Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Nepali Radical Women

[American Dream]

http://ordoesitexplode.wordpress.com/20 ... cceptance/

Queers and Capitalism Part One: The Dialectics of Moving Towards A Larger Social Acceptance

“. . . the waters around you have grown “

I remember the first time I saw a B.Scott video. I sat in my freshman dorm and listened to this very flamboyant, very androgynous, bi-racial man rant and rave about Shemar Moore’s penis being exposed online. A moment like this sounds very mundane and trivial, but has profound meaning when placed into context. As a queer person it is very rare that I see myself reflected, even if it is slight, in media and this doubles when we’re talking about queer people of color, who are all but invisible in the culture. So when we see representations of ourselves it becomes something spiritual, something affirming, something that touches us and says: “you are worth attention and love.” The 7-minute rant did that for me. Move ahead 5 years and we get this . . .




The same B.Scott I knew and loved is now a bonified star complete with music videos, red carpet appearances and celebrity interviews. Looking at this very feminine, queer, man of color on the screen brings all kinds of questions to the surface for me:

“Has society come to a place where we can accept queers as people?”

“Does capitalism need homophobia (patriarchy) to exist?”

and “What does this mean for queer struggle and activism?”


I want to think out loud a bit about these things . . .




“Has society come to a place where we can accept queers as people?”

For someone like this and many other gay figures to come to such prominence in our time means that there is a large shift in society. Homo-life is a commodity now, something being placed onto the pedestal of consumer culture and devoured: your favorite pop singer has probably stolen swag from the ballroom, and there is a gay plotline on just about every show. In addition to that, more and more states are sanctioning some degree of union between gay couples and DADT is becoming smaller and smaller in the rear view. The state and big business are slowly adapting to a shift in public opinion. I believe that much of the work of 60’s queer activists to prove that gay culture was just as legitimate as others paved the way for certain aspects of the culture to take center stage in the way that they have thus influencing public consciousness. I also believe that the majority of this “gay is okay” push comes from capitalism’s understanding that it cannot afford for the queer population to be isolated in total from the whole of society.

I’ve always said that queer people represented a very particular threat to capitalism, especially in the United States, because of their positioning in the society. Queer folk prior to many of the movements of the 60’s and 70’s had little to no material connection to the American melting pot. And it can be argued that in certain communities of color the nature of queer oppression had a different character because of the fact that people found themselves already segregated and marginalized. Thus, many queers of color a.) Identified more with their racial caste and were kept in the embrace of their families because of their shared oppression and/or b.) weren’t given access into larger queer spaces because of the segregation.

However, I believe that the generalization can be made that queer folks challenged the stability of capitalism because of their status as people pushed outside of the nuclear family, which is one of the most basic oppressive structures of society and patriarchy. It becomes too dangerous to have pockets of the society that have no material attachment to it. It is also dangerous for capitalism to have spaces in which the development of such a critique can be developed and shared.

In addition, radical queer politics, much like feminism challenged many of the assumptions of the culture and capitalism. What does it mean for white supremacist hetero capitalism when the nuclear family, male/ female socialization and personal identity are challenged? Many older, less fabulous, leftists would say that it means nothing or very little because the means of production, the material ways in which capitalism operates, are not immediately being challenged. But they would be wrong on multiple fronts. The challenging of patriarchal social relations not only means liberating womyn from unwaged labor but also brings the political and the personal together. Something desperately missing from a lot of movements of the past has been the revolutionary observation and transformation of gender identities. By this I mean, that feminism and anti-patriarchal ideology have never really been taken seriously by groups involving a straight male majority and that’s because it strikes at the most guarded and unchallenged of our identities; our gender. Feminist and queer movements of the past have sought to turn this on its head by placing an emphasis on personal development along these lines along with organizing in the workplace.

Slowly and subtly, queers have been brought into the fold. One interesting moment in this history was in the wake of the 60’s and 70’s, in the middle of the AIDS crisis-we saw thousands of gays –revolutionary or otherwise- pass away at epidemic levels. This crisis had varying effects on gay communities, some of which are relevant to this post and some aren’t. Something that is important to recognize is that the effect of the AIDS epidemic and the response to it not only left a vacuum of leadership in queer spaces but it also paved the way, in part, for queer struggle to be co-opted through the nonprofit industrial complex. This is important because we see a very distinct change in the character of queer activism around this time. Friendlier, more passive things like quilt making and appealing to the state for sympathy became more prominent. A little later on, queers became more attached to the causes of DADT repeal and marriage rights, the latter can be understood partially in the context of having to watch loved ones die without any recourse or protection from their biological families. I would argue that this more identity based activism, and less aggressive stance in the mainstream, had a less alienating and more tolerance inducing effect on the some of the population.

So I think the boost in queer visibility can be attributed to a push and pull between forces. I think that movements against patriarchy and capitalism paved the way for aspects of oppressed peoples humanity (specifically queers here) to be accepted in the mainstream and capitalism, by it’s very nature and need to survive, adapted to this shift by exploiting and incorporating what it could.

“Does capitalism need homophobia (patriarchy) to exist?”

For me, a struggle against homophobia must mean one that addresses capitalism. I see my oppression as a Black, gay male as one whose roots are intrinsically linked with the beast of capitalism. In order for the power structure to maintain itself it needs to suppress certain parts of the population. Does this mean that we will never see wealthy gays? No, San Francisco is proof of that. However, it does mean that the majority of queer and trans folk, especially those of color, can bet that they will never be apart of the ruling class. The very nature of the society cannot allow for that. Queer folk, being a one of the more vulnerable parts of the population, find themselves subordinated into lower levels of the working class through homophobia or excluded entirely as seen in the case of trans folk. This strengthens the elite and their machinery because the horizontal violence (homophobia) maintains a division of labor and permanent caste position. We also see the building of a surplus army of labor (the unemployed) to be used against working people who may feel the need to challenge their abuse at the hands of the elite. Workers who seek to withhold their labor (strikes) until better conditions arise are quickly met with the leagues of unemployed folk who will scab (break the picket and replace the strikers) and that makes sense in a society where there is no space for the entirety of the population to work for a decent wage.

Also, just as in the case of race, socialized gender is a one of the pillars of capitalism. In using patriarchy as one of it’s stepping stones, capitalism has created the conditions under which it’s demise cannot come without attacking the gendered division of labor, homophobia, etc . . . This means that our ascension into the utter fabulousness of liberation means that gender, and capitalism must be destroyed because the destruction of such a poisonous ideology (patriarchy) would mean the crumbling of walls built between working people. The system needs us isolated into paranoid fractions.

“What does this mean for queer struggle and activism?”

It is in the best interest of capitalism to bring queers into the fold (through a very narrow, white supremacist, patriarchal view of course) the potential to expand capital through an exploitation of queer images and culture is vast. At the same time this gay assimilation dulls the blade of radical queer politics. Because capitalism’s veil of justice and equality is kept in place through the façade of acceptance and limitless upward mobility, embodied in the emerging queer ruling class, it becomes harder for queer militants to argue for the necessity of a revolution against capitalism itself. Reform to the system is popular when the connection between class oppression and patriarchy isn’t clear. If I believe that patriarchy is something completely separate from the otherwise redeemable capitalist world order then it makes no sense to seize the means of production as apart of liberation because my conceived liberation is tied to the eradication of an ideology within certain people and not connected to a material struggle against the bourgeoisie (the top 10% of people who own everything) to end the totality of oppression. Radical queers, in this historical moment, find themselves struggling to articulate the need for a queer struggle that includes a radical class analysis and positive program that reflects such. We must also win people away from bourgeois delusions like equality under capitalism.



