UNCTAD economists openly follow the
Keynesian ‘explanation’ for the lost decade (or what I have
called the Long Depression) since 2009. And their solution is a
re-adoption of Keynesian policies to manage capitalism better.
For UNCTAD, slumps start with a collapse in demand ie in
investment spending and above all in household consumption.
That leads to a fall in sales, trade and then production and
investment.“Since its founding in
the aftermath of the Great Depression, the key principle of
macroeconomics has been that effective demand – expected sales
of final goods and services – determines income and
employment.” That may be
the key principle of macroeconomics, butas
I have argued before in many posts,this sequence is not
correct and is actually back to front. In a capitalist,
profit-making, economy, it is profits and profitability that
drive investment and when profitability drops, investment in the
means of production and in labour will contract, leading to
unemployment and loss of consumer incomes and demand
I thought that some of you might be interested in this article about Gramsci by Asad Haider from Viewpoint Magazine. Btw, you can support Viewpoint Mag. on Patreon.
A page from a 1945 Italian Communist Party pamphlet, with the caption: “The red guards of Fiat greet Gramsci.” (Image provided by Paul Saba)
In April 1920, Italy was in crisis. The previous month at the Fiat auto factory in Turin, management had set back the clock hands of the factory for daylight saving’s time, without asking permission from the democratic workers’ councils that had been spreading throughout Italy’s factories. A chain of work stoppages had popped up in protest. But as tense negotiations continued, with a massive lockout by management, it became clear that what was really at stake was the existence of the factory councils themselves. 1 The whole city entered into a general strike in defense of the councils, which Antonio Gramsci would hail later that year in a report for the Comintern as “a great event, not only in the history of the Italian working class but also in the history of the European and world proletariat,” because “for the first time a proletariat was seen to take up the fight for the control of production without being forced into this struggle by unemployment and hunger.”
In April 1920, Italy was in crisis. The previous month at the Fiat auto factory in Turin, management had set back the clock hands of the factory for daylight saving’s time, without asking permission from the democratic workers’ councils that had been spreading throughout Italy’s factories. A chain of work stoppages had popped up in protest. But as tense negotiations continued, with a massive lockout by management, it became clear that what was really at stake was the existence of the factory councils themselves. 1 The whole city entered into a general strike in defense of the councils, which Antonio Gramsci would hail later that year in a report for the Comintern as “a great event, not only in the history of the Italian working class but also in the history of the European and world proletariat,” because “for the first time a proletariat was seen to take up the fight for the control of production without being forced into this struggle by unemployment and hunger.”
In April 1920, Italy was in crisis. The previous month at the Fiat auto factory in Turin, management had set back the clock hands of the factory for daylight saving’s time, without asking permission from the democratic workers’ councils that had been spreading throughout Italy’s factories. A chain of work stoppages had popped up in protest. But as tense negotiations continued, with a massive lockout by management, it became clear that what was really at stake was the existence of the factory councils themselves. 1 The whole city entered into a general strike in defense of the councils, which Antonio Gramsci would hail later that year in a report for the Comintern as “a great event, not only in the history of the Italian working class but also in the history of the European and world proletariat,” because “for the first time a proletariat was seen to take up the fight for the control of production without being forced into this struggle by unemployment and hunger.
Hi All ---- I want to take off from Mark's following comment
The quite standard idolatry of the free market is quite sufficient
to get us here. By the 1980s, the Republicans--and, yes, the Democrats,
too--embraced that notion that what's good for the market is good for
the society. This deepened over the next twenty years into systemic
faith that capitalism means that greed is a social good--and, conversely
rationalizing draconian cruelties inflicted on those who were least
able to protect themselves. This converged with a corporatized
Fundamentalist Christianity to create a religion of cruelty with the new
century.
