I have been trying, unsuccessfully, to work on a paper on the politics of Mozambique. The reasons for this are both political and personal, and the ways in which these two intersect. It was due at the end of April, which seemed reasonable at the time, but then a whole series of events followed and life in general took a tanking dive and I’ve been trying to deal with a lot of that. I haven’t been able to work on the paper, and when I try, I fail quite miserably.

But if I can’t bring myself write on Mozambique, perhaps I can write about writing on Mozambique (argh, postmodernism’s revenge!). I’ve done a bit of research — having gone through dozens of journal and news articles and a few books. All of this raises more than a few questions for me, to which I have no satisfactory answer. I hope my musings here will help to, at least, organize the issues for me and give me focus in writing the paper.

I took the class in the first place for a few reasons. I could have taken David McNally’s class on Marx’s Capital — which would have been fantastic, no doubt — but I felt like I needed a grounding in the way capitalism works, internationally, on the ground. I have more than a passing interest in the politics of southern Africa and I wanted, also, to examine how the post-colonial moment has been working out (answer: not well). Also, I heard that this might be one of the last times that John S. Saul would be teaching the class (and, indeed, it was the last class he taught), and that it was worth it to take a class with him. (Saul is a noted scholar-activist, and he was involved in the struggles against colonialism and apartheid, back in the day.) Of course, I also heard and kept hearing other stuff about Saul — vague and non-specific rumours, all of which turned out to be unsubstantiated; and the fact that he seemed to assign his own work a lot was a bit disconcerting, but ultimately, it wasn’t a problem at all.

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A high school teacher in Los Angeles got fired for encouraging her students to be, well, socially engaged. Karen Salazar was accused of teaching a curriculum that was too “Afro-centric”. You see, teaching texts like the Autobiography of Malcolm X is dangerous. Students organizing and mobilizing on the high school campus was apparently too much for stuffed up administrators (and most definitely, their higher ups) to see and deal with, so they do what they usually do in such circumstances: Scapegoat a teacher, because, of course, students themselves are too stupid to do anything on their own, and press down on her. In this case, they’ve decided to fire Ms. Salazar.

No, wait, it wasn’t that the curriculum was too “Afro-centric” after all — the materials, apparently, were appropriate. It’s just that her teaching style crossed the line into advocacy. You see, when someone encourages you to change the conditions in society that produce inequality and injustice, that’s inappropriate. Ms. Salazar quotes Paulo Freire, she says one should practice “education as the practice of freedom.” In a democratic country, where education is supposed to be a pillar of freedom, that would be all right. But in countries which pass themselves as democracies but practice so many dispersed forms of tyranny, education needs to be the brainwashing of students to toe the line.

And by firing Karen Salazar, that’s precisely what these administrators are trying to enforce. It’s not that she teaches Malcolm X and Tupac, or that she quotes Freire. It’s that students are organizing and mobilizing, learning to work together in cooperative and collective frameworks to challenge authority and change things for the better. And that’s too much.

Learn more about the struggle of the students to have Ms. Salazar reinstated — including videos of their mass actions — here: http://savesalazar.pbwiki.com/

March 20, 2008 thirty-five University of Toronto students occupied Simcoe Hall, the home of the President’s Office, to protest a 20% fee increase. The nonviolent sit-in was accompanied with a peaceful rally outside the building—until the police began brutalizing those inside. This was captured by multiple video cameras.

The students had three simple demands.
1) To be granted a meeting with President David Naylor;
2) To have the proposed fee increase removed from the University Affairs Board meeting, scheduled to take place on March 25; and
3) To be given 15 minutes at the University Affairs Board meeting for a presentation and discussion on broader issues of access to education and the impacts of high tuition upon students, families and communities.

Students attempted to deliver their letter to the University of Toronto President, David Naylor, and to speak to other members of the administration in Simcoe Hall about the rising costs of education in Ontario. The administration refused to meet with the students. The response of the University of Toronto was to violently remove students from their peaceful sit-in. Police aggressively grabbed students and dragged them away from the entrance of the office. The students feared for their safety and after four hours in the building, the police violence forced the students to leave.

Video of these events has been posted on YouTube and it can be viewed here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ketNtnZQIwQ

Images can be viewed here:
http://www.edwardfwong.com/uoftact/9.jpg
http://www.edwardfwong.com/uoftact/10.jpg

Students are continuing to demand a meeting with President Naylor, and the right to accessible and affordable education.

One of the more common arguments against socialism, or in general, against imagining or enacting alternatives to capitalism, revolves around the notion of human nature. The argument goes that humans are intrinsically selfish, and will put their interests before that of others. This is, in effect, held to be “the law of nature” — animals step over each other to accomplish their self-preservation. So, the argument implies, it is human nature to be self-interested in the way that we all are now and to want more things.

There are two levels at which I’d like to respond to this argument, but I should add that these two levels are not the only ones from which it can be approached. The first is at the level of what constitutes “human nature” itself. The second is to examine the role of society (or “nurture”). However, the one approach bleeds into the other.

I agree that there is a human nature.

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Hey dumbass, guess what: Other people need to take out books from the library, too.

No, it’s true. They’ve proven this empirically. I saw it in a book I took out from the library. I noticed that fact because you happened to underline it. Along with everything else on that page. Which, apparently, was important to you. Thank you, also, for writing down in the margins several key words that you noticed in the paragraphs. That they were of no significance to the argument or the book in general explains something. You also happened to underline and highlight most of Chapters 3 and 4. I wonder why you ignored the rest of the book.

Maybe because you’re an idiot?