I think it’s exciting to be alive right now, and to organize right now. We have an opportunity to present a new proposition and deconstruct past failures with the intent of building a movement that can win. For me, radical queer organizing looks like many things: the building of safe spaces where we can heal and build self determination, the challenging of straight and male privilege, and the inverting of gender roles with the intention to create the conditions where all beings can fully express themselves are a few of those. The incorporation ideas such as self-care, and consciousness raising around gendered dynamics are some others. The appropriation of queer identities by the mainstream has, in an unintentional way, given us the opportunity to observe and reflect on our organizing and position in struggle. It also has made the ground fertile to plant revolutionary seeds. More queers are out and engaging in some form of political activity than we’ve seen in a while. (Maybe ever, I would wager that the amount of queers campaigning for reform and the amount visibly/verbally opposing the reformist queers out numbers the activists of 40-50 years ago) And that means we have some work to do. We have some questions to pose. We have some ideas to raise. And we have some consciousness to change.

[American Dream]

And the gay rights movement has . . . adopted largely an identity politics; we were born this way, we can’t help it, and we should have civil rights just like anyone else. But the born-lesbian/lesbian-as-identity politics of the gay movements erases precisely what is most radically political about being a lesbian: that we are women resisting heterosexist patriarchy and valuing women as human beings—and that other women can choose to do this too.

—Jennie Ruby, “Is the Lesbian Future Feminist?” off our backs: a women’s news journal, Vol. 26, October 1, 1996

I am told that in order for me to fight for queer rights that I should tell people that my sexuality is biologically determined, that I was “born this way.” I can’t. That is like saying that I was born with an unwanted affliction and assumes that it is necessary and even desirable to become heterosexual. Sexuality is not an innate orientation as most would believe, but rather a preference that in some way biology may play a role in defining.

—Daryl Vocat, 2000

Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality. But finding this difficult, and preferring not to admit it, it invented a pariah state, a leper colony for the incorrigible whose very existence, when tolerated openly, was admonition to all. We queers keep everyone straight as whores keep matrons virtuous.

—Kate Millett, Flying, part 1, 1974

[American Dream]

Black Panther Party inspires the Black working class

[American Dream]

http://ordoesitexplode.wordpress.com/20 ... lienation/

Spears & Flowers: Reflections on Queer Alienation



I have been very introspective recently. The beauty of radical queer politics, and the benefit it holds for all political tendencies and struggles, is it’s unflinching quest to challenge all aspects of the culture, including ourselves. radical queer politics questioned the family, feminism, patriarchy and other aspects of society through a look at their workings within human beings and our interpersonal relationships. In a recent meeting of a radical queer space that I love and am connected to, I was inspired to write this piece.

I often catch glimpses of who I want to be staring at me in the mirror, waving. I see a lot of what I am and more of someone I wish I was from time to time. But the purpose of all of this is to come closer to loving my reflection for what it is, when I see it. It is becoming more evident to me that self-improvement and self-love are not mutually exclusive. As I stand I see thousands of contradictions and things I despise about myself, but I also know that many of these are a result of being out in the world. They are not essential components of my character and I can change them. It also is important to look at that image, in the mirror, and love it fiercely. To embrace it for what it is at that moment: not who it was, could or should be. It is only when we strive towards a place of love for ourselves that we can truly work to combat the negative traits we despise.

P.S. I wrote somewhat dry because I wanted to get the thoughts out as clearly as possible without too much colorful language possibly getting in the way.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

In my younger years I sought to craft a master heterosexual disguise. This desire came from the fact that I knew that the boldness exemplified by some of my “out” peers was something that was not tolerable, something that was often met with violence. The most disgusting incident of this manifested with the murder of someone who lived on the same street as I did. The young man, who often cross dressed and defied the code of conduct by talking back to his hecklers, was found stabbed to death with shards of glass in his anus. Daily, I knew of boys who were raped or beat in school. The general attitude around these attacks was silence from the administration and larger community. Because of this, I learned, very early, that my survival was dependant on my ability to make myself invisible. Part of this pact with oppressive patriarchy, meant also that I had to often partake in the demonizing of my queer brothers and sisters. Eventually this meant that I began to absorb the rhetoric, let it run through my blood, and define myself with those same horizontal lines.

I hated effeminate men. They were something unforgivable to me, something disgusting. I would lash out at my friends, and police them when we hung out. I despised the fact that I possessed those same qualities and wanted to exorcise them, from myself, through verbal assaults on other effeminate men. Often times, in oppressed communities, the qualities that are picked upon by the dominant culture are those that are most harshly policed. It’s the same as problem I sometimes see occur in Black communities around “loudness”, “Black English”, and “dress”. Because we live in a society that is dominated by the straight white male lens, we must all act accordingly in order to move about with the least amount of trouble. Albeit, oppression and trouble are mainstays regardless of how much people desire to assimilate to the prescribed aesthetic. So we come to a place where we, as the various oppressed peoples, see ourselves through dual lenses and we posses what Dubois coined as “double consciousness”

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

- W.E.B. Dubois

Recently, I have been challenging the way this internal hatred manifest in a different way: by looking at the men I lust for. I’ve always been attracted to a specific kind of man. My day dreams and night fantasies were dominated by very hard, masculine men. My dealings, in real life, have been the same. Regardless of the tragic amounts of repression within them and the dysfunction that it brings to the relationship, I wanted a “MAN”. I remember having a conversation with an ex, while we were dating, where he forbid me to be around other queer black men. This was also the same man who refused to engage with the option of versatility in the bed, who refused to acknowledge me sexually. And none of this is said with the intention of demonizing him. Quite the contrary, he represents the psychic dissonance formed within us in this society, where oppressed folk cannot fully come to a place of reconciliation with themselves and develop into semi-formed humans. The same thing goes for myself and my attraction to men like him.

In a recent video, the poet Yolo Akili, challenged the culture, specifically of Queer Black men, when he asked the question: “Are You The Kind of Boy You Want?” The video, which features a range of men, focuses on the fact that often times we pursue partners, and friends, out of a longing to negate certain qualities within ourselves. It highlights the lack of self-love we have. Personally, I know that my desire to be with stereotypical images of Black men or damaged men, who would ultimately lead to hurt, came from a disgust I had for myself. I outright rejected the notion that I would be in a relationship with effeminate men, with larger men etc . . . Looking back, I see a lot of my attitudes towards potential partners as reflective of a kind of alliance with White supremacy and patriarchy. I projected this prescribed image of Black manhood onto these men, dehumanizing them. At the same time, this image was something I desperately wanted to be because of my learned hatred of the effeminate parts of myself.



