FIRST, MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO the tech support women at Typepad, my blog server, for showing me how to bypass my dead word processing system and assemble, edit and write Dispatches directly on my website at dispatchesfromdystopia.net. Without such expert help -- especially that most recently provided by Anna D. -- I would remain but a lost child in the alien, glitch-haunted forests of Pancomputerdemonium. (The Nurdly consensus is I was not hacked; instead, attempting to run Open Office 4.1.1 in Windows 10, I was yet another of the innumerable victims in Microfuck's ongoing war against open-source software.) Hence this special, catch-up edition of Dispatches, including much of what was to have been 8 February's post but was lost in the WP demise.
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NOW LET'S GET TO WORK. As friends, Communist Labor Party comrades and even some kinfolk will attest, I have argued for many years we USian whites will never overthrow Capitalism until we not only join in heartfelt solidarity with our minority sisters and brothers but fully accept minority leadership and thereby take to heart the pivotal lessons, strategic and tactical, these seasoned veterans of extended class-struggle are uniquely qualified to teach us all.
Nor is my stance unique. In the personal sense it was shaped by my late father -- ironically a skilled teacher despite the psychological brutality and sadism that made him an abysmally unfit parent -- who fervently believed the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement would, in his words, "force the United States to at long last live up to its democratic potential." (A few years later, I would for a time hold the same view of the Women's Liberation Movement, believing its original Marxism could save us from Capitalism's march toward fascism.) But my pivotal moment in this thinking was shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Canadian media laid bare a purported Committee for State Security (KGB) estimate of U.S. revolutionary potential in the late 1960s. It concluded that amongst most USian whites, the vast majority of whom were from comfortable bourgeois or petite bourgeois backgrounds, revolution was no more than a passing fad, while within the viciously oppressed African-American, Hispanic and First Nations communities, as well as within a tiny segment of the white Working Class, revolution was correctly viewed as a matter of survival. Hence while the KGB analysts evaluated the revolutionary potential of the Caucasian community as near absolute zero, it rated the revolutionary potential of the minority communities as quite high, though it simultaneously concluded these communities were of themselves too small to qualify for clandestine Soviet assistance.
(Note I write of this KGB analysis from memory; the reportage in question, which appeared in print c. 1992-1993, as I recall in Maclean's Magazine, has either never been referenced on the Internet or has been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole, though I suspect it could yet be confirmed by any researcher who had access to a major Canadian library.)
In any case, the implicit conclusion is obvious: either we whites learn to listen to our Black, Hispanic and First Nations sisters and brothers, or we remain slaves forever. After all, is not listening the first step toward building solidarity? Thus the following, the best (i.e., most thought-provoking) essay on intersectionality I have yet read, reprinted in full with permission from its author, Black Agenda Report Managing Editor Bruce A. Dixon, to whom my most sincere thanks.
Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism, Part 2
By Bruce A. Dixon
WHEN I TOOK A swipe at intersectionality last week, declaring that it was a hole, that afro-pessimism was a shovel and it was high time to stop digging, some friends and comrades were displeased. As far as they were concerned, questioning intersectionality amounted to a frontal attack on the place of women in the struggle against capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire, utterly inconsistent with my own politics and that of Black Agenda Report. I also threw some rocks at afro-pessimism, which I labeled the nappy headed step child of intersectionality, to the disappointment of its defenders, some of them friends and comrades too. Additionally neither group admits to understanding why I lumped them together, so I’m taking this opportunity to clarify both critiques and what joins them.
"The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis..."
Intersectionality is a termed coined by California law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 in her attempt to convince her fellow officers of the court to refine anti-discrimination law by incorporating the recognition of multiple overlapping oppressions into anti-discrimination law. While the term hasn’t made much headway the last three decades in the arguments of lawyers or the decisions of judges, it’s become a pervasive buzzword with multiple meanings in the realms of politics and the nonprofit industrial complex.
