freedom and reason

I haven’t worked out the math in great detail, but the Prometheus (the starship in Ridley Scott’s movie Prometheus) does not need to travel faster than light to reach its destination in a few years. This is satisfying because we can remain in the realm of conventional physics. In fact, it only works out if we do.

The planet LV-223 is in the Zeta 2 Reticuli star system, which is approximately 12 parsecs from Earth or 39 light years. (This is a real place, in case you were wondering.) The movie gives a different distance: 34.5 light years. Perhaps this could be accounted for by distances between the stars in Zeta 2 Reticuli, with LV-223 on the near side of the system relative to us (I am not an astronomer, I don’t know the distances, so I’m speculating). At any rate, given our frame of reference here on Earth, the Prometheus would reach LV-223 in 34.5 years at light speed, a little bit longer at near-light speed. 

According to David, the humans were in cryonic sleep for 2.4 years. This is what is referred to as “ship years.” We can explain this using the concept of time dilation (theory of relativity), which has the Prometheus traveling somewhere in the neighborhood of .99 percent light speed. At this speed, the Prometheus could do a round trip in 4.8 ship years, which would be experienced by the crew as a normal 4.8 years.

Time elapsed on Earth would be 69 years, which is the current average lifespan of a person. I suspect life has been extended by 2089, the year Shaw and Holloway discover the ancient star map, but not by that much.

The Prometheus arrives at LV-223 in the year 2093 relative to their frame of reference. From the relative frame of a person on Earth, supposing the Prometheus left in 2090, the ship would arrive at LV-223 in the year 2114. If the crew had survived and returned to Earth, they would arrive home in 2159. By then everybody they had known would be deceased. 

This means that the Engineers’ Juggernaut, assuming it couldn’t defy the known laws of physics, would have reached the Earth in 34.5 years. It is possible for the Prometheus to have sent a message on a beam of light to that would have arrived a few weeks or months before the juggernaut arrived warning Earth of its arrival. That might have been enough time to prepare, especially given the level of technological prowess; they should have the technology to deal with the alien vessel.

The Prometheus could also have taken off and raced the Juggernaut back to Earth sending warnings the whole way. But it was hectic and all, and the Juggernaut did get the jump on them. Moreover, it might have been armed and whacked the Prometheus.

(As an aside, had the ship left when it was supposed to, and safely arrived on schedule, the apocalypse promised by the Juggernaut’s cargo would have hit Earth 2000 years ago and the history of our planet would likely have been radically altered.)

I think that some folks are trying to calculate the matter in the following way: Assume two positions in space separated by 35 light years: location A and location B. Assume, for the sake of the illustration, equivalent gravitational pulls, etc., at these locations. Time is thus roughly equivalent. Now launch a ship from location A to location B. The ship will travel at multiple times the speed of light in order to reach its destination in two years. The speed of light is 670,615,200 miles per hour. A light year (the distance light travels in a vacuum in a year) is 5,865,696,000,000 miles. So the distance from location A to location B is 205,299,360,000,000. That’s a bit more than 205 trillion miles. How fast would you have to be traveling to make that journey in two years (ignorant of time dilation)? I can make it there in 2.1875 years at a speed of 10,729,843,200 miles per hour. That is five times the speed of light.

Now, throwing time dilation into the mix, and working through the Lorentz transformations (which I haven’t used since I was a teenager, so I’m not even going to try it), the time experienced by the crew of the Prometheus will be less than two years. How much less, I don’t know for sure, but considerably less. However, this is impossible, since nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

To clarify some things…

The DNA can’t be an exact match of the Engineers/Titans or else they would look like the humans, not alabaster-skinned humanoids standing 12-15 feet tall with the other obvious anatomical differences. What they mean is that the Engineer’s DNA contains matching human DNA, i.e. the humans were engineered from Titan DNA. And of course, that is the only thing that makes sense. I don’t know why this is even a point of debate.

The substance the titan is drinking is the new DNA engineered/synthesized from Titan DNA. The DNA product, manufactured in Titan laboratories, needs to mix with preexisting organic material to assume its dispersant protein form. Then, through the destruction of the Engineer, the viable DNA is spread through the water (this occurring on an experimental planet , not Earth. The effects specialist explaining what they are doing in the new video clip is describing things precisely according to the way Scott sees the process. This is the way Scott explained it to him. 

At the deep spiritual level, it’s the metaphor of the dying/life-giver god that one finds throughout ancient mythology. Gods create life through self-sacrifice. Standard life-from-death theme (Osiris, Kephri, etc.). This is how gods pass onto immortality. For example, Osiris was disintegrated by the Seti and cast into the sea. His parts were collected by Isis to germinate the Tree of Life. All the while Osiris became transcendent—liberated from corporeal form—to guide the sun through the sky. 

At the concrete technical level, just as we humans have to grow life in definite media, all the technology the Titans have developed requires incubation in some preexisting organic materials. If the reality were otherwise, there would be no point is using bodies as vessels, which is the gruesome vibe of the Alien universe. So humans (or some other unlucky organism) are synthesized into eggs via xenomorphic slime (see the Director’s Cut of Alien to see the actual life cycle and fuck Cameron and his simplistic ant/bee treatment), eggs that produce facehuggers, facehuggers that produce xenomorphs, xenomorphs that produce eggs. All of these stages use a host. Not to beat you over the head with this, but these are parasites. Another process is DNA infusions producing Holloway monsters, producing trilobites, trilobites producing deacons, etc. A cycle of life engineered by the “gods.”

Third, the Titans aren’t going to destroy the human race simply to destroy them. Humans were bred for a purpose: the production of bioweapons. Either that or the Titans have a newfound purpose for humans, either for use in an inter-Titan war or a war between Titans and some other alien race, perhaps an alien race they themselves created, a Frankenstein’s monster (which seems to be suggested by the dead spacejockeys/engineers/titans against the wall).

The catalyst for this new purpose is likely the murder of Jesus 2000 years before. Jesus was really an Engineer misunderstood and killed—or sacrificed inappropriately or inopportunely—by the Romans. Whatever the specific case, the vials aboard the Juggernaut destined for Earth self-evidently contain the same substance that David plants in Holloway to create the Holloway monster and, therefore, into Shaw to create the trilobite (some of the trilobite larva are even seen coming from Holloway’s eyes). The substance is transforming Holloway into a bioweapon or at least into an incubator for other larval trilobites, which are collectively through Holloway desperately seeking to stay alive for further implantation. Implanted in Shaw’s womb, the trilobite matures, intending to give rise to the Deacon. Shaw stops the process temporarily by performing autoabortion (continuing Scott’s feminist theme established in Alien).

(By the way, the trilobite grows fat on the blood and blood plasma that exists in the well-stocked surgical unit. So you can ignore the haters who sarcastically wonder how it got so big. It is clear that the females are to be used a wombs for trilobites, whereas the men are to become vessels—once transformed into Holloway monsters —for the Deacons.)

It’s an extremely well thought out movie, yet we have all these people walking around talking about how disappointed they are because the movie doesn’t make sense. Really? I guess they would have preferred a flat and awkward tour guide speech about unobtanium; otherwise they wouldn’t get the whole earthlings-exploiting-third-world-primitives thing. Cameron holds hands. Scott doesn’t. He depends on the intelligence of his audience. On that score, I think he’s too optimistic.

This whole thing about Obama not doing what it seemed he said he was going to do in order to get reelected to another term, what does this really mean to say?

It means to say that the president has to be something that he really isn’t, which assumes he really is something, because if he were who he really is, then he wouldn’t be reelected. So his supporters encourage him to deceive the public so he can during his first four years in office make law and policy that is contrary to the interests of his supporters all for the sake of seeing him for eight years.

“Please screw me for four years, Mr. President, so that you can get re-elected,” the progressive says. “It’s no problem you screwing me for four years, because what I really want is for you to be president for eight years. And, really, if you screw me for four more years, that’s okay, too. Because it’s really all about you being president, not about what you do as president. I just love you, Mr. President. That is all.”

It means to say that what progressives really want the president to do is not what most Americans want him to do, hence why they wouldn’t reelect him if he did those things. You’re right; this makes no sense. Had the president governed like Franklin Roosevelt during these first four years, the economy would be going gangbusters right now and he would be immensely popular. Progressives would not only see your guy reelected, but you would have your guy doing what you said he couldn’t do in order to get reelected—which, if you’ve looked at the polls, looks like a difficult proposition at this point. In other words, by supporting his decision to not do what progressives really wanted him to do—in fact they wanted him not to do what they really wanted him to do so he could get re-elected—progressives have likely fated him to the status of a one-term president. 