The nature of life in this society teaches us many things; among them is an intense self-loathing. From birth we are told that we are lacking and taught to consume in order to fill in for, or cover up our flaws. Combine this basic rule of Capitalism with White Supremacy and Patriarchy and we have generations of oppressed people consuming an ideology that is slowly killing them. And for that we both desire and loathe societal poison. The society hates womyn and defines “male” by what the former is not. And so it follows that men embodying traits relegated to womyn are seen as pariahs, or backwards. The tragic error in this confusion is that it continues that dissonance we spoke of by ignoring the full range of human expression and the material fact that nothing is essentially “male” or “female”.

In my search to come to a deeper love for myself, and therefore coming closer to a greater capacity to honestly love another person, I have come to some very hard truths. And it is difficult to approach a place of self-love after years of taught hatred but it is a healing we need. Many constructions of relationships between beings fall between the pillars of co-dependence and co modification. Our alienation brings us to seek an unhealthy validation in romantic partners. We disguise this often as “love”, all the while afraid to see our tolerance of abuse and longing for what they really are: reactions to the fact that we have not been told enough that we are loved or deserving of love. We commodify one another: looking at the value we acquire through virtue of being involved with another. I believe that this comes from the lack of self-love that comes with life under White supremacist, patriarchal capitalism. That’s why “love” is something radical, something golden, something revolutionary: because it is something diametrically opposed to the progress of the society which oppresses and exploits us. If we as militants, as revolutionaries, as any people who hope to bring joy to the world and ourselves, cannot deal with the love most essential to the revolutionary project then we have lost.

I look out, as I try to free myself, and see rooms filled with Black men like me. Sitting underneath the horror of that ceiling and knowing, each day, that its existence is becoming more and more real – the air a little more thin.

I also see that, like all things, this doesn’t have to be the permanent definition of our existence. I draw inspiration from healing spaces, from spaces of challenge and love. It is easy to become overwhelmed and see it all as insurmountable. But that is the exact the opposite of reality: our individual projects of self-help and improvement lead us to a greater love for ourselves and for humanity. This has a material effect on our conditions because it brings to the surface a counter ideology that will move with us through physical struggle. The scars of the racist and sexist capitalist system are seen beyond economic oppression, they are apart of our spiritual fabric. Our oppressions intersect and harm on multiple levels. That is why this work and kind of analysis was crucial to the Queer liberation movement and Feminist theory. That is why revolutionary self-reflection is crucial to me.

I want to end with a quote, and some commentary:

“I believe that many of the destructive lessons taught in our childhood homes is the result of the desperation of our parents. They were children once and learned those same lessons. I don’t know how we begin to unlearn that behavior.”

–Essex Hemphill

I believe that many of the destructive lessons learned in this society are the result of the desperation of our parents and the ailments of our society. As children we are torn asunder learning these lessons. The beginning of the unlearning, of the reconciliation of our torn selves lies in our ability to grasp warmly, hold up and affirm one another. Our power lies in our ability to recognize and reconcile with our own humanity: to take our scarred inner children and embrace them, allow them to cry and finally, to speak. Much of Western culture is a about running away from ourselves, being terrified of what makes us human and repressing it. It is my sincere intention to do away with this within myself. I want to see every raw bit and say “I appreciate you.”

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://ordoesitexplode.wordpress.com/20 ... he-f-word/

The “F-word”


My queer, class struggle, politics stem from my relationship with feminism and the radical challenging of power through confronting patriarchy. It is through a developing Black, Marxist, Feminist lens that I understand the material conditions of, not only my particular oppression, but the history of the various people who have existed in the world and confronted oppression and exploitation. Recently it has become very obvious to me that I am a bit of an oddity, in the sense that it is not common to hear of male feminist, even in the political Left. Often times my political position has been met with raised eyebrows, uneasiness, or dismissal of my opinions as being my own. Other men sometimes attribute my feminism to my relationships with womyn and while it is true that the source of my feminism comes from my upbringing/ close relationships with womyn, it is a bit inaccurate to speak of those connections as if I have been brainwashed by angry, butch, white womyn who refuse to shave.

Feminism came to me long before I was able to articulate, understand, or accept it. It was not something taught to me by a member of the intelligentsia, but instead by the womyn who surrounded me as I grew up. Looking back to my childhood, I can see feminist thought and action as something ever-present in my mother’s smile, her hands, her roar, her laugh, and her back. When she was a young womyn she ventured out into the world, and went to college in Michigan. This was forever and a day away from Washington DC, where she was born and raised. My grandfather, unhappy about one of his daughters venturing out so far attempted to raise all of hell to the surface. She lived, became a Black Nationalist, womanyst, dancer, poet, and finally a social worker upon graduation. I remember going through her old photos in my youth and seeing images of righteous afros, smiling men, homemade dashikis, glorious fists, forever cloths, and a life so wondrous and far away from mine. All of this joy and eccentricity made it harder for me to understand how and why I found myself poor and unhappy in the ghettos of DC with the same womyn who’s smile emanated from those pictures. I didn’t know then that the world is a cruel place for Black people and especially Black womyn. My mother, full of light, saw that for herself. Somewhere between the crack infested 80’s, Ronald Regan’s love letter to the Black ghetto, and ailing parents my mother found herself in a less sun filled position.

My youth is filled with memories of violent men, drugs, dignity destroying welfare, tear-stained food stamps and thunder screams. These were the realities that I observed my mother navigate. I saw firsthand the incredible power that lies in Black womyn and the strength that is necessary to re-enter, everyday, a world that chips away at your very life force. I also witnessed the power of community and the laying of hands that is womyn holding each other warmly and creating informal networks of support and trust. All of my mother’s friends were womyn that I looked at as aunts. They watched me, played with me, applauded me, and scolded me. Most importantly, they all imbued me with the strength, courage, and wisdom of a generation of Black womyn who had come of age in the post 60’s nightmare of America and lived to tell the tales of rape, joy, power, and loss.



They relied on one another so fiercely and loved one another fiercely, even in times of disagreement or betrayal. Many of the patriarchal, Black Nationalists, I’ve met, take issue with the fact that the racist capitalist system has exploited male/female difference, combined it with institutional racism and made it near impossible for the mythical “Black nuclear family” to exist. I have a serious problem with a generation of Black men falling by the waist-side due to White Supremacist, Patriarchal Capitalism and state sponsored terror.

However, I see Black womyn’s role as mothers to Black men as essential and I am not an advocate for the lessening of that by some reactionary “return of the Black male to his rightful place”. Often times that slogan has been code for female and child subordination through patriarchal oppression.

I see Black womyn’s oppression as my primary teacher and shaper. I see it as the roots of my radicalization and worldview. Queer or not, men are socialized through the patriarchal society and are people who have lived with those values as central parts of their lives. However, I found that that was something derailed by my upbringing in this community of Black womyn and seeing something powerful in radical womyn raising men. In addition to my developing queer identity, I began to analyze the society from the position of someone who was oppressed based my gender expression.

It is important to state, however, that my upbringing didn’t make me a feminist. It made me more understanding and receptive of and to feminism.

It wasn’t until college, when I entered a larger more radical community of my peers that I embraced the “f-word”. Being in struggle and solidarity with female comrades contributed to my understanding of patriarchy, under capitalism, and how the two beast feed off of one another’s destructive energy. As a queer person, my oppression is based in patriarchal thought. It is the thought that socializes men to see their needs as the most important, that breeds their violent culture, that reprimands their tears, that tells them everything that is masculine is so out of a negation of the feminine characteristics within all of us. So when we talk about battling patriarchy, we are talking, in part, about breaking down the socialization that contributes to the development of men and womyn semi-self realized human beings. We are talking about abolishing gender as such and that is essential not only to womyn and queers, but to the whole of the world. We are talking about ending a world that creates such a power dissonance between humans. We are not merely talking about getting people who wear dresses to join picket lines and call it feminist realization in class struggle.