Nowadays, and perhaps from the start, as Sharon Smith explains in an indispensable August 2017 Socialist Worker article titled “A Marxist Case for Intersectionality ,” there are two separate, distinct and mutually incompatible intersectionalities. The first, she says is firmly in the camp of the real left, those who oppose and aim to overthrow capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four. This tradition, which puts intersectionality in the context of class analysis and class struggle goes back at least to Claudia Jones in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and the Cohambee River Collective in the 1970s, although neither of these ever heard or uttered the word “intersectional.” The second intersectionality according to Smith, is rooted in post-structuralism which categorically rejects socialism and class analysis, and downgrades the importance of class struggle at most to something coequal in importance with ageism, ableism and speciesism. With no anchor in class struggle, and emphasizing the oppressed experience of individuals and non-class groups this kind of intersectionalism acts to perpetuate the division of the US left and wannabe left into squabbling constituency groups vying for attention, funding and acknowledgement of whose cause is the most righteous. With neither the means nor the inclination to contend for power, this intersectionalist emphasis on individual experience and deeds has given rise to atrocities like callout culture .
Unfortunately this second version of intersectionality is nearly hegemonic among self defined radicals and even liberals in the academy. Since it’s vigorously promoted by sectors of corporate media and the funders of the nonprofit industrial complex , it’s likely to remain so for the forseeable future. Worse still, since class conscious and class oriented formations neither dominate or even figure prominently in the US left, the class struggle intersectionalists are seriously handicapped at playing the game they say they want to play. Add to this the fact that some left feminists doggedly insist on using the same name for themselves as the anti-socialist, anti-class struggle intersectionalists who have a far broader reach and bigger microphones, and we have what can only be described as a hot mess.
"...the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric to deceive the unwary..."
Zoologists identify about a hundred species of birds they call brood parasites . A brood parasite lays its egg in the nest of a host species, and it counts on fooling the host mom into hatching, feeding and raising the hostile alien offspring. Evolution has engineered the parasite chick to out-eat, out-compete or simply butcher its nest mates. The parasite chicks often grow bigger than both parents put together while still being fed in the nest. In the context of the real left, the community of those aiming to overthrow capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire – not two or three out of four but all four, the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric and branding to deceive the unwary and ensnare many bright, serious and sincere leftists into defending and promoting its fundamentally hostile project.
Melissa Harris-Perry was lauded as a leading intersectionlist at the same time she aggressively defended the government’s right to intercept and record every email, text message, phone call and electronic brain fart on the planet and store them for future inspection. DemocracyNow, which has given more air time to intersectionality than perhaps anybody, refused to cover the lynching and ethnic cleansing of black Libyans during Obama’s 2012 war on that unhappy country even though they had a correspondent on the ground. To this day DemocracyNow dependably spouts US propaganda justifying Obama’s and Trump’s war on Syria. Angela Davis gets credit for being a leading proponent of intersectionality too, even though like hordes of other intersectionalists, she lost her mind over Barack Obama. All these people are examples of intersectionalists, with bigger audiences and far more visibility than left feminists are likely to achieve any time soon. When bona fide left feminists defend the word intersectionality and call themselves intersectional they confuse the lazy, the naive or unwary, they surrender their own credibility to the anti-socialist intersectionalists, and they provide protective cover to the eggs of these brood parasites. It doesn’t have to work that way.
In the natural world brood parasites have been around for millions of years, long enough for hosts to evolve defenses against them. Birds defensively mark their eggs and their chicks to distinguish them from hostile parasites. Sometimes they stand watch to sound the alarm at the presence of intruders and strange eggs, and more. These are lessons left feminists might do well to emulate. You defeat a brood parasite not by adopting its name, but by making it easier, not harder to distinguish the parasite from the real thing. Real left feminists will never get as many professorships, grants, media outlets and TED Talks as the anti-socialist intersectionalists. They invented the term anyway, for their own reasons not yours. Get over it. The real left can't get intersectionality back and there was never a time when they had exclusive possession of it anyhow. Claudia Jones and the Cohambee comrades made themselves perfectly well understood without it.
