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The comparatively early (in global terms) appearance of sophisticated Nyāya logic, epistemology, and empiricism in Indian/Indic philosophy

Apologia: As part of my research on Lokāyata/Cārvāka philosophical views, for which there is a comparative paucity of textual evidence (several possible and plausible reasons have been proffered for this state of affairs), and thus the knowledge of which is often gleaned from the descriptions and arguments of other—and opposing—philosophical schools in India, I am reading Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti’s “erudite” (Jay Garfield) exploration of aspects of Nyāya logic and epistemology in his book, Classical Indian Philosophy of Induction: The Nyāya Viewpoint (Lexington Books, 2010).

“While Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans made great contributions to the study of induction, there is no firm evidence to show that in the Western tradition [of philosophy] the problem of induction was explicitly recognized and elaborately discussed as a serious problem before Hume. But clearly the Indian logicians have done that long before that time. Again, in the Western tradition (notwithstanding the good work done by Whewell, Herschel and Mill earlier in the nineteenth century) it was left to [Charles Sanders] Peirce in the late nineteenth century to bring out the value of the method of hypothesis (calling it abduction and distinguishing it from deduction and induction). Even after that philosophers in this century took time to warm up to the idea as can be gathered from the relative lack of any substantial discussion of this method in the first decades of the twentieth century. The same is true of the link between causation and counterfactual conditionals. Although some traces are found in Hume, no detailed and systematic study of them is found in any Western writing before the twentieth century. The same, further, applies to the principle of economy. While the principle is very old and sometimes called … Occam’s razor, no Western philosopher has systematically and explicitly studied different kinds of economy before the twentieth century. Similarly, a systematic study of inference to the best explanation is emerging only in some recent publications. As an epistemological theory Nyāya empiricism, though older, appears to be more developed than the modern European empiricism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. The powerful defense of causality, the careful analysis of circularity, the sophisticated arguments from counter-factual conditionals and belief-behavior conflict appear to give Nyāya empiricism the decisive edge.”—Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti, Classical Indian Philosophy of Induction: The Nyāya Viewpoint (Lexington Books, 2010): 67-68.

Suggested Reading (basic and largely secondary material in English):

• Chakrabarti, Kisor Kumar. Logic of Gotama [Akṣapāda Gautama]. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1978.
• Chakrabarti, Kisor Kumar. Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyāya Dualist Tradition. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.
• Chakrabarti, Kisor Kumar. Classical Indian Philosophy of Induction: The Nyāya Viewpoint. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.
• Ganeri, Jonardon. The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Gangeśa (Stephen H. Phillips and N.S. Ramanuja Tatacharya, trans. and philosophical commentary) Epistemology of Perception—Gangeśa’s Tattvacintāmaṇi: Jewel of Reflection on the Truth (about Epistemology), The Perception chapter (pratyaksa-khanda). New York: American Institute of Buddhist Studies (with Columbia University’s Center for Buddhist Studies and Tibet House US), 2004.
• Krishna, Daya. The Nyāyasūtras: A New Commentary on an Old Text. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 2004.
• Krishna, Daya, ed. Discussion and Debate in Indian Philosophy: Vedānta, Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya. New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2004.
• Matilal, B.K. [Bimal Krishna] The Navya-Nyāya Doctrine of Negation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
• Matilal, B.K. Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986.
• Matilal, B.K. (Jonardon Ganeri and Heeraman Tiwari, eds.) The Character of Logic in India. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
• Phillips, Stephen H. Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of “New Logic.” Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1996/Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997.
• Phillips, Stephen H. Epistemology in Classical India: The Knowledge Sources of the Nyāya School. New York: Routledge, 2012.
• Phillips, Stephen H. and N.S.
• Potter, Karl H., ed. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, vol. 2. Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika up to Gaṅgeśa. Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 1977.
• Potter, Karl H. and Sabijiban Bhattacharya, eds. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, vol. 6. Indian Philosophical Analysis: Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika from Gaṅgeśa to Raghunātha Śiromaṇi. Delhi: Motilal Barnasidass, 1993.
• Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. “Nyāya: Suffering, Detachment and Peace,” in Ram-Prasad’s Knowledge and Liberation in Classical Indian Thought. New York: Palgrave, 2001: 57-108.

Indian/Indic darśanas and hedonistic egoism

There’s a provocative yet plausible argument to be made, and Pradeep P. Gokhale has made it (in his 2015 book, Lokāyata/Cārvāka: A Philosophical Inquiry), that orthodox and heterodox Indic philosophical systems or schools* (save, perhaps, Mahāyāna Buddhism) can be aptly characterized in the main (thus in the form of a generalization) as minor variations on the ethical theme of “hedonistic egoism.” Of course I am not claiming that altruism or ethical views and practices beyond hedonistic egoism don’t exist in Indian philosophy (or here or there in canonical sacred texts). Rather, the philosophical systems, qua systems, can be ethically characterized this way insofar as the paramount value or emphasis is on mokṣa/mukti “liberation” (from pain, suffering) or, as in the case of Mīmāṃsā, heaven (and enjoyment of life therein) and the consequent mental and/or spiritual states such liberation is said to bring: (eternal) peace, pure happiness, the highest bliss, unadulterated and enduring pleasure, what have you. As one of my professors from university, Raghavan Iyer, has written, “In the course of time moksha became in India a largely negative notion of escape [or withdrawal from the world, as it were], a rejection of this irredeemable world, an intoxicating flight from reality” (one of the indirect or unintended consequences of Mughal rule and especially British colonialism is that they combined to compel Indians to recover and renew their appreciation of the conditions of worldly life and the value of social, cultural and political self-determination).

Not surprisingly, there are various philosophical conceptions of hedonistic egoism so in a forthcoming guest post at the Indian Philosophy blog I will attempt to clarify what those are (as part of this endeavor I will use, in part, notions of psychological hedonism and egoism as Freud appears to have understood and used them). I believe it’s possible to ethically reconfigure or reconstruct these philosophical systems (as Gandhi did in his inimitable way, for example, with a stress on karma yoga and a more or less universalized conception of dharma as lokasangraha, as well as his understanding of mokṣa as absolute ‘truth,’ in effect giving ‘traditional values a new meaning and a fresh relevance to politics and to society’) so as to change this fundamental ethical orientation.

Much of this discussion hinges on how one understands the ideal-typical normative categories enshrined in the puruṣārtha(s). Religiously motivated philosophical opponents of Cārvāka/Lokāyata (which is predominantly empiricist, sceptical, materialist or naturalist, rationalist, and thus secular) have often characterized the latter’s ethical views along the lines of hedonism or egoism or hedonistic egoism (or even as amoral or immoral) although, as Gokhale has argued, the “this-worldly” hedonistic egoism of Cārvāka/Lokāyata is more realistic and in some respects (at least potentially) more profoundly ethical than that found in the regnant religio-philosophical worldviews on the Indian sub-continent.

* The six orthodox (āstika) schools of Indic philosophy: Navya-Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta. The schools are often grouped in pairs, thus: Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika (Logic and Atomism); (Classical) Yoga and Sāṃkhya (Yoga and Discrimination or Distinctionism); Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Uttara Mīmāṃsā or Vedānta (Prior Exegesis [of the Veda] and Later Exegesis or End of the Vedas Metaphysics). There are sub-schools within several of these main philosophical systems. The heterodox (nāstika) schools are Jainism, Buddhism and Cārvāka/Lokāyata (this last is the only one of the darśana(s) that is not religious).

Should you not be familiar with these philosophical traditions, a nice introduction is provided in a series of podcasts available here (on that same page you will also find a short list of recommended reading as well as a couple of links to sites with material on Indian philosophy).

Relevant bibliographies:

• Buddhism
• Hinduism
• Indian/Indic Philosophies
• Jainism

Edward W. Said (1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003)

Edward Said “was one of the leading literary critics of the last quarter of the 20th century. As professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, he was widely regarded as the outstanding representative of the post-structuralist left in America. Above all, he was the most articulate and visible advocate of the Palestinian cause in the United States, where it earned him many enemies. The broadness of Said’s approach to literature and his other great love, classical music, eludes easy categorisation. His most influential book, Orientalism (1978), is credited with helping to change the direction of several disciplines by exposing an unholy alliance between the enlightenment and colonialism.” — Malise Ruthven

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“Edward (Wadie) Said (1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.

Educated in the Western canon, at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.

As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among scholars of Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.

As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, because he publicly criticized Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has ‘to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual man and woman.’

In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. Besides being an academic, Said was also an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a compilation of their conversations about music. Said died of leukemia on 25 September 2003.”

An Edward Said bibliography is here.

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Re-thinking the Orientalism thesis: a few comments

I suspect insinuations or charges of “Orientalism” (in a pejorative sense, as something ‘essentialist, racialist, patronizing and ideologically motivated’) today come too easily for most of us (yes, there are times when it’s perfectly appropriate, i.e., hits the target). And the late (and great) Edward Said’s seminal and widely venerated book (1978) on same is in large measure responsible for this state of affairs, the remaining portion of responsibility lying in the hands of his readers. I’m inclined to believe that several early, highly critical (some would say ‘hostile’) reviews of Said’s book, as well as Robert Irwin’s later study, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Overlook Press, 2006; outside the U.S. the book was titled, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies), are more or less on the mark (Irwin focuses on Said’s book in one chapter: ‘An Enquiry into the Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic’). Saying this should not at all detract from the well-deserved respect for—if not admiration of—Said’s considerable virtues as a literary critic, an intellectual keenly sensitive to issues of intellectual obligation and responsibility, and a “tireless campaigner for Palestinian rights” (Irwin). Please don’t infer from these comments sympathetic to critics of Said’s “Orientalism thesis” that I align myself with the views, say, of a Martin Kramer or (the Zionist ideologue) Bernard Lewis. In addition to Irwin, please see Daniel Martin Varisco’s indispensable if not exhaustive analysis, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (University of Washington Press, 2007).

More recently (last year) I read a critique (in ‘solidarity’*) of Said’s Orientalism that should be must reading for anyone convinced of the book’s brilliance (there’s brilliance there, but it’s rather episodic), namely, the chapter, “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” by Aijaz Ahmad from his Marxist-inspired In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso, 1992). I had previously read other parts of the book (the introductory material and the respective chapters on Jameson and Rushdie), so while I’m not surprised by the quality of the analysis, it is far better than I imagined it would—or even could—be! There is any number of compelling reasons to read Ahmad’s book in toto, but should you be understandably enchanted by Said’s Orientalism, I suggest you find the time to read Ahmad.

Finally, I’d like to give notice to one of my favorite Orientalists, Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004). Rodinson—like the late Samir Amin—has been correctly lauded as an “independent Marxist,” as well as a (pre-Saidian) “French Orientalist.” In the words of Gilbert Achcar,

“Maxime Rodinson was the last survivor of an exceptional group of French Orientalists—in the pre-Saidian non-pejorative meaning of this term, i.e. scholars of Islam and the Arab world—who lived through most of the twentieth century and rose to fame in the 1960s, a decade that saw the emergence of an impressive contingent of French thinkers whose names loom large in the social sciences of our time. The group of brilliant Orientalists to which Rodinson belonged, and which included other luminaries such as Jacque Berque and Claude Cahen, reclaimed the field of Arab and Islamic studies with impeccable erudition, scientific rigour, and a critical solidarity with the peoples they studies that made their writings largely free from the deficiencies of the colonial ‘Orientalism’ of yesteryear and their own time.”

