I am speechless with rage. My jaw has been clenched and fists knotted since I first heard word. How to express what we are all feeling after the events off Gaza? I don’t know what to write at this moment. Many of us are bound to know or know of folks in the flotilla. They are part of the activist community to which we all belong; we must respond. Get out there and demonstrate if you can.
When we have nothing left to give
There will be no reason for us to live
But when we have nothing left to lose
You will have nothing left to use
We owe you nothing you have no control
Merchandise keeps us in line
Common sense says it’s by design
What could a businessman ever want more
than to have us sucking in his store
We owe you nothing
You have no control
You are not what you own
Statement from the (highly recommended) revolutionary Marxist Indian website Radical Socialist:
In country after country in Europe, political forces ranging from liberals (Belgium) to the openly right wing (Sarkozy in France, the Northern League in Italy) have been initiating actions to ban Muslim women from wearing the veil, or seeking punishment for those wearing it. The Netherlands and Italy already have regional or local restrictions, as do twenty municipalities in Belgium. Now the Belgium Lower House has voted to ban the burkha in the name of protecting Muslim women as well as security. This has had immediate impact in a string of countries with Christian and white majorities – from France, Italy, Austria and the Netherlands inside the European Union to Australia, with various prominent politicians calling for similar measures. Two basic arguments have been put forward in defence of such actions. The first is that the veil, in any form, is degrading to women, and Islam is contemptuous to women. The second is that the veil hides the face and obscures the public interpersonal exchange — which is supposed to be a gain specifically of western civilization, as well as the fact that by so hiding the face it creates a security problem.
Our response to this is very clear. We are absolutely certain that Islamic fundamentalism/ communalism is repressive towards Muslim women, and not merely by seeking to impose various forms of control, by imposing social inequality, and so on. We have seen some of its horrible forms in the well publicized case of the Taliban and its rule in Afghanistan. But several very important considerations compel us to warn that the picture, if we stop at this point, is utterly false and misleading. In the first place, there are diverse views within Islam Second, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, imperialist ruling classes of North America and Europe have been busy creating a new “other”, this being Islam, which is supposed to stand against all the values of the Enlightenment, modernity, and so on, and is seeking to erase progress. It is quite true that Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary force. But what is forgotten or suppressed is the role of the imperialist west in fostering this Islamic fundamentalism –Saudi Wahabism as a bulwark of the imperialists and a sure supplier of oil, a precious commodity ever since the early 20th century, controlled by Britain and France in West Asia till the USA managed to support Saudi Arabia and got in. Islamic fundamentalism was also supported against Arab progressive bourgeois nationalism – e.g., the Islamic Brotherhood against Nasser. Islamic fundamentalism was the chosen instrument of the USA in its proxy war with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, when opposition to the ill-judged and politically illegitimate Soviet invasion was used by the imperialists to shore up fundamentalist forces, out of which grew the Taliban. Finally, it should be remembered that even in Afghanistan after its spurious liberation the anti-women laws are much in force.
This leads us to the next issue. Attacking colonial subjects for their attitude to women is not a new strategy for imperialism. British colonialism and its allies pursued this strategy throughout British rule in India, from James Mill depicting Hindus as degenerates because they ill-treated women and by implication suggesting that colonial rule was therefore necessary, in the interests of women. Attacking Muslims because of the veil is a similar strategy. It is worth noting that in Belgium, only a minority of Muslim women wear the burkha. In 2009, only 29 women were apprehended by the police in the municipalities that have already banned the burkha, while the total number of Muslims in Belgium is about 400,000.
Among those who wear the veil, there are those who do so out of choice, as well as those who are compelled by family and community pressure. Those who wear the veil out of choice do so either because they have internalized all the patriarchal, anti-women assumptions behind it, or because, as minorities, they are choosing to express their identities in that particular fashion. We disagree with their choice. We believe that ultimately, the dress code, targeting women, reflects reactionary views. In a very difficult situation, the New Anti-Capitalist Party of France, when one of its candidates, Ilham Moussaid, was targeted for wearing the headscarf, argued in a statement:
• Ilham herself saw no contradiction between wearing a headscarf and abiding by the secular and feminist principles of the NPA
• The NPA leadership felt that notwithstanding Ilham’s own feelings, they considered the headscarf to be an instrument of subjection of women
• They made a distinction between the debates within the social movements over Ilham’s headscarf, and the hysteria promoted by the rightwing parties. They would engage in serious debates within the social movement. But the Right was hypocritical, considering that Sarkozy was willing to embrace the Pope, and that bourgeois parties spent millions on financing private high schools, in particular Catholic ones.
