UPDATE: Upon looking into the issue further, I discovered that Feministing provided an excellent explanation of the evils of the ban when it first took effect in April:

I am so tired of having to read the qualifier from mostly white Western feminists before any discussion of the veil ban that the veil is sexist but . . . In the context of global patriarchy doesn’t this qualifier belong in front of, like, everything? It seems to me we have a lot easier seeing -isms in a cultural context different from our own, and a lot harder time seeing agency. To veil or not to veil is a question to be navigated by Muslim women – what kind of feminism supports the imposition of values and behaviors on women by a government?

I’m struck by the timing of the ban going into effect, as France re-engages in colonial violence in places like Libya. There were two major flavors of colonialism: kill everyone who was there and take the land for yourself (dominant in the Americas), and fix the backwards people by making them like us, while using their labor and their land, the preferred method of France. People raced as Muslim or Arab were brought into France to serve its economy with very little personal gain in the first place. I can’t help think about this as France engages in violence where they have clear oil interests at the same time they try to stomp out cultural diversity within the nation. The country claims to be secular, but the veil ban is a reminder leadership still holds white, Catholic values. Women are so often the targets of colonial violence, and I see the ban as part of the continued project to make them like us.

So, it would appear that the problem is, yet again, the insistence that middle class feminists are allowed to speak for women of other cultures, regardless of whether these women accept it or not.

INITIAL POST: Secular misogyny in France remains in place:

Kenza Drider's posters for the French presidential race are ready to go, months before the official campaign begins. There she is, the freedom candidate, pictured standing in front of a line of police — a forbidden veil hiding her face.

Drider declared her longshot candidacy Thursday, the same day that a French court fined two women who refuse to remove their veils. All three are among a group of women mounting an attack on the law that has banned the garments from the streets of France since April, and prompted similar moves in other European countries.

They are bent on proving that the ban contravenes fundamental rights and that women who hide their faces stand for freedom, not submission.

When a woman wants to maintain her freedom, she must be bold, Drider told The Associated Press in an interview.

President Nicolas Sarkozy strongly disagrees, and says the veil imprisons women.

Drider makes the observation that the law effectively places women who believe that, for religious reasons, they should wear the veil, under home detention, because going out in public subjects them to insults from the populace and possible arrest. Not surprisingly, she has experienced both.

Drider has therefore revealed the true motivations behind the the enactment of the ban on the wearing of the veil. First, it has the effect of segregating these woman from the rest of French society, much in the same way that early Nazi measures against the Jews, such as the requirement that Jewish businesses identify themselves with a Star of David, did in Germany, and secondly, as occurred in Germany to much greater degree, it empowers the populace to abuse them whenever they encounter them in public. The government is relying upon xenophobes, like those who have historically supported Jean Le Pen and his daughters, to enforce the ban and create a climate of intimidation instead of the police.

Upon encountering this, one wonders, where are the feminists? Are there reports of feminist support for women like Driver? I haven't encountered them, so I'd be curious if any readers have run across any. You'd think that feminists would be concerned about a law regulating the dress of women that has the consequence of driving them underground to avoid public harassment. But no, turns out that French feminists are, by and large, characterized as being proponents of it, providing ideological justification for the measure. Nabila Ramdani, a Parisian born free lance journalist and academic of Algerian descent, has stated that very few feminist groups have actually supported these women's freedom to cover-up, arguing that it is men who are invariably forcing them to do so. Beyond the harassment, the willingness of these feminists to embrace a law that legitimizes French xenophobes is particularly alarming. Combined with the enthusiastic support of some publicly prominent American feminists for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, it is not surprising that feminism is at risk of being trapped in a Eurocentric ghetto because of the cultural biases of its most visible proponents, proponents with more social acceptability and media access than those with a contrary perspective.

Driver herself is a personal refutation of the prevailing French feminist notion that the veil renders a Muslim woman as nothing more than the property of her husband, that it constitutes a form of imprisonment. She wears the veil in public, risking harassment and arrest. She engages in civil disobedience. Even more striking, she is now running for President of France. Of course, she is probably not the norm, but can we really say that there is any norm at all in regard to something so personal as one's religion and one's practice of it? No doubt, there are episodes of domestic violence involving Muslim men and women, but, as As'ad Abukhalil periodically notes, it is highly questionable whether it is more common than domestic violence involving others. Perhaps, if there are feminists who want to liberate the Muslim women of France, it might be a good idea for them to talk to these women without preconditions, and discover what sort of liberation they really need. They don't necessarily believe that banning the veil is part of that process.

Labels: Afghanistan, Eurocentrism, Feminism, France, Immigration

Someone, perhaps it was the ubiquitous Sasha, asserted that if people from Mexico attempted to force their way across the border with the US, the US would respond with force equal to, and possibly even greater than, the force used by Israel against Palestinians on Sunday. I tend to disagree with him for several reasons, primarily because of the economic relationship between the US and Mexico as well as the social unrest that it would ignite within the US itself, particularly in states like California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. But he has revealed an important aspect of the occupation that deserves more than the scant attention that it commonly receives, with the recognition of it limited to academia and international providers of security services.

Sasha has implicitly associated the occupation with broader issues of global border contral, and despite his Zionist stance, he is correct in doing so. It is an emerging narrative of the occupation that is as important as the dominant one regarding the conflict between Zionists and Palestinians for the land of Palestine. There is, in fact, a frightening symmetry between the evolution of the occupation and international methods of border control, so much so that the occupation often serves as a testing ground for policies and technologies utilized elsewhere, especially in the US. Prior to the mid-1990s, there was a time when the occupation took a somewhat more benign form in terms of the intrusiveness of social control measures and technologies, but, in the immediate aftermath of Oslo accords, Israel commenced the installation of a system of border checkpoints that has culminated with the ongoing construction of what critics have called the Apartheid Wall, as well as the militarization of daily life. The part of this process that gets ignored, possibly because it is contrary to the tendency of many around the world to hold Israel solely responsible for the abuses of the occupation, is the effort to integrate these measures into other border control situations.

One of the most obvious examples of this process was the attempted construction of a border fence, known as the Secure Border Initiative network, or SBInet, by the US along the border of the US and Mexico, cancelled last fall. Not surprisingly, the US looked to Israel in 2006 for its construction before abandoning the project:

For the SBInet project, the Boeing/Elbit consortium proposed the radical idea of 1,800 towers equipped with cameras and motion detectors stretched across the border. For possibly the first time ever, the words Israel and border are in the same sentence and it doesn't have anything to do with its own borders. The talent and expertise that Elbit Systems (NASDAQ ELST) has employed for years in protecting Israel's borders will now be put to use on US borders to keep Americans safe.

Kollsman Inc., an American-based subsidiary of Elbit, has been selected as a member of the winning consortium by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) to supply technology to identify threats, to deter and prevent crossings, and to apprehend intruders along the US borders with Canada and Mexico.

Kollsman, headquartered in Merrimack, New Hampshire, is a development, manufacturing and support organization providing advanced electro-optical and avionics systems to the commercial aerospace, military and homeland security markets. The company's expertise includes enhanced vision systems, flight displays, head-up displays, thermal imaging systems, fire control systems, and advanced security and surveillance solutions.

The Secure Border Initiative is the latest attempt by the United States government to use technology to secure its borders, stop smuggling, and prevent illegal immigration. After September 11, illegal immigration is not just seen as a social problem, but also a national security issue. A unique aspect of this initiative was that Homeland Security gave the bidders total freedom to create new ideas of how to apply both new and old technology to secure the US borders.

Except that it is not really accurate to say that the US looked to Israel, as the consortium of corporations involved in the aborted construction of the fence, Boeing and Elbit, are transnational, with both companies listed on US stock exchanges. Accordingly, it is more appropriate to say that transnational corporations, many headquartered in the US and Israel, have utilized the occupation as an experimental testing ground for technologies with an anticipated global application. Given the proliferation of surveillance cameras and airborne surveillance in the United Kingdom to the extent that it is considered the most surveilled society among industrialized countries, I would not be surprised to discover that UK corporations are playing a prominent role in this effort as well. Of course, the deployment of technologies originally developed for border control for the purpose of mass surveillance shouldn't surprise anyone. Hence, the occupation, and the technologies associated with its imposition, are part of a global, transnational corporate effort to maintain the separation of the poor of the Global South from the wealthy of the Global North and monitor virtually every aspect of our daily lives. In this respect, Chicano activists in California have much in common with the Palestinians enclosed within the occupied territories, and they have supported the actions of Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of California, as most recently expressed through the support of MECHA for the Irvine 11.

Furthermore, as you may recall, the US engaged in extemporaneous forms of occupation inspired border control within Iraq during some of the most intense periods of Iraqi resistance. Starting in late 2003, the US partitioned Iraqi cities, creating, in the words of Robert Fisk, a controlled populace. By August 2004, Toufic Haddad described US methods as synonymous with those of the occupation:

. . . the use of aggressive techniques of urban warfare with an emphasis upon special units, house to house searches, wide scale arrest campaigns (almost 14,000 Iraqis are now in prison), and torture; the erecting of an elaborate system of watchtowers, military bases, check-points, barbed wire, and trenches to monitor, control, and restrict transportation and movement; the clearing of wide swaths of land next to roads; the use of armored bulldozers to destroy the homes of suspected militants; the razing of entire fields from which militants might seek refuge; the heightened relevance of snipers and unmanned drones; and the attempted erecton of collaborator networks to extract information from the local populace about resistance activities -- both military and political.