* “Suppression of criticism,” writes Ahmad, “is not the best way of expressing solidarity,” and yet one should make plain the motivation for such solidarity,

[f]or Edward Said is not only a cultural critic, he is also a Palestinian. Much that is splendid in his work is connected with the fact that he has tried to do honour to that origin; and he has done so against all odds, to the full extent of his capacity, by stepping outside the boundaries of his academic discipline and original intellectual formation, under no compulsion of profession or fame, in pursuit of personal gain—in fact, a frightening risk to himself. … [I]t is worth remarking that his eloquent and irrepressible partisanship with his national cause has earned him assassination threats, from quarters which are known to have assassinated a great many other patriotic Palestinians. Said has decided to live with such risks, and much honour—a very rare kind of honour—attaches to that decision.”

Hence Ahmad’s heartfelt expression of solidarity in conjunction with his “many disagreements” with Said “on substantive issues.”

References & Further Reading:

• Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992).
• Anderson, Kevin B. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2^nd ed., 2016).
• Bilgrami, Akeel. “Reflections on Edward Said,” the final three chapters from Bilgrami’s book, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013).
• Irwin, Robert. Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2006).
• Macfie, Alexander Lyon, ed. Orientalism: A Reader (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 2000).
• Rodinson, Maxime. The Arabs (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
• Rodinson, Maxime. Cult, Ghetto, and State: The Persistence of the Jewish Question (London: Saqi Books, 1991).
• Rodinson, Maxime. Europe and the Mystique of Islam (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1988).
• Rodinson, Maxime. Islam and Capitalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).
• Rodinson, Maxime. Israel and the Arabs (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, revised ed., 1982).
• Rodinson, Maxime. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973).
• Rodinson, Maxime. Marxism and the Muslim World (London: Zed Books, 2015) (1979).
• Rodinson, Maxime. Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). [I realize this biography is controversial for obvious reasons, nonetheless, it remains a sympathetic portrait from an avowed Marxist.]
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
• Varisco, Daniel Martin. Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007).

Privacy and Blasey Ford

Last week, a friend of mine argued that Kavanaugh should be confirmed because Dr. Blasey (her professional name) had remained anonymous until quite late. In this, he spied a character flaw. I observed that the issue was not whether she had a character flaw, but whether Kavanaugh had the requisite character for a Supreme Court appointment.

In addition, Blasey had every right to remain anonymous. Indeed, she revealed her name only after her name was leaked to the press. The same thing happened to Anita Hill.

This points to a scandal that has not received enough attention in this matter. Leaking Blasey’s name to the press when she had requested anonymity is inexcusable as it was with Hill. Who leaked her name and why? This exploitation of Blasey for whatever reason cannot be defended and members of the press should try to find out who did it.

The President’s arrested emotional and moral development

At Dorf on Law this morning, Michael Dorf writes:

“Last week, while in North Carolina surveying some of the damage caused by Florence, the president came across a property on which a yacht had washed ashore during the storm. According to the NY Times story:

‘Is this your boat?’ Mr. Trump asked the homeowner.  When the man shook his head and said ‘No,’ the president turned with a grin and replied, ‘At least you got a nice boat out of the deal.’ Then, the real-estate-tycoon-turned-president added: ‘They don’t know whose boat that is. What’s the law? Maybe it becomes theirs.’”

As part of his discussion, Professor Dorf rightly observes that “[T]his is further evidence that Trump’s moral development was arrested when

Hence my comment:

In the currency of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development (after Piaget), Trump’s moral (and psychological) development is thus arrested at the “pre-conventional” level of moral reasoning (Kohlberg noted that this could be found among some adults; it is also a level that happens to be immune from Carol Gilligan’s critique), although I would hesitate to use the adjective “moral” in both cases, for it strikes me as “pre-moral” as well with regard to interpersonal communication and behavior (or folk psychological narrative). Psychologically speaking, whether we attribute this arrested moral (and emotional?) development to “narcissism in extremis” or simply pathological narcissism (‘narcissistic personality disorder’), it is associated with a cluster of well-attested behavioral manifestations and symptoms (this is not an exhaustive list): condescension and arrogance, self-aggrandizement, egregious exaggeration and habitual lying, bullying, envy, paranoia, fragile self-esteem, absence of compassion, a tendency to “dehumanize” others, racism, misogyny, “what’s in it for me” or “tit-for-tat” (or ‘you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours’) reasoning (in foreign policy terms, ‘us-v.-them’). (Incidentally, Gerald Gaus has argued, soundly and persuasively by my lights, the widely held view that iterated game theory [tit-for-tat] and evolutionary psychology [kin altruism] provide sufficient evidence for the proposition that purely instrumental reasoning is capable of securing large-scale social cooperation is profoundly mistaken.) Some psychiatrists have described Trump’s behavior in terms of “unbridled, or extreme present hedonism,” which is descriptively rich and fairly transparent in meaning.

What has increasingly interested me is what all of this says about those who continue to enthusiastically and uncritically support Trump (be they citizens or politicians), whatever class or social strata they come from. We have, it seems, a more or less authoritarian social psychological dynamic in which ideological messianism is entrenched or facilitated by the cultural “triumph of spectacle” (Chris Hedges). A cluster of apparently mutually reinforcing and deplorable beliefs and attitudes are held by individuals who are unusually (that is to say, more than the rest of us) prone or disposed to self-deception, denial, and wishful or fantasized thinking while being attracted to an authoritarian, plutocratic, and kleptocratic “daddy” who happens to suffer from narcissistic megalomania. A paranoid “politics of fear” is the (or one) result, although I confess to being afraid for rather different reasons (and this fear is not merely personal).

George Padmore (28 June 1903 – 23 September 1959): author, journalist, Left organizer and activist (against colonialism, imperialism and Empire), one-time Communist Party member, socialist, and Pan-Africanist intellectual

This post is in memory and honor of the life and work of George Padmore. In an earlier post I attempted to characterize the “Marxist spirituality” of C.L.R. James (a good friend of Padmore’s going back to the days of their youth in Trinidad) and in this case I would like to invoke, in the broadest and deepest sense, the kindred “humanist spirituality” of Padmore, which is equally non-religious or secular, while firmly grounded in a communism (Padmore’s ‘communist’ and socialist beliefs and commitments appear to have more or less survived his former and formal identity as a Communist Party member) and Pan-Africanism that he viewed as integral to the ends of Black self-determination and emancipation. The following material, a kind of bricolage, is an attempt to give some sense of the remarkable qualities Padmore possessed as an “organic intellectual” and political organizer on the (Black) Left.

[The Soviet Union] has done more to liquidate illiteracy and raise the cultural level of the former subject races of Central Asia within twenty-five years, than the British Government has accomplished in India or Africa in two centuries. — George Padmore, writing in The Crisis (November 1942): [One can appreciate this fact, cited by Padmore in spite of his formal withdrawal/expulsion from the Communist Party, without ignoring Soviet behavior at the time in—among other places—Poland and Finland.]

… I don’t know anybody else, except perhaps Dr. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, who is worth more careful consideration…. Anyone who wants to know where the movement [i.e., Pan-Africanism] came from, what was its foundation, the people you have to look at are Marcus Garvey, who made it a mass movement, Du Bois, who gave it the historical and social background it needed, and George Padmore, who organized it…. Marcus Garvey was the great agitator who made black people and Black politics something in the world. Before Garvey there was none. After Garvey … the great theorist and historian was Dr. Du Bois, but the organizer, the man who took Du Bois’ theory and linked it in such a way to political movement, to the mass movement that Garvey created—that man was George Padmore.—C.L.R. James, At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: London: Allison and Busby, 1984): 253

Padmore’s writing and his organizing were never distinct spheres: his writing was a form of action. This writing was intended, quite literally, as ‘praxis;’ that is, the application of ideas into practice. The praxis was primarily pedagogical. He executed his primary aim of teaching and enabling through his writing but also, crucially, in his own home. His correspondence with [Richard] Wright and the testimony of many, including C.L.R. James and Ras Makonnen, described Padmore’s practice of taking in and advising anyone interested in imperialism and its relevance to contemporary politics. His home became a center for visitors from the colonies seeking advice and/or access to British sympathizers such that upon arrival in London, the first question on people’s lips was often ‘How can I get in touch with George Padmore?’ C.L.R. James admitted that his own political methodology in the 1960s, when he lived in Washington, D.C. was modelled on Padmore. [Padmore was a ‘political organizer’ and social movement builder who] … encourag[ed] others to take action …, provid[ing] them with the skills and knowledge to do so. [….] Padmore expressed a strong contempt for ‘café intellectuals’ who were unwilling to ‘get out and fight for freedom.’ [….] The vast majority of his work, which required a literate audience able to absorb sometimes vast amounts of information, was still distinct from many in his network like Richard Wright, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. Du Bois because it was much more forensic and report-based, rather than theoretical. Padmore labored to imprint the evidence that could serves as the basis for a sustained attack on the hypocrisy of benevolent empire. [….] Yet Padmore was also deeply engaged in political thought of his own, even if he derided the status of intellectualism. His books have been described as ‘empirically dense’ accounts that applied [history] to present problems, referencing authors who often stood on opposite side of the political spectrum from him.—Leslie James, in George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 10-11

George Padmore’s biography courtesy of the Marxist Internet Archive:

“George Padmore was the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse, who was born in 1902 in Trinidad, then part of the British Empire. After leaving school, Nurse went into journalism before leaving Trinidad to study law at university in the United States. Yet instead of returning home to become a respected professional among the small black middle class of Trinidad, Nurse became a student radical and in 1927 joined the Communist Party of the USA, becoming ‘George Padmore’ in the process. Padmore’s talents as an organiser and writer meant he was soon appointed head of the Communist International’s ‘Negro Bureau,’ and from 1929 to 1933 he was a leading agitator for colonial revolution, travelling widely and residing for periods in Moscow, Hamburg, Vienna, London and Paris. As well as editing the Negro Worker, Padmore wrote prolifically, and his The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) was particularly influential.

However, when the rise of Hitler’s Nazis in Germany led the Soviet Union to join the League of Nations and seek new diplomatic and military ties with Britain and France, anti-colonialism was no longer the central issue it once was for the Communist International. Resigning from his positions in disgust, the anti-imperialist Padmore survived a vicious Stalinist witch-hunt, and in 1935 returned to Britain. Meeting up again with his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the then Trotskyist C.L.R. James, Padmore from his base in London now steadily evolved into arguably one of the twentieth century’s most important Pan-African figures. Though close to the Independent Labour Party in Britain, and writing prolifically for its publications, Padmore never formally joined, but continued to devote his energies to the struggle to liberate Africa from colonial rule.

In 1937, Padmore formed the International African Service Bureau, later the Pan-African Federation and in 1945 was central to organising the legendary Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Besides writing several books from his London home, from How Britain Rules Africa (1936) to Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Padmore’s greatest triumph undoubtedly came when one African disciple of his, Kwame Nkrumah, led the Gold Coast from British colonial rule to independence in 1957. Though Padmore’s experience working in Ghana as advisor to Nkrumah in the last years of his life was to be a rather disappointing one, that he lived to witness the birth of a black nation in Africa remains a vindication of, and a testament to, his life’s work.”

