A couple of years ago when I was at York University I remember a conversation between two other graduate students at a campus restaurant, in that campus mall. They were talking about capitalist development, and how it ought to be judged considering a radical critique and considering the betterment of people’s lives. The example of South Korea came up and the one student pointed out that living standards had gone up and people were living better lives than they had been living some fifty years ago in general, and that this was a result of capitalist development. What would a Marxist say to that? The other student tried to counter that a Marxist would talk about how capitalism alienates the worker from fellow workers, or something like that, trying to give a fairly abstracted answer to a fairly concrete question. It was clear the brother didn’t know much about South Korea.

Neither did, I for that matter. I don’t remember if I interjected to voice what I do remember thinking, that to the contention that capitalist development had raised living standards a Marxist would not, without concrete investigation, say much. The Marxist would go and study South Korea and see what trajectories its historical development had taken, and then come back with an answer about whether or not capitalist development was beneficial to it.

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That was it?

After racing through Manning Marable’s nearly 500-page biography of Malcolm X, recently released, I realized that I hadn’t learned anything significant, more than that which I already knew, except that Malcolm was not very happy in his marriage (I knew Betty wasn’t happy with Malcolm’s sexual performance at some stage in their marriage) and that he may have cheated on Betty a few times near the end of his life, just as she may have cheated on him. We also get some more details on Malcolm’s tourism/activism abroad, and details on the relationships Malcolm had with people inside and out the Nation of Islam. Sometimes, these details are almost mundane and gossipy. Overall, the book leaves one with an empty feeling.

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Guest post by Elleni Centime Zeleke

I am confused by the analyses of the anglo-phone left with regards to the social revolts in Libya. The only thing folks seem able to muster are a series of bifurcated abstractions. Thus certain metaphors in the analyses of Libya prevail such as, “greed and grievance”, “patron and client”, “rapacious rule vs innocent population “, “madness vs sanity” etc. Absent from the discussion are: social forces, social base, achievements and contradictions of Libya’s Green revolution, contradictions of liberal-democracy, and the contradictions of market dependency on specific social formations. One of the results of such a skewed discussion is that liberal democracy is idealized as the only viable political order in Libya (or the rest of the world for that matter). This is because absent of an analyses of social processes (which the left seems incapable of doing), liberal democracy gets proffered as at least having the institutional checks and balances to keep evil at bay. Of course, historically we know that this is not true. In fact liberal democracy is very often the problem, as it also entrenches certain odd forms of non-state and state led dictatorship and rule. And no stage-ist theory of history can get around this problem. Liberal-democracy does not necessarily lead to things getting better, sometimes life becomes much more ironically cruel. Modestly, then, we can say that what we need is to build institutions that speak to the specific historical problems of a given social formation. And yet given that the category of evil has been one-sidely operationalized as the concept through which we think about Libya and Ghadaffi, the end result has been that we have all been led down the path as believers of liberal-democracy.

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Why is it okay for Libyans to use violence in resisting tyranny, whereas Palestinians are supposed to renounce the use of violence in resisting tyranny?

Why is it okay for Libyans to use violence in resisting tyranny, whereas in Tunisia and Egypt and other states “both sides” were and are asked to refrain from the use of violence (even though it was and is only one side using violence)?

(I make this post with caveats about the nature of the Libyans resisting tyranny — it remains to be seen if, given that they are now apparently headed by former-Qaddafi regime members, they will be less tyrannous.)

Guest post by Elleni Centime Zeleke

The way the term Arab is being thrown around these days is enough to give a person reason to pause while celebrating the victories of the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. After all, in the present revolutionary context in North Africa there has been a deliberate effort to erase the fact that Libya, Tunisia and Egypt are all continental African countries. Moreover, to call one’s self Black or African or Arab is to use identity markers that are not indigenous to Africans or even the vast majority of people we now call Arab. The question then is who uses these identities and when? No doubt, mobilizing these identities can be useful for making certain kinds of political claims that advance the needs of African and Arab peoples (pan-Africanism, the Arab league etc). But still, we need to always ask for whom is this mobilization happening.

Cutting off the historical ties between so called Arabs and so called Africans (by which we mean black people, as if those kinds of people are easily identifiable) is a trick of Orientalist historiography (in the way Edward Said uses the term). And investigating the problem of Orientalist methodology is not just about raising the bogeyman of identity politics, rather what ends up happening is that Orientalist methods are often blindly adopted to conceal the multiple historical, political, and economic ties that connect so called black people to browner looking people. For example, Yemeni ancient and contemporary history has deep connections with Somalis, Eritreans and Ethiopians across the Red Sea (20 km), but the way the story gets told you would think Yemen was closer to Libya, and that the West Side of the Red Sea could be skipped in any story about Arabs. I would venture to say this is ridiculous. And I really don’t think we should accept Orientalist methods when thinking about what is an Arab or an African.

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One of the narratives that has come about in response to the uprisings in Africa and West Asia is that the Western world needs to intervene to either protect the protesters or to help consolidate any emerging democracies. Jack Layton, the leader of Canada’s federal left-of-centre-left New Democratic Party, spoke at a rally for Egyptian freedom on February 5, 2011, and said that Canada and Canadians could offer

… to help the people of Egypt to construct … democracy using the knowledge and expertise that we have developed over so many years — which has fallen into some disuse lately. Bring our troops back home from Afghanistan and let’s start being envoys for peace in places like Egypt.

