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Enlarging the circle of care, concern, rights, and obligations: gratitude to the “web of life”

         

Prayer for the Great Family

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing, light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowering spiral grain
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave and aware
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep— he who wakes us—
            in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars— and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts
and yet is within us—

Grandfather Space.
The Mind is his Wife.

so be it.

            (after a Mohawk prayer) — Gary Snyder

       

“Nature Is Becoming a Person”

By Justin E. H. Smith for Foreign Policy, November 24, 2021

How to make sense of the new global trend that grants legal rights to animals, plants, and rivers.

“Inbred, feral, and hungry, the ‘cocaine hippos’ of Colombia took to the rainforests after liberation from Pablo Escobar’s menagerie at the time of the drug kingpin’s death in 1993. From an initial population of four, the hippos are now a fast-growing nuisance numbering over 100. Yet they are also the stuff of legend and an obvious favorite in a popular culture ever in search of quirky, new animal mascots.

In part because of their singular fame, a symbolic impediment to treating them as a common invasive pest was introduced in October, when a U.S. judge recognized their status as ‘interested persons,’ which at least (in principle) enables them to exercise their legal right to obtain information in a U.S. legal trial. This ruling is not enforceable in Colombia, but it is a milestone in U.S. law and pushes the idea that the Earth is a political community composed of all sorts of ‘persons’—only some of whom are human.

Escobar’s hippos are far from unique (at least with respect to their claim to personhood). Building upon his own 2010 article, ‘Legal Personhood and the Nonhuman Rights Project’ (Animal Law 17/1), the philosopher and animal-rights activist Steven Wise has spearheaded a movement for animal freedom that has successfully used the writ of habeas corpus to secure it—a writ that generally presupposes of the entity whose freedom is being sought that it is a ‘person.’ Following Wise’s strategy, in 2018 a group of philosophers wrote a brief in support of two captive chimpanzees, Tommy and Kiko, arguing that they ‘satisfy the criteria [for personhood] and are entitled to habeas corpus relief.’ As early as 2004, before the Nonhuman Rights Project had begun, a landmark case known as The Cetacean Community vs. George W. Bush asked an American court to decide whether marine mammals have the legal standing necessary to bring a suit in their own name. Again, the presumption is that such legal standing flows from personhood, even if until recent years this did not have to be made explicit, since the kind of persons brought before the court were consistently those we take to be paradigmatic: human beings.

The expansion of the legal category of ‘person’ in this way may look like an opportunistic bit of wordplay, redefining a term in a way that satisfies certain immediate goals but without any real requirement that the new definition wins broad assent—or even that it seems intuitively plausible to anyone. In fact, however, the broadening of personhood to include some nonhuman entities is not so much a recent adaptation of an old legal concept as it is a return to an even older one. The expansion of the concept of ‘person’ was perhaps always inevitable. Like the creative definitions of gambling in at least some U.S. states—designed to carve out a legal niche for riverboat casinos while prohibiting the same activity on terra firma—legal personhood for nonhumans was an available loophole that someone was always bound to try to jump through. If you are looking to secure protections for certain beings or environmental features that are otherwise at risk of exploitation, winning the status of person for them is a good way to get what you want.

For a long time, the only way under the law to protect an animal from wanton abuse was to characterize the abuse as harm to property, essentially no different from the sort of law that prevents you from smashing your neighbor’s wheelbarrow. As for morality, if it was to enter into question at all, it was indirect incitement to moral depravity brought on by abuse of animals that justified any prohibition on harming them. Thus, philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted it is indeed wrong to harm domestic animals, but this still does not require us to suppose these animals are, as he would say, ‘ends in themselves.’ They can only ever be means to distinctly human ends while a child who grows up torturing these ‘means’ is, at worst, going to be more prone to abusing human beings later in life—animal torture as a gateway to human torture—or, at best, is going to be stunted in his or her overall moral development.

In any case, such indirect protection generally only extends to domestic animals while the vast majority of animals belonging to the category we call ‘wildlife’ cannot be protected as property because, by definition, they do not belong to anyone. Over the course of the 20th century, significant subcategories of wildlife would come to be legally protected as part of large-scale conservationist efforts. But the concern here was at the population level rather than the individual and typically implied no commitment to the irreducible worth, however that may be conceived, of any individual member of a given protected species.

For example, gorillas, it appears to many, are sufficiently like human beings in deserving not to be harmed for the same reasons we deserve not to be harmed: not because we belong to someone else and not because our species is at risk of disappearing (though this is, in fact, also the case for gorillas) but because we are—however one might wish to flesh this out in theoretical, metaphysical, or even religious terms—intrinsically worthy beings. The best way to recognize this apparent truth in law has been to reclassify gorillas—perhaps to ‘promote’ them to the status of person as has been done with varying degrees of success in several European countries, New Zealand, and Argentina.

So far, this is the easy part. Again, the case for gorilla personhood has typically been made on the basis of an evident similitude of internal capacities they share with us. Even hippos have what appear to be big smiling faces and plainly love to eat, so they come across as (in certain salient respects) relatable. But no one, at least no one directly involved in modern states’ law-making institutions, will make a similar argument for rivers and mountains. Rivers, it is generally believed, have no internal capacities at all. They are not subjects. To adapt an expression from philosopher Thomas Nagel, there is nothing that it’s like to be a river. Yet today, at least some rivers have been reclassified as persons too. To bring such a river harm is to harm a person, a being that ought to be considered an end in itself with inalienable rights and intrinsic worth. In other words, some legal systems are now treating rivers as subject entities nearly universally recognized as lacking any subjective existence at all.

If it sounds as if the law is stretching concepts beyond their natural usefulness, it is worth recalling that nonhuman persons have been around for a long time, and it is only in the most recent era that we have begun to assimilate ‘person’ and ‘human being’ as synonyms. The term ‘persona’ in Latin originally signified ‘mask’ and, by extension, a ‘role’ one might take on in a theatrical performance. Thus, the dramatis personae, literally the ‘masks of the drama,’ are simply the roles in a play. Nor was it traditionally believed that only human beings could don such masks. Outside of the context of drama, in the Roman Republic, personhood was commonly extended to municipalities and voluntary associations. This entailed, among other things, that such collective bodies had rights and responsibilities independent of their individual members. They were not themselves individual human beings, but they donned a mask, so to speak, by which they presented themselves to the world as singular characters.

In the early modern period, with the rise of powerful joint stock companies for the funding and orchestration of global trade, the idea of corporate personhood became common. And soon enough, the conceptual peculiarity of this idea found echoes in the work of some of the greatest philosophical minds. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, is sensitive to the origins of personhood in drama and claims everything that counts as a person is in some sense an actor. ‘A person,’ the philosopher wrote in his 1651 book, Leviathan, ‘is he whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed.’ From here, Hobbes makes a crucial distinction: ‘When [these words] are considered as his own, then is he called a natural person: and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then is he a feigned or artificial person.’ Among such artificial persons are corporations, such as the East India Company, but also, in Hobbes’s view, the state itself.

Even when we come to appreciate the long history of nonhuman personhood, however, we are still hardly in a position to understand how it might be extended to rivers. For although rivers are not moral subjects and lack innate capacities in virtue that we attribute to intrinsic (rather than instrumental) moral worth, unlike corporations or states, rivers are evidently not ‘representing’ anyone or anything. They are simply flowing.

Legislation in Bolivia, and indeed Ecuador’s new 2008 constitution, enshrine within law the ‘rights of nature.’ While being a rights-bearer is not precisely the same thing as being a person, the two have typically overlapped to the point of near co-extensivity throughout modern history. But this overlap does not do much to help determine what a person is, because a clear understanding of what rights are is no less difficult to pin down. When we make claims that ‘every human being has a right to clean water’ or ‘every human being has a right to internet access,’ the propositions take the form of declarative sentences. But they might be better understood as imperatives. Saying a given good, such as clean water, is a ‘human right’ lends gravity to arguments for government funding of sanitation plants or deeper wells.

When the Ecuadorian Constitution’s Article 71 specifies that nature ‘has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes,’ we might similarly suspect this declaration translates faithfully into a conservationist imperative. The apparent inescapability of an anthropocentric motivation for conservation, moreover, seems to appear in the constitution’s Article 27, where a prior right is identified for human beings ‘to live in a healthy environment that is ecologically balanced, pollution-free and in harmony with nature.’ Could it be that Article 71 simply restates, from an attempted nature-centric angle, what has already been claimed in Article 27 but in the more familiar terms of human rights?

Such a suggestion fails to take into account the effort at the heart of the revised constitution and similar legislation elsewhere to do justice to Indigenous conceptualizations of nature and humanity’s place within it. This effort has resulted in what Belgian legal scholar François Ost calls ‘legal animism,’ which not only carves out a space for the preservation of traditional belief systems within modern Western (or Western-derived) legal frameworks but also permits these belief systems to determine the laws’ content and scope. Although it is impossible to succinctly summarize the great diversity of Indigenous beliefs around the world, it is certainly true these beliefs often represent human society and the natural environment as constituting a single ‘socio-natural’ unity—thus conceiving nature or the ‘wilderness’ as populated by sundry nonhuman agents whose actions and interests are no less ‘political’ than those of a neighboring clan. Legal systems that seek to reflect this worldview are thus, in Ost’s words, compelled to use language that ‘personalizes nature.’

A particularly revealing example comes from New Zealand, where, in 2017, in deference to Maori representations of nature, parliament recognized the personhood of the Whanganui River on the North Island, finally bringing an end to long disputes about its territorial status from the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. The British Empire had at least formally recognized certain rights and responsibilities of stewardship or guardianship flowing from Maori traditional beliefs and practices. How well ‘guardianship’ translated the Maori concept of kaitiakitanga was not a point of long consideration, and in any case, the formal recognition of Maori rights to the river by no means translated, in practice, into smooth coexistence in the region.

Conflicts over practical questions continued, leading eventually to the 1975 Waitangi Tribunal, which sought to redress generations of colonial misuse of resources. The solutions were practical—for example, New Zealand’s government agreed to discontinue used water’s circulation back into the river even after having run it through purification plants—but the differences were cosmological. The kinds of things European settlers supposed one might do to, with, or in a river flowed from a different understanding of what sort of thing or being a river is. As Ost notes, in Maori cosmology, human beings, natural resources, ancestors, and spirits ‘form a single community of life when they all descend from Mother Earth, which is like the body of the tribe.’ Significantly, a single term, whenua, designates both the Earth and the placenta. [….] The rest of this article is here.

       

Comment:
This is a somewhat odd place for this article, but perhaps it will reach those otherwise well-educated and well-placed elites who are not familiar with such material. Our regular readers will perhaps not be surprised that I agree with Justin E.H. Smith’s argument and am delighted to see his concise and sympathetic historical, legal and philosophical analysis and discussion of important topics in (nonhuman) animal and environmental ethics.

One of the things that occurs in granting legal personhood to nonhuman animals and to sundry ecosystems is that metaphysical, ontological, and ethical concepts and practices found in the worldviews of indigenous peoples like the Māori and American Indian tribes are acquiring greater recognition and respect, in other words, what is happening here is that “Western” philosophy and jurisprudence is becoming less provincial and imperialistic (and more cosmopolitan in the best sense), at least at the margins or on occasion, and this cannot but be a good thing. There is precedent within Western philosophy and law for extending the concept of “personhood” which is a term not equivalent to what we mean by being a nonhuman animal or human person, distinctions that have been and can be made and further clarified until they one day become commonplace. Ecological devastation, quickened by global climate change, has solidified and strengthened trends that began in environmental (e.g., should trees have ‘legal standing’) and animal ethics (animals are in many respects, ‘like us,’ even if we grant there remains distinct features or properties that distinguish human animals from their nonhuman cousins or extended family), and led to philosophical and ethical “soul searching” as to how human beings relate to the natural world, awakening deeper interest in Asian worldviews like Jainism, Buddhism and Daoism, and those indigenous traditions and worldviews that extend the circle of care and concern, of rights and corresponding obligations (the former to animals and ecosystems, the latter to us), as well as gratitude, to much of the natural world or the “web of life,” a phrase which entails notions of survival, sustenance, and sustainability if not human flourishing. Another way to put this, after Wittgenstein, would be to say that there is strong “family resemblance” which is more than analogical and metaphorical, between human beings and the rest of the natural world.

I would like to note, however, that in addition to being at least ambivalent about corporations being thought of as legal (‘artificial’) “persons,” I am ardently and adamantly opposed, for a host of reasons (some of which rely on features of the ‘for’ argument above), to according (extending) legal personhood to AI machines of any kind, a topic I have addressed before and hope to speak to again in the near future. There are and continue to be philosophical and legal arguments in favor of this extension which I find disturbing if not frightening.

Although I do not think it a plausible argument or well-considered concern, it needs to be said that nothing here directly or implicitly entails “crowding out” the attention we give to those of us near and afar who are absolutely or relatively poor, more disadvantaged, needlessly suffering or having their most fundamental needs unmet or lacking recognition of their dignity-based human rights. And eco-socialist worldviews, movements and parties in part, help one appreciate how welfare, well-being, and flourishing provide us with normative criteria applicable to both the human and natural worlds, worlds that are in many respects perfectly coextensive with each other.

         

Relevant Bibliographies:

• North American Indians: History, Culture, Politics, and Law
• Animals; Ethics, Rights, and Law
• Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
• Indigenous Peoples: Culture, Law and Politics
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory

Residency, Immigrant Voting, Jamie Raskin, and Ken Karst

New York City is likely to permit 800,000 non-citizens to vote in local elections. These individuals have permanent legal resident status and pay taxes. Few Republicans would approve of this. An op-ed carried by Fox claims that it shows the depravity and evil of the Democratic Party, and states that immigrants who have citizen status with “communist” China will be voting.

I would note that the 14^th Amendment’s protections of due process and equal protection extends beyond citizens and protects “persons” regardless of citizen status. On Facebook, Mark Tushnet helpfully reports that Jamie Raskin's tenure article at American University was about this issue. (See

• Jamin Raskin, Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical, Constitutional and Theoretical Meanings of Alien Suffrage, U. Pa. L. Rev. (Apr. 1993).

I am reminded of an article by Ken Karst who argued in a Foreword to the Harvard Law Review for the principle of “equal citizenship” that generous protections should be found in the Amendment for citizens and for non-citizens including the clause that protects the privileges and immunities of citizenship. It was influential, but the courts have not lived up to his generous approach. And, of course, the current Court is intent on cutting back on many of the Amendment’s protections. 