Accordingly, an ethnic, sectarian emphasis upon the nature of the conflict in Palestine, while appealing to those seeking to organize among nationalistic Americans seeking to avoid US culpability in the actions of Israel, doesn't come close to addressing the real dimensions of the struggle.

Meanwhile, in regard to Europe, the occupation is consistent with an ideological belief in the necessity of rigorous border control to prevent the entry of people characterized as culturally dangerous. The governments of Italy and France are expressing alarm over the possibility of an influx of North Africans in the absence of Gaddafi's willingness to interdict them, but such xenophobia is not a recent development, as demonstrated by periodic statements by German politicians about the purported inability of Turkish immigrants to adopt German values, as if this matters. Several years ago, Behzad Yaghmaian spent two years in Europe interviewing Muslim immigrants, many of them imprisoned within refugee camps, and published a book about what they told him, Embracing the Infidel. In this book, he humanizes his subjects while exposing an impersonal system of social control across the European continent that restricts them to ghettoes and refugee camps. In a sense, the police methods of stopping people for their identity cards, detaining them and incarcerating them in refugee camps evokes a bygone era, one that predates the accelerated technological modernization connected to the occupation and US military operations in lesser developed countries, but it retains the cultural superiority and xenophobia at the heart of this project. Last week, the suppressed brutality of it erupted on the streets of Athens, as right wing Greek mobs attacked the undocumented.

Labels: American Empire, Europe, Germany, Greece, Immigration, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Palestine, Police, United Kingdom, US Military, Zionism

Attacks on immigrants and anarchists in Athens since May 10th:

Hassan, a 9 year old from Afghanistan:

My mummy, my small brother and me were going home this afternoon. We had to cross Omonia square. I am very afraid. We had to run a lot because we were chased in Omonia. All my friends were chased and beaten – also their mums and dads. One of my friends was brought to hospital. Why was this happening? I am in my room now, but I am very afraid!

Hassan is since 6 months in Greece. The rest of his family is in Germany. Only a few months ago his mummy was beaten up by a Greek old men in Victoria square. They spend all the time in their room, because they are afraid to go out.

Ahmad, 12 years old from Afghanistan:

Yesterday some Greeks came to Victoria square. They beat all people there. They also beat me on my head!

In the early morning hours of the 10th May a theft ended up in the tragic murder of a come-to-be father in the centre of Athens. During the following hours of the day, the media started reporting about three dark skinned suspects, hence, initiating a propaganda which ended up in a manhunt by fascists of the extreme right group Golden Dawn on all migrants in the centre of the city. Around 16 o’clock 100 inhabitants of the neighbourhood, as the media said, protested against the violent death of the Greek citizen. Only some hours later central streets were closed by the police, the neighbourhood was patrolled by armed officers, while a group of 100 fascists attacked migrants and refugees at a central square, beating up many of them. A young men from Bangladesh was so violently stabbed 10 times that he died on the way to the hospital. The fascists split into smaller groups and while some of them threw stones on squatted houses of the areas, others invaded private households of migrants leaving behind them destruction and blood. The public discourse is reigned again by the construction of fear and racist propaganda. During the whole night inhabitants of different neighbourhoods of Athens reported single attacks of fascists on bypassing migrants. At the 11th of May Neonazis threw a molotov cocktail into the house of a Pakistani national in the region of Reddi. In two cases labourers interfered and protected their migrant colleagues from the violent outbursts of fascists.

The attacks continued also Wednesday 11th and at the 12th with further demonstrations – meaning a huge and enduring POGROM against migrants.

Fascist groups attacked Wednesday and Thursday again the two anarchist squats of the area, this time together with the police, and after splitting into smaller groups of up to 10 chased immigrants in the further area…..

At the 12th and during the beginning of the demonstration against the murderous police brutality of the 11th against demonstrators of the general strike in another part of the cities’ centre around 500-1.000 fascists demonstrated towards Omonia square and invaded a soup kitchen of the municipality of Athens, where poor people – mostly migrants – try survive from hunger, beating up blindly refugees and migrants and stabbing them with knives and hitting them with bottles!!!!! After returning back to the area of Victoria Square and St. Panteleimon / Attiki they attacked again the anarchist squats while continuing their POGROM against migrants in the whole area in the most violent way. Rumours talked about more migrant deaths. The hospitals talked about at least 25 migrants with severe injuries 12 of which were stabbed with knives one was shot!!!

The area around Omonia, St. Panteleimon, Victoria Square and Attiki has become a field of war with extreme right wing groups walking around with Greek flags shouting fascist slogans against migrants. Consciously and on purpose the cold-blooded Neonazis kill and destroy in the whole neighbourhood without being severely disturbed by the high numbers of police officers in the area. Migrants report of repeated violent and cruel attacks: beating with clubs on the head, stabbing with knives. A number of migrant shops were destroyed also and fascist were chasing and beating even small children of 6-10 years, beating also them on all parts of their bodies!!!!!

Attiki Square and St. Panteleimon Square that had been in the past central places of agglomeration were already occupied by fascist groups and marked with graffities of Greek flags. Now Victoria Square also seems like a deserted empty hole. The migrants who know have disappeared and hide inside their homes. Fear is ruling the area that is covered by silence.

The place of the death of the 44 old man has become a place of pilgramage and worship for the extreme right wing. The slogan on the mourning table says: Here three migrants stabbed a Greek family man to death!’ The demonstrators are shouting: ‘Greece to the Greek Christians’, ‘Foreigners, out of Greece’ and threaten everybody who is renting flats to migrants by saying: ‘violence has to be answered with violence!’. Their memorial for the dead is accompanied by the Greek anthem…

The murder of the 44 old Greek in the early morning hours of the 10th is being misused as the symbol for the new crusade of the Neonazis in the area. Instead of mourning the loss with respect, the grieving fascists are violating and exploiting the tragic death for their own purposes. Though the media report also about the pogrom and the extreme right wing violence in the area, they highlight the death of the Greek citizen and the increased criminality and violence in the cities centre and the ghettoisation due to immigrants – but the victims of the Neonazis were referred to until the 13th only in one sentence as collateral damage. Only since the further brutalisation and intensification of the pogrom at the 12th newspapers are titling also about the right wing violence.

The municipality of Athens plans to encounter the problem by police raids against illegal.migrants, shops, street vending and brothels while increasing their repressive measures, they plan to ‘clean’ the area. The centre of Athens is an area to be gentrified and up-graded, thus, the pogrom of the Neonazis is adding its part on the dirty job to be done – no matter what the consequences.

For updates on the situation in Greece, visit the From the Greek Streets blog at Occupied London.

Labels: Anarchism, Europe, Greece, IMF, Immigration, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

On Wednesday, there was a general strike in Athens and much of Greece over the continued imposition of austerity measures by the government, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Towards the end of the day, the police attacked a group of people participating in a protest march, with the doctors who treated the injured, many of them severely, condemning the assault:

Today, we witnessed the the barbarism of the IMF government, which seeks to repress every healthy act of resistance to their plans, laid out by Greek and international capital, and faithfully implemented by their local servants. Dozens of injured demonstrators were transfered to our hospital by ambulances, or by themeselves. Most of them were suffering from fractured skulls. Among them, a 30-year old demonstrator, which arrived in a serious antemortem ["prothanatio"] state, anisocoria and extradural hematoma. At this moment, he is in surgery, operated by colleagues fighting to save his life. We denounce this form of police brutality, and consider the members of Greek government as responsible for this attempt at murder, as well as all attacks upon demonstrators.Violence and repression against the people will not serve them much longer.

A common response to such protests has been police and fascist terror against the undocumented, and the anti-authoritarian movement has, as usual, attempted to defend them. Consider, for example, what has happened in the aftermath of Wednesday's protest, as reported by Occupied London:

In the early hours of May 12th a 21-year old Bangladeshi migrant was stabbed to death in the Kato Patisia district of Athens. The victim, wrongly reported in mainstream news (and reposted on this blog) as a Pakistani migrant, was lethally stabbed almost certainly by fascist thugs who have launched a series of attacks in the centre of Athens following the murder of a Greek man on Tuesday night, on the corner of Ipirou and Tritis Septemvriou Street. Eyewitnesses report that the murderers of the 21-year old man chased him around the neighbourhood and spoke Greek. On Wednesday night alone fascist thugs roamed through a number of districts of central Athens, injuring at least another fifteen migrants most of which were hospitalised.

And, then, more recently, this:

In Thessaloniki, a fascist gathering at the square opposite the city’s train station was temporarily cancelled after approximately 300 anti-fascists gathered at the point first. The fascists were forced to meet at their headquarters instead. There are two demonstrations in the city at the moment, a fascist one (around 50-people strong) and an anti-fascist one, with about 300 people participating.

In Athens, there are reports that fascists stopped public transportation buses passing by Tritis Septemvriou street, where the murder of a 44-year old man on Tuesday night sparkled the tension. The fascists forced passengers out, beating those who looked foreign to them.

Did anyone stand up for the foreigners forced off the buses? The report does not address this urgent question. In Greece, as in France and Italy, the government is complicit in the scapegoating of the undocumented for its political and econcomic failures.

Labels: Anarchism, Europe, France, Greece, IMF, Immigration, Italy, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

UPDATE 1: Now we know what prompted Blanc to issue a public apology:

Mohammed Belkacemi, a respected official responsible for liaising with young players in suburbs and highrise estates, on Wednesday admitted he was the whistleblower who had recorded the controversial meeting in November 2010 where race quotas were discussed. It is believed he gave the tape to other officials rather than directly to the media.