George Padmore Archive (at the Marxists Internet Archive Encyclopedia):

• The Negro Liberation Movement and the International Conference, 1930
• The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers, 1931
• “Left” Imperialism and the Negro Toilers, May 1932
• Fascism in the Colonies, February 1938
• Hands off the Colonies!, February 1938
• An Outrageous Report, March 1938
• Why Moors help Franco, May 1938
• White Workers and Black, May 1938
• The Government’s Betrayal of the Protectorates, June 1938
• Labour Unrest in Jamaica, July 1938
• West Africans, Watch Your Land, September 1938
• Manifesto Against War, 25 September 1938
• Police Swoop On Workers’ Leaders In Colonies, 20 October 1939
• The British Empire Is Worst Racket Yet Invented By Man, 15 December 1939
• Hands Off the Soviet Union, February 1940
• Poverty, Disease Is Native’s Lot in West Indies, 17 June 1940
• West Indies Need Independence – Not Big Reports, 24 June 1940
• A Typical British Colony, December 1940
• British Imperialists Treat the Negro Masses Like Nazis Treat the Jews, 1941
• Empire “Gauleiters” Greet Each Other, January 1941
• West Indians Answer Anglo-U.S. Imperialism, 4 January 1941
• Whither the West Indies?, 21 July 1941
• Britain’s Black Record, September 1941
• The Socialist Attitude to the Invasion of the U.S.S.R., September 1941
• Answers to a Questionnaire on the War, November 1941
• Blue-Print of Post-War Anglo-American Imperialism, October 1943
• Imperialism: The Basis of Labour Party Crisis, June 1944
• Chris Jones: Fighter for the Oppressed, September 1944
• A Political Review of the Colonies, February 1945
• The Voice of Coloured Labour, World Trade Union Conference, 1945
• Colonial and Coloured Unity, History of the Pan-African Congress, 1947
• Madagascar Fights for Freedom, October 1947

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“A forgotten fighter”

International Socialism, Issue: 124 (1st October 2009)

Christian Høgsbjerg (book review)

Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert Lewis (eds.) George Padmore: Pan–African Revolutionary (Ian Randle Publishers, 2009).

This collection of essays on the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore (1902-59), appearing on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, is a timely tribute to the life and work of a fascinating but forgotten anti-colonial activist and intellectual. The appearance of such a volume is to be welcomed, not simply because Padmore stands as a towering figure of the 20th century ‘black Atlantic’ who fully deserves more critical appreciation in his own right, but also because the question of why he has remained so overlooked for so long, despite the rise of postcolonial studies, is in itself illuminating.

George Padmore was the pseudonym of Malcolm Nurse, who was born in 1902 in Trinidad, then a British crown colony. After leaving school Nurse went into journalism before leaving the Caribbean to study law at university in the United States in 1924. Yet instead of returning home to become a respected professional among the small black middle class of Trinidad (indeed he never returned to the Caribbean), he became a student radical and soon joined the Communist Party of the USA, becoming George Padmore in the process.

Padmore’s talents as an organiser and writer meant he was soon appointed head of the Communist International’s ‘Negro Bureau,’ and from 1929 to 1933 he threw himself into agitating for black liberation and colonial revolution, residing for periods in Moscow, Hamburg, Vienna, London and Paris, and undertaking daring underground work in colonial Africa. As well as editing the Negro Worker, Padmore wrote prolifically, and his pamphlet The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931) became something of a classic.¹

However, when Russia’s Stalinist rulers, threatened by the rise of Nazi Germany, sought new diplomatic and military ties with the ‘democratic’ empires of Britain and France, anti-colonialism ceased to be the critical issue it once was for the Communist International. Padmore, a principled anti-imperialist, resigned from his position in disgust in 1933 and was vilified by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In 1935 he moved to London, the ‘dark heart’ of the British Empire, and joined forces with his boyhood friend from Trinidad, the Trotskyist CLR James.

For the next 20 years or so Padmore devoted all his energies to the struggle to liberate Africa and the Caribbean from colonial rule. In 1937 he formed the International African Service Bureau, later the Pan-African Federation, and in 1945 was central to organising the historic Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Matthew Quest offers a useful discussion of the ‘class struggle Pan-Africanism’ of the bureau’s journal International African Opinion, while Hakim Adi and the late Fitzroy Baptiste examine respectively how the fifth congress was built and how its potential impact was somewhat blunted by the realpolitik of British colonial officials.

Besides writing several books from his London home, from How Britain Rules Africa (1936) to Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956), Padmore’s greatest triumph undoubtedly came when one of his African disciples, Kwame Nkrumah, led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957. Nkrumah had met CLR James in America during the Second World War and when Nkrumah moved to Britain in 1945 James referred him to Padmore as a matter of course.

Marika Sherwood discusses Padmore’s relationship as mentor to Nkrumah, quoting one of Padmore’s letters, from 1955, in which he notes that James ‘introduced [Nkrumah] to Trotskyism and I knocked that nonsense out of him before his return [to the Gold Coast]. And put in its place Pan-Africanism (black nationalism and socialism).’

The extent to which Padmore, who ended his life working as adviser to Nkrumah in Ghana, bears responsibility for the manifest failings of Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism generally is perhaps a moot question, but it is certainly one avoided in this volume due to the Pan-Africanist perspective and hagiographic tone of some of the contributors.

Fitzroy Baptiste’s fine contribution does, however, note important continuities between the Stalinist ‘two-stage theory’ of colonial liberation (first political independence then socialism) that formed part of Padmore’s training while in Moscow and his later strategic vision for achieving ‘Pan-African Socialism.’ Baptiste also quotes from a British Foreign Office document from December 1959 entitled ‘Africa: The Next Ten Years,’ which, with what Baptiste notes was the ‘typical smugness’ of those wielding imperial power, concluded that ‘Pan-Africanism, in itself, is not necessarily a force that we need regard with suspicion and fear.’ This statement stands as an epitaph to the limitations of the ‘Pan-African Socialism’ envisioned by Nkrumah and Padmore (and for that matter by James).

That said, George Padmore’s extraordinary lived experience as an ‘organic intellectual’ of anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Caribbean is well brought out in this volume and remains in many ways inspiring for anti-imperialists today. Moreover, his relentless work exposing and denouncing what Karl Marx called ‘the profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation’ is of course relevant today.

Indeed, as a new ‘Scramble for Africa’ centred around oil unfolds, the memory of anti-colonialists such as Padmore becomes particularly poignant. His fate was to be largely ignored by postcolonial studies, never forgiven by Stalinists, regarded as a ‘problem’ by the British Labour Party and, after his death, turned into a ‘harmless icon’ by the new Pan-Africanist rulers of post-colonial Africa. Anyone interested in the past, present and future of revolutionary socialist politics in Africa and the Caribbean can learn much from a critical engagement with his life, work and legacy.

Note

1. For this pamphlet and more of Padmore’s writing, go to marxists.org/archive/padmore

*          *          *

George Padmore interviews Ho Chi Minh in Paris (1946)

I was delighted to learn that George Padmore (né Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse) interviewed Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Sinh Cung, also known as Nguyen Tat Thanh and Nguyen Ai Quoc) while both were in Paris: Ho was there for the Paris Peace Conference (29 July to 15 October 1946), engaged in “confidential negotiations,” and Padmore was covering the conference for the Free India Press. According to James Hooker, one of the articles Padmore wrote “remains a good introduction to Vietnamese affairs,” the piece having been published by the Defender (28 September 1946, with an autographed photo of Ho!). In Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger, 1967), Hooker further describes Padmore’s article as “a concise introduction to the Vietnam tangle, one which holds up surprisingly well after nearly two decades of persistent journalistic rediscovery of the situation in South East Asia” (in this instance, Indochina). We further learn that a portion of the article was reprinted in the December issue of (Dwight Macdonald’s) politics (sic) as “The Story of Vietnam.” It seems the journal’s readers took Padmore to task for “play[ing] down Ho’s communist associations.” Padmore defended his work, decrying the “preoccupation with anti-communism which seemed so tiresomely characteristic” of the American Left. 

Finally, Hooker mentions one consequence of Padmore’s exclusive interview at the private hotel provided Ho by the French government: “Padmore became the unofficial guardian of Viet-Minh interests in London, to which city Ho despatched a representative for English language training.”

*          *          *

George Padmore: Pan-African “communist”

 “An anecdote suggests [George Padmore’s] power of persuasion. [Cyril C.] Ollivierre [a fellow West Indian student at Howard University and president of the campus Garvey Club] and Padmore met as dishwashers at Camp Kinderland, a resort for leftwing working-class Jewish New Yorkers which had opened in 1923 in Hopewell Junction. When washing up for a large party, the two fell behind. As the stacks of dirty dishes mounted in the steaming kitchen and the waiters’ voices became more and more abusive, Nurse [i.e., Padmore] grew indignant. Ollivierre, a more pliant man, commenced to scant his efforts, merely dipping plates for a cursory swish, a course of action which brought about his downfall, but in the meantime earned him a respite. Nurse refused to do so. Instead, he stopped, rolled down his sleeves (always one for proper dress) and marched to the dining room where he excoriated the startled diners for abetting the exploitation going on beneath their noses. Some of the men marched back through the swinging doors and helped catch up under Nurse’s supervision.”

According to James Hooker, “[George] Padmore’s strength was his indefatigable nature, remarkable memory and sense of organization. He was able to state his aims concisely, collected statistics avidly, read the capitalist press in detail and quoted from the generally accepted academic sources when he touched upon sensitive issues.” Several of these virtues are exemplified in Padmore’s Life and Struggle of Negro Toilers (London: Red International of Labour Unions, 1931), “the back cover of which showed a gigantic Negro hovering over the United States, West Indies and Africa, snapping the links in the slave chain which connected these distant places,” while its contents displayed “an amazing amount of information on the condition of black men in three continents, described their various organisations, showed statistical tables of the black man’s role in the various militaries of the great powers (including the United States), and explained the role of the new section of the RILU [Red International of Labour Unions]. The book, though on occasion lapsing into jargon, is in the main straightforward journalism which conveys a feeling that the black men of the world are at last awake, with the appropriate weapon of their deliverance at hand. Of his ten books or extended pamphlets, this and his last, Pan-Africanism or Communism? [London: Dennis Dobson, 1956], are probably the best known.” — from James R. Hooker’s Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (Praeger Publishers, 1967).

*          *          *

Books by George Padmore

• Padmore, George. The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers. London: Red International of Labour Unions Magazine for the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, 1931.
• Padmore, George. How Britain Rules Africa. London: Wishart Books, 1936.
• Padmore, George. African and World Peace. London: Secker and Warburg, 1937.
• Padmore, George, with Nancy Cunard. White Man's Duty. London: W. H. Allen, 1942.
• Padmore, George (in collaboration with Dorothy Pizer). How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire: A Challenge to the Imperialist Powers. London: Dennis Dobson, 1946.
• Padmore, George. Africa: Britain's Third Empire. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949.
• Padmore, George. The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom. London: Dennis Dobson, 1953.
• Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. London: Dennis Dobson, 1956.
• Padmore, George, ed. The Voice of Coloured Labour. Manchester: Panaf Services, 1945.
• Padmore, George, ed. Colonial and Coloured Unity—A Programme of Action: History of the Pan-African Congress. Manchester: Pan-African Federation/Panaf Services, 1947.

