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"We won't win every battle. We won't save every child. But together we can be the standard bearers of human dignity by being present in humility and in solidarity with the world's most vulnerable individuals, families and communities." - Joia Mukherjee

I try to live my life by this motto. It's hard though. Sometimes it definitely feels like I lose more than I win. That more children are lost than saved. That those who are saved mostly save themselves. But it's aspirational for me.

Being a teacher is kinda hard too, because sometimes you have to do things in the long-term interests of the child that short-term might make them not like you so much. I try to keep in mind that I am really working in loco parentis, in the place of the parent, which means that I need to have the long-term interests of the children foremost in my mind. How can I help them to grow into self-reliant, literate and educated individuals?

In the end, I believe that I am a "standard bearer of human dignity". That my students understand that I value them as human beings, that I care for them as individuals. And the work I am doing has significance in teaching children both life-lessons (mostly implied) as well as pushing them to achieve in the academic arena.

BTW - the quote came from an article in PIH Bulletin, published by Partners in Health. PIH is one of my favorite organizations; founded by one of my heroes: Paul Farmer. If you are looking for an organization to support financially, I highly recommend PIH. They are doing important work, but more importantly, I believe they are doing transformative work. Also, if you haven't yet read Mountains Beyond Mountains, the biography of Paul Farmer by Tracy Kidder . . . get thee to a library!

Latest Read: Efuru

Nwapa, Flora.  Efuru.  London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1966.

I got this from a friend of mine who recommended it, saying it is the first recognized post-colonial book out of Africa.  Or something to that effect.  I enjoyed it, although it took me a while to get into the writing style.

Stylistically, it seemed a bit, well, simplistic.  It definitely wasn't what I am used to - the sentences tended to be short and choppy, rather than have much flow to them.  On the other hand, it sometimes reminded me of storytelling, in the oral tradition.  Still, it was a challenge for me, though by the end I was definitely into it - there's definitely some suspense.

Overall though, the characters don't seem to have much life to them (and my favorite work is character driven).  It's a tragedy whose central character is a woman, Efuru.  But throughout it all, there's not much emotion.  She makes up her mind to marry a guy even though he can't provide a dowry and her approach seems very business-like.

The central theme is the change from the old ways to more modern ways.  Consistently, the elders of the community complain about the youth going off and doing things, though it seems pretty clear that the elders were rebellious in their own time.  However, this shift from a traditional way of life to a modern way of life is something different.  It is impacted by the influence of White colonialists.  Much of the change is seen as negative, although there is a doctor who cures several characters using modern medicine, so it isn't all bad.

Efuru, in many ways, is both traditional and modern and therefore can be seen to represent the broader experience of Africa; both traditional and modern, but ultimately, also a tragedy.

Slumming and the Bourgeoisie

I suppose I'm as guilty as any middle-class white boy trying to kick it with the poor little brown children.  Trying to pretend that I can appreciate the "high brow" culture that I was raised in (Beethoven, Monet, fine wine) along with the "low brow" culture I claim to enjoy because it's "real" (hip-hop, for instance).  It is somewhat of a tradition in hipster culture to do this crossover.  To claim adherence to both ends of the spectrum, anything but "middle brow" - the petit bourgeois crap that is neither real nor aesthetically good - like garden gnomes.

But I've always also had a problem with the hipsters - it's always felt a bit condescending and a bit touristy.  Kinda like a cultural safari: the subjects safe inside their RangeRover gawking at the objects and their quaint little culture of the "real".

In my defense, I like to think that I've situated myself as culturally opposed to pretty much everything and then selective of those cultural objects wherever they are found (and there isn't shit in the middle brow) that match the culture that I wish to create.  Namely, cultural objects which are steeped in revolutionary tradition - so Beethoven and Public Enemy and Strike Anywhere and Johnny Cash all fit together pretty damn well to my ear, even if they don't have a whole lot in common musically.

What do we die for?

As human beings, we have the innate ability to sacrifice our individuality for the good of the collective.  Sometimes, that collective is writ small - our families, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, sons and/or daughters.  Sometimes it is writ a bit larger: our friends and/or associates.  Sometimes larger than that: our people and/or our nation.

And we kill for that which we are willing to die for.  It seems there is a connection within violence and that it all connects back to how we define ourselves socially.

Who counts as "us" is who we sacrifice for.  Who counts as "them", the other, is whomever we are willing to perpetrate violence against and/or whom we expect violence from.

It appears to me that there is less of a willingness to sacrifice for the nation.  The youth I meet can't even conceive of dying for the nation - it is insanity, not heroism.  The individual is celebrated at the expense of the collective, at least when it comes to the nation.  I believe that there is some level where they might see sacrifice for others as a positive, but just not at a national level.  Does this portend the downfall of the nation?  I think so, and this is sad to me, at least in as far as the nation is not being replaced by a larger humanitarian concern.  I critique the way the nation is used as a division b/w the world's people, but I think we need to think of our social groupings in larger terms, not smaller.  

"Workers of the world, unite!"

The Value of the Work Ethic in America

It's an old saw, really - if you study hard, work hard, etc., you will make it.

Make it where?  The assumed place that you want to make it is into the middle class.  Of course you want to make it there - that's where social power resides in America.  I've contended that bourgeois culture is completely corrupt, but then where does one turn?  I've argued that we need to build a new culture - not an oppositional culture, but a new culture from scratch.

But let me concede the case for a moment . . . let us agree that the bourgeois life is the goal.  So, does hard work get you there?  Well, yes and no.

First, without hard work, making it is nearly impossible.

But hard work is also not a guarantee.  For some, it is about plain old good luck - Andrew Carnegie: born a poor Irish immigrant.  Worked in a factory.  Got a windfall opportunity from his boss to own a piece of the company and from there he built his empire.  Had he gotten a job at a different factory, or his boss had been a different person, it never would have happened.

For others, it is about the opportunities that come (or not) more easily because of one's family, socioeconomic status, race, gender, etc.