The French national coach Laurent Blanc first flatly denied any discussion about quotas, then apologised for any offence about certain terms he used.

The recordings show officials were debating French players with dual-nationality who could train in France but leave to play for other teams. Several officials suggested limiting these players. Blanc reportedly talks about black players' morphology. He says of the training centres, which produced French champions such as Thierry Henry and Nicolas Anelka: You have the impression that they really train the same prototype of players, big, strong, powerful … What is there that is currently big, strong, powerful? The blacks. He said other criteria should be used to bring in players with our culture, our history.

One can only imagine how the players at this meeting reacted to hearing their national coach talk like a Klansman.

INITIAL POST: From The Guardian:

France has been plunged into a fresh race crisis after claims that football officials tried to limit black and Arab players on youth training schemes to make the French team more white.

The French football federation has opened an internal investigation after website Mediapart reported that top management approved a quota system to limit young black players and those of north African origin emerging as candidates for the national team. The alleged plan involved limiting non-white youngsters as young as 12 or 13 from entering the selection process through training centres and academies.

For the top brass in French football, the issue is settled: there are too many blacks, too many Arabs, and not enough white players in French football, the website said.

According to Mediapart, one of the most senior football federation figures wanted to set a cap of 30% on players of certain origins, but insisted at a meeting the quota should be kept quiet. At another meeting, the French national team coach Laurent Blanc allegedly backed changing youth talent selection criteria to favour players with our culture, our history. Sources claimed Blanc cited current world champions Spain, saying: The Spanish, they say: 'We don't have a problem. We have no blacks'.

In response, the technical director of the French Football Federation, Francois Blauquart, has been suspended pending an investigation. But it just seems to get worse with every new revelation:

On Saturday Mediapart published further claims about a meeting at which Blaquart, the France coach, Laurent Blanc, the under-21 coach, Erick Mombaerts, and the under-20 coach, Francis Smerecki, among others, allegedly debated African players with dual nationality who were groomed in France but opted to play for their country of origin.

We can mark out, in an unspoken way, a sort of quota. But it needs to remain unspoken, Blaquart was quoted as saying by Mediapart. Blaquart told RMC radio's website: I cannot not acknowledge these remarks. But they have to be put in their context. We acknowledged the fact that there were many players with dual nationality ... we had to control the management of these players who might be leaving us. There is nothing more to it.

Blanc, who played in the 1998 World Cup-winning team that was dubbed Black-Blanc-Beur (Blacks, Whites and Arabs) by French media, has often raised the issue of dual nationality players, but rejected the claim he was in favour of quotas based on race. On Friday he said: No such project has been revealed to me. It's a lie. You cannot have quotas in football. It does not exist. Football is made of diversity. It really bothers me because it's against my values. To me, this is totally false.

Last night Blanc said in a statement: I do not withdraw what I said yesterday. I admit that some remarks made during a work meeting, taken out of their context, may be misinterpreted and, as far as I am concerned, I apologise if I have hurt some feelings. But I, who am against any form of discrimination, do not stand being accused of racism or xenophobia.

Note the deviousness of Blanc's emphasis upon the loss of players trained in France because of their dual nationality. By speaking critically of it, he motivates even more French Arabs to play for their countries of origin, insuring that the French national team is predominately constituted of players with our culture, our history. No need to worry, though, we can sure that Sarkozy will get to the bottom of it, given his empathy for Arabs living in France.

Labels: Eurocentrism, Europe, France, Immigration, Racism, Sarkozy

Labels: Arizona, Immigration, Police, Racism

Crossposted from The Spanish Prisoner:

Recently I was asked to give a talk on immigration. It’s been a long time since I’ve been asked to give a talk on any topic, and the first time I’ve been asked to talk about immigration. Below is the talk I gave at the University of Oregon campus on April 29th:

During the past decade, more than 3,000 people have died crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. These are people coming to look for work. They come here because the economies of Mexico and Central America have been devastated by NAFTA and other “free trade” agreements. These agreements are meant to under-develop these nations so they can serve as sources of raw materials and cheap labor. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has called these immigrants “criminal aliens”.

The state of Arizona recently passed a law making it a state crime for immigrants to not carry authorization papers. The bill also requires the police to ask anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant for papers, a sure-fire invitation to racial profiling. The bill makes it possible for people to sue police who refuse to do racial profiling. Meanwhile, in Maricopa County Arizona, Sheriff Arpaio keeps arrested undocumented immigrants in tents 110-degree heat. In 20009, thousands of workers at American Apparel, American Building Maintenance and Overhill Farms lost their jobs because they purportedly lacked proof that they were legally eligible to work in the U.S. When Obama was running for president, he promised to reform the country’s immigration system and offer undocumented workers a path to citizenship. (67 percent of Latino voters voted for Obama.) Instead, the Obama Administration has expanded the 287(g) program. This is part of the 1986 Immigration and Control Act (IRCA) that was passed under the Reagan Administration. This bill enabled three million undocumented immigrants to acquire legal residency. However, it also contained a clause, 287(g), which enabled the U.S. government to deputize local and state law enforcement officials to enforce immigration laws (something that previously only the federal government could do). As a result of this expansion, police have been able throw immigrants into jail after traffic stops. In 2009, immigration prosecutions were up 20 percent over the previous years.(1) A third of all filings in U.S. district courts are immigration cases.(2) Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON), has said:

We’ve seen racial profiling practices that we haven’t seen in a generation, perhaps since Jim Crow. Obama ran on an agenda of inclusion… He wants equality. He said that we have to promote understanding. Well, guess what – the 287(g) program is not promoting that kind of understanding. It’s promoting division. It’s giving ammunition to all those anti-immigrant organizations, to all those groups with strong white supremacist ties. Day laborers all over the country have experienced it… the men and women who every day defy the odds to find a day of work – they’ve seen what hatred looks like.(3)

The Obama Administration has also announced that it will only award federal contracts to companies that use E-Verify to check employee work authorization. E-Verify is a program started by the Bush administration. It is on-line system by the government that allows companies to verify whether employees have work authorization. Journalist David Bacon has described the effect of this policy:

Workplace immigration enforcement is filled with examples of employers who use audits and discrepancies as pretexts to discharge union militants or discourage worker organization… Overhill Farms has a union. American Apparel pays better than most garment factories. In Minneapolis, the 1,200 fired janitors at ABM get a higher wage than non-union workers–and they had to strike to win it… If anything, ICE seems intent on punishing undocumented workers who earn too much, or who become too visible by demanding higher wages and organizing unions.

And despite Obama’s notion that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, at American Apparel and ABM the employers were rewarded for cooperation by being immunized from prosecution… No one in the Obama or Bush administrations, or the Clinton administration before them, wants to stop migration to the U.S. or imagines that this could be done without catastrophic consequences…Instead [e]nforcement is a means for managing the flow of migrants, and making their labor available to employers at a price they want to pay. (4)

Bacon touches upon a point that is often misunderstood by both the Right and the Left. The government does not want to stop the flow of undocumented immigrants into the U.S., rather it wants to manage it. This is because the exploitation of undocumented workers is an essential element of how the U.S. economy works. Undocumented workers can be paid lower wages and forced to work longer hours than other workers, and forced to work in dangerous conditions, and they don’t have recourse to any labor laws in the U.S. What’s more, it’s difficult for undocumented workers to form unions, because organizers can be easily targeted and fired by companies. Let me use the case of Overhill Farms as an example. Overhill makes processed foods that are served on airlines and in other places. The workers at Overhill are unionized. Overhill has used the firing of workers as a way to weaken the union. Last year, the company fired 254 unionized workers, claiming there were discrepancies in the Social Security numbers. They then replaced the workers with “part-time” workers who receive no benefits, even though they sometimes work up to thirteen hours a day.(5)

Currently the Democrats in Congress are considering legislation that would create a guest worker program here in the U.S. This is not a solution to the immigration problem. Such a program would merely allow employers to do legally what they have so far been doing illegally, that is, exploiting immigrant workers. Workers who complain or try to organize can be fired, and they would have to leave the country under the terms of the guest worker program. The real purpose of this legislation is to provide U.S. companies with cheap labor. It has nothing to do with helping immigrant or native-born workers. The best way to protect the rights of both of these groups is give legal status to undocumented workers. According to Phil Gasper:

A UCLA study conducted a few years ago concluded that if undocumented workers were given legal status, wages for all workers would immediately increase by approximately 5 percent in agriculture, 2.75 percent in services, and 2.5 percent in manufacturing.(6)

The legislation being considered by the Democrats would also call for stricter law enforcement along the border including the erecting of a fence. This would merely make things more dangerous for immigrants, forcing them to cross in more isolated areas in the desert and mountains, resulting in more deaths and suffering. The only real solution to the immigration problem is an open border policy that would allow the free flow of people across borders. The outrageous anti-immigrant bill passed in Arizona has provoked an angry backlash among Latinos and other groups. In the days following the bill’s passage, thousands marched through the streets of the state capitol angrily calling for repeal of this bill. Some protestors plastered swastikas made of refried beans on the windows of the state capitol building. Since the politicians are intent on only serving the interests of the capitalist class, only a movement of the people can bring any real change. Last month, 200,000 people marched through the streets of Washington, D.C. to demand an end to raids and deportations and a better immigration system. This Saturday, May Day, people will be marching in Portland and in Salem. We should stand with those people.

