Metaphors of the Revolution: Architecture vs. Composition

By Joseph Orosco (November 6, 2019)

We are entering into the thick of presidential electoral politics as the Democratic party narrows its contenders to take on Trump.  There are pundits looking to see what can be learned about the mid-term elections of 2018 for creating a “Blue Wave,” and others wondering if the impeachment proceedings will lead to electoral turmoil before November 2020.

One of the argument strains going on on center-left circles is, of course, the old binary of reform vs. revolution, and whether the pronouncements of Bernie and AOC amount to “real” socialism, or whether Elizabeth Warren represents a more “measured” reform path compared to Bernie, etc.

A few weeks ago I found this video of Roberto Unger, the social theorist and philosopher at Harvard Law, and former advisor to Lula in Brazil.  What was interesting for me was a metaphor that he uses at about 5:30 into the video.

He says one the barriers to radical social change is a legacy of movements that claim that a “revolution” is like the practice of architecture.  By this, I think he means that make radical social change you need to first begin with a deep understanding of the conditions and materials you have at hand and build a blueprint for action.  Your blueprint determines your endpoint and the strategy to achieve it.

Unger wants to substitute the idea of revolution as something like musical composition.  Instead of knowing exactly where you want to go, you move forward by thinking of the progression of notes and how they follow.  This doesn’t mean that the same notes need to follow from what has come before, but you ought to see each note as building forward from what came just before it.  This doesn’t mean you can’t take radically new directions, but you see that such things happen as following from a progression of steps.

I take it this means that that radical social change can happen incrementally, like notes in a song; and that we shouldn’t get overwhelmed because we can’t imagine what the endpoint should be and don’t have a grand theory to explain how to start the revolution right now.

Is Unger’s music metaphor helpful in thinking about how we might move ahead to think about revolutionary change?

 

What is “racial capitalism”?

By Joseph Orosco (October 29, 2018)

Robin D.G. Kelley explains Cedric Robinson’s groundbreaking concept from Black Marxism:

“Building on the work of another forgotten black radical intellectual, sociologist Oliver Cox, Robinson challenged the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. Instead capitalism emerged within the feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. Capitalism was “racial” not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society. The first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and they were victims of dispossession (enclosure), colonialism, and slavery within Europe. Indeed, Robinson suggested that racialization within Europe was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy. Insisting that modern European nationalism was completely bound up with racialist myths, he reminds us that the ideology of Herrenvolk (governance by an ethnic majority) that drove German colonization of central Europe and “Slavic” territories “explained the inevitability and the naturalness of the domination of some Europeans by other Europeans.” To acknowledge this is not to diminish anti-black racism or African slavery, but rather to recognize that capitalism was notthe great modernizer giving birth to the European proletariat as a universal subject, and the “tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.””

Read more here.

Bezo’s Plan for Space Intensifies Misery on Earth

By Arun Gupta (July 20, 2018)

Consider this.
Jeff Bezo’s wealth has surpassed $150 billion.
There are at least 11,600 homeless people in King County, where Amazon is located.
Amazon recently strong-armed the Seattle City Council to repeal a small $275 annual head tax on large corporations to address the soaring homelessness in the wealthiest city in the Western Hemisphere.

Bezos sees no use to spending his fortune on planet Earth. His explicit plan is to sell $1 billion of stock a year to colonize space


“I get increasing conviction with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work that I’m doing. Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune.”

A grumpy old German bro described all of this nearly two centuries ago:

“Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

If you’re not a Marxist, you’re not paying attention.

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We Need a Theology of Liberation in the United States

By Mikasi Goodwin (June 22, 2018)

I was born and raised in Oregon, on colonized land, in a state founded specifically on systemic racism. I grew up poor. I grew up in a rural, conservative environment. I was very conservative for a long time. I am white, a trans woman, a lesbian, and a poor person. I say this to establish who is speaking, and what context I am speaking from.

When I was 13 I went to Bible Camp. Over a week away from home, our denomination’s pastors worked tirelessly to convert us. We were in church 3 times a day. Everything we did had a religious component, even when we went swimming or on hikes. By the end of the week, I felt sure that I was a sinner, that I was going to hell, and that I wanted to be saved. For the next few years I was a zealous believer in what I thought was the gospel, and what I thought was a lifesaving religious tradition.
I read the Bible fervently. I read commentaries, I studied & fasted. What I found wasn’t what I was taught to find. Time & time again I was getting a different message than my church. I was getting a message of liberation, of solidarity & of love from the gospel. Even immersed in conservatism like water, I couldn’t come to the same conclusions. This contradiction quickly led to a break with my church, and with Christianity in general. I spent a long time wandering & searching.