As I am writing this, I think of the male organizers I know. I recently decided to celebrate my birthday with a drag party. I originally thought that the men would react very negatively to this, that they would outright protest. And indeed some of them did. Some had a problem with my minimum requirement of lipstick. It is incredible to think of the reasons and thought behind the aversion to men wearing dresses. What does it say about the culture when men who claim to be about revolution cannot bring themselves to wear a dress for one night? Many of my male comrades did come in dresses and that small act, while not a feminist revolution, made me smile a bit.

I hear the radio on in the distance and the discussion is of whether or not men should be able to have “man bags”. People are outraged and disgusted that the DJ would even propose something so horrific, that he would propose men degrade themselves by performing some act attributed to the opposite gender. It is heart breaking to think of the generation of men who cannot be themselves without the violent reinforcement of our culture’s hatred of womyn. I think I’m going to call in.

[American Dream]

“For while we wait for another Malcolm, another Martin, another charismatic Black leader to validate our struggles, old Black people are freezing to death in tenements, Black children are being brutalized and slaughtered in the streets, or lobotomized by the television, and the percentage of Black families living below the poverty line is higher today than in 1963. And if we wait to put the future into the hands of some new messiah, what happens when those people are shot, or discredited, or tried for murder, or called homosexual, or otherwise disempowered. Do we put our future on hold?

- Audre Lorde

[American Dream]

http://chaka85.wordpress.com/2011/07/13 ... oppressed/

Marxism and Feminism: Necessary tools in the hands of the oppressed!


Revolutionary Afghani Women!

I became politicized, like most oppressed people, through my lived experience and identity. Being a working-class, mixed raced, queer woman in a home with domestic violence, I became conscious early on of inequality and domination centered around race and gender. I had an organic awareness of class divides, like most poor people, and a healthy distrust of the rich, as well as a distaste with the greed of bourgeois culture. It didn’t seem fair for a minority to have such exorbitant wealth, while my mother struggled to pay the bills with two jobs. When I became politically active I was drawn to radical feminist and queer politics, because they were both so empowering. It gave me a space to talk about my experiences with gender oppression in a political context, as well as build community with other women and queer people of color. The organizations I built were autonomous student groups with other women and queers, who centralized gender, race and sexuality in our politics and action. I was not aware of marxism or marxist organizations/parties. I knew that Marx was critical of capitalism, and according to my organic class consciousness that meant he was okay and radical in my book. When I moved to the bay and begin to intentionally build and study with other autonomous Marxists I begin to understand that my previous ideas of what Marxism was were totally incorrect. It wasn’t an ideology or a state capitalist/communist party. Marxism is a methodology that represents the unity of theory and practice; it is an outlet to make us socially aware of the totality of the capitalist world and our place in it in order to change our world for the better through our actions. This is what feminism did for me; it made me socially aware of the patriarchal world, and put my experiences in a larger political context. Marxism puts people’s actions and lives in a political context as well as a historical context, revealing that it is the actions and struggle committed by the oppressed that make history. Feminism and Marxism didn’t seem to be in conflict to me, but represented a revolutionary synthesis that could be used to develop revolutionary theory that could be applied in practice to unite the people, and tear down patriarchal capitalist systems of oppression. That said, there are many strands of feminism and marxism that have different theoretical approaches, and thus different forms of struggle from one another. Some Marxists reject feminism and some Feminists reject marxism. However, the only way to rid the world of capitalism and patriarchy is through the bridging of these political frameworks. This post is an attempt to show the organic connections between Marxist and Feminist politics, and the need for revolutionary feminist organizations.

Like I said above, Marxism is not an ideology, which is the way most liberals like to characterize it. It is a methodology called Dialectical historical materialism. German philosopher Hegel revolutionized thought through developing dialectics by looking at the subject, object, and the spirit, and how they manifested into contradictions. I am no Hegelian, but Karl Marx is and he took Hegels dialectics and advanced it by bringing it down from the realm of the spirit and ideas, and grounding it in material reality. A huge inspiration to Marx were the European revolutions, particularly the French revolution, that lead him to understand society through class struggle. Marx developed theory, based off of actual struggle, that was meant to be put in practice in order to liberate ourselves from the chains of capitalism. Here is one of my favorite quotes that demonstrates the dialectic,

“the world has long since possessed something in the form of a dream, which it need only take possession of consciously, in order to possess in reality.”

Marx is speaking to the material power of idea’s; conscious thought is the first step towards conscious action. It also demonstrates the relationship between consciousness and revolution. Revolutions aren’t just about tactics; revolutions happen when people decide they will no longer go on living under the current system. When they decide that consciously then they will act on that basis. That is the dialectic; the relationship between the subject (people) and the object (the system). The subject acts against the object and changes itself and the object in the process. In order for the people to act correctly and strategically they must have an understanding of the total system and how the division of labor is organized along gender and racial lines that also regulate our sexualities. The role of theory should be an analysis of existing systems of oppression, as well as practical strategies, that the oppress can then apply in practice in order fight these systems.

Marxism is a methodology for the working class to use in order to understand capitalist society through self-knowledge. Marx asserted that the true exploitative nature of capitalism can only be obtained by the proletariat; the workers it exploits and oppresses in order to reproduce itself. The bourgeoisie; ruling class; the rich; the man; whatever label you prefer, cannot understand the true nature of the system and solution to crisis, because they believe their own lies that the system is good and free. Meanwhile, the planet is suffering and responding: hurricanes, soil erosion, global warming, tornadoes in the south, tsunami’s hitting Japan and San Francisco. These aren’t natural disasters, but responses to an unnatural system of domination and exploitation of the earth and humanity. The people are suffering and responding too: the standard of living for most of the world is terrible with wide spread poverty and suffering, but there has been political upheavals, general strikes, and revolutions. Yet, when we turn on the bourgeois controlled news, we have our rulers talking about how the economy is looking up; how the three imperialist wars our country is involved in are making us safer, when really it is just a struggle over resources that uses the largely working class soldiers as pawns in their games of greed and destruction.