1. Orlando Sepulveda, “Is the Gutierrez Bill Good for Immigrants?” Socialist Worker, http://socialistworker.org/2010/01/21/gutierrez-bill-and- immigrants, p. 3.

2. Ibid.

3. Quoted by Brian Tierney, “Standing Up to Immgration Police”, Socialist Worker, September 20, 2009, Issue 706.

4. David Bacon, “The Brutal Dark Side of Obama’s “Softer” Immigration Enforcement”, Znet, http://www.zcommunications.org/the-brutal-dark-side-of-obamas-softer-immigrationenforcement- by-david-bacon.

5. “Standing Up to Overhill Farms”, Socialist Worker, http://socialistworker.org/2009/07/27/standing-up-to-overhill.

6. Phil Gasper, “Scapegoating immigrants”, International Socialist Review, Issue 50, November– December 2006, http://www.isreview.org/issues/50/gasper2.shtml.

NOTE 1: Overhill Farms disputes the assertion that it replaced full time, undocumented workers with part-time ones with lesser benefits, stating that it promoted the initially part-time replacement workers to full-time status. Left unmentioned is whether Overhill Farms did this after the organizing campaign described in Socialist Worker last July.

NOTE 2: For further elaboration on this subject, please see the statement of Alexander Auerbach, a spokespeson for Overhill Farms and a member of its Board of Directors, in the comments section. According to Auerbach, Overhill Farms hired replacement workers and compensated them pursuant to the terms of its collective bargaining agreement, and is proud to be a union shop. Long time labor activist and author David Bacon provides an overview of the situation at Overhill Farms within the context of immigration law enforcement in this article published last spring.

Labels: Immigration, Neoliberalism, Police, Racism, Sub-Proletarianization of America, Unions

Last September, Ron Glick and I had the opportunity to interview Lucien van der Walt, a co-author of the recently released book, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, on KDVS 90.3 FM. AK Press, the publisher of the book, and van der Walt have provided me with a transcript of the interview, which I am posting here in its entirety:

RICHARD ESTES: Our first guest today is LUCIEN VAN DER WALT. He is based at the University of Witwatersrand…rand….srand…excuse me, Witwatersrand. Is that right?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Witwatersrand.

RICHARD ESTES: … Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He teaches, you teach, Development, Economic Sociology and Labour Studies. The reason I invited you to be on the air with us today is because several months ago I had the opportunity to encounter your book that you co-authored with Michael Schmidt, who’s a Johannesburg-based investigative journalist, entitled Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism.

RON GLICK: I just want to say that this is the first time that we’ve had a live guest from Africa on this programme, which is very exciting.

RICHARD ESTES: It is a first and, in this instance, it is also, I think, noteworthy… Anarchism is something that I think, in terms of the general public perception and understanding, in comparison to other political values and ideas, is not well understood and not well defined in the public consciousness. So, for that reason, I wanted to have you on the air today because I thought your book was extraordinarily well-timed and provides a context for people to engage the subject and to evaluate their own political values in comparison to it. I enjoyed the book very much for that reason. So, thanks for making some time available—and I also want to note that you are also up back in South Africa and I think it’s 2am, is that right?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Ja, no, it’s around about then.

RICHARD ESTES: So…

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: But thanks for having me on the show, no problem at all.

[DEFINING ANARCHISM AND SYNDICALISM]

RICHARD ESTES: The first thing I want to ask you, because it’s one of the primary subjects of the book, is sort of a simple question…what is it that you believe to be anarchism, and what, in your view, do you consider to be improperly described as anarchism?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Well, as you know, the whole idea of “anarchism,” the whole word, has gathered a lot of connotations over time which have obscured people’s ability to understand it. I mean, in the public mind in the States I imagine it’s pretty similar to a lot of other English-speaking countries: anarchism is seen as chaos, disorder, and so on. But once you get beyond that, there’s a whole lot of things that get thrown into a bit of a grab-bag called anarchism.

Now when you look closely at anarchism, to understand what its core ideas are, you have to look at its history, you have to look at when it emerges. And when you look at its emergence, you have to go back to the 1860s, you find it emerging in the union movement, the workers’ movement, in the socialist movement.

So to answer your question about what we see as anarchism, and this is the central argument in our book, we would understand anarchism as a movement that aimed, through struggle, to create a free, stateless, socialist society based on cooperation and mutual aid, a movement that sees the motor of history as the struggle of ordinary people, working-class people, just ordinary folks, peasants, small farmers…trying to create that world across borders internationally.

That would be the basics of it—a class struggle-based, socialist movement, libertarian in its aims, libertarian in its message, trying to create a sort of a free cooperative, socialist order.

Now, the thing is, “anarchism,” besides the label of chaos and so on, has been used a lot in the academy—and I think this is one of the problems it faces in its perception as compared to, say, Marxism or liberalism—it has been used in the academy to relate to a whole bunch of quite unrelated doctrines ranging from the ideas of Max Stirner, who was an extreme individualist, all the way through to various fairly abstruse philosophies around individual autonomy and so on. I don’t know…does that answer you?

RON GLICK: It just seems to me, that with Marxism you have Marx. So like…

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Right…

RON GLICK: …so like there’s this person you can point to. With totalitarianism: Hanna Arendt, and with anarchism? With fascism, Mussolini, and with anarchism there isn’t…certainly, I don’t know where you exactly point to. You also have in the title of the book “syndicalism.” Maybe you could define that for us as well?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Alright, before I get onto that, let me say that if you were looking for your, say, Marx or Engels of anarchism, I think you’d have to look at Mikhail Bakunin, and you’d have to look at Peter Kropotkin. So Bakunin and Kropotkin would be the two main figures.

These would be the two key figures; the key influences on the movement; the people who really…articulate and express and codify a lot of its doctrine. This is not to say that they invented everything—they never claimed to. They codified a lot of ideas that were out there, expressed them; acted as the sort of mouthpiece of the movement. Those would be the two big guys…the Big Two.

Now, in terms of “syndicalism,” right, syndicalism at a minimum means the idea of a revolutionary trade union movement. The idea of syndicalism was that you could essentially use trade unions, rather than the state, rather than political parties, rather than some small group of guerrillas running around the mountains in berets. Actual unions, run by ordinary people in their workplaces, to bring about this new anarchist society.

So in that sense, syndicalism, the idea of revolutionary trade unionism, is a strategy, a strategy developed within the anarchist movement, a strategy that was there from the start.

But, partly because of the connotations attached to anarchism, partly because there is a bit of a tendency, in a lot of the literature, in a lot of activist milieu, in a lot of the union movement, to see syndicalism as something altogether different to anarchism, we’ve had to single out the words a bit there, “anarchism” and “syndicalism,” but we see syndicalism as part of a broad anarchist tradition.

[TRADE UNIONISM AND ANARCHISM TODAY]

RICHARD ESTES: Ron brought up this question of syndicalism because one of the questions I found interesting in the book…there’s, I think, a couple of chapters that address the relationship of anarchism to the unions, you know, union movements broadly defined. And here in the United States, basically trade unionism, trade union movements generally, have been facing a great deal of difficulty over the last several decades. And so, when I was reading those passages in the book, one of the things that came to my mind is the strategies and tactics associated with anarchism and syndicalism, are they still viable today, and if so, how?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Alright, well, part of the reason we placed emphasis on unions was that in the historic anarchist movement, from its emergence back in the 1860s, unions were a central part of its strategy—for most anarchists, syndicalism was the way to go.

Not only focussing on unions, but certainly seeing unions as absolutely central, and it’s through trade unions that anarchism made many of its biggest impacts historically. For example you had a situation in Argentina in the 1910s when there were two major union federations. These were the two big centres in the country and they were both different variants of anarchism and syndicalism.

So this is the kind of influence it had in the past. If you would, imagine what it would be like in the States if, say the AFL-CIO was an anarchist or a syndicalist organisation. But this wasn’t actually that uncommon. So the emphasis on unions partly reflects the historical reality in which, certainly into the 20s and 30s, anarchists and syndicalists led, founded, major union federations around the world.

The question, though, is how do you actually get back to that? You spoke about strategy and tactics? Well, the strategy of syndicalism is quite straightforward. You run a sort of militant, radical, participatory, democratic, transformative trade unionism, you tie it up to other social movements in communities, you tie it up to social justice issues, issues such as racial prejudice and so on.

But, tactics, how do you actually get there? How do you actually get to that position of influence?

Now, at one level, the potential is there in that trade unionism, even in the States, continues to be an absolutely central force—and in the States itself, the AFL-CIO has seen a bit of a turnaround recently with, in figures I saw earlier this year, over a million new members being recruited. Once you look outside the States, you look at places like Brazil, South Africa, or South Korea, you see trade unionism playing not just a central role, but actually expanding its influence all the time.

Okay, but on another level, how do you actually link that to the anarchist movement? And this is a very tricky thing.

There is a lot of debate on that, and the book gets into a lot of it. I don’t claim to have a magical formula here. What I would say, looking historically at anarchism, unions were absolutely critical. Looking at the present, I’d say that unions still have that potential to be critical.

But how to fit those two together? That’s the trick and I think a lot will depend on context, a lot will depend on programme, a lot will depend on what people who find themselves part of an anarchist tradition actually do.

