The Struggle of Fanon and the Dialectics of the Existentialism of Identity Politics and its Irony

By

Malik Sekou OSEI

 

       While to bring an understanding of reality or rather “social’ reality, one has to grip two considerations one objective and two subjective, in relation of race and power in American social reality. For without understanding the dialectical bases of that relationship the actual understanding would become barren and empty.  For to be frank without a dialectical view—this view cannot actually be confrontational intellectually nor socially. For without dialectic, this view is the pragmatic comfort of the slave in a racist society.

       Here, we must examine the subjective factor in relation to social sensibilities and class oppression that finds its sterile flower in American racialism as social culture.

      This leads up to the question of social and personal authenticity as a broad rationalization of never negating the pragmatic world outlook of the comfort of the slave. This view is helped and cultivated by the more liberal view of white capitalist power. The role of liberal of liberalism is to provide symbolic reform to co-op the necessity of opposition. Thus this is to create dependent-authenticity among the oppressed.

      One of the venues of dependent-authenticity is the fact that the oppressed—or more to the point—the racially oppressed must pretend of being naïve or come to accept naivety as the road to their actualization. The questions of direction and goals are to be safely negated for the notion of “motion” in itself as a general goal. For the implicit goal under this agenda has only been acceptance by white middle power of privilege and consumption. 

     Thus, the role of this choice is to make the “native” conceptually barren. Thus within his paradigm, he loses the ability to distinguish between the notions to strive or to struggle. Thus his striving of upward mobility within white middle class acceptance is articulated as “struggle” and resistance. For this is where we see the talent and skills of the pragmatic native in the use of language games of articulate obscurement. 

      For it is within this forum that the “native” finds pleasure within his emotional escape from reality through abstract and emotive symbolic language of American celebrity culture. For the natives answers question that no one has asked. Thus his life is a life of daily performance of his cultivated ignorance of slave pragmatism.

      While in the realm of American culture “his” role has been the role of an entertaining distraction and the social advertisement of American conspicuous consumption as” progress,” of the coming social crisis of American capitalism.

     While most people in the US never discuss the question of ideology or engage a discussion as a question—where should society go—to be more humane?  For in this social and intellectual vacuum, leaves a space for a number of postures as projections as rigorous engagement, for which in fact is only incestuous self-entertainment.

     I think that the work and history of Frantz Fanon is most useful. I think here at this point, as we try to further grasp the work of Fanon and his contribution to the humanist dialectic of liberation. We must be very careful not to fall into essential sloganeering as liberation. For to understand Fanon’s work is the work of social emancipation through political revolution. While his languages was at times expressed in existentialist terms, but his work was very concern with the actualization of the humanity of the colonial racially oppressed.

       While it must be understood that human liberation is actually beyond the question of existentialism and is more involved with the question of power of ontological reality. For this involves economics and redistribution of the socially created wealth. At the same time the notions of class has a role to play in the anti-racist struggle against capitalism. But to be more than grounded in the reality of the racially oppressed, their struggle is a struggle of class in the form of racial conditions. What a number of progressive pundits seem to forget is that the slave-mode-of-production is a notion of class struggle, because slaves are a class of compulsory and coerce labor.

       While existentialism can and has provided a number of perceptual insights, its weakness is that its logic is not conceptual, but “perceptual” that could be given to intellectual speculation of human nature and not address the question of actual power.

       But the question of human choice and self-definition is more than an important question and to many this is a question of choice of existence.

        Thus, I will begin with the works of the bespectacled cock-eye French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and his existential philosophy of being.

       As vast human communities must fact profound social tragedies under the paradigm of human and democratic rights of and within the American menu. Must begin to face, how the vast majority conceived that the rights were to be guaranteed as political rights of the right to housing, health care, education through the commitment to hard work. And this was perceived unlike the so-called “other,” which was based on race. And thus the struggle of effort was to distinguish oneself by social behavior and ways. However, these attitudes could not protect large sections of people from the necessary dictates of capitalist profits and the moving of jobs and work abroad.

    While, a number of white ethnic groups thought by distinguishing themselves from the fundamental contradiction of capital and labor from the descendants of American slavery, the African American community and labor. But this social and racial loyalty to the capitol of the white ruling elite could not protect them from the need of private profit.

     For the crisis in America is multi-faceted not just materially, but also socially in terms of social consciousness of social awareness. Thus, American must face to negate its pragmatism of the slave of immediate comfort at all cost. Where the thinking of Americans is that they can be entertained to death with no problem or contradictions, and this has been based on the nature of imperialism and super-profits and the historic racism of the founding of the American white settler state as the right of land grabs under the guidance of god and religious freedom.

      While what was needed was not a philosophy seeking to understand the objective reality of the world, but a philosophical rationalization of the comfort and privilege of the merchant and the plantation class, while the status of this class of ownership was based on race.     

     As America goes through it first Black executive office holder and see that this first Black president had no charge or commitment to any political or social reform, and has brought drastic cut of austerity to vast America public and in particular the president had no charge to effect the condition of the African American unemployed and under employed working class.

        While a number of Obama pundits begin to spur a number of arguments, what we find that a lot of these arguments or not arguments at all, but are stagnant rationalization of racial pride. Thus the realm of identity politics is still within the realm of African American social and political sensibilities and at the same time use to vindicate the racialist and imperialist agenda of the current Black individually led presidential office. Thus the question and notion of and about identity has become the opium of African American senilities of social resistance.

    As we look and see that the material standing the African American community has profoundly and profanely collapse around racial lines of capitalism in crisis and under the preview of a Black presidency. Thus the political question of “what is to be done” has collapses into the questions of whom are we: by questions of identity and further escape from American political reality. The politics of identity, or “identity politics” as it more frequently called, is based on a set of propositions that, although widely held, are for the most part only loosely formulated or even tacitly presupposed. There is not any singular text that one can turn for a systematic formulation of the tenets of identity politics, and indeed the very notion of identity is so open to radically divergent interpretations, thus ranging from the biological to the broad and expansive.