Environmental justice will be served when the environmentally
unjust system of capitalism is overthrown

The bourgeoisie has false consciousness, and it runs so deep that they don’t even understand how to truly solve their own crisis. The only solution to the capitalist crisis is revolution. The bourgeoisie has structured society along its own capitalist interests, relying on the exploitation of the earth and the people to reproduce itself, because the logic of capital is to continually expand in order to reproduce. This system is proving itself to be unsustainable, because capital cannot keep expanding, due to the earth and humanities limits. The bourgeoisie does not see this, because of their place in the division of labor, but the vast majority of the people, who are workers do see this through their daily experience with oppression and exploitation. When workers begin to understand themselves within the context of the political economic system then they understand the truth of the system, and can decide if they want to struggle together to change such a system. This is what Marx means when he argues that capitalism is understood through self knowledge; when we understand that we, the working class, are the foundation of the system that supports it through the division of labor, we can make a decision if we want to continue our lives living that way. The key phrase in all of this, and the subject of much conflict between marxists and other political frameworks, is the division of labor, and how it is defined and understood. The division of labor is complex with many divisions that have their basis in other systems of oppression as well, such as racism, sexism and homophobia, to name a few. We are forced into this role as workers to survive, but other aspects of our identity, such as gender, race, age, citizenship status, effect the type of work we do. As Marxists, we must always strive to understand the total picture of capitalist society, that means we must strive to break through these complexities within the division of labor, in order to understand all the particularities of our class oppression in order to root them out and build a new society. In the past, Marxists and marxism has been accused of being class reductionist and not understanding the many different ways people experience class. Different feminisms have been critical of marxism for this, but feminism can and must play a role in developing an understanding of the truth of the system in the minds of the oppressed.



Just as Marxism makes us aware of the world through our own self-knowledge as workers in it, Feminism makes us aware of the patriarchal world and its system of domination through our self-knowledge as gender oppressed people. Patriarchy structures societies along a gendered division of labor, and rigid gender categories that are harmful to all human beings, and supports the overall devaluation of ‘women’. Like Marx, feminism, particularly Black feminism, has developed an analysis of society through self-knowledge of our place in it. It is important to understand that there isn’t one gendered division of labor. In the United States, the origins of capitalism lie within American Slavery, and the creation of race and white supremacy. This development of a gendered and racialized division of labor created divisions among women that we still see today. Black women are socialized differently then White women; working class women are socialized differently then middle class women. This is because differnt positions within the division of labor carry different social power. Selma James speaks to this directly in her pamphlet Sex, Race & Class,

“The work you do and the wages you receive are not merely “economic” but social determinants, determinants of social power…The social power relations of the sexes, races, nations and generations are precisely, then, particularized forms of class relations. These power relations within the working class weaken us in the power struggle between the classes. They are the particularized forms of indirect rule, one section of the class colonizing another and through this capital imposing its own will on us all.”

Unfortunately, race has often been neglected by the theory produced by Marxist feminists, who have taken a eurocentric and academic approach at times. Contemporary Black feminism was developed by Black feminists, who were dissatisfied with racial, gender, and queer struggles that failed to understand the many divisions within society, and thus ignored the experiences of working class, queer, black women. The Combahee River Collective, a collective of Black feminists from the 1970s-80′s, published a very important statement, where they assert that their analysis of oppression and the system comes from their daily lives,

“We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.”



This work can be done, not only to understand the situation of working-class black women, but to understand how all people are divided and placed within a system that is organized into two classes. Marxism and feminism provide a very powerful tool in the hands of the oppressed. Feminism advances Marxism, and its awareness of the totality of the system, by revealing the divisions of gender, race, and sexuality and their necessary functions to uphold an oppressive and exploitative division of labor. Feminism provides programmatic content for the development of revolutionary theory, as well as helps shape an alternative communist vision of the world, where gender, like class, will no longer exist. These feminist communist politics can also be developed within the structures of revolutionary organizations by implementing a horizontal division of labor that strives to develop women, queer, people of color, and all combinations of, leadership. These internal organizational structures reflect the politics of our alternative vision of the world. Marxism advances feminism, because it makes feminism aware of the development of Capital and its relationship to Patriarchy. It gives feminist theory a method, dialectics, to apply its ideas in practice in order to abolish patriarchy thus making feminism into a revolutionary praxis.

Marxists have critiqued or rejected feminism as reformist at times, and this is true. There are the NOW feminist out there that believe equality for women can be achieved through integrating ourselves into the current system. But that doesn’t mean feminism is inherently reformist. Historically and currently there have been ‘marxists’ who have also been reformists. Revolutionary marxist Rosa Luxemburg polemicized against them in her brilliant work, Reform or Revolution. The Second International, a network of international marxist and revolutionaries formed in the 19th and 20th centuries, even supported World War I. Does that mean that Marxism is actually pro-imperialism? No. It means that feminism and marxism are not monolithic, and that historically there have been opportunistic currents that will use the politics and struggles to further their own reformist agendas. It also speaks to the contradictions within people’s consciousness, because they have failed to understand the total truth of the system, and to understand that reforms in and of themselves will not liberate the people from capitalism or patriarchy. Feminism, like Marxism, should not be used to fight for reforms or solely analyze existing systems. It should use theory to make people understand the realities of the society we live in in order to change it. Many revolutionary organizations (Feminist and Marxist) have failed to build a powerful class struggle, because their analysis has been limited, due to not understanding the total truth of the world and failing to unite the people. A holistic collaboration between marxism and feminism can begin to point us in the right direction so that we learn from the mistakes of the past as we strive to make history today.


.

[American Dream]

Spa offers massage, facials, shamanic journey

By David Pescovitz Monday, Oct 31



I recently attended a conference at a luxury hotel in Marina, California where the spa brochure lists services like massage, facials, and, er, shamanic journeys. Ostensibly, the shaman is a white dude in southwestern resort ware who will place shells on your body and wave a feather over you as he "engages the forces of nature and the ancestors' ancient wisdom to create lasting changes for physical, mental and emotional well-being." Your shamanic journey includes illumination, soul retrieval, destiny retrieval and divination, and bands of power. Man, bands of power would alone be worth the $250 fee. Click the menu to see it larger. {See original for this]

[American Dream]

http://chaka85.wordpress.com/2011/02/26 ... o-unlearn/

Learning to unlearn!




The function of capital is to reproduce itself and extract more and more profit. It is not about the survival and health of the people it uses and exploits to operate. It then tricks us to believe that it is actually good; the best system for individual opportunity and growth. Meanwhile as we all struggle against inflation, high rent and unemployment we are alienated from ourselves and each other so we have no sense of our collectivity. Alienation means the loss of self; we have no power or control over the system and the way it abuses and oppresses us. This loss of individual and collective power is vital for maintaining the order of the system, because the ruling class understands that if we develop a sense of love and trust for each other then maybe we might collectively decide to fight such a system and change it so the people might have power; and that work might be shared collectively for the survival of entire communities. How does this happen? It is when the oppressed take these ideas and translate them into a material force and usher our society into a new historical epoch; hopefully a socialist one. It is the role of revolutionaries in revolutionary organizations to quicken this process and help educate the oppressed of this historical task; make them conscious of a revolutionary people’s history they are robbed of by the bourgeois ideology that dominates public education.

But in order for revolutionaries to embody these alternative values and spread dreams of a healthy, loving, communal world we must do work on ourselves to overcome the alienation and internalized oppression that isolates us from each other and makes us do harm to each other. Self-care is revolutionary work. Alienation makes it so hard to learn to trust and love each other, because we are not taught those skills. We are taught to fear each other and look out for ourselves. This reality makes it so difficult to have healthy, loving relationships (friendships and lovers), that aren’t shrouded in fear and co-dependency. We are not taught to care for ourselves or each other. The one relationship model offered to us is the heterosexual family, whose real function is to support the capitalist division of labor through this domestic system of reproducing human labor through the oppression of women in the home. And if you are a queer woman of color you are definitely not taught how to love another woman. It’s not even an option in the heteronormative relationships we are pressured to accept. We must silence our desire in general, and if it is queer desire we must swallow them deep inside ourselves. As women, we are not given the tools to have loving relationships with other women. We are taught to devalue women the way patriarchy does; to unleash our anger on each other.