It means to assume that the president really wants to do the things progressives really want him to do after he is re-elected. Progressives assume that he is not doing the things they really want him to do because he knows that he cannot because he would not get reelected if he did. And, since he’s so super smart, being a Harvard Law School graduate and all, progressives support him on that by not wanting the things they really want.

Obama and his followers are winking at each other. But his wink is disingenuous. He’s smart enough to know that their interpretation of the relationship flows from their gullibility and that he can use them at will to do things entirely opposite of their interests and professed values. He must keep them believing that he would love to do those things but can’t because he must first get reelected, which is why he “accidentally” says those sorts of things while pretending not to know there are live microphones in the room.

Obama is the master of the bamboozle. He knows, like any good carnival barker, that people will line up to be bamboozled if it makes them feel good. 

The people we need to provide the bodies for a mass movement against corporate capitalism are in thrall of an irrational form thinking that accompanies personality cults, for cognitive style where everything can be rationalized. The “Pied Piper syndrome” accompanies the personality cult. The escape from freedom impulse is writ large on the very people who were supposed to lead the rebellion against corporate power.

All this reminds me of when I was a kid and telling myself that I wanted the toy at the bottom of the cereal box that I really didn’t want because I knew that if I wanted the toy I really wanted I would get the one I didn’t want. I figured I would trick the Toy God into giving me the toy I really wanted by saying I wanted the one I didn’t want. Why I assumed the Toy God was a trickster god who wanted to give me toys I didn’t want I don’t know. I was a little kid. I suppose it was something like, “With Andy’s luck, he’ll get the toy he doesn’t want.” The last time I used magical thinking like that to shape opportunities for obtaining the things I wanted was elementary school. Progressives, what’s your excuse? 

I don’t accept the two-party dilemma. It is based on the lesser of two evils fallacy, or LOTE—a false choice that carries with it a serious consequence: enlarging the scope of evil. Democrats will continue down the neoliberal path if labor does not hold them accountable for their anti-working class policies. Democrats will never be held accountable if labor votes out of fear rather than collective long-term interests. Believing that they can take labor’s vote for granted, Democrats only have to do the bidding of the ruling class, since they could easily lose big business to the Republicans. When labor votes Democrat it legitimizes the Democrat’s pro-business agenda. It’s self-destructive behavior, and the proof of this is what has happened over the last several decades.

Why should we continue on for several more decades being drawn into the downward spiral into greater evil? Surely it is obvious to everybody that Democrats can always be portrayed as a little less evil than Republicans, who can always be portrayed as more evil than Democrats. But voting to make greater evil is clearly a less desirable outcome than Mitt Romney living in the White House for a few years. Better to work from a long-term class interested perspective than to continue with that losing proposition called the Democratic Party.

If we are going to use the ballot box for something, perhaps it should be to hold our elected representatives responsible for their failure to represent us. Otherwise, the two-party system remains what it has become: the dictatorship of the capitalist class. And we will keep losing. After all, Obama’s victory in 2008 was clearly a loss for labor. If he wins re-election, labor will suffer yet another loss.

Libertarianism (and variants, such as communist-anarchism and libertarian socialism) is a long-standing economic, legal, and moral philosophy of continental origins that puts personal sovereignty and the full development of human potential at the center of the system of civil liberties and rights. Here, rights are not defined strictly in the negative sense, as they are under classical liberalism (of which the so-called right-wing libertarianism is an unfortunate subspecies), but rather they are defined in a positive sense, that is, not simply “freedom from” (state and religious control), but “freedom to,” that is effectively realizing one’s purpose in the world together with those whom your actions will likely affect. This complete view of personal freedom means that the well-being of people comes before, say, the interests of capital. 

To illustrate, whereas under the liberal conception of freedom Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, private business, wielding contract law, can and do make rules sharply restricting speech, which the state machinery upholds in the interests of capital over against the interests of the individual. In contrast, in societies operating on the basis of libertarian principle, one has free speech in both public and private spheres and, moreover, access to fora in which to make her speech potentially effective. That means an effective right to the means of communication. This arrangement is not free press in the private media sense, but free press in the sense that all individuals have access to it. Media corporations go away under these arrangements and the means of communication becomes a public resource (like the free internet). There is no copyright or trademark. Individuals are free to access the social product together through democratically-negotiated processes (democratic, not majoritarian). Individuals are free to combine the ideas found in society in any way they wish to advance the interests of the community, not some subset of it. 

Clearly this is the diametric opposite of the libertarianism advocated by the political far right. For the latter, property rights are the most important rights. They trump our inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For example, Ron Paul argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is bad law because it forces white property owners to serve and hire African Americans in establishments of public accommodations. He contends that capital should be able to determine who it serves and hires free of popular or community interests, and especially of social justice concerns. From the original libertarian position, Paul’s argument represents a desire for tyranny of capital over persons, here a type of tyranny specifically designed to exclude individuals from public accommodations on the basis of race. There is another word for this: segregation. How could a real libertarian argue for tyranny? Clearly this paradox exposes something very wrong with their use of the term. 

In fact, “libertarianism” as used by Ron Paul (and Murray Rothbard, Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman, the Cato Institute, etc.) is a propaganda term introduced in the 1950s, becoming deployed in a widespread manner in the late-1960s and early-1970s, to differentiate those liberals who advocated neoclassical economic theory and neoliberal public policy (manifest in the push for privatization) from the social welfare liberals of the New Deal tradition, who, advocating some form of Keynesian political economy, called their own brand of liberalism “New Liberalism” to distinguish themselves from classical liberalism.

The webpage, Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation, is a State Department project.* The Obama Administration rolled out the webpage in 2010. Likely University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein’s work, or inspired by it, the webpage is an example of state-organized subterfuge.

Why do I suspect Sunstein is behind the project? In a working paper written in 2007, “Conspiracy Theories” (see Harvard University Law School Public Law & Legal Research Paper Series, No. 08-03, January 15), Sunstein, now administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, pondered the government response to “problem” of conspiracy theories. 

What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).**

A conspiracy theory is an explanation of events harmful to persons and societies attributable to plots hatched in secret. The phrase is unremarkable. At least it should be. The fact that conspiracies exist and that they are seen as bad by most people might explain why there is a category in the criminal law covering them. A theory is an explanation of a set of facts in terms of their interrelations. Every police officer and prosecutor who pursues a conspiracy has a theory about it. The prosecutor’s goal is to convince judge and jury that her theory is the best explanation for the facts.

From Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation:

Conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored. As a superpower, the United States is often cast as a villain in these dramas.

When persons claim that “conspiracy theories exist in the realm of myth, where imaginations run wild, fears trump facts, and evidence is ignored,” they mean to short-circuit theories about historical events and social trends where conspiracy is an important element. This is about conditioning the public to engage in thought-stopping. If the author of the web site were objective, he would distinguish between, on the one hand, conspiracy theories, which are legitimate, and, on the other hand, conspiracy fantasies, which aren’t. How do you know the difference? You have to look into them. But propagandists like Sunstein don’t want you looking into them. He believes the government should tell you how to think and what to think about.

Conspiracies can be big or small. Because they are perpetrated by those with moneyed and institutional power, the big ones are far more damaging and harder to control and punish. The big ones are also the more interesting and—obviously, because they are so damaging—the more important ones to consider. It is to these conspiracies that Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation is dedicated to denying, namely the explanation of historical and social events by exposing clandestine operations by persons and organizations with money and institutional power.

Moreover, many of the conspiracies identified on Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation are not conspiracies at all, as those involved in planning, as well as their plans, unfolded overtly. Characterizing these as conspiracy theories asks the public to deny what it occurring out in the open. The fact that the United States government is the major villain in world affairs today and had been for decades is hardly a conspiracy. For a comprehensive account of its villainous ways, read Killing Hope by William Blum. Or read Chomsky and Herman’s Political Economy of Human Rights series The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, After the Cataclysm, and Manufacturing Consent.

From Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation: 

Economic conspiracy theories are often based on the false, but popular, idea that powerful individuals are motivated overwhelmingly by their desire for wealth, rather than the wide variety of human motivations we all experience. (This one-dimensional, cartoonish view of human nature is at the heart of Marxist ideology, which once held hundreds of millions under its sway.)

Marxism understands that these other motives are irrelevant because they are necessarily secondary. The capitalist is a personification of the system imperative to accumulate capital. Arguably, Marxism doesn’t have a view of human nature. Marx saw human beings as personifications of social relations. In his “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx argues that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” For this reason, the wealthy are motivated by their desire for wealth because it is their social role in the capitalist mode of production to possess this desire and continually act upon it. This fact does not preclude “the wide variety of human motivations we all experience.” There is nothing cartoonish about Marxism. Judged in terms of relevant forms of validity (construct, convergent, content, and criterion-related), it is the most complete, dynamic, and successful method for explaining history and social change. 

One fantasy, reflecting this simplistic, unimaginative way of interpreting human events, falsely claims that U.S. national security agencies employ “economic hit men” to entrap countries with huge amounts of debt.

This isn’t a conspiracy but a basic fact of US foreign policy, which serves the interests of the global corporate class. The United States is the main imperialist power providing the intelligence and physical might that secures global domination by the international banking cartel and transnational corporate powers that benefit from the prevailing economic arrangements. The reason the US spends almost 60 percent of its discretionary budget on the military-industrial complex (the US share of global military spending exceeds 40 percent of the total) is to provide muscle for the ruling elite. These functions and the arrangements they serve are in plain sight. To be sure, various conspiracies help maintain the status quo, but the central premise of the quote provided above—that the powers-that-be use debt to entrap countries—is not a conspiracy. This is the way international political economy works. Study the situation in Europe to see for yourself. Look at the situations of Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal. The quote attempts to take a self-evident truth and transform it into a conspiracy so it can be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

Notes

* As of 7.26.2021, the day I am migrating this entry from Blogger, the Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation webpage appears to have been removed. Was it removed by the Trump administration?

** How can legal scholar seriously write that (1) and (2) “will have a place under imaginable conditions” without also implying that a totalitarian state would be necessary for such “instruments” to be imaginable? As for (3), (4), and (5), “counterspeech”? That’s not Orwellian at all.

Delivered before a room of educators at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 2012.

When I was told me that students identified me as a culturally competent teacher and asked if I would present my ideas  before a video camera for a short piece on cultural competence, I agreed.

I must confess that I didn’t know exactly what to say in response to the specific question that was put to me, something to the effect of sharing examples of intentional ways I set an inclusive tone in my classroom. I don’t use any specific techniques or strategies to do that, or to enhance my ability to effectively interact with people of different cultural, ethnical, or racial backgrounds, or to teach members of majority groups to better appreciate the standpoints and situations of minority group members. Frankly, I have found many of the techniques and strategies people use to accomplish these things to be contrived, even alienating.

So I worried about what I was going to say as the date of the video interview rapidly approached. I sought counsel from my dear friend and colleague Andy Kersten and, as if he had studied phenomenological psychological counseling techniques, Carl Rogered out of me the influence of my background as the child of civil rights workers and the knowledge I acquired through a life of working and playing closely with my peers in the African American community (I wasn’t like other southern white boys).

I said this – and some other things – to the camera, after asking Mike to prompt me with the question. I don’t really remember much of what I said, frankly. However, I do know that, because of time limitations, I left out the intellectual and social justice pieces. I want to share those with you today.

The general epistemological framework that informs my sociology provides the means to be culturally competent. It allows me to pursue a politically-interested scientific pedagogy. Why I use the term “epistemological” here – that is, what I characterizes as thinking concerned with interrogating the source and logic of knowledge – will become clear as my argument unfolds.  What I will be saying to you here today is what I tell my students in one way or another. This is a general approach, not a tool kit of strategies or techniques.

Before proceeding, I want to define cultural competency as I understand it. To be culturally competent is to accomplish at least three things, all of which have objective and subjective dimensions:

• cultural, ethnical, and racial self-awareness, especially of racial attitudes and advantages (often referred to as “privileges”);
• knowledge of cultural, ethnical, and racial differences and struggles; and
• a culturally – but not morally – relative attitude towards (or sensitivity to) cultural difference. Thus an appreciation of universalism.

These are objective because attitudes and advantages issue from social structure, ideology is a consequence of inequalities in power, and universal human rights are an objective feature of human being.  

My sociology is rooted in historical materialism, an elaboration of the scientific approach to studying history first developed by the revolutionary communist Karl Marx. Emphasis here is on the social relations that comprise the societal totality, with an eye towards identifying the internal contradictions and power asymmetries that generate group conflict. Historical materialism explains cultural and historical change in terms of these dynamics.

This way of studying the problem of culture and history links the objective reality of social relations to the subjective experience of them. To this put another way, it works as objective explanation of social relations that pulls attendant subjective elements into the domain of scientific analysis.

Social class, to take the paradigm, is not a subjective category, either as the arbitrary division of income by social science or as group self-perception, but rather as a material fact of segmented society which, in our epoch and for the most part, appears as the capitalist/wage-labor relation (in other epochs – and to some extent even in the current one – lord and serf and master and slave). The same objective relation that binds the classes together, because it is exploitative and oppressive, differentiates the subjective experiences of the respective class members in a real way (of which they can, crucially, be falsely conscious). In this way, we can analyze group consciousness as an objective fact of the system, understand the realities it perceives, and show how material divisions distort perception of the part and whole.

This also breaks down the traditional liberal barrier between science and politics – or, more accurately, exposes value neutrality as a mere fig leaf covering the nakedness revealed when one takes a critical approach to scientific subjects. My students learn very early in the semester that there is no value-free social science.

As I explain this – presenting the ideas of feminist philosopher Sandra Harding, historian Howard Zinn, educator Paulo Freire, revolutionary Karl Marx, critical race theorist Derrick Bell, etc. – students see new ways to think about the world. For most of their lives, they have received bits of information disconnected from a comprehensive theory of history and power, knowledge that is depoliticized and sanitized (think about the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. – in reality, a despised radical Christian socialist struggling against apartheid, capitalism, imperialism, and militarism, yet, in popular narrative, a beloved liberal reformer gently pushing the nation to make good on the promise of formal equality and pretty much setting things right). If social facts are at all plugged into anything remotely resembling a historical narrative, that narrative is typically ideological.

When considering the world through the lens of critical theory, students see history as power, structure, and struggle. This standpoint is particularly powerful for minority students. Often, for the first time, they have before them a method that, because it focuses on the circumstances of the oppressed, explains those circumstances, and makes a choice of comrades (to use Ignazio Salone’s famous phrase from the pages of Dissent), conveys their situation. Yet, at the same time, an approach that sides with the proletariat will also count many whites among its comrades.

I explain this to students this way: the subjective experience of a black man is objectively differentiated from that of a white man because each stands in a different grouped location with respect to the race or caste relation, a relation that is objective, empirically describable using a wealth of empirical facts. (It is crucial in making this argument to show that racism is not merely about race prejudice – in fact, it does not always depend on attitudes – but about structural and institutional power and discrimination.) However, the experience of a working class white man is different from that of a rich white man. White students learn that, while they have lived a life apart from minorities, particularly blacks in this part of the country, they share a common class position.

I use myself as an example, a southern white man. I admit that I cannot fully experience black consciousness. But I can understand that consciousness by grasping its relationship to the system of social positions that underpin it – and more than this: by understanding that this consciousness is the result of existence on the oppressed end of the relation, I can forge an educational relationship in which both minority and majority students can develop a deeper consciousness of the social relations and its problems. I structure my classes to achieve what critical race theorists, such as Derrick Bell, call “interest convergence.” This is the ideas that white people will support racial justice to the extent that they can identify with the situation of black people, see their common interests.

This deeper consciousness leads not only to greater knowledge, but to more profound moral and political understandings, pushing participants towards the considerations of democratic solutions that address the problems of inequalities. For it is only when a white people understand the social situation various minority groups – and can relate to it – that they can accept black or American Indian or Latino/Chicano consciousness as a legitimate expression – rather than fear it (as racial hatred), or see it as inferior, or see it as biased or as part of an agenda (minorities playing the race card by talking about race, for example) – and call upon the other elements of the empathy they express in just the normal process of knowing others: sympathyand solidarity.

I define sympathy here as social affinity, in which one person stands withanother person, thereby closely understanding his or her feelings through an alignment of interests, which calls upon the majority group member to make what he previously viewed as sacrifices, but now sees as necessary acts of restorative justice.

I readily admit that my goal is not simply to educate, but to transform. We review other perspectives, but we are careful to examine these in terms of the role they play in history, in creating and entrenching inequalities, in preserving the status quo. It is not enough to say we are citizens in a democratic society. History is not static. It is becoming.  Democracy is a project. We have to learn how to think and act democratic and we must struggle for justice. We must identify the real barriers to realizing a just and democratic society, and for working people of different racial and ethnical backgrounds, that barrier must not be each other.

* * *

Here are examples of the language I use in discussing these ideas. In critical race theory, the concepts of oppressed and oppressor are termed “perpetrator” and “victim.” This is similar to Franz Fanon’s conceptualization, echoed in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, of “executioner” and “victim.” We talk in class about the perpetrator’s perspective and the victim’s perspective. 

It is important to understand this distinction because, in standard educational practices, the dominant standpoint is sold as the neutral standpoint. When the minority standpoint is presented, it is seen as political, producing resentment, indoctrination.

For example, discrimination is typically defined in law as an intentional individual act of discrimination based on race. This becomes the understanding of racism and generates such terms as “reverse discrimination” and “reverse racism,” thus ignoring power and starting from the false assumption that there is racial equality. This is the error of substituting an ideal of formal equality for the reality of material inequality. You hear that in the selective quoting of Martin Luther King Jr. about the “content of our character, not the color of our skin.” The victims of discrimination often can’t identify a perpetrator, yet they are the victims of discrimination. 

Knowledge in the academy is shot through with this hidden bias. Sandra Harding attacks this as the problem of confusing objectivity with neutrality. They are not the same thing. She identifies two types of politics in science (and this works for deepening our understanding of politics in the humanity, too). There is, on the one hand, the politicization of science in which politics intrudes on “pure” science. We can easily identify instances of this, for example when President Bush suppresses the findings in studies of No Child Left Behind in order to sustain his ideologically-driven program to privatize the public education system.

The harder type to detect is the depoliticization of science, wherein politics operates unnoticed through dominant institutional structures, priorities, practices and language of science. This attempt at neutrality not only hides systematically distorted research results, but it allows dominant science to normalize authoritarian politics. Thus when challenges are made to the hegemony of dominant science, the challengers are depicted as threatening the neutrality of science. Critics of prevailing politics in science portrayed as ideologues. This counterattack functions to reproduce power and privilege by marginalizing other views, which are, as I have explained, part of the objective reality of things. Modernization theory – and ideological cover for imperialism –is a good example of this type of depoliticized social science.

Harding writes that we need to distinguish between epistemological relativism, which holds different judgments are equally valid, equally good – what is also called “perspectivalism” – and sociological relativism, which holds that different cultural, ethnical, and racial groups, along with classes and genders, have different types of knowledge, a fact that does not negate the external position of an objective reality of social relations. Harding stresses: “No critics of racism, imperialism, male supremacy, or the class system think that the evidence and arguments they present leave their claims valid only ‘from their perspective’; they argue for the validity of these claims on objective grounds, not on ‘perspectivalist’ ones.”

To quote Harding further, “If one wants to detect the values and interests that structure scientific institutions, practices, and conceptual schemes… [o]ne must start from outside them to gain a causal, critical view of them.” Objectivity ¹neutrality.  We have to be aware of how your ideas, perspective, etc., are shaped by existence in society, how it is emergent from social relations (organicism). I strive to teach my students thatobjectivity ¹objectivism; objectivism provides only partial knowledge because it denies knowledge is historically/socially constituted.  All knowledge is socially situated. Therefore, maximal objectivity obtained through critical exploration of relations between subject and object.

* * *

I can illustrate how the failure to comprehend this truth can interfere with democratic educational practices (I hesitate to use the word “progressive” here because of its reformist implications – the historical materialist approach is much more radical).

Some of you are perhaps familiar with the situation in the Tucson School District with the Mexican American Studies Program (Chicano Studies). La Raza. Arizona public school administrators – really the unilateral directive of Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal whose threat of appropriating $14 million dollars in public funds forced the Tucson Unified School District voted to suspend its Mexican American Studies program– have not only terminated the program, but have issued a list of book that can no longer be used in the classroom. These books include Rethinking Columbus, edited by Bill Bigelow and Bob Perterson, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire, and Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by Rodolfo Acuña.

Huppenthal ruled the program violated a state law by “promot[ing] resentment toward a race or class of people.” Huppenthal put it this way: “If all you’re teaching these students is one viewpoint, one dimension, we can readily see that it’s not an accurate history, it’s not an education at all. It’s not teaching these kids to think critically, but instead it’s an indoctrination.”  Without getting into the greater anti-immigrant politics of Arizona (we don’t really have to, as this situation is a microcosm of it), let’s explore the problem of Huppenthal’s thinking.

Huppenthal argued that “a dysfunctional school board… allowed a political faction to come into its campus,” and “take over these classes.” Analyzing the “lessons plans of what was actually taking place in these classes, it wasn’t something that people would tolerate, if they could see it out in the open air, not anybody who was liberal, not anybody who was conservative. This is outside of those kind of politics.”

Note how the problem isn’t that the curriculum is necessarily political but that it stands outside the very narrow range of allowable political thought in the United States, liberal versus conservative – which it has to in order to escape the standard ideological distortion. The “designers of the class” sought to “racemize the classes.” He then cited Freire’s work, who he described as “South American” and a “controversial philosopher” who “uses a Marxist structure to his thinking and his philosophy.” “So,” he continued, “the designers of the Mexican American Studies classes explicitly say in their journal articles that they’re going to construct Mexican American Studies around this Marxian framework with a predominantly ethnic underclass, the oppressed, being—filling out that Marxian model and a predominantly Caucasian class filling out the role of the oppressor.” (Interesting that he would use the racist word “Caucasian” here.) He notes that Freire claims that the word “oppressed” “is taken right out of The Communist Manifesto, where… Marx talks about the…history of mankind being the struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors.”

Huppenthal  told Amy Goodman that he “was challenged to come into the classroom” and his experience confirmed what he has just explained. “When I come in the class, they have a poster of Che Guevara up on the wall. [By the way, the lesson that day did not include any discusson of Guevara.] And I said, ‘Did you… all know that Che Guevara helped direct the Communist death camps in Cuba, …that under that regime, they put to death 14,000 dissidents, many of whom their only violation is what we would call free speech rights?’ And while I was in the class, they characterized Benjamin Franklin as a racist.” He was astonished by the contradiction. After all, he went on to explain, Benjamin Franklin did so much for African slaves.[1] 

I am not going to go through his list. What struck me is this: “There’s some kind of historical record there because of the attitudes and beliefs at that time.” And I thought to myself. Oh this is so typical. We have to understand Franklin in terms of his time period and back then everybody held those attitudes and beliefs. I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody said that to me. This is precisely the oppressor’s perspective.

Was it true that it was the attitude of African slaves, who in many of the colonies were a majority of the population, held these attitudes at the time? Where is their voice – the voice of the oppressed.  He had the audacity to say that not apologizing for Franklin’s prejudiced views did “not do justice to history and to give these kids a distorted view of what America is all about.” He added, “This is a great country. You have lots of opportunities. Anyone, the odds are stacked against you.” 

“This is talking about healthy educational processes that allow students to think critically from many viewpoints, not be indoctrinated into a Paulo Freirean-Marxian kind of style of thinking about racial attitudes and creating hatred and creating an attitude of—really, that’s unhealthy in our educational system, and one that, if it was subject to community review, wouldn’t be allowed.” So teaching students about the history of racial hatred is “creating hatred” and “creating an attitude that is unhealthy.”

And then, when challenged about the banning of books, he gave this pernicious example: “You could use Mein Kampf in the classroom, but you’d have to be really careful, because you—if you found a teacher who wasn’t using it to explore the issues in Mein Kampf critically, but you were—they were using it as a Bible, boy, that would be intolerable. And that’s where the teachers have crossed over the line. They’ve gone from using these books critically, to get the students thinking about them from many vantage points, to using these books essentially as a Bible.” So teaching Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is about democratic education and liberation and advocating the views contained therein is the same as teaching Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and advocating those views, which is about fascist dictatorship and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

[1]“Benjamin Franklin was the president of the Abolitionist Society in Pennsylvania. It was under his direct influence that Pennsylvania became the first state to outlaw the slave trade. Benjamin Franklin, out of his own pocket, paid for the very first schools for African Americans in this country and perhaps in the whole world.”

Speech delivered at Occupy Green Bay, January 28, 2012.

I want to thank the organizers of this event for inviting me to speak with you today and I look forward to entertaining questions and hearing your ideas. The title of my talk is “Theorizing the Moment,” operating with a rather open-ended conception of “the moment.” During these several minutes, I want to explore the character of the history of late capitalism—the period just before the Great Depression to the situation we face today—at a macro-level in order to situate the Occupy movement and compare it to other movements that have challenged aspects of capitalist state and economy during this period.

I believe that, even while the capitalist elite try to restore it to its previous “glory,” capitalism is nearing or has already reached its effective end; unfortunately, however, moribund social systems rarely go quietly, and the death of this particular one I fear will be a long and drawn out ordeal. Those who live by the exploitation of human labor and pillage of nature won’t easily give up the ghost. 

Although I have not until this moment been a participant in an Occupy event, I have been watching and listening to the protests on social media, reading the various and many statements by the movement published in newspapers and elsewhere, as well as discussing them in various outlets, including my classrooms. I was involved in several Green Bay and Madison protests last spring in the pushback against the Republican’s unfortunately successful attacks on workers’ rights and I believe deeply in mass popular action, including the Occupy movement, the complex character of which participants are coming to understand in one way or another (yes, it is true that we don’t always grasp the moments and movements in which we are participants).

Indeed, I find the present moment to be among the most exciting in my political life. It recalls the excitement I experienced as a boy during the civil rights movement and, later, during the student youth movement, moments in which my parents were deeply involved, and in which they involved my younger sister and me. I was so hopeful then, only to have those hopes dashed by world-engineering forces who, to use the words of the notorious report, “Crisis of Democracy,” by the Trilateral Commission, were forced by popular forces to battle back the “excess of democracy” that imperiled the governability of the liberal republic.

The period between the end of that period—which I will discuss today, among other things—and the present moment, which my own children are now experiencing, seems like a political dark ages. We have been sleepwalking as a people. But the people it seems have reawakened.  And the movement has clearly frightened the power elite who comically pretend to not know what it’s all about.

There are several moments and movements that I believe are useful for thinking about the way forward in the present, one of those being the series of events immediately leading up to now: the period of economic stagnation following the Clinton presidency, the expansion and entrenchment of the security state following the attacks of 9-11, the anti-war mobilization surrounding the U.S. war of aggression in Iraq, the emerging popular critique of corporate capitalism, the housing bubble, and the deep global recession that began in 2008, what together represent a legitimation crisis of corporate capitalism.

By “legitimation crisis” I mean that the legitimacy of corporate capitalism as a benevolent structure that brings good things to life is, in the eyes of many, in tatters. Moreover, this, as other periods, must rest on a proper theorization of the social structure in which they appear in order to chart a path out of the tangle. In my view, the movement is approaching a choice between the reformist rhetoric it finds itself articulating in its defensive moments and the more revolutionary impulse that threatens to break free—that itch that has so many young people politically scratching.

Before I begin I want to apologize ahead of time if the academic tone of my speech is off-putting. I hope there will be time afterwards to clarify terms and arguments. I work through thoughts by engaging the thoughts and arguments of the many brilliant people I encounter in my work. Indeed, I find that much of the difficulty in people getting together to accomplish big things is the lack of a theory of the world. I also want to warn the audience that my analysis of history is not a heartwarming narrative. We find our world in crisis, and being honest about the character of our situation is necessary to organize a common sense of urgency about preparing a solution.  

The economic moment in history that is most frequently compared to the present economic one is the crisis of capitalism that triggered the Wall Street collapse in 1929, which was followed by a deep worldwide depression. I need to say a few words here about the source of capitalist crisis, because, while historical moments are never empirically the same, they are nonetheless the result of the structure of the epoch; history, like everything else in the universe, is not a series of random, disconnected events. While a more complete discussion of the structure and dynamics—in a word, contradictions—of capitalism is not possible in the time we have here, I need to sketch its basic features. 

Capitalism is, more than any other social formation, a crisis-ridden system. The premise of capitalism is this: the appropriation by the owners of the means of production—i.e., land, resources, and technology—of the value produced by human labor minus wages, or surplus value. Capitalists have created a production system in which workers produce more material value that what is required to reproduce labor. Capitalists take the difference and convert it to profit in the market. The more surplus value relative to wages that is produced—that is, the greater the difference between the value of what is produced and the wages paid to produce it—the more potential profit there is.

It is the opportunity inherent in this relation that motivates the capitalists to reduce labor costs, either by suppressing wages or by making workers more productive by rationalizing their work through technology and organization, which, in practical terms, means fewer workers are needed to produce the same or more value. At the same time, capitalists depend on consumers buying products to realize as profit the value stored in them.

A contradiction thus becomes obvious. How do capitalist firms realize value as profit when capitalists as a class undercut the ability of workers to buy the commodities that the workers produce? The contradiction leads to a realization crisis, or a crisis of overproduction. Hence the paradox: poverty amid plenty. For there is enough wealth to lift everybody above the poverty line, yet one-third of our people live in poverty. Estimates of homeless persons range from 1.5 to 3.5 million, yet there are between 16 and 20 million vacant houses. There are many examples. There are associated features, not least of which is the periodic overgrowth of finance capital that, in its inevitable collapse, initiates the deeper crises we knows as “depression.”

Returning to the historical narrative, we find that different countries pursued different strategies to find their way out of the crisis that followed the stock market crash of 1929. Some European states, Italy and Germany most notoriously, resorted to forms of authoritarian capitalism that emphasized nationalism, and, particularly in the case of Germany, ethno-nationalism, which place national and ethnic unity above class solidarity, with the hope that the former supplanting the latter. The fascists identified democracy—such as it is in the confines of the liberal republic—as the problem, eliminated it in form and substance, violently repressing labor and other popular movements, especially those that emphasized class struggle.

(It is important to raise the specter of fascism here so we can discuss its possible reappearance in the present historical moment, manifest perhaps in, for example, the legal machinery reaffirmed in the National Defense Authorization Act, just signed by Barack Obama, which allows the president to detain indefinitely, without a writ of habeas corpus any U.S. citizen who the government claims is threatening the security of the United States and its interests around the world, a power not sought by any of the heads of the defense or security apparatuses.) 

In the United States, however, the government, faced with the still powerful remnants of popular movements that had formed with the emergence of industrial capitalism (which survived in some fashion the calamity of WWI and the Red Scare), and the crisis of the legitimacy of liberal institutions that inevitably accompanies, albeit in degrees, profound capitalist crisis, instituted a range of policies designed to save the prevailing system of property relations.

The most prominent representatives of the liberal state were President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry A. Wallace, who served in various capacities, including Vice President (and later ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket). Roosevelt and Wallace adopted a different, more optimistic approach to the crisis than their European counterparts. They dealt with the economic and attendant legitimation crisis not by violently suppressing popular organizations, but by integrating popular desire with government action in a very controlled way. The government co-opted and neutralized class struggle by declaring a new social contract, a “New Deal,” in which organized labor would be legitimized and institutionalized.

The business community was, predictably, hostile to this solution (they rather liked the Italian and German solution, and even plotted to overthrow Roosevelt), but in the end Roosevelt saved capitalism and did so in a way that avoided the authoritarian solutions that, in the end, rely on war to mobilize the masses (the US was in any case dragged into the fascist wars).

It is important to emphasize the role played by the popular movements in this moment in relationship to the structure of liberal capitalist society. However progressive were Roosevelt and the politicians and intellectuals who surrounded him, the structural position of the capitalist state requires mass mobilization of popular and especially radical forces to push the government into a compromise. This relationship is not as clear as it should be in some of the analysis I have seen from intellectuals closely allying themselves with the Occupy movement, most notably Chris Hedges. 

Hedges conceptualizes the liberal state as a, more or less, neutral agent that negotiates conflicts (this is the liberal-pluralist or polyarchic view of state and politics), in this case, brokering a compromise between the business community, on the one side, and the popular forces, mainly organized labor, on the other. This is the “function” of the “liberal class,” he argues. He then locates the problem of the corporate state as a phenomenon emerging in the post-WWII era, a situation he refers to, using a term coined by Sheldon Wolin, in Democracy Incorporated, as “inverted totalitarianism.” This interpretation is quite similar to that of Noam Chomsky’s, a name with which some of you are probably more familiar. 

Let me say a bit more about this interpretation because this part is an essentially correct description of the current order. Wolin writes: “Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.”

What Wolin is identifying is a governmental structure that is democratic in form but totalitarian in substance. It is, he writes, “a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control.” It is a system of staged-managed elections and careful message control, one that elevates personality and symbols over principle and substance, designed to keep the masses engaged in rituals (for most of the electorate just one ritual) with the appearance of democracy but which systematically precludes their ability to have a significant impact on policy formation. The two-party system, or bi-party, if you will, is central to the illusion of political choice. The idea of politics as electoral choice is the even deeper deception. 

For democracy is not something that happens every two years when you visit the polling place at your local church or school. Democracy is “people rule,” and it’s supposed to happen all the time and everywhere where your interests are affected by the decisions that people make.

American radical sociologist C. Wright Mills writes in the Sociological Imagination, “Democracy means the power and the freedom of those controlled by the law to change the law, according to agreed-upon rules—and even to change those rules; but more than that, it means some kind of collective self-control over the structural mechanics of history itself.” “In essence,” he writes, “democracy implies that those vitally affected by any decision men make have an effective voice in that decision.” According to this definition, which I regard as the definitively one, we do not live in a democracy because the most significant lever of power—“the structural mechanics of history”—are, under bourgeois state and legal arrangements, the private domain of capitalism.

We rightly brag about accomplishing the separation of church and state, but we rarely talk the central element in the coup we know as the U.S. Constitution: the separation of democracy and economy. Those who know the history are quite to remind us that this is not a democracy but a liberal republic.

This forces another point of clarification: the confusion over this term “liberal,” a term which many on the left use to identify their politics. Here allow me to quote world systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein who, in his essay, “Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy,” tells us that, “democracy and liberalism are not twins, but for the most part opposites.  Liberalism was invented to counter democracy. The problem that gave birth to liberalism was how to contain the dangerous classes.” He continues: “The liberal solution was to grant limited access to political power and limited sharing of the economic surplus-value, both at levels that would not threaten the process of the ceaseless accumulation of capital and the state-system that sustains it.”

The liberal state has historically functioned to manage the working class, and the “new liberalism” initiated by Roosevelt was designed to carry out that function. Consider the way in which the co-optation of the labor movement by capitalist power, coupled with the Cold War and a growing conservatism in the newly minted white enclaves or suburbs, led to a purging of the movement’s radical elements, those very elements that represented the corrective to the excesses of capitalist power in society. Once the radical elements of the labor movement had been neutralized (along with critically-minded journalists and intellectuals during the McCarthy years), unions began their long decline.

With the emergence of the consumer culture, changes in the composition of the U.S. economy, globalization, and the successful right-to-work countermovement headed by states, trends that Patricia Sexton characterizes as a “war on labor and the left,” union membership, which had grown quickly during the 1930s through the early 1950s, topping out at around one-third of the workforce, began a steady decline after the mid-1950s. Elites ramped up the war in the 1980s, in the United States, and in England, claiming that the economic stagnation of the 1970s—which clearly indicated the coming of late capitalism—was due to the “excessive power of labor in relationship to capital,” now quoting David Harvey. “That, therefore, the way out of the crisis last time was to discipline labor.” Harvey writes: “And we know how that was done. It was done by off-shoring. It was done by,…Thatcher and Reagan. And it was done by neoliberal doctrine; it was done in all kinds of different ways. … By 1985 or 86, the labor question had essentially been solved for capital. It had access to all the world’s labor supplies.” 

Union density now stands at below seven percent for private sector unions. The assault on public sector unions is simply the final push to eliminate collective bargaining in America.

Central to this history has been the role played by the public relations industry, the corporate mass media, and what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno identify as the culture industry—you know, those folks who lavished campaign contributions on members of Congress to push through SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). The industries and their ideological product of consumerism amount to a corporate technology of thought control based on the science of crowd psychology and psychodynamic theory (Sigmund Freud, Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, Wilfred Trotter), which theorized that alienation and ignorance made the masses susceptible to “emotionally potent oversimplifications” (to quote Reinhold Niebuhr), an idea honed by industry propagandists like Walter Lippmann (“public opinion” and “manufacturing consent”) and Edward Bernays (“engineering of consent”) and later many others. As Christopher Simpson documents in The Science of Coercion, corporations, the military, and the intelligence community organized academic departments at the major universities to scientifically engineer propaganda techniques. The goal was to seduce the public into exchanging their political role as citizen for politically-neutralized role of consumer.

Through much of this period, a similarity between fascist totalitarianism and liberal (increasingly state-monopoly) capitalism could be seen, if one looked carefully, in the use of propaganda to manipulate the masses.  Propaganda is essential to both systems—albeit the source in the former is the state, while the latter is promulgated by corporate media monopoly, which has the virtue of maintaining the illusion of an independent press—which filters out facts and opinions that might actually challenge the power elite. But as time has gone on we have seen the emergence of a coercive structures, the police state and mass incarceration, operating through the war on drugs—which is in reality a war on the people—and the war on terrorism—which is yet another war on the people.  

Thus we must take care to emphasize the class character of these developments. The United States assumed in the post-war period the neo-imperialist role of military apparatus maintaining global capitalism, neo-imperialist because in most instances it did not in the long-term occupy the countries it overthrew and destabilized (there are obvious and important exceptions). This apparatus was developed not for the sake of a nationally consciousness elite, but rather represents the cooptation of the might of the United States by the transnational capitalist class operating through the transnational corporation and global banking industry, forces more powerful than nation-states.

The doctrine of pre-emptive war for national self-defense, which Bush used to invade Iraq, was formally introduced to cover the reality that it is nothing more than the reality that, with the Cold War no longer operative, individual states (particularly those without a nuclear deterrent) have no power to thwart, for example, the desires of energy corporations that seek to get their hands on oil and gas and other resources. The rise of corporate power in directing military adventures—which are increasing carried out by private corporations—goes hand in hand with the privatization of state functions and the dismantling of the welfare state and destruction of collective bargaining.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, elites have come to believe that it is no longer necessary to subdue the public with the democratic pretense or by reducing inequality to tolerable levels. This moment, they say, represents the end of history. There is no competing model to threaten capitalist hegemony. What I am describing is the neoliberal order of things. 

In essence, the argument made by Hedges and others is that there is at some point during the post-War period (actually occurring through a series of points) a hostile takeover of the state by corporate power. But the truth is that the state always acts to preserve capitalists relations and advance the accumulation process, it just uses different tactics at different times. It is this more radical understanding that is crucial for thinking about the strategy to movement should embrace.

Let’s go deeper into the domestic economic character of the period after World War II to see how this has affected us. It is in this period that the intersection of geopolitical events, massive changes in the domestic structure of the United States, and the mass consumerism system becomes fully installed and organized within a bipolar world of the free market versus command economy, of democratic capitalism and communist (and godless) totalitarianism. In the United States in particular, there was the rise of religious fundamentalism. 

There is also reconfiguration of the structure of white supremacy. I will focus on the situation for black Americans to illustrate—and this is important because of the great suffering of the black community during this period, but also for understand the methods the state used to build up its police power, the apparatus the Occupy movement is facing on the street. 

Growing affluence during the economic boom of the post-war period fueled the struggle of blacks to share in the economic gains, domestic changes in industry and the expanding state sector, the rising organic composition of capital, led by a series of technological “revolutions” during the post war years, spurred in part by government coordination of research and development through the military-industrial complex, transformed labor markets, enlarging the structurally unemployed strata of the economy, which were disproportionately black.

For example, by 1950, the proportion of unskilled laborers in the US work force had declined to 20 percent and the capital-intensive sectors could not absorb them, precisely because they were unskilled and because increasing structural segregation with ghettoization and suburbanization and the lose of tax base meant that educational systems in the cities rapidly deteriorated (along with everything else). By 1962, the proportion of unskilled labor was down to 5 percent. Technological change impacts demand for different kinds and grades of labor, differentially affecting groups embedded in racialized labor markets. Since blacks were concentrated in competitive labor markets in the labor-intensive industrial sectors dependent on unskilled labor, the effects were devastating for them. Consider that at the end of the Great Depression, black unemployment was only a little greater than white unemployment. By the 1960s, the black unemployment rate rose to more than double the white rate, and was frequently triple that of whites.  

This development would stimulate the need for control strategy based on penal incapacitation in the 1970s-on. The development of mass incarceration and the police state to deal with despised populations—the prison population rose from 200,000 in the early 1970s to almost 2.5 million today, more than 60 percent minority composition—gave a vast coercive control structure legitimacy among the white majority—why the struggle against white supremacy is not just a moral cause but a tactical one in delegitimizing the penitentiary . 

Rising organic composition of capital was occurring side-by-side with capital migration from inner cities to the suburbs and from the “Snowbelt” to the “Sunbelt.” Disinvestment was accomplished—beyond more organic push and pull factors—by federal, state, and local authorities rewarding businessmen who relocated firms out of the central cities with tax breaks, subsidized loans, and assistance in organization and infrastructure (the same dynamic with suburbanization). This created a “Rustbelt,” which contained at its core an abandoned and impoverished peripheral zone with high rates of joblessness and job instability. Segregation in the central cities, i.e., the ghettoization of blacks, thus set the foundation for the deplorable conditions that would result that the state used to justify putting the new police and prison capacity to “good use.” The drug war was the mechanism.

I am sure most of you know what has happened to cities in the Midwest. Our brothers and sisters in Detroit have been devastated, and the state has responded with a fascistic law to take over cities, eliminate their democratically-elected municipal governments and school boards and replace citizens in the communities with outside financial managers, empowered to unilaterally privatize government functions, which of course means to hand this or that public sector service to this or that private contractor who profits on the taxpayers dime. And since it is a for-profit activity, this means that the quality of services must deteriorate as the public need is rationalized out of the equation.

As a consequence of these forces—the changing needs of capital, expanding racialized structural unemployment, and domestic regional macroeconomic reorganization—and the legacy of ghettoization and white flight from the cities, the black community was fragmented between a small stratum of relatively affluent, professional blacks, created in part by the New Deal, and the mass of working class blacks. The affluent professional stratum was co-opted by the state, thus forming, as middle classes always do, a barrier to more fundamental change. And they were used as an example of the possibility of the American Dream, which in turn blamed poor blacks (and by extension other minorities) for their problems. Whites in their suburban dwellings would become cut off from the plight of the city, and would turn against programs that might benefit urban areas, as these programs had no economic benefit for whites.

All of these forces combined to offset the gains that might have been made on the political and legal front.  They would also combine to produce the white backlash that would during the 1960s, especially after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, cause an explosion in the numbers of blacks in the penitentiary system.

Throw into the mix an imperialist war of aggression in Southeast Asia, in which millions of civilians were slaughtered, and popular forces were in open rebellion by the end of the 1960s. Student, feminist, black power, and a myriad other movements were challenging the structure of power and privilege. Their enthusiasm attracted fellow travelers.  There was widespread opposition to the Vietnam War. There was growing consciousness about the inequalities in American society. Blacks were increasingly dissatisfied with the pace and scope of civil rights reform. Radicals questioned, and thereby threatened, the legitimacy of capitalist practice and the moral right of the US state to secure its far-flung colonial empire for the world capitalist class. Cold war liberalism was collapsing with the Vietnam War.  The South successfully used repressive and legal controls to prevent the blacks movement from achieving many successes in the South. 

Struggle frequently reached the level of open and even cataclysmic violence. In the Summer of 1967, race riots erupted in several major cities. By the mid-1960s it had become clear to most black leaders—certainly to those struggling on the ground—that the political liberties granted by the Supreme Court and federal legislative measures, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, were insufficient to address the deep social and economic inequalities that had grown up under conditions of slavery and apartheid.  Black leaders like Martin Luther King, formerly regarded by the white establishment as moderate and controllable, began attacking the political and economic structure of inequality. The militant black liberation movement was gaining strength and support.  

Under the provision of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizing the right of colonized people to wage armed struggle against the colonizing power, some black nationalists began arming themselves and calling for revolution, e.g., the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. This movement, which I regard as the vanguard of socialist revolutionary forces in the United States, was violently suppressed by the government’s COINTELPRO program, a counterintelligence program of the type developed in Vietnam. Likewise, the American Indian Movement suffered this program. And state governments moved against the student youth movement, including encampments, in a manner analogous to what we saw happen to the Occupy encampments.  Police and the National Guard at Berkeley and Kent State killed protesters.

With the increasingly volatile character of what Ernest Mandel calls “late capitalism,” by which is meant, using the words of Jürgen Habermas, that “even in state-regulated capitalism, social developments involve ‘contradictions’ or crises,” the liberal arrangement, is giving way to state bureaucratic controls on behalf of the capitalist class.

Mihailo Marković observes, “As liberalism gradually gives way to state-bureaucratism, domination and hierarchy are more and more stressed as central genetic characteristics of the human species.” So we see the rise of evolutionary psychology, barely reheated sociobiology (itself barely warmed over social Darwinism), not only promulgated by “the conservative advocates of law and order [who] derive the legitimacy of a coercive state machinery from the view of human beings as naturally egoistic, aggressive, acquisitive, primarily interested in the satisfaction of their own appetites,” but by the liberals and progressives.

All of this echoes the social Darwinism of Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer, ideologues of laissez-faire capitalism who see humans as “inert, sluggish, [and] averse from labor, unless compelled by necessity.” Because, “The worse their image, the less hope for any project of social improvement, the more justification for restrictions of freedom.” This is what lies behind the demonization of the poor, which is most dangerous not when it is uttered by conservative Republicans who compare children to wolves and alligators and warn their constituents not to feed the “strays,” but by liberal Democrats who talk about the culture of poverty and helping poor people overcome the cycle of poverty through inspiration and jobs programs. Remember, it was Bill Clinton who ended AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the major cash support for poor children. Presently, 48 million Americans are poor, a disproportionate number of them children, and they are in great need of cash support. 

I am concerned that contemporary movement for democracy and social justice do not repeat the mistakes of the last movements. The labor movement allowed itself to co-opted and de-radicalized by getting too close to power, by becoming fearful, by purging its ranks of radicals. The radical movements of the 1960s, those that weren’t obliterated by government repression, degenerated into identity politics. When the struggle was organized around class and inequality, as it was in both the civil rights struggles led by MLK Jr. and the Marxist organizations Black Panthers, strides were made. When elements of the movement worked closely with corporations and state, they were neutralized. It was enough to split and pacify the movement. 

We have seen a similar problem with the environmental movement, reflecting the problem with progressivism generally. The illustration, used by the late Richard Grossman, of mountain top removal, is instructive. Progressives found mountaintop removal only to see the institution of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA) which rather than banning this terrible practice, regulated it, thus not only allowing mining companies to continue blowing the tops off of mountains, but legitimizing their right to do so. 

Grossman says: “These laws have channeled people (including dedicated lawyers) into endless regulatory and juridical struggles over definitions and minutiae, struggles which conceded corporations’ right to govern communities and devour the Earth. These laws have diverted passionate and creative minds away from strategies and tactics that empower local jurisdictions to prevent their eviscerations by absentee corporations and politicians for hire. … Before young activists and lawyers throw themselves into another twenty five years of trying to make corporate rights laws work to people’s and the Earth’s advantage, wouldn’t it make sense to explore the nation’s experience with regulatory laws? With corporations? With the Constitution?”

When I see some members of the Occupy movement asked if they oppose capitalism, I worry when a defensive posture is taken. “No, we just want to make it fairer.” “We just want better regulations.” But capitalism cannot really be made fairer. It can certainly never be made just. Regulating capitalism kicks the can down the road and even legitimates the exploitative and environmentally destructive nature of capitalism. Like slavery, capitalism must be transcended. 

My hope for the movement is that it will become consciousness of its generation as an oppositional force to capitalism, not as a reformist cause—and there is pressure from all quarters to help the movement self-define as reformist. My hope is that it will announce its status as an abolitionist movement.

These critical comments are made out of my love for this moment. I hope my comments at the beginning of my talk made it very clear how profoundly excited I am to see this happening. I have been waiting for the radical reawakening, and now that it is here, I am just as excited to see the youth of America take the lead. I sometimes wish I could be the long age of so many of you I see here in possession of the energy to be out in the streets day and night. 

I started off this talk with a metaphor of death. I said that capitalism has likely reached its effective end, but that it will not easily quit its death throes. It is ultimately up to us to decide whether or not we shall to hasten its demise, put it out of its misery, and build a new order. Of course, how to go about doing that is the most difficult question facing the movement.  

William Norman Grigg, writing for Information Liberation, has written a useful essay, titled “When the Right to Resist Becomes the ‘Duty to Submit.” He quotes Paul Chevigny’s words from a 1969 Yale Law Journal essay: “The right to resist unlawful arrest memorializes one of the principal elements in the heritage of the English revolution: the belief that the will to resist arbitrary authority in a reasonable way is valuable and ought not to be suppressed by the criminal law.” And so this must be true of the American revolution (if we may be allowed to call it that).

“The weight of authoritative precedent supports a right to repel an unlawful arrest with force,” according to the Alaska State Supreme Court in Terry Glenn Miller v State of Alaska. “This was the rule at common law.” The rule is “based on the proposition that everyone should be privileged to use reasonable force to prevent an unlawful invasion of his physical integrity and personal liberty.” Read the article to see how the court wormed its way back into a justification of unlawful police coercion. In this blog, I want to make some points about police powers and the sovereignty of the people who employ them.

There is a fundamental distinction to be drawn between power and authority. Power is ability to make people act in ways contrary to their will. Authority is legitimate power. In a monarchy, legitimacy comes from the divine right of kings. In a totalitarian state, legitimacy comes from the dictator and his cult of personality. In a free society, legitimacy flows from the consent of the governed who, through common law and democratic deliberation, express a willingness to submit to that authority when it accords with the law and meets their fundamental needs, which includes the preservation of their rights.

No upright citizen in a free society voluntarily gives up those rights or agrees to act in a manner contrary to the law. They are either forced to do so or they are confused about their rights, both conditions that indicate that society is become more or less unfree. It follows that, in a free society, every citizen has a right to resist an unlawful or wrongful order (just as we have the right to violate unjust rules and laws). Self defense, defense of the innocent, and resistance to and overthrow of tyranny and oppression are fundamental and nonnegotiable rights in a free society.

You do not have any legal or moral obligation to follow the commands of a police officer if you have done nothing wrong or if he is commanding you to do something wrong. Any state that would criminalize resistance—even violent resistance, to which every human being has a right—to an unlawful order is by definition a tyrannical state. The only reason to obey a police officer’s unlawful order is for personal safety and then only if following that order does not jeopardize the personal safety of others. However, it must be emphasized that obeying an unlawful order for personal safety is a personal choice, never an obligation. It may be prudent, but it is not obligatory.

Moreover, every citizen has the right to aid any other citizen who is being unlawfully detained and, especially, assaulted by the police. Indeed, citizens, if able, have an obligation to physically intervene in the case of an assault. If you are in a group of persons of sufficient number or if you are armed and you see a police officer assaulting another person, you are within the law to stop that assault—yes, even if it means using deadly force.

Americans must, if we are to be free, understand the meaning of this and start acting in a manner that asserts our rights. We are the law. The police work for us. We pay their salary. They are our servants. Their duty is to protect and serve the community, not detain, harass, and assault its members without cause. We cannot harass an officer who is harassing us. This is resistance, and resistance is not harassment. We cannot assault an officer who is assaulting us. Self-defense is not assault. A badge doesn’t give a police officer the right to go wherever he pleases or do whatever he wants.

The police need to acquire a healthy fear of the public so that they can have confidence in their actions only when those actions are in accordance with the law. The police need to work for and with us, not against us. To be sure, we have a long way to go to reign in the police state. Laws and prostitution and drugs and other so-called “public order crimes” need repealing. Such laws as disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and harassing a public servant must never be used as tactics to control populations, especially when those laws amount to contempt of cop charges. We should forbid deception and lying by the police and prosecutors. Entrapment should be disallowed.

There should be no felony associated with touching a police officer or breathing on an officer. If police officers don’t want to be touched or breathed upon, then they shouldn’t get in the faces of citizens. If a police officer puts his hands on you and he has no reason to, it cannot be a felony when you physically resist what is by definition assault. The very notion that citizens do not have a right to resist physical force when it is wrongful is the essence of tyranny.

To win back our freedoms—and more fully realize them, since we have never truly been optimally free and cannot be so in the current epoch—we need to critically examine ourselves. I have watched too many videos of police perpetrating wrongful acts—unlawful detention, arrest, assault—with scores of people standing around not doing anything about it.

Why did the crowd stand by while Andrew Meyer was being unlawfully arrested for asking John Kerry uncomfortable questions at an event at the University of Florida? They watched—only a few verbally protested—while he was being tortured in front of them, repeatedly dry tased. Many in the audience shamefully applauded the police action.

Recently I showed a clip of a naked man at an outdoor concert being violently assaulted by the police, repeatedly tased for refusing to put on his clothes. A human being was tortured in front a crowd hundreds strong merely because he wanted to wear the suit he was born with. Some in the crowd cried “shame,” but no one in the crowd acted to stop it. Why?

I recently posted a video of men and women being violently arrested at the Jefferson Memorial for the crime of “dancing.” This occurred in front of a number of witnesses. None of the bystanders organized a group to intervene and stop the police. How come?

Michael Foucault, in the preface to Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus, suggests that Deleuze’s book might be otherwise titled “Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.” Foucault condemns “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploit us.”

We sure do love power in America, don’t we? We heroize the police and the soldier. Even while they are off protecting the imperial interests of the transnational corporation, we thank them for defending our freedoms. Our freedoms? We see the capitalist exploiter as virtuous—just as the slave society sees the plantation owner as noble.

Psychologically locked into the hierarchical mentality of class, gender, and race. we are alienated from our own power—the power to make history and the law. We think that it is only natural that the law comes from the state and that the state decides what is lawful. We have come to see the republic as previous generations saw the monarchy. But in a free and democratic society, the law comes from the people. We decide what is lawful.

Here is exposed the fundamental problem of our epoch: in a capitalist society, the state is not legitimate because it does cannot represent us. It is an instrument of the ruling class—the capitalist class—and that class wields the state and law as a weapon to oppress our right, the right to determine history for our needs.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” puts the matter superbly: “The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”

Liberal capitalism can give way to fascism because the inequality generated by exploitation destabilizes liberal legal and intellectual structures. These are ultimately incapable of legitimating the oppressive rule of the capitalist class. Class society is not a free society and eventually enough people come to realize this and demand something different.

Consent breaks down because the people understand the problem and withdraw their consent. Then the torn velvet glove of consensual control comes off and the iron fist of coercive force comes out. Hence the police violence perpetrated on the Occupy Wall Street protesters. At this point it is no longer authority—it has lost its legitimacy—but naked, bare-fisted power.

Benjamin understands the moment perfectly. “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.”

So we have our wars: the war on communism, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, the war on poverty. We have our carceral controls, our gulags—2.4 million strong—and more than eight million with criminal labels under some form of correctional control, with millions more stigmatized, hundreds of thousands disenfranchised. We have our therapeutic controls (remember, if you aren’t criminal, then you’re crazy).

And in our wars and control systems (their wars, their control systems), the police and the soldiers and the doctors must be our heroes. Speak no ill of them! They protect us from danger and disease! No, they protect the ruling class from the dangerous classes—you and me, the working people and the poor and the movements against capitalism and imperialism.

The New York Times carried an op-ed today with the provocative title, “My Guantanamo Nightmare.” The author of the editorial is Lakhdar Boumediene, who was locked away at Guantánamo Bay for seven years, his family thrown into poverty, his world forever changed.

Let me be blunt. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of them should be arrested and tried for the crimes that were perpetrated against Boumediene and the many others who suffered or are suffering his fate (or worse). It is hard to imagine that a fair trial would find Bush and nest of war criminals not guilty of these most serious offenses—false imprisonment, torture, destruction of livelihood, and, in some cases, physical injury and death. These are the actions of sociopaths, and only a successful plea of not guilty by reason of insanity would justify sending them anywhere else but prison for their natural lives. I don’t think many of my progressive friends will disagree with me about that. If they do, then I wonder about their commitment to rule of law and, not to be insulting, but I have to say it: basic moral decency.

Second, if Bush and associates should be punished for the crime of Guantánamo Bay, then what shall we do with Barack Obama for keeping Guantánamo Bay open? Here’s where progressives find their double standard. But human beings are there still, enduring all the horrors that the Bush Administration visited upon Boumediene and his fellow detainees. If Guantánamo Bay is a reason for prosecuting Bush and associates—and I know it is because I can still hear the din of progressives calling for his impeachment over the matter—then why are progressives silent about Obama? It cannot be that it is only wrong to falsely imprison and torture human beings when Republicans do it. If Guantánamo Bay exists whether a Republican or a Democrat is the Commander-in-Chief, then how can a person vote for either party’s nominee?