RICHARD ESTES: So would it be fair to say that people today, who might have a view that unions have become too sclerotic, are too difficult to transform, and that anarchism should move in a different direction, would be advocating a perspective that is either misguided or is potentially suicidal?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Well, I think there again we have to look at context. One of the things that happened during the 20th century was the rise of quite centralised forms of trade unionism. So, trade unionism that was anarchist, or syndicalist, would be a unionism that was very flat, very participatory, a unionism that allowed for quite a development of a counter-culture, a proletarian counter-culture.

Now, in the 20th century, as unions have become more centralised, more entangled in the state, more tied to political parties, the amount of space in those unions to actually change them seems to often be quite narrow. I mean, if we look at the South African case, we see that while the unions’ official policy is actually quite far to the left, there is actually not always that much space within the union to contest what that “left” would mean. So these issues of intolerance and centralism are going to play a critical role.

What I would say is: look at the historical experience. It would be vital to find ways to get an anarcho-syndicalist or anarchist programme back into the union and it won’t be easy. It’s certainly going to take a lot of creativity, a lot of activity.

Right now, that may not be on the agenda; that may not even be practical for people in a lot of circumstances. Right now, people may be investing their energy better into community organising, into alternative institution-building, but in the long term, I think it would be absolutely impossible to get the sort of change anarcho-syndicalism, or anarchism in general, has aimed at without some sort of link into the unions.

How exactly to do that, I think it’s difficult to be prescriptive, but I think as a strategic objective it would be absolutely crucial.

[ANARCHISM AND CENTRALISATION]

RON GLICK: It seems that what you’ve described as the rise of an anarchist philosophy comes in response to the centralisation of capital in the emergence of the industrial revolution. And here we are now in the age of global capital and centralisation of that power with things like the Fortune 500 and, you know, global capital can move around and move around so quickly and easily. Is, is it really viable? It seems like this is an idea, a philosophy that has never really been able to compete successfully with more centralised power structures.

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Well I think, I think it’s important to bear in mind that anarchism wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to any centralisation as such. The question would be what is the form of centralisation that you are actually aiming at. Now, if you’re going to build a movement from below upwards, a movement based on participation, assembly, inevitably you’re going to end up having delegates and you going to end up having coordinating structures.

In that sense, anarchism can pose a form of centralisation and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, but it’s important that that would be a federalist, non-coercive centralisation from below. And I think it can coordinate…potentially, anarchist movements could coordinate in a way that would be as efficient, but yet far more participatory than the centralisation we see on the part of capital and the state.

[GLOBALISATION: THEN AND NOW]

Now, to move on from that, your question around globalisation, your question around the rise of large companies, and so on: could anarchism pose…could it respond to, could it engage with this new world order?

I think one of the key points we wanted to make in this book is that anarchism did emerge very much in concrete circumstances that are not much different than ours. If you look at the period from the 1880s into the 1920s, the 1930s, we’re actually talking about a period of very deep globalisation—a period in which capital movement internationally, while slower, was at least as extensive as it is today, in which international trade was actually freer than it is today.

So, you might think of anarchism as a movement which has got a lot to offer to contemporary anti-globalisation, counter-globalisation activists, because it operated, in its period of greatest influence, the 1880s to the 1920s, in a world that wasn’t actually that different than what we have now.

[THE SOVIET UNION AND COMMUNISM]

RICHARD ESTES: One of the things I think is an important subject is there’s a contrast between anarchism and, I guess the right way to say it would be State Socialism, or Marxist-Leninism that’s put into practice. What, precisely, are the points of contention between that Marxist-Leninism and anarchism in relation to understanding class relationships, and to what extent is anarchism a different model than the State Socialist model that was attempted in the 20th century?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: I think that this is actually quite crucial. The Marxist tradition, while it is not a homogenous tradition, the actually-existing, the actually organised Marxist movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, was one very much dominated by a centralist vision—the vision that got its expression in Soviet Union, or the People’s Republic of China.

And in anarchism’s birth, anarchism’s emergence in the 1860s, it was very much, a reaction not just against capitalism, not just against the state, but against what the anarchists like Bakunin saw as an incipient, centralised, authoritarian model of state socialism.

Now, the differences are at the level of the understanding of society, and there’re differences at the level of the vision and the strategy. I want to talk about the vision and the strategy more.

Generally speaking, classical Marxism, whether it was in the original social democratic, or later in its Leninist form, saw the state as the engine of transformation. The basic idea was that you would take over the state, you would use the state to transform society from above. You would create your socialist citizens from above: even if people weren’t ready, they could be compelled to become ready. The revolution wouldn’t necessarily need to move at the speed of the slowest soldier. Rather, the vanguard of the class, at least the self-defined vanguard, would seize power and move to put in socialism from above.

Now, the anarchist model was very different from that, whereas Marxism-Leninism saw the building of a highly centralised, quite militarised party organisation with the aim of capturing state power, the anarchist tradition, including syndicalism, stressed the participatory model—that was based on participation, it was based on intellectual emancipation, it was based in training people in the here-and-now to run society in a democratic, participatory way in the future.

I mean, this was the idea that your means would have to match your ends. The way you organise now is going to shape what you get in the future. If you build a centralised, militarised party organisation aiming to seize state power and implement socialism from above, you’re being perfectly consistent.

If, on the other hand, you want to create a democratic, horizontal society, well, you would actually have to start to do that now.

Tied to that was the idea in anarchism that, if this new society meant anything, it would have to be something that ordinary people created. By definition, you could not create a horizontal society from above. You can’t, as Martin Buber says somewhere, take a young oak sapling, strip off its bark, strip off the leaves, use it as a club, and later stick it in the ground and hope that it is going to turn back into an oak tree.

So, in terms of stressing a democratic approach, in terms of stressing a non-authoritarian approach, in terms of making democracy not a tactic, but absolutely central, anarchists broke with what they saw as the tendency in Marxism to sacrifice people to goals rather than seeing people’s emancipation as the goal in-and-of itself.

[MARXISM, ANARCHISM, CAPITALISM, AND THE SPANISH REVOLUTION]

RON GLICK: To me, the intersection between Marxism, anarchism and capitalism is the Spanish Civil War. Could you explain the dynamics going on there and how that affected the growth of one system over another?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Sure. I just want to mention one thing about the relationship between anarchism and Marxism which plays out in this situation, which is that there’s a bit of an overlap. Anarchists do take something from Marxism and that’s, above all, Marxist economics. So there, there’s a bit of an overlap. We would be exaggerating if we set them up as entirely separate systems.

However, the differences harden over time, especially once you get the rise of the Soviet Union. Now, the Soviet Union, the formation of the Soviet Union, beginning from 1917 onwards, is absolutely central to the rise of Marxism in the 20th century. Before then, Marxism is not the mass movement it sort of becomes later.

Before then, Marxism is essentially a movement in Europe. It is not a movement that has any real traction in the rest of the world. Once the Soviet Union is established, the Communist Parties have really got a very powerful force in their corner.

Now, when you get to Spain, in 1936 there is essentially an attempted military coup. Francisco Franco, who’s a general who is influenced by the ideas of fascism, particularly Mussolini-style fascism, rather than Hitler-style Nazism, tries to seize power. He’s thrown back by a left coalition, which includes a large anarchist proportion, as well as the Spanish Communist Party.

Now civil war breaks out, which is why most people remember the events from ’36 to ’39 as the Spanish Civil War. What happens in the areas where anarchists are strong, is a large-scale application of the anarchist vision. What I mean is people self-managing factories, self-managing land, implementing social reforms, trying to implement the anarchist vision.

But within that left camp which is fighting against Franco’s camp, a civil war starts to break out between the Communists and the anarchists, and the Soviet Union’s calculation, then under Josef Stalin, is that a revolution in Spain (which the anarchists are actually doing) has to be stopped.

At one level, it would challenge the hegemony that the Communist International is trying to create in the workers’ movement—anarchism in Spain is vastly, vastly more influential than Communism. At another level, Stalin, seeing the interests of “socialism” as equivalent to the interests of the Soviet Union, believes that a revolution there would essentially destabilise the relations he’s trying to set up with Britain and France.

So, what this actually means, in practice, is besides the civil war against Franco and his forces, the anarchists find themselves under attack from Stalin, the Communist Party in Spain, and, by the time that the left, liberal coalition—the Republican forces, as they’re usually called—are defeated by Franco, the revolution that the anarchists had tried to put into place, has already been destroyed by other left forces, foremost amongst which is the Communist Party.

RON GLICK: This reminds me somewhat of what happened with the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto, where Stalin didn’t want this independent group to gain any traction against the Nazis, and wouldn’t arm them.

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: I mean, I think part of the problem is that what Bakunin and Kropotkin feared—which was that “socialism” would become a tool of a new ruling elite and of state policy—had become a reality by the 1920s and the 1930s.

Before the Soviet Union was founded, Marxism was simply another movement out there. Guys you would know in the union, guys you would know in the political sphere—people you would engage with.

But from then on Marxism finds itself in a position where, on the one hand, Marxist-Leninist parties are playing an incredibly progressive role in all sorts of areas—for example, in the States, playing a very important role in championing black rights, in organising in the Deep South, and so on. But, on the other hand, they’re being continually constrained by the realpolitik, by the power calculations of the Soviet leadership.

And you see this pattern play out again and again and again. So this is, to me, part of the tragedy of Marxism-Leninism—on one hand, it achieved a great many good things, but on another hand, this subordination of particular struggles to the interests and politics of the Soviet Union.