As I have been hurt and have hurt others I am trying to learn all these lessons about loving and accepting love in order to overcome the alienation as a healthy queer revolutionary woman. I think a lot of it has to do with trust, and overcoming the way I have hardened myself in order to protect myself from people breaking or abusing my trust. I think a large part of this has to do with the pains of my early childhood years, which are so crucial for your development into your adult years. I developed unhealthy behavior patterns as a response to the conditions I was raised in that were never really challenged by the people around me so I could re-learn better behavior. A large part of this has to do with the abuse and neglect of my father and having him break over and over again my trust, faith and love for him. This, combined with early heartbreak, made me swallow my pain like stones that I buried deep within me. This process hardened me and made it difficult for me to trust and love someone. I have realized this through my last two failed attempts at love and relationships. The most recent one being particularly devastating, because It was so clear that the barrier preventing the relationship from growing was my fear and lack of trust of her. My past feelings of rejection and suspicion of people made it difficult for me to ever open up and believe that she could have real love for me. Whenever there was a slight opportunity for me to assume the worst I did and I think in some ways we are both responsible for that, but I take a lot of responsibility due to my lack of trust. It is rather tragic to think about the ways we self sabotage our own happiness and abilities for love in a world that is not the most loving. But I am also hopeful in myself, and the loving radical community around me, to begin to the process of unearthing these stones within me and each other.

[American Dream]

http://ordoesitexplode.wordpress.com/20 ... iberation/

BYE GIRL! Moving beyond Capitalism & Gay Rights towards liberation.




Over here at “. . . or does it explode?”, we take much inspiration from the radical queer militants and organizations of the past and seek to begin to expand upon the discourse around what queer liberation means in the context of the larger class struggle. As movement against the ills and oppressive regimes of White supremacist patriarchal capitalism picks up it is important to look at the contributions to people’s liberation made by those whose voices are often rendered silent by history: the womyn and the homosexual. It is in the spirit of Audre Lorde, The Combahee River Collective, Gay Shame, and James Baldwin that we submit the following post.

In light of the disheartening amount of queer teen suicides, it has become very apparent that organization of queer youth, in particular womyn and those of color, must be re-conceptualized. The two groups previously mentioned were given special attention because they often find themselves directly under the heels of a society dominated by the many-headed beast known as capitalism. The gay rights movement has found itself completely out of touch and sync with the issues facing queers, especially queer youth. In fact, we would go so far as to say that due to the direction and composition of the leadership, the objectives of the gay rights movement are almost diametrically opposed to bringing about true liberation for queers under white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism. If it is true that the capitalist system is beyond reform then it must also follow that a movement that places the markers of its revolution, of its homecoming, at assimilation, cannot possibly succeed in the liberation of its people. It is thus the job of queer militants to bring into being a new proposition for queers and other oppressed people who are increasingly finding that rainbow flags and bumper stickers, made in third world sweat shops, proclaiming love and advocating for equal rights aren’t enough.

In the beginning stages of organizing amongst oppressed people it often becomes necessary to create safe spaces. These are areas that people can congregate away from the stress of daily harassment and degradation. Though they do not serve as a permanent solution they provide comfort and a temporary oasis. It is absolutely necessary that these safe spaces exist in order to create militants that are able to create revolutionary change. After all, if one doesn’t have some degree of self-confidence and support then it is near impossible for them to begin to take on the historic task assigned to us all: the revolutionary overthrow of the oppressive capitalist system. The Black Panther party often spoke of self-determination. It was a common theme in their rhetoric. This idea becomes increasingly important when we speak of those who under white supremacist patriarchal capitalism that face multiple forms of oppression, not only as the mules of the ruling class but also as the inhabitants of the lower stratus of the caste system: queers, womyn, & non whites. In these cases the oppression faced under capitalism is felt, often times, disproportionately harder and the level of struggle involves more than merely overthrowing wage slavery. For example: Black Liberation activist saw the need to battle not only capitalism but also devastating effects of white supremacy. This meant affirming the self and the race through pride and a re-establishment of the Black womyn and man as people with a history and legacy that went well beyond the Maafa. They saw the need to instill a sense of agency in the people who had known almost nothing but rape, murder and forced subservience (spiritual, physical, and mental) to whites. Their oppression was not just as workers, but also as “other’d” humans. In their affirmation statement The Combahee River Collectiveexpressed the following:

The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess anyone of these types of privilege have.

The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. There is a very low value placed upon Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist.

The same can be said of queer folk, who are also oppressed not just as workers, but also as people perceived to be the lepers of the bourgeois family. Sexuality was something that was immediately policed in several societies by the European colonizer. One of the simplest explanations for this is because the act is not conducive to reproducing the workforce. In order for capitalism to develop it took not only a violent assault on the bodies and autonomy of womyn but also the rape of the African continent. Racism and patriarchy are at the very foundation of capitalism.



Queer safe spaces serve to create the community that queer folk (gay, Trans, etc. . .) are often violently forced out of. The binaries of gender expression and interpretation are laws written in blood. The society acts on these aberrations of the bourgeois nuclear family often with resounding violence and disdain. One has to look no further than the case of Duanna Johnson (the Black Trans womyn who became a national figure initially because she was viciously beat by police, with their hands wrapped with hand cuffs. After filing suit, she was found gunned down in the streets. Her murder is still unsolved.) to see a manifestation of the aforementioned point. Often times, people in more privileged positions in caste society, see these spaces as separatist and incongruous with creating change. While it is true that there is a huge potential for these spaces to devolve into reactionary separatism, which we will discuss a little later, it does not hold true that these spaces are in incongruous with the revolutionary project. They are in fact necessary parts of the blueprint.

Something that queer organizers, and others, should be conscious of, however, is the development of these spaces. For if they never progress beyond creating a space outside of the tyranny of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, then they have in many, if not all, ways failed in their revolutionary task and have indeed become reactionary separatist spaces. If the coming revolution is truly about an organic coming together of those oppressed by the bourgeoisie then organizations whose end goal is separatist are indeed counter-revolutionary.

It must be made perfectly clear to queers and the larger class struggle is that they are in unity with one another. Does this mean that queers should fully immerse themselves into class struggle, giving up the politics of their radical queer roots? Hell No! These politics, which are in many instances grounded in feminist theory, are so desperately needed in the political Left at the current moment. It is, however an understandable fear by many that entering into the class struggle, as narrowly as it is currently defined, often means class reductionism. One of the reasons that the Left currently finds itself drowning in the muck is because the issues of race, sexuality and gender have not been fully dealt with in a way that is respectful of both and the self-determination needed by people in those particular caste. Until these things are addressed then the Left is certainly doomed. Let us return to another part of the River Collective’s Statement:

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.

If this is agreed upon and true, then we cannot merely spend our time fighting a class war under the loose banner of “unite and fight” we need to be in constant struggle with one another against the vestiges of the poisonous system that exist within ourselves and manifest in our organizing. It is through the lens of these politics that we may accurately see the role of the queer militant not as one that advocates for the inclusion of queers into broader activist spaces to argue for the inclusion of “queer rights” but expanding upon what queer rights and liberation mean overall.

