Workers Resistance

Category: Asia

  • Chicago International Women’s Day demands justice for Rasmea Odeh

    Chicago IL – To mark International Women’s Day (IWD) in Chicago, and to honor leading Palestinian women’s rights organizer Rasmea Odeh, 70 activists came together here, March 8, for a panel and dinner titled, “Winning Justice for Palestine & for Rasmea Odeh.”

    The dinner saw one woman speaker after another rising to recognize IWD and the guest of honor, Rasmea Odeh. Odeh is the community activist from Chicago who faces a trial in June on charges that could result in deportation and prison time. She was arrested in October 2013 and charged with violations on a questionnaire for citizenship from 20 years ago. She is the victim of another politically-motivated witch-hunt by federal law enforcement in their campaign to intimidate Palestinian community and solidarity activists.

    Professor Nadine Naber spoke about the history of IWD, and the honored place that Rasmea Odeh holds in the eyes of Palestinian people across the world for her history as a political prisoner and of organizing against Israel’s occupation. Naber offered a powerful analysis of how the U.S. empire claims that women in the Arab and Muslim worlds are oppressed and powerless, and cannot fight for their own rights, which is used to justify U.S. wars and occupations. She went on to say that Odeh and so many other strong women and women’s organizations are self-determined and do not want or need U.S. intervention.

    Sarah Chambers of the Chicago Teachers Union spoke about the teachers at her school, mainly women, who made national news when they refused to give the Illinois Standard Achievement Test to their students in protest of the education program of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, which values non-stop standardized testing over critical thinking and creative learning skills.

    Kait McIntyre talked about the efforts of the Anti-War Committee-Chicago to oppose new wars, as well as that group’s ongoing support for Palestine and for Rasmea Odeh . McIntyre used the opportunity to announce that she is running on an anti-war platform for the board of directors of Boeing Company. Chicago-based Boeing is the second largest arms manufacturer in the world and is bidding for the Pentagon contract to build a new, more deadly combat drone.

    Delores Phillips of the United Electrical workers thanked Odeh for standing up for her rights, in the same way that Phillips, newly elected president of UE Local 1118, and her fellow union activists have been standing up for their rights against the bosses in her workplace. She closed with, “We should support Rasmea in her struggle by showing other women that they are not alone. No woman should go without emotional, physical, educational, mental and financial support!”

    And Lulu Martinez of the Immigrant Youth Justice League described the international headlines made by her and eight other undocumented students – the Dream 9 – who ‘self deported’ by presenting themselves to federal agents in Arizona. She spent 15 days in a federal detention center there, and talked about that experience in prison, which made her respect greatly Odeh’s history as a political prisoner, as well as the tens of thousands of Mexican and other Latino women who have been deported in the past decade.

    The pre-dinner panel began with Palestinian activists Rama Kased, who is based in San Francisco and is a National Coordinating Committee Member of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, and Tarek Khalil of the Chicago chapter of the American Muslims for Palestine, speaking on the prospects of the peace talks in Palestine.

    Khalil criticized the terms of the negotiations, which he believes violated Palestinians’ rights from the outset. He suggested, like most Palestinians around the world, that the right to return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants should be the main demand in any negotiations.

    Kased declared that the Palestinian national bourgeoisie, represented by a small sector of the Palestinian Authority, stands to gain economically from a peace treaty, but that the vast majority of Palestinians will not. She also suggested that Palestine-support activists in the U.S. must analyze the issue not only from a human rights standpoint, but mostly from a “liberation framework,” especially since, as she explained, “We are not in the state-building stage of our struggle yet. We are still in the national liberation stage.” In answer to a question from the floor, she supported that the Palestine Liberation Organization needed to be reconstituted, and stated confidently that unity discussions happen regularly in Palestine and beyond, but “this fact just does not make the news here in the states.”

    After the analysis, solidarity activists on the panel held up the gains made by the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Leila Abdelrazaq, a leader in both Students for Justice in Palestine at DePaul University and on the national level, expressed the power of the BDS campaigns to pressure Israel. “BDS forces everyone to see that they can participate in opposing the occupation of Palestine.” She also gave an account of the BDS victories nationally; including the forced resignation of Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson from Oxfam International, the global human rights organization. Johansson chose being a spokesperson for the Israeli company, SodaStream, with its main factory located on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, over human rights. BDS activists declared victory and made international news pressuring her to uphold the boycott of SodaStream.

    Bill Chambers of the Palestine Solidarity Group wrapped up the panel by describing local BDS efforts, and asking people to join the BDS coalition in Chicago. Chambers also called for support of a new effort in Illinois to stop a bill in the state legislature. The bill would punish any college or university where faculty members went along with the boycott of Israeli educational institutions. The bill is in reaction to the historic resolution against Israeli apartheid adopted by the American Studies Association in the fall.

  • Theorising the Present Political Crisis in Bangladesh

    Nazmul Sultan

    Predictably enough, with the arrival of the scheduled parliamentary elections, Bangladesh has once again become entangled in a rather inextricable political crisis. The recently held national parliamentary elections—boycotted by the major opposition parties—is only a prelude to further political contestation over the occupation of state power. The crisis is structural and constitutive of the political system— the moral bankruptcy and the lack of will that the concerned political parties show is not the cause, but rather the effect, of the structural conflict. Elections—that is, the process through which the occupier of the centre of explicit political power is periodically shifted—take place amid chaos and unrest across the world. The procedural concern regarding elections might be a problem in its own right, but this is not the fundamental source of the present crisis in Bangladesh. The crux of the problem lies in the irresolvable contradiction constitutive of the distribution of explicit political power in Bangladesh. What is at stake is not simply the dysfunctionality of institutions such as the election commission, nor is it primarily a conflict between the two political parties over the occupation of power. To be sure, the power struggle between the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is the occasion that triggers the crisis. However, the fundamental source of the crisis, as I will seek to show in this article, lies in the conflictual instability over the very distribution of political power, involving the political society, civil society, military apparatus and, not so obviously, the people.

    Elections and the Suspension of Power

    Let us start with a plain narration of the crisis at stake. Apparently, the crisis is about the failure of the two parties to reach an agreement regarding the procedural arrangement of national parliamentary politics. The terms of procedural arrangement concerns this central register of dispute: the suspension of political power of the elected ruling party. The provisional Non-party Caretaker Government — once orchestrated as an apparently innovative solution to this crisis — is no longer a viable option for the political society. The legally-sanctioned arrangement of the caretaker government required the elected ruling party to suspend its power three months prior to election so that the non-party provisional government could oversee the electoral process. Although the chief of the provisional government was required to be chosen from among retired Supreme Court chief justices, the advisers were chosen from the recommended candidates by the political parties. As a result, the political society collectively retained control over the provisional government. Despite the presence of the non-party provisional government, the pre-election period had always been marked by political confrontation between the major parties. The contention over the appointment of the Chief Adviser of the provisional government in 2006 ended up in a political stalemate and resulted in a quasi-military coup that installed another Caretaker Government for the next couple of years. The coming together of the civil society actors and the military to occupy the place of governmental power added a twist to the preceding contestation that was limited to being one between the political and civil societies. Heavily persecuted by the military-backed regime, both the major political parties share a common opposition against the extra-political-society agents. So now, while the BNP demands that a national government be installed prior to the election, the AL dismisses the demand by claiming that the non-partisan provisional government would pave the way for the intrusion of non-political actors (a not-so-hidden reference to the civil society) in the sphere of political power.