I am mostly (not quite 100 %) a supporter of the SSA (Social Structures of Accumulation) analysis of the stages of capitalist development in the US political economy. My book actually tried to straddle the two "left wing" macro-economic analyses (SSA vs. Monthly Review "stagnation" thesis) because I wanted to make the case that there was such a thing called the "Reagain Revolution" in the US political economy that was ENABLED by the Clinton Administration ---
(Shameless self-plug -- book entitled SURRENDER, HOW THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION COMPLETED THE REAGAN REVOLUTION -- should be available on line for free)
We have lived through almost 20 years since Clinton and during that period we had both the financial meltdown and the emergence of TRUMP and TRUMPISM --- which (you all know) I consider a particularly American version of fascism. I am now convinced that the best explanation for the last 20 years is that the neo-liberal SSA entered a period of crisis FROM WHICH IT HASN'T EMERGED. According to the traditional ("classical") Leninist version of Imperialism (I'm more a W.A. Williams guy but forget that for a moment ...), as hegemons (read British Empire) get challenged (read Germany) we get "wars of redivision" (read WW I) ---- Germany and Italy demanded a "do-over" (sorry if that seems flip -- I certainly don't mean to be) and so we had WW II --- which led to the emergence of a new hegemon ---
45 years of COld War (with hot wars all over the place but SOMEHOW --despite the Cuban Missile Crisis -- no civilization ending nuclear war) led to the demise of the Soviet Union but the FAILURE of the United States to consolidate its hegemonic status and so we now have the emergence of CHINA as the new challenge ---
US CHina military confrontation is obviously something they both want to avoid -- but look for a LONG period of hostile "competition" ....
Meanwhile, internally, neo-liberalism failed to deliver the goods which accounts for the emergence of the populist RIGHT (leading directly to Trump and OTHER authoritarian versions elsewhere in the world) and SOME left wing challenges (Sanders, some true left wingers in the Congress --- I would argue first of their kind since Marcantonio) ----
In the US this has meant that the Roosevelt Coalition that created the US political economy from 1945-say- 1980 completely fell apart ---- and Mark's quote with which I stated this post became appropriate.
Where I think I disagree with folks is I don't think "the left" had much to do with this --- we played a major role in forcing an end to the Indochinese Wars and clipping the wings of American imperialism -- at least partially -- but with the end of the draft and the failure of the Soviet Union to be a MODEL for alternatives to western style capitalism, the way was opened for the ideological victory of neo-liberalism -- (David Kotzs book THE RISE AND FALL OF NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM is the book that informs me most about this). We on the left had nothing to say about this--- in some nooks and crannies (fighting against welfare reform....) we may have had some marginal influence ---- with the end of the draft and the implosion of the "new left" into the various groupuscules --- Weather Underground, October League, RCP, you name it --- we were pretty irrelevant until the Bush Administration decided to take advantage of 9-11 to go after Iraq, (later Iran and North Korea --- remember those "promises") and CHOKED on that imperial overreach.
Unfortunately, despite all this HISTORY that has occurred since the 1960s, we on the left are almost exactly where we were --- not very relevant to make real change --- and forced to choose between standing on the sidelines and criticizing or getting involved in supporting the imperial corporate democrats to defeat what some of us fear will be real honest to God fascism (and let's not go there --- we've all rehearsed the arguments ad nauseum).
The only glimmer of hope were the Black Lives Matter demonstrations over the past years --- starting small in Ferguson --- building to a tsunami after George Floyd was murdered --- AND the various wildcat teachers strikes which showed the power of working class self-activity.
The fact that NBA athletes forced a (short) postponement of games in support of the Black Lives Matter movement should be celebrated not denigrated --- If Trump stages a coup after November 3, we are going to need professional athletes to shut down sports along with flight attendants, teachers, you name it ....
That would open space for "the left" while hopefully squashing the attempt to bring fascism to the US.
So sorry this was so long --- hope it was somewhat useful in clarifying some points --
I'm approaching this less as a historian than someone who's lived through the times we're discussing. Overall, I think the Left has never been coherent enough in my lifetime to do much more than make a strategic nudge here and there and, in hindsight, I think we've done remarkably well with what we've had. I have a serious bone to pick about how little we've had to work with.
A somewhat deeper caveat about what you're suggesting is that it reads way too much thought into decisions that are not really much more than those of a paramecium. They turn to what they think will warm them or, at least, make them feel warmer.
The problem is that American civic culture was never very ideologically defined or obsessed with the battle of ideas in the 1960s. That pathetic level of analysis and understanding has just degenerated entirely. The former president of my union told me a few weeks ago that I'm engaged in a "crime against humanity" by not voting for Biden and an old socialist comrade recently asked me whether I was on the Republican payroll. That kind of shit-stupid is what you get from those in responsible positions. I have another Biden supporter shrieking that I want the dangerous reactionary working class people in her neighborhood are going to beat her up if Trump gets a second term.
But the point isn't really this kind of individual madness.
It's how media and political institutions shape it all into what passes for a collective political decision. I honestly think there are things at work other than an excess of libertarian thinking.
The quite standard idolatry of the free market is quite sufficient to get us here. By the 1980s, the Republicans--and, yes, the Democrats, too--embraced that notion that what's good for the market is good for the society. This deepened over the next twenty years into systemic faith that capitalism means that greed is a social good--and, conversely rationalizing draconian cruelties inflicted on those who were least able to protect themselves. This converged with a corporatized Fundamentalist Christianity to create a religion of cruelty with the new century.