In the beginning of this piece I accused the mainstream gay rights movement of being assimilationist in character and I would like to bring the article to a close by elaborating on this point. Firstly I use the term “gay rights” instead of saying queer liberation because the current movement at best promotes an image of bourgeois gays as happy capitalists desperately begging for their seat in the imperialist coliseum. Secondly, I wish to re-label the mainstream movement as a bourgeois white supremacist patriarchal movement that prioritizes the politics of assimilation over true liberation. In the gay community pictured here we see no people of color, no Trans-folk, no poor people and scarcely lesbians (never mind lesbians with any of the other aforementioned categories attached). These people are only seen when the need arises to show false diversity, play on old stereotypes for scare tactics, make sexual objects of, or add more validity to the existing claim of oppression. What we see constantly is middle class white men proclaiming their love for one another and for a system that in reality would rather them choke to death while going down on one another than be present in society. The unity and inclusion featured and promoted through the false images of international love and otherwise are just that: false! Gay Shame poses the following question on their website:

Where are the gay marriage “activists” when the INS is actively raiding and deporting whole families? (such as it is currently doing just blocks away from the Castro in San Francisco’s Mission District).

Other struggle against oppression is only used in the service of strengthening the reformist dogma of “EQUALITY NOW!” It is also in this erasure of all things not white, privileged and male that we find the rhetoric of assimilation. It is shouted from the mountain tops. “WE’RE HERE WE’RE QUEER! “ “LET US MARRY!” “LET US FIGHT” “LET US ADOPT!” The ability to adopt, join the military and marry is treated as the final indicators of the “Great Gay Arrival” into American society. The problem with this line of thought is that it treats queer struggle as a.) something outside of the problems of the rest of society and b.) Begs for inclusion into the destructive culture that, at this moment, moves to annihilate the Middle East in its quest for profit and control, actively places disproportionately large amounts of Black and Brown bodies into the prison industrial complex, and seeks to privatize higher education. And these are just a few things. Are issues such as housing, healthcare, education, war, and the prison industrial complex not queer issues? Are they regulated to other sections of the population? THEY ABSOLUTELY ARE but cannot be discussed under the context of this bourgeois gay rights hokum.

Over at the Gathering Forces blog there was a post entitled: “Beyond Gay Marriage and Queer Separatists–The Call for a Working-Class Queer Movement” that called for a third tendency in the struggle for queer liberation, one that went beyond separatism and reform. We second that motion. When we speak of queer liberation we are speaking of the liberation of the entire working class from the chains of capitalism because in order for queers to be liberated they must confront and overcome the contradictions of allies but also amongst themselves as people who occupy one of the lower caste in society. It is through this revolutionary confrontation and work that the community of which we also speak may begin being built. Imagine a queer group taking on the issue of child care funding and working with mothers to develop a culture of militant resistance, while at the same time making the space into a place where dogma and stereotype may be challenged and done away with. It’s fantastical but very possible. Queer safe spaces (which they almost always must start as) must also go beyond their comfort zones and begin to intervene and dialogue with the rest of the working class. It is only through this work and dialogue can the two sides be made whole. There must an alternative out there that rejects the push to pacify and young queers bourgeois by telling them to wait on a better life later on. A better life only comes through engaging in struggle that aims at breaking down the walls of this house. Only then will it get better. We have seen that the liberation of queers is dependent on the abolishing of capitalism and thus dependent on working class revolution. We have also seen that the working class cannot move towards liberation, and thus ending its status as a class of exploited laborers under the ruling class, unless it addresses the attitudes prevalent within itself that breed homophobia, racism, patriarchy, etc. This is the challenge that lays at the feet of the new Left in general and queer organizers in particular.

.

[American Dream]

Murdererrrrrr Murdererrrrrr

Tell dem already wi have to tell dem again

Tell dem already wi have to tell dem again

Tell dem already wi have to tell dem again

Dem a murderer

Dem a murderer

Dem come inna mi area want to kill off the youth

Dem dress up inna jacket & dem dress up inna tie

Come a court house want to tell pure lies

Dem a murderer

Tell dem already wi have to tell dem again

Tell dem already wi have to tell dem again

[American Dream]

Rasta and Resistance

by Horace Campbell

http://www.druglibrary.net/olsen/RASTAF ... eface.html


Preface

Absence of a political enquiry into the Rastafari of the Caribbean has always been an uncomfortable gap in the record of the Caribbean revolution. Now Horace Campbell has made a big step towards the filling of that gap. This is not to suggest that Caribbean writers and thinkers (we should not confuse the two groups) have not done much investigation of the Rastafari way of life with all the clarity and depth which their areas of investigation permitted them; some have also ventured into the political dominion.

Campbell has many of the qualifications for the task he has undertaken. He has been struggling for some years to apply the scientific theory of society to the reality of African and Caribbean politics, and in the process has avoided the creation of false gods. When I first met him in Trinago in 1976, he said that he was a Marxist and that his mentors were Rodney, Fanon and Cabral. Readers of this work should welcome this attitude, because it is a clear indication of hostility to all forms of political and cultural dependence.

The formal emancipation of the African slaves in the Caribbean took place late in the first half of the 18th century. From that time there began a totalitarian assault on the African psyche, with similar aims to those of the various bondages imposed during the period of slavery. Some of the education was necessary to fit the African-Caribbean masses into the peculiar level of technology and the mode of production then ruling in the region.

The ignorance of the ruling classes, and their need for social control, produced a culture that filled the masses with self-contempt (Martin Carter). The splitting up of the free populations into classes more sharply divided than those of the slave period, and the introduction of immigrant labour from Asia, Africa and Europe robbed the masses in general of that self-confidence which is necessary before a people takes its destiny into its own hands. This is why the Caribbean has never resounded with anything similar to "Asia for the Asians" and "Africa for the Africans", regardless of the short-term nature of that nationalism.

Partly because of processes of this nature, and partly because of the uneven development of the integration process, the African presence has always had to find periodically a new mode of self-expression and self-proclamation from slavery until now. Experts in this area of study should review this claim. The need was not at all confined to African descendants. The Indian independence movement of the 1940s had a remarkable effect on the mass of the Indian population of the Caribbean. Movements with religious emphasis, or of religious reform, in India have also moved up the waters of the Caribbean.

What is it then that determines whether the dominant mode of expression argued above takes one form or another: bush negro villages, Maroons, liberated areas, Jordanites, Rastafari, Pocomania, Cumina, Spiritual Baptist, Islam? This is determined by the existing production relations and also by the place of the actors within those relations.

Campbell's book is thrice welcome because it deals with the historical, the political and the subjective levels of Rastafari. An individual crank here or there in any society can be ignored; a mass movement must be accounted for, as far as we are able to account for it.

The practising Rasta is a man of astonishing presence. In this country, Guyana, where the movement is perhaps weakest and most misrepresented, or in Trinago, the Rasta is typically male. He is a public figure, a picture of self-confidence and self-assurance. He is quick-witted and philosophical, flaunting his striking simplicity and peculiarity of dress in the face of cosmopolitan pretensions of Babylonian fashion. He exudes love. His conversation is lively verse. His replies are razor-sharp repartee. His world outlook is a duality of the material and the spiritual, the positive and the negative. His religious aspiration is total absorption into the being of Jah, to be achieved by contemplation and meditation.

