of exoticization, can be used to deny civic and economic rights.
In his groundbreaking text, The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad effectively unpacks some of these stereotypes, providing an excellent historical contextualization of the many layers that determine the complex lives of South Asians. His book, as he puts it, is about "the feeling, the consciousness of being South Asian, of being desi (those people who claim ancestry of South Asia) in the United States. It is also a set of sutras (aphorisms) of the karma (fate) of desis, who must now imagine ourselves within the U.S. racial formation and seek to mediate between the dream of America and our realities" (viii). Prashad's book, however, is not just an archival resource or a series of community vignettes; it is also a call to action, striving "to address the dilemmas of desi life in the United States." In addition, the book "suggests passages to transform [desis'] current aporias" (ix).

One of the greatest strengths of the book is Prashad's historical overview of desi life in the United States and of desis' unique, evolving place in a white supremacist society. Prashad does an excellent job of tracing the roots of some of the racist notions that persist into contemporary times. An early example of racial othering, for instance, had been constructed by American writers, such as Emerson and Thoreau, who had portrayed the East as essentially spiritual and different. These views were exacerbated by turn of the century "popular orientalism," which "paraded out both the ghastly and beautiful mysteries of India as racial specimens that represented the multiplicity of Indian society, entertained U.S. residents, and validated the U.S. way of life in opposition to that deemed to be general in the East" (30). Some examples of these specimens included idols in personal museum collections, spectacles organized by the Barnum circuses, and the Ethnological Congress, which displayed people of "different and (lower) races" (30). Such spectacles were further sanctioned by the "Godmen of the fin-de-siècle who came from India to the United States" (40).

However, Prashad notes that many of these "godmen," including the most famous one, Swami Vivekananda, were disturbed by the American "tendency to view India as solely spiritual." In their eyes, this perception "obscured the devastation wrought on the subcontinent by capitalism and colonialism" (41). Prashad is particularly effective at demonstrating the continuing pattern of these perceptions by focusing at some length on the most prominent contemporary exponent of Indian "spirituality," Deepak Chopra. Chopra, according to Prashad, is a "sly baba" who "is the complete stereotype willed upon India by U.S. orientalism, for he delivers just what is expected of a seer from the East" (48). Unlike Vivekananda, however, Chopra "fails to mention the structural poverty of his homeland, nor does he offer any of criticism of capitalism" (48).

Continues at: http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i2/chowdu.htm








Full Video:

[American Dream]

White Liberals Have White Privilege Too!

By Alex Jung, AlterNet
Posted on December 21, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/71290/whi ... ege_too%21

It often seems that the only way liberals can talk about race is to encircle the "racists" and point at them -- either for a laugh or a morality tale. The former is one of the many tricks that faux news personality Stephen Colbert employs in his caricature of a conservative. His racist schtick makes fun of racists, and there's a comfortable distance between the satire and the show's mostly liberal viewers. The critique goes down easy because it represents something the viewer isn't.

On the other hand, the website http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com, featuring a liberal white couple, Johnny and Sally, enters murkier territory. Well-intentioned Johnny and Sally hang out with their black friends, who, as the namesake indicates, love them. Part of the site's subversion -- and subsequent confusion -- comes from the fact that its humor is not so separate from liberal Americana. We could meet a Johnny and Sally at a cocktail party, and maybe already have. One black "friend's" testimonial -- "Johnny is generous enough to remark upon how 'articulate' I am! That makes me feel good!" -- carries a zesty punch in light of Joe Biden's recent remarks on Barack Obama.

At these satires' roots is a distinction between challenging a Don Imus-type racism and the investment in something called white privilege. In the 1980s, a white feminist, Peggy McIntosh, came up with the metaphor of an "invisible knapsack" to analyze white privilege. It's unconscious, elusive, pervasive, and white liberals have as much of it as white conservatives do. McIntosh listed some ways she has white privilege. Her list ranges from the broad: "I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time," to the supposedly trivial: "I can choose ... bandages in 'flesh' color and have them more or less match my skin."

Jonah Peretti, co-creator of blackpeopelloveus.com (and also of Nike Sweatshop E-mail fame) said that the Web site's purpose was to "draw attention to the unintentionally offensive comments made by well-meaning white folks."

I've met Johnnys and Sallys at political events, house parties, and through friends of friends, who have an unnerving belief in their own righteousness -- their "downness" with the cause. The issue, though, is not the occasional off-color remark, but rather the framework that comment stems from.

Growing up in the company of white people, I was unaware of systems of whiteness. I knew that, as an Asian American, I looked different (and was unhappy about that), and that my parents faced linguistic and financial barriers (which I blamed them for). I did what "good" Americans did, and I individualized my struggles, believing that if I had enough gumption and know-how, I could rise to the pinnacle of society regardless of my starting point. I was an acolyte of the Temple of Ayn Rand. I didn't connect my experiences, or those of my parents, with larger institutions (i.e., capitalism) or cultural biases (i.e., white is right!), and blamed myself for failing to meet those standards rather than critique the systems that generated those standards. I had internalized whiteness, and if I had, then white people certainly had. As I began to develop what W.E.B. Du Bois called a "double consciousness" -- the perspective of "always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," I could not stop looking. Race (which in its fullness includes gender and class) was impossible to ignore, and I could not believe I had perpetuated racial hierarchy as much as I had.

Moving out of a parochial town in Florida to the cosmopolitan mecca of New York City, I did not experience the radical shift in racial awareness that I had expected. Contending with the racial bias of liberals proved to be more difficult because these urban sophisticates sheathed themselves in worldliness and benevolence rather than outright ignorance. Critiques of whiteness slid off their backs as though they were protected by a Teflon body armor. And so I offer the following list of misunderstandings that many white liberals have about race because I think they can do better -- and because we need to rethink our understanding of race and its relationship to U.S. democracy. The commentary does not encompass all white liberals nor does it solely apply to white people. But the frequency with which I encounter these misunderstandings makes the posture of liberal enlightenment seem halfway farcical and all the more crucial to confront. A critique of whiteness should extend beyond electoral politics and cut through every "issue" area because it's not just about how we vote, but rather about who we are.

1. White supremacy? You mean white men in white sheets?

Contemporary images suggest that white supremacy is a white man driving a pickup with a noose trailing from the back and a Confederate flag tattooed on his arm. Rather, it is simply the idea that white people, neighborhoods, concerns, beauty and self-worth are more important then nonwhite ones.