If you've been keeping up with me over the last month or so, you know that I'm a dreamer.  I'd like to see a society where the opportunities are openly available to all, where people build communities that care for each other, where hard work is not just rewarded, but is truly its own reward because the worker has control over their own labor.

Courage in the War on Terrorism

I've been hearing a lot about drones lately. You know when it makes it into the pages of Time magazine that it's beginning to sink into the national consciousness . . .

These are those drones killing people in Pakistan, but being piloted from just outside of Sin City, USA. And they aren't helping much in the battle for hearts and minds . . . did you hear the new one about the Pakistani woman who dumped her American boyfriend? She said, "He shoots his missle from 30,000 ft!" Ba-dum-dum-ching!

No, but seriously folks, what struck me is that the people are calling Americans cowards, and I think they are right. We now value (American) human life so much, we aren't willing to risk it. It goes back to the criticism Walzer had about the way that war in Israel gets fought - soldiers' lives are valued more than the enemy, uniform or civilian.

It's the flip-side of the argument that terrorists are cowardly for attacking "soft" targets instead of fighting it out mano-a-mano. The only difference is that on the one hand you've got the most technologically advanced and richest nation in the world attacking farmers with guns; and on the other hand you've got people with homemade bombs killing themselves along with their targets. I hate to say it, but it seems to me that we've got to rethink how we define what a coward is.

Race and Class (pt 3)

Given the previous post on the Incorporation of America, it seems appropriate to return to my thesis on the intersection of race and class.

The bourgeois American culture is dependent on the notion of civilization.  It holds this up, but there has also been an ongoing debate and contest over what counts as civilized.  Could Irish people be accepted into the notion of American civilization?  For a long time, the WASP bourgeoisie was resistant.  Ultimately, as we see happening in the late 19th century, race functions as the primary othering agent against the lower-classes by the bourgeoisie.  And so, race and class are conflated - race becomes a stand in for class.  The bourgeoisie isn't afraid of the racial other per se, but rather the racial other as poor, and as a physical threat.

But race functions somewhat differently among the working-class.  Within the working-class, race works to divide the people against themselves.  Competition for jobs and economic well-being is a primary driving force of this phenomenon.  So, also, is a desire for cultural acceptance within the bourgeoisie.  Finally, the othering process is alive and well here, too.  Denied cultural acceptance by the dominant group, people define their own cultural groups for cultural strength, but at the expense of the other, thus impacting the ability to create class-based resistance to what is really a class-based domination.

So, race is used as a proxy for class in an argument to maintain the bourgeoisie.  In essence, the dominant American culture of the bourgeoisie allows relatively small groups to count themselves as "in" the culture, even while maintaining a specific Other.  Ultimately, American culture has been changed by these non-dominant cultures, while maintaining a heavy class-based hierarchy, which still is impacted by the othering processes, and still includes members of otherwise incorporated groups.  So, the working-class remains divided, and the bourgeoisie survives.

Latest Read: Incorporation of America

Trachtenberg, Alan.  The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

This book was a pretty straight-forward and cogently argued piece on the transformation of American society around the turn of the 20th century.  Trachtenberg focuses on the development of American culture at the time as being pushed by the technological and industrial processes that were driving economic development.

The argument is really focused on the development of the bourgeois culture of the time - the analysis of working-class culture is more muted.  In fact, Trachtenberg's subtext is that bourgeois culture becomes American culture.  Certainly, this is played out in the literature of the time (as opposed to the dime novels).  In any case, Trachtenberg examines this new American culture through the other impacts of industrialization on America - Westward expansion, mechanization, labor, urbanization, politics and literature.

The final chapter is focused on what Trachtenberg sees as the culminating point of this new culture (after which, I think he would argue, it enters a period of denouement) - White City.  White City was the center piece of the Chicago's World Fair of 1893.  The city of the fair was white - made of plaster that lasted only for about as long as the fair lasted, several months.  However, it was also a very "White" city, in that it was meant to exhibit the crowning achievements of White American civilization (in arts, industry, etc.).  It was contrasted with an exhibit area outside of the city for the uncivilized, savage cultures of the non-White parts of the world.

Trachtenberg does an excellent job of showing how the process of Othering the savage is integral to the development of bourgeois American culture.  The foundations of American culture in the 20th century are laid here, not far removed from the Civil War and its aftermath 

Women . . .

In the May 25th edition of Time magazine, I read the following:

"Women are also less competitive, in a good way.  They're consensus builders, conciliators and collaborators, and they employ what is called a transformational leadership style - heavily engaged, motivational . . ."

Ahh, fearless reader, it looks like we've found the new femininity.  Is this really biologically determined?  It sounds like the authors are suggesting that women are nice; men are mean.  Women are group oriented, men are individual oriented.  Right?  

It's in the genes.  

Or is it all bullshit?

I vote for the latter.  Women are human, oh, and btw, so are men.  And that particular fact says a lot more about our commonalities and is the biggest argument against this essentializing crap that sells books, defines culture but doesn't represent Truth (big T).  I might concede biologically defined differences between men and women on some level, but to suggest that these differences then define men and women is a different story.  Especially when you consider the fact that all of my female friends complain more about their female peers' cattiness and backstabbing ways than about the men in their lives.

People are competitive, period.  Thanks Time magazine for reminding me how entirely bourgeois and culturally normative you really are.  Gotta love ya.

Masculinity and Effeminacy

Been noticing these terms a lot lately, and they've been bothering me.  I think in part it's because masculinity is typically seen as a positive and effeminacy as a negative.  And masculinity itself is often times wrapped in an ideology of violence, certainly of power.  The two terms end up being opposites in a grander ideology of gender, but effeminacy is not exactly peace, definitely powerlessness, but more weakness.  So strength is directly related to power, and more particularly to violence in opposition to weakness.  The implication is that there is a link between violence and weakness, a sort of yin-yang, which is kinda fucked up.

And then there is the notion of emasculating, which I've also seen lately.  This also has negative connotations, which I also have issues with.  The implication, again, is that power and manliness are one and the same.  It turns out that masculine as a word only entered the American English language in the late 19th century as part of the imperialist project, which had it's roots in gender and racial domination.  It's not surprising then, that the term has violent connotations.