In my first year of teaching, I would carry many bound volumes home with articles discussing what I needed for the next day’s class session. Virtually every time the most helpful article was written by the guy down the hall – a friend and mentor – Ken Karst.

“artisanal miner (or mining): a term that is, facilitates, or contributes to, a “mystifying illusion”

Definition: “An artisanal miner or small-scale miner (ASM) is a subsistence miner who is not officially employed by a mining company, but works independently, mining minerals using their own resources, usually by hand. Small-scale mining includes enterprises or individuals that employ workers for mining, but generally still using manually-intensive methods, working with hand tools.”

I thought to speak to this a result of the reading and research I did for the latest compilation about diamond mining (and other kinds of mining) in Africa.

Comment: The adjective “artisanal” here is misleading, to put it mildly, insofar as it might understandably be taken to refer to a practice or activity “relating to, or characteristic of an artisan.” Another related but distinguishable adjectival definition means that which is “produced in limited quantities by an artisan through the use of traditional methods.” In this case, again, reference to an “artisan” is significant, although the “use of traditional methods” and “production in limited quantities” can be said to apply to small-scale or subsistence mining. The literature on contemporary mining in the poorer countries or regions around the world continues to employ the term “artisanal mining” by way of contrast to modern industrialized mining by state-run companies or capitalist firms (some of the corporations are ‘partially’ state-owned). This is a nice example of what Marx and Marxists have meant by something being or facilitating or contributing to a socio-economic or political illusion, or an illusion (embodied in a concept, description, explanation, or theory, for example) as it is found in the social sciences (distinct from what was thought of more properly as a religious or ‘philosophical’ illusion, what I would prefer to call a ‘worldview’ illusion or the illusory component or components of a worldview). These socially mystifying illusions (e.g., the mystification of social relations exemplified by bourgeois economic and sociological theory and the fetishism of capital) fall within the Marxist concept (or conception) of ideology and “the ideological” used in reference to what has the characteristic of being “socially mystifying.” In our example, “artisanal miner” also represents an instance of “false consciousness” (a wildly misunderstood term in the Marxist literature) in as much as that means simply that which is wrong or false (usually applied to a theory or viewpoint).

Related Bibliographies (with some measure of family resemblance to this subject):

• The Congo and Coltan: Political Economy, Precious Commodity, and Politics
• Diamonds in Africa: Conflict Commodity & Capitalist Political Economy
• Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics
• Famine: History, Causes, and Consequences
• Global Distributive Justice
• Frantz Fanon
• Human Rights
• Immigration and Refugees: Ethics, Law, and Politics
• International Law
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism
• South African Liberation Struggles
• Transitional Justice
• Violent Conflict and the Laws of War
• Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Toward a democratic “binational” state in Palestine

       

First, a triune propaedeutic by way of historical, moral, and political presuppositions, assumptions, and presumptions as part and parcel of “facts on the ground (i.e., exemplifying ‘fact-value entanglement’).” That is followed by several important points that serve as prelude to introducing Jeff Halper’s latest book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2021). Americans often stand apart in being woefully misinformed and ill-informed (or in denial, etc.) about the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the vast majority of its representatives in Congress and the major mass media outlets both in print and on television, have been far too long willing if not enthusiastic partners in propagating this ignorance, sometimes willfully so.

(i) “There are only two ways. The one currently pursued by the Israeli government, in all its agencies, is the path of violent, stubborn coercion. The extreme nationalists of the Israeli right have a vision that is easy enough to comprehend; it is embodied daily in a thousand acts and signs. They want to crush Palestinian nationalism as a historical force, and the Palestinian people as a collective; to hem the Palestinians within isolated enclaves and to cut off any hope of their sustaining a national existence with a basis on the ground; and, in the course of achieving this, to annex as much land (with as few living Palestinians attached to it) as possible. In short, this is an uncompromising vision of domination and control. The right, clinging to all the violent memories of the past, fears the Palestinians and inhabits a mental universe in which the only safe option is to attack, punish, destroy, incarcerate, and contain. Such people perceive any alternative approach or action, based on compromise and negotiation and on acknowledging one’s own responsibility for what has happened, as an existential threat. Thus they are prepared to live indefinitely with ongoing occupation, in one form or another; they are also willing to make occasional, relatively minor sacrifices, like the withdrawal from Gaza, in order to ensure the continuation of the main colonial enterprise. A regime of total control, constant application of brute force, the rape of the land—all these are acceptable, indeed necessary, if the Jews are to survive.” — David Shulman, Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine (University of Chicago Press, 2007)

*          *          *

The following from G.A. Cohen [see the reference under ‘Recommended Reading’] hardly does justice to the complete substance of Cohen’s argument, as I had to leave much out owing to its length and complexity. Nevertheless, I trust it provides at least a sufficient taste of the questions and topics raised by Cohen, most of which are not, typically (indeed, hardly ever), addressed in the Palestinians’ pursuit of self-determination both within and outside the Israeli state. At least once Cohen refers to the Palestinians, or Arabs in Israel more generally, lacking “citizenship” status which, strictly speaking, is not true, the problem here being rather that, for a variety of reasons, “Arabs are very much second-class citizens in Israel,” for example, they have “passport citizenship” rights, but are excluded from several aspects of the Jewish welfare state and are therefore denied equal “democratic citizenship.” “While enjoying the fruits of Jewish civil rights (such as access to courts of law and private property) and political rights (access to the ballot and to government) they are denied social rights and economic rights in the form of social security, education and welfare, or access to land and water resources of the State.” Furthermore, while Israel “grants automatic citizenship to every Jew in the world, wherever he or she was born,” the state of Israel completely rejects “the Palestinian right of return—recognized internationally by the UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. This rejection refuses to allow the Palestinian citizens of Israel to unite with their immediate families or with those who were expelled in 1948. Denying people the right of return to their homeland, and at the same time offering this right to others who have no connection to the land, is a model of undemocratic practice.” (See Pappé, 2011, 2017; and Peleg and Waxman, 2011, for these and other reasons Arabs in Israel are denied equal democratic citizenship within the state of Israel.)

(ii) … [W]e may be disposed to affirm what certain conditions of extreme injustice need not be tolerated, that people may do everything within their power to remove them, or, at any rate, that the sufferers of that extreme injustice may themselves do anything they can do to remove them. But we are also inclined to affirm that certain means of fighting injustice should never under any circumstances be used. Yet what can we say when our two inclinations come together because we are asked to consider circumstances that display the contemplated conditions of extreme injustice, in which forbidden means are the only means available? When we acknowledge that such circumstances are possible, we are forced to revise some of our convictions about what morality says. [….]

… [T]he force, the effect, of a moral admonition varies according to who’s speaking and who’s listening [this falls with the range of topics addressed in rhetoric]. Admonition may be sound, and in place, but some people may be poorly placed to offer it. When a person replies to a critic by saying: ‘Where do you get off criticizing me for that?’ she is not denying (or, of course, affirming) the inherent soundness of the critic’s criticism. She is denying here critics right to make that criticism, in a posture of judgment. Her rejoinder achieves its effect without confronting the context of her critic’s judgment. She challenges, instead, her critic’s right to sit in judgment, and to pass judgment. She couldn’t similarly challenge a critic whom she had overheard saying, to a third party: ‘I of course agree that what she did was morally wrong, but I’m not myself in a position to criticize her (It’s not for me to cast the first stone).‘ [….]

We can distinguish three ways in which a person may seek to silence, or to blunt, the edge of a critic’s condemnation. First, she may seek to show that she did not, in fact, perform the action under criticism. Second, and without denying that she performed that action, she may claim that the action does not warrant moral condemnation, because there was an adequate justification for it, or at least a legitimate excuse for performing it. Third, while not denying that the action was performed, and that it is to be condemned (which is not to say: while agreeing that it is to be condemned), she can seek to discredit her critic’s assertion of her standing as a good faith condemner of the relevant action. [….] What I mean is that there are facts about the critic that compromise her utterance considered as, what it purports to be, a condemnation: the focus is on the intended role, or illocutionary force of the utterance. [….]

This third way of deflecting criticism, that is, by impugning the right of the critic to condemn, is of great importance in the political world, where it matters enormously who can say what to whom, credibly and sincerely: that consideration helps to determine the fate of would-be critical interventions. The world of politics is not populated by saints with spotless track records, but by non-saints who have a better hope of deflecting criticism not by trying to justify what they themselves did, but by implicating their criticizing fellow non-saints in the same or similar charges [e.g., ‘Tu quoque,’ which is an informal fallacy, meaning there are occasions, as here, when it is not fallacious; nor is it, therefore, reducible to a fallacious ad hominem]. [….]

The Israelis have a tu quoque case to answer, because they kill and maim many more people, and deprive many more still of their homes and livelihoods, than Palestinian terrorists do. To be sure, there are Israelis who are oppressed by that fact and who are highly critical of their own government, but who believe that that government may nevertheless credibly condemn Palestinian terrorism because terrorism is morally much worse than any violence that the Israeli government itself commits. In response to the claim that Israeli condemnation of Palestinian terror is silenced by the fact that Israelis kill many more Palestinians, and a lot more children, these Israelis argue that Israeli killing is not as bad as Palestinian killing.

Some of these Israelis invoke the principle of double effect, which distinguishes between killing innocent people as an unintended but foreseeable side effect of otherwise targeted action, and killing innocent people who are your target, people, that is, whom you hope and intend to kill. ‘Our government can condemn them,’ these Israelis might say, ‘because although our government kills more innocent people than they do, our government does not aim to kill innocent people. [….]

I … believe that the only sane form of the principle of double effect is comparative, rather than absolute. I believe, for example, that, holding everything else equal, such as, for instance, the amount of justice that there is in the motivating cause, killing two hundred innocents through foreseeable side effect is actually worse than killing one innocent who is your target. It seems to me ludicrous for us to sat that you committed an outrage when you set your sights on, and killed, a civilian with your petrol bomb, but that we did not commit an outrage when our bombing destroyed not only the Hamas leader [presumably one believed ‘guilty’ of directing or implicated in terrorist acts] that we were aiming at but also fifteen people that lived near him, because we merely foresaw that effect, without intending it [forswearing intention may in any case be disingenuous, as we might conclude after the various wars and ‘operations’ in Gaza]. And we also have to take into account how careful combatants are to avoid killing civilians. It is possible not to aim at killing them yet to be utterly reckless of their safety, and it seems pretty clear that Israeli soldiers have become more reckless, in some cases willfully reckless, as the conflict has deepened. And worse still than (merely) reckless side-effect killing is the side-effect killing that is still not aimed at, that remains ‘mere’ side effect, but that is expected and welcomed, because it deters potential terrorists who care about their families and their neighbors. [….]

For you are yourself more or less implicated in the act you seek to condemn if you caused a legitimate grievance to which the act is a response. And how, therefore, can you reasonably expect your condemnation of the act to be received as made in good faith, unless you address the grievance of those you condemn? How can you suppose yourself to be free to set aside the size and character of that grievance, and your putative role in causing it, and proceed to condemn the responsive terrorist act, as a third party freely might? [….] For whoever caused a particular grievance, and whatever the weight of that grievance may be [in this instance, it happens to be ‘spectacular’], an agent who unjustifiably constrains the practical options that are available to the putatively aggrieved [the Israeli government has often treated predominantly or even exclusively nonviolent protest in much the same manner it responds to violent protest] is not well placed to condemn the choice of option (in our case, terrorism) that he, the constrainer, makes particularly eligible, from the point of the view of the constrained. [….]

… [I]f the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance, then it is against an Israel that both created their grievance and restricts their practical options of response. Accordingly, the question of the justice of the Palestinian grievance cannot be set aside by those who deprive them of conventional means of redress in a discussion of the particular unconventional means that they use to pursue their grievance, especially (but not only) if those who deprive them of conventional means are also the unjust causers of that grievance. [….] If the Palestinians had normal democratic sovereignty and normal civil liberty they would have a normal army which is not equipped merely to police its own people. It is central to their grievance that they lack a state, and therefore, among other things, the approved means of violence that a state possesses. … [This lack] contributes strongly to the explanation of their mode of pursuing their grievance which includes the grievance that you lack conventional means of pursuing grievances. [Please note that Cohen is here assuming the Palestinians want their own state, separate from the Israeli state, commonly termed the ‘two-state’ solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a phrase that belies the grossly asymmetrical and fundamentally or genetically unjust nature of the colonial settler Zionist project in Palestine). But, as Jeff Helper explains, ‘[h]ad it been implemented, the two-state solution might have worked, even if it wasn’t fair. Palestinians would have had a viable sovereign (if small) state on 22 percent of historic Palestine.’ But Israel has steadfastly and intransigently rejected what the international community supported as far back as 1967. And both the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) (in 1988) and the Arab League (in 2002) officially accepted the two-state solution. (‘They even reject the very fact of occupation.’) ‘So, true, while the two-state solution may have worked, it was never accepted by Israel. Regardless, it is now dead and gone, buried under massive settlement blocs.’]

Cohen proceeds to clarify the truth of two conceptual claims:

… [Y]our having left me with no reasonable alternative does not itself entail that I was forced to do whatever it was you left me with not reasonable alternative to, if only because I might nevertheless not have done that thing. […. ] Therefore having no acceptable alternative do doing something does not entail being forced to do that thing. The second truth is that having no reasonable alternative to using terror may be a necessary condition of being justified in using terror, but it does not follow that it is a sufficient condition of being justified in using terror. For it might be true, I might be in the parlous position that, while I have no acceptable alternative to terrorism, terrorism is nevertheless more unacceptable than one or more of my other unacceptable courses. I might have to choose between disaster for me and a course so morally horrible that the only decent thing to do is to choose disaster for me [a real ‘Sophie’s choice?’]. But how can you in particular condemn me if I refuse to choose disaster for me, when it was you who deprived me of all acceptable alternatives, unless you can justify your having done so? If someone has no acceptable alternative, then there is a case to answer against whoever made that true. If the sad moral truth is that, although all of my alternatives to terrorism are unacceptable, my terrorism is nevertheless unjustified, then how, even so, can the person who deprived me of the acceptable alternatives, and so drove me to admittedly unjustifiable terrorism, condemn that resort, without justifying the action that thus disabled me? [….]

