A Critique of the “Celebrate People’s History - Build Popular Power Bloc”

north america / mexico | the left | other libertarian press Wednesday December 03, 2008 03:55 by Anonymous - Triumph Against Racism and Neo-Colonialism

An anonymously-written editorial criticizing a recent call for anarchists to "celebrate" rather than "protest" the inauguration of capitalist politician Barack Obama

On November 15th, a message was sent out across the Virginia Anarchist Federation e-mail list. Included in it was a first draft of an “inauguration call” written by two activists named Cindy Milstein and Andrew Willes Garces. In a message included in the e-mail, Ms. Milstein and Mr. Garces explained their motivations for authoring the call:

“This was prompted in part by an unhelpful call for an all-out anarchist protest of the inauguration that began circulating the day after the election. Many of us in DC are worried enough about the National Alliance et al coming to town Jan. 20, and would prefer not to also wonder about an inappropriate black bloc. This call is written to support that energy manifesting in a productive way.”

The call, entitled “Celebrate People’s History - Build Popular Power”, has since been circulated across the Internet and has generated heated debate among the comment sections of Infoshop.org, Kasama, and the heavily frequented anarchist LiveJournal community, to name a few. Dozens have people have already signed their names to the call, including the “who’s who” of North American radicalism, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.

The call starts out promisingly “Yes, we can - and should - be rigorously critical of Barack Obama”. In the subsequent paragraphs of text, however, none of this rigorous criticism can be found. In fact, the language of the call makes a sudden and immediate change of gears - “it is neither the time nor the place to critique hope” - “if we fail to recognize both the historical meaning and power of this particular moment, we will ensure our own irrelevance”.

The quickest way for anyone to ensure their own irrelevance, especially in the face of seminal historical events such as this one, is to renege on one’s responsibility to offer true and honest analysis of the situation, as one sees it through one’s own eyes. The call continues on it’s set course - “The inauguration marks a watershed event in the often cruel history of these United States, and the whole world will be watching, hoping that we’ve done just a little to grapple with the legacy of slavery, lynching, [and] segregation”

When making any political statement, the language we use, no matter how subtle, is always of great importance, and should be deliberated upon carefully. It’s obvious the authors of the call chose their language cautiously. America’s history has only been “often” cruel? No doubt this understatement is intentional - in an attempt to be dry, perhaps - but much more likely in an attempt to soften the blow of the anarchist perspective.

More troubling is the use of the term “legacy” to describe slavery, lynching, segregation - almost implying these things are distant and antiquated. Slavery is the norm of life under global capitalism, but it’s obvious the authors were referring specifically to the chattel slavery Africans suffered under during the initial stages of colonialism, which, as we should keep in mind, was abandoned by the colonial powers themselves. The big bad U.S. government even conducted a full-scale invasion, spending six trillion dollars and ending the lives of tens of thousands, to do so. Similarly, “segregation” as mainstream parlance knows it (most neighborhoods in the U.S. are still de facto segregated) was abolished in the U.S. by the force of the police, who used their muscle to safeguard the process of integration from violent and resentful racist whites.

I bring this up to illustrate the failure of black-and-white thinking. The U.S. government is bad. Chattel slavery and segregation are bad. Why would the U.S. government, which is bad, want to put a stop to these other bad things? The bourgeoisie are not the villains of Marvel comics or James Bond films, and should not be expected to think in terms of badness, but in terms of what is most profitable for them, and what is most crucial to the stability of their rule.

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, for example, railed against African chattel slavery decades before it’s abolition in the U.S. - not- as their latter-day apologists frequently suggest, out of compassion for Africans, (Jefferson, for example, routinely stated that African and Indian cultures were inferior to that of the Europeans, and never ceased beating, raping, and over-working his personal slaves) but out of concern for the inefficiency of chattel slavery and the source of potential instability it provides. As Franklin himself put it, in response to a Southern delegate’s comment comparing African slaves to sheep, “sheep will never make any insurrections”.

This very same threat of insurrection is one of the driving forces behind the capitalist system’s constant state of rearrangement, restructuring, and reshuffling. An obvious example is the New Deal, the spirit of which was summed up by a statement made by its embodiment, FDR - “I was convinced we’d have a revolution in [the] US and I decided to be its leader and prevent it. I’m a rich man too and have run with your kind of people. I decided half a loaf was better than none - a half loaf for me and a half loaf for you and no revolution.”