Is there a more accurate way to talk about the issues, then?  Well, yes and no.  No, as far as people who are making a claim for a gender-specific power that includes violence as a means of wielding such power.  This is an ideological issue that p.c.-ness will not cure.  Rather, the ideology itself needs to be challenged, not the use of the language, per se.  On the other hand, I think it sometimes is used to describe a more general grievance about power inequality that gets framed as being specifically male-centered, but is rather centered on other issues - in which case, the issues should be more carefully deconstructed and a non-gendered response to the power inequality can then be crafted.

The Revolutionary and Hegemony

Preface: I've been accused of using too many big words, so I'll try to break it down a bit.  The problem is that when one is popping off about this or that one prefers to use words that more exactly mean what one is trying to pop off about.  For instance, in the following I am going to be talking about hegemony, which is kinda like culture, or a dominant culture, but it's more than that.  In the book Eight Hours for What We Will reviewed previously in a Latest Read installment, the author used the term "hegemony" inappropriately.  For him, it was the middle class culture attempting to assert itself onto the immigrant working classes (which more-or-less successfully defended themselves).  His idea of hegemony was defined as the culture of dominant class, which is not it at all.  I argue instead that hegemony is the meta-culture (big word again, I know); the umbrella culture that all the other cultures end up falling into.

Example: in today's world, hegemonic culture teaches us that boys are better than girls, that the very essence of being a boy is called into question if one is not stronger (physically, and arguably intellectually) than any random girl one encounters.

Example: in today's world, hegemonic culture teaches us that status and success are directly measured by one's salary and/or indicated by material possessions - cars, houses, clothing.

So, it doesn't matter whether you are black, latino or white.  It doesn't matter if you are immigrant or native.  It doesn't matter if you are west coast or east coast.  It doesn't matter if you listen to rap, rock and roll, country or classical.  It doesn't matter if you are a lawyer or a pimp.  It is the culture of America.

The Meat of the Matter:

The Revolutionary is in a predicament, because the Revolutionary is dedicated to changing the culture, but is also a product of the same culture.  The pitfalls are many.

On the one hand, there is danger that in trying to counter the power relationships that exist in society, the Revolutionary will merely replace them with new, equally unequal power relationships.  Example: Communist revolutions to date (Russia, Cuba, China, etc.).  This connects back to my arguments against cultural nationalism.

On the other hand, there is the problem of recognizing and dealing with one's own cultural expectations and identity.  This gets at the problem of the Martin Luther King, Jr. being a great leader for equality in one area, but also being pretty damn anti-woman within his own organization.  As Revolutionaries, if we are true to our pledge to create a just world, we must recognize and deal with the counter-revolution within our own souls.

This is an ongoing process, as we can never truly know ourselves, we may not recognize the ways that we have been negatively shaped by our culture, but we should be open to the possibility.  I was encouraged today to read a blog-post from a friend of mine.  It turns out, fearless reader, the Revolution is alive and well in our youth . . .

The Individual and Culture

To what extent can the individual break out of cultural hegemony?  Obviously, it happens.  I suspect however, that it is ultimately a matter of choice: one does not choose to not belong to a culture, but rather chooses to belong to a different culture.  Human beings are social animals, after all.

It's kinda like language - one must choose a mode of communication (to be most broad about it), so we can either use the language we are taught growing up, or we can choose a different language to use, but ultimately, we still must use language.  Same thing with culture . . .

It's a bit more complicated than that, as we can choose bits and pieces of the cultures around us, as many people are with religion (or at least were, 5 years ago . . . curiously enough, I haven't heard much about it recently).  And, of course, fearless reader, I have issues.  My argument for culture mirrors my argument for religion: I feel like something meaningful is lost when you mix and match.  The whole of a culture or a religion is more than the sum of its parts, so mixing and matching ends up losing meaning.

Anyways, the point is that we as individuals are still bound by culture, even in the rejection of culture, which makes things complicated.  There was an old comic strip in the 90s that poked fun at kids who rejected main-stream culture as being too normal by adopting "grunge" and then all looking the same as each other.  But I always felt that the comic strip missed the essential point: the kids weren't being hypocritical, but rather potentially revolutionary (sorta - not surprisingly, fearless reader, I got issues here, too) by joining a culture of opposition.  Essentially, the problem wasn't their sameness, which the strip mocked, but rather their valuing of individuality in the first place - which is really the hegemonic ideology despite any evidence to the contrary.

Who the Hell are You?

I'm going to take a brief break from my obsession with race, culture, class and the revolution, dear leader, to turn my attention to  . . . metaphysics?  I think the term applies in this case.

Anyways, the questions under consideration are:

1) Is it truly possible to know another person?

2) Can we ever really know ourselves?

The basic argument is as follows: Let us say I have a hammer.  It was my father's and his father's before that.  When my father had it, the handle broke and he had the handle replaced with a new one.  Since it's been in my possession, I've had the head of the hammer replaced.  Is this still my grandfather's hammer?  Well, yes and no.  I still refer to it as my grandfather's, because it has attached to it a sentiment of identity - but clearly it is not the hammer that my grandfather used.

In the same way, our own bodies are being replaced without our even being aware of it.  Cells die all the time and are replaced (that dust you sweep and vacuum from your floors: that's your skin).  You have grown up (and in my case, out).  You have gone through major transformations, so on the one hand, you are still you.  On the other, you are physically a completely different person - not you.

Finally, you have also changed your mind - if you are like me, you have changed some pretty fundamental beliefs about life and God and who you are.  So, even your self, your mind, your identity is malleable and if it hasn't changed yet, it most likely will.  So, you are not even you in the sense of identity, of the fundamental sort.

And what does it mean to know somebody?  To know their habits, their likes and dislikes, to know how they will react in any given situation - to know their future, on some level.  But if we are liable to change to be completely different people, how well, really, can we know each other?  Never mind the fact, that we know each other based on our actions, not our thoughts.  The interior world is forever hidden and in shadow, even if we attempt to "open up" and let others in, it is only possible by being mediated through the outside world: actions and language (the best and worst of communicating mechanisms - that hides as much as it makes plain).