    The explicit political power – at its institutionalised locus — is disproportionately concentrated in the ruling regime. The power of the ruling regime appears to be an almost permanent prerogative. The ruling regime holds sway over almost all the central registers of political power, perhaps with the exception of the civil society. In most cases, the ruling regime is also able to secure its political control over the military, a force whose relative autonomy nevertheless remains fairly obvious. The concentration of power is generally explained by the lack of functionality of the institutions. The lack of will among politicians to allow institutions to function autonomously is then singled out as the source of the problem. The lack of autonomous procedurality in the political institutions is, of course, apparent. However, to delimit the problem to the moral lack of the politicians is to overlook the underlying logic that generates the concentration of power. Although, as I remarked earlier, there is a “conflictual instability” in the distribution of power, this instability should not be conflated with disequilibrium. Often in the form of parallelism with the supposedly “ideal types” of democracy in the West, the political arrangement of non-western countries is theorised as the lack of equilibrium among institutions. Such an understanding of our political horizon misses the presence of a distinct organism that cannot readily be understood in terms of western political models. The arrangement of power is unstable, but this instability forms an equilibrium of its own. Regardless of the impression that the facticity of political institutions provide, political power is not an unmoored force reproduced by the monopoly over violence. The question of legitimacy is crucial here. This is so not only because of its justification of the relationship of domination (as pointed out by Weber), but also because of the production of political power through the contesting process of legitimation. There is a gap that separates the claim of popular sovereignty from the institutions. In the putatively universal mode of modern democracy’s self-description, the constitutions of the post-colonial nation-states state that the people are the sovereign, and they transfer that sovereignty to the elected regime through periodic elections. In other words, the elected government and the political institutions claim to represent the people. This normative account is inadequate in understanding the disseminated form of political sovereignty, as it misses how the claims of sovereignty remain more volatile, contingent and tied up with the staging of the extra-institutional people.

    In the case of Bangladesh, the foundation of the present political order was laid by the event of 1971. The political horizon of “the national” conditions the form of political legitimacy and draws the spectrum of partisanship. The dominant form of legitimacy that exists in Bangladesh is correlated with the “Bengali nation”—i.e. the Bengali nation’s right to rule over itself. This form of legitimacy has no determinate dovetailing with the institutionalised regime of the political. If the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and other legally autonomous spheres of political order cannot lay claim to be autonomous agencies and are easily folded under the agency of the ruling regime, this is primarily because of the reason that these institutions cannot appeal to the founding legitimacy in the way the extra-institutional people do. Granted, these institutions have their own logics of operation, and yet they have no agency to assert their political autonomy. Even whatever legitimacy the operation of pastoral power provides to the ruling regime, it is always vulnerable vis-à-vis the claims of the extra-institutional people. In any case, the imbalance of power, I would suggest, has a deeper root than sheer institutional dysfunctionality. The ruling regime is in a position to control and navigate the institutions at the level of decision, if not at the level of institutional logic. The concentration of power in the hand of the ruling regime results in an irresolvable tension within the sphere of political power. At the moment of election – that is, the moment when the power is to be transferred — the systematic absence of an autonomous procedurality and the attendant concentration of power in the ruling regime enter into a sharp contest. The opposition party — along with the civil society and any other actors concerned with a “fair” election — cannot but oppose the occurrence of elections under the aegis of the ruling regime. There are two forms of determinate contest in the political sphere: (i) the apparent and predominant contest between the political parties, who, in their identity and difference, form the political society; (ii) the simultaneous tension between the political and civil societies. The Non-partisan Caretaker Government was a solution that kept the suspended power within the political society with the aim of mitigating the tension between the two main parties. This option has lost its credibility owing to the introduction of the second form of contest following the rupture of the military-backed regime. The military-backed caretaker regime has established that the suspension of political power for the “caretakers” to come into being is not immune to the intrusion of the civil society into the sphere that the political society claims as its own. There is clearly a generalised opposition to the civil society from the partisans of political society. Evidently, both the BNP and the AL are not willing to leave power to a caretaker government that is open to the influence of extra-political-society actors. Thus the BNP came up with another option, that of the “national government”. Clearly, this would be more immune to the risks than what the old model of the caretaker government faced. The problem is there is not enough political force present in the political sphere to make the AL accept this otherwise amenable demand. The political ambition of the ruling party lies in outdoing both the external civil society and the opposition party (internal to political society) by way of rhetorically reducing the opposition party and the civil society to the same level.

    French political theorist Claude Lefort famously argued that the locus of power is empty in democracy.(1) In contrast to the monarchic regime, wherein the king embodied society by virtue of being the mediator between the other-worldly and the worldly, the source of the legitimacy that hierarchically ordered society broke down with the arrival of modern democracy. Against the grain of the much-vaunted claim of modern liberal democracy concerning its ability to represent the will of the people in an institutionalised form, Lefort has argued that neither the people nor the institutionalised structure can occupy the empty place of power. The place of power is impersonal, and thus it is impossible for any political agency to identify itself with the locus of power. It is a form of society that internalises the impossibility of representing the people in the political institutions, despite taking the former as a symbolic ground of power. According to Lefort, it was not for nothing that many socialists and liberals protested against universal suffrage in its inaugural moment. The numericalisation of the will of the people would effectively displace the substantial and extra-institutional emergence and assertion of the people. Since the locus of power is empty and society is instituted without an organic body, the tendency of disincorporation introduces a gap between the sphere of power, and law and knowledge. Legality and the sphere of knowledge assert their independence from the sphere of power. Lefort’s argument hinges on the observation that only the mechanism of the exercise of power is visible, not the locus of the power itself. The government, or that which possesses the executive register of power, is posterior to the institutionalised form that conditions it. And thus, says Lefort, the government is not capable of embodying the power in itself, nor can it use the power for its own end. It does exercise power explicitly, but the government cannot identify with the mechanism and process that allow it to exercise power. In that sense, the institutional-form that makes it possible for the government to exercise power is prior. Furthering Lefort’s argument, Ernesto Laclau contends that there is a permanent gap between the form and content of political community in democracy. As a supplement to Lefort, Laclau argues that democracy “requires the constant and active production of the emptiness.”(2) The particular hegemonic “aggregation of demands” tends to be generalised and, in so doing, it seeks to represent the (incomplete) universality of the community through the particularity of its own constitution.

    Lefort’s theorisation of modern democracy poses considerable questions and problems. His account is based on the transition from monarchy to democracy. While for someone like Foucault the ruptural shift from the old monarchic regime to the modern institutionalised democracy coincided with the expansion of disciplinary practices to the finest grain of society, Lefort’s account describes the political organisation of the form of modern society as indeterminately determinate, claiming a rupture among the spheres of (political) power, knowledge and legality. Lefort is certainly correct in arguing that the marker of certainty has dissolved in modern democracy insofar as the ordering of society is concerned, as the political order of society was no longer strictly hierarchised. However, it is unclear how would he theorise the empty locus of power itself other than referring to the void that had been produced through the disappearance of the monarchic form and reproduced by the sustenance of the institutional arrangement of modern democracy. Insofar as the empty locus of power acts as a foundation (as its emptiness determines how the sphere of power is arranged and correlated with other spheres), it is imperative for us to think whether it is pure emptiness or a form of (incompletely and contingently) saturated political foundation. The case of Bangladesh is an interesting instance. Coming out of the colonial experience, Bangladesh is certainly not the ideal site for thinking Lefort’s Europe-centered account of democracy. That being the case, the distribution of political power in Bangladesh clearly poses certain questions that are akin to Lefort’s problematic. Given the concentration of power in the ruling regime and the lack of autonomy of the political institutions, there is a profound imbalance in the distribution of political power. This adds complexity to the form of political sphere. As our discussion of election and its attendant suspension of political power has shown, there is a fundamental uncertainty regarding the very form — and not just content — of the political community. If all the contests were over the content of power, there would not have been enough reason for disputing the suspension of power. The otherwise banal ideological debates among political parties indicates that the core of their political reasoning is not so much concerning governance, but rather about instantiating the border and order of the political community. The political parties thus manifest the drive to collapse the distinction between the prior empty place of power and their occupation of it, as though their particular occupation of power is the only means to safeguard it. This centripetal force of power also explains why the sphere of law and knowledge are so closely tailed with the political sphere in Bangladesh. The subordination of legality to politics — whether in the form of para-legalism or simple suspension — is barely a matter of dispute. More interestingly, the intellectual sphere of Bangladesh shows a remarkable tendency to divide itself between the rival camps of Bengali and Bangladeshi nationalism, while the autonomy-seeking section of it remains trapped in unreflective contrarianism. While the constitutional democratic political structure formally generates a necessity for extricating the place of power from the particular contents that occupy it, this institutional drive is neutralised and outdriven by the presence of a saturated political foundation that collapses the distinction between form and content of politics. Unlike the Laclauian hegemony that explains the occupation of power through the becoming-universal of a particularity amid the plurality of demands and groups, the appeal to the foundation of political community generates a desire for an immediate identity between the form and content of the polity. The drive to saturate the empty locus of power is that which explains both the danger and potency of Bangladesh’s political horizon. The articulation of this claim would require us to make a foray into how the people construct themselves by bypassing the logic of institutions.