Those who followed those first steps of Reaganism are going to find it very hard to backtrack and reconsider what they've been sanctioning. That's gotten progressively harder for them but not hard enough to make them rethink their assumptions. And, of course, the Democrats are constitutionally unwilling to challenge those assumptions.
But I honestly wouldn't chalk this up to some kind of libertarianism that swept us away in the 1960s. If that were so, how could we have not had a serious shakeup in the party system, particularly as both engaged in that persistent expansion of the war machine year after year? Then there's the simply grotesquely antirepublican and antidemocratic centralization of the national police powers
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 08:22 PM, <fkalosar101@...> wrote: Sorry about that--I apologize for my tone. I have great respect for Comrade Lause as a historian and am not seeking a social media pissing contest with him, however upsetting I may find his dismissive response to my post.
What I meant by saying that we are the enemy is that the Left as a whole capitulated to a form of neoliberalism by embracing the essentially libertarian ideology of eg the pop music industry and its leading figures as well as key elements of actual libertarianism during the struggle against the Vietnam War. This IMO has contributed to the absence of any popular socialist tendency in the US at present.
We now have a widespread notion that even in the absence of the unstable fusion once known as "liberalism" in the U.S., you can have a valid non-socialist Left, which has IMO influenced the white and non-black "allies" of BLM to the extent that they are protesting not only police racist murder but the broader injustices and innate unsustainability of capitalism.
Comrades Lause, Meeropol, and Proyect (et al) are of course not personally to blame for this,--on the contrary--but the ideological suicide of the Left over the past three quarters of a century remains the responsibility of the Left as a whole.
Putting it another way, the de facto ideology of the encampments may increasingly represent the transformation of a revolutionary potential to a counter-revolutionary potential. It has much in common with the underrated persuasiveness of Trumpism, which gives concrete form to something new in the world of ideologies that has much in common with its nominal Left antagonists.
WITBD?
I'll only add that Trump's resolute hostility to the very notion of social infrastructure and actual governance has many points of coincidence with the vulgar Graeberism of the encampments. The only reason for voting Biden is to preserve such luxuries as a Postal Service and the CDC for another two or three years so that the Left can come to grips with its failures. The collapse of liberal democracy isn't something to cheer on even if it may be inevitable.
Again--trying to keep this above the waist and serious.
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 08:22 PM, <fkalosar101@...> wrote: Sorry about that--I apologize for my tone. I have great respect for Comrade Lause as a historian and am not seeking a social media pissing contest with him, however upsetting I may find his dismissive response to my post.
What I meant by saying that we are the enemy is that the Left as a whole capitulated to a form of neoliberalism by embracing the essentially libertarian ideology of eg the pop music industry and its leading figures as well as key elements of actual libertarianism during the struggle against the Vietnam War. This IMO has contributed to the absence of any popular socialist tendency in the US at present.
We now have a widespread notion that even in the absence of the unstable fusion once known as "liberalism" in the U.S., you can have a valid non-socialist Left, which has IMO influenced the white and non-black "allies" of BLM to the extent that they are protesting not only police racist murder but the broader injustices and innate unsustainability of capitalism.
Comrades Lause, Meeropol, and Proyect (et al) are of course not personally to blame for this,--on the contrary--but the ideological suicide of the Left over the past three quarters of a century remains the responsibility of the Left as a whole.
Putting it another way, the de facto ideology of the encampments may increasingly represent the transformation of a revolutionary potential to a counter-revolutionary potential. It has much in common with the underrated persuasiveness of Trumpism, which gives concrete form to something new in the world of ideologies that has much in common with its nominal Left antagonists.
WITBD?
I'll only add that Trump's resolute hostility to the very notion of social infrastructure and actual governance has many points of coincidence with the vulgar Graeberism of the encampments. The only reason for voting Biden is to preserve such luxuries as a Postal Service and the CDC for another two or three years so that the Left can come to grips with its failures. The collapse of liberal democracy isn't something to cheer on even if it may be inevitable.
Again--trying to keep this above the waist and serious.
I want to make a distinction. Trump is not only a distraction he is practically irrelevant to what is happening. Yes, he is a culmination but the Republic has been in danger for about 75 years now. The ruling class's unwritten constitution of "Empire" has overwhelmed the written constitution and it is the Democratic Party that was the architect of the unwritten constitution. Now everyday democratic freedoms are at stake and there are whole sections of the Democratic Party, who are shocked.