And can we really know ourselves?  I've already suggested that we can't even identify what we mean by ourselves.  But to press the point, and make it a little less abstract, we put on acts and then convince ourselves that our acts are our reality (but it's an act, right?), we have ideas that we can't make sense of, can't express, can't find the right words for.  So, fearless reader, the question remains . . . who the hell are you?

Speaking of the Revolution

You might ask, fearless reader, what's the problem with the revolution in the United States?  There isn't much going on in the population that should be the genesis of the revolution itself.  There are far more people like me on the radical left - bourgeois philosophers and "activists" (whatever the hell that means) and we spend more time talking to each other than doing anything meaningful.  Oh - and when we talk about "the masses" (whatever the hell that means) it tends to be entirely condescending . . . as in, those stupid masses, or marginally, not much, better: those poor, defenseless masses.

In my defense, I'd like to think that my role as teacher in an "urban" school (whatever the hell that means) is to teach young people to think - giving them the tools to rethink the world they find themselves in.  I worry about multiple versions of the bourgeois leftist educator: there are those that teach young people and are either dogmatists and don't allow the students to think for themselves, or want to "save the children" by dumbing them down; then there are those that teach at the university level, where they either are similarly dogmatic, or just way too removed from real life.

Anyways, what is the role of the radical-left bourgeoisie?  I think we can be supportive, but essentially need to stay out of the way.  We shouldn't be, cannot be leading the masses (a la Lenin), but at this point it seems that we've lost connection with the proletariat, so we need to work on rebuilding that.  How?  Through organizing - I'm going out on a limb here, but I feel like it has to be along the lines of the old Communist cell - in communities, working intimately, even if it's only in small groups that may not be all that well connected to each other.

That's the theory for folks that want to pick that up . . . I'm not an organizer - not even a people person, really.  So, I'm gonna keep doing my little part: teaching the young'uns to think (not what to think).  Hypocrisy is a bitch.

Culture and Family

What is a family anyway?  I suppose I'm probably arguing vs. late-20th Century family values rhetoric on this one, but I have a feeling that argument isn't quite dead yet.  It's funny, now that I think of it, that good ol' family values definitely got less play over the last decade, what with GW focused on torturing our way to security with a quick stop to trample on the Constitution.

Anyways, what is the root of the family?  I don't have much faith in evolutionary sociology, but I would argue that family is one of those basic human elements that have been passed down to us via our DNA in order to help us (and therefore our DNA) survive.  Basically, we are hard-wired for social structures, and family is the society at its most basic.  So, family is society and it is the basic means for social reproduction.

Identity is also largely a family affair.  The fad, or hobby, or whatever, that is genealogical research confirms this; and don't forget the desire that adopted children have to know their "real" (by which they mean "biological") parents.  Somehow, we think we do not know ourselves without knowing our DNA - as if we were trapped in bodies and minds that we can't make sense of without knowing the people that made them.  We are our family; our family is us.

And family might be the most conservative of social forces - the ultimate root that keeps us from the revolution.  The family is us, not them.  The family is the most basic social structure and it is the one place where we put our trust - or want to.  The dysfunctional family is dysfunctional because trust is impossible.  For the families we are born into, or the families that we create the most dangerous aspect is that we would be willing to do anything - including kill and torture - in order to keep our families safe.

So, as human beings we are ultimately afraid - on some level, we are still in Hobbes' state of nature.  But we must trust in each other, so we draw lines - who's in?  who's out?  The revolution, in my eyes, is when we draw the line in the broadest, most inclusive way.

Latest Read: Young Stalin

Just for the record: I'm not a Stalinist.  In fact, the man disgusts me.  But I was interested - how does a man get to become an evil dictator and kill millions?  Turns out, Stalin's early life (when he was better known as Joseph Djugashvili) has a pretty direct connection.  He wasn't killing millions, but he was living in what amounts to a Wild West frontier environment where trust was in short supply and shootouts part of life.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of the book under review, Young Stalin, does a fantastic job of tracing Stalin's family background and early life leading up to the Bolshevik take over of Russia in 1917.  In fact, this might be one of my favorite non-fiction books of the last few years.  The pacing is great, the lives of the people are presented in vivid detail, and the author knows how to turn a phrase.

Stalin started out life inauspiciously enough born into a poor Georgian family.  His father was a cobbler, but more importantly, a drinker.  In and out of Stalin's life for some time, finally he was out permanently and the mother was left to find a way to raise the child.  Ironically enough, Stalin was sent to the local Orthodox school where he became top of his class.  His academic potential earned him the financial support necessary to move on to higher education (and out of his home town).  But at university, his propensities towards rebellion clashed with the dictatorial power of church education in tsarist Russia and he fell in league with other misfits from the school, eventually joining Lenin's growing ranks.

Tsarist Russia was a shambles of corruption and ineptitude, but the secret police managed to inspire distrust and betrayal within the small bands of Leninists around the nation.  Stalin's claim to fame came through a bank heist he orchestrated and his first meeting with Lenin came about when he delivered the goods to Lenin's headquarters in exile.

Stalin's other formative experience was in exile.  Stalin's frequent arrests and exiles (and escapes) were really times of rest and plotting with and against comrades.  His one period of prolonged and straining exile hardened Stalin, rather than breaking him.

Basically, fearless reader, his formative experiences seemed to have been life in the "Wild West" atmosphere of Georgia; intellectual rigor and challenge at school and in private reading; his experiences in conspiracy theory within the fractured and infiltrated Party; and his life in exile.  Montefiore seems to single out what he calls the conspiratia as the ethos that molded Stalin into the man who would kill millions of people that he saw as threats to his regime.

I was left with a few questions on the applicable lessons to the revolution in the United States.  For instance, why did the wildness of Georgia lead to a multiplicity of political groups and ideas being batted around, whereas the United States' West was wild, but not particularly political in the same way?  I'm guessing it has to do with an American hegemony that did not allow room for the ideological debate; and decentralized power, which made revolution less obviously necessary. 