This system is one people of color imbibe as well, albeit to their detriment. For an extreme example, Michelle Malkin as a token Asian-American conservative hurts people of color despite being one. Even beyond conventional politics, internalized white supremacy often permeates communities of color, perpetuating whiteness as a desired standard. Those standards are the most visually arresting when they relate to expectations of beauty. It's not uncommon, for example, to see communities of color awash with lighter-skinned, rounder-eyed and thinner-haired images.

White supremacy gives white individuals a special racial privilege, be it through economic policies, law enforcement, schooling or magazine covers; consequently those people of color who seem whiter -- whether it is in appearance or action (the two often go hand-in-hand) -- receive special treats for their excellent performance.

White supremacy more accurately describes racial hierarchy in a way that "racism" doesn't. Racism is generally individualized -- e.g., What Bill O'Reilly said was racist! -- and doesn't describe the institutionalized systems that engender those moments. Anyone can be a perpetrator or a victim of racism, but that leaves out the reality that people live in a world with unequal claims to power -- a racial epithet directed at a white man is not the same as its opposite because a nonwhite person does not have the institutional power to pack her verbal punch. Racism has a mutability that white supremacy doesn't.

2. I'm not racist, but ...

Nobody is racist anymore. Liberals are often scared of calling other white people racist. Even Frank Rich of the New York Times defended the Republican candidates' snubbing of a debate at a historically black university as not racist but, rather, as "out of touch" (then again, Rich admitted he was a frequent guest on Don Imus' radio show).

But perhaps instead of using "Am I racist?" as our cultural litmus test, a more provocative question would be: "Am I anti-racist?" as in, do my actions overturn racial hierarchy? Such a question is far more complex because an affirmative answer affects every area of life -- what your job is, what bars you go to, the neighborhood you live in, where you send your kids to school, and with whom you surround yourself. The personal is as crucial (if not more so) than the political. Developing an anti-racist consciousness means recognizing the individual privileges we have and the larger context in which they exist. Such an assessment can be as uncomplicated as paying attention to (1) who is at the table and (2) who takes up the most space at said table.

Too often, "not racist" is equated with not conservative and not Southern; by thinking in binaries, liberals excuse themselves from criticism by pointing to the greater evil. Rush Limbaugh is really just an overly medicated red herring to the privileges of white liberals. The liberal establishment -- everyone from the Democratic Party to Daily Kos -- fails the anti-racism test by merely paying lip service to racial oppression while maintaining a predominantly white constituency. They remain complicit with the belief that white men know better and therefore should talk louder and much more often.

3. Colorblind as a bat.

On Bloggingheads Video , the Nation columnist Eric Alterman whines about how talking about race is ruining liberalism (and of course, the Democratic Party). He tells the other talking head (who basically agrees with him): "Liberalism has paid an enormous price for bringing race to the fore, destroyed the Democratic party ... Everything in this country would be better, if we could leave race out of it."

Alterman's belief is a class-not-race argument, and from a generous perspective, he could be suggesting that racial subject matter is inherently divisive. But he's essentially spewing the same colorblind rhetoric as Justice John Roberts did with the Seattle/Louisville cases, when the conservative majority ruled that the schools' use of race to achieve desegregation was unconstitutional. Roberts said, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Alterman seems to believe that Jim Crow laws existed during a time when race was unavoidable. But how is racial oppression not a problem now? The continued xenophobia against immigrants, the racial profiling of black and Arab peoples, police brutality, soaring incarceration rates and vast educational inequities result from complex racial, class and gender structures. Moreover, even if there is no overt racial discrimination written into a certain law, that law's effects can still be discriminatory. For example, what editorialist Sylvester Brown Jr. calls the "walking with sagging pants while black" laws currently sweeping the nation, is according to the lawmakers, not about reigning in black masculinity, but rather about propriety. It is easy to make up laws that eschew the word "race" while only targeting one group. In the case of Alterman, it's not just about "class" as much as he yearns. (Couldn't I argue that slavery was just about class too? But more on that later.) It is a suspect attempt to excise race from class when they are inherently interwoven.

His desire to ignore race reinforces the dominant discourse. Alterman's vision of political discourse effectively invalidates people of color and prevents them from articulating their political concerns and personal experiences. In other words, who is this white man telling me how to talk about race?

4. Kumbaya, multiculturalism!

A popular perspective favored by many college admissions officers is the "It's a small world" multicultural approach. When celebrating "diversity," everything is positive, and nothing is unsavory. We can admire an African mask, hit a piñata with verve and gobble down a steamy bowl of pho -- all without political concerns. Stanley Fish calls it boutique multiculturalism. But it's just food. Or earrings. Or music. It reduces culture to benign, apolitical trinkets.

Boutique multiculturalism is most obviously inappropriate when it happens to domestic people of color, in the form of "ghetto fabulous" parties, where white college students -- or government officials -- don their favorite imitation of blackface. But the most uncriticized suspects are hipsters, hippies or other variants of alterna-whiteness. Their faddish diets often consist of keffiyehs (a symbol of Arab solidarity), dreadlocks (originally from Rastafarianism and black self-empowerment in Jamaica) and trips to Asia or Latin America -- all of which are part of their post-modern, post-cultural and post-political philosophy, where discrete cultures no longer exist, and everything is fair game. The consumer gains a "cool" credibility and some self-improvement, -discovery or -awareness.

Take New Age orientalist guru, Deepak Chopra. In the book Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad, writing in the legacy of Edward Said, says Chopra is "a complete stereotype willed upon India by U.S. orientalism, for he delivers just what is expected of a seer from the East."

Multiculturalism, according to Prashad:

Each cultural community is accorded the right to determine its destiny, as long as it does not clash in some fundamental way with the social construct of the state and its citizens ... The problem with U.S. multiculturalism as it stands is that it pretends to be the solution to chauvinism rather than the means for a struggle against white supremacy.

So it's easy to adopt Chopra's philosophy because he is Ayn Rand lite. And it's easy for white hippie-hipsters to wear keffiyehs, because they would never be mistaken as a terrorist. Or groove to Tupac's music without ever fighting against poverty or the prison system. But what, both literally and figuratively, are we buying into?