Clifford Orwin is a professor of political theory at the University of Toronto. Unlike Layton, he is a supporter of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Orwin often writes opinion pieces for the Globe & Mail. His latest opinion piece is also featured on the home page of the department of political science.

In it, Orwin argues that uprisings do not straightforwardly lead to establishing and maintaining democracies:

… disgust with despotism, poverty, inequality and corruption is the easy part of the revolution. Lofty hopes don’t suffice for successful self-government, and may undercut it…. What’s needed is the development of institutions of civil society – schools for the practice of democracy.

Decades of repression, or government co-optation of oppositional movements, has led to a shell of a civil society. The people of Tunisia and Egypt have no experience “managing complex affairs.”

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This is my translation, with help from friends, of another poem by Makhdoom Mohiuddin. As always, the translation is still a work in progress — so if you know Urdu and English, and have suggestions, let me know through the comments (same goes for transliteration).

The poem itself was collected in his 1944 anthology, Surkh Sawera, or Red Dawn. It was written to protest Indian troops fighting for Britain in the “imperialist phase” (samraaji daur) of the second world war.

sipahi
makhdoom mohiuddin

jaane waale sipahi se poochho
voh kahaaN jaa raha hai

kaun dukhiya hai jo gaa rahi hai
bhooke bachchoN ko behla rahi hai
laash jalne ki boo aa rahi hai
zindagi hai ki chilla rahi hai

jaane waale sipahi se poochho
voh kahaaN jaa raha hai

kitne sehme hue haiN nazaare
kaisa Dar Dar ke chalte haiN taare
kya jawaani ka KhooN ho raha hai
surKh haiN aaNchaloN ke kinare

jaane waale sipahi se poochho
voh kahaaN jaa raha hai

gir raha hai siyahi ka Dera
ho raha hai meri jaaN savera
o vatan choRh kar jaane waale
khul gaya inquilaabi farera

jaane waale sipahi se poochho
voh kahaaN jaa raha hai

Soldier
Makhdoom Mohiuddin

Ask the departing soldier
Where he is going

Ask the departing soldier
Where he is going

The vistas themselves are afraid
How frightened the stars proceed
Such murder of youth
Red are the hems of veils

Ask the departing soldier
Where he is going

The tent of darkness is falling
My dear, the dawn is coming
O you who have left the nation!
The revolutionary flag is unfurled

Ask the departing soldier
Where he is going

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I am trying to work out some thoughts on Marxism and ethnicity, with respect to Donald Horowitz’s reading of ethnicity. For some part, and this is a massive book, I think Horowitz proceeds properly. He sees ethnicity as something that is neither set in stone nor putty, it is malleable, within limits — to paraphrase Horowtiz (66). Ethnicity is a myth of common ancestry, or common descent (52). It isn’t “natural,” in the sense that it doesn’t proceed logically that, from differences of race, language, kinship groups, etc., there will be differentiated groups. Rather, differentiation of groups picks up on — or even constructs, that is, intensifies or gives new meaning to — language, race, etc. As he puts it, it’s not the attribute that makes the group or group difference, it’s group difference that makes the attribute (50). Culture provides the content, it is not the prerequisite to ethnic differentiation (69). If ethnicity, in and of itself, isn’t “modern” — i.e., identitarian differences existed long before “modernization” (incorporation of the Third World into the world capitalist system) — it certainly has been modulated, moulded, shaped by this incorporation of societies into modernity. Particularly, he notes how colonization gave rise to the significance of identity by incorporating diffuse groups, that is, previously politically diffuse groups, into a singular polity (76). All of a sudden, you have a different dynamic to deal with. He does mention somewhere about how colonialism reinforced ethnic identities, but he doesn’t focus on this too much (as, for instance, Benedict Anderson does in Chapter 10 of Imagined Communities, or how Leroy Vail approaches the question in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa).

Horowitz distinguishes between “ranked” and “unranked” ethnic groups. Ranked is where, for instance, ethnicity maps on, more or less, to class. So slavery, or colonialism, is a clear example of how ethnicity (race) is ranked. The question of a caste system, to the extent that a caste can be seen as an ethnicity, is also a ranked system. (However, here we have to be considerate of the fact that castes exist within ethnic identities. Horowitz doesn’t seem to theorize this.) However, an unranked system is more complicated, in the sense that within an ethnic group you will have different classes (or castes, is it is). The question then is why is ethnic conflict — or ethnicity, at any rate — so salient in these unranked systems?

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I had to do an assignment on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. I tried to pull together some of my thoughts here. Besides, it’s been over six months since I last updated this blog. So what better way to update now than to indulge in this.

When I first read Anderson’s book I quite liked it. Sure, some parts of it left me unsettled, but I couldn’t quite grasp why. It focused largely on culture and consciousness, but its basis was entirely “material” — so to speak — that the developments of capitalism facilitated national consciousness. Ah, historical materialism, I thought. And to a considerable degree, Anderson’s work is a pretty good example of a work that seeks to relate changes in consciousness to changes in material conditions (in a sense), and not doing so in a vulgar way, despite certain pronouncements in his book. But then pulling my thoughts together her helped me realize why I didn’t like it, his historical materialism isn’t properly historical nor properly material. For Anderson, history is not driven by the struggle of peoples — class struggle, in a word.

But I am putting the cart before the horse. Let us first examine Anderson’s argument step by step, so that we may better engage in critique.

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Here I am trying to do something on my laptop. A moth flies around me, and reflexively I try to shoo it away. It persists. My attempts to make it go away are ineffective. It lands on my finger. I am too tired, I concede.