That has been something which…which essentially crippled it from the start as a people’s movement.

[ANARCHISM AND CONTEMPORARY IMMIGRATION]

RICHARD ESTES: Lucien, I have a question regarding a subject that I don’t recall really being very prominent in your book, but I have a feeling that it might be an important one in relation to anarchism in the contemporary social environment. One of the primary features of the kind of globalisation process that we’ve experienced in the last thirty or forty years has been a tremendous, almost exponential increase in immigration—both sanctioned by states as well as unsanctioned—and extraordinary, transnational movements of peoples around the world. What is the anarchist perspective about that immigration process, and does it potentially present opportunities for anarchism that didn’t previously exist?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Right. Well, from the 1920s to the 1970s, when the world economy is characterised by quite closed national economies, whether it’s the Soviet model of central planning, or the Keynesian model in the West of demand-management, or import-substitution models in the “global south”—or the third world, or the colonial/postcolonial world, or whatever we want to call the other countries—building a vision of an international workers’ movement is actually quite abstract, in the sense that wage levels were determined very much by national conditions, in that people’s identities, their movement, all sorts of things were set up by very particular national experiences.

Now, with the deregulation of population movements and the international migration that you’re talking about, you really do start to get international connections on a scale you haven’t seen for a hundred years.

At one level this can, of course, pose huge problems in terms of backlashes against immigrants (for example, in South Africa, we had huge riots last year). On the other hand, it creates that potential for arguments around class as a unifying force to have much larger interest.

And, I mean, a third level is also a sort of circulation of political traditions that you get as a result. You get people coming into Western countries, who bring in very radical traditions that are very energising; traditions of struggle that are very impressive, traditions of struggle that are very much able to get things going again in places where they’ve stopped.

So, I think it’s got a lot of threats, but it’s also got a lot of potential in terms of people’s identities, in terms of the political project that would resonate with people.

[CLASS POLITICS AND OTHER FORMS OF OPPRESSION]

RICHARD ESTES: One other thing I was wondering about too. You have a chapter towards the end that addresses issues of race and gender in regard to anarchism. Is the anarchist explanation for racial and gender divisions in society really adequate in the sense that it seems to reduce those divisions down to primarily being a class-based cause? Aren’t there other causes and other influences there that need to be incorporated into an anarchist analysis?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Well, I think here we come to an important aspect of the whole anarchist explanation, and we can tie it back to the question you posed earlier around Marxism.

Now, Marxism, as you know, one part of its power is its very simple explanation…you can essentially reduce everything to economics. Economics is defined as the heart of society, and therefore anything that happens in society has an economic basis.

Now, the anarchists did try, in general, to move away from that reductionism. But certainly it was characteristic of anarchist theory that class, while not necessarily always primary, is always central to explain social phenomena, such as race and gender.

Saying “central not primary” in the sense that…what this would mean in terms of race and gender would be that, for the classical anarchist movement…certainly it would be that issues of class expressed through the state, expressed through capital, expressed through labour market competition, would help explain the question of, say, racial prejudice.

But that wouldn’t be the only explanation…that would be central, but there are a lot of other factors there which would have an independent logic, which you can’t reduce. If you look at that chapter again, you’ll see that the approach wasn’t simply on reducing issues to class issues, but also seeing their roots in culture; their roots in prejudices that people have; their roots, even in pre-capitalist formations…

RICHARD ESTES: That’s my last question, adequacy …

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: But, in terms of adequacy I’m not entirely…it’s a difficult thing to say what’s adequate or not, but certainly the argument that was made was that class was central, but not the sole explanation. That was the general tendency.

Is this a good argument? Well, I think it’s a good argument.

Particularly around political strategy. Often questions of race and gender are simply reduced to people’s attitudes, without asking the question of where the attitudes come from. By stressing class, you’re also able to look at the role that class-based movements, such as trade unions, can play in securing advantages for black folk, for women, and so on.

At a second level, it also enriches your understanding of class politics, because if you reduce class, if you reduce working class organisation, to the issue of wages and working conditions, to sort of pork-chop issues, then you are actually going to miss a lot of the anarchist project, which is about emancipating people from all forms of social and economic inequalities.

So, ideally, what you would want to do is not end up with an economic reductionism. You would want to end up with a radical class politics that is feminist, that is anti-racist, that brings these things together in the form of popular movements that are simultaneously anti-capitalist, simultaneously deeply opposed to issues of gender and racial oppression and national oppression. So you’d like to try to synthesize these into a single coherent struggle.

RON GLICK: You’re listening to KVVS, 90.3 FM. Lucien, we had a big protest here [University of California] on campus yesterday about tuition and pay cuts, and certainly issues of class and, so we’re going to have some people come on, but I wanted to ask you one more question and then…

[ANARCHISM AFTER SEATTLE]

RICHARD ESTES: I want to ask you one closing question. What year was that thing in Seattle…do you remember…was that 2000, 2001?

RON GLICK: That was 1999…

RICHARD ESTES: 1999. There was this big anti-globalization protest, and was it a GATT meeting or a…

RON GLICK: It was WTO…

RICHARD ESTES: Yeah, a WTO meeting in Seattle, it was called “the Battle for Seattle.” There was group that were described as anarchists…are you familiar what happened there, and how does that fit in?

RON GLICK: I think you’re alluding to the “Black Bloc” by the way…

RICHARD ESTES: Just for clarification…

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Well, I think one of the interesting things that’s been happening over the last twenty years is the re-emergence of a significant anarchist current. One of the expressions has been a range of anarchist activity in the “anti-globalisation,” or “counter-globalisation” movement.

And the one that the grabbed media attention, I think, was this Black Bloc, which as I understand was essentially groups of people wearing black and balaclavas and trying to push protests in the direction of riots and so on. Now, I’m less concerned with whether that was a good tactic or not, than with the significance, the overall significance of that development.

The overall significance is this: that anarchism, over the last two or three decades, has been reviving as a very important force in many contexts…it’s equivalent to the rebirth of an open Marxism in the 1960s.

Anarchism, as a pole of attraction over the last few years, is becoming extremely powerful and, in this sense, this is partly what our book is trying to do: as the new anarchist movement emerges internationally as a movement that starts to get a significant influence, it’s important to debate and clarify the issues, which is why we’ve pulled together a book which, is a mixture of theory and history and philosophy.

Ja, I think I’ll leave that there.

[ANARCHISM AND POSTMODERNISM]

RICHARD ESTES: Let me ask you one last question; it may be an overly theoretical question, so feel free to be, you know, dismissive of it. But it comes to mind in light of the remarks you just made. One of the things I tend to encounter quite frequently is this tendency among what I would call, I guess, the Marxist-Leninist and parliamentary socialist left to ascribe a lot of the current problems, politically, that they experience to postmodernism, which they seem to broadly define as this sort of excessive relativisation of class and culture to the point where there is no such thing as a meaningful class or cultural identity, or they’re all the same, which I personally believe is a gross distortion of postmodernism from my own readings. But, in any event, they seem to be ascribing a great deal of blame to it in terms of their own predicament, and really criticizing it quite severely. While, as you’ve noted, anarchism seems to have thrived, it seems to have done quite well, during this very same postmodern period. So, I guess my question is: Do anarchists really share this perspective that more parliamentary socialist and Marxist-Leninists have about postmodernism? Or do they relate to it in an entirely different way?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: Well, I think there’s two things here.

The one is that one of the strengths of postmodernism is its focus on a more open-ended view of society and a more open-ended view of history. If you look at classical Marxist-Leninism it ended up with a very, very mechanical, narrow, reductionist view of how things work, to the extent you could virtually read off people’s identities solely from their occupation, and their political views solely from their source of income. So that’s a strength, and I think anarchists would appreciate that…in that anarchism is a much more open model, although it makes class central, it’s a much more open than a Marxist model.

However, I do think that anarchism, historically, was very much a movement, a modernist movement that stressed rationalism, that stressed conscious human control of events, one that did see things as having a fixity, as having a stability, as having a pattern and a purpose far beyond anything that postmodernism would conceive. So, I would certainly say that someone like Bakunin or Kropotkin would be very, very critical of postmodern relativism.

On the one hand, it’s also very, very moralistic actually, anarchism. It stresses morals. I’m not saying “moralistic” in a bad sense. On the other hand, it’s very much enamoured of the idea of rationality as a tool to change society.

RICHARD ESTES: Well, LUCIEN VAN DER WALT, we really appreciate you making this time available to us today, and if people are interested in the book, it’s entitled Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. It’s available through AK Press so you can check out akpress.org to find out more about it.

RON GLICK: And do you have a website or anything that you’d like to give out? In South Africa?

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: I think you could just Google my name…you’ll come up with a bunch of stuff. There is a blog at AK Press, but it’s got an extremely long URL. So I don’t actually remember the whole thing. Just Google my name and you’ll come to my own website.

RON GLICK: Well, thanks so much. It’s really been an interesting discussion…and get some sleep.

LUCIEN VAN DER WALT: No, thanks very much for having me and thanks for the questions. It’s been absolutely brilliant!

RICHARD ESTES AND RON GLICK: Thank you!

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Immigration, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Unions

During the course of my recent travel in Georgia and North Carolina, I introduced my young son to relatives there that had never seen him before. Naturally, they were delighted to see him. But I also learned more about the severity of the recession.