5. It's not a "[insert racial group here]" issue as much as it is a "human" issue.

Last year, the outreach program Keep a Child Alive ran an AIDS awareness campaign featuring headshots of Western celebrities adorned with facepaint and large block letters proclaiming, "I Am African." The high-profile roster included such human rights luminaries as Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker and only one person who could actually claim to be African: supermodel Iman. There was a rapid backlash to the campaign and its asserted motives: "Each and every one of us contains DNA that can be traced back to our African ancestors ... Now they need our help." Its flaws were easily exposed by a deft parody that reversed the roles portraying an African woman with the tagline, "I am Gwyneth Paltrow."

The campaign fit neatly into a framework of universal humanism, where a Westerner, with enough knowledge and/or empathy, could speak for another. Universalism, as it has existed, has refused to allow nonwhiteness to exist in any real or multifaceted way, and while Gwynnie can stand in for Africa, a nameless African woman could never replace her, or the "West" for that matter. This is yet another permutation of colorblindness that denies those who most experience racial oppression the right to speak to it. In the introduction to Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin writes, "When we talk about color, we are not merely speaking about phenotype, but experience, oppression, and livelihoods -- things that inform our humanity."

Even Toni Morrison (and she's not the only person who said this) made an egregious error when, in a New Yorker article, she said Bill Clinton was the first "black president." She said his background and the potshots directed at his sex life were indicative of the black experience. Not really. Nothing can stand in for having dark skin. It's also especially ironic because policies he espoused resulted in higher incarceration rates for black people.

6. One of my best friends is [insert nonwhite group here]!

Earlier this year, I was at a bar in the liberal bastion of Berkeley with a group of Asian-American girls. A white male sidled next to us and offered to buy us a round of drinks. Not the types who refuse free drinks, we accepted (of course, I forgot my mother's warning that nothing in life is free) and began chatting with our new friend, and self-identified liberal, "Sam."

Everything was dandy until Sam made a derogatory remark about Asian-Americans. Our irritated expression elicited a swift defense: "No, no! It's OK! I dated a Chinese girl."

In Thinking Orientals, historian Henry Yu discusses the Chicago sociologists and their work on Asian Americans. Robert Park, among others, wanted to measure "social distance," which was "whether a person cared about another or could imagine the other's point of view." Park quantified empathic ability on a scale from zero to five, where zero represented marriage (and sex, naturally) and five a desire for a group to leave the country. But Yu wonders, "Why was sex and intermarriage to be the ground zero of social distance?" For Park, the "possibility that someone could at the same moment abhor and desire a person of another race was counted an impossibility."

But how does a white person having sex with a nonwhite person -- or having a nonwhite "best friend" for that matter -- necessarily make her less racist? Strom Thurmond managed the contradiction fairly well. For example, analyzing Asian-white sexual relationships, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that Asian females are twice as likely to marry a white male, than if the racial roles were reversed. The disparity fits neatly into a narrative that has belittled and desexualized Asian-American men (note that the most famous Asian-American American Idol contestants were William Hung and Sanjaya Malakar) and eroticized Asian-American women (in contrast, look at American Apparel ads or take a trip to the "adult" section of the video store). Private bedroom acts are, in this way, as political as declaring which candidate we champion in an election.

7. How could I have white privilege? I'm poor/female/gay/Polish/disabled!

Another liberal technique is to eschew a discussion of race in favor of one of "class." The implicit, and sometimes explicit, argument is that race (or "identity politics") holds the Left back from what actually oppresses people and furthermore assumes that constructions of class and race are separate, rather than dynamically intertwined. Historian Robin Kelley critiques such an either-class-or-race construction in Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America:

The idea that race, gender and sexuality are particular whereas class is universal not only presumes that class struggle is some sort of race- and gender-neutral terrain but takes for granted that movements focused on race, gender or sexuality necessarily undermine class unity and, by definition, cannot be emancipatory for the whole.

Race determines how class (and gender) is experienced and vice versa. (Isn't that what this conversation about immigration and a "guest workers" program is about?) Furthermore, there is a failure to integrate racial analysis on the parts of mainstream feminist and gay rights organizations. A cursory look at mainstream gay and lesbian and feminist commentators reveals that while a gender analysis might be a part of their ethos, anti-racism is not. Arguing for primacy of dismantling one hierarchy over another, or simply leaving one out, is a limited and ultimately doomed strategy for liberation.

8. The white savior complex.

Saving Africa is a hot trend, especially for consumers. U.S. shoppers can buy a (red) iPod Shuffle or (red) T-shirts from the Gap, which recently got caught employing child labor in India to manufacture its world-saving goodies. Celebrities like Madonna are taking some personal initiative and trailblazing the "save African babies" trend. But, maybe it's not actually about the babies.

Western countries perpetually exploit the people and resources of the Global South, which, in turn, conveniently places them in a prime position to be saved either economically or morally. (For example, on the issue of colonial Britain's attempt to illegalize "suttee," or widow-burning in India, scholar Gayatri Spivak called it an example of "white men saving brown women from brown men." This is not to collapse moral indignation with economic and colonial repression, but rather to suggest they have a complex relationship to each other.

The exploitation of domestic exotics is linked to human rights abuses abroad because the disregard for lives of color operates from the same logic. Furthermore, neighborhoods like Chinatown, the projects and barrios are considered the results of those people not being able to get it together or something regressive about their "culture," rather than something unequal about the "system." It creates a dynamic where the wealthy, and/or the well-intentioned can begrudgingly, condescendingly or magnanimously save the black, brown, and yellow people from themselves. It's the difference between social service and social justice, where the former works to alleviate hardship, while the latter aims to eradicate the root causes of that hardship.

9. "Good" people of color

At the beginning of Obama's candidacy for president, Joe Klein of Time observed that white people were "out of control" at a rally for Obama, while the black folks were decidedly reserved. Chris Matthews gushed that, with Obama, there was "no history of Jim Crow, no history of anger, no history of slavery. All the bad stuff in our history ain't there with this guy." Indeed, in a speech at Selma, Ala., commemorating the march in 1965, Obama himself stated that in the struggle for equality, the Civil Rights leaders had brought black people "90 percent of the way." Just 10 percent to go!

Obama is a portrait of calm amicability -- so much so that his own supporters have urged him to ramp up the heat. Walter Shapiro described Obama's debating style as "smooth jazz" for its mellowness (a racialized characterization for sure, but we'll leave it be). Gary Younge has noted that his cadences are also unlike the oratorical styles of black politicians like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. The New York Times has also had a recent orgy of articles calling Obama "post-racial," "post-feminist" and "post-polarization." White liberals have gleefully projected their fantasies (delusions?) of a post-race society on a man who looks black but doesn't "act" black. But what about those who do?