Is it a “victory” to be “celebrated” when we get our half a loaf? Or is it a set-back? If the sole motivation for being given half a loaf is to dissuade us from revolution, to restore our faith in the supposedly “representative” nature of liberal democracy, aren’t we dutifully serving the interests of the ruling class we purport to oppose by acting as agents of conduit for the very lies they seek to spread?

As the technological development of the capitalist system progresses, the obvious result is drastic changes in the way people live. Theater and other forms of “live” entertainment have significantly declined in popularity as film, television, and the Internet fill the niche they once provided. To the casual observer, racially-motivated lynching in the U.S. faded out of existence, perhaps out of increased awareness of and sensitivity to racial oppression. To those willing to look at the man behind the curtain, it’s obvious what’s really going on. Why lift your ass out of your seat to venture into the cold and watch a black man get hanged, when you can bask in the warmth of your entertainment system and watch law enforcement harass, assault, and humiliate random blacks, Latinos, and rednecks on COPS, or any other number of law-enforcement-themed reality shows?

Why would the most powerful political entity in the world rely on a motley crue of peckerwoods running around on horseback with hemp ropes and bedsheets pulled over their faces to intimidate and control unruly ethnic minorities, when it has the largest and most state-of-the-art prison system and police force in the world? Why would cops bother to spray black dissidents with firehoses and harass them with dogs? You don’t have to feed a TASER dog-food, after all, or screw it in to the nearest fire extinguisher.

It’s not the place of the anarchist to praise the virtues of “progress” or celebrate the abandonment of antiquated forms of social control in favor of more sophisticated ones - that’s the job of the apologists of the state. In fact, it’s the job of the anarchist to denounce these things, so why is a call directed at “anarchists, horizontalists, autonomists, anti-capitalists, anti-authoritarians, and others organizing a world from below” demanding “presence rather than protest”, insisting that “instead of breaking things, [...] we should break bread with those [...] who feel moved by Obama’s inauguration”and “stand with [those] inspired by Obama”? (The first draft of the call was even more embarrassing, referring twice to Obama’s presidency as a “baby step” and insisting that “the inauguration is neither the time nor the place to critique presidential policy”, going on to describe Barack Obama as “eloquent”, stating that “it’s their day, we need to give it to them”, and, in a moment of brutal honesty, admitting at the end that “This bloc does not support a diversity tactics but rather [...] respect[s] the celebratory spirit of the day”)

Needless to say, no anarchist ever made the argument that “the inauguration is neither the time nor the place to critique presidential policy” during either of Bush’s two inaugurations - what has changed? Either Obama’s policies are substantially different than past U.S. presidents, Obama’s higher levels of support among people of color demand a different approach, (at least those that bothered to vote - contrary to what the propagandists might have you believe, America’s voter turnout remained at around the same number this election as any other) or Obama’s African ethnicity itself exempts him from the vitriol anarchists were happy to provide Bush. It can’t be the former, as Obama’s almost exclusive appointment of unthawed Clinton-flunkies and Bush-era neo-cons has shown, and Obama’s support among people of color is about the same as Clinton’s, so it must be the latter. Would we be expected to behave the same way if Condi Rice, Collin Powell, or Alan Keyes had ran for office of the presidency and won?

The establishment hasn’t been interested in keeping individual people of color from holding positions of power for decades, as evidenced by the large number of black politicians, judges, DAs, CEOs, cops, professional athletes, and entertainment-industry moguls. This certainly isn’t a new development for black folk - black social critic E. Franklin Frazier wrote a devastatingly harsh critique of the black bourgeoisie in 1957. (The U.S. even unsuccessfully tried to give black America it’s own proxy-government, like it did for the Indians, and like the British and the French did for their colonial subjects, after the Civil War) So how did white anarchists miss the memo? Perhaps they’re too focused on trying to relive the glory days of the 60s or even the 20s. How can we be “respectful” and “listen” to the voices of people of color, as the Celebrate People’s History Bloc call so nobly suggests of white activists, when the authors have refused to listen to a century’s worth of black radical voices, from W.E.B. DuBois’s scathing criticism of the assimilationist policies of Booker T. Washington, to Malcolm X’s description of the March on Washington as a “monumental farce” that exemplified "how much this country goes in for the surface glossing-over [...] instead of truly dealing with its deep-rooted problems”. (A description that’s doubly apt in regards to Obama’s presidency)