• They also criticized the Communist Party for its opportunism, since on other occasions it too had counted women like Ilham in its list of candidates.
Like the NPA, we consider that the demand that women must cover their heads is a part of instrument of subjection of women. But, like the NPA again, we agree that if women have adopted this through choice, we need to politically discuss the issue and struggle to change the situation. In India, as in the West, the Muslim minority can be and are often targeted. We don’t hear anything when Hindu religious symbolisms are used, or when Hindu women are subjected to all manners of religious commands that make them inferiors. What seems “normal”, “civilised” for the majority community, appears different for the minorities.
In other words, we argue that every religion is historically an ideology of, among other things, gender oppression. It does not follow that calling for bans on all religions or religious customs is the correct way to fight such oppression. Classical Marxism did not require the inscription of atheism in the programme of social movements. On the contrary, in his 1874 critique of the Blanquist émigrés from the Paris Commune, Engels rejected their call to abolish religion by decree. His view has been completely confirmed by 20th Century experiences, as when he wrote that: “persecutions are the best means of promoting disliked convictions”. The more minorities are persecuted for belonging to minority religions, the more they turn to so-called community heads for material and spiritual help. As a result, ghettoisation leads to the growth of minority communalism. However, classical Marxism, with essentially European and a little North American experience, had not dealt with the further complexities introduced by colonialism. Colonialism and its attendant racism means we must additionally reject persecutions of minority religions because they constitute a dimension of ethnic or racial oppression, no less than political or economic persecution and discrimination.
In most countries where Islam is the religion of the majority, religion is still the dominant form of ideology. Retrograde, more or less literal, interpretations of Islam are used to retain entire populations in submission and cultural backwardness. The first victims are the women. In such countries, struggles for socialism must involve, from the start, an ideological struggle against religion as an instrument of oppression. But while women’s liberation must in all such cases involve liberation from the headscarf or its grosser forms, to impose “freedom” by law on women would be a travesty of emancipation. Neither women wearing the hijab or the burkha, nor men wearing the beard, should have the police set upon them for that reason.
Like the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other fundamentalisms aiming to imposed a puritan interpretation of religion as a code of life, if not as a mode of government, Islamic fundamentalism is a real danger to social progress and emancipatory struggles. By taking care to establish a clear distinction between religion as such and its fundamentalist interpretation, the most reactionary of all, it is necessary to fight Islamic fundamentalism ideologically and politically, as much in the Islamic countries as in the midst of the Muslim minorities in the West or elsewhere. But that cannot however constitute an argument in favour of a public prohibition of the Islamic scarf. This amounts to singling out Islamic fundamentalism while remaining silent about other religious fundamentalists. Has there been a call to ban campaigns against abortion by Christian extremists?
Turning to the argument about security, we reject this outright. This is nothing but the profiling of particular groups of people as dangerous. There is no evidence that wearing the veil in public threatens public safety, public order, health, morals, or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others. And rather than help women who are coerced into wearing the veil, a ban would limit, if not eliminate, their ability to seek advice and support. Indeed, the primary impact of legislation of this kind would be to confine these women to their homes, rather than to liberate them. Nor will the act of treating Muslim women who believe that it is pious to wear the veil as criminals help in integrating Muslims in those countries.
Our stand can therefore be summed up by saying:
• Oppose the ban on religion or custom specific dress as a form of racism and anti-minorityism.
• No legal sanctions for following particular religions.
• Politically combat the oppression of women using religion as an ideology.
Conjure up your ecological nightmare. What is now happening in the Gulf might just scare your nightmares away. And with the Federal response being led by Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who vehemently opposes any attempt by the government to remove BP from control over the situation (because, apparently, only the private sector has the technical ability), the nightmare can’t but continue. Amazing. The US government has the technical ability to destroy damn near everything on the planet, but not deal with this? We can bail out the banks and auto companies, but not the environment?
Oh no, that would be too much meddling in the private affairs of private companies. I bet there’s already a derivatives market in insurance claims over this. Never mind that the oil now slopping and sludging its way through the Gulf seems to be effecting the public writ large, indeed the very territory of the United States (not to mention the rest of the nations in or straddling the Gulf) is under threat. Nearly forgotten already, 11 workers lost their lives on that damnable rig. Nothing will ever return them to their families. Their names added to a list too long to conceive of: Those Who Died For Oil. Obama’s (BP’s single largest donor recipient in twenty years) urgency makes it look like Brownie was doing a heck of a job. And where’s the outcry over his reversal of campaign pledges on offshore drilling announced just days before the present disaster? Obviously the right won’t complain, but the progressives? They offer Obama yet another pass.