Any group of color -- Asian American, black, Latino -- is incredibly heterogeneous, but experiences a bifurcation of their community into "good" and "bad." And what happens when the "good" start misbehaving? Take Nina Simone: She rose to popularity in the late '50s with her hit I Loves You Porgy, and her music took a political turn in the mid-'60s. On a live recording of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam," the predominantly white audience laughs initially at her introduction of the song but, listening to the lyrics, slowly grows quiet and uncomfortable. She quips, "Bet you thought I was kidding."

In "The Souls of White Folk," W.E.B. Du Bois, describes the separation:

So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble with thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites, there is much mental peace and moral satisfaction. But when the black man begins to dispute the white man's title to certain alleged bequests of the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when his attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity ... then the spell is suddenly broken, and the philanthropist is ready to believe that Negroes are impudent, that the South is right, and that Japan wants to fight America.

"Good" and "bad" come down to the extent to which a person challenges the hierarchy, whether it is through action or style. I wonder, if Obama started sporting an afro and talking about black empowerment, would white liberals suddenly lose their affection for him? And if Bill Richardson's last name were in the Spanish style of taking both parents' last names, with his mother's maiden name following his father's surname, would he be as successful as Bill Richardson López?

10. All that guilt.

An attack on a white supremacist system is not a personal insult. Anti-racist critiques seek to dismantle a system that gives different groups unequal power. No one chooses her/his skin color, but people can change the values assigned to those differences.

This conversation about race is an easy one to ignore (Hi, Alterman!). Privilege, by its nature, can choose what it wishes to engage with. Being critical of white supremacy is not designed to make white people feel bad about being white and replace the knapsack of white privilege with one of white guilt. Rather, it is asking white people to take off the knapsack and chuck it down the river. White people not only need to acknowledge their individual advantages, but also build a resistant collective consciousness that privileges marginalized peoples. But the question remains, can they do it?


Alex Jung is an editorial intern at AlterNet.

[American Dream]

Cross-posting to the Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS") thread:

http://eriswish.wordpress.com/2010/04/2 ... ientalism/

Shopping for Dharma- Eastern religions, consumerism and orientalism
By Dan

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said argued of a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture.
dharmic religions and cultures have long been subject to various forms of Orientalism in the West, both objectifying the East in a negative or a positive way.



Heinrich Dumoulin who has published much work on Zen Buddhism and has served as a professor in Tokyo, argued that when Buddhism was introduced into the West during the 19th century, the rationalist thinkers of Europe thought that they have found their desired philosophy or rationality which was without God, without heaven and hell, without soul. but upon researching Buddhism, it was obvious that Buddhism also included the supernatural (and what they considered irrational) phenomena such as saints and miracles, veneration of images and relics, magic and other forms of what was considered superstition. he argued that in order to truly understand Buddhism one must understand it in the context of its native lands in Asia.

On the other hand Dr Judith Snodgrass argues in her book: Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition, confronts the widespread view that Asian societies are objectified and filtered through Western thought. in her book she claims that it was the Buddhists who have labored in transforming Buddhism into a modern philosophy.

Stephen Batchelor, an author, teacher and scholar of Buddhism who has practiced Buddhism in Dharamsala and South Korea said of the background to the emergence of Buddhology:

Throughout the course of the 18th century three interconnected factors were gestating that would help give birth to what we know as ‘Buddhism’. These were the emergence of the rationalist Enlightenment, the decline of religious authority and the consolidation of colonialism.

While the colonial and missionary factor might have given Buddhism and Hinduism a negative image in Europe initially during the 19th century, as a naive philosophy, or in the form of corrupted priesthoods and wild and outlandish beliefs, the rationalism and emerging counter thought to religion in Europe also brought another form of Orientalism. Buddhism was introduced to Europe when the continent was experiencing dramatic social, political and technological changes. relations were conceived between Buddhism and modern science. dharmic ideas such as rebirth were seen as compatible with evolution and the biological vision that Darwin introduced into Europe in the 19th century. Buddhism was used as a force that together with the new biological views could tackle Christianity in Europe.

Buddhism was accommodated to European physics. a recent recycling of this phenomenon might be seen in the popular metaphysical use of quantum mechanics and Buddhism.



When it comes to the media, Hollywood has been presenting a Utopian Himalayan existence for decades to Western viewers, and the lamas of Tibet have been presented to the American consumer while fitting a certain image.

While Tibet was once subject to the quest of the Aryan prototype by the Third Reich and Aryan traces were sought after in India’s treasure of Sanskrit, now Tibetan religion and Tibetans themselves became an embodiment of ideals in the face of a Chinese oppressor.

The mystification and idealization of the East in Western thought has taken on a consumerism approach on many levels, the challenges and social problems of societies who practice dhamric religions seem to be detached by the image religions such as Buddhism receive in the West, social problems such as the gender discrimination by Buddhist institutions in Asia, or persecution of minorities seem to be a world apart from the harmony of Shangri-La.

In many ways, popular culture has had different phases in depicting Buddhism and the east, at first in the spirit of European orientalism as primitive, then as intellectual, and later as mystical. these forms of objectifying are in fact draining the human factor out of Buddhists or Hindus and places them in a line of Western consumerism. Eastern religions and societies are having certain aspects of them exposed and moderated into pleasent movements and philosophies in the West, while the human capacity to engage in social or political strife seem to be filtered out. this leaves societies in Asia dehumanized and places eastern religions as a product to shop for in the grand bazaar of religions. this product is robbed of its indigenous elements, and the real life challenges and social dilemmas it experiences throughout Asia.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Maybe it's a good time now for a musical interlude with Fela Kuti:

[American Dream]

Cross-posting to the Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS") thread:

http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/blog/arch ... out-asians

Jane Iwamura, on Asian Religions without Asians

Submitted by Jane Iwamura on March 25, 2011




Russell Brand, unpredictable and offbeat comic and husband to pop diva Katy Perry, is celebrity’s newest convert to Transcendental Meditation: an Asian-based spiritual practice popularized by Indian yogi Maharishi Mahesh in the 1960s. The coupling of Brand and Transcendental Meditation seems oxymoronic at best. But as the New York Times reports, Brand feels “Transcendental Meditation has been incredibly valuable to me both in my recovery as a drug addict and in my personal life, my marriage, my professional life.”