The Rastafari faith, or even early liberation theology, has not escaped the dilemma which each of the great religions, especially Hinduism and Christianity, has set itself - the conflict between faith and works, contemplation and action. The fact that this very conflict now grips the soul of the Rastafari, in relation to politics, is not a sign of collapse but of maturity. So it is that there are differences of opinion among the Rasta, whether it is their work to storm the earthly kingdom and take it in order to change it; or to explain it, to enquire more deeply into the Maker and his mysteries; or to engage in both warfares.

The statement that the renaissance movements are determined in form by the production relations is not a mere phrase. Nor is the social need for rebirth an idle invention. Those who most consistently see it as an idle invention are precisely those whose education affords them the chance to learn the most about the slave experience.

Because the trampling of the sense of Africa was conducted with so much brutality during the course of slavery, and with so much ignorance, dishonesty and insensitivity after it, and because the institutions of propaganda which were raised up were so thorough and unrepresentative, every now and then Africans in the Diaspora have been gripped with the need to hold the old banner aloft. This need has been expressed in various forms and under the inspiration of various ideas.

At one period it is the "bush negro" movement or the Maroon version of the strategy of liberated areas, in which ideas of traditional religion and culture are mingled with ideas of state formation. Production relations at other times have taken the form of full-scale rebellion or revolution. At other times only pockets of conscious persons, with more interest in the spiritual than the physical, have been ready for the break with oppressive society. At later stages the main movement for self-expression has become more or less merged with the general movement of the whole population and no longer has race-worthiness as a major quest. As for the ideology of these movements, they have in various places, without comment on their quality, been inspired by traditional African religion, by Judaism and Christianity, by Islam, and they have produced the Jordanites, the Shakers, the Pocomania, the Cumina and the Rastafari.

The production relations determine the general form of the movement, because it is the social relations of production that will determine at any given moment the extent to which seizeable land is available, the extent to which it is possible to opt out of the market, set up a counter-market, and the extent to which formal schooling is an everyday need of the rebels.

Rastafari who wish to withdraw from the market and set up their own communities on the land are finding more and more that the modern state regards land not as a free gift of nature, but as an unfree grant of the state. This is what is meant by the statement that the forms of expression of the African presence are determined, at least in part, by the production relations of the day.

Campbell's concern is that many students of Rastafari see the movement as merely looking forward to a golden age. This is also the view of many in the ranks of the movement. In most of the great religions the majority of the faithful are content with the religious tenets of the faith, while an active group (often an influential minority) sees the social relations as an obstacle in the way of their dreams about a reformed humanity. Thus, while praying for all the necessary help, they work directly in the area of social relations. The two outlooks merge happily in the declaration of an early Christian saint, "I pray with my hands".

There are two problems facing the Rastafari community to which the public relations services of the movement and its allies need to give urgent attention. The first is the stubborn belief among sections of the public that the Rastaman is a criminal, and a violent one at that. Often this is a problem of the environment rather than of the Rasta themselves. Because Rasta is a dynamic lifestyle, and perhaps the only prestige-giving one within reach of the very poor, many of those already recruited into crime are attracted to it, just as daily in the courts of law we find accused offenders swearing on the holy books of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, without casting the least slander on these religions. From the Rasta lifestyle, the poor wretches get attention and some esteem. They can use it as a weapon against any disparaging attack on a tainted past. Many offenders in prison may sincerely be converted: the brethren there may show others the light.

One case which slipped through the censors of the Guyana Broadcasting Corporation on a feature programme showed a clear link between crime and social policy. The programme featured a young offender who talked fluent Rasta language throughout the interview. He said that he had deserted his life of crime and hustle, and turned trader. However, the young woman Mayor of Georgetown began to clear the pavements of traders in the interest of good order and a better Guyana. The offender said that because of this policy he was forced to stop trading and start hustling again.

Part of the problem is the other prospect offered to the Rasta by members of the establishment in various countries. These members are willing to let the Rastaman be; but only as a sort of agent and appendage to them as principals. The marijuana traffic, from the information at our disposal, is based on this kind of accommodation. The agent in the sub-culture is offered the prospect of earning money for his vital share in the traffic, but he must be prepared, at moments of public outcry, to "take a rap" and spend short periods in jail. At worst he comes out as a self-confessed recidivist, with ideas of earning money while he is out. At best he is able to step out of the ranks and join the ranks of a new petty bourgeoisie of the outcast in the slums.

The big question raised in this book is the role of the Rastafari in the Caribbean revolution. It is not an easy question. Yet it is a quest which is central to the movement against oppression in the Caribbean. It is so mainly because the Rastafari culture is perhaps the most influential cultural movement in the Caribbean today, in spite of the fact that many claiming to be Rastas in several places do all they can to discredit the movement. Wide cross-sections of the youth of various races are captivated by the style of the Rasta and in many cases by the bold thoughts and aspirations of the Rasta religion, by its thorough-going reclassification and redefinition of a life which wide sections of the society find unbearable and full of hyprocrisy.

The placing of the stamp of Babylon on the whole of official society and the wide acceptance of this description is one of the landmark achievements of the Caribbean revolution. The more it is seriously accepted, the more the culture divides into two poles of authority: a necessary forerunner to any long-term revolutionary objectives. Those members of the society who do not accept or embrace the dress, or need the religious ideas, accept the language; those who do not accept the language with the movement's redefinition of the order of things, accept the music. In fact, such is the power of art that Bob Marley's music has done more to popularise the real issues of the African liberation movement than several decades of backbreaking work of Pan-Africanists and international revolutionaries.

It is also relevant, as said before, that the mass of the practising Rastafari - as it was also with early Christianity - comes from among the most oppressed sections of the working population. The unemployed, the social outcasts from official society, and school drop-outs are all adrift. They see in Rasta life a way of being, a system or order, all giving dignity to the individual, not conformist dignity but an exciting anti-customary dignity.

It is no wonder that the style in whole or in part is assumed, sometimes internally, but often only externally, by wide sections of the oppressed and their allies in the Caribbean. Among these converts are included those who live by the hustle. They too yearn for dignity and they find it in Rasta. So it is that in many communities the people see Rasta as a criminal sect. It is this wide appeal, with due respect to the anti-Rastas in our midst, which makes the movement the formidable political force that it is, organised at the level of the sub-culture.

My own impression is that the Rastafari disdain to organise in the formal ways of a political party for political ends; that those Rastafari who become political activists are as effective as any other; that the Rastafari are not a party, that basically they shrink from the exercise of power over others, although many of them talk about a single power in the world. Yet it is the Rastafari who are most fitted to endure the trials and tribulations of a revolutionary process.

Perhaps the greatest single contribution of the Rastafari is at the level of consciousness, if I may use this term in the most common sense. By succeeding in branding the existing regimes and existing orders as illegitimate, and by winning mass support for this view even among persons who outwardly conform to the establishment culture, the Rastafari have made and are making an outstanding contribution to the Caribbean revolution.

Eusi Kwayana, Georgetown, Guyana - 1982



Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, by Horace Campbell (African World Press 1987), pp. IX-XIII.

[American Dream]