    The People and the Institutions

    Between the people and the sphere of political power, there is a lack of correspondence. This is, however, a lack that is systematic. To be sure, the failure to reflect the political will of “the people” in the institutional order of the political system is the perennial crisis of modern representative democracy. This is a constitutive failure of constitutional democratic system — it is inherently incapable of accommodating the extra-institutional entity that is the people. In the West, “public opinion” emerged as a mediating process in introducing the institutionalised correspondence between the people and the political institutions. Public opinion, of course, is not the pure will of the people. Its form is institutionally determined, whereby the opinion of the individuated citizens – which is distinct from the truth-claim that a political collectivity pushes for — operates within clear limits. Given the absence of the role that “public opinion” plays in the West, there is a vacuum between the institutions and the people. As I said earlier, the gap is constitutive of constitutional democracy. What is, however, specific to the Bangladeshi scenario is the absence of any mitigating correspondence between the two poles. No absence, however, is pure absence. This structural particularity is also at the root of the extra-institutional politicisation of the people in the Bangladeshi context. What we call the people is far from being a readily accessible political category. Instead, it is one of the most complex political entities. Partly because of the “failure” of the institutions to set up a neutralising correspondence with the people a la public opinion, the Bangladeshi people are in a privileged position to extra-systematically contest political power. As the diagram shows, the political construction of the people leaps over the realm of non-correspondence and directly enters into the realm of power.(3) The Shahbag movement is an apt example. The current scenario is complicated precisely because of the Shahbag event. It heralded a new political configuration. To portray the post-Shahbag crisis as merely a contest between proponents and opponents of the trial of war criminals is to fall short of understanding how the congealed image of Shahbag has transformed the ordinary regime of power distribution. Moving beyond the myopic concern with what the demand of the movement was and who constituted the sociological formation of its ranks, we need to look at the way in which it amounted to a contestatory construction of the people and, in so doing, mobilised an extra-institutional source of legitimacy.

    diagram for RN article

    The political power that the movement generated did not arise through any institutional process, nor did it gather force in the manner of issue-based social movements that operate through channeling the demands and mounting pressure on the concerned authority. The event came into being abruptly, and mobilised political claims by way of reclaiming the founding legitimacy of the polity. The people that the Shahbag Movement brought into being by way of re-invoking the political community form founded by 1971 is political in the sense that it generated political power independently of the permanent agencies of the sphere of political power. The virtual impossibility of affecting the sphere of political power through an institutionalised process breeds the possibility for the people to put themselves in the sphere of political power through bypassing what I have called “the sphere of systematic non-correspondence”. As I argued above, while the Shahbag movement contended with the state over the source of legitimacy, it did not result in an antagonistic contestation with the state over political power. This is precisely the feature that made it susceptible to the cooptation of the ruling regime. With the symbolic fulfillment of the explicit demands that the movement put forward, the AL regime could articulate the afterlife of the movement in its own terms. Political events do not just burst through the surface and then vanish without any effect. They do disappear, but in so doing, they alter the relations of forces in often not-so-apparent manner. The continued presence of the Shahbag Movement registers such a transformation. On the one hand, it has made it nearly impossible for the political parties and platforms to negotiate with what the movement had identified as “anti-1971” forces, thus affecting the border of the regime of political power. On the other hand, its claim to the source of legitimacy –and the attendant construction of the people — provided it with a political authority that, however, was not directly antagonistic to the state. These paradoxical features have rendered the event amenable to cooption by the ruling regime, which through such cooption sought to boost itself with the power that flowed from the Shahbag Movement. If the Shahbag Movement is reduced to the demands that it voiced, then it is possible to find the cooption acceptable. The present crisis is not a crisis centered on the war-criminal issue. It is a structural crisis integral to our political system, whereby the afterlife of the Shahbag movement has added productive complexity to the crisis.

    The empty politics of “good governance”

    The civil society is once again at the forefront of national politics. The civil society — or what is rather barbarically translated as Susheel Samaj (civilised society) in Bengali — is a complex entity whose understanding requires close theoretical and historical investigation. This is a task that I cannot undertake here. The grotesque name that they have given themselves is more than a symptom of mere linguistic incompetence. It designates the preconception that posits both the political society and the people as unqualified subjects of politics. Nevertheless, let us consider some of the prevalent (mis)conceptions about civil society in the context of Bangladesh. While it is obviously true that the Bangladeshi civil society did not evolve in the way in which western civil societies have, this contrast does not warrant us to conceptualise this civil society as historically parasitic or an entity without any social root. The civil society is neither simply a conglomeration of self-interested agents bent on procuring their economic and cultural interests. To be sure, they are self-interested, but that does not tell us much about their political drives and actions. The modern theorisation of civil society that came into being with Hegel explicates it as a mediator between the natural realm of family and the rational sphere of the state. For Hegel, individuals operate as self-interested subjects in civil society; but, in so doing, they conjure up a collective rationality which, in turn, results in a form of society that strikes a balance between the individual and the collective. The self-conception of Bangladeshi civil society expresses the desire to mediate between the “development-seeking” people and the “corrupted and irrational” state. However, since they deem the state as utterly irrational and self-serving, and the people as incapable of acting at the institutional sites, that dual presuppositions lead them to decide for both the state and the people. The task of mediation, as it were, is nothing less than dictating the logics of the entities between which they purport to mediate. In one sense, the political constitution of civil society captures the paradox of our political community in a rather actualised way. The paradox resides in the duality of the nation and the state. The civil society is as much under the condition of the national as any other political agent in Bangladesh. The cultural imagination of the civil society, however westernised, clearly feeds into the horizon of Bengali nationalism. The border and order of the political community that it envisages is under the condition of the national. As I noted above, its commitment to the liberal-democratic structure as the form of governance – with its attendant institutionalism, moral and cultural configurations and so on — puts them in an antagonistic relationship with regard to the political society. Indeed, there is clearly a generalised opposition to the civil society from the otherwise diverging entities of the political society. If the ruling regime does little to ensure the autonomy and independence of the institutions such as the judiciary and administration, it is because these institutions do not figure in the production of legitimacy and its attendant political power in the way in which the street does. Missing this central site of political power, the civil society takes institutions as the objects of politics. The liberal democracy that they push for is one that only knows institutions, extricated as it is from the extra-institutional sources of politics.

    Being preoccupied with the task of ostracising corruption from the institutions, the politics of “good governance” is unable to intervene in the extra-institutional sites of politics. As a result, it is an ideology — regardless of its intentions — that strives to negate and excoriate the unruly self-representing people from the sphere of politics. The true subject of the politics of “good governance” is a non-subject proper. From the student rebellion of 2007 to the Shahbag Movement, the civil society had found itself incapable of — if not always indifferent to — dealing with the extra-institutional grounding of politics. The signature characteristic of the civil society’s political vision is the fear of disorder. Constitutionally incapable of realising how the moments of “disorder” are the fecund sites of politics, the civil society locates the source of all crises in the corruption of institutions. Owing to the lack-based understanding specified above, it transposes political contestations on to an empty normative horizon. The failure to influence both the institutional terrain dominated by the ruling regime and the extra-institutional sites, the ideologues of good governance have no other option than relying on the superlative intervention of western diplomats and the military.

    The Crisis of the Left-Over Left

    This complicated scenario of national politics has dragged the left into a quagmire. The modest success of the post-1971 Left has been dependent on the mobilisation of the nationalist condition of politics. With the emergence of a group of strong nationalist political activists in the last decade — a group that ideologically leans towards the Awami League and yet maintains a distance from its institutional aspects — the Left has been encountering contest and resistance in the attempt to short-circuit between nationalist and traditional leftist discourses. Nor can the Left lay claim to represent the urban workers and poor, the conspicuous outsider in the national politics. In short, the left is unable to instantiate any particular people as the legitimising ground of its politics. The stage-ist left, by and large, is happy to hibernate, while waiting for the coming of the pure (and thus mythological) class-conscious working class. The more active section of the left is oriented to the social issues. In the recent past, they have rather successfully led few social movements. This otherwise promising social-content-oriented section of the left’s crisis lies in its failure to transform social issues into political contest proper. While the Left’s pointing out of injustice and oppression normatively makes sense to the public, that act of making-sense does not get catapulted into a political contestation by itself. The precondition of the emergence of a political contestation requires not only an articulation of the terms of opposition, but also a contesting horizon of the collectivity, i.e. the possibility of a political community. This is precisely what the Left has been unable to generate in the recent years.