The Oriental Monk who made this all possible is the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Those who remember him from the 1960s and '70s remember his long flowing hair, unruly beard, bare feet, wide grin, and brown skin. The dhoti-clad guru and his infectious giggle seemed to reflect the ethos of the hippie generation particularly well (“Enjoy! Enjoy!”). Maharishi’s face graced the pages of Time and Newsweek and his image became iconic for a generation.

American engagement with Asian religions has earlier precedents -- from Hindu and Buddhist influences in the works of Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to spiritual leanings of Theosophist Annie Besant. Widespread knowledge and acceptance of Asian religious alternatives did not take root, though, until the mid-20th century and especially during the seminal decade of the 1960s.

So how did the American fascination with meditation, yoga, the Dalai Lama, or even Mr. Miyagi and Yoda come about? How does an Asian religion gain entry into the American cultural imagination? Viewing Americans’ fascination with “Eastern spirituality” from this historical vantage point, we might offer the following pointers.


1. Have an icon. A focus on a specific guru or teacher -- an “Oriental Monk” figure -- is key. His philosophy and outlook are important; but perhaps more significant are his Asian face, mannerisms, and style of dress. Such visual cues help authorize an Asian spiritual movement and practice.

2. Networking, networking, networking. The Oriental Monk has to have celebrity friends. Asian religions really gained exposure and popularity when D.T. Suzuki and Zen Buddhism were embraced by John Cage, Beat writers, and the New York art scene. Similarly, the Maharishi capitalized on his association with the Beatles, Mia Farrow, and the Beach Boys. And of course, we are all familiar with the Dalai Lama and his celebrity network.

3. Be user-friendly. The successful Oriental Monk must market his views and practice as something that requires minimal time and energy and easily conforms to one’s lifestyle. It should make little demands on the practitioner and be easily consumable. Religious commitment is not really a factor, since these Oriental Monks present their spiritual alternatives as universally inspired, scientifically-based, or solely philosophical. Asian-inspired religions in the Oriental Monk’s entrepreneurial hands and within the American imagination become no religion at all.


I am being a bit facetious here. However, historical research and current events demonstrate that my observations are not completely off the mark. The newfound spirituality of Russell Brand fits all most of these characteristics. First of all, it is easy. Transcendental Meditation “prescribes two 15- to 20-minute sessions a day of silently repeating a one-to-three syllable mantra, so that practitioners can access a state of what is known as transcendental consciousness.” No sweat.

TM has celebrity endorsements. Aside from our latest religious trendsetting celebrity there’s also Clint Eastwood, Moby, Jerry Seinfeld, Russell Simmons, Howard Stern, and of course TM’s most engaged spokesperson, David Lynch. Lynch, who began meditating in the late 1960s when TM was all the rage, founded the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace (DLF), to introduce TM in public schools, prisons, homeless shelters, and among Native Americans and military personnel. He continues the tradition of star-powered spirituality begun by the Maharishi himself. TM officials deny the influence of their famous followers, though. Robert Roth, Vice-President of Lynch’s foundation protests that, “No one is going to meditate twice a day because a Hollywood filmmaker is doing it.” Sure. At any rate, such celebrity networks and the media attention they draw have kept the movement alive.

But Mahesh is strangely absent from Transcendental Meditation’s most recent incarnation. His likeness appears nowhere on the David Lynch Foundation website (a brief reference to the yogi is tucked away in a FAQ). And the official TM website is not much better. Mahesh’s image appears as a small icon at the top of the homepage, indicative of his shrinking significance.

It's Asian religions without Asians.

Now you can say that Transcendental Meditation was never an Indian religion (or a religion at all, as some of its followers would argue). That the Maharishi always had global ambitions or (put more nicely) universal appeal. Or that the contemporary movement seeks to distance itself from a leader whose image is plagued by suspect motives and material concerns.

All these statements are true. However, the bigger picture remains. Western practitioners appropriate what they want and need from Asian religious traditions. While TM proponents might eschew any formal connections to an established faith (most notably Hinduism) and downplay the Vedic roots of its practice, they certainly enjoy the thin veneer of Asian-ness that coats the movement. (A large part of TM’s attraction is the “mantra” -- a term imbued with Eastern mysticism and intrigue.) Asian-ness is invoked at will.

Ultimately, the Oriental Monk or guru is seen as a remnant of a dying (or dead) civilization: the last of his kind. Those in the West (à la David Lynch or Richard Gere) see themselves as the only ones who are able to appreciate the Monk’s ancient wisdom and as the tradition’s appointed heirs. Asians and Asians American certainly are not fit to play a prominent role. Or so the fiction goes.

Asian Americans have tried to challenge this narrative, along with the decoupling of Asian religions from the rich traditions from which they emerge and the vibrant ethnic communities in which they are practiced. Most recently, the Hindu American Foundation (based in Minneapolis) launched its “Take Back Yoga” campaign aimed at reconnecting the meditative practice with its Hindu roots and context. The campaign provoked a strong and often vociferous response. While the HAF’s essentialized re-presentation of yoga may also suffer from a lack of historical nuance, the Indian American organization does rightly point out the erasure of Asians from the larger religious picture.

The truth of the matter is that Asians have carried their religious traditions to the US for well over a century and continue to maintain thriving Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, and Muslim communities. But again, this presence is rarely seen or highlighted. Instead, we have to settle for a single acclaimed Oriental Monk at a time, who serves to make the movement legitimate but is eventually made obsolete and fades from the American scene. The Maharishi died in 2008, but he has been reincarnated as David Lynch -- still quirky, yet wholly assimilated for the American scene.

* * *



Prof. Jane Iwamura is the author of Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (Oxford, 2010). She also co-edited the volume Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (Routledge, 2003).

[American Dream]

Excerpted from: Temporary Tattoos: Indo-Chic Fantasies and Late Capitalist Orientalism
by S Maira
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338549

Henna has helped bring India back home for me. It has brought home to me, and many other South Asian American women, the instability and power of the concept of nation, the ambiguity of cultural possession, and the perils involved in the material processes of “bringing back” a memory or fantasy of belonging. Traveling to the U.S. in the guise of “body art,” henna and other popular markers of “Indo-chic” exemplify the ways in which the use of commodities expresses the contradictions of transnational capital, gendered multiculturalism, and racialized citizenship. (Henna, or mehndi as it is called in Hindi, is the word for a plant, and for henna painting, which is done with a paste from crushed henna leaves and applied, generally, to the hands and feet. Henna is a practice generally done by and for women, particularly for wedding ceremonies, in South Asia but also in North Africa, the Middle East, and South East Asia). The fact that henna has to be applied to the body lends itself to entrepeneurial “body artists” who “perform” or paint mehndi designs for a price.