 Further Reading:

• Adi, Hakim. West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998.
• Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013.
• Adi, Hakim and Sherwood, Marika. The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited. London: New Beacon Books, 1995.
• Baptiste, Fitzroy and Rupert Lewis, eds. George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary. Kingston and London: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009.
• Bolland, O. Nigel. On the March: Labour Rebellions in the British Caribbean, 1934-39. London: James Currey, 1995.
• Braithwaite, Lloyd. Colonial West Indian Students in Britain. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001.
• Bush, Barbara. Imperialism, Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919 –1945. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Cooper, Frederick. Decolonization and African Society: The Labour Question in French and British Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Cunard, Nancy (Maureen Moynagh, ed.) Essays on Race and Empire. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002.
• Cunard, Nancy, ed. Negro Anthology made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933. London: Wishart and Co., 1934.
• Derrick, Jonathan. Africa’s “Agitators”: Militant Anti-Colonialism in in Africa and the West, 1918-1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Fryer, Peter, Staying Power:The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto, 1984.
• Geiss, Imanuel. The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen, 1974.
• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C. L. R. James Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
• Hooker, James R. Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1967.
• James, C.L.R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison and Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. “George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary,” in C. L. R. James, ed. At the Rendezvous of Victory:Selected Writings. London: Allison and Busby, 1984.
• James, Leslie. George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Langley, Jabez Ayodele. Pan-Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa, 1900-1945: A Study in Ideology and Social Classes. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973.
• Langley, Jabez Ayodele, ed. Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa. London: Rex Collings, 1979.
• Lewis, Rupert and Baptiste, Fitzroy, eds. George Padmore:Pan-African Revolutionary. Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2008.
• Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Makonnen, Ras (Kenneth King, ed.) Pan-Africanism from Within. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
• Matera, Marc. Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 (1983).
• Schwarz, Bill, ed. West Indian Intellectuals in Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
• Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
• Thompson, Dudley, with Margaret Cezair Thompson. From Kingston to Kenya: The Making of a Pan-African Lawyer. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1993.
• Tilley, Helen, ed., with Robert J. Gordon. Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.
• Von Eschen, Penny. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
• Zachernuk, Philip S. Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Blacks on the (Radical) Left
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism.

On the putative genius of (our) constitutional democracy

 … [L]iberalism, constitutionalism, and democracy do not per se make good societies, although they are arguably necessary part of the structure of a good society. But it is also true that merely having the psychology for or a commitment to a good society will make one. In particular, the makings of a civil society are not the makings of good government under a constitutional regime. What is generally required for a constitutional regime to work is that it serve the relative interests of major political groups in the society, that is, groups that are politically efficacious. — Russell Hardin

Capitalist democracy encourages economic calculation through the generation of conditions of material uncertainty. But economic calculation leads rationally to a rejection of more radical long-term struggles against capitalism itself. Short-term material improvement is the preferred aim of materially based conflict within a capitalist democracy because of the different requirements and competing logics of short-term pursuits and longer-term struggles, and the rational pursuit if material advantage within capitalist democracy thus leads to a less radical and less global pursuit of short-term material gain. [….] Thus the situation in which workers make their decisions leads them rationally, on the basis of their material interest, to choose not to struggle against capitalism. The long-term production of consent within capitalist democracy is based on just such short-term decisions to consent to capitalist production. The system can provide workers with short-term material satisfaction, and workers participate in the system to assure that satisfaction. And even when, as is not infrequently the case, capitalism is failing to deliver material benefits, rational calculation does not mandate a longer-term transformative conflict. Individual workers may hope that the burden of decline will not fall on them. They may calculate that protecting existing gains from further erosion is more likely to deliver benefits than engaging in a costly and in any case uncertain long-term effort. And if they are organized, their organizations, designed to deliver short-term benefits under better conditions, are likely to be ill-suited to the enterprise of radical transformation. – Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers

The likelihood of reducing the extreme inequality of representation in the Senate is virtually zero. The chances of altering our constitutional system to make it either more clearly consensual or more definitely majoritarian are also quite low. The likelihood is very low that the Supreme Court will refrain from legislating public policies, often highly partisan ones, and instead focus its power of judicial review strictly on the protection of fundamental democratic rights and issues of federalism. The combination of chief executive and monarch in the American presidency is not likely to change. Finally, the probability that democratic changes in the electoral college will occur appear to be inversely related to their desirability, with the most desirable having the lowest probability of occurring. There is at least a modest chance that some states might require their electoral votes to be allocated in proportion to the popular votes. But a constitutional amendment that makes the number of a state’s electors proportionate to its population stands little chance of adoption. And the inequality in representation in the Senate makes a constitutional amendment providing for direct popular election of the president virtually impossible. — Robert A. Dahl

*          *          *

“The genius of constitutional democracy has been that it limits what the most powerful interests are allowed to do.”—Neil H. Buchanan (in a recent post at Dorf on Law)

I beg to differ: I think it’s in fact the case that the genius of (liberal) constitutional democracy, to the extent such a thing exists, is owing to its ability to serve the mutual advantage of interests embodied in and common to a large middle class and the wealthy (the wealth here being of the kind generated by capitalism). And it is the comparative stability, ideological tenacity, and rule of such genius that is democratically distorting and disturbing. It may, on occasion (thus in an episodic not structural sense), and owing to the aspirational legitimacy of a representative democracy, constrain the exercise or morally egregious expression of the most powerful of those interests, but this is utterly contingent on those outside the circle of the (largely white) middle and upper classes having opportunities to represent their interests within the four corners of the constitution. The groups whose mutual advantage must be served are not the poor, the disenfranchised, the vulnerable, the incarcerated, and so forth; in brief, those outside the circle of the most powerful interests. De jure constitutional democracy in this instance is de facto capitalist democracy, hence political rights tend to be formal and procedural and not substantive (this is not to dismiss the value of the former, but to highlight their limits vis-à-vis a democratic society). The true genius of our constitutional democracy, therefore, is best evidenced in the fact that the welfare of workers is structurally secondary to the welfare of capitalists, the well-being of the former in the hands of the decision-making and investment practices of the latter. Capitalist or constitutional democracy does not limit the private control of investment in the hands of the wealthy (as individuals or corporations). Conditions of material insecurity inherent in a capitalist democracy (be it a liberal, corporatist or social democratic welfare state; although the choice among these types has very real consequences for the welfare and well-being of those not solidly middle class or wealthy) finds workers canalizing their general and moral (or worldview or ‘lifeworld’) interests in a myopic manner into the “rational” pursuit of material advantage or short-term material gain.

Professor Buchanan replied to my comment as follows: “I do not disagree with Patrick O’Donnell’s comments at all. I would only say that he is arguing that constitutional democracy is quite consistent with neoliberalism and thus exploitation. Again, I agree. My point was that the very nature of constitutional rules is to put some limits on what powerful interests can do. If that were not true, powerful interests would not be so eager to hire Supreme Court justices to eliminate those limits.”

References & Further Reading

• Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
• Anderson, Carol. One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).
• Berman, Ari. Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
• Chang, Ja-Joon. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism (Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
• Cole, David and James X. Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution (The New Press, 3^{rd ed.}, 2006).
• Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^{nd ed.}, 2003).
• Fontana, Benedetto, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
• Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
• Hardin, Russell. Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Hasen, Richard L. Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (Yale University Press, 2016).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (2017).
• May, Gary. Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy (Basic Books, 2013).
• Mayer, Jane. Dark Money (Doubleday, 2016).
• Nelson, Dana D. Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
• Tullis, Jeffrey K. and Stephen Macedo, eds. The Limits of Constitutional Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2010).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Wills, Garry. Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (Penguin Press, 2010).
• Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Aspirational Fascism

I just finished William Connolly’s, Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy Under Trumpism. Connolly is a giant in political theory and this short book is well worth reading. It offers fascinating comparisons and contrasts between the political and rhetorical appeals of Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler and important guidance for the resistance – all embedded in themes familiar to those who have generally followed the development of his theory. As he argues, it is crucial to understand the appeal of nationalist, right-wing, authoritarian politicians if resistance is to be informed. It is not enough to write off the racism, sexism, and fascist tendencies of Trump’s base (though that needs to be done). Connolly argues that a multifaceted diverse social movement has to bring in white male workers left behind who have been conned by Trump. In this respect, the book deserves to be read with Listen Liberal by Thomas Frank which argues that the Democratic Party has largely abandoned its commitment to the working class.

Barney Sanders understood this (though some would question his ability sufficiently to energize important segments of the Democratic base). And Bill Connolly has argued this for many decades. He recognizes and appreciates the pulls and tensions within the resistance (it could not be other way), but he writes well about the substantive and emotional appeals necessary to combat Trumpism together with the appropriate attitudes to assume within the resistance.

Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791)

On this date in 1791, Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, one of the first tracts to champion women’s rights: “Woman is born free and remains the equal of man in rights.”

We would do well to remember, with Jonathan Israel in Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (2014), that

“‘[w]oman be a citoyenne!’ within the French Revolution … remained exclusively the call of la philosophie and republican philosophisme. It was not promoted by liberal monarchism, Marat’s populism, or any other revolutionary political, cultural, or social movement. Backed by Condorcet, Bonneville, Brissot, Villette, and the Revolution’s leading women—Gouges, Palm, and Sophie Condorcet—an argued, developed, politically organized feminism that conquered a narrow but real enclave in the public sphere was forged for the first time in human history.”

*           *           *

“Olympe de Gouges (7 May 1748 – 3 November 1793), born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience.

She began her career as a playwright in the early 1780s. As political tension arose in France, Olympe de Gouges became increasingly politically engaged. She became an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies in 1788. At the same time, she began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists. [….]

Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen had been widely reproduced and influenced the writings of women's advocates in the Atlantic world. One year after its publication, in 1792, the keen observer of the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft, published Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Writings on women and their lack of rights became widely available. The experience of French women during the revolution entered the collective consciousness.” [….] (From her Wikipedia entry)

See too this site on Gouges maintained by Clarissa Palmer which has, among other things, English translations of her French texts.

Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference (1955)

In [April 18–24] 1955, a conference was held in Bandung, Indonesia that was attended by representatives from twenty-nine nations.* “The leaders of Asian and African countries gathered in this historic meeting … included Premiers Chou En-Lai of China, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, U Nu of Burma, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt besides President Sukarno of Indonesia, and leaders from Liberia, Sudan, Gold Coast, Jordan, Iran, Ceylon, Nepal, Pakistan and Philippines. The meeting of these leaders was a key point in the history of developing countries that gave rise to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the concept of the Third World or the South. At the start of the Cold War between the West and the former Soviet Union, the leaders of the developing countries gathered in Bandung asked for an alternative way of just global governance and global justice, to achieve greater social and economic development for their people, and to continue the process of political and economic decolonization.

In his opening speech at the first Asian-African Conference, President Sukarno of Indonesia recognized that the gathering of the leaders of the 29 Asian-African independent countries was a result of the sacrifices made by their forefathers and by the people of their own and younger generations. ‘The hall was filled not only by the leaders of the nations of Asia and Africa but also contained within its walls the undying, the indomitable, the invincible spirit of those who went before them,’ he said. Their struggle and sacrifice paved the way for this meeting of the highest representatives of independent and sovereign nations from two of the biggest continents of the globe. In a historic event, Asian and African peoples were meeting together to discuss and deliberate upon matters of common concern to them.

