Until Death

It is not my prison. It is my liberation.

Depression and despair versus action and agency. Starts and is maintained in the head and heart, no matter the circumstances.

Pernicious effects of political correctness

"Were third-party bugging a prevalent practice, it might well smother that spontaneity—reflected in frivolous, impetuous, sacrilegious, and defiant discourse—that liberates daily life."

-- Justice Harlan, dissenting (Supreme Court of the US), United States v. White, 401 U.S. 745 (1971).

The presumed harmful effects against people of both state surveillance and political correctness are of the same character. 

Most Liberals opposes surveillance but participate in political correctness. Many Conservatives reject both, which is at least consistent. 

I believe that language intolerance, regarding both form and content, is a major liability against freedom, democracy, and personal emancipation.

If Robert F. Williams could speak to BLM...

If Robert F. Williams could speak to Black Lives Matter militants, he might remind them of this central problem in any organized liberation struggle... the problem of the supported network of collaborators.

"I learned in Atlanta that Mr. Elijah Muhammed had made quite an impression and that many Afro-Americans are learning, to the consternation and embarrassment of the black respectable leadership, that he has more to offer than weak prayers of deliverance. A prominent minister in South Carolina said, "Our biggest stumbling block is the Uncle Tom minister--the people must stop paying these traitors." In Atlanta, a university professor, energetic about the new spirit on the part of the Negroes, was very hopeful that new militant leadership would replace the old Uncle Toms, whose days, he was confident, were numbered.

There are exceptions among us. The Uncle Toms, the Judases, and the Quislings of the black "elite" would deny this rising consciousness. They do everything possible to make white Americans think that it is not true, while apologizing to us for the very people who oppress us. Some of these "responsible" Negroes are afraid that militant action damages "amiable race relations." They complain that race relations may deteriorate to a point that many Negroes may lose jobs. What they mean is that they may lose their (ital.) jobs. For the black workers, who are the first to be fired, and last, if ever, to be hired, the situation is so bad it can't deteriorate.

We realize that there must be a struggle within our own ranks to take the leadership away from the black Quislings who betray us. Then the white liberals who are dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into our struggle in the South to convert us to pacifism will have to accept our (ital.) understanding of the situation or drop their liberal pretensions." [Bold-emphasis added.]

--Robert F. Williams, in Negroes with Guns, 1962 (Martino Publishing, CT, 2013), p. 112

Frederick Douglass explained the truth about social change

Frederick Douglass's "West India Emancipation" speech of 1857 is possibly the most incisive description of the true mechanism of social change ever written.

The speech is brilliant like only works resulting from liberation praxis can be.

LINK TO SPEECH

Why is "freedom" so difficult to understand?

By Denis G. Rancourt


For the same reason that it is so difficult for a slave to recognize that he/she is a slave! [1]

A first step is for the (wage, economic, or other) slave to recognize -- beyond the master's grip on the mental and emotional environment -- that he/she is a slave. Even this consciousness can only be substantively attained through the process (praxis) itself of liberation; this too the master knows.

There may result a spontaneous impulse to escape from physical oppression but liberation is much more than escape. Mere escape from physical and economic oppression is not the full ontological freedom that is fulfillment and purpose; and that is contagious and exhilarating.

Since consciousness and liberation are always possible and can lead to a social chain reaction if radical nuclei are not quickly identified, isolated, and destroyed, and since such nucleation is frequent and widespread in slaves left to think for themselves, the hierarchy of dominance that we inhabit must create and maintain an illusion of the danger of freedom.

The establishment's mantra in this regard -- which resonates incessantly in the halls of all law schools and between the walls of all philosophy and ethics classrooms -- is the hollow statement that "freedom is always at the expense of the freedoms of others".