Henna, and other markers of Indo-chic, have become signifiers for a turn-of-the-millenium Orientalism. The flier by a “henna artist” invokes the”ancient,” “sacred,” and “ritual” practice of henna and uses the motto “Express yourself,” perhaps not accidentally, for it was Madonna who performed one of the most widely publicized spectacles proclaiming India en vogue in her video for “Frozen.” The flyer was produced in a small town in Massachusetts where I did a study of the meanings of Indo-chic outside of the large, metropolitan centers with which its consumption is typically associated, and interviewed several young South Asian and South Asian American women about their views of henna, cultural appropriation, ethnic authenticity, and globalization.

But why the return of Indo-chic now, thirty years after the psychedelic sixties and the quest to tune into India? Certainly India occupies a somewhat different niche in the American cultural economy than it did in the 1960s and 1970s. With the economic restructuring and neo-liberalization policies that have taken place in the past decade, India has been drawn further into global movements of labor, goods, and capital. Multinational corporations in the fashion industry now browse in South Asia for cheap labor, cheap goods, and profitable market trend ideas. The economics of Indo-chic and the vagaries of global capital are clearly one aspect of commodification that is not “digestible” by the discourse of packaged ethnicity, and is left undiscussed in the mainstream media although clearly articulated by youth of South Asian descent. What is also different about 1990s’ Indo-chic is that there are new groups of South Asian Americans who have come as labor migrants to the U.S. on family reunification visas or sometimes as undocumented immigrants, beginning in the 1980s, and who work as taxi drivers, convenience store owners, and domestic workers. The indigestible fact of working-class and lower middle-class South Asian Americans, who are not considered bearers of Indian mysticism or avatars of Indo-chic, is precisely the unassimilable contradiction with which we must grapple.

[emphasis added]

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://www.nativeweb.org/papers/stateme ... f09_en.php

World Social Forum 2009
Belém, Amazon, Brazil
Declaration of Indigenous Peoples


Appeal from the Indigenous Peoples facing the crisis of capitalist Western Civilization

*The global struggle for Mother Earth against the commodification of life (October 12, 2009)

*To outline alternatives to decolonization through living well, collective rights, self determination and climate justice

Modern capitalism began centuries ago and was imposed in America with the invasion of October 12, 1492. This gave way to global plundering and the invention of theories of "races" to justify American ethnocide, the incursion into Africa for the slave trade and the plundering of other continents. These genocides have not ceased and retain power due to transnational capital and military support. This worldwide capitalist exploitation and oppression fuels global warming, leading to the planet’s self-destruction.

This crisis in the development model – capitalist, Eurocentric, sexist and racist – is absolute and is drawing us into the worst socio-environmental climate crisis in human history. The financial, economic, energy, and production crises have worsened structural unemployment, social exclusion, gender and race-based violence, and religious fanaticism all at once. These crises of “capitalist development and modernity” are so numerous and so deep that they constitute a true crisis of civilization, endangering all ways of life. Yet there are those who continue dreaming of changing this model and do not wish to accept that what is in crisis is capitalism, Euro-centrism and its model of the uni-national State, cultural homogeneity, western positive law, developmentalism and the commodification of life.

The crisis of capitalist western civilization forces us to reconstruct and reinvent new and diverse ways for nature, society, democracy, the State and consumption to coexist. For this, new paradigms are necessary, not only making "other worlds possible", but critical. These paradigms are already being built by the first victims of the most barbaric forms of capitalist, colonial, modern and contemporary violence: indigenous peoples and communities, natives, farmers, riverside inhabitants, Quilombolas, Afro-descendents, Garifunas, Caboclos, Dalits, among others, and their children who migrated to the poor slums of the cities; and all the other excluded, invisible and "untouchables" of the planet. We continue resisting, strengthening and updating alternative forms of technological, social, ethical, political, economic, cultural and spiritual order of the human race.

We, the Native Indigenous Peoples, practice and propose: uniting Mother Earth, society and culture. Nurture Mother Earth and to be nurtured by her. Raising water as a fundamental human right and not a commodity. Decolonization of power with the theory "lead by obeying", community self-government, multinational states, self-determination of peoples, unity through diversity and other forms of collective authority. Gender unity, duality, equity and complementarity. Spiritualities rooted in the everyday and the diverse. Freedom from all racial, ethnic, or gender domination and discrimination. Collective decisions regarding production, markets and the economy. Decolonization of the sciences and technologies. Expansion of reciprocity in the distribution of work, products and services. Therefrom produce a new social ethic different from that of the market and colonial/capitalist profit.

We belong to Mother Earth; we are not her owners or plunderers, nor are we her vendors. Today we are at a crossroads: imperialist capitalism has shown itself to be dangerous not only due to its domination, exploitation and structural violence but also because it kills Mother Earth and leads us to the planetary suicide, which is neither "useful" nor "necessary".

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://www.redanarchist.org/texts/autpu ... ffect.html

The Eros Effect: An Interview With George Katsiaficas

This interview originally appeared in the first issue of Praxis, journal of the Red & Anarchist Action Network (Summer, 2003)

George Katsaficas is a professor of Humanities and Social Studies at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. In 2001 he spent time reasearching the Kwangju uprising in South Korea. He is the editor of New Political Science and the author of several books including The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life and Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. He has also editted several books, most recently The Battle for Seattle. A close friend of Herbert Marcuse, Katsiaficas runs the website ErosEffect.com.

RAAN came into contact with Katsiaficas mostly as a result of his phenomenal work in The Subversion of Politics, a book that deals in part with the German Autonomen and Italian Autonomia. After a few exchanges in dialogue, RAAN was able to conduct this interview, in which we have tried to hit upon some practical solutions to common problems within the anti-authoritarian movement.
June 1, 2003 Gwangju (South Korea)

RAAN: To what extent do you see a need for an open alliance between anti-statist forces, and what forms have such alliances taken in the past? What do you feel has been the main cause for division amongst anti-statists, and what are the necessary steps that you feel need to be taken to obtain a unifying open alliance of these anti-statists?