    Thus even so, as much from observing the practice of identity politics in action, we can also draw from its written texts, it can be argued that it can be characterize its core propositions as the following: 1) that differences of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and so on have for too long been obscured by a hegemonic white, male, upper-class and heterosexual elite which, under the guise of claiming that there exists a universal human condition, has constructed an account of reality that serves its own ends; 2)  now, those groups whose identities were previously subjugated by this elite should now be privileged as sources of both epistemological and moral authority, since their oppression gives them a unique capacity and the right to speak about and judge what is true and what is good; 3) that (implicit in the first two claims) access to truth and the authority to make moral and political judgments is not universal, but is always relative to who one is; 4) that to “unmask” or “deconstruct” privileged, universalist reading of reality and to make possible the expression by the previously silenced and subjugated of their own identity and truth are not only valid forms of political action, but the most important forms of political actions today; 5) that such a politics of unmasking privilege the subjugated to come to voice needs also to be conducted internally, within groups and movements on the Left.

       Identity politics is a rather new and recent phenomenon of what could be called “the politics of recognition.” It can be argued that with the collapse of the recognized identities and social hierarchies, that is, with the transition from the feudal codes of honor to the modern, Universalist claims about equal human dignity, that the politics of recognition born. For with the collapse of the unproblematic, ascribed social identities of pre-modern society, it became necessary to discover, create, or negotiate social and personal identities.

      It was of course, Hegel who first powerfully formulated the demand of the modern self for recognition: to be fully human, to attain full consciousness of self, this was to be possible only through the reciprocal struggle for recognition by the other. Although Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” was couched in abstract terms of a reciprocal struggle only between two consciousnesses’s, and although it constituted only an account of an ethico-existential struggle of selfhood, the demand for free recognition by the other for which Hegel had postulated has been fundamental to broad political struggles for at least two centuries. It has been subtended not only demands for the “Rights of Man,” for an equality the law and adult white male suffrage, but also the abolition of slavery, the demand for women’s suffrage, visions of socialism and, more recently, the Black civil rights movement.

        Without taking these struggles out of context, they all were to take place within social and economic organization, in other words within social systems of society of the reform for democratic rights. Nonetheless, what makes identity politics an important difference from such earlier forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which it has been heretofore been denied: it is qua woman, qua Black, qua lesbian or gay—and not qua incarnation of universal human qualities—that recognition is demanded and moral superiority sometimes alleged and defended. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human characteristics, nor even for respect in spite of one’s differences. Rather, hat is demanded is respect or oneself as fundamentally different.

        This recasting of an earlier universalistic politics of recognition that today culminates in identity politics had its classic philosophical formulation in the early works of the existential thinking of Jean Paul Sartre and the materialist and psycho-cultural-existentialist articulation of Frantz Fanon. The principle is Sartre’s treatment of the “Jewish question,” and Fanon’s creative and critical appropriation of that term of that analysis in terms of Black identity. Thus, we must turn to Sartre and then to Fanon to give the historical and intellectual genesis of this ungratified human contradiction within human history and the underdevelopment of human organization at this time.

      In examining the pyscho-existential accounts of the dialectic of recognition and non-recognition that Sartre and Fanon were to develop, firstly we must recover the important strands of its intellectual roots of identity politics; secondly, it has to be shown that there are numbers of ways in which identity politics can learn from these earlier thinkers; and finally, to suggest that some of the failures and insufficiencies of present-day identity politics can be brought more sharply into emphasis by examining certain problems found in the original texts. 

                             1) The Outlook and Logic of Sartre

      As we look at Jean Paul Sartre paradigmatic accounts of non-recognition as oppression, together with his strongest call for the oppressed authentically to affirm their identity is found in his essay called The Anti-Semite and the Jew. While it must be noted that this question of recognition had already been extensively explored in his book called Being and Nothingness that was published in 1943, here Sartre was to argue that the “Other” is always a threat to the experience on the self to the non-other, thus having the power to objectify the “Other” and thus to cause the “Other” to run off into self-objection. In spite of this, such dynamics are portrayed by Sartre in his Being and Nothingness as socially mutual: each can equally objectify or be objectified. Anti-Semitism, by distinction, is not simply “the expression of our fundamental relations to the Other.” For in the Anti-Semite performs upon the Jew something further is involved, which precludes the mutuality or reversibility of the objectifying relationship: “The Jew has a personality like the rest of us, and on top of that he is Jewish. It amounts to a doubling of the fundamental relationship with the Other. The Jew is over-determined.” In short, there is not a reciprocal relation of objectification between the Jew and other people. For the Jew, in an Anti-Semitic world, is never free not to be te  Jew or the Other.      Here Sartre writes in a passage that really captures the dynamic between white liberals and the African American in America today, here Sartre writes: “The liberal, when he met a Jew, was free, completely free to shake his hand of spit in his face; he could decide… but the Jew was not free not to be a Jew.” In explaining the dynamics of this “over-determination,” Sartre in significant ways anticipates more recent anti-essential accounts of the construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identities. To be a Jew, Sartre argues, is not to be born of a physical race, or even—since many Jews are non-practicing—into the religion. If one asks what it is that Jews have in common, it is no fixed essence but rather “the identity of their situation.” Here Sartre goes to illustrates being-in-a-situation as living “an ensemble of limits and restrictions” that one does not freely choose, but which one can choose to invent with various meanings. The situation of the Jew in Sartre’s account is one above all constituted by the Anti-Semite—just as other will later argue that of women is constituted by the sexist and that of people of color by the racist. “The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew…it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew.”

     Thus, how can the Jew and other oppressed groups respond to this over-determination? Sartre suggests that the most common response is “flight,” the attempt to avoid fully facing the pain of the situation through a multiplicity of self-evasive strategies that he explains as choices of “inauthenticity.” For example, Sartre explains the attraction to many Jews of rationalism as a form of flight, for in the abstract life of the mind it would appear that we are all “men” and particularity can be transcended.

       In contrast to the Jew who flees, Sartre describes the authentic Jew: the one who demands recognition for what he is. Authenticity, as proporients of Black pride, gay pride and other forms of identity politics also insists does not involve the mere admission that one is what the Other says one is. Rather it involves re-appropriating, as a positive value, the self that the Other has imposed on one. Thus, “The authentic Jew… ceases to run away from the obligation to live in a situation that is define precisely by the fact it is unlivable; he derives pride from his humiliation.”