Sukarno stated that the burden of the delegates attending the Conference was not a light one. ‘For many generations our peoples have been the voiceless ones in the world. We have been the unregarded, the peoples for whom decisions were made by others whose interests were paramount, the peoples who lived in poverty and humiliation. Then our nations demanded, nay fought for independence, and achieved independence, and with that independence came responsibility. We have heavy responsibilities to ourselves, and to the world, and to the yet unborn generations.’ [….]

The Final Communiqué of the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference provided the basis for South-South cooperation with concrete proposals for promoting economic, political, technological, cultural spheres. It declared full support of the fundamental principles of human rights as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations and took note of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations in a moment in history when many South nations were still under Western colonial rule.

The communiqué deplored all forms of racial segregation and discrimination. In declaring support for the cause of freedom and independence for all peoples it also deplored colonialism, in all its manifestations.

The communiqué took note that several States had still not been admitted to the United Nations, and that for effective cooperation and world peace, membership in the United Nations should be universal. The leaders also considered that representation of Asian and African countries in the UN Security Council, in relation to the principle of equitable and geographical distribution, was inadequate, as it is today. The right to self-determination, stated the communiqué, should be enjoyed by all peoples. The Ten Bandung Principles enunciated in 1955 continue to be as relevant today as it was 60 years ago and in the decades since. These are as follows:

1. Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.
4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.
5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
6. (a) Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers, (b) Abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries.
7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.
8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration or judicial settlement as well as other peaceful means of the parties’ own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
10. Respect for justice and international obligation.’

The 1955 Bandung communiqué concluded by expressing its conviction that friendly cooperation in accordance with the 10 Principles of Bandung would effectively contribute to the maintenance and promotion of international peace and security, while cooperation in the economic, social and cultural fields would help bring about the common prosperity and well-being of all.”

* “The twenty-nine countries that participated at the Bandung Conference represented nearly one-quarter of the Earth’s land surface and a total population of 1.5 billion people, roughly 54% of the Earth’s population at the time. The conference was organised by Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and India and was coordinated by Ruslan Abdulgani, secretary general of the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

Richard Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) attended and wrote about (The Color Curtain) the 1955 Bandung Conference. He secured funds through the Paris office of the Congress of Cultural Freedom,¹ “making sure to establish his terms in advance:

“In order to ensure that his statements on colonialism and the Third World would in no way be controlled or censured, he would attend the conference as an independent journalist. The Congress would have the option to use any of Wright’s articles in its various publications, and, in return, he would receive $500 in addition to travel expenses and retain the right to publish his entire report as a book at a later date.” — Michael Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (University of Illinois Press, 2^nd ed., 1993): 417. 

Because I’ve begun reading (on occasional breaks from other things) Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (New York: World Publishing Co., 1956),² I thought I’d share a few words of wisdom from “the unadulterated genius of Richard Wright” (Cornel West—a philosopher, political activist, and public intellectual—is prone to rhetorical hyperbole, but does not indulge it in this instance). I concur with West’s description of Wright as “first and foremost a cosmopolitan intellectual, a global man of letters, a Promethean figure in the life of the mind with international scope.”

Notes:

1. “Although the discovery that the organization was indirectly financed by the CIA as a means of combating Communist propaganda from the liberal Left was not made until some years later, most of the great names associated with the Congress were unaware of this at the time.”(Fabre)
2. This book is conveniently available together with Black Power (1954) and White Man, Listen! (1957) in paperback edition published by HarperCollins in 2008, the introduction to which is by Cornel West.

• “Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like livin’ in jail.”
• “Anything seemed possible, likely, feasible, because I wanted everything to be possible... Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.”
• “Literature is a struggle over the nature of reality.”
• “Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread. (I would add: they must be free from starvation to have the knowledge that they are suffering from the negation of self-realization; or, to put it differently, freedom from starvation is a necessary yet not sufficient condition for awakening to the fact that one is being denied the opportunity for self-realization. Gandhi more or less captured this insight, despite not speaking about self-realization as such, when he said, ‘There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.’)
• “Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.”
• “Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books ... ”
• “Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others’ hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.”

― Richard Wright

Further Reading:

• Eslava, Luis, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah, eds. Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures. Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2^nd, 1993.
• Lee, Christopher J., ed. Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press (Center for International Studies), 2010.
• Roberts, Brian Russell, and Keith Foulcher, eds. Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
• Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
• Tan, See Seng and Amitav Acharya, eds. Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008.
• Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995 (1956).

Our Undemocratic Government

We do not live in a democracy. If we think of a democracy as a system of representation in which the rights and interests of the People are respected, my claim seems to be unassailable. Surely, a legislature that attempts to deprive millions of people of health insurance and passes a massive tax cut in which more than 80% of the revenue goes to the top 1% reminds us that John Kenneth Galbraith was on to something when he said we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. This welfare for the rich is compounded by the unearthing of health and safety measures (including bad faith denials about climate change) and otherwise promoting a short-term, short-sighted friendly business environment opposed by and to the detriment of the People.

The system is rigged against the People. The Framers were opposed to democracy. Even with elections for the Senate, that institution is specifically designed to oppose majority rule. The House achieves the same result by gerrymandering. And the Supreme Court assists by proclaiming that millionaires and corporations have a First Amendment right to dominate elections with their spending. At the same time, the Court has appropriated the First Amendment for campaigns of union busting thus removing an important check on corporate abuses. The Court has also paved the way for Republicans to deprive African-Americans of their voting rights (by the thousands) by gutting the Voting Rights Act and by upholding measures with the purpose and effect of preventing the same citizens and others from voting by specious claims of fraud that purportedly justify requiring burdensome identification requirements.

Donald Trump did not invent racism (though he is a specialist). The Republican Party has exploited the race card for decades.  In a long series of decisions, Republican justices have done their best to undermine Congressional attempts to enforce our Fourteenth Amendment commitment to equality. The party of Lincoln is the party of rich white male privilege.  And the Democratic party is overly dependent on corporate money as Bernie Sanders has long made clear.

We do not have a democracy; our government is now and for some time has been illegitimate.

Beyond Factory Farming

I should like to call your attention to an article by Sherry F. Colb today at Verdict: “Factory Farming:” An Evolving Phrase. While I recommend the entire piece, I’ve highlighted one passage below so as to make a brief comment.

For (philosophical and ethical) reasons found within the Buddhist tradition,* I wholeheartedly agree with this, although of course one need not be a Buddhist to concur with the premises and conclusion:

“First, if a sentient living being feels good and healthy and happy, I cannot justify depriving her of her life if I have other options. Factory farming originally woke me and others up to the fact that the animals whom we were using for food and clothing have feelings and suffer and want to live out their lives [while they likely lack a conception of what it means to ‘live out their lives,’ they clearly express a will or desire to live, they ‘cling’ to life, as it were]. Having realized and fully absorbed this, I no longer wanted to play any role in sending animals to the slaughterhouse, however lovely their pre-slaughter abode.”

Those of us who more or less share this view cannot countenance “humane slaughter” of animals (which, for us, albeit with a few possible exceptions, is a contradiction). It is true that farm animals can be treated humanely, “pre-slaughter,” and thus the forswearing of factory farming, to the extent this takes place, represents a significant measure of improvement in the quality of the lives of animals before they make it to “our” plates. I welcome that, even if, from my spiritual and ethical perspective, it falls short of what we should be—and sometimes are—capable of in our ethical relations with non-human animals.

* Specifically, the Eightfold Path, which is divided into three interrelated and mutually supporting parts: (i) insight or wisdom (prajñā), (ii) moral virtue (śīla), and (iii) meditation (samādhi). Moral virtue consists, broadly speaking, of “right speech,” “right action” and “right livelihood.” And, among other things, and given other Buddhist teachings and doctrines, “right action” entails observing the “five precepts” (pañcaśīla), the first of which is to abstain from harming breathing beings (Pali: Pāṇātipātā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi). This is keeping with a pan-Indic virtue, ahiṃsā or (‘non-injury’ or ‘non-harming,’ often also translated as nonviolence) exemplified in particular within the traditions of Hinduism and especially Jainism and Buddhism. There is a helpful discussion of this in Peter Harvey’s An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Relevant Bibliographies:

• Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
• Buddhism

Steve Biko (d. 12 September 1977)

By way of a small tribute to Steve Biko (18 December 1946 – 12 September 1977), here is a brief descriptive introduction to and characterization of Biko as a thoughtful and politically aware young medical student at Wentworth (the Natal University nonwhite medical school), where he was elected to the Students’ Representative Council and soon participated in NUSAS (the multiracial National Union of South African Students):

“Undogmatic but highly disciplined in his thinking, possessed with a rare insight into human and political situations, Biko increasingly began to question the value of what he saw as the artificial integration of student politics. As in South African politics generally, Africans were hanging back, resentful but reticent, hiding behind white spokesmen who had shouldered the job of defining black grievances and goals. For liberal whites, verbal protest and symbolic racial mixing were seen as the outer limit of action. Apartheid was defined as the enemy, and nonracialism prescribed as the antidote. Repeated over and over in words and symbols, this liberal approach, and in fact the entire liberal analysis, had to Biko’s way of thinking become not an inspiration to constructive action but a sterile dogma disguising an unconscious attachment to the status quo.”— Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (University of California Press, 1978): 260. Gerhart had the privilege of interviewing Biko in 1972.

Related bibliography: South African Liberation Struggles: Toward (revolutionary?) Democratic Self-Determination.

The Attica Prison Uprising

Today, September 9, 2018, marks the end of the Nationwide Prison Strike which began on August 21, 2018. Both dates have deliberate, symbolic political significance, as September 9, 1971 marks the start of the revolt at Attica Prison, while the commencement of the strike on August 21, harkens back to the death of George (Lester) Jackson (b. September 23, 1941), who was killed on that date in 1971, thus several week before the Attica Prison uprising, ostensibly by prison guards,* outside the Adjustment Center (AC) in the prison yard at San Quentin Prison after being involved in a violent and deadly takeover of the AC:

“Jackson moved guards Kenneth McCray, Paul Krasenes, and Frank DeLeon down to the tier to his cell … where he and a few other prisoners hogtied and beat the officers before slashing their throats with a makeshift knife. Krasenes died of that wound; Jackson shot and killed DeLeon; McCray ultimately survived. Later, when another guard, Jere Graham, came down to the AC, Jackson placed him in the cell and shot him, too.” Two more guards were taken hostage and had their throats slashed as well, “though both survived.” When two white prisoners (‘trustees’), Ronald Kane and Johnny Lynn “came down to deliver meals in the midst of the rebellion,” they too were killed with a handmade knife.

* This account is from Dan Berger’s Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2014): 129-138. See too the chapter, “Who Killed George Jackson?” in Charles Garry (and Art Goldberg), Streetfighter in the Courtroom: The People’s Advocate (E.P. Dutton, 1977): 242-266.

*          *          *

The incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwacking [sic] of the two prisoners Sept. 8, 1971 but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administration network of the prison, throughout the year.