Let me repeat, Somebody like Trump has been inevitable for the last 20 years and has been baked into the unwritten National Security State constitution for the last 75 years. All this liberal non-sense of focusing on Trump is what has gotten us in this situation in the first place. Trump could say or do anything and it wouldn't matter without the backing of his enablers. If his enablers get away with a less legal coup d'etat then and only then will Trump be the main problem, because then he and his cronies will begin to purge as many people as they can.
Focusing on Trump as the main problem is demobilizing. Focusing on Trump is focusing on Biden as an alternative to Trump. Let's be clear if Biden gets put into the Presidency instead of Trump we will just be waiting around for the next Trump. Trumps and their kin are inevitable in the current system and the only reason to hope that Biden wins over Trump is that it will give us time to breathe and organize.
Trump barely knows how to play chess. But while the Republicans are playing the game of chess very badly everybody else is playing ducks and drakes. This not only includes the liberals it also includes the left.
There is nothing. There is absolutely nothing that anybody is doing of real import to prevent a coup d'etat that is as plain as the street scene out my window. There are rank-and-file organizations and they should be preparing stress tests for mobilization. We need an ad-hoc leadership of mostly people of color to lead working people to form now and to test their powers of mobilization now if we are going to prevent this.
Those of you who think we are fighting Trump in this slow-motion legal coup d'etat are deluding yourself. We are not fighting Trump. We are fighting the whole Republican Party and the billionaires behind it.
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 06:05 PM, Mark Lause wrote:
We are not the enemy.
Neither are we particularly effective about being THEIR enemy.
Your saying so does not make it so. This is a glib and arrogant cheap shot that does not constitute a valid reply to what I wrote. Your deserved eminence as a historian does not make this kind of shallow nonsense acceptable or even tolerable.
On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 06:05 PM, Mark Lause wrote:
We are not the enemy.
Neither are we particularly effective about being THEIR enemy.
Your saying so does not make it so. This is a glib and arrogant cheap shot that does not constitute a valid reply to what I wrote. Your deserved eminence as a historian does not make this kind of shallow nonsense acceptable or even tolerable.
I cannot disagree with anything you said. I guess I’m wondering if it’s a huge betrayal to cast a no vote for Trump (aka vote for Biden) and keep doing all the things that you say about building the power of the working class.
You pose the question as though we have to concede to either. Our job is to build the independent power of the working class, which means encouraging independent action in the streets. We favor more, larger, and better organized mass actions. Who the chief of police is going to be isn't really our problem. We get the best results if we apply the only real independent weight we have in the political process.
We might be having a different discussion if the Democrats
Biden and the other Democrats instinctively respond to any rumor about the demonstors engaging in "violence" by disassociated themselves as quickly and clearly as they can. To calls for defunding the police, Biden promises more funding and more logistical goodies for the police. Like Trump, Biden claims to favor universal medical courage, and--also like Trump--it belies what he's done. Ditto for social security, wars, and other issues. Neither has actually done anything good to address climate change and inequalities.
Trump is probably the most piss-poor excuse for a human being that's occupied the White House in my lifetime, and we should thoroughly detest him, his family, his entire criminal party. I particularly hate the fact that he's an omnipresent feature of American life and culture, but realize that this reflects the oft-discussed priorities of corporate media. Still, Trump and his lot do what they do because they all know they can get away with it. They knew and know that Dubya, his CIA daddy, Reagan, and even Nixon never really had their power grabs checked or balanced.
Who had the job of checking and balancing that? Who has been whining incessantly about them for the last three years and done virtually nothing to check this trend? Since the aftermath of Nxon, the Democrats have pursued a strategy oriented to getting the kind of donor support that Nixon had, which meant ignoring the needs of the voters and encouraging the Republican to be awful enough to push people to vote Democratic. So nobody can really be surprised that Trump's term has been characterized by more and more objectionable conduct.
So, you have one party that's made a religion of cruelty and robbery, and another that's made a strategy of not effectively opposing it.
Their rules for their game is to force us to pick between them.
Trump is far more than a distraction. He is a harbinger of the end of 'liberal democracy" in the united states, very possibly the agent of that dissolution.
If you fail to grasp the consequences of the convulsion that will probably ensue from that, you are in the same camp as Ted Kaczynski, John Zerzan, and--on the other hand--all the halfassed autonomists who have been shadowing BLM with their self-indulgent little Zones in the childish belief that such stunts are themselves revolutionary--the more so because any other form of infrastructure, voting, military command structures and other revolutionary necessities are just like fucking old and like horizontal and like we are better than fucking that, and OK boomer and let's shoot all the computer programmers, and fuck you.