In the language of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms this becomes:

"The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

And the courts are the arbitrator of this fantasy. For example, in a recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling about libel law we have:

"The exercise as a whole involves balancing freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the protection of reputation, privacy concerns, and the public interest. Each of these is a complex value protected either directly or indirectly by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Weighing these often competing constitutional interests is a legal determination. It is, therefore, a determination that the judge should undertake [not a jury!?]."
-- (2009, Grant vs TorStarCorp)

Judges are always "balancing". Note how in this ruling a jury cannot decide the weight attributed to "the public interest", that "privacy concerns" usually relate to an employer's "labour relations", to corporate management and to solicitor-client privilege, that those who can afford to sue for libel and slander have money, and that the mainstream press is owned by the same economic masters that determine the rest, including the economic apartheid of the working class and surplus peoples.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
-- Anatole France

The system's mantra "freedom is always at the expense of the freedoms of others" is hollow because it purposely abstracts away the omnipresent relation of dominance; the asymmetry of power between the individual drawn to freedom and the oppressive system bent on maintaining dominance.

The mantra is often accompanied with the nightmarish fairy tale that humans left to satiate their primal impulses would ravage unprotected humanity. The word "chaos" often comes up. The immediate conclusion of course is that one needs the master's protection; that the slaves themselves are to be feared by other slaves. That more police and prisons are needed, etc.

Everyone has the experience of dominance and its effects on otherwise healthy persons and so everyone can relate to the "need" to be protected...

Let's see. If I use my freedom of expression how does this occur at the expense of the freedoms of others? Does the fact of my expression prevent others from expressing themselves? If I am too loud and persistent won't my audience walk away? If I am speaking loudly in a library is my expression preventing others from speaking loudly in the library? I may be asked to leave and I may be expelled by force but have I impinged on the freedoms of expression of others? It is not my expression that has caused me to be expelled. It is my bad choice of venue and my aggression against community members collectively seeking tranquility.

Similarly, if as the professor in a classroom I choose to express racist views does this act prevent other professors from expressing whatever views they wish? No. Does it oppress the targeted minority students in the classroom? Yes. The oppression comes from the asymmetry of power and influence, not from the expressed views themselves. Black students may express the same views among themselves in an authentic and exploratory discourse without there being any racism of oppression. [2]

My freedom of expression does not mask my oppression-of-dominance of individuals or groups. The expression component remains expression and the oppression is oppression. Let us not confuse the expression with the oppression. Let us hone our ability to recognize and name hierarchical oppression and not become language police. Let us not displace our capacity to sense manipulation and coercion in favor of language and expression purification.

"Words that wound" are an artifice of new-wave law theorists looking to lead a legal analysis sect premised on slave-hood and the law as protective master and paternalistic guardian of society's values. Here Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s deconstruction of critical race theory is a breath of fresh air but does not go far enough regarding hierarchy. [3]

No one and no group has an ontological right to oppress. It's not about balancing freedoms. It's about getting freedom.

"Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it."
-- Malcolm X

"Taking it" is "positive freedom", not just the "negative" freedom from oppression, but actuation of freedom.

Isaiah Berlin put it this way [4]:

"The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. This is at least part of what I mean when I say that I am rational, and that it is my reason that distinguishes me as a human being from the rest of the world. I wish, above all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for his choices and able to explain them by reference to his own ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the degree that I am made to realize that it is not."

This is in line with Paulo Freire's liberation [1]:

"Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion. [...] If people, as historical beings necessarily engaged with other people in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of their humanity. Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects."

Regarding the legal system's sanitized freedom rights balancing act diversion that conveniently disappears the relation of oppression, Derrick Jensen has this to say [5]:

"It comes down to a basic truism: defensive rights always trump offensive rights. My right to freedom always trumps your right to exploit me, and if you do try to exploit me, I have the right to stop you, even at the expense of you."

Now think who exploits who in our little dominance hierarchy over here where we live... Who is in jail for what? Who kills the most people? Who gets away with selling death to all? Who has a license to print money? Who sues who and who wins at it? Who has a voice? Who decides?


Endnotes

[1] "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paolo Freire, 1970.

[2] "How anti-racism protects class structure and dominance hierarchy" by Denis G. Rancourt, 2011.

[3] "Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech" by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 1996. In: "The Future of Academic Freedom", edited by Louis Menard.

[4] "Two Concepts of Liberty" by Isaiah Berlin, 1958.

[5] Preface by Derrick Jensen to the 2007 edition of "Pacifism as Pathology" by Ward Churchill.

Other essays by Denis G. Rancourt

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is in court hearings that will extend into 2012.