Ahh, the priorities of the corporate state; the sovereignty of the capitalist enterprise is paramount (even though it couldn’t exist without the support and intervention of the capitalist government on its behalf). A contradiction that confuses progressives and libertarians alike, but seems not to confuse the monopolies, trusts, banks, etc. All and sundry they may whine about regulation, but that is hardly the only role of the state. They know that a big part of their power, and a guarantee of their future power, lies in their control over the state (the lobbyist-government revolving door is just one manifestation of this control). After all, they’ve had the state since – oh, the Grant Administration – and it has worked out remarkably well for them.
Unfortunately that nightmare is only the logic of global capitalism’s reliance on fossil fuels and the power of the energy sector of the economy. A capitalist state can hardly be relied on to limit the power of capital., though it may be forced on occasion. Hell, even if we went to solar power tomorrow I have a feeling we’d see wars for the Sahara sands, Caribbean beaches or that last little bit of the polar ice-cap left; all of that sunlight to accumulate along with the profits necessary to make it ‘efficient’. Yes, probably for democracy too. An Inuit will become the new Saddam, we’ll be greeted with flowers. I don’t mean to be glib about what is happening in the Gulf; it is a horror show and has left me a little speechless. For a some background on the present corporate control of the ‘neutral’ state readers are directed to Billy Wharton’s article ‘How Big Oil Bought The Interior Department’
Vodpod videos no longer available.
John Bellamy Foster of Monthly Review speaking before the recent disaster in the Gulf. As Foster says we are now in the ‘Oh Shit!’ stage of the ecological crisis.
Down By The River
There is one sound in rock that I crave almost more than any other and that is of Crazy Horse. Ralph Molina on drums, Billy Talbot on bass and Poncho Sanpedro on guitar with Neil Young. Combined this group makes the thickest, downbeat heavy, smothering sound in rock. When they’re on, when ‘it’s all one song’, watch out. Neil Young is already one of my favorite guitarists, with the Horse he let’s go as with no one else. I first saw them as a young teenager on the 1986 tour. I remember that show vividly; Neil Young is one of the very few artists that I have listened to from a child until now. None of these videos do them full justice (though Fucking Up comes close). Pick up Weld of the Year of the Horse soundtrack for some killer live sounds. It’s Friday night, smell the Horse on these comrades.
Fucking Up from the great Jarmusch film Year of the Horse.
Going Home from Montreux, 2001.
Tonight’s the Night, Japan, 2001
In August and September of 1888 Friedrich Engels took a boozer of a trip throughout New England and Canada. His companions on the journey were his good friend, comrade and fellow carouser, the chemist Carl Schorlemmer (known in the Marx circle as ‘Jollymeier’), Marx’s daughter Eleanor (‘Tussy’)and her beau, that cur Edward Aveling (‘General Boulanger’). Traveling largely for pleasure they visited all of the famous tourist spots; Niagara Falls, the Catskills and the Adirondacks, Lake Champlain as well as the cities of Boston (‘their Athens’) and New York (where everyone looked like a ‘discharged croupier from Monte Carlo’).
Engels also stayed with Adolph Sorge, the leading US Marxist of his day, in Hoboken and visited his nephew, by way of his Irish wife Lizzy, Willie Burns who was an active socialist and railway worker. The letters back to Laura (Marx) Lafargue and his brother Hermann are pure pleasure to read…which is just what I did until 2 am last night.
Most of Engels reportage goes something like this; to his brother ‘we have eaten, drunk and smoked incessantly and I have just at this moment – 11 o’clock in the morning – been summoned to take my morning Tipple,’ followed immediately by, ‘The voyage has done me a tremendous amount of good; I feel at least 5 years younger’. A good time was clearly had. In one letter from Engels to Laura, Tussy offers a shaky post script: ‘What with Niagara Falls and Niagara Beer we are most of us beyond the writing stage. When I pull myself together I’ll write.’ Just after leaving Lake Placid Engels writes ahead to Sorge in Hoboken, near New York where they well soon be arriving, ‘…get us another 150 cigars of the usual brand. We’re right cleaned out.’
The chief complaint is not the American beer since ‘the German beer, i.e. brewed after the German fashion, is quite excellent…’, but the ‘dearness’ of European wine, not even obtainable at hotels. Although he did bring 24 bottles of Ohio wine (?!) and a Californian Riesling back with him for the return voyage (‘which we are drinking with gusto’). Not too bad he says; a good flavor, but no bouquet. His voyage to America was on the steamer The City of Berlin (which occasioned all amount of puns and jokes, especially about the food), which was, coincidently, the vehicle of emigration (on a different trip) of one of the Rustbelt’s ancestors from the Old Country.