The whole thing and nearly the entire corpus of potentially revolutionary young people are imbued with the transcendental individualist nonsense that, following in the path of the Popular Front, finally evicted any hope of mass socialism during the struggle against the Vietnam War--thanks in part to neoliberal oracles like the armies of wealthy rock star who got themselves accepted as somehow revolutionary while pushing de facto libertarianism, having one's cake and eating it too, and the politics of abstract moral gesticulation--in short, Rolling-Stoneism and the bullshit that goes along with it.
This ideology is the degenerate and increasingly fragmentary offscouring of the old Popular Front--which, being Stalinist, did not really care what people thought or said as long as in the view of the leadership the idiots involved were useful and could be used.
The reason why the Left is repeatedly confronted with the problem of the lesser evil is that the left has completely, utterly, and irrevocably failed--beginning with the Vietnam antiwar movement--to commit to socialism except as a kind of Science Fair project to which any child can bring her own clever papier-mache exhibit.
The Biden lesser evil offers us the continuity of the infrastructure that the current mass left movement regards as unnecessary, if not an actual impediment, where they do not stupidly take it for granted--a Postal Service, accurate government statistics, functioning bourgeois elections, a CDC, an NIH, the WHO, international standards bodies, the census, and thing after boring thing that our anarchist Left, very much like the Trumpists, regard as an impediment to "air fraydom."
This necessary infrastructure has not been seriously threatened in any election before now--not even by the terrifying candidacy of George Wallace.
When the broad eclectic ex Popular Front Left en masse yielded a consensus for this bastard libertarianism instead of socialism in order to fight the Vietnam War, the Left de facto opted for a Lesser Evil that continues to bedevil us to this day. The enemy is us.
From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-review@...> Date: September 27, 2020 at 3:01:11 PM EDT To: h-review@... Cc: H-Net Staff <revhelp@...> Subject:H-Net Review [H-Diplo]: Zimmerman on Joseph-Gabriel, 'Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire' Reply-To: h-review@...
Annette K.. Joseph-Gabriel. Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire. Urbana University of Illinois Press, 2019. 264 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-04293-5.
Reviewed by Sarah J. Zimmerman (Western Washington University) Published on H-Diplo (September, 2020) Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
The middle decades of the twentieth century were a thrilling time for reimagining a new world order. Pan-Africanist intellectual and political movements extended across francophone Afro-Atlantic worlds and generated new ways of imagining shared identities and collective action. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel's _Reimagining Liberation _is a timely monograph that recasts this history of anticolonial black liberation to attend to what "decolonization [would] look like if we took into account, even centered, women's visions for a decolonial future" (p. 159). The women included in this book are already known for their participation in Négritude or their membership in political bodies like the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain and the French Union's High Council (1946-58). Here, Annette Joseph-Gabriel foregrounds the intellectual production and radical politics of Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Jane Vialle, Eugénie Eboué-Tell, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson in a history of intersectional feminist activism. These women had revolutionary, at times discordant, aspirations for equitable futures. Their actions add complexity to historical narratives of mid-century electoral politics and black liberation movements. _Reimagining Liberation _calls attention to important antecedents for contemporary Afro-feminist and African feminist action in francophone worlds.
_Reimagined Liberation _contributes to recent scholarly work that historicizes how black French women confronted Republican universalism's gendered and racialized hypocrisies.[1] Citizenship and its limitations are often central to these critiques. For Joseph-Gabriel, citizenship is less a rights-bearing political status and more an intellectual and political practice. Joseph-Gabriel uses "decolonial citizenship" to frame the diverse means through which black women struggled for their envisioned futures within and without French civic identity in diverse geographies. "Decolonial," as opposed to "anticolonial," accounts for intersectional political activities and literary production that championed forms of liberation that do not fit neatly within teleological narratives featuring pan-African independence movements during the postwar era. In pairing decolonial praxis with citizenship, Joseph-Gabriel seeks to "untether citizenship from the narrow confines of the nation-state as the only political community imaginable and advocates a shift toward plural forms of belonging" (p. 11). Decolonial citizenship is an analytical frame used to account for the incongruities and manifold expressions of black women's struggles for cultural and political transformation in arenas that scaled from village to department to colony to empire. These women redrew the boundaries of black political space and advocated for collective activism that bridged the Caribbean archipelago, French Equatorial Africa, French Soudan, and the transnational global South.