I have assumed, in order to expose some lines of moral principle, that Palestinian terrorism is an effective strategy. But certain non-terrorist strategies might in fact be more effective. Suicide protests [as seen, for example, during the American war in Vietnam, among both Tibetan monks and laypersons protesting Chinese cultural genocide, among peace protestors in the U.S., and in the Middle East] which kill only the protestors might be far more effective, because of the reaction of world opinion. [….] Or suppose that the Palestinians retire their anti-Israeli armed struggle and demonstrate wholly peacefully on a mass on a mass scale against the semi-apartheid/semi-colonial status that they are coming to have under Israeli rule [things have worsened on this score since Cohen wrote this]. Might this not, in time, produce a potent international, and Israeli, outcry against Israeli rule?

It has been a central claim [of Cohen’s argument] that one consequence of the difference between an expression of moral opinion and a condemnation is that it might be true both that terrorism is to be condemned (moral opinion) and that some particular person is not in a position to condemn it, But equally, so it follows, the fact that someone is not in a position to condemn something does not imply that the thing is not to be condemned.” — G.A. Cohen

*          *          *

(iii) “Future historians may single out 2021 as the year the tide turned for the Palestinian struggle—though it was hard to see coming. The final months of 2020 were among the bleakest in decades, as a US administration bent on furthering Israel’s right-wing expansionist vision sought to dismantle, bit by bit, the central concerns that make up the Palestinian cause: the right of refugees to return to homes from which they were expelled in 1948, the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and the right to self-determination on lands currently occupied by Israel. At the year’s end, the coup de grâce came when several Arab states turned their backs on Palestine, normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel despite its continuing subjugation of Palestinians. The Palestinian people seemed to have been vanquished, while Israel pursued its annexation of occupied territory.

But breakthroughs came unexpectedly. In January 2021, B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, released a report unambiguously titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid. In it, the authors argued that their organization’s mandate from its founding in 1989—to bring to light Israeli human rights violations in the Occupied Territories—was no longer adequate. ‘The situation has changed,’ the report explained. ‘What happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control.’

The power of this report was not in the accusation, delivered by an Israeli organization, that Israel was practicing apartheid; Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization committed to protecting Palestinians living under Israel’s military regime in the West Bank, had leveled that charge six months earlier, as had several leading Israeli public figures. Indeed, numerous Israeli and international voices have warned for years that Israeli practices, left unchecked, would amount to a system of apartheid. What was different about B’Tselem’s analysis was its challenge to a pervasive myth, one to which much of the international community subscribes, that Israel’s military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory can be treated as somehow separate from the state of Israel. Instead, the organization characterized Israel as a single ‘regime that governs the entire area.’

Three months later, Human Rights Watch, the world’s leading international human rights organization, echoed this finding when it issued an exhaustive report, including extensive legal analysis, which concluded damningly that a historic threshold had been crossed: Israeli authorities were committing crimes against humanity, in the form of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people. Beyond the South African origin of the term, apartheid is universally prohibited under the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which also prohibits the crime of persecution.

To justify their claim of a watershed, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch cited a number of developments: Israel’s continuing de facto annexation of Palestinian territory; the laws with constitutional status within Israel enshrining Jewish supremacy; the entrenchment of Israel’s system of control over Palestinians; the demise of the peace process; and the efforts of the US to ratify and formalize this reality under the guise of a nominal commitment to a two-state solution. For both organizations, as for many other analysts, activists, and policymakers, the convention of treating Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as temporary—and therefore a matter that could potentially be resolved outside the confines and control of the state of Israel—was no longer an accurate description of reality. There was no indication of anything other than the permanence of Israel’s hold over ‘the entire area,’ as B’Tselem had put it.

Then, in May, the uprising that Palestinian have come to dub the ‘Unity Intifada’ erupted, set off by Israel’s planned expulsion of several Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. Within days, Israel was facing popular protests by Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, a mass mobilization against state-sanctioned violence in Israeli cities, and protests among the Palestinian refugee and diaspora communities. As the crackdown by Israeli police in Jerusalem intensified in violence and scale, militants in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip offered armed resistance, sending barrages of rockets farther into Israel than they had in previous conflicts; this escalation inevitably drew a disproportionate military response from Israel. By the time a truce was called, at least 248 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed, including sixty-six children; a dozen Israelis had died, including two children.

The ground zero of the uprising, the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, had emerged as both a symptom and a symbol of the regime that B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch had identified: a sprawling nexus of legal, military, and economic institutions, both directly of the state and by proxy, whose primary purpose was to consolidate land for Jewish settlement by dispossessing Palestinians. Overnight, Sheikh Jarrah became emblematic of what Zionism has wrought in Palestine over more than a century, and the uprising across the land heralded a rejection of the regime’s decades-long efforts to divide and fragment Palestinian unity.” — Tareq Baconi, in The New York Review of Books, Nov. 5, 2021

*          *          *

The Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination & the Right of Resistance to Occupation

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it: no nation-state or group of such states has legal and political—let alone moral—authority, to ask or demand (as part of one or more conditions for negotiations, or ending a belligerent occupation, aggression or repressive forms policing or ‘security’) political groups or organizations struggling to realize their international legal right to collective self-determination to renounce all use of violence to achieve their ends—all the more so if the denial of self-determination is, as is often the case, part and parcel of collaboration with outside and more powerful parties systematically failing to enforce or recognize human rights: civil, political, social, cultural, and economic. Adding insult to injury, we note the states “demanding” such relinquishment have themselves more often than not achieved their own collective self-determination through violent means (war, rebellion, revolution, terrorism, what have you), while now resorting to means of violence when conventional and nonviolent political methods (diplomacy, negotiation, sanctions, etc.) appear to fail, ruthlessly exploiting a gross asymmetry in various forms of power while employing violence to assert its political will on others (for whatever reason: ideological domination, regime change, resource exploitation, a more congenial economic environment …). Conceding this does not amount to an implicit or roundabout justification or warrant for the particular means of violence such groups or organizations may choose in their struggle (although it’s not difficult to understand why those who are frequently subject to state terror often defend themselves with terrorist means readily available to them) for which they are morally responsible, hence accountable (consider the Sorelian-like celebration of violence or the romantic militarism that finds easy justification for acts of terrorism). Indeed, it may be the case that the humanitarian-inspired constraints of just war theory (especially jus in bello) should apply to groups like the Palestinians in their struggle for collective self-determination.

Speaking of the Palestinians, it’s useful to remind ourselves that, under international law, in the words of Richard Falk, “Palestinian resistance to occupation is a legally protected right,” one that arises in the first instance from two documents: the 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and the Fourth Geneva Convention and its subsequent protocols. As argued in a couple of articles Falk co-authored with Burns Weston,

“Israel’s failures as a belligerent occupant to abide by international law amount[s] to a fundamental denial of the Palestinian right of self-determination, and more generally of respect for the framework of belligerent occupation—therefore giving rise to a Palestinian right of resistance.”

In short, Palestinians have an inalienable moral and legal right to resist an illegal and violent military occupation.

For its part, Israel has reacted to all manner of Palestinian resistance, be it violent or non-violent, with routine reliance on “excessive and disproportionate use of lethal force, including the apparent targeting of civilians and children [including the demolition of housing, torture and various other forms of indiscriminate ‘collective punishment’].” Both the creation of “facts on the ground” (e.g., ever-expanding settlements) “and the use of such force … constitute repeated and fundamental violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, violations that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

*          *          *

Argument (part of an argument made by more than a few of our authors below): There is no longer a plausible or viable “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Assumptions (which case serve as premises): If one is still speaking of a “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it shows you have not been paying attention to the history and politics in the Palestinian territories, that you lack a basic understanding of the nature of Zionist settler colonialism and the role of Zionist nationalism in Israel politics, that you are indulging in ideological myths and fantasies that lack a meaningful orientation to social, economic, and political facts (on the ground, as we say), that you do not fully grasp the legal right and political principle of Palestinian self-determination, that you do not sufficiently appreciate the logic, values and principled practices of democratic theory and practice and the corresponding significance of human dignity and human rights … and so forth and so on.

A bit of relevant history

In 1939, Great Britain proposed a “one-state” solution in Palestine after concluding that the partition proposal was not acceptable to either the Jews or the Arabs. In its White Paper of the same year, the Government noted that the Mandate, which included the notorious Balfour Declaration, was not intended to convert Palestine into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population:

“His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past…. [….]

It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-Government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries. His Majesty’s Government are [sic] unable at present to foresee the exact constitutional forms which Government in Palestine will eventually take, but their objective is self-government, and they desire to see established ultimately an independent Palestinian State. It should be a State in which the two in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority in Government in such a way that the essential interests of each are secured.” — Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in a statement presented to the Parliament (1939).

*          *          *

In the Los Angeles Times last year (May 23, 2019) George Bisharat argued the case for a democratic, one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

[….] “The two-state solution is dead, laid low by a thousand cuts – or, more precisely, by the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, whose immovable presence ensures that no genuinely sovereign Palestinian state will ever emerge there. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both played a role in delivering the final blows: Trump with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and Netanyahu by promising voters prior to his recent reelection to begin annexation of the West Bank. [….]

It is time to face some undeniable facts: First, despite Israel’s every effort to establish and maintain a Jewish majority, the two peoples living under Israeli rule hover at near parity, at approximately 6.5 million Jews and 6.5 million Palestinians. Second, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs are destined to live together in Israel/Palestine in perpetuity. Neither people can or should be forced to leave the land in which they reside and to which they are passionately committed. Third, segregation, of which the two-state solution was a form, is not the answer. As Americans know from our own historical experience, separate is never equal. Finally, it is only equal rights and justice that can provide the foundation for a durable peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” [….]

*          *          *

I am reading, intermittently, Jeff Halper’s informative, perceptive, and persuasive book, Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State (Pluto Press, 2021). Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a founding member of the One Democratic State, reminds us that the phrase “Arab – Israeli Conflict” [and since the first Intifada, ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’] conceals a “deeper struggle,” that is,

“… the colonization of Palestine by the Zionist movement, culminating in a state of Israel ruling over the entirety of the country [that is, Palestine]. To be sure, colonization generates conflict. But ‘conflict’ did not simply erupt for one reason or another. Jews, in fact, lived in peace with the local Arab population for centuries, if not millennia. They were known in Arabic as yahud awlad ῾arab (Native Arab Jews), al-yahud al-῾arab (Arab Jews), al-yahud al-῾alin (Native Jews), abna al-balad (Sons of the Land) or, in Hebrew, Bnei Ha’aaretz (Children of the Land). Zionism shattered this historic relationship.

Driven by persecution and the rise of nationalism in Europe, it was European Jews with little knowledge of Palestine and its peoples who launched a movement of Jewish ‘return’ to its ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel, after a national absence of 2000 years. In their newly minted nationalist ideology, they were the returning natives. In their eyes, the Arabs of Palestine were mere background. They had no national claims or even cultural identity of their own. Palestine was, as the famous Zionist phrase put it, ‘a land without a people.’ The European Zionists knew the land was peopled, of course. But to them the Arabs did not amount to ‘a people’ in the national sense of the term. They were just a collection of natives—though not the Natives, a status the Jewish claimants reserved for themselves. They played no role in the Zionist story. Having no national existence or claims of their own, the Arabs were to removed, confined or eliminated so as to make way for the country’s ‘real’ owners.

This form of conquest—for that is what it was—took the form of settler colonialism. Zionism felt a deep sense of historical, religious and national connection to the Land of Israel. But in claiming Palestine for themselves alone and rejecting the society they found there, they chose to come as settlers—or more precisely, their choice of settler colonialism rested on formative elements in both Jewish and European societies, such as the notion of biblical ‘chosenness’ and a Divinely sanctioned ownership of the land; a self- and externally enforced ethno-national existence in the European ‘Diaspora:’ embeddedness in the rise of European nationalism, primarily the ‘tribal’ nationalism of Eastern Europe and European experiences of settler colonialism (particularly of Germans in Slavic lands); immediate pressures of economic and religious persecution; and more, …. The upshot is that Zionists intended to displace the local population, not integrate into it as immigrants would. And displacement is by definition a violent process. Zionist ideology justifying the displacement of the indigenous population. The ‘logic’ of settler colonialism worked itself through nationalist ideology. Early Zionist leaders presented the ‘conflict’ as one ethno-religious nationalism against another [which functioned on the order of a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’] so as to deflect attention from settler colonialism, garner the support of the Jewish people and stifle diasporic Jewish opposition. They also used arguments of self-defense to win support of non-Zionist Jews, especially allies in Britain and the U.S. As the only legitimate national group, the Zionists reduced ‘the Arabs’ into a faceless, dismissible enemy Other. Zionist ideologues like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir knowingly altered the framework from one of settler colonialism to that of conflict between and aggressive (and foreign) Arab ‘Goliath’ and the peace-loving (native) Jewish ‘David.’”

Near the end of the book, Halper has a helpful chapter “addressing the fears and concerns of a single democratic state,” one home to both Palestinians and Jews, one in which a Liberal democratic constitution “protects both the individual civil rights of all the country’s citizens as well as the collective rights of all its ethnic, religious, and national communities.”