Symbiosis of anarchy and hierarchy: Towards understanding the continuous revolution of liberation and the barrier that is the oppressor within

Or, if you can’t fucking cheer a burning cop car...

By Denis G. Rancourt

This is my reaction to the recent North American Anarchism Study Network conference held in Toronto, at which the divide between the study of anarchism and the practice of anarchy was made abundantly clear. An overview would bring one to the overly hasty conclusion that anarchy is dead. I found myself compelled to express that anarchists should celebrate acts of anarchy, at an anarchism conference!

We are born anarchists and we are born into hierarchy.

We have a built-in desire to make decisions that are good for our individual selves in all circumstances. This can lead us to want to cooperate, to want to rebel, to accept sacrifice for an anticipated greater good or future good, and to accept oppressive circumstances when we do not perceive a possibility of escaping these circumstances.

We seek to survive and to project ourselves within the limits of what we perceive to be achievable. Projection is both biological (reproductive, genetic) and political (influence, authority).

In making individual decisions, our perception is largely societal, in that it is modulated and defined by societal norms and the societal world view.

It is the overriding influence of society on individual perception that mostly keeps the individual embedded within society’s structure. Cracks in the mental environment allow dissidence and deviance – anarchy.

The seasons, the elements, and natural competitors have taught humans to foresee and guard against attacks and other threats to safety. More planning implies greater organization and specialization. Organization and specialization, if it is not constrained by non-exploitive tradition, can in turn become resiliently tied to gender, race, other human characteristics and affinity groups of conspiring profiteers to become class-defined hierarchy.

Hierarchy is a resilient structure of societal stratification that is maintained by force, rather than simply a form of societal organization consciously and willingly supported by free participants.

Control of the many by the few is achieved by socio-psychological methods (gangsterism, the risk of being mobbed, mythology, divide and conquer tactics, strategic control of key resources, and so on) and by one-sided use of the most advanced technology, in particular weapons technology.

Once initiated, a hierarchy has a life and a will of its own. All hierarchical pyramids spontaneously sharpen. All hierarchies spontaneously tend to become more hierarchical. This is driven by the individuals and groups who benefit from more hierarchy. The sharpening ultimately leads to fascism.

At the same time, there is spontaneous resistance to sharpening of the hierarchical pyramid from those who suffer from the sharpening. But this resistance typically only occurs to the degree that the hierarchical sharpening and its consequences are perceived.

The anarchist understands hierarchy as inherently oppressive and as necessarily violent. Here Paulo Freire’s definition of violence is particularly relevant [1]:

“Any situation in which “A” objectively exploits “B” or hinders his and her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression. Such a situation in itself constitutes violence even when sweetened by false generosity; because it interferes with the individual’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human. With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun.”

“If people, as historical beings necessarily engaged with other people in a movement of inquiry, did not control that movement, it would be (and is) a violation of their humanity. Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.”

Therefore, hierarchy is bad.

All acts that attack hierarchy and its structures are acts of anarchy. To practice anarchy is to attack hierarchy. Of course there is a backlash to the practice of anarchy, as any hierarchy will react to protect and reinforce itself.

To not attack hierarchy for fear of the backlash, or to postpone attacking hierarchy in order to prepare for the backlash in a protracted avoidance period of “organizing”, is to not practice anarchy.

A praxis of liberation fighting one’s own oppression and driven by authentic rebellion is a sustainable practice of anarchy. In this model, the subject of liberation does not plan a definitive revolution but rather engages in a life of acquiring his/her freedom [1]:

“Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man [woman]; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”

“[Otherwise, the participants] aspire to revolution as a means of domination, rather than as a road to liberation.”

A revolution cannot lead to a post-revolutionary period with less hierarchy unless it is a revolution of dismantling hierarchy as part of the process of liberation. And this revolution can have ups and downs and accelerated moments; it can mesh, coalesce, fragment and more; but it is never complete, never done.

Anarchy will never run out of hierarchy.

In this view, we prioritize the process of liberation by fighting the oppressor over the severed distractions of “building alternatives”, “building community” and “organizing to resist”. The latter are seen as at best empty or superficial and at worst strengthening the oppressor’s presence within when not accompanied by a praxis of self-defence spirited by authentic rebellion. Only direct self-defence or push-back against oppression and towards liberation can produce dignity, true solidarity, and personal and communal emancipation.