Education and Bureaucracy

K-12 education is a human enterprise that is built on relationships.  In the end, the teacher is very much in loco parentis.  It is, in actuality, a different relationship than the parent-child relationship, but it is similar.  Much more similar than the currently in vogue conceptualizations of the teacher-student relationship or the old concept which they claim to contest.

The (obviously failed) educational paradigm of the past is the bureaucracy.  The modern state (as in nation-state)  is organized by bureaucracy.  Despite it's bad name, bureaucracy does do some things exceedingly well (see: the military).  Unfortunately, education is not one of them.  I would bet that if you did a comparison of the size of a educational system's bureaucracy and compared it with the quality of education that students receive, that there is a negative relationship.  The larger the bureaucracy, the worse the education provided.

Public education in the United States began in Boston as a means by which the community (of maybe a thousand at the time) took care of itself (specifically, training their religious leaders).  This was not a bureaucratic, but rather an organic undertaking.  It was communal.

The problem with today's educational reform movement is that it claims to challenge the bureaucratic norm, but all too often it seeks to replace the bureaucracy with a corporate norm.  Schools should be run as businesses: more competition is good for education.  Students, and parents, are seen as customers.  But this is also a fallacy.  Students and parents are not customers.  Sometimes schools must do things that specifically hurt the short-term interests of students (by not passing them), which violates the axiom that the customer is always right.

The big question, fearless reader, is can public schools be successful in the modern world?  Or does the answer lie in charter schools?

Here We Go Again . . .

Listening to yesterday's edition of Democracy Now! I was reminded of why the American left is a mess.  We've forgotten the concept of unity - if somebody on the left does something that we don't agree with, they automatically get labeled as an enemy - Other.  So, the left gets more and more fragmented and ultimately it becomes more about ideological purity than real-world revolution.

Today, it's about single-payer healthcare.  Granted, it's important.  Granted, the Congressional hearings and Obama's moves so far are a bit frustrating for those of us (apparently 60% of the citizenry) that support single-payer.  But the rhetoric is telling . . . the representative from Single-Payer Action Network said something along the lines of this: "the enemy is no longer the insurance industry, the enemy is now the corporate Democrats like Obama."

Obama's not perfect.  And he certainly doesn't represent everything that I believe in.  But we on the left should be supporting a President (certainly early in his administration) that comes from us.  Somehow, I don't think there were many conservatives that called Bush the enemy when he did (the few) things that rankled their feathers.

Revolution and Culture

It's all Gramsci's fault, really.  I mean, what the fuck does he really mean by hegemony anyway?  The dude's writing revolutionary philosophy in prison.  Everything he writes is being censored, so he writes this really convoluted stuff.  It's brilliant enough that people think they understand what he's saying, but nobody really gets it.

I'm a take a stab at it for the shits and giggles.

Hegemony is the winning side in the cultural battle - in the US, materialism is the hegemony.  It infects everything we do.  Even if there were a communist revolution today that took over the government, nobody would go for it, since the culture itself is materialistic and anti-communist.  So, in order to create the conditions that might make the revolution possible, we first need to reconstruct the culture.

The problem is that the reproduction of culture is intimately tied into social reproduction.  In fact, I would argue that advertising has impacted the cultural reproduction such that social reproduction reproduces the conditions of poverty, but the youth - that holy grail of the advertiser - is barraged and steadily influenced to adopt a more materialistic culture than their forebears.

So, popular culture is inherently anti-revolution.  What about ethnically self-conscious cultures?  For many years, revolutionary rhetoric has been couched with ethnic nationalisms.  But in reality, this is oxymoronic.  Ethnic nationalisms are centered on cultural patterns that are idealized and constructed of historical patterns of the relevant ethnicity.  Revolutionary rhetoric is used as a reaction to the dominant American capitalistic culture, but it is an oppositional, not constructive rhetoric.

Mao's famous quote about revolution and reaction notwithstanding, Maoist political groups, both in China and in the US (Black Panther Party, Maoist International Movement, Revolutionary Workers Party), are inherently conservative and reactionary movements.  They are oppositional, not constructive.  Not coincidently, they are also predicated on ethnic opposition to European/White American domination.  But the reaction leads to some pretty sick and twisted dictatorial shit.  This isn't revolution; this is tyranny.

If one is truly dedicated to revolution, to change, one has to work towards a worldview that is beyond, not in opposition to the world that is.  Opposition is really the other side of the same coin, to use a metaphor I took from a great documentary on the Weathermen.  The revolution is about getting into the third dimension and getting outside of the two-sided, two-dimensional politics of the coin.

Hope in Our Youth?

It's become cliche . . . the aging "revolutionary" that never did more than sit around and complain about the "man" looking wistfully upon the youth and wondering what the fuck is wrong with them.  Revolution is supposed to be a young person's game, but the elders don't see much hope in today's youth . . . they seem to have bought in to America's culture of materialism.

The problem with this attitude is that invariably the youth revolution is centered on the bourgeois youth rebellion.  I'm all for that - the bourgeois youth should be fighting to destroy their own class interests in the name of the revolution (hell, look at me).  But the center of revolutionary power can't be in a group of privileged youth . . . it necessarily must be located in the ranks of the proletariate.  Admittedly, a quick look there doesn't appear to show much, but actually, fearless reader, I have a glimmer, a ray of hope.

To be somewhat contradictory, it's because I am a teacher and I feel this gives me a particular vantage point.  I teach the children of the American urban proletariat and they appear to have a glimmer of hope, which then, makes me hopeful.  I'm not sure I can explain it, but my students, on the whole, seem to be thinking about life and society differently than I am used to (it's been a decade).  There is a consciousness that is growing . . . not so much about the situation (they know that only too well), but about the possibilities of change.  Maybe it was Obama's election.  Maybe the frustrations and the failures of the previous generations are being forgotten (this is what I attribute as the cause of the cyclical nature of revolutionary action).  Maybe it's just time.

I hope so.

The Development of Whiteness

Oh, fearless reader, it is funny indeed how life works out.  You go from one book to the next, one reading to another and they seem to work in dialogue with each other.