WE are MEN! We are not beasts and do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison population has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United State. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed. – “L.D.” (Elliot James) Barkley, reading aloud from the introductory paragraphs of The Five Demands in the prison’s D-Yard

Forty-seven years ago the prisoners of the Attica Correctional Facility began a revolt (to reduce it to a ‘riot’ is misleading and tendentious) to assert their intrinsic dignity as human beings. Thirty-nine individuals were killed by corrections officers and state troopers in the armed assault of the prison, nine of which were hostages, one, a civilian, and the remaining twenty-nine persons, inmates (several deaths occurred prior to re-taking control of the prison). As Heather Ann Thompson notes in her definitive book on the uprising (see below), numerous others were “wounded, maimed, tortured, and scarred” at the prison on September 13, 1971.

The New York Times has an archival page with helpful material covering the various historical, sociological, and political dimensions of the Uprising. See too this interview with Joseph “Jazz” Hayden at Jacobin (first published in the Socialist Worker).

Timeline of the Attica Rebellion (compiled by Mariame Kaba from various sources)

• August 1970: The men in Auburn prison revolt. Forty of them are transferred at Attica. At the same time a struggle begins at Attica for higher wages and lower commissary prices. It includes petitioning and later a strike by hundreds of prisoners. The struggle initially results in the alleged leaders being shipped out to other prisons and all the men in cell block “B” being locked in their cells for two weeks. It also results in commissary prices being lowered and, a short while later, in a small increase in wages.
• October 1970: Rebellions occur at several New York City Jails. This includes the “Tombs” where Civil Rights activist Herbert Blyden was a leader of the uprising.
• May-June 1971: The Attica Liberation Faction is founded by five prisoners.
• July 2, 1971: The Attica Liberation Faction presents 27 demands to Commissioner Oswald and Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
• August 21, 1971: Black Panther leader George Jackson is killed by correctional officers at San Quentin Prison in California. They contend that they shot him as he was attempting to escape. No one believes this.
• August 22, 1971: A hunger strike is called at Attica in honor of George Jackson. Strikers march into the mess hall for breakfast single file, sit silently, and refuse to eat. The Commission put the number of prisoners participating in the protest at 700, out of a total population of 2,243.
• August 30, 197: Three hundred prisoners sign up for sick call and occupy the hospital area to dramatize the substandard health facilities. This was the second peaceful protest at Attica in two weeks. Frank Smith, who served on the negotiating committee during the September rebellion, describes the scene the morning after Jackson’s death: “I didn’t know anything about George Jackson. So, when we got to the mess hall that morning, everything was quiet. No one was saying nothing, and you’re talking about five, six, seven hundred people! Inmates! So, I said to my buddy, ‘What’s up, man?’ The McKay Commission described the correctional officers’ impression of the protest as follows: “For the young correction officers who found themselves in the mess hall with 700 silent, fasting inmates wearing black armbands, the very silence and the mood of unreserved hostility was the most threatening and frightening experience in their memory. ‘I was scared shitless,’ one young officer later recalled.”
• September 2, 1971: Commissioner Oswald visits Attica and meets briefly with Frank Lott, Chairman of the Attica Liberation Faction. Oswald asks for more time to implement demands. He leaves early due to his wife’s illness and leaves behind a recorded a message that is played three times over the prison public address system. Oswald’s message says: “I assure you that changes will be made.” He asks for more time to implement the requested changes.
• September 8, 1971: Early in the day, there is an altercation between correctional officers and two prisoners. Later that day, correctional officers lead two prisoners whom they believe to be responsible to Housing Block Z (HBZ), the disciplinary housing unit where inmates were locked down for twenty-three hours per day. Ray Lamorie, one of the two, had not been involved in the altercation. Observers saw officers strike Leroy Dewer, the other prisoner, while taking him to HBZ. Prisoners attest that HBZ was a site of routine, brutal beatings by correctional officers.
• September 9, 1971: The revolt begins. Prisoners subdue Lieutenant Robert Curtis in a tunnel that divides the prison yard into quarters. A group of fifteen to twenty-five prisoners eventually overpower four guards and lock them in cells. The uprising quickly spreads to the other cell blocks, with more than 1200 prisoners congregating in Cell Block D. Although members of the Attica Liberation Front did not participate in the initial rioting, they quickly joined in to move the prisoners toward more explicit demands for reform. The prisoners create a committee to negotiate with Commissioner Oswald and demand that outside observers be present.
• September 10, 1971: Uprising continues. 33 observers assemble at Attica and pay a brief visit to D yard.
• September 11, 1971: Rockefeller refuses to come to Attica to aid in the negotiations. He also refuses the prisoners demand for amnesty. William Quinn, a guard held hostage, dies of head injuries. The observer committee negotiates the 28 point package with Oswald. This plan is intended to convey what the state would offer in concessions to the prisoners. However the state did not agree to the key issue of criminal amnesty. The prisoners reject the 28 points package because they did not trust the state to meet even these promises. Black Panther leader and co-founder Bobby Seale arrives at Attica. Some hope he can convince the prisoners to accept the 28 point package. Seale tells Oswald and the observers that he could not tell the prisoners what to do but that he would let them know that he would support whatever decisions they made.
• September 12, 1971: Uprising continues. Rockefeller, again, refuses pleas of the hostages, the prisoners, Commissioner Oswald, and the Observers Committee, all asking him to come to Attica. A Time to Die by Tom Wicker (1975): 9.
• September 13, 1971: Bloody Monday. Rockefeller orders thousands of National Guardsmen, State Troopers and Corrections Guards to attack the prisoners. Hundreds of prisoners are shot. The State’s forces also shoot and kill nine of the hostage correctional workers. The prisoners have no guns. Many of the alleged leaders of the rebellion are selectively marked and assassinated by the State’s forces. 40 men (prisoners and hostages) die in the retaking of the prison. The Corrections Department says the hostages’ throats were slashed by the prisoners. Guards torture and beat prisoners
• September 14 and after: Coroner’s report shows that no hostages died of slashed throats. All died of police gunshot wounds. Demonstrations protesting the Attica Massacre begin in New York and around nation. Beatings and harassment of prisoners continues. Several hundred of the rebel prisoners are shipped out to other prisons. 80 of the alleged leaders are put in 24-hour segregation. On May 1, they also are shipped out. Wyoming County Grand Jury prepares to indict prisoners for the rebellion. 62 prisoners were charged in 42 indictments with 1,289 separate counts. Only one state trooper was charged. McKay Commission, created by Rockefeller, holds hearings about Attica revolt.

Attica Prison Liberation Faction, Manifesto of Demands, 1971

“[I]nspired by events at Folsom … the demands were made following several thousand inmates seizing control of the prison in protest against the usual issues of, overcrowding, racism, and brutality from prison staff.”

We, the men of Attica Prison, have been committed to the New York State Department of Corrections by the people of society for the purpose of correcting what has been deemed as social errors in behavior. Errors which have classified us as socially unacceptable until reprogrammed with new values and more thorough understanding as to our values and responsibilities as members of the outside community. The Attica Prison program in its structure and conditions have been enslaved on the pages of this Manifesto of Demands with the blood, sweat, and tears of the inmates of this prison.

The program which we are submitted to under the façade of rehabilitation are relative to the ancient stupidity of pouring water on a drowning man, inasmuch as we are treated for our hostilities by our program administrators with their hostility as medication.

In our efforts to comprehend on a feeling level an existence contrary to violence, we are confronted by our captors with what is fair and just, we are victimized by the exploitation and the denial of the celebrated due process of law.

In our peaceful efforts to assemble in dissent as provided under this nation’s U.S. Constitution, we are in turn murdered, brutalized, and framed on various criminal charges because we seek the rights and privileges of all American People.

In our efforts to intellectually expand in keeping with the outside world, through all categories of news media, we are systematically restricted and punitively remanded to isolation status when we insist on our human rights to the wisdom of awareness.

MANIFESTO OF DEMANDS

1. We Demand the constitutional rights of legal representation at the time of all parole board hearings and the protection from the procedures of the parole authorities whereby they permit no procedural safeguards such as an attorney for cross-examination of witnesses, witnesses in behalf of the parolee, at parole revocation hearings.
2. We Demand a change in medical staff and medical policy and procedure. The Attica Prison hospital is totally inadequate, understaffed, and prejudiced in the treatment of inmates. There are numerous “mistakes” made many times; improper and erroneous medication is given by untrained personnel. We also demand periodical check-ups on all prisoners and sufficient licensed practitioners 24 hours a day instead of inmates’ help that is used now.
3. We Demand adequate visiting conditions and facilities for the inmate and families of Attica prisoners. The visiting facilities at the prison are such as to preclude adequate visiting for inmates and their families.
4. We Demand an end to the segregation of prisoners from the mainline population because of their political beliefs. Some of the men in segregation units are confined there solely for political reasons and their segregation from other inmates is indefinite.
5. We Demand an end to the persecution and punishment of prisoners who practice the Constitutional Right of peaceful dissent. Prisoners at Attica and other New York prisons cannot be compelled to work as these prisons were built for the purpose of housing prisoners and there is no mention as to the prisoners being required to work on prison jobs in order to remain in the mainline population and/or be considered for release. Many prisoners believe their labour power is being exploited in order for the state to increase its economic power and to continue to expand its correctional industries (which are million-dollar complexes), yet do not develop working skills acceptable for employment in the outside society, and which do not pay the prisoner more than an average of forty cents a day. Most prisoners never make more than fifty cents a day. Prisoners who refuse to work for the outrageous scale, or who strike, are punished and segregated without the access to the privileges shared by those who work; this is class legislation, class division, and creates hostilities within the prison.
6. We Demand an end to political persecution, racial persecution, and the denial of prisoner’s rights to subscribe to political papers, books, or any other educational and current media chronicles that are forwarded through the U.S. Mail.
7. We Demand that industries be allowed to enter the institutions and employ inmates to work eight hours a day and fit into the category of workers for scale wages. The working conditions in prisons do not develop working incentives parallel to the many jobs in the outside society, and a paroled prisoner faces many contradictions of the job that add to his difficulty in adjusting. Those industries outside who desire to enter prisons should be allowed to enter for the purpose of employment placement.
8. We Demand that inmates be granted the right to join or form labour unions.
9. We Demand that inmates be granted the right to support their own families; at present, thousands of welfare recipients have to divide their checks to support their imprisoned relatives, who without outside support, cannot even buy toilet articles or food. Men working on scale wages could support themselves and families while in prison.
10. We Demand that correctional officers be prosecuted as a matter of law for any act of cruel and unusual punishment where it is not a matter of life and death.
11. We Demand that all institutions using inmate labour be made to conform with the state and federal minimum wage laws.
12. We Demand an end to the escalating practice of physical brutality being perpetrated upon the inmates of New York State prisons.
13. We Demand the appointment of three lawyers from the New York State Bar Association to full-time positions for the provision of legal assistance to inmates seeking post-conviction relief, and to act as a liaison between the administration and inmates for bringing inmates’ complaints to the attention of the administration.
14. We Demand the updating of industry working conditions to the standards provided for under New York State law.
15. We Demand the establishment of inmate worker’s insurance plan to provide compensation for work-related accidents.
16. We Demand the establishment of unionized vocational training programs comparable to that of the Federal Prison System which provides for union instructions, union pay scales, and union membership upon completion of the vocational training course.
17. We Demand annual accounting of the inmates Recreational Fund and formulation of an inmate committee to give inmates a voice as to how such funds are used.
18. We Demand that the present Parole Board appointed by the Governor be eradicated and replaced by the parole board elected by popular vote of the people. In a world where many crimes are punished by indeterminate sentences and where authority acts within secrecy and within vast discretion and given heavy weight to accusations by prison employees against inmates, inmates feel trapped unless they are willing to abandon their desire to be independent men.
19. We Demand that the state legislature create a full-time salaried board of overseers for the State Prisons. The board would be responsible for evaluating allegations made by inmates, their families, friends and lawyers against employers charged with acting inhumanely, illegally or unreasonably. The board should include people nominated by a psychological or psychiatric association, by the State Bar Association or by the Civil Liberties Union and by groups of concerned involved laymen.
20. We Demand an immediate end to the agitation of race relations by the prison administration of this State.
21. We Demand that the Dept. of Corrections furnish all prisoners with the services of ethnic counsellors for the needed special services of the Brown and Black population of this prison.
22. We Demand an end to the discrimination in the judgment and quota of parole for Black and Brown people.
23. We Demand that all prisoners be present at the time their cells and property are being searched by the correctional officers of state prisons.
24. We Demand an end to the discrimination against prisoners when they appear before the Parole Board. Most prisoners are denied parole solely because of their prior records. Life sentences should not confine a man longer than 10 years as 7 years is the considered statute for a lifetime out of circulation, and if a man cannot be rehabilitated after a maximum of ten years of constructive programs, etc., then he belongs in a mental hygiene center, not a prison.
25. We Demand that better food be served to the inmates. The food is a gastronomical disaster. We also demand that drinking water be put on each table and that each inmate be allowed to take as much food as he wants and as much bread as he wants, instead of the severely limited portions and limited (4) slices of bread. Inmates wishing a pork-free diet should have one, since 85% of our diet is pork meat or pork-saturated food.
26. We Demand an end to the unsanitary conditions that exist in the mess hall: i.e., dirty trays, dirty utensils, stained drinking cups and an end to the practice of putting food on the table’s hours before eating time without any protective covering over it.
27. We Demand that there be one set of rules governing all prisons in this state instead of the present system where each warden makes rules for his institution as he sees fit.