George Katsiaficas: In my opinion, one of the main problems dividing the radical movement has been and continues to be an obsessive compulsion to define ideology first rather than unity on the basis of action and program. By this I mean an over-theoretical orientation—“Zerzanists” vs. “Bookchinites” as a contemporary example in the anti-statist movement. Consider for a moment, the radical movement of the 1960s, which had not widely developed an anti-statist position but which was nevertheless quite radical and active, pulling in millions of people into a militant movement that opposed the government and momentarily posed the idea of a revolution. I remember a story about one of the final Students for a Democratic Society conventions in 1968 with thousands of people present. The PL (Maoist/workerist) faction insisted Albania was a “socialist” country and should be supported. The RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement) disagreed. Hundreds of people were chanting, “Ho Ho Ho Chi-Minh, NLF is going to win!” against the other side chanting “Mao, Mao Mao Tse-tung, Revolution by the young.” During a brief pause, someone in the back yelled, “What’s the capital of Albania??” Silence followed. No one in the room even knew the name of the city. The eloquence of this silence speaks volumes to the overideologization of the movement and the waste of thousands of activists’ energies. Actually it’s worse than a waste—it’s the counterrevolution inside the movement, the prevalence of dead labor, weighing like a “nightmare on the brains of the living.”

RAAN: To what extent have autonomous movements in the past been attacked or hindered by the political left (Leninists, Greens, etc), and what can be done to minimize the damage done?

GK: In the latter part of the 20th century, the best revolutionary organizations in the Americas developed outside—or in opposition to the established left. Think of the Fidelistas in Cuba, the Tupamaros, Sandinistas, SDS and the Black Panther Party (in its young and radical days). Autonomous movements in Italy and Germany were quite confrontational vis-a-vis the established Left and the Greens (as I discuss in The Subversion of Politics).

Developing our own open councils, general assemblies, and other venues of discussion and action is necessarily difficult because of the attendance of sects and ideologists. In Berlin, Turkish Stalinists insisted on carrying giant posters of Stalin in the Mayday marches. One year, people tried to make them leave, but the Stalinists hurt many people with iron bars and insisted on staying. Building movements as opposed to hierarchical organizations often requires autonomous space in which sectarian groups refuse to participate. In Ocean Beach, California, for example, the movement was built in a “white, youth ghetto” repugnant to groups of the traditional left, thereby allowing the free development of alternative institutions as well as anti-war and anti-racist centers of organizing in San Diego generally. (See the last part of Andre Gorz’s book, Ecology as Politics for discussion of OB.)

RAAN: The autonomous movements and near-revolutions of the 60s and 70s represented a return to the union of revolutionary theory and practice in the workers' movement, which had been at the mercy of Stalinism and Social Democracy since the end of WWI. Is there a similar potential for the rebirth of these movements within the current political climate?

GK: Currently a diffuse but global uprising is occurring against neo-liberalism. From Atenco, Mexico (where people stopped the new airport) to Peru (stopping privatization of water) to Nigeria, Ecuador, the Zapatistas and many others, the broad popular upsurge is building momentum. While increasingly active, workers in Europe, Japan and the USA have often been at the tail of such movements. As material conditions deteriorate, these workers will become more radicalized. They will set themselves in motion, aligning themselves (as in Seattle) with more radical strata in the core and periphery and possibly using them as models. A few years after the anti-war movement tried to shut down Washington DC in 1971, farmers brought their tractors to DC in a similar attempt. This is an example of what I name the “eros effect”—the intuitive spread of tactics and movements without direct organizational intervention. We need to build our militant circles as tightly and radically as possible, and have confidence that even though small, our actions speak to the society at large.

RAAN: You don't speak of the particulars of organization and method in The Subversion of Politics. For instance, guerrilla radio has been popular among North American anti-authoritarians and the Internet has made names like the Midnight Notes Collective celebrities among the circle of anti-statists. What role have these planes of communication played in autonomous movements?

GK: First, I am anti-celebrity. The effect of celebs in the movement is to depoliticize the popular upsurge and co-opt it into the hierarchical fame-status-power structure.

In terms of the German Autonomen, they developed before the Internet. Nowadays the web is a powerful organizing tool but can never replace face-to-face action. Radio and possibly even internet TV will continue to be important venues for radical practice—as will electronic bulletin boards, list serves and other electronic forms. This tendency is today nowhere more developed than in South Korea, where millions of people were mobilized against the USA after two schoolgirls were killed by a US military vehicle.

RAAN: In your explanation of the Italian Autonomia you mentioned the Red Zoras, Red Brigades, and Prima Linea as different strands of guerrilla tactics to other autonomous sects like the Metropolitan Indians, Lotta Continua, etc. Have these different inter-class divisions served as autonomous inclusiveness of oppressed groups such as women, youth, etc or do you see them as furthering capitalist antagonism? Why?

GK: I disagree with the characterization of the Metropolitan Indians as a sect. In fact they are a model to me of how not to be a sect. In their multiplicity of views, ease of action and communalism, we find the basics of nonsectarian organization.

For me the universal resides in the particular. Feminism is in everyone’s interest. Black music appeals to us all. Fighting racism is in all our interest. Within separate groups, advanced activists need to elicit the universal appeal of the particular group and need for coordinated visions and actions. Some need to unite in organizations that are not defined by “identity” but not all!

RAAN: Still referring to the above inter-class divisions, do you feel violence or militancy has been fetishized into a macho, and therefore patriarchal or ageist, tendency?

GK: Yes and no. “Chaos days” and Mayday in Berlin have often been criticized as ritualized male violence, but I believe there is also a moment in their occurrence that builds militant experience, tempers activists’ street savvy and builds affinity groups’ reliance on each other. In my view, popular and militant street actions play a vital role in enhancing the movement’s systematic critique of the existing social order and deepening peoples’ commitment.

RAAN: For those who bring offense to your group, whether it is verbal/physical/sexual or otherwise, what do you think is the best course of action? I would assume for serious problems excommunication is in order, but wouldn’t that allow for a much more dangerous situation where your group would be compromised (IE: character assassinations and clique formations)?

GK: Groupthink can be a serious problem in understanding what exactly an offense to the group is. One of the primary tasks today is to build our capacity for dual power. The system will not permit autonomous courts, judgments and sentences but in some cases we must be able to carry them out. What about police infiltrators? What about rapists in our midst?