To be honest, I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised at the serendipity as I am taking a course and there is much reading involved, but still . . .

The latest gem comes from Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race by Matthew Frye Jacobson.  In it, Jacobson argues that pre-1840 there were essentially 2 races: Black and White.  However, with the rise of European immigration between 1840 and 1920, there is a variegated whiteness.  Irish, Italians and Jews are all marked for disapprobation by the White power structure because they are not culturally the same as the dominant Anglo-Saxon population.  

It's an interesting argument, although I am not finished and the focus on this particular time period leaves out the eventual ways in which the concept of White is enlarged to make room for those ethnic groups.  In terms of argumentation and writing style I prefer Racial Fault Lines: the Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California by Tomas Almaguer.  But this enlarges essentially the same argument to fit the United States.

What I found most interesting about it was the ways in which the Irish essentially maintained their ethnic identity by "Othering" the dominant culture.  Eventually, based on some other reading I've done, the dominant culture and Irish culture reach an accord of sorts, as Irish force the concept of Whiteness to include them (by establishing themselves as not-Black).  So, Jacobson's argument is interesting, but ultimately, I think he overstates the ways in which ethnic groups are pushed out as "other" to the dominant culture.  Clearly, these White ethnic groups are othered, in the beginning, as different.  But the most essential division in America, the one that defines America, is between Black and White.  So, really, it's just a matter of time before American culture changes and adapts and the definition of Whiteness stretches a bit, but in the end, the essential facts remain unchanged.

Israel, Palestine and Just War Theory

Walzer has just published another essay, this one he co-wrote and appeared in the NY Review of Books. In it he and his co-author directly address the work of Israeli pundits that places an emphasis on saving the lives of Israeli soldiers at the expense of Palestinian civilians.

This is the natural, logical conclusion of the "anti-war" message of support the troops - bring them home. That is, fearless reader, that the real reason we want to end a war is to protect the lives of our own. This line of thinking directly feeds into and off of the "othering" philosophy and behavior that plays out especially during wartime. We keep meticulous records of the several thousand US war dead, but the numbers of Iraqi and Afghani casualties is almost never recorded or talked about. They remain part of a large mass of others out there who all hate us and threaten us and would do us harm if only given the chance.

So, the West has been busy building weapons systems that leave "friendly" soldiers out of the line of fire. There was a recent report on Democracy Now! about the Predator drones in Afghanistan that are piloted from Nevada. We have created the capability of killing without threat of being killed, and without even really having to confront the reality of one's actions. The line between soldier and civilian is getting murkier.

And so, the Israeli authors argued that in order to save Israeli (soldier) lives, it was justified to use massive force in the form of artillery to destroy buildings in which terrorists were holed up, never mind the fact that many civilians might be living in said buildings.

Clearly, the massive inhumanity of the wars of the 20th century has affected us, but it appears that we have lost the sense that war, in itself, was responsible for the inhumanity of millions killed. Now, it appears, war is back in fashion, as long as the only ones dying are the "others". Given the massive technological advantages that the West has, and the process of "othering", I'm not surprised that terrorism has grown. The question, as always, is how to get people to stop the cycle of "othering" that leads to the dehumanization that justifies or excuses the violence?

Latest Read: The Promised Land

Mary Antin, an immigrant to America from the Jewish Pale in Russia, wrote The Promised Land in 1912.  It is an autobiographical account of life in Russia as well as her years in America.  It is the account of an immigrant, but while she claims to be writing on behalf of the millions of other immigrants to the United States, in reality the bulk of her years in America are mostly her personal accounts of life in the Boston Public Library, the Natural History Club at the Hale Settlement House, and at Boston Latin School.  These mark her experience as exceptional, rather than the norm.

Fearless reader, the book should be read through the lens of an early-20th Century Progressive, bourgeois, liberal perspective.  It falls neatly within this tradition with its focus on uplift through education, specifically classical education.  Antin presents herself as exhibit A in the defense of immigration and specifically in arguing for the possibilities of immigrants to be subsumed and assimilated into a New England intellectual culture.

Antin begins her story at the beginning - that is, gives background on her family and proceeds into her earliest memories.  The most riveting parts of the book are in this section, as she describes life in Russia, and particularly the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and the role of the pogrom.  It is not all that different from the relationship between Blacks and Whites in the American South, the pogrom sounding much like what we would recognize as a lynching.

In any case, her family managed to carve out for itself a prosperous life, complete with servants and fine things and education for Mary, until illness brought the family's fortunes down.  Having spent all of their money on "treatments", the family finds it difficult to regain their economic footing, and so Antin's father emigrates to America and a few years later, tells his family to meet him in Boston.

Mary is able to reestablish her education in America, falls in love with George Washington, and becomes a writer and a proselytizer for a particular version of the American Dream that is born in this era: the immigrant version of prosperity.  The Promised Land is an interesting account, and certainly its implied arguments for the role of the immigrant in American life, as well as the glory and possibilities of public education are well-taken.  However, it is hard to see the account as particularly emblematic or typical of the immigrant experience.

Michael Walzer on Torture

As I mentioned, I've jumped on the Walzer bandwagon.  However, there were a couple of essays that raised some serious questions for me.  One "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands", dealt in part with torture.

The following hypothetical is framed: An honest politician pledged to peace in a protracted war wins office.  Among his first decisions is whether or not to torture a suspect that has knowledge of a terrorist attack that will claim the lives of many civilians.  He orders the torture in order to save the lives of the civilians.

Walzer continues, "When he ordered the prisoner tortured, he committed a moral crime and he accepted a moral burden.  Now he is a guilty man.  His willingness to acknowledge and bear (and perhaps to repent and do penance for) his guilt is evidence, and it is the only evidence he can offer us, both that he is not too good for politics and that he is good enough.  If he were a moral man and nothing else, his hands would not be dirty; if he were a politician and nothing else, he would pretend that they were clean."  (Emphasis mine.)