Remember, signing out a book from the library is a privilege. The act does not confer ownership of the book to you. So don’t write in it. This isn’t socialism you punk ass bitch.

Four hours of research, writing and work. None of it for instrumental (read, coursework/degree-work) reasons.

Here is Part 2 of my response to Ward Churchill’s essay on Marxism. Part 1 is here.

Historical materialism

Churchill asserts that historical materialism is a way of looking at society not as a unified whole, but as a mass of contradictions. All of history is simply the course of contradictions in society reconciling themselves to production (i.e., the transformation of nature from one of its aspects into another). Churchill tells us that “‘Productive relations,’ in [the Marxist] schema, determine all and everything.” The “orthodox” Marxists, according to Albert and Hahnel, assert that Marxism downgrades the “importance of the creative aspect of the human consciousness” and that consciousness rests primarily on objective production relations.

There is some truth in some of these assertions, but Churchill does not provide a coherent account of historical (or, indeed, dialectical materialism) before he proceeds to criticize it — relying on quotations taken wildly out of context from Althusser and Baudrillard. For this reason I cannot proceed by addressing Churchill’s assertions in turn, but will provide a sketch of what historical materialism means. In doing this, I hope, we will take up Churchill’s criticisms and address them.

The main idea of historical materialism is that history — the course of development of human societies, including ideas and consciousness — is based on material realities. It is not the ideas in our heads that determine the conditions of our existence; so much as it is the conditions of our existence that largely contribute to the determination of the ideas in our heads. This is not to say that ideas do not have an effect on reality, but they do so when put into material action in whatever way. History is a chronology of changes: institutions, cultures, values and so on change over time. None of these are immutable, all of these are eminently historical — they exist, as they do, in particular times and spaces — and they are in constant flux.

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I came upon Ward Churchill’s critique of Marxism from an “indigenist” perspective through a friend’s facebook note. I am going to do an anti-critique here, not because I disagree with everything Churchill says, but because I disagree with a lot of it, and because on many counts he’s just wrong. It’s important to take stock of this, because what Churchill is presenting might form the basis of mistaken critiques of Marxism. Now, I have no problem with anyone critiquing Marxism, whether the critic is Marxist or non-Marxist or indigenist or religious or whatever. I’d just prefer that the critic read Marx first and then present a coherent argument (is that too much to ask?).

Having said that, I’d like to point out that Marxism is a many-splendoured thing. To quote my friend and interlocutor, Nathanial Thomas: “Like any Marxist, I have my own opinions on what is closer to Marxism and what is … less so, but I feel inclined to the view that Marxists define Marxism, rather than the other way round.” In this vein, I’m going to examine Churchill’s critique from my own perhaps idiosyncratic Marxist perspective which is nevertheless solidly grounded in Marxian thought and, particularly, Marx’s thought–but it’s certainly not the kind of Soviet (orthodox?) Marxism that Churchill repeatedly conflates with Marxism on the whole. Additionally, I’m going to publish this anti-critique in pieces.

Churchill seems to have delivered this essay as a talk, sometime between 1985 and 1995. That’s all I can tell. The historical perspective is important because it would give us a temporal context in which to place this uneven critique. In that broad period we saw the decline of the Soviet Union and other satellite states. No doubt, there were many Marxists who saw their reified, teleological and schematic approaches to revolutionary politics and theory as universal and necessary.

Dialectics and nature

Churchill begins his essay with describing dialectical thinking, or relational thinking that sees things not as things, but as a set of relations. He finds its roots in just about every indigenous culture in America, certainly, but also all across the world. Churchill doesn’t really define what he means by indigenous culture (are Germans indigenous to Germany?), but that’s okay. The Greeks–who, I guess, are the basis of modern European philosophy for Churchill (and many others, I should add)–got it from the Egyptians who got it, apparently, from the Ethiopians (did he mean Nubians?). This connection–the Greek, not the Egyptian–leads us to Hegel, who revived dialectical thinking in Europe, and from whom (or at least, being mediated by Bauer and others) it got to Marx.

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Well. I’m not going to apologize for being a Marxist.

But it seems that there are some people for whom I have become a caricature of myself, a caricature of a Marxist. No, I’ve never tried to sell papers to you, and though I may have suggested reading a piece or two by Marx, I certainly don’t think I’ve hit you over the head with anything. Oh, I return to Marxist perspectives and ideas in our conversations, sometimes explicitly referring to them as Marxist and other times not, but you can tell — right? — you can tell that that’s Marxist.

And for you, of course, that’s a problem. Because, I guess, Marx is white? Or Marx is European? Marx was Eurocentric? Okay.

And of course, I’ve lost my way. We — those of us who aren’t white — must, by all and every means reject everything that is Western. And, I suppose you imagine that I’ve never had to wrestle with this sense of being detached from my own reality, of being detached and disgusted and even insulted because when I go into a library and stare at a shelf of books on a topic the only thing I can find from the general direction from where I came is some Orientalist’s rendering of an 11th century scholar anyway. So we must reject all of the Western shit because it is Western. No, we must. We must have a visceral distaste for the West and Eurocentrism and look for “alternative epistemologies” and ways of looking at things. Just because.

Which is fine. I don’t envy you your alternative epistemologies. And perhaps you’ve read a couple of Marx’s works yourselves, though I doubt it, and more likely you’ve read a critique of Marx written by some scholar who is far out of his field of expertise. Maybe not even that.

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I was trained for over three years in political science. I spent half of it doing conservative political theory, the other half focusing largely on the politics of development and certain developing regions.

I still don’t know what it means to be a political scientist.

Why is this paper not writing itself?