One of my aunts lives in Dalton, Georgia, a city in the Appalachian foothills that describes itself as the carpet capital of the world. Indeed, there are numerous plants sprinkled throughout the region that produce carpet. Unfortunately, with the collapse of new home construction, there isn't much demand for it anymore. Perhaps as many as half of the plants there have been shuttered. Unemployment in Whitfield County, the county where Dalton is located, is officially 12.5%, the highest in Georgia, comparable to the most devastated areas of the Rust Belt, like Detroit.

Last Saturday, we drove down the Old Dixie Highway into town to go to the grocery store. There were numerous empty store fronts along the way, and, at one point, I observed a Latino family in front of one of them, a family with a little girl, displaying some used children's toys in a row, including a tricycle. By the time that we passed them again on our return, about half an hour later, numerous other household items, including a microwave, had been added. Upon seeing the microwave, it dawned on me: the family is selling everything to return to Mexico.

An era of economic development in north Georgia was coming to a sad close, with the most bitter consequences for those who had arrived too late to permanently established themselves and their families. Back in the mid-1980s, the cities and counties of north Georgia discovered that they had one of the lowest percentages of high school graduates proceeding to college in the United States. Work in the carpet plants was sufficiently renumerative to enable these graduates to live quite comfortably, given the low cost of living there. Embarrassed local elites adopted a conscious policy of encouraging young people to go to college, while actively recruiting undocumented people from Mexico to serve as a workforce in the growing carpet industry.

By the mid-1990s, Dalton resembled a Southwestern city more than it did a Deep South one. Local political and business leaders mediated disputes between a growing, Spanish speaking immigrant population and resentful hill country whites, falling back upon a tried and true emphasis on economic pragmatism. Dalton was one of the epicenters of Latino migration into the South, one of the major demographic trends of the last 20 years, one that exploded onto the nation stage during the 2006 immigrants rights' protests, when people in small to medium sized towns throughout the Appalachians and the Piedmont were astounded to discover that there were not only Latinos in their town, documented and undocumented, but quite a lot of them. Latinos later played an important role in the success of the Obama campaign in states like North Carolina and Virginia, as well as his surprisingly strong performance in defeat in Georgia.

But that's ancient history now. Fleeing immigrants are a symptom of a much more serious disease, the loss of manufacturing jobs that aren't likely to return anytime soon. Furthermore, when manufacturing jobs finally do increase again, the recovery is going to be conditioned upon a restructuring of the economy to the detriment of the people who need them. My experience in Dalton was more generally confirmed when I talked to relatives in western North Carolina. My uncle-in-law ruefully told me that the region had lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, and doubted that they would ever return. His sadness was genuine. Well educated people like him live in communities with many high school graduates who have relied upon semi-skilled employment throughout their entire lives. A sense of community and extended family trump the class based elitism that one commonly experiences in most major American cities.

And, it is precisely that sense of community and family, both real and artificially constructed, that is being frayed by the severity of this recession. As I returned my rental car at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, accompanied by my son, safely secure in his car seat, the woman who about to give me my receipt asked me if I had a lot of luggage. I said yes, as I had to take the car seat and several other items of varying sizes home with us, and she immediately called for a valet. Within a couple of minutes, another women arrived, and got into the driver's seat to drive us to our terminal. Of course, as anyone who has traveled through Hartsfield-Jackson would know, both women were African American, as the airport and its myriad support services, such as rental car companies, have been a major source of employment for African Americans in the greater Atlanta metropolitan area.

Most people who work in these jobs are friendly and engaging, sometimes to a fault, it is one of those stereotypes about Atlanta that happens to be true. As I conversed with the woman during our quick trip to the terminal, she informed me that business at the rental car companies was down, that people had been laid off, and that her husband, who was a supervisor at an unspecified company of some kind, had been forced to lay off a lot of people as well. It had been painful for him, she said, as he was close to them after many softball games and barbeques. It hurt him to lay off the younger workers. Better them than us, she told him.

Labels: African Americans, American Empire, Global Recession, Immigration, Neoliberalism, Sub-Proletarianization of America

I really should have known better. I guess that I still possess too much of that naive American optimism, an optimism that resists the harsh dialetical realities of European Marxism and anarchism. How else to explain my gullibility in believing that the House would resist the importunings of finance capital, and its seemingly ubiquitous political and social allies, and again refuse to move the bailout bill to the President's desk? Time for a moment of self-criticism and a rededicated resolve to avoid substituting wish fulfillment for hardened analysis.

With the requisite mea culpa out of the way, I can now offer assistance in the process of drawing a few conclusions as to what has just transpired. First, as I observed in my first post on the subject, the same processes of secrecy that have been developed for the Pentagon and the intelligence services are about to be extended to governmental involvement in the financial markets. The government developed the bailout proposal in closed door meetings, and it was modified as a consequence of equally covert meetings between the White House and congressional representatives. No meaningful hearings were held, with the only public testimony provided by Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke. Understanding the rules of the game, they politely sat through a couple of days of verbal abuse as the price for getting their plan approved.

Furthermore, there was little consideration of any alternatives to the plan put forward by Paulson, alternatives such as ones that would benefit lower and middle income Americans as well as the financial sector. Indeed, there was not even an attempt to explain how the bailout would address the current crisis, and thereby initiate a dialogue as to how to most effectively confront it, except by reference to day to day events in the financial markets. As with the invasion of Iraq, the bailout was marketed through hysteria, and the need to relieve it. Substance was irrelevant, as there is nothing in the plan that necessitates that the recipients of funds through debt purchases actually resume extending credit.

Accordingly, we should presume that the extension of such secrecy into the realm of economic policy will become more and more of a feature of our domestic politics, regardless of whom wins the November election. And, more disturbingly, we should also assume that, contrary to expectations, manipulation of public ignorance, fear and anxiety in the service of capital and conquest will become even more frequent than it was during the Bush presidency. With the media as willing accomplices, there is no reason for politicians, and the interests behind them, to conduct themselves otherwise.

Second, along these lines, the passage of the plan reveals the irrelevancy of the Congress in regard to serving as a constraint upon the President. It is pretty much acknowledged that the changes to the plan related to executive compensation and oversight were cosmetic ones so as to serve the purpose of enabling congressional Democrats to claim that they had improved it. As with the adoption of practices of unprecedented secrecy, this abandonment of responsibility first manifested itself within the confines of military and intelligence activities, and has now crossed the boundary into the realm of economic policy.

Just as with the war in Iraq, Congress has not only relinquished oversight, but has also, even more shockingly, allowed the President to assume the power of the purse. It is easy to forget that, even before the bailout, Congress permitted Paulson and Bernanke to loan hundreds of billions of dollars against distressed, low value securities without objection. It also permitted Paulson and Bernanke to implement their own restructuring of the US financial system by brokering deals, such as the J. P. Morgan purchases of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, and nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without any review.

The US is now subject to a de facto government by decree as part of a global trend that includes countries as disperate as France, Venezuela, the Russian Republic and Great Britain. We cannot ignore the possibility, as absurd as it sounds, that there is more diverse participation in policy development in the People's Republic of China, a Communist dictatorship, with its plurality of emerging national and local interests, than there is in the US. Or, to put it differently, the US may well have a more centralized form of government than the People's Republic.

Third, as invoked by Joseph Stiglitz, Naomi Klein and many others, the invasion and occupation of Iraq is an inescapable metaphor for what has happened and what is about to happen. Bush and his allies have used the occupation as an opportunity to direct billions of dollars, much of it free from public disclosure, to private contractors. Some have provided military and security services, others focused upon more mundane things like rebuilding schools, public utilities and roads. Contrary to the musings of liberal defense policy critics who have limited their evaluations of the occupation to its military effectiveness, it has been a tremendous success in terms of accelerating the redistribution of income within the US. The US, along with Great Britain, now has the greatest inequality, among rich countries, as measured by the Gini coefficient.

Now, Paulson has the power to purchase $700 billion in distressed debt securities between now and January 20, 2009. The debt will be borne by all of us, while the recipients . . . well, the recipients, if the Bush record is any indication, will be financial institutions aligned with both the Bush regime and its bipartisan Congress allies, just as many of the occupation contractors, like Bechtel and Blackwater are. Crony capitalism is now official state policy. Predictably, Barack Obama supported the bailout, with an assertion that we can fix the problem later, even though the Democrats, after two years in control of the Congress, still haven't fixed a single problem identified with the Bush presidency. Expect a lot of talk, but little action, on a Democratic agenda of regulatory reform if he wins the election.

Finally, as noted here, many have recognized that the $700 billion is insufficient to deal with the amount of distressed debt, with Spengler over at Asia Times Online being one of the most recent to acknowledge it. The interests of the public appear to be subordinate to the interests of US finance capital, which seeks to retain its dominance within the this country and the world beyond. We are living through an inexorable process of asset destruction and recalculation of risk in relation to the extension of credit, and it is hard to imagine how the bailout can stop this merciless process, unless it can somehow reflate the housing bubble, an achievement that would be akin to levitation. Even then, we would just be kicking the can down the road a few years, with more extreme consequences when it invariably burst as well.

If the bailout does fail, there will, of course, be scapegoats, and the right has already obligingly targeted them for us. I reiterate what I posted here on Wednesday, because it is important:

And if conditions deteriorate to an extent not seen since the mid-1970s, or, one shudders to say it, even the 1930s, then, there are always poor people, people of color and undocumented immigrants to blame. The willingness of the mortgage lending community to target the requirements of the Community Reinvestment Act as one of the causes of this crisis is not reassuring in this regard. It suggests that the financial sector will, if no alternative is perceived, manipulate the bigotries of racist and xenophobic elements to resist any progressive assault upon its autonomy.