    As an insignificant actor in the equation of electoral politics, the Left does not hold any effective leverage in shaping the terms of parliamentary elections. A large chunk of the old Left has allied with — or rather tailed behind —the ruling regime. At the level of ideological articulation, this section of the Left has little bearing on Bangladeshi politics. This political inaction is exacerbated by the Left’s understandably ambivalent relationship to the afterlife of the Shahbag movement. The epochal importance, if any, of the Shahbag movement resided in its instantiation of the possibility to re-enact the politics-form of the national by way of constructing the extra-statal people. With the subsumption of the afterlife of the movement by the ruling regime, the persistent presence of its after-effect has got crystallized into something that tends in the direction of lending legitimacy to the Awami League regime. Clearly, any provisional alliance with the AL has to reckon with the fact that the Shahbag movement does not have primacy here — it is the AL’s internal contest with the oppositional party and the civil society that dictates the terms.

    Although it is true that the national is the dominant condition of the political in Bangladesh, there is no reason to resign and hold that there is no possibility of articulating a political grounding that would stand outside the present condition. I argued that the crisis of the Left owes to their growing dislocation from the internal order of the national, resulting in a redundant tailism with the mainstream Bengali Nationalist forces. The “outside” that the left needs is not necessarily an absolute outside — the possibilities of constructing a new ground of politics is present in the society. The possibilities themselves must be seized upon — the task of politics is more about subjectivating those possibilities than about waiting for a fully interiorized outside. The manoeuvre to dislodge this state of politics must re-examine the unquestioned ontological presuppositions and discursive strategies of the traditional Left. Hopefulness is empty and self-circling when it obdurately bypasses the facticity of despair. The Left must recognise and reflect on its apparently unmoving negativity, if it wants to break out of the existing state of political order.

    Notes

    (1) Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).

    (2) Ernest Laclau, “Democracy and the Question of Power,” Constellations 8, no. 1 (2001): 12.

    (3) I do not consider the anti-Shahbag Hefazat-e-Islami movement as another example of constructing the people. For sure, the Hefazat reaction drew huge crowds, garnering considerable support. However, in terms of the politics-form, it was neither able to carve out a space outside of the national nor was it able to appeal to the existing political foundations. As a result, notwithstanding its numerical force, it remained caught up in the moment of its negative energy vis-à-vis the Shahbag Movement.

  • Fight Back! editor speaks on U.S. ‘pivot to Asia’

    Minneapolis, MN – Mick Kelly, anti-war activist and editor of Fight Back! spoke here, Feb. 23, at a forum entitled “Next Target: China?” The event was organized by Mayday Books, a progressive book store.

    Kelly told attendees that the rulers of the U.S. are on collision course with China, stating, “The U.S policy of pivoting towards Asia is all about preparing for a war on China. It might come sooner, due to a miscalculation on Washington’s part or it might come later.”

    “The U.S. cannot remain a world empire without maintaining its relative hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region. People’s China is in a period of ascendency. China’s economy is different than the capitalist economies of the West. It has expanded each year since 1949 and its growth rates in a relative sense are spectacular. China is playing an expanding role in Asia, Africa and Latin America,” stated Kelly.

    Kelly talked about the long history of U.S. aggression and interference in China’s internal affairs. He also condemned U.S. support for Japan’s occupation of the Chinese Diaoyu Islands and provocative U.S. military flights near China’s coast.

     

  • Aam Aadmi or the Tyranny of the Average Man

    Pratyush Chandra

    On the eve of India’s Republic Day, President Pranab Mukherjee made some strong statements about the political scenario prevailing in the country. He talked about democracy as “a sacred trust” for those in power and those who violate it as “committing sacrilege against the nation”; about “democratic institutions being weakened by complacency and incompetence”; about corruption “as a cancer that erodes democracy, and weakens the foundations of our state”. He also talked about “hypocrisy in public life”, about making “false promises”, warning against taking elections as “the licence to flirt with illusions”, government as “a charity shop”, etc. But the most striking aspect of the speech was of course the recognition of street anger, of hearing “an anthem of despair from the street”, of Indians being “enraged”, of “rage”, which “has one legitimate target: those in power”, of “the aspirational young Indian”, who “will not forgive a betrayal of her future” (Mukherjee 2014).

    The speech recognises “the trust deficit between them [those in office] and the people.” It hints at the crisis of legitimation – the crisis of reproducing the liberal state, and the need to rebuild the trust. It also reflects a conservative institutional anxiety towards the populist attempts to overcome this crisis. When the speech attacks “populist anarchy”, the emphasis is on rage turning to proper anarchy because of the erratic nature of populist politics that derives from attempts to synchronise with the tenor of popular apathy and rage, and harness it in the service of the state. Populism that emerges as a resolution to the crisis might in fact deepen it further by “flirting with illusions,” thus augmenting expectations and despair. Therefore, the President stresses on the sacredness of this trust – on identity between the people and the democratic state, and in the process of this identification bringing sanity to the streets, sanitising them of any difference. People can change governments, but they are one with the state. Of course, for any eventuality, the security and armed forces are always ready – “they can crush an enemy within; with as much felicity as they guard our frontiers. Mavericks who question the integrity of our armed services are irresponsible and should find no place in public life”.

    I

    Much debate around the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is mainly about the personal acts of leaders and activists, how much they are fulfilling their promises and are true to liberal (left or right) political ideals (norms and ideologies), how much they themselves are embodiments of public values that they seek to institutionalise. You can see left-liberals swinging with the erratic moves of the AAP’s street gymnastics. They are frequently outraged by the AAP’s politically ‘incorrect’ stances that are organic to the common sense of the “common man”. More serious voices too are concerned about the AAP’s discursive and behavioural makeup, which they comprehend through generalisations that were perhaps effective in characterising historical forms of political behaviours. They indulge in analogical exercises which are generally useful, but at times, they can be arrogant, nauseating and sterile apologia for conservative wisdom, inaction and conformism, especially when they refuse to see the now-timeness of these hard times and the breach that characterises them – their non-homogeneity and non-emptiness pregnant with contradictions. Of course, the AAP can be, and perhaps is, as I try to demonstrate here, both a systematic and systemic attempt to transcend this breach, but it is also a symptom of this breach.

    It is the recognition of the breach or crisis that is crucial to comprehend the present – not as “a mass of facts”, but something that constellates with the past to remake history as a trajectory that is filled with possibilities and actions, “jumps” and “leaps”, roadmines and explosions.

    What is interesting about the AAP is not its promises and its exception-al way of profaning the sacred, which is in continuum with the federalising project of the “average bourgeois” – the rural, mercantile, local, petty and emergent bourgeoisie – that India has witnessed over the last three decades. We must remember we have gone through a whole series of crises marked by eruption of federal demands and have witnessed the resilience of the Indian state in overcoming them through accommodation and expansion. One such major crisis was inaugurated by massive educated unemployment in the late 1960s, an increased assertion of backward caste rural bourgeoisie and of the communally-charged petty bourgeoisie, which significantly transformed the political taxonomy in India based on identitarian conflicts and alliances. That was a crisis which Lohia socialism, JP’s “total revolution” and Naxal Maoism spiced up. It is not surprising if in the AAP we see anti-reservationists, firebrand Lohiaites and retired social democrats (tired of preaching sterile welfarist militancy) coming together in a post-ideological political formation.

    In fact, it will not be too much to say that the project of promoting competitive federalism has succeeded with the AAP entering the last citadel of exclusionary centralism of the past. True to Delhi’s prime location, the incident that finally exploded the continuum was characterised by its inter-national composure – racism. The AAP chose to assert its claim or share in the coercive apparatus of the Indian state by abiding to the racist common sense of Delhi’s common man. Those who are outraged by the ‘exceptional’ nature of the incident are those who refuse to see that the exceptional is general and their politically correct spectacular gestures signify the need for new ideological-institutional fetishes that can cover up the blatancy of this generalisation.

    II

    So much about the continuity that enters into the making of the AAP phenomenon. Let us now talk about the break – which is not really about the AAP but about the conjunctural newness that shapes the AAP, or about what the AAP tells us about the context of its emergence. Let us begin by a few assertions that we think are very obvious.