         Whether or not an individual chooses authenticity, to be a Jew is to live in a situation one has not chosen, yet which constitutes part of one’s very being. One is not “just” a human being who happens, in addition, to be a Jew: one is one’s situation. And although one can give to one’s being-for-others various meanings, one can never push it off. Thus, anticipating later critiques of universalism, Sartre argues that the old style abstract humanism of the liberal democrat is not merely inadequate, but itself oppressive. Liberal universalism puts Jews—and other minorities—in a double bind. For it seeks to suppress the particularities of concrete groups and individuals that are, for better or worse, integral to their existence. It also obscures the dynamics of oppression behind the assertion of a universal human essence that “we” all share.

         For it seems to be undoubtedly the case that what is today under attack from identity politics, including liberal ideology and the western humanist tradition, have normally —has function as exclusionary discourses. On the other hand, this is not to say that all Universalist values should—or indeed can—be simply thrown out. Indeed the troubling and subjective thrust by a radical relativism only leads to social and moral speculation and nothing more. As we are to read Ms. Marnia Lazreg essay “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of writing as a women on Women in Algeria.” In the book calledConflicts in Feminism, Editor M. Hiersch. She goes to say that: “The rejection of humanism and its universalistic character…deprives the proponents of difference of any basis for understanding the relationship between the varieties of modes of being different in the world.” For ontologically one can makes sense of difference only by recognizing the certain commonality to the human condition; generality is the sphere against in which particularity must be or become configured. The demand to be recognized in one’s particularity or difference is itself an implicit call for wider human reciprocity and respect. For if recognition by negating the Other was not needed for the integrity of the self, non-recognition per say would not present itself as a problem.

       Here, one can find Sartre’s position to be much more lucid than that of the many contemporary thinkers of identity politics. While devising a clear and persuasive critique of abstract humanism, he does not claim that difference inherently fractures knowledge, truth, and reality. Instead Sartre maintains and emphasizes the need to hold together in tension both difference and a certain commonality of the human world. He goes further to argue that oppression must also be resisted by those who are not directly its victims because lives are in fact demonstrably interconnected. The fate of the oppressed is also “ours,” not because we share a common human “nature” but because we are embedded in one and the same historical world.

       But here Sartre runs up against a logical incoherence between the realm of moral and existential experience (in which the demands for recognition takes place) and the world of concrete political transformation, a incoherence that actually haunts modern  identity politics today. Thus having portrayed anti-Semitism as above all an existential relation of anti-Semite to the Jew, in which the Jew cannot escape the objectifying portrait fabricated by the anti-Semite but he can choose to live it either the world of authentically or inauthentically; and thus having urged authenticity—the active and prideful taking up of identity—on the Jew, Sartre points out that, although authenticity might affirm existential freedoms in the face of oppression, it does not in itself address the social situation of the Jew. The individual Jew may resist the self-objectifying look of the anti-Semite, but authenticity provides no clear orientations towards the elimination of anti-Semitism. On the contrary, Sartre concludes that, “The choice of authenticity appears to be a moral decision, bring certainty to the Jew on the ethical level but in no way serving as a solution on the social or political level.”

       The problem is that Sartre leaves a profound question that remain in speculation and ambivalence in particular in his Anti-Semite and the Jew is this: how to bring the realm of moral and existential self-affirmation into a practical engagement with the actualities of a realm of politics that extend beyond personal experience—that is, the realm of institutions and enduring social structures? For power does not rest on objectification alone. Anti-Semitism is more than the sum of the actions of a collection of individual anti-Semites: it takes enduring historical and structural forms. Sartre was very aware of this reflective limitation, but he in his Anti-Semite and Jew he can only acknowledge the hiatus and tries schematically to bridge it with a hopelessly rationalist appeal at the end of the book for a classless society as the end to all ills, including anti-Semitism. At this point of Sartre arguments that he becomes culpable of accepting a de-situated and schematic vision of history, which he had ignored his own valuable insights into the concrete particularities of oppression.

      What is missing, in both Sartre’s account and in contemporary identity politics and its stress on social validation and not the organization of and on actual power, this is because it lacks a sense of intermediation and intervention, for which the dynamics through which issues of the interpersonal recognition and identity pass into and from the realm of concrete institutions. How for example, do they pass into anti-Semitic legislation, into segmented labor markets that perpetuate low Black and women wages into mechanisms that grant differential access to health care or education by class and race?

                 2) The Outlook and Logic of Fanon

       While looking at the work of Fanon and for better or worse, the effect of Sartre is more than persistent in Fanon earliest work in the text of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon takes Sartre’s account of the dialectic of recognitions and non-recognition and intensifies and splendidly transfigures as it is extended to issues of racial identity. Yet a similar abandonment of a careful phenomenology of situated experience and abrupt shift to rationalize also impairs Fanon’s work. However, what Fanon also brought to his topic was something that Sartre could not bring and did not have: first-hand experience. While Sartre writes as a progressive, but as neither anti-Semite nor a Jew, Fanon writes as a black man. There is both a tangible eloquent of knowledge and depth of temper to this consciousness that gives his work as a classic for later movements for Black consciousness. Even though the book focuses on the experiences of Black Antilleans in the 1940s and 1950s, it has resonated far beyond these boundaries of time and place.

         Fanon’s starting point in Black Skin is the problem of authenticity. Most colonized Black men, he observes, are not capable of an “authentic upheaval” today.  For they are the victims of a socially produced, but real, situation of inferiority which they have internalized, thus they suffer from a “psycho-existential complex,” that inhibits them from authentic self and social transformation. The Black—the Negro—is, as he suggests, characterized by a “situational neurosis…a constant effort to run away from his own individuality, to annihilate his own presence.” Fanon hopes to help “cure” this neurosis through his analysis.