IN CONCLUSION

We are firm in our resolve and we demand, as human beings, the dignity and justice that is due to us by our right of birth. We do not know how the present system of brutality and dehumanization and injustice has been allowed to be perpetrated in this day of enlightenment, but we are the living proof of its existence and we cannot allow it to continue.

The taxpayers who just happen to be our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons should be made aware of how their tax dollars are being spent to deny their sons, brothers, fathers and uncles of justice, equality and dignity.

*          *          *

The Five Demands

To the People of America:

The incident that has erupted here at Attica is not a result of the dastardly bushwhacking of the two prisoners Sept. 8, 1971, but of the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administration network of the prison, throughout the year.

WE are MEN! We are not beasts and do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.

We will not compromise on any terms except those that are agreeable to us. We call upon all the conscientious citizens of America to assist us in putting an end to this situation that threatens not only our lives, but each and every citizen as well.

We have set forth demands that will bring closer to reality the demise of these prisons, institutions that serve no useful purpose to the People of America but to those who would enslave and exploit the People of America.

Our Demands Are Such:

1. We want complete amnesty, meaning freedom from any physical, mental, and legal reprisals.
2. We want now, speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a non-imperialistic country.
3. We demand that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT intervene, so that we will be under direct FEDERAL JURISDICTION.
4. We demand the reconstruction of ATTICA PRISON to be done by inmates and/or inmate supervision.
5. We urgently demand immediate negotiation thru Wm. M. Kunstler, Attorney-at-Law, 588 Ninth Ave., NYC, Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve of Buffalo, the Solidarity Committee, Minister Farrakhan of MUHAMMAD SPEAKS, Palante, The Young Lords Party Paper, the Black Panther Party, Clarence Jones of the Amsterdam News, Tom Wicker of NY Times, Richard Roth of the Courier Express, the Fortune Society, David Anderson of the Urban League of Rochester, Blond-Eva Bond of NICAP, and Jim Ingram of Democrat Chronicle of Detroit, Michigan. We guarantee the safe passage of all people to and from this institution. We invite all the people to come here and witness this degradation, so that they can better know how to bring this degradation to an end. — THE INMATES OF ATTICA PRISON

*          *          *

THE 15 PRACTICAL PROPOSALS

Practical Proposals

1. Apply the New York State minimum wage law to all state institutions. STOP SLAVE LABOR.
2. Allow all New York State prisoners to be politically active, without intimidation or reprisals.
3. Give us true religious freedom.
4. End all censorship of newspapers, magazines, letters, and other publications coming from the publisher.
5. Allow all inmates, at their own expense, to communicate with anyone they please.
6. When an inmate reaches conditional release date, give him a full release without parole.
7. Cease administrative resentencing of inmates returned for parole violations.
8. Institute realistic rehabilitation programs for all inmates according to their offense and personal needs.
9. Educate all correctional officers to the needs of the inmates, i.e., understanding rather than punishment.
10. Give us a healthy diet, stop feeding us so much pork, and give us some fresh fruit daily.
11. Modernize the inmate education system.
12. Give us a doctor that will examine and treat all inmates that request treatment.
13. Have an institutional delegation comprised of one inmate from each company authorized to speak to the institution administration concerning grievances (QUARTERLY).
14. Give us less cell time and more recreation with better recreational equipment and facilities.
15. Remove inside walls, making one open yard, and no more segregation or punishment.

Comprehensive List of Observers Committee at Attica Correction Facility—September 9-13, 1971 (from Appendix Three of Wicker’s A Time to Die … )

1. David Anderson, Rochester Urban League*
2. U.S. Representative Herman Badillo of New York
3. Alberto Cappas, Office of Minority Student Affairs, State University of New York at Buffalo
4. Rev. Marvin Chandler, Rochester minister
5. State Senator John Dunne of Nassau County, New York
6. Assemblyman James L. Emery of 136^th District, New York
7. Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve of 143^rd District, New York*
8. Tony Fitch, Washington lawyer
9. Minister Franklin Florence, former President, FIGHT, a Rochester community organization
10. William Gaiter, BUILD, a Buffalo community organization
11. State Senator Robert Garcia of the Bronx, New York
12. James Ingram, reporter, The Michigan Chronicle, Detroit*
13. Kenneth Jackson, officer of Fortune Society, New York*
14. Clarence Jones, publisher of the Amsterdam News, New York*
15. Jaybarr Kenyatta, Black Muslim, a former inmate at Attica
16. William Kunstler, Center for Constitutional Rights, New York*
17. State Senator Thomas McGowan of 58^th District, New York
18. Alfredo Mathew, school superintendent, New York City
19. Juan ‘Fi’ Ortiz, member of Young Lords party, New York*
20. Jose ‘G.I.’ Paris, member of Young Lords party, New York*
21. Al Poder, State University of New York at Buffalo
22. Mel Rivers, office of Fortune Society, New York*
23. Domingo Rodriguez, member of BUILD, a Buffalo community organization
24. Richard Roth, reporter for Buffalo Courier-Express*
25. David Rothenberg, founder of the Fortune Society, New York*
26. Herman Schwartz, law faculty, State University of New York at Buffalo
27. Minister Raymond Scott, director of FIGHT, a Rochester community
28. Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party*
29. Dan Skoler, Washington lawyer
30. Thomas Soto, member of the Prison Solidarity Committee, New York*
31. Lewis Steel, vice president, National Lawyers Guild, New York
32. Julian Tepper, Washington lawyer
33. State Senator Sidney von Luther, New York County, New York
34. Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, Urban Affairs advisor to Governor Rockefeller, New York
35. Assemblyman Frank Walkley of Castile, New York
36. Assemblyman Clark Wemple of 107^th District, New York
37. Tom Wicker, Associate Editor of The New York Times*

* These members of the Observers Committee were invited to Attica by the rebelling inmates, either personally or as representative of their organizations.

Essential Reading:

• Berger, Dan (2014) Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
• Berger, Dan (2014) The Struggle Within: Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
• Berkman, Ronald (1979) Opening the Gates: The Rise of the Prisoners’ Movement. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
• Breitman, George (1967) The Last Year of Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary. New York: Pathfinder Press.
• Cummins, Eric (1994) The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press. [After acknowledging this book as ‘[o]ne of the first scholarly histories of prison protest,’ Berger points out that its ‘valuable research ... remains troublesomely antagonistic to prison activism. He sees the prison movement as a violence-obsessed phenomenon premised on naive white fascination with dangerous black criminal men.’]
• Irwin, John (1980) Prisons in Turmoil. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.
• Irwin, John (2004) The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publ.
• Jackson, George L. (1970) Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York: Coward-McCann.
• James, Joy, ed. (2003) Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• James, Joy, ed. (2007) Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Thompson, Heather Ann (2016) Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Tibbs, Donald F. (2012) From Black Power to Prison Power: The Making of Jones v. North Carolina Prisons’ Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Wicker, Tom (2011) A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books (first published by Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1975).

Most of the material from this post is found in my sixty page compilation, “Attica Prison Uprising (September 9, 1971 – September 13, 1971): Notes, Timeline, and Essential Reading.”

For further reading and research, see my bibliographies for the Black Panther Party and Punishment and Prison.

Finally, please see the Prison Abolition Syllabus 2.0 at Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS).

The Delano Grape Strike

“The Delano [Kern County] grape strike was a labor strike by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the United Farm Workers against grape growers in California. The strike began on September 8, 1965 [this is when Filipino pickers first walked out of the fields; Bardacke marks September 20^th  as the official beginning of the coordinated strike action], and lasted more than five years. Due largely to a consumer boycott of non-union grapes, the strike ended with a significant victory for the United Farm Workers as well as its first contract with the growers.

The strike began when the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, mostly Filipino farm workers in Delano, California, led by Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, Benjamin Gines and Pete Velasco, walked off the farms of area table-grape growers, demanding wages equal to the federal minimum wage. One week after the strike began, the predominantly Mexican-American National Farmworkers Association, led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and Richard Chavez, joined the strike, and eventually the two groups merged, forming the United Farm Workers of America in August 1966. The strike rapidly spread to more than 2,000 workers.

Through its grassroots efforts—using consumer boycotts, marches, community organizing and nonviolent resistance—the movement gained national attention for the plight of some of the nation’s lowest-paid workers. By July 1970, the UFW had succeeded in reaching a collective bargaining agreement with the table-grape growers, affecting in excess of 10,000 farm workers.”—This is an excerpt from the beginning of the Wikipedia entry on the strike, which is quite reliable and the endnotes contain excellent links to some of the best material available online about this strike and period of farmworker history in California which of course is crucial to the later formation of the United Farm Workers (of America—the UFW).

The foremost historical and analytical account of the strike and its aftermath is found in Frank Bardacke’s Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (Verso, 2011).

See too the bibliography for “César Chávez & the United Farm Workers… and the Struggle of Farm Workers in the U.S.”

 

 

 

Alienation: Marxist and Otherwise

Elizabeth Catlett, “Pensive”

First, permit me to draw your attention to a new entry (as opposed to an updated entry) in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) on “Alienation.” The following comments do not presume you have read the entry and a few of the ideas merely introduced below are treated in more depth by the entry’s author, David Leopold. From what I take to be a basic Marxist vantage point, alienation is conversely, intimately, and normatively connected to the possibility of the transcendence of same, or what is sometimes termed human flourishing (eudaimonia in classical Greek philosophy), or simply the notion of human fulfillment, the triune nature of which entails, minimally and broadly speaking, freedom (as self-determination), human community, and self-realization.