       

Recommended Reading (there is much worth reading left off this list, so one might browse through my Israeli-Palestinian Conflict bibliography):

• Abunimah, Ali. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006.
• Aly, Abdel Monem Said. “The Case for the One-State Solution,” The Cairo Review of Global Affairs (Winter 2019).
• Avnery, Uri and Ilan Pappé. “Two States or One State,” A debate sponsored by Gush Shalom (June 11, 2007): http://ilanpappe.com/?p=58
• Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir (Tal Haran, trans.) The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Baconi, Tareq. Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
• Baconi, Tareq. “What Apartheid Means for Israel,” The New York Review of Books, November 5, 2021.
• Barghouti, Omar. BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
  
• Cobban, Helena. “Breakout: Hamas and the End of the Two-State Solution,” Boston Review (May/June 2008): http://bostonreview.net/BR33.3/cobban.php
• Cohen, G.A. “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” in Cohen’s posthumously published volume edited by Michael Otsuka, Finding Oneself in the Other. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013: 115-142.
• Cypel, Sylvain. Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse. New York: Other Press, 2006.
• Davis, Uri. Israel: An Apartheid State. London: Zed Press, 1987.
• Fari, Hani, ed. The Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
• Hajjar, Lisa. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005.
• Halper, Jeff. Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
• Harding, Jeremy. “Subversive Activity,” London Review of Books (LRB) blog, 27 October, 2021.
• Hilal, Jamil, ed. Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution. London: Zed Books, 2007.
• Hiltermann, Joost. “Israel’s Latest Effort to Fragment and Disempower the Palestinians,” Middle East Report Online, November 10, 2021.
• Hussein, Cherine. The Re-emergence of the Single State Solution in Palestine-Israel: Countering an Illusion. New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Judt, Tony. “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 50, No, 16 (Oct. 23, 2003): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16671
• Kattan, Victor. From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949. London: Pluto Press, 2009.
• Kovel, Joel. Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel-Palestine. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
• Kretzmer, David. The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Lazare, Daniel. “The One-State Solution,” The Nation (Oct. 16, 2003): http://www.thenation.com/doc/20031103/lazare/single
• Lieblich, Eliav and Adam Shinar. “Counterterrorism Off the Rails: Israel’s Declaration of Palestinian Human Rights Groups as ‘Terrorist’ Organizations,” Just Security, October 24, 2021.
• Lim, Audrea, ed. The Case for Sanctions Against Israel. London: Verso, 2012.
• Lustik, Ian S. Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
• Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008: 281-298.
• Maoz, Zeev. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009 (2006).
• Middle East Monitor. “Israel outlaws six Palestinian human rights groups,” October 22, 2021.
• O’Malley, Padraig. The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Penguins Books, 2015.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, England: One World Publications, 2006.
• Pappé, Ilan. “Blueprint for a One-State Movement: A Troubled History,” in Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010: 125-144.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
• Pappé, Ilan, ed. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid. London: Zed Books, 2015.
• Pappé, Ilan. Ten Myths about Israel. London: Verso, 2017.
• Peleg, Ilan and Dov Waxman. Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Rena and Milena. “Israel just declared our human rights work ‘terrorism.’ But it won’t silence us,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2021.
• Rodinson, Maxime. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973.
• Salhab, Akram and Dahoud al-Ghoul. “Jerusalem Youth at the Forefront of 2021’s Unity Intifada,” Middle East Report Online, November 10, 2021.
• Shamas, Diala. “The Downstream Effects of Israel’s ‘Terrorist’ Designation on Human Rights Defenders in the US,” Just Security, November 4, 2021.
• Shehadeh, Raja. “What Does Israel Fear from This ‘Terrorist’?” The New York Review of Books, December 2, 2021 issue.
• Shenhav, Yehouda. Beyond the Two State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.
• Tilley, Virginia. “The One-State Solution,” London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No. 21 (6 November 2003): http://www.lrb.co.uk/.../virginia.../the-one-state-solution
• Tilley, Virginia. The One State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israel-Palestinian Conflict. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
• Tilley, Virginia, ed. Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism, and International Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
• White, Ben. Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
• Zertal, Idith and Akiva Eldar. Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. New York: Nation Books, 2007.

Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links; freely available on my Academia page for viewing or download)

• The Modern Arab World
• The Bedouin
• Human Rights
• International Criminal Law
• International Law
• The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• Modern Iran
• Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East
• Nuclear Weapons
• Terrorism
• Torture
• Violent Conflict and the Laws of War
• Zionist Ideologies

Peggy Noonan and "Woke" Education

Peggy Noonan’s column Saturday argued that the Democrats need to face down the “Woke.” She refers to the woke education agenda and the woke regime. She claims that her bias is that there should be “two strong parties duking it out.” She does not refer in this column to the departure from support of democracy by the Republicans. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines woke as aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice). But Noonan defines it differently and claims that the teachers unions and the school boards (who she says are stacked with candidates backed by teachers) adhere to her characterization of woke:

• According to her the woke regime primarily stems from a charge that racial evil was systematically and deliberately embedded long ago by the white patriarchy, in the heart of all American life. Comment: The first part of the sentence surely applies to slavery, not to mention segregation in the south and north (see the work of historian Leon Litwack). Comment 2 “All of American life” Who teaches this?
• “This ugliness thrives undiminished, which justifies all present attempts at eradication.” Comment: Undiminished? “All present attempts” Who teaches this?
• “We are not persons with souls. We are part of identity groups marked by specific traits. We hate each other and must fight each other.’’ [Soul is probably meant by her as a religious term. If so, the denial of a soul cannot constitutionally be taught in the schools because of the Establishment Clause. Shiffrin, The Religious Left and Church/State Relations. It would be the very rare teacher who taught that we do not have souls whatever their personal beliefs. As to the last sentence of the quotation, does she seriously believe this is taught in the public schools? Does she seriously believe that a Democratic politician would have the slightest trouble condemning this as she intimates later in her column.

Noonan leaps over a number of other unilluminating characterizations to this piece of (sorry to say it) ignorance. She says that public-education is a cartel. But there are 50 states and 13 thousand public school districts! American public education is not standardized. Of course, some things are taught everywhere (e.g., don’t take drugs, alas too many students pay little attention), but New York city education is not upstate New York education and both are internally and wildly diverse. Yes, some stupid things about race have been said in and out of schools. Anyone who thinks Lincoln’s statue should be taken down is unworthy of public office and the Democrats should say so. But Noonan’s column suggesting that woke education (as she defines it) dominates the teacher unions or the school boards is as specious as the claim (which she would not make) that the last election was stolen.

For too many years, the Republicans have found an issue that appeals to those with racial prejudice. The Democrats need to publicly acknowledge that the education of our children is a vital and controversial issue. They also need to condemn the Republican emphasis on a specious form of woke education: both its inaccuracy and its motivation. In our public education, decisions are put in the hands of school boards. I was President of the Ithaca City School District Board. Parents appeared before our Board at every meeting. We responded as we thought best: sometimes parents disagreed, but we listened and learned.

I was initially told not to run because (“It’s a thankless job”). It is not. Scores of parents stopped me in the grocery store (this was pre-pandemic) to thank me and to argue in a civil way on behalf of their children. I knew many at Cornell, but few off the east hill (where Cornell sits). That all changed when I joined the school board. Our Board was politically divided in a number of ways. It was not always sunny, but I would encourage people to run for a school board.

Peggy Noonan is certainly not a racist. And her separationist argument is surely right that the Democrats should have no part the kind of woke education she describes. Of course, the Democrats should fight against racial injustice.

Nonetheless, it is shocking to read her fictional account of unions and school boards. A major problem with public education is underfunding; the problem with the teaching of history is not woke education as she defines it; it is the failure to teach history at all in so many districts across the country. In many districts, the teaching of reading and writing is very poor. I would encourage Noonan to focus on the real problems of education or to beat a drum about the threat to the two party system and to our shared values presented by her party, the party that threatens democracy.

Quigley on the need for radical or revolutionary social change lawyers

       

“Ten Ways of Looking at Movement Lawyering,” by William P. Quigley, Clinic Professor Emeritus

5 Howard Human & Civil Rights Law Review 23 (2020): 23-43.

I have highlighted some material by way of an introduction to this excellent and inspiring article. We might compare this piece to similar or analogous normative arguments and accounts of the need for “intellectuals” (of a certain kind) in working class struggles and radical social change movements, drawing, for example, on the works of Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Rudolf Bahro, Noam Chomsky, among others.

“Nadia Ben-Youssef, a radical, social-change, lawyer-friend told me that ‘lawyers are either servants of the people or predators.’ There are more than a million lawyers in the United States, but most of them are not servants of the people. Lawyers and legal workers, who are true servants of the people, are often engaged in the struggles for justice alongside communities of directly impacted people. They are engaged in movement lawyering.

Movement lawyering involves several simultaneous journeys that this article will briefly highlight: (1) education of how social change comes about; (2) learning a critical understanding of the differences between law and justice; (3) understanding how to work in respectful partnership with communities and how to actually begin the work; (4) a willingness to be uncomfortable; (5) developing relationships built on solidarity, liberation, and community; and (6) finding, as I have, that the foundation of our relationships and work as movement lawyers is based on hope, joy, and love. [….]

Lawyers doing legal work can be useful to movements. And yes, much of what the movement lawyer does is legal work. The keys to determining whether legal work is considered movement lawyering are included in the answers to following questions:

• Does the lawyer understand how change comes about and how important social movements led by directly impacted people are?
• Is the lawyer in a respectful, ongoing, and team relationship with the community?
• Is the legal work about building and confronting power alongside directly impacted communities?
• Is the directly impacted community making decisions about what the lawyer should be doing in terms of the direction, purpose, strategies, and tactics?
• Is the lawyer listening and learning?
• Is the lawyer listening to the community as much as they are listening to her?
• Is the community getting credit, support, attention, and resources as a result of the lawyer’s work?
• Is the lawyer accountable to the community? [….]

Law schools are full of courses about law. The courts are full of lawyers. Legal work is work done by lawyers for whoever pays the bills. It is often another type of commercial work for businesses. Oftentimes, legal work is actually anti-justice work. What is justice? Words related to justice are often plastered on the outside of courthouses. Justice is mentioned regularly at the swearing-in ceremonies of judges and new lawyers, and at law school orientations and graduations. But is justice furthered in the actual practice of law? Hardly. In fact, justice is often a counter-cultural value in the legal profession. Charles Hamilton Houston, a leading civil rights lawyer, said years ago that a lawyer was ‘either a social engineer or a parasite on society.’

No one can dispute that the legal system is based on, reflects, and supports structurally unequal distribution of economic, social, and political power. That is because the laws are made by those with power, and traditional power resides in corporations, governments, courts, and legislatures. People and communities with less power are usually shut out. If you carefully examine how laws are created, you will usually discover stated and unstated race, class, and gender issues are part of the debate and crafting of laws. The law protects power through reinforcement of institutional racism and systematic injustices based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and class.

One way of critiquing law is to change perspective. Landlord-tenant laws might benefit landlords, but what do renters think? Current civil rights laws might look really progressive to white people given the way the laws used to be, but what about to people of color? Should corporations have more legal protection than their employees or the people in the communities where they operate? If private property is so important, why shouldn’t everyone have proportional rights to property?

Though social progress has been made, the gulf between the ideals of justice and the practice of law remains wide. People defend our current laws saying that they are much better than before, or that they are better in comparison to other countries. There is no doubt that many of our laws today and many of our institutions represent an advancement over what was in place in the past. However, that does not mean all of our laws and institutions are better than what preceded them, nor does it mean that they are as just as they can be, and that the critique on justice should stop.

Without lawyers, courts are effectively walled off from people. Few lawyers provide direct services for individual poor and working-class people. Visit any family law court, landlord-tenant court, or immigration proceeding, and you will find that the majority of people impacted do not participate at all because they lack access to lawyers or try to represent themselves. The overwhelming majority of people have no access to justice or law. Access to law, much less justice, is determined by money. Those with money can go to court, go to the legislature, and change the laws. That is why most lawyering is performed for corporations and the few with real resources. Justice advocates for communities of marginalized people are few because community injustice issues are essentially not on any legal agenda. Big injustice issues are well-insulated from real people. They are wrapped in layers of laws and special interests protecting them from influence by communities.

The idea of radical change scares some people because it is not possible to bring about radical change without reducing the power, influence, and comfort of those who have more than their fair share of the world’s resources. Some will say this is revolutionary. That is fine. Lawyers can be revolutionaries. Martin Luther King Jr. called each of us to join together to undergo a radical revolution of values and to conquer racism, materialism, and militarism. Martin Luther King Jr. did not say the call to be revolutionary extended to everyone except lawyers. He also did not call us to merely reform racism, materialism, and militarism. Revolutionaries are called not just to test the limits of the current legal system or to reform the current law, but also to join in the destruction of unjust structures and systems—to tear them up by their roots. We are called to join the struggles and replace them with new systems based on fairness and justice.

Radical justice work is what movement lawyering is about. The Latin source for the word ‘radical’ means root. Radical justice does not mean merely trimming the edges of injustices or reforming the unjust systems but ripping the unjust systems out by their roots and starting over. Thus, the root causes that support and underpin current unjust systems must be identified and dismantled. [….]

Our world desperately needs more movement lawyers and legal workers who will engage in radical solidarity and partnership with the communities of directly impacted people fighting for justice. [….] Our world needs lawyers willing to work with movements toward a radical revolution of our world. We do not need any more lawyers defending the status quo. We need revolutionary radical social change lawyers; we need movement lawyers.”

       

I will be adding the article to this compilation: Toward a Manifesto for a People’s Law School

The Congo and Coltan: Political Economy, Precious Commodity, and Politics—an introduction and brief bibliography

Environmental Justice Atlas

“Coltan is an abbreviation of columbite-tantalite, a mixture of two mineral ores, and is the common name for these ores in eastern Congo. Tantalum is the name of the metal extracted from tantalite-bearing ores, including coltan, after processing. Scholars, journalists and activists who have sought to understand and publicize the relationship between the  tantalum supply chain and violence in the Congo, popularized the term coltan because this is the name used in the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo]. ‘Coltan’ has subsequently become widely used outside industry and scientific circles.” Michael Nest uses the term ‘coltan’ only in reference “to unprocessed tantalite-bearing ores from the DRC.” Accordingly, ‘tantalite’ refers to “tantalum-bearing ores in general or from countries other than the Congo. ‘Tantalum’ is used when referring to the processed metal.” From Michael Nest’s invaluable volume that motivated this compilation, Coltan (Polity Press, 2011). Coltan falls within the category of what today are termed “conflict minerals (or ’resources’ more ‘widely).” Indeed, “the most prominent contemporary example has been the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where various armies, rebel groups, and outside actors have profited from mining while contributing to violence and exploitation during wars in the region. An unfortunate irony is that many countries rich in minerals are impoverished in terms of their capacity for governance. Conflict, corruption and bribery may be seen as the typical costs of doing business.”

“When refined, coltan becomes metallic tantalum, a heat-resistant powder that can hold a high electrical charge. These properties make it a vital element in creating capacitors, the electronic elements that control current flow inside miniature circuit boards. Tantalum capacitors are used in almost all cell phones, laptops, pagers and many other electronics. The recent technology boom caused the price of coltan to skyrocket to as much as $400 a kilogram at one point, as companies such as Nokia and Sony struggled to meet demand.” (From ABC News in 2006)

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Heavily edited material from the Wikipedia entry on “coltan mining and ethics:”

“Coltan is the colloquial name for the mineral columbite-tantalum (‘col-tan’); it is sometimes incorrectly used as shorthand for tantalite, a metallic ore from which the very similar elements niobium, also known as columbium, and tantalum are extracted. In the early 21st century coltan mining was associated with human rights violations such as child labour, systematic exploitation of the population by governments or militant groups, exposure to toxic chemicals and other hazards as a result of lax environmental protection, and general safety laws and regulations.  