      The social origin of this neurosis lies with the attitude of whites, colonial society to Blackness.  “Negrophobia” is in many ways a similar phenomenon to anti-Semitism as Sartre had depicted it, but there are also profound differences. For the Jew and sometimes become anonymous, but the Black is always visible as such. Creatively appropriating Sartre’s notion of the over-determined otherness of the Jew, Fanon writes: I am  overdetermined from outside. I am not the slave of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my appearance” (Black Skin, White Mask p.116). For in the white unconscious and as well within white culture, Fanon argues that the Negro even more than the Jew denotes “Evil.” “Is it not whiteness in symbols always ascribe in French to Justice, Truth, Virginity? …The [B]lack is the symbol of Evil and Ugliness. …But the Negro does not stand for abstract evil so much as for the threat of uncontrolled carnality and sexuality. The Jew is an intellectual or economic threat, but the Negro symbolizes the biological danger. For the Negro is only biological….[for] the Negros are animals” Thus the experience of alienation in one’s body, that self-doubling process in which one experiences oneself as a body-for-others, is more profound for Fanon’s Negro than for Sartre’s Jew. The task that Fanon assumes in Black Skin is less to account for white negrophobia than to investigate the lived-experience and moral possibilities open to a Black living in a negrophobic world.

       Like Sartre Jew, Fanon’s Negro often engages in forms of flight. For Fanon and the reality of the racially oppressed it seems most impossible to do otherwise. While, here the question of ideology is more implied for whiteness is also the venue for material upward mobility, as it seemed. For virtually all paths to an authentic self-affirmation seem to Fanon to be blocked or co-opted. From childhood onwards, exposure to the values of white culture induces an inauthentic identification with whiteness—particular in the educated child of color—such as Fanon.

       Here Fanon goes to say:

            “The young black in the Antilles, who in school never ceases to repeat, ‘our

              forefathers, the Gauls,” identifies his [or herself] self with the explorers, the

              civilizer, the white who brings truth to the savages—an all white truth.

             There is [the] identification that is to say that the young black subjectively

             adopts a white attitude. [For] The Hero, who is white, is invested with all

             aggression’ (p.147)

      Indeed, Fanon reports that this is so much the case that many Antilleans simply not see themselves as Black: Antilleans are French as white; and Negros are Black and primitive—and they are far off in the mountains of Africa.

      But once a direct encounter forces on the Antillean knowledge of his own Blackness—Whereas Fanon did, he goes to the metropolitan France and experiences white fears and hostility as he walks down the streets—at this point further forms of inauthenticity are elicited. Thus, having internalized white negrophobia and the belief in the superiority of white “civilization,” the Antillean cannot receive the description the Black. For to speak French well, to be educated, are after all, sure signs of being French—that is, white. But suddenly, there he is, irrevocably marked by his body as the feared and despised other, the threat to real and authentic “civilization.” For many Fanon included, the response is to the white negrophole’s stare, is to employ in the kind of self-objectification that Sartre depict in the inauthentic Jew. Here, Fanon goes to say:

                       “On that day…disoriented, incapable of being abroad with the other, the white man,

                         who imprisoned me without pity—I took myself far off from my own presence

                         —making myself an object (p.112)

       Here Fanon was to note that this self-objectification is the source of the allege Black “inferiority complex,” a complex that has nothing to do with family dynamics or the Oedipus complex, but everything to do with what he calls the “epidermalization” of social inferiority

        Fanon was also to deal with another response that was to more than fascinate him—is the natives attempt to escape into a universal humanity through the appeal to reason. Just as the Jew seeks to evade his particular situation through “rationalism,” claiming that reason makes him a “man” like any other, so too there is a temptation, especially for the Black intellectual, to try to escape from his racialized situation by an appeal to reason or other transcendental universals. But this is always thrown back into his face by power of the culture of white racism:

                        “…this Negro who is looking for the universal. He is looking for the

                        universal! But in June 1950, the   hotels in Paris refused to rent rooms

                       to Negro pilgrim. Why? Purely and simply because their Anglo-Saxon

                      customers (who are rich and who, as everyone knows, hate Negros)

                     threatened to move out (p.186) 

         Nonetheless, there is another strategy, which looks at first sight seem to be more promising: “I decided, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to affirm myself as BLACK. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself know” (p. 115). This might seem as an authentic response to racism. For this was surely, is what Sartre was to advocate for the authentic Jew, even though he noted that it would not resolve the Jew’s social situation.  Here also is more that discerns and sees identity politics from prior forms of the politics of identification: the demand to be acknowledged in one’s difference. But, here we see that fanon was more than hesitant and undecided, for he saw that this was more of a reactive politics. Of course, the native will be “…driven to discover the meaning of [B]lack identity” is and advance of the “native who seeks to be white. But the search for Black identity is in itself laden and burdened with problems. For here Fanon argues: “[That…] what is called the black is a white construction.”

          It was through his brief visit and scrutiny of negritude that Fanon surveys the quandaries of the pronouncement of Black identity. For here Fanon was in a tactical philosophical dilemma, negritude is at once flawed and yet necessary. Here through extensive citations from the works of Senghor, Cesaire and other, Fanon illustrates that much of its affirmation of Black identity simply rested on reversal of social place, but not the advocating of the destruction of white colonial power. A type of re-appropriation of white stereotypes of Black culture, for what is celebrated as authentically “Black” is the rhythm of the individual person, the magical, the irrational, the emotional, and the intuitive—and all of these are more than inundated and drenched with the sexuality of the over-sexed, whose social role is to bring the world an immediate happiness of a too close familiarity, as Black culture. Here Fanon goes to explain the sterile logic that leads to such a reversal:

                     “I had [come] to rationalize the world and the world had rejected me

                       on the basis of color prejudice. Since no accord was possible on the

                       level of reason, I threw myself back toward irrationality…I wade in

                       the irrational. Up to my neck in the irrational. And now my voice

                       vibrates (p. 123)  

         What has to be looked at here is the clearly ironic attitude of fanon’s presentation of the mythic grandeur that displays the poets of negritude. Yet, still however oversensitive it might be, in Fanon view it was also very necessary. For in his view, this was to shift in the Black-and-white relation, at least in the realm of the symbolic.    

To be continued…

            

2000 and 13 has come!

By William Pleasant (8-10-2013)

We stand on the despoiled shore of Black political meltdown.

In the far distance we can see a yacht captained by Pres. Buckwheat and crewed by white social dems, greasy-lipped negro preachers and homebettes sporting the latest Belgian-manufactured afro-duds.