My issue is that Walzer seems to be condoning torture in certain circumstances.  But I think really, he's arguing for an exception that proves a rule.  Really, though, he argues for something more than that.  That is, that it is important that we, as a society that aspires to morality, condemn torture in all circumstances, but that in practice it might be necessary to torture . . . but that the condemnation still stands.

This is what angers me most about the Bush officials that Obama has refused so far to target for prosecution.  Either they have lied and dissembled about the fact that it was torture.  Or they have defended themselves (a la Cheney) and argued that it was a good thing - that they had a moral obligation to torture, or even worse, that the ends justified the means.

Walzer does not buy that the ends justify the means.  Nothing justifies torture, fearless reader . . . but sometimes it may be necessary to do anyway and the politician should take responsibility and acknowledge it's wrongness.  The fact that Cheney feels good about the use of torture is extraordinarily disturbing.

Torture

To prosecute or not to prosecute, that is the question.

The question is no longer whether or not it is torture.  Mark Danner wrote an exposé on the torture of prisoners in the New York Review of Books (Part 1, Part 2).  No matter what people say, water-boarding (and one suspect was water-boarded 180+ times!  - it's sick, really) is torture.  So, now Dick Cheney and his ilk don't even bother with the pretense that it wasn't torture, but rather argue that it was worth it.  That we needed to torture in order to extract information to protect our nation.

So, as Danner points out, the next step is to figure out whether or not we got the information we needed.

According to this article in TIME magazine, we did get important information when we tortured suspects, but the torture was unnecessary . . . we could have gotten the same information without using torture.  And the writer of the article is Robert Baer, a former CIA man, so you'd think he'd know what he was talking about.

So, where does that leave us?  Well, for one, it vindicates everything that had been said before hand - everything that Bush denied.  Secondly, it shows how much of a moral fraud Dick Cheney and all his supporters are.  Thirdly, it raises serious questions about what America stands for (that Obama is addressing, thank God).  Fourthly, it presents the question: to prosecute or not to prosecute.

So far, Obama has been reluctant, and I understand that reluctance.  We have had too much partisanship over the last 20 years or so.  We need to start reforging a sense of what it means to be an American - a sense that is inclusive of many perspectives.  But it is also important for us to draw some lines (othering, so to speak).  If there is one line that I think it is important to draw, fearless reader, it is the line that torture is not something that represents America.  I think we need to have some sort of investigation and public shaming, if not outright prosecution.  To do nothing would only abet those that would save America by destroying America.

Beyond Identity Politics

So, why all this obsession with race and class and culture in the early entries of my blog?

Well, firstly, it's because I believe they explain a lot about the history of America and our current situation.

And, secondly, because I believe that we need to move beyond identity politics.  That the future of hope and justice and goodness is a future that is outward looking, rather than identity politics, which is inward looking.

This is difficult, for what oppressed group should be expected to embrace difference?  A defensive posture is expected, but ultimately detrimental.

Our future as human beings, can't be based on difference, but rather one that embraces what we all have in common: our common humanity.

At the same time, fearless reader, I reject the easy answers from the right that tell people to get over it, that created the false notion of reverse racism, which only makes sense in the context of an original racism that blatantly demands that those that are wronged must not defend themselves.

I suppose that all I ask people to do is keep the door ever so slightly ajar; to be defensive, but also to be open to the possibility that it doesn't have to be this way; to look for possibilities for forging truly human communities of love and justice and equality and freedom.

Does Race Still Count?

I've been mulling over this idea that we're in a post-identity politics period.  I hope so as I'm getting tired of identity politics; I think they are distracting us from building a real movement and culture of change; and I think if we are in fact beyond identity politics, and that this is a good sign of things to come.

But, then, does race still count?

Well, yes and no.

Clearly, racism is no longer publicly and politically acceptable.  The numbers of African-Americans making it into the bourgeoisie grows.  African-Americans are accepted without question in communities that didn't have a single person of color not that long ago.  Perhaps most importantly (in terms of creating acceptance in the broader American culture) African-Americans are in the public eye regularly as success stories.  And the process of cultural integration is slow enough without the history of slavery and racism to contend with, so progress, right?

I hope so.

But, I have the sneaking suspicion that in reality we've just conflated race and class in a whole new way.  The Black proletariat is (as usual) still incomprehensible for America, even if all other people, of all races and ethnicities, are accepted.

Perhaps we are headed for a true cultural integration.  (I avoid the term assimilation, because I would argue that Black culture has and will continue to impact American culture as much as, if not more than, it is affected back.)  But then, fearless reader, I wonder who gets Other-ed next: immigrants are always the easy targets, ones that don't speak English are even easier.  It would be nice to put an end to these remnants of a culture of hatred.  That would be the real revolution.

Race and Class (pt 2)

I'm going to try and once and for all address the issue of class (and the way that race plays a role in class) in America in the hopes of feeling like I can put this to rest for the time being.

America is a capitalist nation.  Our economic system creates, by the virtue of the way it exists, economic inequality.  This inequality is ultimately explained as the just way that scarce resources are distributed - if people were not lazy or incompetent or stupid, they wouldn't be poor.  So, naturally, people are ostracized and demeaned and dehumanized for being low-class.  Class becomes the structure of our social system, a product of our economic system, but not merely, or necessarily, dependent on income.

Race and ethnicity play their role in this system because certain groups are assumed to be higher class because of their race (read: White) while others are automatically class-suspect due to their race (read: Black).  Individuals and groups then, given that our purpose in life (at least in the US) is to climb the economic ladder, vie for inclusion in the assumed successful group and typically do so by avoiding the cultural signposts of the pariah group.  There is an argument made by every group that they should be accepted within the concept of "White" and much of this is by arguing that they cannot be associated within the Other concept: "Black".

Latest Read: Eight Hours for What We Will

Rosenzweig, Roy.  Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Dear fearless reader: 

Worcester, MA once was a major manufacturing center, specializing in producing wire.  In some ways, Worcester's development mirrored that of other industrial cities.  Large numbers of immigrants from ever changing locations, new wealth derived from capitalistic successes, and the process of urbanization determined the life of Worcester as a city.  However, Worcester did not, unlike most other cities in America, have a significant union movement.