We reject the isolationist and segregationist tendency to rationalize-out rebellion and its direct expressions. In this sense, we see the current rejections and qualifications of direct action as pathological pacifism [2]. We also understand any absence of or suppression of the instinct to celebrate all acts of anarchy as a deadly internalization of the oppressor.

We further reject the notion that visceral, vehement, and cathartic acts of anarchy are the hallmark of societal and political immaturity, a phase that it is healthy to grow out of by turning towards cooperative suppression and consensus-based imprisonment. Instead, the individual’s intensity of praxis can match the individual’s growing experience and stature; as opposed to accommodation of the oppressor within.

If you can’t fucking cheer at a burning cop car in a city replete with racist and classist police violence then you have seriously invested the oppressor within you; and likewise if you can’t celebrate targeted property damage against the main institutions of economic predation – G20 or no G20.

The whole idea of anarchy is that, although it can be coordinated and strategic within groups of consenting individuals, it is always within the grasp of the individual, it can spread spontaneously, and it is distributed. The anarchist does not need permission or approval from any community or societal group to enact anarchy in self-defence [3].

That the master will be pissed (or that the master’s media will give a bad image in the internalized masters’ eyes) is no reason for not practicing anarchy. The anarchist takes the risk of the backlash and makes the decision. That the master will punish others by association is primarily a matter for the others to consider. No informed bystanders are innocent.

To not attack hierarchy is to support it. To attack anarchists is to support hierarchy. Hierarchy is violent oppression on a mass scale. These are not elusive points.

References
[1] “Pedagogy of the oppressed” by Paulo Freire
[2] “Pacifism as pathology” by Ward Churchill
[3] Canadian Animal Liberation Movement Collective: Until every cage is empty...

On the prison of delayed fertility*

The right to choose death vs. life imposing choices

By Denis G. Rancourt

In this note I suggest that the mainstream political thrust of “right to choose” proponents is harmful, as viewed in a meta-picture of society.

In the First World, the system separates us from ourselves and from each other. It’s more than atomization. It includes ionization, loss of self.

School is a major instrument. We are made obedient but also made sterile for use in non-life tasks. We are conditioned to delay entry into adulthood, into responsibility, into participation and into meaning.

We are barred from creation of life as discovery of self and conditioned to view procreation as a disaster in our reproductive prime and as an optional distraction and luxury in our reproductive decline.

The system needs dedicated managers and workers who only reproduce to replicate economic extraction. There is no time or space for self-discovery and self-organization.

We are conditioned into a death culture where our imposed primary purpose is to serve the exploitation machine.

Where life gave life which sustained life, now death is manufactured in order to serve death.

The First World is the land of the walking dead. No community, no nature, no self.

Walk off the plane in the developing world and step into life creation, bonds, vibrancy, family and community. Only military onslaught and sustained merciless economic predation can destroy a life-based people.

By comparison, the death-based people that we are fall prey to depression, futility, emptiness, pharma-cure, consuma-cure, entertaina-cure, and the rest. We don’t have a chance because we have been designed to be dead – in order to be manageable and malleable.

And the design must be strictly enforced. Rebellious teenage parents must pay the price and suffer the system’s wrath: Economic punishment, child removal, societal exclusion, stigmatization, isolation …

There may as well be prison walls keeping us from our own fertility; and in addition there is technology – the pill, the abortion, surgical intervention, and the food we eat.

And on the privileged left there is a mental environment industry to justify the prison: “A woman’s right to choose.” A woman’s right to be fairly exploited and oppressed equally to men.

The right to life movement is in part an earnest revolutionary impulse against the culture of death, the culture of the market; the expanding and globalizing market that destroys traditional family types centered on procreation.

The life vs. choice debate confronts more traditional modes against corporate-oriented organization. It is a fundamental battle touching the heart of the single most important defining characteristic of any culture: The culture’s reproductive paradigm.

The “right to choose” in the mainstream is a misguided political venture and a harmful slogan that preserves class inequality. Does woman choose to be in a culture of delayed fertility or is this an unquestioned given defined by market forces?