There’s no shortage of sharp, erudite left feminists who can if they want, come up with some new terminology that will allow ordinary people to distinguish between the anti-socialist intersectionalist project and authentic left feminism without a six paragraph discourse on postmoderism and post-structuralism. We cannot wait on natural selection to take care of this for us. At the risk of being that cis het guy who offers unsolicited advice to woman comrades, I respectfully suggest this is something that needs to happen real soon.
"Like the dominant version of intersectionality afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle..."
I said last week that afro pessimism was a stepchild of intersectionality. Like the dominant version of intersectionality, afro-pessimism is pretty explicitly anti-socialist and anti-class struggle. It’s about centering (the woke intersectional word for putting something first and last and ignoring all else) the totality of anti-blackness, the permanent war against black bodies, black aspirations, black lives, black livelihoods and black dreams. Sounds a lot like Ta-Nehisi Coates. Like intersectionality, afro-pessimism is not a theory. Like intersectionality, it only describes and does not explain. Like the prevailing flavor of intersectionality, it enjoys considerable support in the academy and mimics enough “woke” rhetoric to deceive the unwary into imagining afro-pessimism is some new kind of emancipatory project, that it prescribes or informs solutions and strategies to tackle real world stuff, even though its foremost proponent Frank Wilderson says it does not.
The only instance where afro pessimism seems to have anything prescriptive to say about how struggle ought to be conducted in the real world is afro-pessisms’s consistent disparagement of the possibility of achieving anything in coalition with anybody who ain’t black. It’s never worked before, the afro-pessimists say, trotting out a long historical list of times and places white “allies” turned tail and defected from the cause of their black compatriots. But since in just about every instance neither the fickle white allies nor the black formations in question were class-based, class oriented or led by the working class it’s hard to see how things could have turned out differently. It’s a problem the Green Party, which I’m part of, has to this day. If the state, the media and the so-called economy are contraptions a particular class uses to rule the rest of us, how do you contend for power when you don’t have a class analysis, or even recognize the importance of class? Nobody can be a dependable ally, a steady rock on either side of an alliance contending for power without a class analysis and an understanding of how power is exercised.
Clearly, the afro-pessimist injunction against working with non-blacks is a prescription for impotence. People of African descent are 13% of the US population. Slavery didn’t end until the political moment when a plurality of white people sided with blacks to end it. Reconstruction folded only when that plurality was shrunken, disarmed and shattered. Jim Crow also ended at the political moment that a plurality of whites took the same side as blacks to kill it. But afro-pessimists, even the ones who talk about reparations, rule coalitions off the table period exclamation point. How they plan to achieve that without cultivating and working with non-black political partners is anybody’s guess. But I misspoke-- Afro-pessimists do not plan. They engage, they propose, they put on a show making the point that nobody is or ever was as oppressed as they are, all in the same self-involved spirit of post structuralist intersectionality. Their shtick isn’t even unique; there’s a queer pessimist discourse that sounds a lot like Frank Wilderson or Ta-Nehisi Coates on whatever drug is the opposite of speed.
Tellingly there was no queer pessimism in the early 1980s, when gay men (and even greater numbers of straight black women) were dying like flies from then untreatable HIV-AIDS. People were too busy fighting for their lives then, just as our own ancestors in the 1950s, the 40s, and prior decades had no time for anything like afro-pessimism when Africans in America could be lynched with impunity and Jim Crow was an everyday reality. Queer pessimism only emerged after drug therapies enabled people to live decades with HIV-AIDS. Similarly afro-pessimism only surfaced after enough black faces got comfy spots in the academy.
A few years ago a young comrade in school somewhere told me his professor was insisting that Europeans colonized Africa and maybe the Americas too not because they wanted land, slaves, gold and empire, but because they feared and/or envied the sexual potency of all those outa control black bodies. After I stopped laughing, I assured my young friend this was errant nonsense and I didn’t think about it any more. Now I know this is part of a concept Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson and other afro-pessimist academics call, presumably with straight faces, “libidinal economy .”