    The Aam Aadmi Party is an attempt to resolve the legitimation crisis that the Indian state and bureaucracy have been facing in recent years. It is an attempt to overcome the divide between the social and the political that the economic has generated in the neoliberal phase of capitalist development. It is an effort on the part of the Indian political system to bring back the citizenry to recommit itself to India’s state formation. It is an apparently paradoxical attempt to mobilise the simmering political apathy for the task of strengthening the state. Its multi-class nature, which is being celebrated by some commentators (as if there can be any mono-class formation in electoral democracy), in fact makes it another candidate for reassuring the state machinery of the much needed legitimation by neutralising conflictual interests. It is an attempt to bring out some positive common sense out of the non-sense and chaos of the streets. It demonstrates the will of the liberal Indian state to overcome its crisis yet again by recognising and normalising the “democratic excess”. What is posed as “anti-establishment” becomes the ground for strengthening the establishment – a new context in which the state must reproduce itself, its re-formation. In sum, the AAP is a truce – a disarming of the very street from which it claims its origin.

    In so many assertions that I make above, there is an understanding of the underlying structure of contemporary reality, of which the AAP is a product. The legitimation crisis that we are talking about is essentially a crisis in the political reproduction of this structure, difficulties for the Indian state to deal with the socio-political impact of the volatility of capital relations that constitute this structure.

    The minimisation of the state that neoliberalism demanded was definitely not about withering away of the state, it was not even about its non-intervention in economy, nor about its weakness. It was essentially about the autonomisation of credit money and finance from any socio-political influence, except that which facilitates its expansion. It was about expanding the liberal capitalist state’s capacity to guard against any “externality” in the economic passage, against self-temptations. It was still about depoliticising “the conduct of social relations as relations of liberty, freedom, equality and Bentham”. (Bonefeld 2010) It was always about strengthening “the separation that the state embodies” – “the state separates people, separates leaders from masses, separates the political from the economic, the public from the private”. (Holloway 2010)

    Financialisation intensifies the flow of capital on which every economic activity is dependent in capitalism, transcending any plausibility to bind it in a discrete fraction of timespace. It connects lives and work to the precarities of open markets. Ever-intensifying mobility of finance capital has made ineffective the estatal management of money and prices, which had the potential of being influenced by the balance of social forces. It is the sub-alterity of the ‘social’ in this ‘economic’ process that alienates the former, constituting a legitimation crisis for the state especially during the down cycle of economies – a barrier in the process of the social reproduction of state as “a particular surface (or phenomenal) form of the capital relation”. (Holloway & Picciotto 1977) This crisis becomes crucial when it starts creating barriers in the resurgence of the economic – for capitalist accumulation – i.e., when the social starts attacking the divide between the economic and the political as a fetishism, when the social relations of production that finance sought to regulate are problematised and in the process the social itself starts becoming politicised. Ultimately, the insubordination of the social is a manifestation of the inability of capital to subsume living labour, when the latter starts asserting its own autonomy in some or other form.

    The essential function of this strong state as neoliberals envisage is to manage the socio-political fallouts of neoliberalism. If people are not ready to give their consent to neoliberalisation, then they must be forced to submit. But this subservient role of the state and its shameless display has progressively weakened its support base in the social and has increased political apathy. Throughout the 1990s and in the 2000s there were numerous occasions when the states throughout the globe had to face unmanageable situations and were either forced to resort to violence or try hard to divert public attention from them by investing more in wasteful exercises. All this exploded in 2008. And Keynesians – left and liberals – were elated to find an opportune moment to call for bringing the state back in – not just as a backstage manager but as the administrator of the economy – managing the demand-and-supply, and setting the prices right. If only wishes had wings. Capitalism needed the welfare state and had it.

    What we see today in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, a return of the state which was already there – it is a return of the state as itself – a state which is not just a guard of private players of neoliberalism, but a guardian that secures the basic values of capitalism, ready to reprimand those who foul, ready to listen to those who complain of foul play and to judge. It is (neo)liberal to its core, is committed to socialise the basic liberal values. It abstracts itself from identities to oversee their intermingling and competition, thus reducing them to mere abstract individualities.  It satisfies the “need for the constant political facilitation of free economy by means of a ‘market police’, which includes the embedding of the ‘psycho-moral forces’ of enterprise in society at large to maintain its entrepreneurial ‘vitality’ in the face of a socially and morally disintegrating market logic”. (Bonefeld 2013)

    The traditional political formations, including those who claimed a grounding in the segments down the hierarchical ladder, were instrumentalised too much during the insurgent moments of neoliberalism. They are unable to preserve the “separation that the state embodies.” That has incapacitated them from dealing with the social impact of the global economic crisis. Diverse class interests start expressing themselves autonomously and (il-)legitimately swelling the streets, merging the diverse tunes into a cacophony. This cacophony, its incomprehensibility, is what constitutes the legitimation crisis for a state. Traditional political oppositions have failed in their function as interpreters of this outswelling. They are unable to reduce it to mere competition between abstract identities.

    It is this cacophony and the inability of the existing political formations to subsume it that India’s President was alluding to in the speech that we referred to in the beginning. The so-called post-ideological formations like the AAP come in handy at this juncture. The a-politics of aam aadmi or common or average man is what can bring back order to the streets – the reduction of difference and conflicts to undifferentiated hordes of abstract individuals identified with the sovereign.

    III

    This idea has long been prevalent among political theorists that democracy “presupposes an identity between sovereign and people: sovereign people, popular sovereignty”. This identification is codified in the Indian Constitution too, and it is evident in President Mukherjee’s speech. Legislative changes have sufficed till recently in overcoming any breach or crisis that has cropped up in this identification. Articles 3, 340, numerous amendments to the Constitution and other legislative measures could overcome any breach in the said “identity” and reproduce it within the framework of the Indian state formation.

    The twentieth century has reincarnated democracy as a state-form, rather than just a form of government as “in the democracy of the ancients”. In the definition of democracy as a state-form “the word ‘identity’ is useful…because it points to the complete identity of the homogeneous people, this people that exists within itself qua political unit without any further need for representation, precisely because it is self-representing”. (Schmitt, quoted in Tronti 2009) Italian Marxist Mario Tronti elaborates that this identity precludes majoritarianism – the power of the majority. In fact, any difference must be fought away, including between the majority and the minority. Therefore, the discourse of mainstreaming the latter, cutting them to the size of the one – un-ity. “There is in democracy an identitarian vocation hostile to the articulation of any difference whatever as well as to any order of difference”. (Tronti 2009)

    Mainstreaming, averaging, neutralising – this is what democracy does. It creates the persona of the average, neutral, common man – Aam Aadmi. Power is de-sacralised, secularised and profaned. Common man is one with the state. Tronti takes this conceptualisation to an extreme, when he seems to argue that with the processes of globalisation there is a gradual extinction of the state in an institutional sense. However, it is hard to dispute when he says that the function of the state is recuperated within the social. This simply is to reassert the self-representative nature of the demos – its common-ality, “the massification of thoughts, feelings, tastes, behaviours expressed in that political power which is common sense”. Tronti (ibid.) explains himself further when he defines the common:

    “The ‘common’ which is spoken of today is really that in-common which is already wholly taken over by this kind of self-dictatorship, this kind of tyranny over oneself which is the contemporary form of that brilliant modern idea: voluntary servitude.”

    He aptly concludes giving us a key to disentangle the spirit of democratisation epitomised by forces like the AAP:

    “The average bourgeois has won: this is the figure of democracy. Democracy is this: not the tyranny of the majority, but the tyranny of the average man. And this average man constitutes a mass within the Nietzschean category of the last man.”

    In fact, almost a century back, a liberal American philosopher, John M Mecklin (1918) talked about the “tyranny, more powerful, more insidious perhaps than any other”, about hydra-headed, myriad-handed modern tyrant, about “the tyranny of the average man”, of this “dominant mediocrity”, a “mythical personage” which becomes real “because of the steam-roller effect of the unwritten law of democracy, namely, uniformity.” The average man “dominated by routine and tradition” is “like the golden calf of apostate Israel he is but the creation of our own hands and yet we worship him as our god.”

    President Mukherjee (2014) called out to the common man against any fracture. “A fractured government, hostage to whimsical opportunists, is always an unhappy eventuality. In 2014, it could be catastrophic.” So the question is to build and manage consensus, not giving space to fracturing.