We may be about to enter a period with much more frightening dimensions than people being foreclosed out of their houses and forced to go to food banks.

Labels: American Empire, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Bush, Credit Crunch, Democrats, Housing Bubble, Immigration, Imperial Presidency, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Racism

From today's New York Times:

Senators Barack Obama and John McCain put their battleground campaigning temporarily on hold and headed to Washington on Wednesday to vote in favor of the $700 billion financial bailout package, the consequences of which will help frame the remainder of the fall presidential race.

Mr. Obama intensified his efforts to rally support for the legislation as he sought to sell the idea to skeptical voters — and members of Congress — by presenting it as a plan to "safeguard the American economy."

"This plan is not perfect.,” Mr. Obama told thousands of people at a downtown rally here, not far from the Mississippi River. “Democrats and Republicans in Congress have legitimate concerns about it. I know many Americans share those concerns, but it is clear that this is what we must do right now to prevent a crisis from turning into a catastrophe."

In a speech in Missouri, Mr. McCain struck a similar tone on Wednesday as he characterized the urgency of the moment, which he called, "the greatest financial crisis of our lifetimes."

"It took Congress a while, and there were costs to these delays, but they have awakened to the danger," Mr. McCain told an audience in Independence, Mo. "And today, with the unity that this crisis demands, Congress will once again work to restore confidence and stability to the American economy."

Public rejection of the bailout is threatening to the presidential candidates for two reasons: (1) it prevents the political parties from fulfilling their responsibility to reinforce the political and economic power of finance capital; and (2) it represents an alarming repudiation of the entire system by which the US economy, and much of the global one, is secretly regulated, through institutions like the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and influential banking houses like Goldman Sachs.

Hence, it becomes essential for the candidates to proselytize for the bailout in a doomed effort to recover the lost prestige of these institutions. Otherwise, their influence will continue to dissipate in relation to their lost revenue and declining asset values. No longer able to justify their economic preeminence upon their centrality in the provision of credit and the incredible amount of capital that it attracted, both of which are now threatening their very survival, they have no recourse but seek a historically unprecedented governmental subsidy in order to preserve it. If it they get it, there is good reason to doubt that it will reverse the painful process of asset destruction caused by the deleveraging and accompanying deflation ignited by the bursting of the housing bubble.

After all, the initiatives undertaken by Paulson, Bernanke and the financial institutions that they regulate, like J.P. Morgan, Goldman, Bank of America and others, have been an abysmal failure in terms of restoring confidence to the financial markets. The release of hundreds of billions of dollars of liquidity through Federal Reserve loans secured by distressed collateralized debt obligations, the arranged marriages of Countrywide/Bank of America, J. P. Morgan/Bear Stearns, J.P. Morgan/Washington Mutual, and, possibly, within in a matter of days, Citicorp/Wachovia, as well as the shocking nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have merely been signposts along the road leading to the collapse of the neoliberal economic system.

An attempt to soften the consequences of this collapse by voluntarily releasing much of their power as part of a broader, relatively mild reformist strategy of rescuing the lower and middle classes, and thus, constructing a floor to falling demand and asset values, has never been seriously considered, except by a group of liberal House dissidents and earnest economists. Fund a program for the federal government to buy distressed mortgages directly from the borrowers? If the government is going to shell out $700B, wouldn't it be better if the government spent the money to relieve the borrowers of these onerous debts, thus freeing them to resume their role as the consumers who drive much of global economic growth? Permit bankruptcy courts to step into the role formerly played by banks and savings and loans by empowering them to enforce workouts of underwater loans upon lenders, resulting in much the same?

Forget about it. There is no place for pragmatism within the existing American economic orthodoxy. And if conditions deteriorate to an extent not seen since the mid-1970s, or, one shudders to say it, even the 1930s, then, there are always poor people, people of color and undocumented immigrants to blame. The willingness of the mortgage lending community to target the requirements of the Community Reinvestment Act as one of the causes of this crisis is not reassuring in this regard. It suggests that the financial sector will, if no alternative is perceived, manipulate the bigotries of racist and xenophobic elements to resist any progressive assault upon its autonomy.

Labels: American Empire, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Barack Obama, Credit Crunch, Elections, Housing Bubble, Immigration, John McCain, Neoliberalism, Postmodernism, Racism, Vote or Die

According to psychologist Stephen Soldz:

In Soviet Russia, psychiatrists sometimes collaborated with the repressive regime by locking up dissidents in mental hospitals and injecting them with powerful psychotropic drugs, "antipsychotics" designed to treat schizophrenia. The Soviet psychiatrists were rightly condemned for their misuse of medicine for the un-therapeutic purpose of social control.

American health personnel are not immune from cooperating with efforts to misuse psychiatric drugs for social control purposes having no connection with those drugs' intended uses. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has been systematically administering psychotropic drugs to immigrants in the process of being deported as the Washington Post reported this week. Deportees who in the past had resisted deportation were injected with drugs, often a three drug "cocktail," in order to keep them pliant during deportation. These drugs included the powerful antipsychotic drug Haldol, as well as the antianxiety drug Ativan, and Cogentin, a drug used to treat the often severe Parkinsons illness like side effects of Haldol.

These drugs were prescribed by psychiatrists and administered by specially selected nurse "medical escorts." The drugs were administered in extremely high doses, sometimes rendering the deportees unable to speak. It sometimes took deportees days or even weeks to get the drugs out of their system. Thus Michael Shango was injected with 32.5 milligrams (mg) of Haldol, as well as 8.5 mg of Ativan and some Cogentin over 11 hours. His initial Haldol dose was 10 mg. Compare this with a usual Haldol dose of 2 to 5 mg repeated in 4 to 6 hours for "control of the acutely agitated schizophrenic patient with moderately severe to very severe symptoms" and 2 to 6 mg of Ativan daily for patients whose bodies have already adapted to the medication; lower doses of these drugs are recommended for new patients as people need time to adjust to them.

These drugs, especially Haldol are extremely powerful and are almost never utilized in individuals not diagnosed as actively psychotic. They can be extremely uncomfortable, especially if first administered in high doses and can disorient an individual for days. When Shango was imprisoned upon his return to the Congo, he was so disoriented that he didn't know where he was fortunately, friends helped him escape. It was weeks before he fully recovered from the drugs.

Soldz rightly places the responsibility for these abuses upon the medical professionals themselves:

In 35 years of practice, I have never had to give such high doses of antipsychotics to any person with any mental illness as is described in this story.

Again, we have an utter breakdown of the accountability of health professionals. As with the behavior of nurses and doctors in the war on terror prisons and the use of drugs for the CIA-State Department's rendition flights, we have a failure of understanding of professional ethics and complete passivity of the AMA and the American Nurses Association.

It is time for both Congress and the health professions themselves to investigate. Recently Senators Levin, Biden and Hagel wrote the Defense Department Inspector General requesting an investigation of the reports of involuntary detainee drugging. This new report of involuntary drugging may be investigated as well.

We need a mechanism, however, for a detailed examination of the perversions of the health professions by the current administration. I have previously called for a Truth and Reconciliation process to deal with the shameful cowardice of the health professions in actively and/or passively aiding the administrations' detention and interrogation abuses. Perhaps this process needs to be expanded to confront the broad range of health profession failures to actively oppose their professions' perversion by the forces of the state.

Or, as I more generally explained in regard to the involvement of psychologists in the tortures inflicted at Guantanamo:

One of the common features of an increasingly violent, unaccountable society is the degradation of its professional classes. Now, to some extent, they always invariably serve as functionairies for their masters, only the most independent minded align themselves with movements for radical social change, but, even so, they perform within a complex network of ethical limitations and analytical standards that legitimize their outward appearance of objectivity

Indeed, such limitations are essential to their effectiveness. After all, how else could Blackstone have permanently established the principles of larceny within Anglo-American jurisprudence in the 18th Century, thus criminalizing perquisites, an opaque, informal means of shared property rights in the production process by laborers, entrepreneurs and merchants in England, leading to the enshrinement of new, substituted system of wage labor? How else could Lombroso have persuaded so many that people reveal an inherent criminality through purported physiological deformities, deformities that, not coincidentally, matched the common perception of what was then known as the lower orders? . . .

Accordingly, instead of the education, ethics and methodology of the psychology profession legitimizing the abuse of detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, quite the opposite has occurred. The abuse and the transparent rationalizations for them are delegitimizing the profession, exposing some of its participants, and its primary organization of governance, the American Psychological Association, as willing facilitators of these sadomasochistic practices. A similar phenomenon has occurred in the legal profession in regard to the judicial defense of these indefinite detentions and the conditions of confinement associated with them. One can only assume that the increased freedom to act violently and abusively more than compensates for the loss of institutional credibility and the potential domestic risk associated with it.

A similar tension between delegitimization and the benefits associated with the unencumbered use of violence and physical abuse is now repeating itself in relation to the deportation of detainees by ICE. One wonders, will any profession in the US, and its publicly pronounced ethical values, values frequently displayed to the rest of the world as a model to be emulated, escape being discredited by the purported war on terror? Of course, I can't avoid exposing my own cynicism by saying that Soldz's exhortation for Congress to take action strikes me as extraordinarily naive. Something more direct, more confrontational is necessary to reverse this perverse process.

Labels: "War on Terror", American Empire, Immigration, Sadomasochism