Ta Nehisi Coates has fashioned a lucrative and prestigious career out of that stuff, although I doubt he would call himself an afro-pessimist. Nice work if you can get it. I really believe the afro-pessimist shtick is about one-upping Coates. It’s working well for him, maybe it will work for them too.
(Bruce A. Dixon can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)georgiagreenparty.org., also via Twitter @brucedixon.)
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"(An) intra-Korean deal could open a new path to negotiations between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs and a final settlement of the Korean War—if Donald Trump is willing to take such an off-ramp from the crisis. But it’s not just Kim Jong Un who has taken the diplomatic initiative to open such a path out of the crisis. Moon Jae-in has been working to advance such a compromise since he was inaugurated as South Korean president last May." (Significantly, any reportage on the Moon proposal...has thus far been suppressed by the war-mongering U.S. mainstream media propaganda apparatus.)
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Another example of U.S. law enforcement helping JesuNazis and other white supremacist groups target anti-fascist activists and anti-Trump/Pence Regime protesters.
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Seventy-three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and 36 Democratic Senators joined with Republicans...to pass a two-year spending bill that does nothing to protect immigrant communities and throws undocumented 'Dreamers' under the bus." NOTE: Amongst these Democrats, who by their votes have abandoned all pretense of being anything other than fascists, white-supremacist imperialists (and therefore JesuNazi sympathizers), are Washington state's Senator Patty Murry and Rep. Denny Heck.
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"Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a notice outlining extraordinary plans by the social media company to monitor all the postings and messages of its users, censor independent journalism, and use artificial intelligence (AI) to report users to the police and intelligence agencies."
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"From its earliest establishment in America, capitalism has been guilty of enriching its private fortunes out of the most savage robbery of the Negro people and the most ruthless exploitation of the labor power of Negro working people, both during the era of chattel slavery, and throughout the span of the century since emancipation."
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"The most cynically brilliant outcome of the ‘blame Russia’ campaign has been to neuter left activism by focusing the attack on Donald Trump rather than the interests he represents. As evidence, the proportion of Goldman Sachs alumni in Mr. Trump’s administration approximates that in Mr. Obama’s and what was expected for Mrs. Clinton’s. If the problem is Donald Trump, then the solution is ‘not Trump.’ However, if the problem is that the rich substantially control American political outcomes, how would electing ‘not Trump’ bring about resolution?"
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"What were more than 7,000 'doughboys' (U.S. soldiers) doing in Siberia at the end of the First World War?"
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"The political crisis in South Africa derives from the failure of Zuma and the leadership of the ANC to actually oust white monopoly capital from the commanding heights of the economy, after nearly a quarter century in nominal power. Instead, they have fatted a new class of Black bourgeoisie, most of them ANC-connected, as junior partners with the white monopolists through the government’s Black Economic Empowerment policies."
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"Elizabeth’s New Life Center is part of 'a collaborative effort within the state of Ohio to provide abstinence education to students through in-school programming,' according to the organization’s website. It is the regional coordinator for the 'Ohio Adolescent Health Centers' collaborative program and had received four years of funding from the Ohio Department of Health in 2011. A Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion case study on the collaborative notes that it uses 'sexual risk avoidance strategies' and is paid for 'with federal funding provided through the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant (aka Title V).' Comment: JesuNazi theocracy marches on.
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Recovered from the hitherto-lost text of 8 February 2018:
“These days, Trump mocks Schumer as "Cryin' Chuck" on Twitter and Schumer paints Trump as an unreasonable negotiator who "won't take yes for an answer." But the two have had a close working relationship over years that belies whatever harsh words they exchange today. One example: Schumer has received more donations from Trump across his career than any other sitting member of Congress.”
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“A quiet coup d’état has taken place in Connecticut. The legislature has effectively turned over control of the state to Wall Street.”
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“...white people who are more prejudiced toward black people are also significantly more opposed to welfare.”
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“In the U.S. the absolute majority of the working masses, deprived of elementary rights to survival, are hovering in the abyss of nightmare.”
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“Which is more frightening? The destruction of the environment and the climate that sustain human civilization as we have known it? Or the collapse of democracy and the rise of endless war and fascism?”
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“(The Trump/Pence Regime) has announced that as of January 31 it will stop distributing food and water to residents of Puerto Rico...Politically, the short shrift Trump has given Puerto Rico in the face of the ruinous intensity of Hurricane Maria only adds to the evidence of his bigotry. This will... help him with the white nationalists he has clasped close to his chest.”
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“When Puerto Rico’s governor Ricardo Rosselló announced last week his plan to privatize the nation’s largest electric utility, he justified the move as a remedy to the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe being inflicted upon the population... (the utility) was deliberately run into the ground, starved of resources, and allowed to mire in corruption. Meanwhile American capital, abstaining from investment in the productive forces of Puerto Rico, instead offered indebtedness, fully conscious that this would lead toward default and set the stage for the looting of public property.”
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“Consumed with a Coke versus Pepsi ideological battle, framed within an uncontested arena of historicized nationalism, most Americans, and the political parties to which they owe allegiance, are magnificently unprepared to grapple with their nation’s irrelevance in defending them from the unfolding realities of our geo-historical moment; even less, to comprehend the apparent acts of war being waged by non-human forces – forces with which we must now find an accommodation.”
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“What Trump and his GOP backers want is ethnic cleansing.”
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“This new narrative of FBI integrity and neutrality is predicated on the assumption that most of the public has forgotten or is unaware of the notorious history of the FBI and its founder, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a racist anti-Semite and fascist sympathizer. He shared his obsessive anti-communism and anti-Semitism with Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Gestapo chief, who Hoover corresponded with personally and kept on the FBI’s mailing list right up until the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.”
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“Tobacco changed the entire dynamic of colonization and control in North America. Finally, there was money to be made. The Englishmen shipped the newest vice eastward and pulled a handsome profit in return. Our beloved forefathers were early drug dealers...soon 'blackness' became inseparably associated with slavery and the lowest of social classes.”
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“It’s unclear exactly how many kids in the U.S. are malnourished, but there’s some disturbing evidence: A quarter of toddlers don’t receive enough iron, 1 in 5 children are obese, 1 in 6 households with children are food-insecure, and over half of infants participate in the federal Women, Infants, and Children program for supplemental nutrition.”
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“An outspoken neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier is set to become the Republican nominee for an Illinois congressional seat.”
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“Nearly one in three disabled undergraduate women experiences sexual violence.”
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“The Trump administration approved Indiana’s request requiring some Medicaid recipients to work to get benefits on Friday, meaning thousands of people in the state could soon be without health insurance...Indiana is the second state whose Medicaid changes have been approved, following Kentucky in January. A handful of other states have also sought federal permission to amend their Medicaid programs, from adding work rules to mandating drug tests.” Comment: Obviously, an example of the Capitalist/JesuNazi post-deathcamp methodology of genocide.
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“Republican Congressman Invited a Holocaust Denier to Be His Guest at the State of the Union Address.” Comment: the headline tells the whole story: like the proverbial birds of a feather, Nazis flock together.
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“In 2016, 45 million people did not fill their prescriptions because of cost, half of them are becoming even sicker because they do not have access to medication. Please sign this petition in support of common sense policies to lower drug prices in America and expand access to lower cost medication from pharmacies in other countries.” NOTE: I am not so foolish as to believe the Capitalists and their JesuNazi puppets can be swayed by petition, but I nevertheless post this item because the prohibitive cost of prescription drugs is another perfect example of the post-deathcamp methods of genocide employed our overlords.
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IN MEMORIAM: a statue of Hungarian-born U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, was unveiled Thursday in Budapest as those attending praised the man known for his advocacy of democracy and human rights around the world.
LB (with help from TigerLille1)/ 8-10 February 2018.
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