The coltan industry is worth tens of millions of dollars a year. The price for coltan ranged between $50 and $200 per pound in 2012 and has spiked much higher in the past when supplies were scarce. In 2006, Australia, Brazil, and Canada produced 80% of the world’s coltan. As of 2018, coltan’s main producers are Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Brazil and China. Australia, Canada and Mozambique are also important players. Thus, the task of supplying world coltan needs has fallen largely on conflict regions and underdeveloped countries. The coltan market is characterized by opacity, as supply and trade is based on contracts that do not publish public price references. The products are sold in private, unregulated markets, unlike commodity metals like gold, copper, zinc, and tin. No standards are set or enforced for mining operations and devising safety procedures is the responsibility of mine operators which [can hardly be said to] prioritize worker well-being. [….]

A report by the Commission of the European Union in 2011 raised issues of child labour in coltan mining in DRC, and in the recycling industry in Ghana and China. [….]  In 2016, Amnesty International, in a joint investigation with African NGO African Resources Watch, published a report that found that children even as young as seven years old were working in cobalt mines in the DRC. [….] Many of the burgeoning coltan producers are resource-rich developing countries with economies that are currently largely dependent on mining non-renewable resources. This indicates a danger attached to even clean coltan operations in developing countries. Groups that study developing nations such as Oxfam caution against a developing country putting much of its capital into mining operations, especially single mineral developments. While countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia were able to turn their mining operations into profitable industries, these experiences are not practical models that would support today’s developing countries’ reliance on mining operations for further economic development. These countries’ dependence on mining creates tension due to the relatively small size of the developing countries and their exploitation of nonrenewable resources at the expense of their other natural resources. [….]

In addition to the human rights issues attached to the coltan industry, the mining process itself can be environmentally hazardous. Since it is usually pan-mined, the mining process and slurry from this process can contaminate water and thus cause harm to ecosystems, although since no chemicals are added to process the mineral itself is relatively benign. However, while the exact effects of prolonged coltan exposure through dust around particularly artisanal mines have not yet been studied in detail, more DNA damage was found in children living in mining areas than in those from control groups. Preliminary results of an ongoing study also hint that babies born to miners suffer ‘an increased risk of birth defects.’ Other risks include acidic drainage and the presence of toxic metals such as nickel and substances like arsenic and cyanide. Air pollution is also a concern.

Some people question the sustainability of artisanal mining [an ‘artisanal miner or small-scale miner (ASM) is a subsistence miner who is not officially employed by a mining company, but works independently, mining minerals using their own resources, usually by hand’] but miners often are very poor and have few other options to earn a living. Illegal mining in national parks and land reserves can be especially damaging, such as the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park in the DRC and the Puinawai National Reserve in Colombia, due to the deep forest cover these places provide. Coltan is mined using techniques developed for gold mining in the 1800s. The work is difficult and dangerous, with workers panning for coltan in large craters in stream beds, with the average worker producing less than one kilogram of coltan a day.

Coltan mines operate under boom-bust economics and not only strip the mineral from the land, but also cause environmental degradation. In mining towns that depend on coltan for their wealth, fewer people cultivate the land. Numerous instances of famine related to the mining operations contribute to increasingly unsustainable types for land use. Besides the harm it does to food security in the eastern Congo, coltan mining is inimical to other land uses such as ecotourism, game ranches, and medical research which could possibly provide better incomes and profit from the wildlife and forest land. Mining threatens the national parks across the Congo.

Developing nations often go through with mining operations because they need the capital these operations bring without thinking of the environmental impacts. Given that mining is an expensive venture to undertake, the returns are sometimes low. Global NGOs who study developing nations, such as Oxfam, have stated that the cost of mining on the environment can cause extensive and perhaps permanent environmental damage. [….]

Many countries export their raw coltan to China for further processing. The UN reports that coltan from the DRC that is processed in China is often mixed with samples from conflict-free regions and thus is difficult to source.

In Colombia, the coltan mining industry is involved in numerous internal conflicts and is currently illegal. This has not stopped guerilla forces and militia groups from mining the ore and selling it on the black market or shipping it to China. The Colombian government has made little attempt to regulate the industry. In 2010, plans were announced to auction off the rights to mine coltan in certain areas, but those plans were never completed and were dropped by the current administration. Most of the coltan activity takes place in the deep jungle areas along the Southeastern borders of Venezuela or Brazil, causing severe environmental repercussions. Colombia’s coltan mines are often located in national parks and on indigenous territory, which forces the native population into the mining industry. Colombian coltan is tied to violence at every step of the process. The mines are typically owned by paramilitary groups or drug cartels such as the Sinaloa cartel and the Cifuentes Villa family, who use the same smugglers to move both drugs and coltan. Colombian authorities have little control over the coltan mining region due to its size and density, and coltan is easily moved along the same routes as cocaine and emeralds, two of Colombia’s most heavily trafficked illegal goods.

In Venezuela, the government has sent military patrols into the jungle to root out illegal mining activities and the Colombian cartel leaders who fund these operations. As in Colombia, indigenous Venezuelans in the Parguaza region have suffered from the mining industry, and people have suffered violence from the coltan mine’s military supervisors.

It is difficult for manufacturers to ensure that the coltan they use in their products is not from a conflict zone or otherwise unethically produced. Currently there is one process for verifying the origin of a coltan sample. This process, developed in Germany, involves creating an elemental ‘fingerprint’ via WD X-ray fluorescence analysis and X-ray diffraction analysis to determine the composition and amounts of trace elements present in the sample. These results are then compared to the results of samples of known provenance, much like the Kimberly process for diamonds. This technique works for samples of mixed sources as well as pure coltan; however, it requires having sample fingerprints for all original coltan sources on file. Using this technique, it is possible to identify the source of most coltan samples. As of 2010, almost 75% of the world’s coltan mines have samples on file. However, the process is expensive and lengthy and while it has worked in Rwanda, adapting these fingerprinting techniques to the DRC mining industry and convincing countries such as China to adopt these methods has been difficult. Both the United States and Canada have passed legislation that provides incentives for using certified coltan and making conflict materials extralegal, but because most coltan is processed in China and China does not use the certification processes, avoiding conflict coltan has been very difficult. Roughly 60% of the coltan mines in Africa, including in the DRC, have some percentage of Canadian backing but are not subject to Canada’s laws about environmental hazards and human rights violations. Both Canada and the United States have passed acts that attempt to curtail the purchase of conflict-sourced materials.

Most of this change has been consumer-driven. Back in 2004, the TIC (Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center) had little interest in regulating conflict materials, but since then has become one of the leading voices promoting conflict-free minerals. Awareness campaigns in Western countries have been pushed manufacturers such as Apple and Intel to rely on more than just the word of their suppliers that the coltan used in their products is conflict-free. This consumer interest pushed the TIC to create a working group in 2009 to promote better standards for coltan mining and over the next decade it successfully removed conflict minerals from the coltan supply chain. The group works with the OECD, European Commission, civil society, the International Tin Association, UN and with other NGOs to monitor risks associated with conflict affected and high risk (CAHRA) areas and to promote transparency in the supply chain. [….]

• Ansoms, An and Stefaan Marysse, eds. Natural Resources and Local Livelihoods in the Great Lakes Region of Africa: A Political Economy Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
• Autesserre, Séverine. The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
• Berdal, Mats R. and David M. Malone, eds. Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000).
• Calì, Massimiliano. Trading Away from Conflict: Using Trade to Increase Resilience in Fragile States (World Bank Publications, 2014).
• Chabal, Patrick, ed. Political Domination in Africa: Reflection on the Limits of Power (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013).
• Chimni, B.S. International Commodity Agreements: A Legal Study (Croom Helm, 1987).
• Chimni, B.S. International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2017).
• Clapham, Christopher, ed. African Guerrillas (Indiana University Press, 1998).
• Clark, John F., ed. The African Stakes of the Congo War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
• Close, William T. Beyond the Storm: Treating the Powerless and the Powerful in Mobutu’s Congo/Zaire (Meadowlark Springs Productions, 2006).
• Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005).
• Cooper, Frederick. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2^nd ed., 2019).
• Cotula, Lorenzo. The Great African Land Grab? Agricultural Investments and the global food system (Zed Books, in association with International African Institute/Royal African Society/World Peace Foundation, 2013).
• Cramer, Christopher. Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing: Accounting for Violence in Developing Countries (C. Hurst & Co., 2006).
• Csete, Joanne and Juliane Kippenberg. The War Within the War: sexual violence against women and girls in Eastern Congo (Human Rights Watch, 2002).
• Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums (2006).
• Deibert, Michael. The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books, in association with International African Institute/Royal African Society/World Peace Foundation, 2013).
• Devlin, Lawrence. Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone (Public Affairs, 2007).
• De Witte, Ludo (Renee Fenby and Ann Wright, trans.) The Assassination of Lumumba (Verso, 2001).
• Frankema, Ewout and Frans Buelens, eds. Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development: The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared (Routledge, 2013).
• French, Howard W. A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
• Griffiths, Ieuan LL. The Atlas of African Affairs (Routledge, 2nd ed., 1994).
• Harms, Robert W. River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891 (Yale University Press, 1981).
• Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton University Press, new ed., 2014).
• Hicks, Celeste. Africa’s New Oil: Power, Pipelines and Future Fortunes (Zed Books, in association with International African Institute/Royal African Society/World Peace Foundation, 2015).
• Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998).
• Jerven, Morten. Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong (Zed Books, in association with International African Institute/Royal African Society/World Peace Foundation, 2015).
• Kalyvas, Stathis N. The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
• Keck, Margaret E. and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders (Cornell University Press, 1998).
• Kisangani, Emizet François. Historical Dictionary of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Rowman & Littlefield, 4^th ed., 2016).
• Lemarchand, René. The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
• Longman, Timothy. Zaire: Forced to Flee—Violence Against the Tutsis in Zaire (Human Rights Watch, 1996).
• MacGaffey, Janet. Entrepreneurs and Parasites: The Struggle for Indigenous Capitalism in Zaire (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
• MacGaffey, Janet. The Real Economy of Zaire: The Contribution of Smuggling and Other Unofficial Activities to National Wealth (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
• MacGaffey, Janet and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga. Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (Indiana University Press, 2000).
• Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Colonialism (Princeton University Press, 2008 ed. [1996]).
• Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton University Press, 2001).
• Marriage, Zoë. Formal Peace and Informal War: Security and Development in Congo (Routledge, 2013).
• Mazuri, Ali A. Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa (Heinemann, 1978).
• Nest, Michael. Coltan (Polity Press, 2011).
• Nest, Michael, with François Grignon, and Emizet F. Kisangani. The Democratic Republic of Congo: Economic Dimensions of War and Peace (Lynne Rienner, 2006).
• Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. The Congo: From Leopold to Kabil—A People’s History (Zed Books, 2002).
• Ohambe, Marie Claire Omanyondo, et al. Women’s Bodies as a Battleground: Sexual violence against women and girls during the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Kivu (1996-2003) (International Alert, 2005).
• Prunier, Gérard. Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Radley, Ben and Sara Geenen (2021) “Struggles over value: corporate–state suppression of locally led mining mechanisation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Review of African Political Economy, (2021) 48:161-177. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03056244.2020.1865902
• Raeymaekers, Timothy. Supporting the War Economy in the DRC: European companies and the coltan trade—five case studies (International Peace Information Service, 2002).
• Redmond, Ian. Coltan Boom, Gorilla Bust: The impact of coltan mining on gorillas and other wildlife in Eastern DR Congo (Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund and Born Free Foundation, 2001).
• Reno, William. Warlord Politics and African States (Lynne Rienner, 1998).
• Reno, William. Warfare in Independent Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Reyntjens, Filip. The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996–2006 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Schatzberg, Michael G. Politics and Class in Zaire: Bureaucracy, Business, and Beer in Lisala (Africana Publishing Co., 1980).
• Schatzberg, Michael G. The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire (Indiana University Press, 1988).
• Stearns, Jason. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (PublicAffairs, 2011).
• Stearns, Jason K. The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo (Princeton University Press, 2021).
• Tall, Kadya, Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle, and Michel Cahen, eds. Collective Mobilisations in Africa/Mobilisations collectives en Afrique: Enough is Enough!/Ça suffit! (Brill, 2015).
• Tarrow, Sidney. The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Tegera, Aloys, Sofia Mikolo, and Dominic Johnson. The Coltan Phenomenon: How a rare mineral has changed the life of the population of war-torn North Kivu Province in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Pole Institute, 2002).
• Tordogg, William. Government and Politics in Africa (Indiana University Press, 1984).
• Trapido, Joe. “Africa’s Leaky Giant,” New Left Review, 92 • Mar/Apr 2015: 5-40.
• Trapido, Joe. “Kinshasa’s Theater of Power,” New Left Review, 98 • Mar/Apr 2016: 57-80.
• Trefon, Theodore, ed. Reinventing Order in the Congo: How People Respond to State Failure in Kinshasa (Zed Books, 2004).
• Turner, Thomas. The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality (Zed Books, 2007).
• Turner, Thomas. Congo (Polity Press, 2013).
• Van Reybrouk, David (Sam Garrett, trans.) Congo: The Epic History of a People (Ecco, 2014).
• Van Woudenberg, Anneke. “We Will Crush You:” The Restriction of Political Space in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Human Rights Watch, 2008).
• Warren, Rosie, ed. The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2017).
• Wengraf, Lee. Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa (Haymarket Books, 2018).
• Willame, Jean-Claude, ed. Zaire: Predicament and Prospects (United States Institute of Peace/Minority Rights Group, 1997).
• Wrong, Michela. In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (Harper Collins, 2001).
• Young, Crawford. Ideology and Development in Africa (Yale University Press, 1982).
• Young, Crawford and Thomas Turner. The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

Related Bibliographies (embedded links)

• Samir Amin
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Frantz Fanon
• Global Distributive Justice
• Human Rights
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

The bibliography is also available for free viewing or download on my Academia page.