The concept of alienation or estrangement is found to play a prominent part in several religious and philosophical worldviews (in some of these, the philosophy and religion, if you will, are rather entangled), even if it does not go by that name. The question of alienation, I suspect, should be central to any philosophical anthropology. One might arguably claim, for example, that it is fundamental in an axiomatic sense to the worldviews of Daoism in the East and Existentialism in the West. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it appears to color our interpretation of “the Fall,” however we may understand the act of original disobedience, that is, in either positive or negative terms: in other words, as a (in Christianity, ‘original’) sin, or as symbolic of future redemption. Regarding the latter possibility, Daniel Burston writes that Erich Fromm viewed Adam and Eve’s “freedom to disobey” as “emblematic of the step toward growth and emancipation:”

“Fromm emphasized that alienation, the birth of self-consciousness [which arises with the generative act of disobedience in the Garden of Eden (Paradise)], and the search for unity or union with nature, oneself, and one’s fellows are all the result of the loss of an instinctive, prereflective oneness with the cosmos.”

As Burston explains, this interpretation, more or less, “resonates with sentiment expressed by Schiller, Boehme, Milton, and, indeed, Saint Ambrose, whose doctrine of the felix culpa suggested that the Fall affords humanity the hope of even greater felicity than existed before the Fall.” For Fromm, like the existentialists “some measure of alienation is rooted in human existence and prerequisite to our full personal development.”

Of course the notion of alienation (there are three terms in German for this which range from the descriptive to the evaluative) is one of the fundamental concepts in Marx’s work, expressly in the early writings and more implicitly or assumed in his later, systematic critique of capitalism. I want here merely to highlight two books in which I’ve found the discussion of Marx’s conception of alienation (used in several different senses) quite helpful, indeed, indispensable: Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (1985) and R.G. Peffer’s Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (1990). For now, let me express wholehearted agreement with the following from Peffer:

“The moral content of the various forms of alienation Marx describes in the Manuscripts [i.e., the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844], the moral grounds upon which he condemns these forms of alienation [e.g., the historical and general alienation suffered by the majority of human beings from the ‘objects and products of material and intellectual production,’ as well as alienation from ‘the process of production, other persons, nature, and [our] own selves, i.e., “human life,” or [our] own “species-being”], can, I think, be reduced to three primary moral principles to which he implicitly subscribes in the Manuscripts and throughout the rest of his writings. These principles are freedom (as self-determination), human community, and self-realization.”

References & Further Reading (this is a sample of works I’ve found indispensable to understanding basic concepts and arguments central to the Marxist tradition and thus helpful for illuminating the normative and evaluative principles of freedom, community, and self-realization insofar as they are utilized in the critique of capitalism and the corresponding aspiration for socialism):

• Amin, Samir. Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment, Vols. 1 and 2 (Monthly Review Press, 1974).
• Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism (Monthly Review Press, 2^nd, 2009).
• Anderson, Kevin B. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (expanded ed., University of Chicago Press, 2016).
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University Press, 1991).
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013).
• Cohen, G.A. Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Elster, Jon. “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• Fromm, Erich, ed. Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (Doubleday & Co., 1965).
• Harrington, Michael. Socialism: Past and Future (Arcade Publishing, 1989).
• Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Leopold, David. The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Luntley, Michael. The Meaning of Socialism (Open Court, 1990).
• Marx, Karl (tr. and ed., Lloyd Easton and Kurt H. Guddat) Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Hackett Publishing Co., 1997).
• Peffer, R.G. Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990).
• Rustin, Michael. The Good Society and the Inner World: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Culture (Verso, 1991).
• Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism (Westview Press, 1996).
• Shaikh, Anwar. Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010).

(Some) Relevant Bibliographies:

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Blacks on the (Radical) Left
• Freudian & Post-Freudian Psychology
• Global Distributive Justice
• The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Marxism
• Marxism, Art and Aesthetics
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism
• Toward a Realist Political Psychology
• Utopian Imagination, Thought & Praxis
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Varna, Caste, and the Dalits in India

[D]espite its longevity, caste, and caste oppression, is not a popular theme in India.

In Telangana, which had its own feudal ruler, ‘every untouchable family in every village had to give up their first male child as soon as he learned to talk and walk. They would bring him to the dora [landlord] to work in his household as a slave until death.’ Other castes suffered too. This wasn’t, as Gidla writes, ‘a traditional system,’ but one instituted in the late 19th century to allow the large-scale cultivation of tobacco and cotton. The peasants, aided by the Communist Party, rose up and fought this servitude. By now the brahmins were in power in Delhi. No untouchable or low-caste Hindu harboured many illusions. Some even feared that after the British withdrawal things would get worse for them. They did. The Indian army invaded the city of Hyderabad in Telangana, deposing its rulers, but then turned its guns on the peasants, detaining, torturing and raping thousands and evicting them from the land. The more progressive elements in the Congress Party may have believed that with industrialisation and modernisation the problem of caste would solve itself. It never did. Capitalism itself may be caste, colour and gender-blind but the dominant classes utilise these divisions to preserve their own rule.

In 2012 the Indian and Western media extensively covered the gang rape and murder of a single woman in Delhi, largely because students and feminist groups had protested on the streets and made it an issue; that same year 1574 Dalit women were raped and 651 Dalits murdered. Add to this the regular mob punishment of Dalit and low-caste women: they are forcibly stripped then paraded through villages to humiliate them further. Politically a democracy, constitutionally secular, India has, since 1947, been a caste Hindu dictatorship. – Tariq Ali (from his review cited below)

*          *          *

I want to recommend, without reservation, Tariq Ali’s review of Sujatha Gilda’s book, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), “The Unseeables,” in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 16 (30 August 2018).

See too Pankaj Mishra’s review, “God’s Oppressed Children,” for The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017.

[A self-imposed time constraint precludes the use of subscript diacritic dots in what follows, hence, for example, the ‘s’ in ksatriya should be pronounced more like ‘sh.’]

Comment:

While I unqualifiedly recommend Ali’s review, I could not resist making one comment, not about what Ali himself writes, but on a quote from Arundhati Roy’s introduction to B.R. Ambedkar’s 1930s classic, The Annihilation of Caste:

“What we call the caste system today is known in Hinduism’s founding texts as varnashrama dharma or chaturvarna, the system of four varnas. The approximately four thousand endogamous castes and sub-castes (jatis) in Hindu society, each with its own specified hereditary occupation, are divided into four varnas – Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (soldiers), Vaishyas (traders) and Shudras (servants). Outside of these varnas are the avarna castes, the Ati-Shudras, subhumans, arranged in hierarchies of their own – the Untouchables, the Unseeables, the Unapproachables – whose presence, whose touch, whose very shadow is considered to be polluting by privileged-caste Hindus.”

In this passage Roy elides, as many others (including those who should know better) have done before her, the historical and sociological differences between the varna model¹ and the caste and jāti (‘birth-group’) system. Varna (‘color’); is the Vedic fourfold—vertically and horizontally hierarchical—normative division of labor and patrilineal social system: brāhmanas (priests), ksatriyas (soldiers, administrators, rulers), vaiśyas (farmers, merchants, artisans, etc.), and śudras (servants, landless laborers, etc.). The first three groups are called “twice-born” (dvija) meaning they participate in a religious rite of passage and initiation ceremony that permits them to fully participate in Vedic study and ritual, while the śudras were deemed impure and excluded from Vedic religious practices. The varna system is not, speaking strictly and historically, the caste or jāti system (the word ‘caste’ is from the Portuguese word casta, meaning ‘breed,’ ‘race,’ or ‘kind,’ while the latter term refers, descriptively, to thousands of ‘birth-groups’ throughout India), although it is fair to say that it later serves to provide the religious (Rg Veda 10.90) and conceptual template, if not social and cultural sanction or legitimation, for that system (as in the Dharmaśāstra-s), thus it acts as a necessary yet not sufficient condition for its historical realization (and the two terms are later in fact closely allied, sometimes even interchangeable). It’s possible if not likely that the varna system was originally “little more than a social division of labor” much as one finds in both in older and contemporary civilizations. The following from Gerald Larson is apropos:

“To be sure, the Dharmaśāstra-s, or law-books of [the] Indic period [c. 300-1200], especially perhaps the Mānava-dharma-śāstra or ‘Law-Book of Manu,’ provide clear evidence that a full-blown caste system was in operation, but it is not as clear that social life always mirrored the system as articulated in the official texts. There is some reason to believe that over the centuries there has been more flexibility and mobility among caste groupings in various parts of India than is commonly thought. The more rigid, modern system of caste probably develops during the long centuries (c. 1200-1750) of Muslim dominance in India when Hindu tradition became much more defensive and in-grown for the sake of communal survival.”²

As Larson also explains, it is with this later, more rigid and horrific caste system that “[t]o some extent one can correlate the varna-system with the jāti-system, so that, for example, one might refer to various jāti-s as ‘sub-castes’ of ksatriya-s or vaiśya-s, and so forth.” It has been plausibly argued that the conceptualization and rationalization of this system are said to locate “homo hierarchicus” within a macrocosmic hierarchy extending “from Brahmā to the tufts of grass” (brahmādistambaparyanta).

Notes:

1. In Hinduism, the varna model is importantly and suggestively correlated with two other fourfold categorical classifications. The first is purusārtha-s: the four principal aims or ends of man, namely, wealth (artha), desire (kāma), ethics (dharma), and liberation (moksa). These are best seen as “ideal-typical” categories reflecting corresponding values: economic, psychological, moral, and spiritual. Thus understood, there is an implicit hierarchy here, with dharma and moksa higher than artha and kāma, and moksa the highest of the four. Descriptively and psychologically speaking, these may also represent various forms of motivation, keeping in mind the ubiquity of mixed motivations among human beings. They also represent the possibility that the first three aims may be harnessed toward the fourth end, hence wealth, desire and ethics can be subsumed within, and in service of, moksa. John Grimes accordingly speaks of artha and kāma as instrumental values, dharma as an integrating or regulative value, and moksa as an intrinsic and end value. The second fourfold model is aśrama-s: stages in life, of which there are four: brahmacarya, young person under tutelage of a religious teacher (guru), including the practice of strict sexual continence; grhastya, life as a householder; vānaprastha, “forest-dweller,” beginning of withdrawal from familial and social obligations to spend more time on spiritual practice; and samnyāsa, “renunciation,” all attachments to family and home now abandoned, one is usually initiated into the customs and specific religious practices of a sect. Samnyāsīs, while free of societal rules, norms and conventions, adhere to rules fashioned for them alone (yatidharma). These stages of life are considered normative for brāhmanas or brahmins. Again, as religiously inspired normative models and ideal-typical categories, it should not be assumed that Hindus conform to these models in their daily lives, even if they might be quick to verbally acknowledge their religious and cultural significance.
2. Gerald James Larson, India’s Agony over Religion (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995): 91.

(Some) Relevant Bibliographies (and one ‘study guide’!):

• The Life, Work, and World of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
• Hinduism
• Indian/Indic Philosophies
• The Life, Work, & Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
• The Varna & Caste System in India

Hinduism Study Guide (this was put together for my students when I taught a course on ‘comparative world religions’)