    For Tronti, contemporary political systems are actually apolitical since they do not negotiate between antinomies or social contradictions, but seek to evade them. The (a)political choices are between two aggregates of consensus:

    “[O]n the one side we have reactionary bourgeois drives, and on the other progressive bourgeois drives. And I say drives, that is, emotive reflexes, symbolic imaginaries, all moved and governed by great mass communication. Reactionary and progressive drives which nonetheless share this average bourgeois character. On the one hand compassionate conservatism, on the other political correctness. These are the two great blocs. This is the governmental alternative offered by apolitical democratic systems.” (Tronti 2009)

    Where do the traditional political formations among workers, the traditional communist parties figure in this apolitical system of consensus? What do we make of the hillarious responses of the left to the AAP’s performance? Their bewilderment is a thousand and first symptom of their embeddedness in capitalist polity – all of them wanted to see themselves in the AAP’s place. Their anxiety to find affinity with the AAP in its successes or to trivialise it by chanting “same old same old” is a reflection of their sense of trepidation about their own future. Communist leaders are trying hard to convince their cadre and the media about their continued relevance.

    On the other hand, the chartist left – from NGOs to fringe holier-than-thou militant reformist sects find their role as lobbyists quite self-gratifying with the emergence of the apolitics of aam aadmi – they can perhaps play on the anxieties of the electoral competitors – accept our demands or we will expose you before the aam aadmi. They are increasingly finding lobbyist techniques and blackmailing more satisfying than sharpening social antagonisms and contradictions. That increases their visibility, as it synchronises well with the sensationalist drives of “great mass communication”.

    What Tronti expresses about the transformation of workers’parties in the West has always been true for the communist parties and groups in India – right from their genesis they have been trying hard to be parties of the whole people, and have worked well in the popular management of class conflicts and dissipating the “destructive antagonistic character” of working class politics.

    IV

    However, in our critique of the times we must satisfy the task bestowed upon us by Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. We must recognise the urgency to discern the ground and forms of politics that can change the world. Tronti (ibid.) in his analysis of mass bourgeois democracy finds a contradiction – janus bifrons – at its centre whose incomplete resolution is the persona of the average man, aam aadmi:

    “within democracy, within its history, we find knotted together a practice of dominaton and a project of liberation – they always present themselves together, they are co-present. In some periods (periods of crisis, states of exception) these two dimensions are in conflict. In others (such as in the contemporary situation, which is a state of normality, or at least that is the way I read it) they are integrated.”

    So, the task for Tronti is not just to untie the knot, but cut it apart permanently. The institutional left has always tried to untie it so that new institutions could be built and consolidated – thus retying the knot. The project of liberation has hitherto served to make the practice of domination more and more resilient. Against the average mass bourgeois common man, which is the ideal of bourgeois democratic normalcy (of national/ people’s/ new varieties), a critical praxis must be posed that deconstructs the contemporary state-form, its institutional and ideological apparatuses and exposes the underlying structure of social relations based on exploitation and domination, and how everyday conflicts shape them.

    In a recent work, Tronti (2010) has once again posed the working class as the revolutionary political subject. He talks about liberating the revolutionary discourse of people from its constitutional, institutional appropriation, resuscitating “the authentic meaning of the political concept of the people: specifying and determining it with the social concept of labour. A people, not of the subjects of the crown, not of citizens, but of workers”. He further concludes,

    “The working people as a general class is possible only today, in working conditions that are extended and parcellised, far-reaching and fragmented, territorialised and globalised – the Marxian meaning of labour, without qualifiers, from the exhaustion of the hands to the exhaustion of the concept, from the occupation you don’t love to the occupation you can’t find, an archipelago of islands that make up a continent.” (Ibid)

    As Tronti (2009) stresses, it is only during crises and states of emergency that we find the breach in the democratic state-form and an opportunity to cut the knot that ties the practice of domination and the project of liberation together. But here Walter Benjamin’s eighth thesis on philosophy of history must be brought in to grasp the permanent revolutionary project of the working class. This thesis must be recognised as a strategisation of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. In fact, the various theses, despite their terse makeup, constitute a formidable attack on the social democratic interpretation of history as progression, that takes capitalist exploitation and fascism as “historical norms”. Benjamin (1940 [1969]) shows how this interpretation has led to conformism and “servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus”. Nothing corrupted the working class “so much as the notion that it was moving with the current”. That labour is “the source of all wealth and all culture” is an illusion that serves to resurrect the protestant ethic of work in secularised form.

    Like Tronti, Benjamin too posits the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class against its reduction into an evolutionary agency among “man or men”, aam aadmi to redeem “future generations”. He accuses social democracy of making “the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice”. The working class is revolutionary as “the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.”

    The specificity of the eighth thesis lies in exposing the limited significance of the legal-fictional conception of the “state of emergency” or exception in grasping the state in which the oppressed or the working class lives. The application of this conception is limited to understanding how apolitical systems utilise it to build up their emergency apparatuses to reproduce themselves. However, “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Labour-capital relations that constitute the everydayness of capitalism are always an emergency situation with the self-annihilating mission of the working class posing a constant death threat to capital and capitalism. Going back to our discussion on “separations that the state embodies”, the so-called de-politicisation of the economic actually implies that the arena of everyday life is always under a state of emergency. To know this fact one should simply interact with a wage worker – employed or unemployed. Remember, panopticon was modelled on factory life. In the era of financialisation and global social factory, capitalism has acquired a “fractal panopticist” character: “The pantopticon of the global market is ‘fractal’, in that each level of social aggregation, each node or singularity, is ‘self-similar’ to others.” It is a global network of prison houses. (De Angelis 2007: 217)

    The strategic contributions of Benjamin’s eighth thesis lie at two levels. First, it brings out the conception of history as class struggle (not just as its history), which can be understood only by looking beyond formal processes and progression. History is made in class praxes and antagonisms. Secondly, it stresses on the class strategy of realising “a real state of emergency” that will not allow capital to settle and any of its regime to become a “historical norm.”

    V

    Aam Aadmi is always there as the spirit behind liberal democracy – in the conjuncture of the capitalist state or sovereign and people, but it is only during an explicit breach in this identity that aam aadmi seeks embodiment. It is a formal state of emergency when street rage and cacophony start to threaten the abstraction of the liberal state, separations that it embodies. This formal emergency is a result of “the oppressed” emerging out of their subalterity. They are in the process of creating a real state of emergency by emerging as a class. Aam aadmi must ground itself to average all the voices in the streets and bring order – these voices must get equal representation, and be subsumed. Anarchy must be curbed. But this cannot be accomplished simply by promises or actions from above, but by seeking oneness with the street – by reintegrating people with the State, regrounding it in the social.  The President representing compassionate conservatism is legitimately anxious, and would prefer either the old guards directing this populism, or the new ones learning old tricks and language to ensure continuity. However, the task is to renew consensus behind the State – the depth of apathy and alienation must be matched by the height of populism.

    But it is in this breach that we must seek radical possibilities. The compulsion of the State to reproduce itself in the social, in everydayness, desacralises its instruments, exposes its vulnerabilities. If we find traditional political formations and state institutions complaining about disrespect to the decorum of the officialdom and of “populist anarchism”, it is not populism that they fear, but anarchism on the ground with which populism seeks to connect. The fear is whether populism will consolidate itself and strengthen the basis of state formation or it will over-expose its egregious vulnerabilities. It is the latter that might make the whole edifice of the State fall like a pack of cards – expose the Naked King and his mythical subject, Aam Aadmi. Whether mohalla samitis (neighbourhood councils) will be a replication of the gram sabha, homogenising the neighbourhoods, reproducing and formalising the everyday exploitative social relations in state formation; or are they going to be a ground to generalise, locate and intensify class struggle: will we see a spur of rent strikes, food riots, factory occupations and squatting? Will direct democracy be reduced to the ritual of janata darbar, and eventually a junta darbar? Or will it be a call for a dual power tending towards the destruction of the liberal state? Well, the theoretician among aam aadmi leaders have made it clear: some of them can be socialists, but they are not silly.

    References:

    Benjamin (1940 [1969]) – Benjamin, W. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, Knopf (1969).

    Bonefeld 2010 – Bonefeld, W. “Free economy and the strong state: Some notes on the state”, Capital & Class 34(1), pp 15-24. (February 2010), http://libcom.org/library/free-economy-strong-state-some-notes-state-werner-bonefeld

    Bonefeld 2013 – Bonefeld, W. “Human economy and social policy: On ordo-liberalism and political authority”, History of the Human Sciences 26(2), pp 106-125 (April 2013).

    De Angelis 2001 – De Angelis, M. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Power, Pluto Press (2007).

    Holloway 2010 – Holloway, J. “Foreword to the German Edition”, in Raul Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, AK Press (2010).

    Holloway & Picciotto 1977 – Holloway, J & S. Picciotto, “Capital, Crisis and the State”, Capital & Class 1(2), pp 76-101 (Summer 1977).

    Mecklin 1918 – Mecklin, J.M. “The Tyranny of the Average Man”, International Journal of Ethics, 28(2), pp 240-52 (January 1918).

    Mukherjee 2014 – Address by the President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee on the eve of Republic Day of India 2014, New Delhi (January 25, 2014), http://presidentofindia.nic.in/sp250114-2.html

    Tronti 2009 – Tronti, M. “Towards a Critique of Political Democracy”, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5(1) (2009), http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/127/236

    Tronti 2010 – Tronti, M. “We have populism because there is no people”, Democrazia e Diritto (2010, no. 3-4) published in English in 2013 http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1261-mario-tronti-we-have-populism-because-there-is-no-people

  • Mother Agnes-Mariam of the Cross speaks to Anti-War activists about Syria

    Minneapolis, MN – On, Feb. 16, Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) organized an event for Mother Agnes-Mariam of the Cross, the Mother Superior at the Monastery and Convent of Saint James in Qara, Syria, to speak via Skype to a packed room at the 4200 Cedar Community Center here.

    Mother Agnes is an international spokesperson for peace in the Syrian conflict. Time and again, Mother Agnes has faced life-threatening situations in her humanitarian work for the safety and security of others.

    Margaret Sarfehjooy, chair of the WAMM Mideast Committee, opened the event, saying, “We care deeply about the human suffering of the Syrian people… The situation is becoming more and more violent, with more and more Syrians losing their homes, losing their children, living in horrible situations that we can’t even imagine. What can we, in the U.S. do to help?”

    She continued, “WAMM strongly opposes U.S. military intervention, whether direct or indirect, in the war that is currently raging in Syria, and call for an escalation of diplomacy, not war.”

    Noting the significance of the Syrian conflict, Mother Agnes said, “Syria is becoming a battleground of regional war, and maybe a worldwide war.” She noted that on the one hand, Syria’s government has the support of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), ALBA countries (Latin American countries including Cuba and Venezuela), and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

    She named some of the countries supporting the opposition, “Qatar, Saudi Arabia, France, the U.S., Britain, Jordan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and of course, Israel.” She continued, “We think it is scandalous to set out to topple the Syrian government with these allies.”

    Mother Agnes is one of the main organizers of this Mussalaha Intitiative, which Sarfehjooy described as, “an example of how diplomacy and reconciliation are used in Syria to reduce the violence. Mussalaha describes itself as a community-based, non-violent initiative originating within Syrian civil society. Founded at the community level, it includes members of all Syria’s ethnic and religious communities who are tired of war. It stands as a demonstration of hope that a third way option to armed conflict remains possible and provides an alternative to military intervention from abroad.”

    Mother Agnes said, “Reconciliation brings the possibility to build bridges between different sides of conflict. Diverse people were living together for a long time in Syria under a civilian pact. Foreign forces are sowing dangerous fear and hatred among people. Mediators must be willing to talk to all sides and bring them to a common accord in civilian areas.”

    She then described one community, where the intervention of foreign fighters had displaced 50,000 civilians, brought on a military siege and resulted in starvation conditions for the remaining inhabitants. Through her work, a ceasefire was negotiated to allow the evacuation of those who wanted to leave. Following the agreement, she said, “650 rebels came to give up their arms and act as non-violent opposition. Now that neighborhood has settled a peaceful agreement with guarantees the population its rights.” Mother Agnes reported that such agreements had been negotiated in six more areas, covering 1.5 million people.

    Critical of the U.S., Mother Agnes said, “We need to stop fueling this on all sides with arms. The U.S. should agree with Russia to not arm either side, but instead to support reconciliation.”

    When asked about the prospects for a negotiated settlement to come out of Geneva 2 talks, she said, “As long as toppling the government is a condition of the talks, nothing can happen. This government enjoys the support of more than half the population. The demand should be to create a good atmosphere for fair elections.”

    Mother Agnes urged U.S. peace activists to oppose U.S. military intervention in Syria, including the shipment of arms to fuel the conflict, in Syria. She said, “I love the American people, but the American government can be very harmful. When they want something they think any means are justified.”

    Some 70 people attended the event, which was endorsed by the Minnesota Anti-War Committee, the Twin Cities Peace Campaign, and Veterans for Peace Chapter 27.

  • Not In Our Name! Anti-War activists confront drones advocate

    Minneapolis, MN – Activists from the MN Anti-War Committee, Students for a Democratic Society at the U of MN, Women Against Military Madness, Veterans for Peace, and the Coalition for Palestinian Rights protested the impact of the U.S. use of drones around the world, Feb.11, at the University of Minnesota Law School. Inside the Law School, Oren Gross, a former senior officer in the Israeli Defense Force’s JAG Corps, the legal branch of the Israeli military, gave a presentation titled, “The New Way of War: Is There a Duty to Use Drones?” as a part of the Law School’s spring lecture series.

    Sophia Hansen-Day, of the MN Anti-War Committee, explained, “In Israel, Oren Gross worked to give legal and political cover to human rights violations by the Israel Defense Forces in occupied Palestine. Today, as an advisory board member of the U of M Human Rights program, he is using his prestige to justify the U.S.’s ongoing drone killings abroad. Our action was organized to challenge Dr. Gross’s absurd interpretation of international law.”

    Before the speech by Gross, protesters held signs and passed out hundreds of flyers on the reality of drone warfare. Doors to the presentation were guarded by campus police, who refused to allow protesters to bring signs inside. Even so, a couple dozen community members joined the hundred or so people there for the lecture.

    In a weak attempt to make himself more likeable, Gross opened with a few jokes and cartoons. His winding talk was full of quotes by politicians, largely void of concrete data and lacking in concern for human life. Finally getting to the point, he closed with the claim that drones are an advance in weapons technology, saying, “Drones offer a more accurate and therefore more humane warfare.”

    At that point, questions were invited from the audience. Gross ducked many of them, limiting his comments to the use of drones by the U.S. Army in an active combat zone. He refused to answer questions about U.S. war policy, or the use of drones to carry out extrajudicial assassinations, or even domestic surveillance.

    Jess Sundin, also of the Anti-War Committee, attended the talk. “It was a revolting attempt to sanitize the reality of war, by drones or any means. Most of the questions challenged him and his point of view – it was clear that Gross did not convince anyone that there is some ethical duty to use these remote control killing machines, on the battlefield or anywhere else. Drones are deadly weapons of war. U.S. wars for empire don’t need ‘more accurate’ weapons. They need to be stopped.”

  • Palestine solidarity activists disrupt speech by ‘Homeland’ TV series creator

    Milwaukee, WI – Nearly 50 Palestine solidarity activists disrupted a speech hosted by the Israel Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation on Jan. 30. The event featured Ron Leshem, the original producer of the Israeli television series Hatufim, which was adapted for U.S. television as the series Homeland.

    The event “TV: An Israeli Success Story” was designed to laud Israel’s cultural achievements in arts and entertainment while using those talking points to ignore or whitewash Israel’s illegal existence on stolen land. During the lecture, Leshem described his use of writing to humanize his subjects, who are often members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and showed a clip of an Israeli prisoner displaying his scars. Leshem spoke of shaping global public opinion, telling the “other side of the story,” and of making Israeli media more “cosmopolitan.”

    20 minutes into the presentation, an activist stood in front of Leshem and loudly announced “Occupation is not cosmopolitan, it’s genocide! If you want to understand the other side, listen to the 2002 Palestinian call for academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Stop filming on occupied territory, stop touring with the IDF, stop advocating for Israel. Occupation is not entertainment!”

    During the interruption, about 50 activists in the front of the room wearing t-shirts that read “Occupation is not education” and “Boycott Israel” stood up and slowly filed out of the event. About 30 people remained in the room, many hurling insults as the activists walked out.