One person’s discretionary labor in the surreal and foreboding age of hyper-capitalist technology in general and artificial intelligence and social media in particular

       

“In 1789 and for long afterward, in France and elsewhere, a single word often sufficed to explain the origins of the French Revolution: books. Just days after the fall of the Bastille, the radical journalist and politician Bertrand Barère wrote, ‘Books did it all. Books created opinion, books brought enlightenment down into all classes of society, books destroyed fanaticism and overthrew the prejudices that had subjugated us.’ Even counterrevolutionaries who saw the Revolution as a catastrophe agreed with Barère as to its cause: it was books or, sometimes, ‘philosophy’—by which they meant the great movement of ideas we now call the Enlightenment.

No serious historian today would attribute this kind of power to books alone. We recognize that the French Revolution occurred for many reasons. But no serious historian today would discount the importance of books either. This revolution, one of the greatest in history, did not just replace one king with another. It attempted to establish an entirely new regime, grounded in principles that authors had widely discussed before 1789: equality before the law, the sovereignty of the nation, religious toleration, the ‘rights of man.’ Books mattered.”—David A. Bell, “From Readers to Revolutionaries,” The New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019

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Several times a year I post an updated list of the bibliographies freely available (for viewing or download) on my Academia page, the start of the school year being one of those times (I’m rather late this year!). It is easier to see the list in toto this way because it takes a bit of time to scroll down at the Academia page site to view everything (and the bibliographies are mixed in with my some of my published and unpublished writing). After the bibliographies I have listed  the other the material available at the Academia site as well (encyclopedia entries, essays, and study guides for six worldviews).

1. Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction
2. Africana & African American Philosophy
3. After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle for Civil Rights, Freedom, and Equality in the U.S.
4. Salvador Allende and the Quest for Socialism
5. Alternative and Complementary Medicine
6. B.R. Ambedkar
7. American Indian Law (this list goes considerably beyond ‘law’)
8. Samir Amin (3 September 1931 - 12 August 2018)
9. Analogy & Metaphor
10. Anarchism: Philosophy & Praxis
11. Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
12. The Arab World: Modern & Post-Modern
13. Attica Prison Uprising (September 9, 1971 – September 13, 1971): Notes, Timeline, and Essential Reading
14. The Bedouin
15. Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
16. Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
17. Beyond Inequality: Toward the Globalization of Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
18. Beyond Punitive Capitalist and Liberal Society
19. Bioethics
20. Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
21. Biosecurity
22. The Black Athlete and Sports
23. Blacks and Food Justice: A Guide to Resources
24. Blacks on the (Radical) Left
25. The Black Panther Party
26. On Boxing — Sweet Science & Brutal Agon
27. British Imperialism in India: Economics, Politics, and Ideology
28. Buddhism
29. Buddhism & Psychoanalysis
30. Buddhist Art
31. Capital Punishment
32. Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education — From Etiological Diagnosis to Therapeutic Regimen
33. César Chávez & the United Farm Workers
34. Chinese Law and Legal History
35. Christianity
36. Classical Chinese Worldviews
37. Coffee: cultivation, commodity, culture
38. Communism in India
39. Comparative Law
40. Thinking about Comparative Philosophy
41. Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
42. The Congo and Coltan: Political Economy, Precious Commodity, and Politics
43. Constitutionalism
44. Constitutionalism in India
45. Contract Theory & Promises
46. Criminal Law: Municipal (Domestic) and International
47. The Cuban Revolution
48. Death & Dying
49. Democratic Theory and Praxis
50. Detroit: Labor & Industrialization, Race & Politics, Rebellion & Resurgence
51. Diseases, Epidemics, and Pandemics
52. Dreams and Dreaming
53. Ecological & Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
54. Elections and Voting
55. Emotions
56. Ethical Perspectives on Science & Technology
57. European Enlightenment
58. Famine: History, Causes, and Consequences
59. Frantz Fanon
60. Paulo Freire
61. The Life, Work, & Legacy of Mohandas K. Gandhi
62. Genocide
63. Global Distributive Justice
64. The Great Depression & The New Deal
65. Toward Green Socialist Democracy (Ecosocialism)
66. The Haitian Revolution
67. Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice
68. Hinduism
69. Human Nature and Personal Identity
70. Human Rights
71. Immigration & Refugees: Ethics, Law and Politics
72. Indic (or Indian) Philosophy
73. Indigenous Peoples: Culture, Law and Politics
74. Individual & Shared Responsibility
75. International Criminal Law
76. International Law
77. Modern Iran
78. Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience
79. Islam and Jurisprudence
80. Islam & Muslims in the United States
81. Islamic Studies
82. Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
83. The Jain Tradition
84. C.L.R. James: Marxist Humanist & Afro-Trinidadian Socialist
85. Judaism and Jewish Philosophy
86. Law and Literature
87. The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
88. The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
89. Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965)
90. Marxism
91. Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics
92. Marxism and Freudian Psychology
93. Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
94. Mass Media
95. Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity
96. Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East (with an emphasis on the Palestinian struggle)
97. Nuclear Weapons
98. Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, & Black Cosmopolitanism
99. Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
100. Philosophy, Psychology, & Methodology for the Social Sciences
101. Philosophy & Racism
102. Progressive Philosophy of Education and Pedagogical Practices: liberté, egalité, fraternité in light of participatory and deliberative democracy
103. The Prophet Muhammad
104. Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line: Human Liberation through Welfare, Well-Being, and Individual Flourishing (or Eudaimonia)
105. Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
106. Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
107. The Puerto Rican Struggle for Independence & Self-Determination
108. Punishment and Prison
109. The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies)
110. Radical Catholicism (The Catholic Worker Movement, Liberation Theology…)
111. Toward a “Realist” Social and Political Psychology
112. Science and Religion
113. Science and Technology
114. Slavery
115. Social Security & the Welfare State
116. South African Liberation Struggles
117. Sufism
118. Sugar
119. Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences
120. Terrorism
121. Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions
122. Tort Law
123. Torture: moral, legal, and political dimensions
124. Transitional Justice
125. Utopian Imagination, Thought and Praxis
126. The Varna & Caste System in India
127. Vietnam War
128. Violent Conflict & the Laws of War
129. Water as a Natural Resource, Common Good, and Commodity
130. Women as Intellectuals in the European Enlightenment
131. Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law
132. Zionist Ideologies

In addition to these bibliographies, what follows is some of the published (not everything I’ve published is available online) and unpublished work (encyclopedia entries, essays, and papers, some as first drafts, others a bit more polished), as well as a handful of “Study Guides” for religious worldviews, also freely available (for viewing or download) on my Academia page.

• Abstention from alcohol in Buddhist ethics … and intemperance in Thomas Hobbes's Natural Law morality (or why I remain an aspiring Buddhist)
• “Act Naturally!” “Say What?”
• Advaita Vedānta Philosophy: a short introduction
• Analogy and Metaphor: An Idiosyncratic Introduction
• Unpacking an Aphorism
• On the distinction and differences between AI (‘artificial intelligence’) and human intelligence, judgment and the emotions
• Black Anger and Rage in the Struggle against Racism
• Bombing French Indochina during the U.S. War in Vietnam: a précis
• Book Review: Oliver Leaman’s Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (2004) Philosophy East and West, Vol. 57, No. 2, (2007), 271-275.
• Book Review: Martin D. Yaffe, ed., Judaism and Environmental Ethics (2001), Philosophy East and West, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2007), 400-405.
• Buddhism and Psychoanalysis: Two rather different “therapies of desire” fashioned for the relief of suffering
• Democracy and Islam
• Free Association in Psychoanalysis and “Willing What Cannot Be Willed”
• Friedrich Engels, the English working class, and incipient social epidemiology
• Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and therapy: An introduction to its therapeutic model and “science of subjectivity”
• The Golden Rule
• Iran’s Nuclear Power Program and the Question of Nuclear Weapons: Articles and Blog Posts (this material is not written by yours truly)
• Marxist existentialism and humanism or spirituality: a preliminary apologia
• On moral philosophy-or ethics-and moral psychology (and the general irrelevance of scientific or academic psychology)
• Natural Law “externalism” v. Natural Law as “moral aspiration”
• New Age nonsense and the “spiritual dimension”
• Notes on Presumption(s): Epistemic (or Inferential), Argumentative, and Legal
• Notes on Science and the Sciences
• The pathology of normalcy ... and the quest for a sane society
• Toward a Manifesto for a People’s (i.e., democratic) Law School
• Poetry and Islam: An Introduction
• The Myriad Dimensions of Prosecutorial Misconduct: A Reading Guide (strictly speaking, not a bibliography)
• Prosoche in the Daily Life of a Salonnière in the French Enlightenment
• Toward a Philosophically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law
• Social Norms and Legal Theory
• Toward Socialism
• The Legal Doctrine of Stare Decisis and Rationality
• Therapies of Desire: Introspection in Buddhist and Psychoanalytic Psychologies
• Donald Trump and Narcissistic Personality Disorder
• The “kindly illusions” of Yoga and utopian thought and imagination

Study Guides

• Christianity
• Confucianism
• Daoism
• Hinduism
• Islam
• Judaism

Facts and Fiction: The lingering (and occasionally suffocating) ambivalent and equivocal legacy of the “founders”

Contemporary conventional liberals (the ‘l’ here need not imply a sufficient appreciation of ‘L’- Liberal political philosophy) and conservatives (many on both sides being ‘neoliberal’), as well as right-wing members of the cult of Trump, have one thing in common: together, albeit in differing degrees (and that is significant in its effect), they cannot speak or write about the “founders” without indulging in the cloudy comforts and crass confines of ideology and mythologizing. They selectively quote and repeat ad nauseam shopworn and tired phrases and nostrums so as to bask in their authoritative glow and legitimize whatever it is they want to promote, be it in economics or politics. This implies, correctly, another shared dispositional shortcoming: a tenuous grasp of historical data or information and knowledge. Thus, and by way of illustration, consider the following from Adam Przeworski:

“Representative government meant, for the founders, government of those endowed with reason and virtue, but reason and virtue were reserved to those distinguished by wealth, gender, and race. While governments were to be selected by elections, elections merely ratified the superiority of those qualified to govern by their social and economic position. The poor were instructed by that their interests are represented by the wealthy, women that their interests are guarded by men, the ‘uncivilized’ that they need to be guided by their colonizers. Self-government [construed in either a ‘Republican’ (as in ‘republic’) or ‘democratic’ sense], equality, and liberty were dressed up in elaborate intellectual [or ideological] constructions to make them compatible with rule by a few. Created under a shadow of religious and economics conflicts, representative institutions were designed to bar or at least minimize the voice of the people between elections, treating all ‘intermediate organizations’—clubs, associations, trade unions, as well as political parties—as a danger to civil peace [it was soon to be the case that corporations would be permitted to dominate the space of civil society, just when, roughly speaking, such ‘intermediate’ organizations, groups, and ‘societies’ were beginning to flourish in that space]. Intended as a bulwark against despotism, representative institutions were designed to disable governments from doing much of anything, bad or good, by checking and balancing powers, by protecting the status quo from the will of the majority.”

The original motivations and designs of the founders was more or less successful until the Great Depression and the welfare state inaugurated with the New Deal (which grew intermittently according to several imperatives and standards of justice, however awkwardly or insufficiently, until the 1970s, when global capitalist economic forces and trends began to affect the domestic economy), a fact that sticks in the craw of powerful economic and political elites on the Right to this day. The regressive orientation of Republicans that gained dangerous and deadly momentum under Trump is therefore—at least in some respects—in keeping with the beliefs, values, and pretensions (or ‘interests’) of these founders (in addition to being considerably more well-read than their would-be descendants, they possessed and exhibited a cultivated appreciation of the powers of reason and rational argument, and lacked the widespread penchant for pathological phantasies proliferating in the Republican cult of Trump), its leaders fashioning their own nauseous when not toxic “populist’ ideological recipes for the masses, for disgruntled workers, for whites of all economic strata or classes who are anxious and fearful about losing the power and privileges (hence their aversion to truly equal liberties), thereby inheriting some of the dreams (including nightmares) and designs (intentional or by default and by-product) of the founders.

The “benevolent guise of [Republican] paternalism” constitutionally enshrined by the founders has, under the rule of Republicans, morphed into an authoritarianism that is, politically, neither benevolent nor paternalistic, while economically these Republicans are, more often than not, avowedly and shamelessly laissez-faire or libertarian capitalists, entailing the domination and exploitation intrinsic to hyper-capitalism, which heretofore has been modulated and meliorated in differing measure by its democratic welfare state forms—predominantly liberal, corporatist and social democratic (although, of late, these have become permanently weakened by the entrenchment of a capitalist global political economy). This amounts to a vituperatively quarrelous and ideologically suffused fallacious appeal to authority, one evidencing an implicit when not demonstrable distrust and dislike of the values, methods, and processes of participatory, deliberative, and representative democracy, as well as a colossal failure to understand and thus appreciate the related conceptual richness and corresponding political, economic, and social values ensconced in the triune motto of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Ruminations on elections and democracy, with considerable help from Adam Przeworski

       

“Democracy is a system of positive rights but it does not automatically generate the conditions necessary for exercising these rights. As J.S. Mill observed, ‘without decent wages and universal reading [by the latter Mill meant something wider and deeper than reading tweets and text messages], no government of public opinion is possible.’ Nevertheless, there is nothing about democracy per se that guarantees that wages would be decent and reading universal. The nineteenth-century solution to this problem is to restrict citizenship to those who were in condition to use it. Today citizenship is nominally universal, but many people do not enjoy the conditions necessary to exercises it. Hence, we may be seeing a new monster: democracy without effective citizenship.” — Adam Przeworski

I would add the democracy in the U.S. is itself is increasingly “nominal” or, at any rate, illiberal, in effect a faux democracy in many respects, which is but one reason (and not necessarily the principal one) many Republicans and a majority of “independents” could so easily arrive at the belief that Trump, not Biden, won the last presidential election. Elections are supposed to be a means whereby a society can manage to process conflicts in peace and freedom, but if people believe authoritarian phantasies about “rigged” elections, including claims that their votes “didn’t count,” they become avenues for increased conflict and violence. Of course, as Przeworski has said, “conflicts are ubiquitous and passions at times intense,” yet that is one reason we look to democratic governments for comparatively peaceful change through regular elections, a sign of democracy’s capacity to provide for peaceful regulation of conflicts and a modest or temporary constraint on the intensity of perfervid political passions. Consider this in the dim light of the behavior of Trump and his political cult:

“… [I]f the winner of an election fears that an electoral defeat would be disastrous for him or her personally or for his supporters, he will try everything possible not to lose by manipulating the rules [the sort of thing Trump acolytes in state legislatures are doing throughout the county], repressing the opposition [in this case, in addition to voter suppression, acts of intimidation, coercion and violence against those with opposing views: think of the January 6 insurrection, what is occurring at local school boards, the behavior of anti-vaxxers, including members of police unions and fire departments …], or even reverting to fraud. In turn, if the defeated opposition observes that the winner pursues policies highly damaging to its interests and values, it will be willing to wait patiently for the next election only if it expects to have a reasonable chance to win in the future and reverse the course.”