High above the deck, in the crow's nest, white knuckled bow ties and turbans beseech Allah to raise the profit margin on bean pies and scented oils.

Our pants droop to expose the waistbands of our Versace drawers. We don't need to run, so there

is absolutely no reason to pull them up, now that cocaine--not cotton--is the cash crop of an imploding capitalism.

And what of Captain Buckwheat?

He sails straight into the rocks, beckoned on by a chorus of skag-blown sirens whose claim to fame

remains a cameo appearance on a reality TV show about their empty, spiritless lives.

We grin and charge our AKs in such a liquid movement that it gives the chicks standing next to us

a simultaneous, bone-deep orgasm.

2000 and 13 has come!

--30--

Good night, AMERIKA.

By William Pleasant 
(8-21-2013)


REMEMBER: The joy is in the wrapper, the candy is the poison!


Scudding towards a dysfunctional tomorrow, AMERIKA bends her knee in supplication to an equally hobbled god, pleading for some new contraband to sooth the shame of self-indulgence in her worm-writhing soul.


Black (Brown )(Red)(Yellow) man, meanwhile, flagellates himself against the prickly tree bark of despair, singing to the back-beat of survivalism. Slouching, too, with AMERIKA whose war-puckered sex is bare for all to see on 365 channels, 365 days per year, their eyes rolled to white in their shaved heads, these men march, chanting: BACKWARDS EVER, FORWARDS NEVER! THE PEOPLE DEFEATED WILL NEVER BE UNITED! NO JUSTICE, NO PIZZA! BEAN PIE UBER ALLES! LIFE IS ART, SO THAT'S WHY ART DOESN'T PAY...


And yea, doth the clothes make the man or do their Chinese manufactures make blood the dye of fashion? You tell me, since you're wearing a kufe.


In the end, I got my slogans, now you get yours.


Moaning and groaning, hyper-ventilating and grinding teeth around the clock, AMERIKA 
squats and urinates pure gasoline, as her minions queue up with their dixie cups for a taste of its sweet release. Thrilled, they skip off, highway-bound to 300 million padded nowheres. And they ask at the wheel of the consumer economy:


Is this all there is?


The answer already rattles in their infotainment-grazed minds; and they know not whether to laugh until they cry/cry until they laugh or suck the barrel of a loaded 9MM.


“Pull the trigger, MUTHAFUCKAH! Pull the TRIGGERRRRRRRRRRRRRR!


But they won't DO THE LATTER, not when there is a certainty that the morning will bring something resembling the sun and a chance, just a chance that the pushers of my trade will introduce a new drug onto the market and into their soured veins.


They won't when they can easily walk into any nursery school and bayonet their way to instant fame.


AMERIKA? She caresses her flaccid breasts. She picks her nose, mining for CHANGE AND HOPE. but coming up with only a tea-stained media sensation-cum-Trojan Horse for the worse that is yet to come.


So, I say GOOD NIGHT, AMERIKA.


My cable bill is over-due and the man in the van is on his way to cut me off.
Maybe this will be the first step to my liberation or the heaven's gate to the final chapter of my madness.


--30--

THE COLOR OF THE CLOCK

(Richard Wright, circa 1928)

 

The Role (?) of the Black Intellectual in the Black Struggle

by Comrade Malik Sekou Osei (ed. by M.S. Tucker)

The following is Malik's response to some private conversation points I'd been making about dialectics and politics:

 

 

We are living in the shitty eddy of a roving sewer called “culture”. Our daily lives are hammered in a vast stupidity of self-objectifying backwardness. While I understand culture and art play very real roles in human social development, with that being the case, they must be examined as such. Nonetheless,

this endeavor may be beyond the realm of a lot of thinkers around me, because here our community (at least our middle class) has never generated the ability to confront anything - socially, intellectually, artistically, and most of all politically. I know this is a very unflattering indictment, but truth has to be faced in order to deal with the African American scene.

This contradiction of the African American is that its leadership has always been the Black petty-bourgeoisie and any who aspired to it. This has been the homogenous African American experience and perspective, ultimately the aspiration of the African American people as a whole. Their music, theater, arts, and social sensibilities have been defined by aspirations of accommodation to that class and eventual inclusion in it.

This is an objective assessment, not a disparaging indictment of the Black middle class, for all people must try to live a stable life. The contradiction of the Black middle class in the US, as in most places in the West, is that its struggle was precisely that: the motions of accommodation, laying prostrate to achieve the position. To achieve this, they had to appear to be, or actally become, non-threatening to white economic interests. Thus, they had to appear more than distant from the ways of the Black urban working class experience.

It then must be noted that the Black working class has and had a number of contradictions in lacking social discipline beside an infantile materialism of validation while having no resources to pursue its objective. This wasn't a reflection of social immaturity as such, though, because the object place of Black workings and Black workers was as the reserve army of a labor force having no real job security and thus developing a social culture of always living in the present…with little thought of the future. This created a sociology of immediate gratification.

It must be noted that this working class in history could be mobilized in the most militant way, from the first threat of a march on Washington in 1943 around segregation in the US armed forces, all the way up to the 60s and beyond. Then came such instances as the role of union organizer in the Bus Boycott that created the momentum and infrastructure of the Dallas County Voter Registration League by Mr E.D. Nixon and the motion of Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). It was through material conditions that the Black working class had to confront institutional racism head on. The Black middle class, on the other hand, had to accommodate racism in order to gather job security as a concession.

The Black working class has had a dual character as being the most on-point radical force or of being the most self-involved most undisciplined force, a front that suffered a very long period of demoralization. Then there was the problem of militants of the Black middle class who would never organize to keep status in a material way for class power but instead collapse into the magical thinking of cultural nationalism, living in the world of revisionistically portrayed lives of Ancient African kingdoms postured out for contemporary Black communities, vehicles addressing Black self esteem and no more than that. Thus these "militants" only worked at forging “correct” symbolism as political and social work/theater.

This is why we see a long host of cultural nationalist forces giving full support to Obama as he begins the process of starting the re-colonization of the African continent while, at home, putting the lives and earnings of the working class on the chopping block and actually gutting the programs of the New Deal. He ignores all the violent tragedies worked upon Black people while crying sentimental tears for the white communities who have suffered nowhere near the same problems.