_Reimagining Liberation_ acknowledges that the conventional colonial archive is a product of patriarchal discrimination and anti-black racism that preserves silences and biases around the women included in this book. Joseph-Gabriel locates the political visions of black women in biographical, epistolary, and literary texts produced by and about them. Her examination of autobiographies and personal letters illustrates how public and private spheres were mutually constitutive in developing the intersectional feminist ideologies of these women. Joseph-Gabriel combines historical and literary analysis to interrogate a wide range of sources. Fictional materials--novels and film--provide contextual and comparable examples of black women's activism in order to "enlarge the field of possibility for imagining and representing women's contestation of colonial exploitation" (p. 27). This methodology importantly questions the historical production, accuracy, and utility of any source. Joseph-Gabriel's reliance on fictional sources for historical context is methodologically unconventional. However, this strategy uncompromisingly centers African women's important political visions without eclipsing them with the masculine worlds they operated in.
_Reimagining Liberation_ is organized around vignettes of African and African-descended women that illustrate their decolonial praxis and their radical imaginings of future worlds. Early chapters address Martinicans Suzanne Césaire and Paulette Nardal, who advocated for postwar departmentalization yet remained critical of racial discrimination in mainland France and new forms of imperialism at home. In the face of US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, Césaire championed an archipelagic, Caribbean-based anti-imperialism. Nardal portrayed Martinique as a Caribbean space with histories both distinct from and entangled with France. The next chapter addresses the political dynamism of French Guianese Eugénie Eboué-Tell and French Equatorial African Jane Vialle. Both women capitalized on their participation in the French Resistance to win seats in the High Council of the French Union. From within the French government, Eboué-Tell and Vialle endorsed legislative reform that would increase equality for inhabitants of overseas France. They, along with Césaire and Nardal, sought radical social and legal change without advocating for independence from France.
The final chapters focus on women whose decolonial politics aimed for political independence. Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson respectively championed pan-Africanism, grassroots rural organizing, and South-South transnationalism. For Blouin, a _métisse _Central African women, pan-Africanism allowed her to claim citizenship in plural registers at a time when black nationalism influenced the discourse of liberation politics across the African continent. Kéita, a professional midwife, renounced French citizenship in order to run for local election in French Soudan. At this level, Kéita was better positioned to meaningfully challenge French colonialism and patriarchy in local government. The Blouin and Kéita chapters use fictional literature and film to contextualize the radical politics of these women. In the case of Kéita, Joseph-Gabriel entangles her life history with images and storylines from Ousmane Sembene's film _Emitaï_ (1971) and his book _God's Bits of Wood _(1960)--fictional portrayals of anticolonial historical events in French West Africa. Unlike the other women in this book, Eslanda Robeson was not of French Empire. Her travels in Francophone Africa convinced her that ending colonialism was a necessary step for black liberation across the global South. In the epilogue, Joseph-Gabriel examines the postcolonial black internationalism on display in the pages of _AWA. _Produced by an all-female Senegalese editorial team during the 1960s and 70s, this French-language magazine promoted a "global black feminism at the height of African nationalist movements" (p. 190). The pages of _AWA _promote discordant visions of liberation that convey the complexity of postcolonial black feminine life.
_Reimagining Liberation_ celebrates the diverse epistemologies and broken lineages of black feminist thought occurring within postwar francophone worlds. This generative study innovatively employs an interdisciplinary methodology that foregrounds and takes seriously black women's decolonial practices and futurity. In doing so, Joseph-Gabriel has added significantly to histories of black intellectual and political movements, as well as Atlantic and French colonial history. Race and gender are dealt with deliberately and in nuanced ways throughout the book. A critique of class and educational background would add further complexity to a project that exposes the coloniality of power, as well as champions international and intersectional activism. Ultimately, Joseph-Gabriel's first monograph serves as a model for decolonizing history and prioritizing the intellectual labor of black women in the past. _Reimagining Liberation _is a book for our times.
_Sarah J. Zimmerman is an associate professor of history at Western Washington University. Her research focuses on the experiences of women and the operation of gender in West Africa and French Empire. She recently published _Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers' Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire_ (Ohio University Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in the _International Journal of African Historical Studies_ and _Les Temps modernes_._
Note
[1]. Lorelle D. Semley, _To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France's Atlantic Empire_ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Félix F. Germain and Silyane Larcher, eds., _Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016_ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).
Citation: Sarah J. Zimmerman. Review of Joseph-Gabriel, Annette K.., _Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire_. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55560
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
By sheer
coincidence, two documentaries have both begun showing as VOD
with identical subject matters, the privatization of publicly
owned land—mainly in the west. Ifirst became interestedin this topic after
reading Christopher Ketcham’s article in the February 2015
Harper’s titled “The Great Republican Land Heist: Cliven Bundy
and the politicians who are plundering the West”. When I saw
that Christopher had written a book titled “This Land: How
Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American
West”,I reviewed it for CounterPunch. If Donald Trump ever stands trial
for crimes against the public interest, I’d love to see
Christopher as prosecuting attorney with the two documentaries
serving as evidence.
Ok I’ll bite. What’s the alternative? Concede to Trump and keep fighting in the streets? Why not elect Biden and keep fighting in the streets? (serious questions)
On Sep 27, 2020, at 5:19 AM, Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote:
Dan La Botz says vote for Biden to prevent Trump from seizing power like an American Pinochet. Sure. Since BLM-led general strikes have been forcing the bourgeoisie to its knees, there's no alternative.
In the Midst of Crisis, Union Leaders go to Sleep:
the Situation among Postal Workers, late September 2020
By Tim Hall, Detroit Workers' Voice, Sept. 26, 2020
There is a pause in the postal workers' mass actions, due to the unwillingness of
the union leaders to call for any major events. The widespread-but-tiny rallies at
300 locations, (according to American Postal Workers Union leaders) across the
country at the end of August have not been followed up. The APWU leaders are
setting aside any idea of mass action, instead relying on the November election to
remove Trump, the principal roadblock to any improvements. They are focusing
their efforts on defending mail-in balloting, whose proper conduct clearly would
favor Biden against Trump. Their focus is entirely on getting Biden into office, not
on building the strength of the workers to defend themselves. Their refusal to call
more and expanding actions is especially grievous, considering that in August
and September the plight of the post office and of postal workers was on
everyone's lips, due to late deliveries, the publicity about DeJoy's removal of
postal machinery and Trump's attacks on the post office; never had postal
workers had such a chance to make a forceful statement and receive wide public
support. But the top union leaders. Dimondstein of the APWU and Rolando of the
National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) refused to call the workers into
action. This was a betrayal of the postal workers.
On September 17 a federal judge issued a nationwide order that forbids the
postal service from making any operational changes that could interfere with the
delivery of the mail in the election. Another judge a few days later ruled similarly.
Ballots must be considered first-class mail or priority. Late trips by carriers, which
DeJoy banned, causing delays, are permitted, as is overtime. DeJoy was ordered
to return removed sorting machines. This is a partial victory for the postal unions
and the many other forces alarmed by the destructive activities of Postmaster
DeJoy, Trump's lackey, on the delivery of mail. It does not, however, guarantee
that the election will be run properly, but it does improve the prospects. On
September 24 DeJoy declared that he could not re-install the 711 sorting
machines removed nationally (the post office normally removes about 380 per
year), as they had been dismantled and cannibalized for parts for other machines,
but he claimed the USPS was capable of processing the ballots, an assurance
which few postal workers believe.
More Information on Postal Workers' Plight Emerges
While things are quiet, more information has emerged about the extremely
difficult situation postal workers have faced, not only during the COVID-19
pandemic, which has exacerbated everything, but also for years leading into it.
This material strengthens the points I made in my last report (1). During the
COVID pandemic, 83 postal workers have died from the disease, the number of
postal workers testing positive has tripled from 31,000 to 96,000 from June to
September, and about 52,700 of the agency's 630,000 employees have taken
time off due to COVID, either as sick or quarantining or caring for COVID victims.
This goes a long way toward explaining the delays in delivery that developed
even before DeJoy got his claws on the service. Workers have been working
overtime for years, due to management's refusal to hire sufficient new workers.
One Detroit processing worker nearly died on the machine, having been on the
grind for years.
An article from Salon (2) illustrates the deep difficulties postal workers have
faced. In addition to showing the widespread destructive effect of the pandemic,
the article also exposes the poor preparations by postal management and their
mishandling of the infected and healthy workers in pandemic conditions.
Under-staffing, as I pointed out last time, leading to inflexibility and late deliveries,
is also exposed.
In late summer the union leaders focused their efforts on getting rid of Postmaster
Joy and his disastrous alterations of postal production methods and plans. But
now that federal judges have ordered the mail to be more or less normally
processed, efforts to get rid of DeJoy have subsided. These efforts are no longer
prominently featured on the APWU web site.
Efforts to Get Funds for the USPS
These efforts are completely stalled, while Congress is unable to produce any
kind of stimulus for the masses. The House has passed a bill that would give $25
billion to the USPS, but it is stalled in the Senate. According the APWU, without
this aid the post office will run out of money by early next year. But this, too, takes
a back seat in the leadership's eyes to the election, or will be solved, they hope,
by the election.
At the end of August, 300 or so nationwide small rallies were held by postal
workers to protest privatization. They seemed to have had only a minor effect on
the public, though they were featured on the evening local news in many places,
but they made a statement in the midst of the intense national discussion that
was taking place then about the post office. But the APWU leadership did not
follow up on them, and the chance to create some momentum and have a major
impact was lost. In April and May car caravans of protest took place in Detroit;
this too could have been used to generate momentum. They created enthusiasm
among the workers themselves at the Detroit processing center. By now,
however, even the call-ins to various Congresspeople have diminished; all
emphasis is on the election.
The APWU website highlights, as its central message, a PBS feature with
Dimondstein under the slogan “Save the Post Office!” It was recorded in the first
days of August. Such is the dead-headed lethargy of the top union leaders! Here
we are, one month away from the election, and they are running a video in which
the PBS interviewer begins by saying, “Here we are, three months to the day from
the election....” Also on the web site, Dimondstein has a feature prominently
claiming it will help the workers “check your voter registration status and get the
information you need to vote, including polling place locations and resources to
vote by mail safely, securely and on time.” It doesn't work. The last activity of the
“Grand Alliance” (with the NALC) was June 23. The latest activity listed in the web
site under “Campaigns: The U.S. Mail is Not for Sale!” is the turn-in of petitions
defending the postal service on January 6, 2020, right around the time when the
novel coronavirus was setting foot in this country. Dimondstein should audition for
Rip Van Winkle.
The APWU leadership has engaged the members in phone-calling and petitions
to Congress in an attempt to over-ride the Republican control of the Senate and
hence of all legislation. But even this is on hold. There is not even an explicit call,
with tactics on how, to defend the mailing process at the plants and at the
stations. Just... Vote! and all will be well....
As for the carriers' union, according the the NALC web site, the leadership is not
extremely concerned about the current crisis. The union has joined with other
postal unions (presumably the APWU) and postal management, including DeJoy,
to create an Election Task Force to guarantee that the mail is delivered properly.
This has set up local task forces to try to handle any problems that may arise. It
does not envision a crisis. The NALC did not participate in the APWU-led rallies
at post offices on August 28. All Fairly Quiet on the Postal Front, seems to the the
NALC's view.
The Labor Notes group has been meeting. I have missed a couple of them.
Minutes of the meetings show that while they are in touch with the conditions they
are mostly concerned with preparing for handling mail-in balloting and have few
thoughts of mass actions. They have some contacts in cities where the members
of the postal Board of Governors live and may bring pressure on them.
There seems to be no prospect of any large-scale mass action called by the
union leaderships. The August actions could have been used to fire things up for
something larger, like perhaps rallies at each state capital, but that momentum
was quickly lost, without any plans for more being presented at the time. The only
thing the APWU leadership has engaged the members in is phone-calling and
petitions to Congress in an attempt to over-ride the Republican control of the
Senate and hence of all legislation. But even this is on hold.
This is what happens when the rank and file has no organization to directly
express itself and relies on the top union leaders, Democrats or Republicans, to
lead a fight work the workers' interests. Next to nothing. A grand opportunity lost,
squandered. Just squandered.... <>
Notes
(1) Tim Hall, "Postal workers outraged as attacks on the postal service continue,
but what are the postal unions doing?", August 26,
2020,http://www.communistvoice.org/DSWV-200826.html.
(2) Maryam Jameel, "Postal workers are catching COVID by the thousands. It’s
one more threat to voting by mail", Sept. 19, 2020,
Salon,https://www.yahoo.com/news/postal-workers-catching-covid-thousands-155901798.html. <>
The article does admit that 60% of white workers voted for Trump. It then proceeds to imply that this is nothing but a continuation of a voting pattern that has gone on for many years. But that, in turn, implies that Trump is just a continuation of what's been happening in the Republican Party for many years. Of course, there are elements of the past Republican Party in "Trumpism", but to fail to see a sharp break really is a failure to see what's happening in the US (and the world, in fact). This, then, implies a sharp shift in the thinking, the consciousness, of his supporters, including white workers. Not that it's something completely new or different, but that elements of the consciousness that were deeply buried have come to the foreground and are dominant now.
So, yes, this is new.
John Reimann
--
“Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” Felicity Dowling Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