That Trump and his Right-wing cult did not yield presidential office peacefully stands apart as a disturbing outlier, especially for an “affluent democracy “ (albeit one with extreme economic inequality; as Przeworski notes, ‘while about 70 democracies collapsed in poorer countries, affluent democracies have survived wars, riots, scandals, economic and governmental crises, hell or high water,’ a fact which may be reason for hope in our case, although recent events may displace that reason or at least give us pause):

“[W]hile the habit of changing governments through elections is not easy to acquire, it becomes entrenched with repeated experiences. The habit of changing rulers through elections is self-institutionalizing across institutional and economic environments. Elections peacefully process conflicts when not too much is at stake in them and when the conflicting political forces learn through experience that not too much is at stake.”

The obdurate economic power of elites is liable to cause an inordinate, corrosive and thus debilitating effect on democratic government insofar as it depends on mechanisms, processes, and institutions of participation, deliberation, and representation. These elites exist alongside and sometimes in (either intentional or coincidental) conjunction with the forces of white privilege and “supremacy.” The latter are more dispositionally prone to imbibing regressive phantasies that happen to work to the benefit of the former, beset as they are by fear, anxiety, and ignorance (sometimes willful) about our rapidly changing world (accelerated in poorly understood ways by the pandemic and global climate change), hence their preference for wishful thinking, denial and (individual and collective) self-deception, and the corresponding ideological security of illusions and delusions. In brief, “too much is at stake” from the vantage point of the rabid Right, while economic elites, from corporate interests to the higher classes, have at least a dim sense or awareness that their role in maintaining when not increasing economic inequality will be invariably if not increasingly challenged from the Left, perhaps to the point it acquires populist momentum. Again, it may be case that “too much is at stake” for elections to “peacefully process conflicts.”

The ambivalence or despair many of us understandably entertain about elections (including the threats thereto) today has, to some extent, always been an effect or by-product of the nation’s democratic “spectacle,” to paraphrase Przeworski, one that hardly inspires when its

“everyday life … [is] an endless squabble among petty ambitions, [ideological] rhetoric designed to hide and mislead, shady connections between power and money, laws that make no pretense of justice, policies that reinforce privilege. For better and worse, some people are dissatisfied by the incapacity of elections to make people feel that their participation is effective, some by their incapacity to assure that governments do what they are supposed to do and not do what they are not mandated to do, and many by the failure of elected governments to improve their lives.”

But even if we grant these inherent shortcomings or flaws or disappointments, Przeworski argues that “some of this dissatisfaction” with elections in a would-be democratic society “is misplaced.” And here is where a Marxist with democratic if not Liberal values and sensibilities can readily nod in assent (or exclaim, ‘I told you so’):

“Political mechanisms are embedded in societies, with their property structures, their markets, their relations of physical force, their social, ethnic, and religious divisions, their values and traditions. What any political mechanism can achieve is limited by the social conditions in which it operates [in this instance, within the overarching miserly capitalist welfare and obscenely militarist state]. We should not expect elections to generate results that no system of choosing rules could generate in a given society. Governments are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. [….]

Governments appear particularly ineffective when facing economic inequality. This impotence is partly due to the property structures of societies in which we live, societies in which decisions concerning investment and employment made by owners of productive resources affect the lives of everyone else. Capitalism imposes limits on decisions that can be reached by elections, limits that bind all governments. Yet some of the ineffectiveness of governments in reducing economic inequality is due to the [direct and indirect and not infrequently masked] political power of those who control greater economic resources. Even when all citizens enjoy equal right to affect government policies, their actual influence over these policies is not equal when people are economically unequal. Economic inequality generates political inequality [a seemingly obvious fact yet one dismissed or ignored by those who dream that they too, one day, will be rich], political inequality reproduces economic inequality: getting out of this vicious circle is difficult.”

I leave you with these words from Przeworski by way of a tentative and dispiriting conclusion:

“A ‘crisis of democracy’ may assume more or less drastic forms: it may mean that democracy simply collapses—a democratically elected incumbent does not hold an election, or represses the opposition to the point of preventing it from winning, or the military takes power by force—or it can mean that democratic institutions are formally preserved but the political leader rules by appealing directly to ‘the people’ [the hoi polloi or the masses], ignoring institutional norms, in a form of ‘populism,’ ‘illiberal democracy,’ or whatever else one wants to call such situations. Outright collapses of democracy are relatively easy to identify, but how much and what kind of deterioration of democracy constitutes a ‘crisis’ is an inevitably subjective assessment, so we should expect views to differ. [….]

The danger in the United States [this was published in 2018, although it was probably written about a year or two earlier] is the possibility that the incumbent would intimidate hostile media and create a propaganda machine of its own [which the Trump administration effectively did with FOX News and other mass and social media outlets and platforms], that it would politicize the security agencies [it did this to some extent], that it would harass political opponents [militant groups on the Right did this on behalf of the cult of Trump], that it would use state power to reward sympathetic private firms [it did this too], that it would selectively enforce laws [again, and to a disturbing degree], that it would provoke foreign conflicts to monger fear [a mixed record here, but one might cite China and Iran as conspicuous cases], and that it would rig elections [instead, it was claimed that the Presidential election was rigged by Democrats and other conspiratorial forces]. Such a scenario would not be unprecedented. The United States has a long history of waves of political repression [in addition to the structural oppression of, and group acts of violence toward, Blacks and to some extent other people of color]: the ‘red scare’ of 1917-20, the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, the McCarthy period, and the Nixon presidency. In all these cases, the Supreme Court was slow in reacting against violations of civil and political rights. Yet the Democrats lost the 1920 presidential election, Senator McCarthy was censured by the Senate, and Richard Nixon forced to resign. [….]

In the end it looks, it looks like the current crisis will simmer for the foreseeable future [Przeworski is here speaking in global terms about the radical right in office and other threatened democracies]. Nothing much will change except for increased political polarization and increasing intensity of conflicts, at the extreme erupting from time to time in spirals of state and anti-state violence.”   

*          *          *

Please see Przeworki’s Why Bother with Elections? (Polity Press, 2018), and also his book, Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (Cambridge University Press, 2020), the volume he co-edited with Susan G. Stokes and Bernard Manin, Democracy, Accountability, and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Nadia Urbinati’s Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links)

Democratic Theory and Praxis

Elections and Voting (recently updated)

Marxism (recently updated)

Black anger and rage in the struggle against racism

       

I will introduce the concepts of anger and rage as prelude to an introduction to the particular fictional expression of anger and “Black rage” in the character of Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s powerful, disturbing and compelling novel (better: ‘incendiary tale’), Native Son (1940). Bigger Thomas, for better and worse, exemplifies “inarticulate and explosive rage,” and in his case it leads to the killing of two women. This introduction is then filled out with some relevant sections from Adam Shatz’s (characteristically) incisive and erudite essay, “Outcasts and Desperados,” in the London Review of Books on Wright’s posthumously published novel, The Man Who Lived Underground (HarperPerennial, 2021), which speaks to the subject of “Black rage” in Wright’s work. Wright’s portrait of Bigger proved unsettling to both James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison (among others). Frantz Fanon on the other hand, “drew on Native Son to examine the violent impulses that racism creates in its victims,” perhaps not surprising given that Fanon was a psychiatrist. Wright himself “desire[d] to fuse the insights of Marx and Freud – he said they were two of his favourite ‘poets’ – and apply them to the lives of oppressed people, especially victims of racism” (Shatz).

The subject of “Black rage” is a prominent theme of late in both works of fiction and non-fiction, having arisen in the wake of slavery and obdurate structural and interpersonal racism, largely evidenced through equally enduring forms of political and economic inequality in this country. Most recently, an assistant professor of philosophy at UC Riverside, Myisha Cherry, who co-edited a volume, The Moral Psychology of Anger (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) with her older colleague in the profession, Owen Flanagan, has penned a book weaving together moral psychology, political philosophy, and anti-racist activism, The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press, 2021). I’ve yet to read it, but the book’s title appears to elide distinctions one finds in moral psychology and psychoanalytic theory between anger (a ‘vehement passion’ often associated with resentment, contempt and hate, as well as ‘regret, frustration, and disappointment;’ frustration and annoyance often evolving into anger) and rage, the latter being more inchoate and dangerous than anger proper, best viewed as anger’s most extreme mode of expression (Jerome Neu reminds us that Freud’s ‘Rat Man’ ‘suffered from a host of neurotic symptoms because of his repressed rage’).

Anger is often a vice, and many if not most of us lack self-control when we are angry (e.g., when ‘consumed’ by anger). Spinoza’s conception of anger was a bit different from that of Seneca and the Stoics generally, yet he shared their view that anger is invariably and entirely a negative emotion inherently fraught with danger. And the Buddhist view on anger is virtually identical to that of the Stoics, although they do not have “our” concept of emotion(s) as such, classifying anger as one of the kleśas (‘mental states that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions’).

But there is another philosophical perspective that deserves consideration, one that goes back to both Plato and Aristotle and to some extent is found in the Hebrew Bible, in particular with regard to what we might term “righteous anger,” for example, God’s anger at a person’s sinfulness or the Israelites’ lapses from fidelity to God or the pursuit of justice, these being the more reasonable examples (other instances strike us as irrational and wholly vindictive). In brief, “some form of anger [is] sometimes warranted and often useful.” Plato believed anger (‘as an intrinsic aspect of the spirited part of the tripartite soul’) was capable of being governed by reason. Aristotle’s take was a bit different, for anger can have its reasons: it can be either reasonable or rational to be in a state of anger, hence a “good-tempered” man “is angry at the right things and with the right people, as he ought, when he ought, for as long as he ought.” In this case, anger is dictated by reasons, or at least it is in harmony with same. Thus, Aristotle “thought that a man who is angry for the right reason, with the right person, to the right degree, on the right occasion, and in the right manner, is praiseworthy.”

Aaron Ben- Ze’ev accordingly characterizes rage as a “less specific type of anger,” the “feeling dimension” being “more intense” and thus the “intentional dimension … less complex.” As we saw above, it was Aristotle who first taught us that one species of anger finds moral psychological and ethical warrant as a dispositional virtue: “The man is angry at the right things and with the right people ….” This acceptable or legitimate form of anger, in the words of Philip Fisher, “has its source in the feeling and in the perception of injustice.” And Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, provides an account in the Laws in which the angry or spirited part of the psyche “is fundamental to the indignation necessary for our insistence on justice; that is, not only must we favor or approve of justice, we must [summon the sufficient motivation to] also seek justice and impose it wherever that is required.” (This is but one example of how emotions are often associated with cognitive antecedents and supported by corresponding judgments.) The expression of anger does not always relieve or mitigate it (as in ‘hydraulic’ model or metaphor of the emotions), indeed, it sometimes intensifies anger, and such may be the case with rage, especially if one finds those offenses that led to anger in the first instance enduring or even accumulating.

I largely agree with Aristotle, but what he defines as the “good-tempered” man (or woman) seems, in our time and place at least, increasingly rare, in other words, this dispositional character trait is far from common. A person who does not get angry at Trump’s racist speech and empty public policies, at his demeaning and degrading rhetoric, at his kleptocratic and plutocratic politics, at his narcissistic megalomania and so forth, would appear to be cold-hearted, unethical and self-deceiving (perhaps in a state of denial and prone to self-deception and wishful thinking). A person that cannot summon anger in response to the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar is not acting virtuously or ethically. But such anger need not get the better of one, as we say. I think the Aristotelian view is, for most of us, intuitive, and thus at least plausible, although there is much to be learned from both the Buddhists and Stoics about how to deal with our anger—and of course rage—when it is likely to trump or eviscerate reason. So I am in wholehearted agreement with P.M.S. Hacker’s remarkable analysis of anger in The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018):

“Reason is … needed to apprehend what is offensive, to oneself or others. Indignation or resentment may indeed be appropriate emotional responses to slight and insult, to false accusations or to various forms of offence. That is a proper mark of concern and care. Annoyance and irritation are natural reactions to various forms of disturbance, and natural expressions of frayed nerves. But these natural responses need to be dampened and kept under control lest they feed the flames of fury [or hatred and rage]. Even if anger is warranted, it does not follow that any form or manifestation of anger is warranted. We often have an obligation to control, moderate, or suppress the manifestation of our anger.

Anger is a warranted response to wrong-doing in its manifold forms. It may fuel one’s courage to oppose what is wrong. Nevertheless, to act in anger is never well advised [on this, the Stoics, Buddhists, Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza can all agree]. One may castigate without rage, censure and deplore without fury. The greater one’s wrath, the more likely it is that one’s judgment be led astray, one’s utterances be inappropriate or worse, and one’s action be unjust and harmful. One may rightly seek redress. It is good to endeavor to destroy evil. But reason needs no support from rage or anger in heightened forms in its quest for the right and the good.”

One of the more concise and telling definitions of rage is provided by Robert C. Roberts in his superb study, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003): “Rage is intense anger marked by proneness to violent action.” Roberts proceeds to fill out this definition:

“Actions characteristic of rage are typically performed in an intense and violent behavioral style—for example, with loud voice, reddened visage, tightly tensed muscles, perspiration, wild swinging of the arms, and so on. Like any adult human emotion, rage is a construal of the situation in terms, some of which are propositional (I do not notice any difference from anger in the defining proposition); but rage, bordering as it typically does on the irrational, is likely to be a blurry kind of construal in which one’s consciousness seems to be overlaid with nonpropositional forces [a rather anodyne phenomenological description!]. For example, the desire to destroy may get detached from its anchor in the concern for justice [as we witnessed in the urban riots of the 1960s], and the question of the culpability of the recipient of the punitive behavior may become irrelevant to the action. It is typical for rage (as it is not for plain anger) that, for the duration of the emotion, the subject is blind to ‘reason;’ that is, the rage is not penetrable by considerations contrary to its propositional content. The enraged person may need to cool off before he can listen to reason. ‘Rage’ suggests a state in which the desire for retribution is so intense that is at best only barely within behavioral control and may be out of control.”