As radical choosers know, the right to choose must be the right to choose economic and class justice; before it makes any sense beyond accommodating middle class death management for dedicated house slaves to the system.

There is no choice without personal safety and healthy conditions. And there is no choice in a prison.

I agree that a foetus that cannot survive outside the womb can be subjected to choice and that women have not had choice and that an individual should be allowed to choose his/her own death but the best way to gain all these choices is to take down the prison, starting with the prison of delayed fertility.

*This essay was inspired by the autobiography of Assata Shakur.

RELATED POSTS:

• University Student for Sale
• Murder and Genocide as Natural
• Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation
• On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism
• Need for and Practice of Student Liberation

University Student for Sale

by Denis Rancourt


You are wretched.

In the history of humanity puberty was the passage to adulthood and responsibility of self yet you accept prolonged subservience. You even sell your future life to bankers for the privilege of slavery and sustained stupidity.

You choose to be a house slave rather than risk freedom.

You are pathetic to watch. Racing from assignment to assignment, from essay to essay, from test to test, from lab to lab; racing to regurgitate on demand, to satisfy a master, to be graded for compliance, to be moulded into an obedient servant without ever having the time to think or understand.

You are even more pathetic when you justify your subservience with the master’s catch phrases: this is how we learn from true experts, basic knowledge first then thinking and application, practice leads to skill… as though human development, perception and learning were like tying a shoe or any other technical skill.

You are most pathetic when you devise a world view to justify your own negation and indoctrination; when you bring the master within yourself in this way. You are most sad, most deeply wounded and most distanced from yourself when your oppressor resides in you.

You were broken and institutionalized as a mostly defenceless child but now you are an adult and it is time for you to stand up – or take the path of life-long crawling.

You are now responsible for you.

Are you going to let these moronic ass kissers we call professors – who have jumped through ALL the hoops – impress you with their canned and well delivered spiels (or if not well delivered at least imposed by their illegitimate authority)?

The ones that deliver badly and grade unfairly only better illustrate the madness of it all. But you make a pact with every one of them to obey in exchange for grades and credits. And those that fool you with their smiles from privilege and their empathy entice you to imitate rather than rebel.

Just like with slave-driver tactics, there is a prof for your every student vulnerability. The hard ass offers superiority of the top-level exploiter with a promise of club entry, or the comforting illusion that you are needed for good in the crushing machine. The radical prof denies his/her role in managing the killing machine and offers enticing radical (to the root) analysis severed from all practice beyond writing, communicating, and more analysis – as the ultimate neutralizing stratagem for potential agents (students) who might not otherwise distinguish between inquiry and theorizing as acceptable and social reform as unacceptable.

You confuse your trainer, the master’s tool, for a mentor or a parent. Wake up. As an adult, no one is the boss of you. Your first responsibility is to yourself, to your own dignity. Only you can discover who you are and your rightful place. These scams are soul poison and make you into an oppressor that is oppressed.

Yes you are pathetic, with all your escapes and justifications. And just as pathetic with your drive to dominate and climb the ladder by stepping on heads. It will be a deservedly empty life until you stand straight up.

You deserve to be treated like a number, to be used and manipulated, because you take it. Why would the master respect you? Is reward for obedience respect? Are simulated pleasantness and an offer to take a place on your knees respect?

You have no say in what, how much, when, or where. You simply are told and only ask that the directions be more detailed: When is it due? Can it be double spaced? Can I have an example? And you ask for regurgitation aids: Can you give us copies of your Power Point slides before class…? Good fucking Jesus. You are pathetic.

Neither does your cynicism shield you. Obedience against your nature is harmful obedience no matter how you cast it. It dehumanizes you like it would denaturalize any caged animal.

You can free yourself.

You can fight back to defend yourself, to define yourself.

You must discover personal authentic rebellion and express it with your voice and your body.

Do not repress your emotions. Without anger and hate of your oppressor there is no passion or love. Feel what you feel and use it to drive your liberation.

Each act of rebellion is a step towards self-worth and freedom. Each act of rebellion informs you about you and about the world like nothing else can.

This is how to connect with comrades. You can only connect if you are yourself and know yourself. This is how to discover your place, a real place. It’s also the only known way to create justice.