Rosenzweig doesn't really attempt to explain this phenomenon.  He ascribes the failure to the strength and paternalism of the local captains of industry.  However, the lack of a union movement is significant for Rosenzweig's argument that workers, although they could not resist the control of management over their labor, found ways to resist culturally instead.

Rosenzweig considers the culture wars of turn-of-the-century Worcester through four battles: over saloons, over the Fourth of July, over parks, and over movie theaters.  In each case, he presents the history of working-class life, the attempt by bourgeois Worcesterites to assert power and control over the workers' cultural life, the workers' resistance, and ultimate accommodation between proletariat and bourgeoisie in the development of a new American culture.

Ethnicity seems to be the primary means by which working-class (and later middle-class ethnic) people organize their lives.  The saloon develops by neighborhood and is an ethnic institution.  The Fourth of July celebration was different depending on which ethnic group celebrated it.  Neighborhood parks tended to further support Worcesterites' ethnic affiliation.  However, Rosenzweig's evidence shows broad commonalities among different groups of similar class orientation.  In general, working-class people were considered "rowdy" and "boisterous" irregardless of their ethnic background.

Ultimately, ethnic neighborhoods get to keep their saloons, despite a strong temperance movement dedicated to shutting them down.  Workers simply ignored many of the laws that attempted prohibition in the 1800s.  But, the saloons do eventually become regulated and commercialized (the two main brewers in Worcester basically became controlling interests in the vast majority of watering holes in the city).  A similar process happens with all Worcester institutions and their particular cultures are subsumed within a larger, "American" culture.  But the process isn't simply one-way, or top-down.  There is a back and forth dynamic, with working-class people successfully mediating the ways in which the new culture is developed and changing larger Worcester cultural patterns at least as much as their own cultures are reshaped.

The argument is fairly persuasive, but Rosenzweig has a number of problems.  First, and perhaps not least, Rosenzweig goes to pains to say that Worcester is unlike most of the rest of America, which makes one wonder about the implied argument that Worcester is a case-study for a pattern of industrial development.  

Secondly, his argument that bourgeois Worcester was attempting to impose its culture upon the proletariat ignores the fact that bourgeois Worcester was itself going through massive cultural changes provoked by the influx of new wealth.  Perhaps the picture is better described as a battle of cultural equals over what the new culture of industrial Worcester will be.  Or not.

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, he ignores the ways in which race has to play a role in the development of culture in America.  As much as he wants to argue for a working-class ethnic culture that resists a bourgeois take-over, I kept wondering, to what extent are they also fighting to be included in the broader culture, to be considered White?  Instead, Rosenzweig refers to African-Americans exactly twice: once while reflecting on a larger cultural resistance argument by mentioning blues music in passing; and once to point out that Worcester had a small Black population.  But, particularly if he is making an argument that Worcester's experience is reflective of a broader industrial experience, even if the popluation is small, he should have looked at how that small group of "other" people played a role in the cultural development and inclusion of European immigrants into the white dominant culture.

Race and Class (pt 1)

Okay, I didn't really expect this blog to be all about race, culture and class, but I seem to be on a roll here, so might as follow up with my reflections on race and class, a thread I expect to pick up repeatedly.

So, I'll probably reviewing Eight Hours for What We Will tomorrow and will get into the dynamics of class (and comment on my frustration with the lack of an analysis of race) in the failure of the progressive impulse in America at the turn of the 20th century.

For now, let me comment on the interplay of race and class.

Essentially, the culture of the United States has long been defined by race.  America has been defined as "white", in part by defining itself as not "black".  Black, fearless reader, is not just the new black, but is, in fact, what white America is not.  (Perhaps not incidentally, there are some indications that this is beginning to change - for now, since the process is far from complete, I will assume that the "other" for America is still "Black.")  America, the home of the free, of course, is therefore also the home of the other - the not so free.

And given that we love capitalism - we believe in the power of free markets; we believe that those who deserve, get it; and those who don't . . . well, fuck those who don't (the not so free; the "other" . . . you see where I'm going with this, don't you?)

Okay - so for all y'all who want to argue with W.E.B.; that don't think that race matters in America anymore; that want to believe it is all about class, and race isn't an issue . . . hmm.  Race is class.  It doesn't matter if there are Black people in the middle class . . . the class that America most worries about is the Black working-class.  The White working-class, hell - they're practically bourgeois.  The Black working-class - they're practically criminal . . .

And this is what destroys the dream (and it is my dream) of a working-class revolution to remake the American economic system along lines more consistent with old-fashioned American values like justice and equality.  Perhaps the dream can be reborn; that a real movement of people in solidarity with each other - regardless of race - can be fashioned to challenge the system that keeps us all divided.  But we would need to create a common culture, crafted outside of, yet inclusive of, the cultures that we've been promised are ours.  Unfortunately, we seem to be too attached to our parochial interests to make that happen.

My Problem with Cultural Conservatism

Culture can be like nationalism.  If a culture is being othered, or dominated by another culture, the natural response is to fight back by returning the favor: the dominating culture becomes othered.  This is a similar process to what happened in the wake of Napoleon's domination of Europe or Europe's domination of the rest of the world.  In Napoleon's case, Italy and Germany, in particular, crafted national identities to resist.  In the case of the rest of the world, the national movements of the 60s and 70s developed.

But the problem is that none of that was unproblematic.  Italian and German nationalism turned into fascism: Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on the hatred they could whip up over the others in their society and around them.  In the rest of the world, you have the stereotypical 3rd World Dictator, genocide, and terrorism.

So, nationalism, although it was a revolutionary force in some ways, also was manipulated into a very conservative and hate-filled force.  I worry, fearless reader, that culture can be manipulated in the same way.  Cultural imperialism is injurious, but the cultural reaction by the dominated cultures can also be problematic and can keep cultures from growing organically (any change is perceived as a perpetration by the dominant culture) or from seeing the commonalities among groups (which particularly hurts cultures that are in similar positions vis-a-vis the dominant culture).

In the future, I will be discussing the way that this has worked in the United States and why I think the United States never faced a serious challenge to capitalism.