*          *          *

From Adam Shatz’s essay, “Outcasts and Desperados,” in the London Review of Books, Vol. 43 No. 19 · 7 October 2021

When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile,’ as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies. [….]

The novels he wrote in Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life, failed to deliver on the promise of Native Son, the incendiary tale of a poor black chauffeur in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who achieves a grisly sense of selfhood after killing two women: his black girlfriend and the daughter of his wealthy white employer. But even that novel’s reputation declined, thanks in large part to another black American in Paris. In 1949 James Baldwin described Native Son as a modern-day Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy,’ arguing that Bigger Thomas ‘admits the possibility of his being subhuman’ and that Wright was no less guilty than Harriet Beecher Stowe of insisting that a person’s ‘categorisation ... cannot be transcended.’ Baldwin, whose success Wright had done much to promote, wasn’t the only protégé to turn against him. In 1963 Ralph Ellison wrote that, in Bigger Thomas, Wright had created not a black character other black people would recognise, but ‘a near subhuman indictment of white oppression’ crudely ‘designed to shock whites out of their apathy.’ Ellison’s hyper-cerebral protagonist in Invisible Man, who is able to see far beyond his own condition, was a pointed rejoinder to Bigger’s inarticulate and explosive rage.

That rage had once been important to Ellison too. During their days in the CPUSA, he had sent a letter to Wright commending Bigger’s ‘revolutionary significance.’ Readers horrified by Bigger’s violence, Ellison insisted, ‘fail to see that what’s bad in Bigger from the point of view of bourgeois society is good from our point of view ... Would that all Negroes were as psychologically free as Bigger and as capable of positive action!’ [….]

The Black Power movement’s patriarchal and homophobic embrace of Wright did little to salvage his reputation, especially after the rise of black feminism in the 1970s. In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978), Michele Wallace traced the movement’s ‘love affair with Black Macho’ back to Native Son. Black women writers never forgave Wright for having once accused Zora Neale Hurston of writing ‘in the safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live.’  It didn’t matter that he had denounced the absence of female speakers at the 1956 Conference of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, insisting that black men could only be free if black women were too. Or that in a 1957 book of reportage he had catalogued the forms of oppression suffered by women in contemporary Spain, comparing the Catholic cult of ‘female purity’ to the Ku Klux Klan’s defence of white womanhood. Thanks to Native Son, he continued to be associated with the idea that, in Darryl Pinckney’s words, ‘the black man can only come to life as the white man’s nightmare, the defiler of white women.’

Black feminists weren’t the only ones to take offence. In 1986 the novelist David Bradley confessed that the first time he read Native Son,

‘I shed no tears for Bigger. I wanted him dead; by legal means if possible, by lynching if necessary ... I did not see Bigger Thomas as a symbol of any kind of black man. To me he was a sociopath, pure and simple ... If the price of becoming a black writer was following the model of Native Son, I would just have to write like a honky.’

Novelists never completely shake off an association with the murderers they invent: Dostoevsky is still remembered for Raskolnikov, Camus for Meursault. The difference in Wright’s case is that Bigger Thomas is practically all he is remembered for. Wright is not just blamed for Bigger but almost mistaken for him.

On the surface, Wright’s life bore little resemblance to Bigger’s: he was a child of the rural South not the northern ghetto, a self-made intellectual and writer. But as a young man in Chicago he had had a series of menial jobs in hospitals and the postal service and could identify all too easily with Bigger’s anger at the white world. He had known Bigger’s fear of white people’s arbitrary power – in his view, this was the ‘fundamental emotion guiding black personality and behaviour,’ even if it sometimes appeared in the ‘disguise that is called Negro laughter.’ It wasn’t only whites he wanted to provoke with Native Son, but members of the decorous black middle class, who felt that a figure like Bigger Thomas was a threat to their precarious status on the margins of white America.

Native Son was a work of shocking intransigence in its portrayal of black rage, in its treatment of liberal whites and, above all, in its violence. After suffocating his employer’s daughter, Mary Dalton, with a pillow – he’s terrified that she might alert her blind mother to his presence in her bedroom, and that he might be accused of rape – Bigger slices up her corpse and burns it in a furnace. His violence is recounted as if it were the concentrated payback for hundreds of years of anti-black violence and humiliation, and described with graphic relish. When he murders his girlfriend, Bess, to prevent her from revealing his crime, he feels a rush of exhilaration: at last he has accomplished ‘something that was all his own,’ an act no one would have imagined him daring enough to execute. ‘Elation filled him.’ No longer emasculated by fear, no longer ‘a black timid Negro boy’ in a white man’s world, he has ‘a sense of wholeness,’ of power over his oppressors. He is a man who has ‘evened the score.’

Frantz Fanon drew on Native Son to examine the violent impulses that racism creates in its victims. ‘Bigger Thomas ... is afraid, terribly afraid. But afraid of what?’ Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. ‘Of himself. We don’t yet know who he is, but he knows that fear will haunt the world once the world finds out.’ For Fanon, Wright had shown that violence is a way to ‘put an end to the tension,’ to a ‘feeling of not existing’ in white-dominated society. ‘The black man is a toy in the hands of the white man. So in order to break the vicious circle, he explodes.’ For Bigger, murder provides an irresistible glimpse of freedom. It is ‘disintoxicating,’ as Fanon would write of anti-colonial violence in The Wretched of the Earth. ‘I didn’t want to kill,’ Bigger tells his lawyer, ‘but what I killed for, I am.’

It was hardly surprising that middle-class black readers had little desire to be associated with Bigger. But for Wright, Bigger Thomas was not – or not merely – a symbol of persecuted black masculinity. He was a symbol of the psychic injuries of oppression, rootlessness and dispossession under capitalism. Wright said that he had met defiant men like Bigger while growing up in segregated Mississippi, men who rebelled ‘at least for a sweet brief spell’ before they were ‘shot, hanged, maimed, lynched.’ But in Chicago and New York he had ‘made the discovery that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time ... and there were literally millions of him, everywhere. The extension of my sense of the personality of Bigger was the pivot of my life; it altered the complexion of my existence.’ As he became aware of ‘a vast, muddied pool of human life in America,’ he began to see that segregation was ‘an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine.’

Wright presented Bigger Thomas as the humiliated, alienated and dangerous ‘product of a dislocated society,’ seething with fear and envy, susceptible to fantasies of power, domination and revenge. ‘He liked to hear of how Japan was conquering China; of how Hitler was running the Jews to the ground; of how Mussolini was invading Spain.’ Wright obliquely alluded to Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, with its fusion of black nationalism and militarist discipline. ‘Someday,’ Bigger muses, ‘there would be a black man who would whip the black people into a tight band and together they would act and end fear and shame.’ In linking social atomisation and fear, racism and authoritarianism, Native Son anticipated Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, and Wright suggested that Bigger ‘carried within himself the potentialities of either communism or fascism.’

Baldwin criticised Wright for overlooking the traditions, rituals and family relationships that protect and fortify black communities in even the most appalling conditions. But Wright wasn’t interested in the structures of support or mutual aid that enabled black people to survive as a collective. He was drawn to outcasts and desperados who had fallen through the cracks to find themselves adrift, naked, in mass society. He himself was a loner, never at ease in his own family, and hostile to the Church thanks to a grandmother who frowned on reading anything other than the Bible. His fiercest quarrels inside the Communist Party were with black militants who shared his working-class roots but didn’t trust him as one of them: he was too intellectual, too independent. He was unmoved by the promise of ‘another country’ where black Americans would at last be free. Unlike the young Baldwin, Wright doubted that such a country would ever exist in his homeland.

Why did Baldwin and others mistake Wright for a crude proletarian realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’ laid out the case for a radical, politically engaged modernism, and he had no time for sentimental depictions of the lives of the poor and oppressed. The direct, sometimes coarse prose of Native Son represented a deliberate rupture with comforting modes of realism. [….]

Wright’s publishers rejected the novel he at the time considered his most important, written between Native Son and Black Boy. An abridged version of The Man Who Lived Underground appeared in the posthumous collection Eight Men (1961) and attracted some influential admirers, including Irving Howe, who declared its ‘sense of narrative rhythm’ to be ‘superior to anything in his full-length novels.’ Despite this, the complete novel hasn’t appeared in print until now. It’s a short, riveting, exploratory work, begun in June 1941, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Two weeks before the invasion, at the opening session of the fourth American Writers’ Congress, he had given a passionate speech against the war. To his fury, the CPUSA had suspended its campaign against racism in the war industries, and with the American military still segregated, he refused to support a white man’s army. (He was later drafted but declared psychologically unfit, apparently because of his views about racism.) Although he wasn’t yet ready to leave the party, he withdrew from its activities and poured all his energy into The Man Who Lived Underground.

The novel was inspired by a story Wright read in a detective magazine about a white man in California who lived for several months in a hideout. Wright’s protagonist, Fred Daniels, is black, but unlike Bigger Thomas he is also innocent. The novel begins on a Saturday evening when Daniels, a working-class, churchgoing man with a pregnant wife, is stopped by the police and accused of killing a white man in order to rape his wife. They beat him with a blackjack, and promise he can go home if he signs a confession. Although he’s innocent, he feels ‘condemned, inescapably guilty of some nameless deed,’ and agrees to confess, if only to end the agony and see his wife. When the police take him to his apartment she goes into labour. They rush her to hospital, where he manages to escape. He opens a sewer and climbs inside, sensing in ‘the whispering rush of the water’ the ‘illusion of another world with other values and other laws.’ As many critics have said, The Man Who Lived Underground seems startlingly contemporary in its treatment of police violence against an innocent black man. The story of the interrogation has particular resonances with the 1989 Central Park Five case, in which a group of black and Latino teenagers were manipulated into confessing to the rape of a white female jogger. Not surprisingly, The Man Who Lived Underground has been held up as a prescient indictment of the racist carceral state – a parable for the era of Black Lives Matter.

But this is another misrepresentation. In fact, the book is much less of a protest novel than Native Son, and takes even greater liberties with naturalism. Its setting and atmosphere – chases through sewers, frenzied manhunts – recall noirish films like Fritz Lang’s M and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. The writing combines the blunt rhythms of hard-boiled detective fiction with kinetic, almost phantasmagorical strokes, intensities of emotion and colour. As Howe observed of Native Son, ‘naturalism pushed to an extreme turns here into something other than itself, a kind of expressionist outburst, no longer a replica of the familiar social world but a self-contained realm of grotesque emblems.’ However much the novel may reveal about police brutality and racism, Wright thought of it as a novel of ideas rather than a book about racial injustice: as he told his agent, it was ‘the first time I’ve really tried to step beyond the straight black-white stuff.’

Daniels is a victim of police violence, but Wright’s narrative doesn’t hinge on his victimisation so much as on the mutations of his consciousness as he builds a new home for himself underground, illuminated by a single lightbulb. (Ellison, who knew all about Wright’s novella, equipped his own underground man with 1369 lightbulbs.) He steals money from a real-estate and insurance company that has ‘collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor coloured folks’ – ‘not to spend, but just to keep around and look at.’ He ‘rubbed the money with his fingers, as though expecting it suddenly to reveal secret qualities:’ this is money as Marx describes it in his essay on ‘the mysterious character of the commodity form.’ As Daniels observes ‘with a musing smile,’ it is ‘just like any other kind of paper,’ and he uses it to wallpaper his underground home, a ‘mocking symbol’ of his exile from the world that rejected him. When another man is accused of the theft he has committed he can only conclude that ‘everybody’s guilty.’ The contingency and artifice of the world outside, the ‘dead world of sunshine and rain he had left,’ leads him to the realisation that somehow ‘he was all people. In some utterable fashion he was all people and they were he.’ Rather than hardening his sense of individual identity, racist persecution leads him to an almost cosmic awareness of what he shares with others. One of the novel’s first readers was the German-Jewish psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who sent a poem in response:

‘The Freudians talk about the id
And bury it below.
But Richard Wright took off the lid
And let us see the woe.’

Wertham, a professor at Johns Hopkins who moved in left-wing circles, shared Wright’s conviction that there was ‘no other act … that so gathers together the threads of personal, social, political life of the nation as crime.’ Wright had written to Wertham after reading his book Dark Legend: A Study in Murder, about a young Italian immigrant who killed his sexually adventurous mother to defend the honour of his dead father. Wertham, in turn, published a remarkable essay on Native Son, linking the bedroom scene to a repressed episode from Wright’s childhood. They later joined forces to set up the Lafargue Clinic, which provided cheap psychiatric counselling for people in Harlem. Wright’s friendship with Wertham reflected his desire to fuse the insights of Marx and Freud – he said they were two of his favourite ‘poets’ – and apply them to the lives of oppressed people, especially victims of racism. ‘I’m convinced that the next great arena of discovery in the Negro will be the dark landscape of his own mind, what living in America has done to him,’ he wrote in his diary. [….]

The full essay is here, and it is well worth reading in its entirety, for I’ve left out all the material not directly relevant to our perhaps cursory introduction to anger and rage as it might pertain to facets of Black history and the struggle against racism up into our own time.

       

Anger: A Brief Reading Guide

• Averill, James. Anger and Aggression: An Essay on Emotion (Springer-Verlag, 1982).
• Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000).
• Briggs, Jean L. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Harvard University Press, 1970).
• (The) Dalai Lama (Geshe Thupten Jinpa, trans.) Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective (Snow Lion Publications, 1997).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (Rowman & Littlefield, 3rd ed., 2000).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (Shogam Publications, 4th ed., 2010).
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Fisher, Philip. The Vehement Passions (Princeton University Press, 2002).
• Frijda, Nico H. The Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018)
• Harris, William V. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2001).
• Heald, Suzette. Controlling Anger: The Anthropology of Gisu Violence (Ohio University Press, 1998).
• Kassinove, Howard, ed. Anger Disorders: Definition, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Routledge, 2013 [1995]).
• Murphy, Jeffrie G. and Jean Hampton. Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
• Nhât Hanh, Thich. Anger (Riverhead Books, 2001).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Sarat, Austin and Nasser Hussain, eds. Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency (Stanford University Press, 2007).
• Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum, trans.) Anger, Mercy, Revenge (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
• Thurman, Robert A.F. Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links)

• After Slavery and Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
• Blacks on the Left
• The Black Panther Party
• The Emotions
• Frantz Fanon
• Malcolm X
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Black Cosmopolitanism
• Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line: Human Liberation through Welfare, Well-Being, and Individual Flourishing
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy