Thomas Riggins
Engels discusses the dialectics of quantity and quality in chapter 12 of part one of Anti-Dühring. In this chapter Engels takes on Dühring anti-dialectical approach to philosophy. Not having understood Hegel, Dühring thinks that since a contradiction appears to be absurd (how can you have A and not-A at the same time?) there can be no contradictions in reality. Engels sets himself the task of clearing up Dühring confusions.
Examples of contradictions in nature, according to Engels are, for example, MOTION, where a body is "in one and the same place and also not in it" and LIFE, where a being "is at each moment itself and yet something else." This, I must admit, sounds a bit like Sartre's existentialism and is perhaps for our time a bit more metaphorical than scientific. What Engels means by motion being a contradiction is perhaps best expressed in the following quote from the article "Motion" in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
"The contradictory nature of motion consists in the unbroken unity of two opposing factors --- changeability and stability, motion and rest. in fact, the concept of change makes sense only in connection with the idea of a relatively stable, continuously fixed state. This very change, however, is at the same time also a fixed state, which continues and maintains itself; that is, it also possesses stability. In this contradictory unity of changeability and stability the leading role is played by changeability, for everything new in the world first appears by means of it, whereas stability and rest merely fix what has been attained through this process" (from the article by V.I. Sviderskii).
Dühring also makes fun of Das Kapital because of Marx's use of dialectics. Marx's book, Dühring writes , is an example of the "absence of natural and intelligible logic" resulting in "dialectical frills and mazes and conceptual arabesques." As an example of Dühring complete misunderstanding of Marx's Das Kapital, Engels focuses on his attack on Marx's use of the dialectical notion that quantitative changes bring about qualitative changes.
Here is what Dühring himself has to say about this: "What a comical effect is produced by the reference to the confused, hazy Hegelian notion that quantity changes into quality, and that therefore an advance, when it reaches a certain size, becomes capital by this quantitative increase alone!"
By adding the word "alone" Dühring falsifies both the Hegelian law and Marx's understanding of it. This is what Marx wrote in Vol. 1 of Das Kapital when he discussed how a sum of exchange values, after reaching a certain quantity could become capital. "Here, as in natural science, IS SHOWN the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his LOGIC) that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes."
Engels says Marx held a sum of exchange values can become capital only when it reaches a definite minimum size, depending on the conditions, "this fact is a PROOF OF THE CORRECTNESS of the Hegelian law." Dühring says Marx held BECAUSE quantity changes in to quality THEREFORE at a certain sum exchange value will become capital. The part about "depending on the conditions" is left out so "the very opposite" of what Marx meant [ i.e., an effect is taken as a cause] is put forth as his meaning. This is typical of what Dühring calls his "philosophy of reality." And, Engels adds, "he has the cheek to describe as COMIC the nonsense which he himself has fabricated."
One of the most obvious examples of the dialectical law under discussion is that of H2O. Water in the solid state becomes a liquid with the quantitative addition of heat and with even more heat the liquid state qualitatively changes into a gas.
Engels also points out that all of Part IV of Das Kapital (where Marx discusses the production of relative surplus value and modern industry, etc.) "deals with innumerable cases in which quantitative change alters the quality, and also qualitative changes alter the quantity, ot the things under consideration." The molecular theory of modern [1880s] chemistry is also based on this law.
Thus, Engels maintains, in both the social world and the natural world around us we "can see how 'quantity changes into quality,'and this allegedly confused, hazy Hegelian notion appears in so to speak corporeal form in things and processes--- and no one but Herr Dühring is confused and befogged by it."
Next we will deal with the last chapter on Engels' discussion of philosophy in Anti-Dühring-- the chapter on the negation of the negation.
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Sunday, March 21, 2010
Brave New World
Brain Scans Could Be Marketing Tool of the Future
ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2010) — Using advanced tools to see the human brain at work, a new generation of marketing experts may be able to test a product's appeal while it is still being designed, according to a new analysis by two researchers at Duke University and Emory University.
So-called "neuromarketing" takes the tools of modern brain science, like the functional MRI, and applies them to the somewhat abstract likes and dislikes of customer decision-making.
Though this raises the specter of marketers being able to read people's minds (more than they already do), neuromarketing may prove to be an affordable way for marketers to gather information that was previously unobtainable, or that consumers themselves may not even be fully aware of, says Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke.
In a perspective piece appearing online in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience , Ariely and Gregory S. Berns of Emory's departments of psychiatry, economics and neuropolicy, offer tips on what to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firm, and what ethical considerations there might be for the new field. They also point to some words of caution in interpreting such data to form marketing decisions.
Neuromarketing may never be cheap enough to replace focus groups and other methods used to assess existing products and advertising, but it could have real promise in gauging the conscious and unconscious reactions of consumers in the design phase of such varied products as "food, entertainment, buildings and political candidates," Ariely says.
ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2010) — Using advanced tools to see the human brain at work, a new generation of marketing experts may be able to test a product's appeal while it is still being designed, according to a new analysis by two researchers at Duke University and Emory University.
So-called "neuromarketing" takes the tools of modern brain science, like the functional MRI, and applies them to the somewhat abstract likes and dislikes of customer decision-making.
Though this raises the specter of marketers being able to read people's minds (more than they already do), neuromarketing may prove to be an affordable way for marketers to gather information that was previously unobtainable, or that consumers themselves may not even be fully aware of, says Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke.
In a perspective piece appearing online in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience , Ariely and Gregory S. Berns of Emory's departments of psychiatry, economics and neuropolicy, offer tips on what to look for when hiring a neuromarketing firm, and what ethical considerations there might be for the new field. They also point to some words of caution in interpreting such data to form marketing decisions.
Neuromarketing may never be cheap enough to replace focus groups and other methods used to assess existing products and advertising, but it could have real promise in gauging the conscious and unconscious reactions of consumers in the design phase of such varied products as "food, entertainment, buildings and political candidates," Ariely says.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Annals of Hype: The Real Meaning of the Olympics
What every Marxist should know about the Olympics--tr
The Five Ring Circus - Myths and realities of the Olympic Games [reposted from GamesMonitor]
Book Review | Human Rights | Olympics Studies | Planning & Development | Politics | Protest | Vancouver 2010
"The Olympic Games, once considered the pinnacle of athleticism and fair play, have become a cesspool of greed, backroom deals and the wholesale trampling of civil liberties. In Vancouver, preparations for the 2010 Games have had a substantial negative impact on the environment and have resulted in the 'economic cleansing' of the poor and homeless.
Five Ring Circus details the history of how Vancouver won the bid for the 2010 Games, who was involved, and what the real motives were. It describes the role of corporate media in promoting the Games, the machinations of Government and business, and the opposition that has emerged." (Back cover blurb)
"This book is the IOC and VANOC's worst nightmare. Five Ring Circus is a well-researched and challenging examination of how the Olympics is, at its heart, all about real estate mega deals, and making rich developers even richer. Christopher Shaw should get a medal for investigative journalism."
David Eby, lawyer, Pivot Legal Society
The Five Ring Circus - Myths and realities of the Olympic Games [reposted from GamesMonitor]
Book Review | Human Rights | Olympics Studies | Planning & Development | Politics | Protest | Vancouver 2010
"The Olympic Games, once considered the pinnacle of athleticism and fair play, have become a cesspool of greed, backroom deals and the wholesale trampling of civil liberties. In Vancouver, preparations for the 2010 Games have had a substantial negative impact on the environment and have resulted in the 'economic cleansing' of the poor and homeless.
Five Ring Circus details the history of how Vancouver won the bid for the 2010 Games, who was involved, and what the real motives were. It describes the role of corporate media in promoting the Games, the machinations of Government and business, and the opposition that has emerged." (Back cover blurb)
"This book is the IOC and VANOC's worst nightmare. Five Ring Circus is a well-researched and challenging examination of how the Olympics is, at its heart, all about real estate mega deals, and making rich developers even richer. Christopher Shaw should get a medal for investigative journalism."
David Eby, lawyer, Pivot Legal Society
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
A Sock it to the Working Class Budget in New Jersey
by Norman Markowitz
Chris Christie, a very overweight Rudolf Giuliani imitator, was elected Governor of New Jersey last year, in large part because of the austerity policies of the Democratic incumbent. When parties that depend on the votes of lower income people fail to advance progressive policies in economic crises, they usually lose, even though that often means that parties which represent upper income groups win and advance policies that are objectively worse.
That has happened with a vengeance in New Jersey. Christie unveiled his budget yesterday and called for 1,300 job layoffs, an $820 million reduction in school aid, closing of state psychiatric hospitals, Meanwhile, Christie also called for heavy increases in deductibles and copayments for a state drug plan for low income senior citizens and the disabled, sharp cuts in school breakfast aid and aid to low income renters.
And it gets worse. Plans to intimidate local communities into limiting wage increases for public employees. Property tax freezes on the model of California's proposition 13. Reduction in business taxes.
Christie contends that taxes are the problem in New Jersey. His Republican predecessor, Christine Todd Whitman went a long way in creating the problem when she reduced state income taxes in the 1990s by 30 percent. Christie comically accuses his critics of seeking to "demonize" him and divide the people. He had with big money support sought to demonize public employees and divide them from private sector employees, appeal to the worst kind of suburban isolationism
The class bias in Christie's budget is clear. It goes against everything in President Obama's stimulus package. It arrogantly proclaims as necessary policies to overcome the crisis the very policies which produced the crisis. It is a textbook example of the old definition of a reactionary. Someone who learns nothing and forgets nothing and repeats the same disastrous policies over and over again.
Public employee unions, progressive state organizations, the larger labor movement, will be organizing against this anti-working class budget and Christie's attempt to use the state government as a club against communities and labor. As in life, the only way to stand up to a bully or in this case a reactionary governor with an bullying authoritarian style, is to fight back and the fightback will hopefully make Christie the Biggest Loser.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
NYC'S RACIST TREATMENT OF ARAB EDUCATOR EXPOSED
[In response to the EEOC findings the Bloomberg Administration has said it will continue its racist behavior with regard to this issue-- sending a clear message to Arab New Yorkers that they are second class citizens so far as Hizz Honor's government is concerned]
FYI Reposted from Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make The World A Better Place
EEOC FINDS BIAS IN NYC FIRING ARAB SCHOOL PRINCIPAL, ALMONTASER
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that the New York City Department of Education (DOC) discriminated against Debbie Almontaser, founding principal of the Khalil Gibran Academy, the City’s first Arab-language public school, when they removed her from her position. Readers of this blog may recall a ferocious campaign waged by Jewish neocons and Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes, David Yerushalmi, the N.Y. Post, and Stop the Madrasa against the school and Almontaser personally.
Matters came to a head when Almontaser was smeared over a T-shirt displaying the word “Intifada.” Her opponents made her out to be a supporter of Islamism and armed resistance because she explained the Arabic meaning of the word to a reporter, while not denouncing it sufficiently. When Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein dropped her like a hot potato, her days were numbered. After her forced resignation, she sued and lost. Then she filed a claim with EEOC for discrimination. The N.Y. Times reports on the finding:
A federal commission has determined that New York City’s Department of Education discriminated against the founding principal of an Arabic-language public school by forcing her to resign in 2007 following a storm of controversy driven by opponents of the school.
Acting on a complaint filed last year by the principal, Debbie Almontaser, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that the department “succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on D.O.E. as an employer,” according to a letter issued by the commission on Tuesday.
The commission said that the department had discriminated against Ms. Almontaser, a Muslim of Yemeni descent, “on account of her race, religion and national origin.”
This is a great deal for civil rights in New York and in America. It is a day that Arab-Americans can be proud. It is a day when all Americans should be proud. Debbie Almontaser turned to the federal government for redress and it did what it could to make her whole.
This is a day when Muslim-haters like Norman Podhoretz and his friends I mentioned above should hide their heads in shame (though they will shake their fists in defiance instead). Their bullying has been shown for what it is: un-American, unfair, unjust. We are better than the haters in Stop the Madrasa. The democratic system worked.
My chief regret is that the political leadership of New York and the Jewish communal leadership were cowards and turned tail at the first sign of trouble. Instead of standing up to the ranters, Bloomberg folded at the earliest opportunity. The New York Jewish federation, after allowing Rabbi Michael Paley to represent it in the fight on behalf of the Academy, forced him to shut up. I was never able to determine who specifically made this decision–whether it was an executive decision by CEO Jon Ruskay or a lay decision influenced by a wealthy neocon board member like James Tisch. Whoever made the decision betrayed the courage necessary for true leadership. Instead of speaking out and doing the right thing, they let Daniel Pipes present the Jewish community’s position by default.
The EEOC called on New York City to do the right thing:
The commission asked the Department of Education to reach a “just resolution” with Ms. Almontaser and to consider her demands, which include reinstatement to her old job, back pay, damages of $300,000 and legal fees. Should the two sides fail to reach an agreement, the dispute will end up in court, her lawyer said.
Instead of hearing the message, the City’s attorney said his client would fight Ms. Almontaser every step of the way. They still haven’t gotten the message. I only hope that cooler heads will prevail. The former principal was wronged and deserves her job back and the chance to lead this school. That’s what’s fair. That’s what’s American.
I do take issue with one statement in this report:
Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a moderate Muslim, her critics succeeded in recasting her as a “9/11 denier” and a “jihadist.”
This is very sloppy writing and editing. Her critics did NOT succeed in recasting her as any of those things. But the mud flung by the Islamophobes resonated in certain quarters (like the pages of the Post) and her employer hung her out to dry. There was never ANY truth to any of the claims against Almontaser. They were all lies. So in that sense her critics could not have succeeded in any objective sense in labeling her. But they waged a vitriolic racist campaign which the DOE and city refused to counteract. Rather than fight, they folded.
In its criticism of the City’s actions, the Commission found that Almontaser had said nor done anything related to the T-shirt incident that warranted her removal:
It was The Post’s article, the commission wrote in its letter this week, that prompted the Department of Education to force Ms. Almontaser to resign. (City officials have said that she resigned voluntarily.)
“Significantly, it was not her actual remarks, but their elaboration by the reporter — creating waves of explicit anti-Muslim bias from several extremist sources — that caused D.O.E. to act,” the commission’s letter said.
I’m delighted that the EEOC pointedly noted the nasty role playing by Pipes and STM and labelled them “extremist.
FYI Reposted from Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make The World A Better Place
EEOC FINDS BIAS IN NYC FIRING ARAB SCHOOL PRINCIPAL, ALMONTASER
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that the New York City Department of Education (DOC) discriminated against Debbie Almontaser, founding principal of the Khalil Gibran Academy, the City’s first Arab-language public school, when they removed her from her position. Readers of this blog may recall a ferocious campaign waged by Jewish neocons and Islamophobes like Daniel Pipes, David Yerushalmi, the N.Y. Post, and Stop the Madrasa against the school and Almontaser personally.
Matters came to a head when Almontaser was smeared over a T-shirt displaying the word “Intifada.” Her opponents made her out to be a supporter of Islamism and armed resistance because she explained the Arabic meaning of the word to a reporter, while not denouncing it sufficiently. When Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein dropped her like a hot potato, her days were numbered. After her forced resignation, she sued and lost. Then she filed a claim with EEOC for discrimination. The N.Y. Times reports on the finding:
A federal commission has determined that New York City’s Department of Education discriminated against the founding principal of an Arabic-language public school by forcing her to resign in 2007 following a storm of controversy driven by opponents of the school.
Acting on a complaint filed last year by the principal, Debbie Almontaser, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that the department “succumbed to the very bias that creation of the school was intended to dispel and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on D.O.E. as an employer,” according to a letter issued by the commission on Tuesday.
The commission said that the department had discriminated against Ms. Almontaser, a Muslim of Yemeni descent, “on account of her race, religion and national origin.”
This is a great deal for civil rights in New York and in America. It is a day that Arab-Americans can be proud. It is a day when all Americans should be proud. Debbie Almontaser turned to the federal government for redress and it did what it could to make her whole.
This is a day when Muslim-haters like Norman Podhoretz and his friends I mentioned above should hide their heads in shame (though they will shake their fists in defiance instead). Their bullying has been shown for what it is: un-American, unfair, unjust. We are better than the haters in Stop the Madrasa. The democratic system worked.
My chief regret is that the political leadership of New York and the Jewish communal leadership were cowards and turned tail at the first sign of trouble. Instead of standing up to the ranters, Bloomberg folded at the earliest opportunity. The New York Jewish federation, after allowing Rabbi Michael Paley to represent it in the fight on behalf of the Academy, forced him to shut up. I was never able to determine who specifically made this decision–whether it was an executive decision by CEO Jon Ruskay or a lay decision influenced by a wealthy neocon board member like James Tisch. Whoever made the decision betrayed the courage necessary for true leadership. Instead of speaking out and doing the right thing, they let Daniel Pipes present the Jewish community’s position by default.
The EEOC called on New York City to do the right thing:
The commission asked the Department of Education to reach a “just resolution” with Ms. Almontaser and to consider her demands, which include reinstatement to her old job, back pay, damages of $300,000 and legal fees. Should the two sides fail to reach an agreement, the dispute will end up in court, her lawyer said.
Instead of hearing the message, the City’s attorney said his client would fight Ms. Almontaser every step of the way. They still haven’t gotten the message. I only hope that cooler heads will prevail. The former principal was wronged and deserves her job back and the chance to lead this school. That’s what’s fair. That’s what’s American.
I do take issue with one statement in this report:
Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a moderate Muslim, her critics succeeded in recasting her as a “9/11 denier” and a “jihadist.”
This is very sloppy writing and editing. Her critics did NOT succeed in recasting her as any of those things. But the mud flung by the Islamophobes resonated in certain quarters (like the pages of the Post) and her employer hung her out to dry. There was never ANY truth to any of the claims against Almontaser. They were all lies. So in that sense her critics could not have succeeded in any objective sense in labeling her. But they waged a vitriolic racist campaign which the DOE and city refused to counteract. Rather than fight, they folded.
In its criticism of the City’s actions, the Commission found that Almontaser had said nor done anything related to the T-shirt incident that warranted her removal:
It was The Post’s article, the commission wrote in its letter this week, that prompted the Department of Education to force Ms. Almontaser to resign. (City officials have said that she resigned voluntarily.)
“Significantly, it was not her actual remarks, but their elaboration by the reporter — creating waves of explicit anti-Muslim bias from several extremist sources — that caused D.O.E. to act,” the commission’s letter said.
I’m delighted that the EEOC pointedly noted the nasty role playing by Pipes and STM and labelled them “extremist.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Friday, March 12, 2010
History for Dummies in Texas
by Norman Markowitz
There is an article in today's New York Times about history textbooks and public school curriculum in Texas. If it weren't so sinister, so shameful, it would really be funny. By a vote of 11-4,(10 Republicans and 1 Democrat, versus 4 Democrats) curricula and textbooks are to be revised to bring Christianity and Milton Friedman back to the forefront of U.S. history. The "liberal bias" for the separation of Church and State, for the achievements of presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and even Texas own Lyndon Johnson, is to be combated by giving Ronald Reagan his due(nothing yet was said about GW Bush but that may be covered in current events) Nothing also was said about any new portrayals of the Civil War, where Texas of course fought on the side of the Confederacy, but who knows what will happen in the future. Perhaps the Texas Republican party will issue a formal apology for Abraham Lincoln's refusal to accept secession in 1861, and place an asterisk next to the Emancipation Proclamation.
Talking history in any such way to such people isn't really so useful. You can amass a huge amount of evidence to inform them that the leaders of the American revolution were very different Protestant Christians than they are--that they were products of the Enlightenment which in Texas would be called "secular humanism." That they were making sure that there would be no state church in America on the model of the British Empire, which they had just fought a revolution against. That they believed that religion was a private matter and that its alliance with the state and use by the state was against not only their revolution, but what they perceived as the best traditions of the Protestant Reformation. But these born again historians would never listen Theyt look at the Constitution in the literal way that they look at the bible
You could tell them till you blue in the face that anyone who puts Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek on the same level in textbooks as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes is preparing students for an Alice in Wonderland world at the very best, but they of course wouldn't listen
What this tells us is the need for national standards in subject areas like social studies, standards to be developed by teachers and scholars in the fields. Like most reactionaries, and the GOP today, these Texans don't want education as a springboard to critical and analytical thought, but, to paraphrase John Hobson, as a sort of drug to prevent such thought, to indoctrinate students into conventional wisdoms, however outdated and unscientific they may be. For that they really don't need teachers or textbooks even. They need something like priests bringing the old time religion to parishioners
Norman Markowitz
Palestine Inside Out (or Sadistic Colonialism Exposed)
Book review: Israel's occupation, inside out
Reviewed by Raymond Deane, [reposted from The Electronic Intifada]
Few conflicts, particularly "regional" ones, have spawned such mountains of analysis as that between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. What makes this situation exceptional, however, is the fact that Israel's one-sided war on the Palestinian people continues unabated while these books are being written, published, read and sometimes reviewed. In the time that it takes me to write this article, the state of Israel will in all probability have committed new crimes, more Palestinians will have been killed, tortured or dispossessed, and the Zionist project -- in the full light of day (metaphorically -- many of these crimes take place at dead of night) -- will have inched inexorably forward: "another dunum, another goat," as the old Zionist adage about land colonization goes.
The professional book-reviewer will hardly complain about this state of affairs. The activist reviewer, however, will rapidly tire of reading successive accounts of the same series of events, and will finally demand that any new book worth its salt should present a radically new perspective on these events, and/or advocate new and more effective modes of combating the occupation, and/or have the potential to influence public opinion in the right direction.
In view of the above-mentioned proliferation, it is astonishing that in his new book, in Israel's Occupation, Neve Gordon can claim with apparent accuracy that an "overview of the occupation" is "something that has not yet been done."
Described by the inimitable Alan Dershowitz as "a despicable example of a self-hating Jew and a self-hating Israeli," Gordon is an academic who, having been seriously wounded during his military service on Israel's northern border, became director of Physicians for Human Rights and an active member of the Arab/Jewish partnership Ta'ayush. In view of these facts, and Gordon's professed "passionate commitment to Israel" (The Nation, 12 May 2008), Dershowitz's rabid verbal slavering seems more mischievous than ever. While advancing in roughly chronological order, Gordon organizes his chapters around specific themes: "The Infrastructure of Control," "The Invisible Occupation," "Identification Trouble," "The Intifada," "The Separation Principle," and so forth.
Israel's Occupation, however, is less a conventional history than a carefully argued critique of the statist illusions of traditional commentary. By "statism" Gordon means a view of "the Israeli state as a free agent issuing policies unhindered by contingencies" and of Palestinian resistance as "led by people who stand in some free zone and whose beliefs and actions have not been shaped by the occupation and Israel's controlling apparatuses." As against this, he proposes a "genealogy of Israel's forms of control and an analysis of how they interact ..., suggest[ing] that the excesses and contradictions engendered by the controlling apparatuses help ... shift the emphasis among the modes of power ... shap[ing] Israel's policy choices and Palestinian resistance." Confusingly, the word "excesses" here means something like "unintended consequences." Perhaps no single theme resonates with more monotonous emphasis throughout the book than the fact that Israel's ill-considered actions since 1967 have consistently "blown back" in its face. Indeed even when it succeeded in its aims, that success rapidly morphed into something unanticipated and unwelcome to the occupier, cursed as it is with that inability to learn from history so characteristic of imperial and colonial regimes. The consequent shattering of Palestinian society into "warlordism, a la Somalia" is ultimately "inimical to [Israel's] own interests."
Gordon divides the course of the occupation into five periods. At first the military government (1967-80) sought to improve the standard of living of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, not from altruism but in order to "normalize" the occupation while simultaneously producing the illusion that it was temporary.
Secondly, the misnamed Civil Administration (1981-1987) "represented Israel's recognition that the methods it had hitherto employed to normalize the occupation ... were not working" as well as an "admission that the occupation was not temporary."
Thirdly, the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993) was a response to the contradiction "between Israel's insistence that the Palestinians manage themselves ... and its ongoing efforts to repress all manifestations of Palestinian nationalism." Rabin's "iron fist" policy "was, paradoxically, a sign of the failure of existing forms of control ... since power is tolerable only insofar as it manages to hide part of itself ..." (one of Michel Foucault's more straightforward insights).
Fourthly, the Oslo years (1994-2000) represented Israel's attempt to "outsource the occupation" by turning the newly created Palestinian Authority into a "sub-contractor." Gordon is magnificently scathing about Oslo, which "managed to undo the intifada's most important achievements" by causing "the disappearance of vigorous popular and civil movements" and by "normalizing" the occupation all over again.
Most recently, the second Palestinian intifada saw Israel suspending all legality -- including its own draconian and inherently lawless laws -- in order to brutally crush Palestinian resistance and, in effect, to transfer responsibility for the welfare of the population from the PA to various charity organizations. Taking his cue from Foucault and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Gordon analyzes Israel's controlling apparatuses and practices in terms of three fundamental modes of power: "disciplinary, bio-, and sovereign." Since these modes bleed into one another, the philosophically innocent reader may find their attribution to Israel's successive practices somewhat confusing. The broadest progression (or regression), however, is from a "politics of life" (which nonetheless entailed much killing) in the wake of 1967, to the present "destruction of the infrastructure of existence" in which the Palestinian is reduced to homo sacer, someone "who can be killed without it being considered a crime" (Agamben). In further defining this progression/regression as one "from colonization to separation," Gordon is again taking risks with his terminology. If colonization "attempts to manage the lives of the colonized inhabitants while exploiting the captured territory's resources," separation interests itself solely "in the resources" without "in any way ... assum[ing] responsibility for the people." But it is misleading to suggest that the latter is different in essence from the former, constituting as it does merely a different modality of colonization. Gordon implicitly concedes as much when he uses the phrase "colonial project" for Israel's occupation as a whole.
There are those who will query Gordon's decision to focus on the consequences of the 1967 war, despite his acknowledgment that "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be reduced to the military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem" and that "one cannot understand the current disputes ... without taking into account the ethnic cleansing that took place during and after the 1948 War." With some chutzpah he asserts that "I am interested in interrogating how the Israeli military occupation has operated rather than examining the root causes of and possible solutions to the conflict." Nonetheless, on the last page he tells us that:
"... the key to solving the conflict is by addressing the structural incongruities of the occupation, the most important of which is the distinction Israel has made between the Palestinians and their land. Once Israel relates to the two as one inseparable unit, a just and peaceful solution can evolve ..."
This tight-lipped formulation may evoke nods from academics, but will hardly energize activists. Gordon has undoubtedly deepened our understanding of the occupation, and for this he is to be commended -- the sentimental adage "to understand is to forgive" has no application here. But, to paraphrase Marx, the point is not merely to understand the occupation, but to terminate it.
Saree Makdisi's book, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, is a very different proposition. The author is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He suggests that his scholarly "concern ... with the play of language and politics" in English "nineteenth-century poems and novels" has "served [him] well in reading and writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the interplay of language and politics has a special ... importance."
One's suspicion that such a conviction might be disingenuous evaporates on learning that Makdisi is a nephew of the late great Edward Said, whose cultural concerns were so similar. Furthermore, the tightly-knit ("symphonic") structure of this book suggests that Makdisi has inherited some of his uncle's musicianship. There are four "movements" of varying length, symmetrically entitled "Outsides," "Insides," "Outside In," and "Inside Out," preceded by an Introduction and Coda, and punctuated ("cadentially") by series of statistics qualified as "Occupation by the Numbers" (6 series), and "Dispossession, Segregation, and Inequality by the Numbers."
One can see further parallels between the two intellectuals when Makdisi writes that he has "become far too used to being an outsider ever to feel entirely comfortable as an 'insider' identifying completely with any group or nation." Nonetheless, a few pages from the end this United States citizen refers to "many Palestinians (including myself) ..." The sense of self-discovery discreetly conveyed as Makdisi's text progresses is one of its many incidental (or not so incidental) pleasures.
This word, however, must be severely qualified. Recently, when Amazon requested a review of Palestine Inside Out from me, I wrote that "[t]here were times when Makdisi's sober, understated account of intolerable injustice forced me to put the book down; sometimes I didn't take it up again for days -- but I always did take it up again." This was practically a white lie, as I did not confess to having fast-read -- or even skipped -- some of Makdisi's more horrendous accounts of Palestinian suffering, which are drawn both from personal encounters and "affidavits documented and published by human rights organizations ..., or the Israeli veterans' organization Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence) ..." Most unbearable, and almost unreadable, are the stories of sick people prevented from accessing necessary hospital treatment by Israel's arbitrary checkpoint regime, and his account of the insane vengeance wreaked on Nablus during "Operation Defensive Shield" in 2002.
When The Electronic Intifada asked me to contribute this review, I at first refused, realizing that I would have to start the book from scratch and skip nothing. Having relented, I can only corroborate what I originally wrote: "Makdisi's book presented the stark facts of Israeli occupation with such vividness that I felt I was learning them -- and raging and weeping at them -- for the first time." Palestine Inside Out is not a history of the occupation, or of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, but a detailed exploration of the everyday lives of ordinary people exposed to the ravages of a sadistic colonial project, into which Makdisi manages with great ingenuity to weave all the relevant historical facts as well as a plethora of information about the legal and illegal structures of Israel's occupation.
His ultimate purpose is to demonstrate that Israel has destroyed the option of a two-state solution ("a geophysical impossibility") which it never really desired in the first place. Consequently, moving beyond description to prescription, Makdisi advocates a single democratic state, specifically proposing that the constitution drawn up in 2007 by Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel, should be treated as "a draft constitution for one democratic and secular state -- a bilingual and multicultural state -- in all of historic Palestine ... in which Jews and Palestinian Arabs could live together as equal citizens."
Makdisi is not the first author to make this kind of proposal, nor the first to narrate the dire history that has led him to espouse it. Indeed in one sense there is absolutely nothing new in Palestine Inside Out. And yet it is a uniquely inspiring book, and one that deserves to become the standard source book both for those who know nothing about "the conflict," and those who know too much for their own peace of mind. A heartbreaking masterpiece and one that, one hopes, may contribute towards influencing public opinion -- even in the US -- in support of justice for the Palestinians.
Raymond Deane is an Irish composer and activist (www.raymonddeane.com)
Reviewed by Raymond Deane, [reposted from The Electronic Intifada]
Few conflicts, particularly "regional" ones, have spawned such mountains of analysis as that between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. What makes this situation exceptional, however, is the fact that Israel's one-sided war on the Palestinian people continues unabated while these books are being written, published, read and sometimes reviewed. In the time that it takes me to write this article, the state of Israel will in all probability have committed new crimes, more Palestinians will have been killed, tortured or dispossessed, and the Zionist project -- in the full light of day (metaphorically -- many of these crimes take place at dead of night) -- will have inched inexorably forward: "another dunum, another goat," as the old Zionist adage about land colonization goes.
The professional book-reviewer will hardly complain about this state of affairs. The activist reviewer, however, will rapidly tire of reading successive accounts of the same series of events, and will finally demand that any new book worth its salt should present a radically new perspective on these events, and/or advocate new and more effective modes of combating the occupation, and/or have the potential to influence public opinion in the right direction.
In view of the above-mentioned proliferation, it is astonishing that in his new book, in Israel's Occupation, Neve Gordon can claim with apparent accuracy that an "overview of the occupation" is "something that has not yet been done."
Described by the inimitable Alan Dershowitz as "a despicable example of a self-hating Jew and a self-hating Israeli," Gordon is an academic who, having been seriously wounded during his military service on Israel's northern border, became director of Physicians for Human Rights and an active member of the Arab/Jewish partnership Ta'ayush. In view of these facts, and Gordon's professed "passionate commitment to Israel" (The Nation, 12 May 2008), Dershowitz's rabid verbal slavering seems more mischievous than ever. While advancing in roughly chronological order, Gordon organizes his chapters around specific themes: "The Infrastructure of Control," "The Invisible Occupation," "Identification Trouble," "The Intifada," "The Separation Principle," and so forth.
Israel's Occupation, however, is less a conventional history than a carefully argued critique of the statist illusions of traditional commentary. By "statism" Gordon means a view of "the Israeli state as a free agent issuing policies unhindered by contingencies" and of Palestinian resistance as "led by people who stand in some free zone and whose beliefs and actions have not been shaped by the occupation and Israel's controlling apparatuses." As against this, he proposes a "genealogy of Israel's forms of control and an analysis of how they interact ..., suggest[ing] that the excesses and contradictions engendered by the controlling apparatuses help ... shift the emphasis among the modes of power ... shap[ing] Israel's policy choices and Palestinian resistance." Confusingly, the word "excesses" here means something like "unintended consequences." Perhaps no single theme resonates with more monotonous emphasis throughout the book than the fact that Israel's ill-considered actions since 1967 have consistently "blown back" in its face. Indeed even when it succeeded in its aims, that success rapidly morphed into something unanticipated and unwelcome to the occupier, cursed as it is with that inability to learn from history so characteristic of imperial and colonial regimes. The consequent shattering of Palestinian society into "warlordism, a la Somalia" is ultimately "inimical to [Israel's] own interests."
Gordon divides the course of the occupation into five periods. At first the military government (1967-80) sought to improve the standard of living of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, not from altruism but in order to "normalize" the occupation while simultaneously producing the illusion that it was temporary.
Secondly, the misnamed Civil Administration (1981-1987) "represented Israel's recognition that the methods it had hitherto employed to normalize the occupation ... were not working" as well as an "admission that the occupation was not temporary."
Thirdly, the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993) was a response to the contradiction "between Israel's insistence that the Palestinians manage themselves ... and its ongoing efforts to repress all manifestations of Palestinian nationalism." Rabin's "iron fist" policy "was, paradoxically, a sign of the failure of existing forms of control ... since power is tolerable only insofar as it manages to hide part of itself ..." (one of Michel Foucault's more straightforward insights).
Fourthly, the Oslo years (1994-2000) represented Israel's attempt to "outsource the occupation" by turning the newly created Palestinian Authority into a "sub-contractor." Gordon is magnificently scathing about Oslo, which "managed to undo the intifada's most important achievements" by causing "the disappearance of vigorous popular and civil movements" and by "normalizing" the occupation all over again.
Most recently, the second Palestinian intifada saw Israel suspending all legality -- including its own draconian and inherently lawless laws -- in order to brutally crush Palestinian resistance and, in effect, to transfer responsibility for the welfare of the population from the PA to various charity organizations. Taking his cue from Foucault and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Gordon analyzes Israel's controlling apparatuses and practices in terms of three fundamental modes of power: "disciplinary, bio-, and sovereign." Since these modes bleed into one another, the philosophically innocent reader may find their attribution to Israel's successive practices somewhat confusing. The broadest progression (or regression), however, is from a "politics of life" (which nonetheless entailed much killing) in the wake of 1967, to the present "destruction of the infrastructure of existence" in which the Palestinian is reduced to homo sacer, someone "who can be killed without it being considered a crime" (Agamben). In further defining this progression/regression as one "from colonization to separation," Gordon is again taking risks with his terminology. If colonization "attempts to manage the lives of the colonized inhabitants while exploiting the captured territory's resources," separation interests itself solely "in the resources" without "in any way ... assum[ing] responsibility for the people." But it is misleading to suggest that the latter is different in essence from the former, constituting as it does merely a different modality of colonization. Gordon implicitly concedes as much when he uses the phrase "colonial project" for Israel's occupation as a whole.
There are those who will query Gordon's decision to focus on the consequences of the 1967 war, despite his acknowledgment that "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be reduced to the military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem" and that "one cannot understand the current disputes ... without taking into account the ethnic cleansing that took place during and after the 1948 War." With some chutzpah he asserts that "I am interested in interrogating how the Israeli military occupation has operated rather than examining the root causes of and possible solutions to the conflict." Nonetheless, on the last page he tells us that:
"... the key to solving the conflict is by addressing the structural incongruities of the occupation, the most important of which is the distinction Israel has made between the Palestinians and their land. Once Israel relates to the two as one inseparable unit, a just and peaceful solution can evolve ..."
This tight-lipped formulation may evoke nods from academics, but will hardly energize activists. Gordon has undoubtedly deepened our understanding of the occupation, and for this he is to be commended -- the sentimental adage "to understand is to forgive" has no application here. But, to paraphrase Marx, the point is not merely to understand the occupation, but to terminate it.
Saree Makdisi's book, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, is a very different proposition. The author is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He suggests that his scholarly "concern ... with the play of language and politics" in English "nineteenth-century poems and novels" has "served [him] well in reading and writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the interplay of language and politics has a special ... importance."
One's suspicion that such a conviction might be disingenuous evaporates on learning that Makdisi is a nephew of the late great Edward Said, whose cultural concerns were so similar. Furthermore, the tightly-knit ("symphonic") structure of this book suggests that Makdisi has inherited some of his uncle's musicianship. There are four "movements" of varying length, symmetrically entitled "Outsides," "Insides," "Outside In," and "Inside Out," preceded by an Introduction and Coda, and punctuated ("cadentially") by series of statistics qualified as "Occupation by the Numbers" (6 series), and "Dispossession, Segregation, and Inequality by the Numbers."
One can see further parallels between the two intellectuals when Makdisi writes that he has "become far too used to being an outsider ever to feel entirely comfortable as an 'insider' identifying completely with any group or nation." Nonetheless, a few pages from the end this United States citizen refers to "many Palestinians (including myself) ..." The sense of self-discovery discreetly conveyed as Makdisi's text progresses is one of its many incidental (or not so incidental) pleasures.
This word, however, must be severely qualified. Recently, when Amazon requested a review of Palestine Inside Out from me, I wrote that "[t]here were times when Makdisi's sober, understated account of intolerable injustice forced me to put the book down; sometimes I didn't take it up again for days -- but I always did take it up again." This was practically a white lie, as I did not confess to having fast-read -- or even skipped -- some of Makdisi's more horrendous accounts of Palestinian suffering, which are drawn both from personal encounters and "affidavits documented and published by human rights organizations ..., or the Israeli veterans' organization Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence) ..." Most unbearable, and almost unreadable, are the stories of sick people prevented from accessing necessary hospital treatment by Israel's arbitrary checkpoint regime, and his account of the insane vengeance wreaked on Nablus during "Operation Defensive Shield" in 2002.
When The Electronic Intifada asked me to contribute this review, I at first refused, realizing that I would have to start the book from scratch and skip nothing. Having relented, I can only corroborate what I originally wrote: "Makdisi's book presented the stark facts of Israeli occupation with such vividness that I felt I was learning them -- and raging and weeping at them -- for the first time." Palestine Inside Out is not a history of the occupation, or of the 1948 ethnic cleansing, but a detailed exploration of the everyday lives of ordinary people exposed to the ravages of a sadistic colonial project, into which Makdisi manages with great ingenuity to weave all the relevant historical facts as well as a plethora of information about the legal and illegal structures of Israel's occupation.
His ultimate purpose is to demonstrate that Israel has destroyed the option of a two-state solution ("a geophysical impossibility") which it never really desired in the first place. Consequently, moving beyond description to prescription, Makdisi advocates a single democratic state, specifically proposing that the constitution drawn up in 2007 by Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel, should be treated as "a draft constitution for one democratic and secular state -- a bilingual and multicultural state -- in all of historic Palestine ... in which Jews and Palestinian Arabs could live together as equal citizens."
Makdisi is not the first author to make this kind of proposal, nor the first to narrate the dire history that has led him to espouse it. Indeed in one sense there is absolutely nothing new in Palestine Inside Out. And yet it is a uniquely inspiring book, and one that deserves to become the standard source book both for those who know nothing about "the conflict," and those who know too much for their own peace of mind. A heartbreaking masterpiece and one that, one hopes, may contribute towards influencing public opinion -- even in the US -- in support of justice for the Palestinians.
Raymond Deane is an Irish composer and activist (www.raymonddeane.com)
Thursday, March 11, 2010
THE NEW JIM CROW
The New Jim Crow Book Review
Reviewed by Kam Williams [reposted from NewsBlaze]
"Precisely how the system of mass incarceration works to trap African-Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage can best be understood by viewing the system as a whole... The first stage is the roundup [when] vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color...
Once arrested, defendants are generally denied meaningful legal representation and pressured to plead guilty, whether they are or not. Once convicted... virtually every aspect of one's life is regulated and monitored by the system.
The final stage... often [has] a greater impact on one's life course than the months or years one actually spends behind bars. [Parolees] will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives-denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality."
- Excerpted from Chapter 5 (pgs. 180-181)
Now that bloom has fallen off the rose of the Obama Administration, most black folks are beginning to wake up to the fact that his election isn't about to turn the country into a post-racial utopia any time soon. To the contrary, attorney Michelle Alexander argues that in recent decades America has increasingly, and ever so subtly, adopted a color-coded caste system where minorities are targeted, stigmatized and marginalized by the criminal justice system.
Alexander, a Professor of Law at Ohio State University, makes her very persuasive case in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a scathing indictment of the widespread practice of selective enforcement of draconian drug laws. Ostensibly, the aim of the U.S. government has been not only to warehouse masses of African-American males behind bars, but to relegate them permanently to a subordinate stratum of society even after they're paroled.
For the author explains that upon release, a person convicted of a petty narcotics violation "may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal assistance." Furthermore, "His driver's license may be automatically suspended, and... he will not be permitted to enlist in the military... or obtain a federal security clearance. If a citizen, he may lose the right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable."
Although there's a black man in the White House, Ms. Alexander expects her call for prison reform to fall on deaf ears. After all, she cites as "disturbing, to say the least," Obama's famous Father's Day speech in which he in which he indicted AWOL baby-daddies "without ever acknowledging that the majority of young black men in large urban areas are currently under the control of the criminal justice system."
This sister obviously has some serious issues with the President, since she also reminds her readers about his confessing to snorting coke all the coke he could afford and to smoking pot frequently during his wayward youth. She does s because she feels he ought to be more empathetic about the plight of the millions of African-Americans whose lives were ruined after being found guilty only of the same sort of transgressions he freely owned up to in his autobiography.
If Alexander holds any hope for our future, it rests in raising the country's collective consciousness about the role the Apartheid-like legal system plays in perpetuating oppression along the color line. Her goal is to achieve this by generating some frank dialogue which might lead to a social movement on behalf of the vast underclass of unfairly-criminalized social pariahs.
The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By Michelle Alexander
The New Press
Hardcover
304 pages
ISBN: 1595581030
Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the African-American Film Critics Association, and the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee. Contact him through NewsBlaze.
Reviewed by Kam Williams [reposted from NewsBlaze]
"Precisely how the system of mass incarceration works to trap African-Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage can best be understood by viewing the system as a whole... The first stage is the roundup [when] vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color...
Once arrested, defendants are generally denied meaningful legal representation and pressured to plead guilty, whether they are or not. Once convicted... virtually every aspect of one's life is regulated and monitored by the system.
The final stage... often [has] a greater impact on one's life course than the months or years one actually spends behind bars. [Parolees] will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives-denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality."
- Excerpted from Chapter 5 (pgs. 180-181)
Now that bloom has fallen off the rose of the Obama Administration, most black folks are beginning to wake up to the fact that his election isn't about to turn the country into a post-racial utopia any time soon. To the contrary, attorney Michelle Alexander argues that in recent decades America has increasingly, and ever so subtly, adopted a color-coded caste system where minorities are targeted, stigmatized and marginalized by the criminal justice system.
Alexander, a Professor of Law at Ohio State University, makes her very persuasive case in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, a scathing indictment of the widespread practice of selective enforcement of draconian drug laws. Ostensibly, the aim of the U.S. government has been not only to warehouse masses of African-American males behind bars, but to relegate them permanently to a subordinate stratum of society even after they're paroled.
For the author explains that upon release, a person convicted of a petty narcotics violation "may be ineligible for many federally-funded health and welfare benefits, food stamps, public housing, and federal assistance." Furthermore, "His driver's license may be automatically suspended, and... he will not be permitted to enlist in the military... or obtain a federal security clearance. If a citizen, he may lose the right to vote; if not, he becomes immediately deportable."
Although there's a black man in the White House, Ms. Alexander expects her call for prison reform to fall on deaf ears. After all, she cites as "disturbing, to say the least," Obama's famous Father's Day speech in which he in which he indicted AWOL baby-daddies "without ever acknowledging that the majority of young black men in large urban areas are currently under the control of the criminal justice system."
This sister obviously has some serious issues with the President, since she also reminds her readers about his confessing to snorting coke all the coke he could afford and to smoking pot frequently during his wayward youth. She does s because she feels he ought to be more empathetic about the plight of the millions of African-Americans whose lives were ruined after being found guilty only of the same sort of transgressions he freely owned up to in his autobiography.
If Alexander holds any hope for our future, it rests in raising the country's collective consciousness about the role the Apartheid-like legal system plays in perpetuating oppression along the color line. Her goal is to achieve this by generating some frank dialogue which might lead to a social movement on behalf of the vast underclass of unfairly-criminalized social pariahs.
The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By Michelle Alexander
The New Press
Hardcover
304 pages
ISBN: 1595581030
Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who writes for 100+ publications. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Online, the African-American Film Critics Association, and the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee. Contact him through NewsBlaze.
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