Along with the tales of healthy hedonism (at a sprite 68 years old no less), Engels offers more than a few of his sly, penetrating observations of the emerging power ‘whose history goes back no further than commodity production’ and is capitalism’s ‘promised land’. He stays in the realm of the anecdotal for the most part, but occasionally he offers something profound, like this to Laura: ‘Don’t you believe that America is a new country – it is the most old-fashioned place in the world; [in French] to Europeans like us it is exceedingly provincial, and we are all Parisians compared to the Americans…upon this primitive stage they have grafted a lot of supra-modern novelties many of which are no improvement and none of which are beautiful.’ Later in the same letter he describes coming into New York City after dark as ‘a chapter of Dante’s Inferno’ full of ‘awful noises on all sides’ and ‘arc-lights…not to light you but to attract you as an advertisement.’
An American, he says, ‘cannot bear the idea of anyone walking in front of them in the street, he must push and brush past him – and roughly too’. ‘We poor benighted Europeans,’ he moans ‘cannot see the slightest occasion either for the hurry or the rudeness.’ Even Boston is ‘a sprawl.’ New York, he says, ‘is the grandest site for the capital of Capitalist Production…But everything there, made by man, is horrid.’ He did love the natural beauty; the Hudson and the St. Lawrence, the Falls at Niagara where he put on a wet suit and hat to ride the Maid of the Mist (I’d love to see a picture of Engels so decked out!), the mountains upstate, especially the ‘very lovely’ Adirondacks, of which he wrote, ‘I already feel an urge to go out there again…the August sunshine of Lombardy is combined with the fresh breeze of our Rhenish October.’
He does, in his private letters, occasionally indulge in a kind of ethnic profiling that is distasteful to say the least. He must know it is distasteful as well, because with very few exceptions, his public writings do not engage in such stereotypes. Some of it is playful, even ironic, as it often was with Paul Lafargue’s creole background. However, what is overwhelming in his writings, is his basic tolerance and empathy, both of which he had in abundance. He is laid back, way back on this trip, even writing white lies, school boy-like, to comrades to get out meetings and focus on the fun. I have never done that.
Unfortunately none of these letters are yet up on the Marxist Internet Archive. They are in Volume 48 of the works. The ‘Anti-Durhing’ it is not, but it makes for a great insomniacs read and offers yet more proof that Engels was not just a brilliant communist, he must have been a helluva traveling companion as well. Salút, Old Man. Thanks for making a sleepless night finally end enjoyably.
This is not the birthday of James Baldwin, nor is it in the anniversary of his death. The reasons to celebrate James Baldwin are…James Baldwin. I’ve come back to him from time to time on this blog, as I have in life. I’ll keep coming back to him; I imagine many will for many years. I have too many unfinished novels,or unread essays waiting for me to discover. Like Bergman films, I’m parsing them out (both require a certain stamina). Baldwin is unique and he is the product of the peculiar and particular racial, religious, class and sexual politics of his age–and the ages that led to his time.
Yet Baldwin, consciously and unconsciously, is universal. That is the nature of universality, it is so often first presented in the particular. This, his presentation so honestly of his ‘particular’, is the essence of his timelessness despite his definite time and place. It’s how perceptive he is that astonishes, it is one of the many reasons for his continued relevance. He sees things so clearly that we can easily recognize them, given the sight to do so. Baldwin and I, a white straight guy from the Midwest who grew up without religion two generations after him, would seem to have nothing in common; our experiences as different as can be (except for both being born into a society damned and dominated by race). So why is it when I read him or hear him speak, I feel like he is speaking for me, almost personally? The alienated still speak to one another.
As a human being Baldwin is entirely sympathetic: honest to a fault, an activist, passionate and easily hurt, self-involved, sentimental, brilliant and that combination of empathy and rage that would tear apart lessor folks, but is the source of his greatest strengths. As a writer he is extraordinarily talented and powerful (as he is a speaker). It’s born of a consciousness of our condition and, for lack of a better word, our human nature. His recognition that we all share in it, even when we are at each others’ throats doesn’t for a moment take away his partisanship; indeed it makes him a partisan. A small celebration of James Baldwin then.
‘People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.’
‘It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.’
‘We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth, and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.’
‘People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.’
Rustbelt Radical 