    Israel funding campus propaganda

    With Palestine solidarity activism growing on U.S. campuses, Israel has poured millions of dollars into public relations to counter the success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. A 2013 move by the Jewish Agency for Israel will allocate $300 million a year to fund pro-Israel events, most of which will fund events on U.S. campuses, according to watchdogs.

    Campus activist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have found success in neutralizing pro-Israel events with walk-outs, disruptions, mock checkpoints and other direct actions.

    Ihsan Atta, member of the Milwaukee Palestine Solidarity Coalition states, “As Zionist groups continue to invite speakers who promote hatred and discrimination, we will continue to be there to remind them that oppressing the civilian population of Palestine is not acceptable nor will it be tolerated.”

     

  • PFLP leader Ahmad Sa’adat transferred to Gilboa prison by Israeli authorities

    Fight Back News Service is circulating the following Feb. 2 statement from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

    The Popular Front’s prison branch reported that the Zionist prison authority has transferred the Front’s General Secretary, Comrade Ahmad Sa’adat, from Shata prison to Gilboa prison.

    The Prison Branch said that this is aimed to distract and obstruct the efforts of Sa’adat as a leader in the prisons to unify the national prisoners’ movement and build the struggle within the prisons. The Branch noted that Sa’adat and other leaders of the prisoners’ movement are always subject to vindictive measures and are closely monitored by the Zionist prison authorities in attempts to obstruct their leadership and influence within the prisons.

     

  • Minnesota solidarity with imprisoned Palestinian leader Ahmed Sa’adat

    Saint Paul, MN – Activists from the anti-war and the Palestine solidarity movement gathered here, Jan. 24 to demand the release of all Palestinian political prisoners and an end to Palestinian Authority (PA) security cooperation with Israeli occupation forces. The group rallied for an hour in the midst of a snowstorm. The vigil was held in response to a call from the Campaign to Free Ahmed Sa’adat for Freedom Weeks to commemorate the 12th anniversary of Sa’adat’s abduction by PA forces.

    Observed by hundreds of drivers at one of St. Paul’s busiest rush hour intersections, the group included members of the Minneapolis-based Anti-War Committee, the Minnesota Cuba Committee, students from nearby Macalester College and regular attendees of the long-running weekly Palestine solidarity vigil held in the same location.

    According to the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network Samidoun, “Ahmad Sa’adat, General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, is one of over 5200 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails. These political prisoners – men, women and children – are activists, organizers and political leaders of the Palestinian people.”

    At the conclusion of Friday’s vigil, Anti-War Committee member Sophia Hansen-Day shared the following words, “We are here today to demand the release of all Palestinian political prisoners and for an end to Palestinian Authority security cooperation with Israeli occupation forces. We are here today to commemorate the 12th anniversary of Ahmed Sa’adat’s abduction by PA security forces and to call attention to his ongoing imprisonment by Israeli occupiers.

    “We are here today to acknowledge the power of solidarity. In the words of heroic freedom fighter Samer Issawi prior to his release, ‘Your solidarity gives me the power to continue my hunger strike until I achieve my demand for freedom. It strengthens my steadfastness because it makes me realize that I’m not alone in the battle for freedom and dignity.’ Today we celebrate the release of Samer Issawi whose determination galvanized the Palestinian resistance, and we acknowledge the work yet to be done.

    “We are here today on land stolen from the Dakota people to mark the ongoing occupation of Indigenous territory both in the U.S. and Palestine, to recognize the crimson blood on all our hands and to adamantly refuse silent complicity with settler colonialism and its ongoing violence.

    “So, today, we raise our voices to the power of resistance, to the power of solidarity, to the power of demanding dignity and justice for all! Another world is necessary, another world is possible, another world is on her way. Long live Palestine!”

    For more information, please go to www.freeahmadsaadat.org or attend an Anti-War Committee meeting held 7-9pm Thursday evenings at 4200 Cedar Ave in Minneapolis.

     

  • PFLP: 12 years on since the arrest of Ahmad Sa’adat and his comrades

    Fight Back News Service is circulating the following Jan 15 statement from the leadership of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). You can read Fight Back!’s interview with PFLP General Secretary Ahmad Sa’adat here http://www.fightbacknews.org/2003-3-summer/pflp.htm

    To the struggling masses of our people…

    On January 15, 2002, the Palestinian Authority security apparatus committed the crime of arresting Comrade General Secretary Ahmad Sa’adat and his comrades Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh, Majdi Rimawi, Hamdi Quran and Basil al-Asmar, in compliance with the requirements of security coordination. This did not stop the attacks on the resistance, the escalation of settlements and the building of the segregation wall.

    The Authority’s crime was completed by the enemy’s attack and abduction of the comrades from Jericho prison, when all agreements were disregarded in U.S. and British collusion with the attack, which exposed the inability of the Authority to protect even its prisons, while our comrades were taken to spend long years in isolation – for which the occupation is not solely responsible.

    We honour these heroic comrades – at their forefront, Comrade leader Ahmad Sa’adat, and affirm today that he was unanimously re-elected with full confidence in his leadership as General Secretary by the Central Committee and the Seventh National Conference of the Front. This is a well-deserved trust that he has earned, demonstrating steadfastness, clarity and unwavering commitment to struggle, principled and ready for struggle, with a broad political vision and carrying a high level of national respect. He and his imprisoned comrades, and all of the prisoners of our people together are at the forefront of the struggle, insisting on Palestinian national goals and rights in their totality on the ground, without prejudice, compromise, negligence, or barter.

    To the masses of our resisting people…

    The courage shown by the people of Qusra village and its area are a brilliant example of the struggling steadfastness of our people and their willingness to continue in all circumstances to confront and resist the enemy and their settlers. As we call on all to be inspired and learn from the steadfastness of our farmers and our prisoners, we are fully aligned with the alternative they present to relying on the futile negotiations. It is clear that the goal of the negotiations is the liquidation of the national liberation cause of our people, enhancing the status of the Zionist entity in the Arab world, and opening the doors to the official Arab regimes to normalize relations with it.

    Today, we confront the ongoing lessons of Oslo and all subsequent agreements and negotiations, while the Palestinian Authority continues to drive the PLO into relying upon this absurd and devastating process, attempting to close the door on a popular option while yielding to U.S. and Arab reactionary pressure.

    To our people and our nation…

    This date shares an appropriate coincidence with the shuttle diplomacy tours of the Secretary of State of the U.S. imperialists, between Palestine and the Arab countries, in order to liquidate our national cause and replace it with the issue of exchanges of land and population, drawing borders, and in support of the Israeli demand for recognition of the enemy state as the “state of the Jewish people.” This is an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian right of return and to whet the appetite for ethnic cleansing against the rights of our people in the areas of Palestine occupied in 1948.

    All of this comes with total disregard of international legitimacy and United Nations resolutions on Palestine, and of the United Nations as a reference, to implement the U.S./Zionist vision.

    What is happening now requires popular confrontation of any party who seeks to negotiate a temporary or permanent solution that detracts from fundamental Palestinian national rights. This moment requires of all national and social forces among the Palestinian people to mobilize to thwart this new scheme, to protect the resistance option, and return the Palestinian issue to the UN as a reference, with its resolutions to be implemented – not negotiated.

    Our cause is in danger from this heated American pursuit to enforce upon us the terms of the enemy. It seeks to take advantage of the state of demobilization and national division, and the resulting confusion about events in the Arab world. It is clear that the leadership of the Authority is unable to confront, and its options have been reduced to negotiations, negotiations, and then more negotiations.

    It is urgent to move past the era of division and return to the clear Palestinian national constants, build our movement and abandon once and for all the illusions that have proved thorny and dangerous. It is our people’s right to know what is going on in the corridors and back-rooms of negotiations, and it is their right to decide and judge on the basis of that reality.

    To the masses of our great people…

    On this occasion, we re-confirm our emphatic commitment to our pledge to the heroic comrades and all of the martyrs and prisoners. We renew our rejection of security coordination and we demand to put an end to the continuing illusions of negotiations amidst a frenzy of settlements and settler violence. We call for an end to the devastating division and the rebuilding of the Palestine Liberation Organization on the basis of a principled political strategy and a national democratic movement to restore the political unity of our people in the homeland, diaspora and exile, to rise and march again in the national liberation struggle.

    Salutes and tributes to our comrade General Secretary and his comrades
    Glory to the martyrs, freedom for the prisoners
    Unite to confront Kerry’s plan for the liquidation of our national cause

    Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – Political Bureau
    January 15, 2014