What has to be done in a more than dialectical way is to show the history of the Black middle class disarming the Black working class through its behind-the-scene actions, its obscurations of the objective realities in American social and political life, the sort of environment where so-called militants would call a Million Man March at the end of the 20th century to protest themselves. The only thing that came from any of that was the regal feel-good of distraction as demonstration.

While the Black middle class has produced - and producted - a number of important activists and thinkers, these people only represented individuals and not the true middle class perspective. Black middle class intellectualism is actually quite socially retarded (i.e, “Chip” Gates and others). Because of its need to posture, the first thing it throws out is intellectual rigor, calling any number of militant Black conferences only to celebrate some Black achievement or bring up a host of so-called "needed questions" no one seeks to answer, intellectualizing and ruminating over them in touchy-feely ways, proud of themselves as grand "cutting edge" intellectuals servicing the do-nothing of Black validation.

What they always seek to ignore is that Black people involved in the founding of America through slavery was the first contradiction of labor and capital - in this case, not wage labor or wage-slave labor but actual slave labor. Disappointingly, the Black role historically has been to celebrate the color of the clock but never to see the actual time.

In such things, I think we are forced to understand what the material conditions are for profound levels of irrationality and to try to explore and understand subjective factors, to see them dialectically. One of those struggles is the reflection of the actual truths of history and its practices. Black people, being an oppressed people, more than anyone else have a struggle on two levels. The first on the objective level of capitalist exploitation and the stifling of life chances amid racialist state violence, the prison youth pipeline, gentrification, lack of access to needed resources, and on and on and on. The second level is the subjective level, where the oppressed learns to objectify him- or herself to appear as "good" and non-threatening, "naive," in order to hopefully have access to and share in the corruptions of those in power.

Oppressed people must ever dance to the vulgar music of 'containment', which itself, of course, contains against acts of explicit resistance. Then there's the matter of joining dogmatic religious orders, secret societies, and other such devices where there are no goals, only articles of faith. The social lives within our communities almost always reflect this outside whatever circles of social and culturally conscious groups there may be. The play of dynamics is interesting on both sides of the fence but most often collapses when it comes to methods of organization within culturally aware formations, replaced by "grand" and "angry" charismatic spokesmen who at times seem brilliant for their informed empirical observations, but, when it comes to history, who forward the theory that the world only has conspiracies of secret white power. This may or may not be true to varying degrees, and we must understand the symbolism within such manifestations lest we fall into the dead-end of a pseudo-science of such "secrets" and such "white power". Containment tends largely to give rise to speculations leading to political dead ends. That's part of what it was designed to do.

The most onerous aspect of it is that it breeds further irrationalisms of escape but never any motivations to confront. The science of such pursuits may indeed be empirical but never dialectical. The goal of such research is never the science of history or of creating the conditions for seeking and seizing power but to live in one's own hierarchy of isolated secret privilege hosting and bringing forth an ugly, profane, personal alienation of the oppressed. This "leadership" maintains itself not through establishing actual goals outside of fundraisers but instead only involuted personal validation in isolation among the weak of mind, will, and emotion. Such an act breeds social corruption and the perversion of personal power in the eternal objectification of the self seeking ever greater validation, and no amount, no matter how outsized, is ever sufficient. For all power that is based on exploitation and the objectification of the self must negate science and always use pseudo-science to subjectively rationalize stations of privilege as "leadership".

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A bit later, Malik interpolated elements of illumination on recessed factors in what was discussed above, so I’m including his response to a re-statement I made in my V.V. take on dialectics a few issues back:

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Mark, your elucidation on the question of synthesis in dialectics was more than enjoyable, but I hadn't told you that my viewpoint last time around came from sitting in at an 88 year tribute to Malcolm X...on the question of Malcolm himself. I had to lecture a socialist guy from the Socialist Workers Party on dialectics, a man who argued that because Malcolm at the end of his life spoke at SWP functions, then Malcolm was obviously a dialectian in thinking, actually a mass leader like Lenin. I could only reply: "WOW!, are you serious???"

This a-historical child of redundancy, posturing, and sloganeering could never explain to me how Malcolm was dialectic in thinking nor quite address how Malcom was a mass leader or anything else. In lieu, Mr. Ass-Wipe gave me titles to read: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and a bunch of dead members of the SWP who had written articles for their paper The Militant. Well, okay, but I had read all of that years ago. I informed this indivdual that Malcolm was never in any socialist formation before the Nation of Islam and before prison. In fact, among so-called "socialists", he was to be murdered when he got back from Africa because he had met a number of African heads of state, an exercise that brought him a broader view of international politics and leadership of color. Malcolm, however, would never come to understand the economics of imperialism or the coming crisis of people of color and neo-colonialism, for he never had the time to engage the true use of political theory at the time of his murder. This kinda put my opponent's theories under the knife, didn't it? Regardless, while Malcolm's view of imperialism was just a recognition of the military arrogance of European powers, I had to talk to this emasculated nut about the dialectic of language and thought.

The contradiction is that a lot of white left formations and their flanking members of color feel are simply militant around the questions of colour and race and not really revolutionary around the questions of actual power and society. What they do for the most part is recite titles of books as substitues for real questions and answers. I know that a number of their members had written tracts on dialectics, so I asked this guy "Have you read Novack on Dialectics", to which the misemotional nut screamed "YES!!!!!!", and to which I merely nodded, adding "Good…so explain his work to me". All this socialist dogmatist could do was avoid the matter and, by way of being seeming cryptically knowledgeable, invite me to an SWP study group. Good grief.

That day, at the 88th tribute, I took notes on the event and speakers, and it all was about as important and cogent as watching wet paint dry, a flaccid orgy of non-stop sentimental romanticizing of an important man's life, an exercise that didn't put him in the context of his time so that a better and deeper understanding of the political catalysis he provided for mid-century Black radicalism, and furthe, for American radicalism, could be had. Sigh! This has resulted in my writing an article will probably be titles the "The Dead End of Sentimental Sloganeering and the Life of Malcolm X", though I'm undecided on that.