RAAN: What methods of outreach have been used in broader spectrum outreach? In the German autonomous movements there's a strong sense of it as a particularly youth based movement that lacked connection to workers, housewives, etc. In your opinion, what can be done to overcome particular class orientations and provide a stronger inclusiveness?

GK: Revolutionary subject emerges in the course of the revolution, as Marcuse observed. What this means is that people themselves are capable to self-organize and propel themselves onto the stage of history. In the Gwangju Uprising, as I have extensively written and spoken about (www.eroseffect.com), people fought to expel heavily armed paratroopers from the city and then quickly cooperated with each other to run the city in a far more humane and just manner than previously thought possible. Everywhere where revolts occur, we see that the people themselves are far superior to ensconced elites in their ability to justly and peacefully manage society. Inclusiveness proceeds from the self-activation of people based on their own internal needs and desires, not their imposition from a vanguard as Lenin thought. In moments of crisis, however, the question of a new hegemonic bloc is critical.

RAAN: When discussing the German squatter's movement and specifically the defense of Hafenstrasse, you mention the tactics used to repel police forces. From your understanding of these police confrontations, did a sustained period of time in these autonomous movements nurture any career activism or "professionalization" because of constant evolution of tactics of resistance, or what exactly was the response to over-familiarity or "sceneism"?

GK: Yes, because of the continuing intensity of the confrontations, the Hafenstrasse became a difficult place for women and children to live in. At one point all the children—and many of the women—had moved out. As the houses were legalized and funds allocated by the government for their renovation, Red Anna, a long-time militant, became something of a city planner in working up plans for the renovations. People structured the newly won space to insure the collective form of living groups. Whether or not the house remains radical after the Victory was won is a question I cannot answer. I have not been there in many years.

RAAN: How is in-group communication typically encouraged? Are roles (cook, cleaner, speaker, etc) rotated to ensure everyone has an equal role as well as ensuring everyone knows how the entire collective works in case people are removed/arrested? How does one foster the group spirit without creating Groupthink (everyone just agreeing because the larger group says something)? Should there be set organizational principles where independent persons are assigned the task of opposing decisions simply for the purpose of creating a critical atmosphere?

GK: Actually in my experience, the reverse problem—i.e. of good-hearted but disruptive individuals—is more common. Forging decisions by consensus is always desirable but not always possible. In no way should organizations mandate dissent if it does not organically emerge. We in the USA are individualistic more than enough to insure dissent and internal debate. Indeed, everyone wanting to be the leader—particularly among males—is too much of a problem in the USA.

It is highly idealistic to expect to do everything equally. Yes, shit work like taking the garbage out and other such tasks need to be shared. But some people are better writers, musicians, cooks, or public speakers than others. While it is desirable to rotate such tasks, it is not always most productive. On the other hand, since publicly identified “leaders” are jailed, killed, sent into exile, or more commonly in the rich countries, co-opted into the system’s control center, care should continually be taken to develop the skills and abilities of every member of the movement. If we are able to multiply through the ongoing efforts of everyone, rather than simply add new members through the brilliance of orators and charisma of individuals, we will build a stronger, more resilient movement.

[American Dream]

The Eros Effect: An Interview With George Katsiaficas

http://www.eroseffect.com/bio/history.html

The intersection of biography and history

My own project begins with a very simple proposition: millions of ordinary people, acting together, can profoundly change the basic facts of social life. The South Korean Minjung movement of 1987 is a good example. If we look at history, we can find other such moments in every country when the activated population changes governments, economic structures-even the way time and space are measured and understood! In these moments of the eros effect, love ties exist between people that are some of the most exhilarating feelings imaginable. I am not talking simply about sexual ties when I say love ties. Love has many forms-love of parents for their children and vice versa, love for brothers, sisters and other family members, love for a significant other, and most socially love for one's fellow human beings.

In moments of the eros effect, previously dominant values and norms suddenly are replaced. Competition gives way to cooperation; hierarchy to equality; power to truth. During the Vietnam war, for example, many Americans' patriotism was superceded by solidarity with the people of Vietnam; in place of racism, many white Americans insisted a Vietnamese life was worth the same as an American (defying the continual media barrage to the contrary).

Furthermore, in the actions of the activated millions, the aspirations and visions of the movement are revealed in their real lived meaning-more than statements of leaders, organizations, or parties, the actions of millions of people lead the way. In the form that strikes, for example, take-posing communalism in place of individualism, of struggle as opposed to acceptance of less than one's worth-that the inner meaning of collective actions are manifest more than in the official demands of the strikers.

The erotic energy of the movement is a vital life-force in the social cosmos of nuclear waste and weapons, chemical defoliation and forced biological mutation-all of which are contemporary features of our political-economic landscape. People benefit in a variety of ways from involvement in social movements. Years ago during the Gulf War (when the US attacked Iraq) students at MIT occupied the student center and established it as "an organizing center against the war and militarism." A daily newspaper was set up, action-committees reached out to different constituencies, teach-ins were organized and a whole flurry of activity existed. I laughed when I first read one of the signs hung in the central office area. It read "Working in the movement is good for your love life." The ease with which these younger students spoke of dynamics usually taken so seriously undermined part of the serious attitude that makes war so easy to occur.

In my book on the global imagination of 1968, I showed how internationalism and self-management were the twin aspirations that united a global New Left. From Czechoslovakia (invaded by the Soviet Union) to Vietnam (invaded by the US) to Paris, New York and Mexico City, the most was practically and intuitively tied together even though no organization tied us all together. I develop the concept of the eros effect to explain how this unity emerged in the absence of organization and sometimes even extensive personal contact. In my second book (also translated by E-who Publishers), The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, I illustrate how "consciously spontaneous" movements integrate categories of existence previously thought of as mutually exclusive: eros and politics; opposing the government and acting properly; being in solidarity with Black Americans (or Vietnamese) rather than their masters.

It was not easy for me to participate in the movement. My father was a career military man, a highly decorated war hero, who didn't want to see his "only son throw his life away." He would come to demonstrations and physically try to make me leave. I was twenty years old, a senior at MIT, and had more than physical altercation with him. It was very embarrassing and he sometimes hurt me. Nonetheless I persisted. When I was put in jail-the next level of social control!-my mother stood up as I was being sentenced for "disturbing a school" and said in Greek to the Greek -American judge: "My son is not a criminal." The atmosphere in the courtroom was a tense, but I exploded when the judge ordered the bailiffs to "arrest that woman!"