Like so many well-meaning projects created by white “anti-racists”, this call reeks of nothing more than years of political correctness and white guilt bubbling to the surface. The white activists who wrote it have already created expectations of how They™ are going to think and act. What will happen when a person of color challenges these white do-gooders’ pre-arranged stereotype of how colored folk should behave? This unhealthy emphasis on how we need to neuter our political analysis out of “respect” implies that we would otherwise conduct our attempts at outreach in a disrespectful matter, and that we should only be expected to do otherwise when we’re dealing with someone we can outwardly identify as being of non-European ethnicity. Are people of color too stupid to hear our honest opinion, or are they too uppity? Or are white anarchists just too afraid of having strong confrontations with other people, having to defend their own positions from the verbal scrutiny of others, and, above else, having their fantasies of “working-class people of color”, as a homogenized, impersonal mass of disgruntled, apathetic, apolitical people waiting to be politicized and organized by the white vanguard challenged?

For those who think there’s no room for lighting a fire under the successive administration’s butt, the call does say that “in the days beyond, we’ll join with the millions of others in demanding fulfillment of, as Obama put it on election night, the possibility of change, as we support the growth of social movements toward a free and directly democratic society”, which screams at us to ask the question, if we have to wait until “the days beyond” to challenge the legitimacy of the state, will “the days beyond” ever finally arrive?

More importantly, is “demanding” Obama fulfill his campaign promises even our goal? Which promises should we focus on? U.S. “intervention” in Sudan, as vice president-elect Biden pleaded for during the vice-presidential debates, or withdrawing troops from Iraq to place in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as Obama has called for time and time again? Putting “more cops on the streets”, as Biden promised during his D.N.C. speech, or taking guns out of the hands of “dangerous criminals”, as Obama expressed interest in on that same night? Investing in “clean-coal”, which Obama himself nakedly acquiesced was against the best interests of environmentalists during the third presidential debate, or pushing for other meaningless “environmental” reforms, such as mercury-laced, headache-inducing CFLs?

Reforms, regardless of how much temporary alleviation they provide, are not goals, or even steps toward the goal, of those who offer a truly radical solution (radical as in digging out the fucking roots of the problem) Subsidized housing for example, only replaces the landlordism of property-owning businessmen with the landlordism of government bureaucrats, and offering food, housing, and healthcare programs for the poor, far from being some grandiose gesture of self-sacrifice on behalf of our oppressors, is necessary to keep the “reserve workforce” alive enough to toil another day. (After all, maximum-security prison is the one place you’re guaranteed a meal and shelter from the cold)

Are we fighting for queer peoples’ right to co-sign mortgages and share joint bank accounts, or are we fighting for queer peoples’ right to be free from mortgages and banks? Are we fighting to pressure the state not to deny women the right to have an abortion, or are we fighting to undermine the state’s ability to encroach on our personal freedom in the first place? Are we fighting for free Wonder-Bread, “American cheese”, rancid produce, and factory-farmed meat and milk, or are we fighting for control over our own means of food-production? Are we fighting for free access to poisonous anti-biotics and addictive pharmaceuticals, or for a society in which the practice of medicine is once again an art of healing rather than a pretense for the ruling class to lobotomize, drug, and mutilate us?

This is a question those self-styled anarchists that go as far as to celebrate Obama’s victory must ask themselves. To the rest of us, nothing, not politicians’ bribery, not the assimilation of a small minority of people of color into the predominately-white American middle class, (how much good has that done for the Jews, the Irish, the Cubans, the Italians, or any of the other oppressed ethnic groups in the U.S. that have been, at least temporarily, given a booster seat at the white man’s table?) absolutely nothing will deter us for fighting - not metaphorically, but literally - for the only dignified existence - an existence free from the very empire that Obama’s inauguration celebrates the rejuvenation of.