However, another very troubling aspect of the tributory program was the fact that the speakers were trying to also romanticize the recent death of Malcolm's grandson, Malik Shabazz. If we were to tell the truth, though, it's a matter of open fact that Malik was the person who set the fire to the house in the incident that killed his grandmother Betty Shabazz. Such knowledge, however, is forever taboo in such circles.

I will always use dialectical method in relation to history, Black or White. If people really understood there is no White history or Black history but only a dialectical history that at times becomes somewhat "colored", everyone could discuss matters a lot more coherently.

-30-

OBAMAMNIA and the capitulation of the Black Left: Or devil worship

To My Comrades,

Please don't be surprise by the so-called Black left silence around the contradictions of Obama and the Obama administration. It has to be noted that our Comrades has been seduce by their own rhetoric of militant popularism as actual work of building a movement. While, what history has shown that the actual practice of these forces has only been trying to be in a positions of being or becoming brokers of discontent to gain concessions of some level of reform. Nonetheless, some were successful other were not.

While a number of comrades don't examine the contemporary reality of present America, with the further consolidation of the American corporate state through the Obama government will not make any concessions to maintain "social peace," but are gaining in position to bring further repression to protect capital accumulation but cutting the social net of entitlements and further privatize the states funds of entitlements.

However, what my problem is or rather contradiction is... is that a number of forces still work and move as if they were still in the late 60s and early 70s of mass mobilization without a program, based on the subjective (at times...) sentiment of mass anger of the latest injustice.

It is from this political work habit that our practice has collapsed into militant sloganeering and tailism and the Black left intellectual leadership has not address that political contradiction. For it was under this venue that "our" movement never look at or examine the actual sources of African American demobilization since the late 70s and early 80s.

What has not been examine is the contradiction of the growth of Black public elected officials and the further decline in the material conditions of a very large sections of Black urban America under elected Black leadership. What has been avoided for a number of years that the the success of the Black elected officials was based on Black demobilization. For it was never examine that the role of the Black elected official was never empowerment of the community by providing state resources to the Black community and working class, but a vehicle race relations management of containment.

This question's implication has indeed, has shown the extents to which the Black left forces have gone to deny its existence as a problem. While what was to happen by it own social logic by refining the peoples routine of life and living--the actual everyday tasks of living everyday life as a venue of autonomy and personal dignity.

This would lead or collapses into the social logic of culture nationalism of redefinition as such and thus, this notion would defined as politically significant “resistance,” thus obscuring all differentiations between active, public opposition and celebrating the actual acquiescence. The effect was to deflect wrestling with the difficult actuality of demobilization by simply renaming it as a form of subjective dignity as resistance of autonomy.

Thus, this would give rise to a cultural nationalism of "Feel Good" slogans as liberation and because these forces could not build anything from this move and view, they were forced to maintain a posture and presence by tailing mass sentiment as "practical."

For a number of forces never had an actual meaning of resistance outside of protest, they lacked a real meaning of resistance that wouldconstitutes explicit demands on de facto power dealingsof local governments that areenforcedand through states intentions and understood by thosethat those intentions are aimed at.

While there were a number of exceptions to this, but they existent only in the South in North Carolina but this never had the mechanism to further consolidate further South or West or even in the North.

However, what made these Southern political moves important were the fact they were an attempt to be worker based and beyond the notions of ancient African kingdoms of self-esteem as political mobilizations.

But the Southern formation in search of attracting a mass mass and presence would collapses into constant sloganism and constant conferencing. While in the North our intellectual work has not been to examine this social contradiction of our impasse, but to research and show the glory of our ancient African kingdoms, which in itself was a political and social acquiesces in the real world of real and actual power.

Sekou

Disney's 'Latinoland' attraction NOW OPEN!

The hand that once had the right to pick a president can now get back to picking cotton!

By Malik Sekou OSEI and William PLEASANT


“The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do.”--Joseph Stalin


July 15, 2012


Perhaps Pres. Barack Obama's most freakish stage routine today is his leading role in de jure disenfranchisement of Blacks and the poor in general. Ironic? Actually, it is quite lawful at this historical juncture characterized by growing convulsive class antagonisms that are sweeping the world. How can it be that the Obama regime at once crows that it is passionately commited to expanding the voter pool of the US and ready-willing-able to mobilize the traditional Democratic Party base--Blacks, Latinos, labor unionists, the elderly and progressive whites--and at the same collaborate in the Republican Party's quite transparent nationwide campaign to drive the poor and the left from the ballot box?


The answer is political. Obama has side-stepped the fundamental issue of democratic rights and equality by engaging the pinata of Voter ID laws under the now moribund 1965 Voting Rights Act.


In the state of Texas there a was week-long trial on a new voter ID law that concluded with members of a three-judge federal court panel indicating they would uphold the federal Department of Justice and block the implementation of the law on the grounds that it has a discriminatory effect on minorities.


Obama's Justice Department presented a compelling 1965 Voting Rights Act case proving that Black people (the poor in general) are far more likely to lack the government-issued photo identification required to vote under the Texas law. One expert witness testified that 11-percent of white registered voters lacked the required ID, compared to 18-percent of Hispanic registered voters and 21-percent of black registered voters. A total of 1.5 million people of all races could have been denied the right to vote under the new Texas law.


Attorneys representing the Texas state government argued that the law would not have a “disproportionate” impact on Latino and African American voters and claimed that “only” 167,000 current voters would be disenfranchised by the new ID requirements. Predictably, the Texas legal team never bothered to bring a single state legislator nor executive official (overwhelmingly right wing Republicans) to the witness stand The reason was simple: They would be subjected to cross-examination by the federal lawyers. That would have of course put the Texans on the record stating that their reasons for snatching the ballot from minorities and the poor was purely a political ploy to keep non-whites from voting AGAINST REPUBLICANS, not preventing voter fraud, as the Lone Star ballot bandits pleaded.


The Texans did not challenge evidence that 80 of the state’s 200 counties have no location where photo IDs can be obtained, and that many residents would have to drive more than 120 miles (one way) to get such an identification card. They also went mum when it was pointed out that the IDs runs at least $22, a hardship,  particularly onerous to the elderly and the poor. 