I didn’t find my way back to faith in a church service. It wasn’t reading the Bible that illuminated my own deeply held spiritual beliefs. God didn’t speak to me in the language of the church, in the scriptures & traditions of Christianity, or the acts of Christians I knew from my old church family. God spoke to me in the voices of people suffering under oppression, in prophetic voices unafraid to speak even the hardest truths. God spoke to me in the long struggle for liberation led by oppressed people. What did I find when I listened? I found that many oppressed peoples throughout the last 100 years have used a very specific tool to analyze their situation. That tool is called Marxism.

So, what is Marxism? That isn’t an easy question to answer. Marxism is about discovering the root of social problems, it is a radical way of analyzing the world. Marx says that ideas are the primary force that shapes our world but also that these ideas don’t come out of nowhere. These ideas are a product of human beings, of human societies, of our ‘material conditions’.
Marxism is about historical materialism. It says societies are divided into contradictory classes, slaves vs. slaveowners, lords vs. serfs, employers vs. employees. These are specific societal relationships that boil down to oppressor & oppressed. In my view, the goal of Marxist analysis is to find a way to transcend this relationship of oppressed & oppressor and create a liberated world.
The idea of creating a liberated world is by no means new. A reading of the New Testament illuminates many similar ideas about transcending class in early Christianity. The Apostle Paul said, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” These words weren’t just a pretty spiritual allegory. The early church was known for distributing their wealth equally. In the book of Acts, it says, “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” Even Jesus said, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me… …Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” The call of the gospel sounds awfully similar to Marx’s famous slogan, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.

Marxism & Christianity have often had an antagonistic relationship, but that antagonism is by no means universal. In Latin America in the 50’s & 60’s, an emergent group of Christian clergy members began to advocate for a fusion of Marxist analysis & Christian theology. The result? Liberation theology. Many of the concepts of liberation theology existed before its inception. Wherever the gospel was in the hands of the oppressed, especially in slave communities in the Americas, a type of theology of liberation sprang up. A theology that says to the oppressed, God is on your side. God is positioned as the liberator, the ultimate spiritual source of all struggles to free the slave & the captive. Liberation theology says to the Christian, you have a mission, a mission to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, and that means nothing less than the unconditional liberation of all humankind. Jesus did not come to found a religion, but to spread the message of redemption, liberation and justice.

Liberation theology is a call to return to the historical mission of the Christian church & the gospel, abandoned by Christians as Christianity became co-opted and turned into a violent & oppressive institution. I am convinced this is the message modern Christianity needs. As young people leave the church in droves to wander the wilderness because they have been betrayed, abandoned & ignored by their faith communities, this theology calls them back in. This theology called me back in, a transgender lesbian who was completely abandoned by my faith community.

We need a theology of liberation. A theology of revolution, justice and love. We need a theology that demands of us that we feed the hungry, house the houseless and put our bodies on the line for justice. We need a theology that says to the oppressed, you are worthy, your voice is important. We need a theology that humanizes, that encourages solidarity, not just charity. A theology that says, “I will give up all I own to raise up the oppressed and empower them”. A theology that spurs us to act tirelessly to free people from the bondage of oppressive systems.

To be clear, this is not about electoral campaigns. This is not about legislation. You can’t elect liberation. You can’t legislate liberation. It takes a spiritual, cultural, and deeply personal shift among all of us. It takes a revolution. It takes an Exodus from the bondage of the United States to find redemption in building a new world, one without borders and nations. This is a long struggle, one that people in the Americas have been waging for over 500 years. It is by no means impossible.

Liberation theology is an expression of this long struggle. Faith in ancestors, faith in God, faith in deliverance from bondage & oppression has carried this long struggle into today. Many on the left have lost hope that they will see liberation in their lifetime, and many in faith communities have lost sight of the vision of liberation. What we can gain from each other is a vision for a better world, and the hope that will sustain us to build that better world in our lifetimes.

When the Israelites were struggling for their liberation from Egypt every attempt to crush them was made. Even when Pharoah’s kingdom lay in ruins, he chased them until the bitter end. We will face the same kind of entrenched resistance every step of the way, but I know that together, we can overcome any obstacle that stands between us & freedom.

mika