At one point, Mr. Robert Hughes, one of the Texas state attorneys, stated that he also regarded literacy tests as permissible, although they were one of the primary KKK-driven tactics for excluding Black people from the ballot box for 90 years!. Literacy tests and poll taxes were supposedly permanently barred by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In other words, for the Texas Attorney General--circa 2012, "The hand that once had the right to pick a president can now get back to picking cotton!"


The Texan's case was so tranparently threadbare that it immdiately exposed the underlying national strategy of the Republican Party, namely to force an appeal in the US Supreme Court aimed at obliterating the 1965 Voting Rights Act altogether. Texas is one of 16 states required under the Voting Rights Act to obtain “clearance” by the federal Justice Department before any significant changes can be made to statewide or even county-level voting protocols.

The heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was to address particular counties where there had existed a historical pattern of de jure measures employed to virtually outlaw Black and Latino participation in the electoral process. These, of course, were augmented by sheer terrorism led by a coalition of local law enforcement officials and KKK death squads.


Texas is not the only Republican-run state to have recently enacted voter ID requirements and other measures aimed at curbing voter registration and reducing the number of people able to vote, in the name of a fight against “vote fraud.” Voter fraud is merely a euphemism for the strong tendency for non-whites and their allies to reject Republican Party candidates. It is a very WHITE ELEPHANT, since there have been no significant nor documented patterns of voter impersonation, the type of fraud that could be forestalled by a photo ID requirement. For example: not a single person has been convicted in Texas for such an offense. The song remains the same in the other states that have pushed for voter supression.


In Michigan, according to a report by the Republican Secretary of State, out of nearly 1.2 million ballots cast in the February 28, 2012 presidential primary, there were half a dozen believed to have been ineligible to vote.


In Florida, where the state attempted to purge 182,000 people from the voter rolls by employing a dubious list of supposed “illegal aliens,” the number was first whittled down to 2,600, then to only 47, after press revelations that the “illegals” on the list included such individuals as the state’s former Republican governor, Rick Scott, a principal sponsor of the law, and a 91-year-old decorated veteran of World War II's Battle of the Bulge.


Since a reactionary 2008 US Supreme Court decree upholding a photo ID requirement for voting in Indiana, such measures have been adopted in a total of 17 states. The Justice Department has blocked implementation of these laws in Texas, Florida and South Carolina, relying on its powers under the Voting Rights Act. But in states that lie out side the jurisdiction of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, legal disenfranchisement of non-white voters is in full swing. By one estimate, as many as five million voters could be summarily driven from the polls by such laws on Election Day 2012..


For example: Pennsylvania's voter ID law takes effect for the first time in November. According to state officials, some 750,000 people, or nine percent of the state’s 8.2 million voters, do not have an acceptable ID card. In Philadelphia, the state’s largest city, which has a Black majority, that figure rises to 18-percent!    


Pennsylvania's Republican House Majority Leader Mike Turzai openly confessed to the political purpose of the bill, declaring that voter ID “[I]s gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”


The clear intent of these laws is to speed up the “vote suppression” tactics applied by the Republican Party in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, which included massive purges of Black and Latino voters from the registration lists in the name of eliminating felons and undocumented workers. The vast majority of those removed were, in fact, US citizens eligible to vote, whose democratic rights were denied in order to obtain an electoral advantage for the Republican Party's candidates..


Of course, the most egregious case of “vote fraud” in recent years was the stolen election of 2000, when Republican state officials in Florida intentionally suppressed turnout in African American precincts and then declared George W. Bush the victor by a 537-vote margin. When the Florida state Supreme Court ordered a full recount that threatened Bush’s supposed victory, the US Supreme Court intervened with its notorious Bush v. Gore decision.This crippled the vote re-count and the installed Bush in the White House. The Democratic Party surrendered to this attack on democratic rights, setting the stage for the anti-working class onslaught that has followed.


We have noted in earlier articles that the 2000 Supreme Court action and the decision by Democratic candidate Al Gore and the Democratic Party to accept the virtual coronation of Bush--who had actually lost the popular vote by a margin of nearly one million--demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency within the US ruling stratum for the defense of democratic rights.


Likewise, there is really no substance to the Obama regime's opposition to the voter supression campaign. Why did not the Justice Department subpoena the
Republican masterminds behind Texas disenfranchisement last week? Why did Obama's legal eagles merely argue against the Texas voter ID law on the basis of the 1965
Voting Rights Act--which applies almost exclusively to the former Confederacy--when voter supression is a nationwide phenomenon in 2012? It should be plainly clear that the 1965 Voting Rights Act is pathetically obsolete today. Doesn't the 19th Amendment of the US Constitution (1920), which granted euqal voting righs to males and females by extension grant the federal executive and legislative branches the absolute power to protect access to the ballot? It reads: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." 


Substitute "race" or "income level" or "geographic location" or "party affiliation" for "sex" and you can see our point. Does Obama support equal democratic rights for minorities and the poor. His Justice Department's performance in Texas leaves strong evidence that he is at most indifferent.



While the Democrats, for short-term electoral purposes, oppose the Republican attacks on voter turnout in minority areas, the Obama administration has in every other respect continued and accelerated the attacks on democratic rights carried out by the Bush administration, including stepped-up political surveillence on the American. Obama has effectively politically disarmed Blacks and other people of color through a highly sophisticate campaign by which the demands of minorities and poor are submerged in the politically neutral jargon of "Middle Class" shared self-interests. This bourgeois populism, propelled by the cultural nationalistic placebo of "Black faces in high places"   has rendered Black political resistance to a mush of apologies for Obama's very open disdain for anything approaching a pro-Black or pro-working class political agenda, even of the mildest reformist specie.


Now is the time for a profound reality check:
 “What” are the material and political interests of the Black community and the larger working class community?


Can Pres. Buckwheat, a representative of the American capitalist/imperialist system really have the same interests as the Black community and the working poor? There is, of course, the argument that we need to support the lesser (Obama) of the two evils. But where in Buckwheat's historical practice of the last four years have we seen him as anything other than evil? Buckwheat was simply the more efficient of the two evils.Let that sink in.
        
For Black people and the 99-percent in the US, history is on their side, but not time.


--30--