You don’t need a better model or argument. Just reject pacification and co-optation. Take your place and your influence – in the classroom to start! – And wherever you are, always. Join your comrades and hold together with those who see the chains. The others are acting out the internalized master and only need to be stirred or challenged. Don’t let them mob you. Stand your ground.

You will find the way if you keep true and never lie down or kneel. Each time you comply you will feel the hurt again and this will remind you to step back into the battle for you.

Get out of the trap and up the ante for your life. It will be worth every moment.

Cowardice, stupidity and depravity are the other option.

It is that simple. You are always in charge of you.

RELATED POSTS:
On the need for and practice of student liberation
Why we must despise university professors
Anti-hierarchy activism vlog series
Against Chomsky

In Place of Death

Canadian university students are enslaved children

by Joseph Hickey
In Place of Death (blog)

In loco parentis was a Latin phrase used on campuses in the 1960’s. It means “in the place of parents”, and it meant the power to establish curfews over students, to impose academic sanctions for any kind of non-academic misbehaviour, and to wreak other elements of control over student lives. The in loco parentis concept was overthrown in the student movements of the time, like the Berkely Free Speech Movement and the Anti-War Movement, wherein students took first steps toward ownership of their education and the glimmering vision of an authentic learning experience that springs from one’s inside-out.

Over the past decades, universities have clawed back the power to determine many aspects of student life: where we can gather in number, which students are “accepted” by the administration as appointees to governance committees, when profs (even the tenured ones) can be sacked for political reasons with no regard to protest from the student body, and even which posters we can’t put up on streetlamps around campus. Meanwhile, non-democratic marketing campaigns and whole administrative offices and even foreign campuses are created to spread the university’s brand of ideology across the world. All against a background of incessant tuition fee increases, increased workload for students, and the continual massacring of small classes.

But our campus patriarchs are upping the ante even further: student codes of conduct are now the norm at Ontario universities and prohibit such dangerous and clearly learning-detrimental activity as criticizing the reputation of the university and sleeping on campus, among many other things. One student at the University of Ottawa – which does not even have a student code of non-academic conduct – was barred from registering last year with no reason given, without any formal procedure being followed, receiving only the unilateral assurance of the Vice-President Governance, Diane Davidson, that it was in “everyone’s best interest” that he pursue his studies at another institution. The student, Marc Kelly, is three courses away from graduating and has devoted seven years of his life as a student at the University of Ottawa. President Allan Rock’s Ms. Davidson has taken on the role of institutional wicked step-mother to a disturbingly accurate degree.

The resistance of the 60’s has long ago softened back into the spineless stance of the career-obsessed or self-ignorant student. Police come onto campus like brutal baby-sitters to handcuff and muscle away the few free-thinkers. The creepy uncles that are Crown attorneys are coming around more and more frequently to get-off on pressing bogus charges against student activists and watching them squirm. The rest of the student population keep their heads down, consume the shit they are forced to and regurgitate it on command, either cursing the entire process with each painful word or descending into a masochistic frenzy, gunning for the blue-ribbon vomit prize to show Daddy at the end of the semester. Students are weak and battered children, cowering in the corner until they are big enough to pick up the whip and start beating their siblings into an even darker submission.

In place of parents we have pathological masters of our minds and bodies. In this family, Mom and Pop’s main concerns are image production, globalization and political influence, and engineering the next crop of intellectually modified servants of the Canadian class hierarchy (that’s us). We don’t need parents at school and we don’t need professors excising our power to think and administrators bashing us for acting according to the principles of the University. We need honesty, growth from within ourselves, and control over our lives in place of domination and death.

Related articles can be found at:

1. (2010) Free Speech Movement Digital Archive.
2. (2010) U of O Watch Blog.
3. (2009) New York University Disorientation Guide.

Joseph Hickey is a physics graduate student and a member of university senate at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

The Torturer’s Apprentice

T.A. doesn’t stand for what you think it does…

by Joseph Hickey
In Place of Death


Teaching assistants at the University of Ottawa are apprentice slave drivers. We are torturers in training, and this training involves doing the dirty work of rewarding or punishing students for their reproduction of the professor’s ideology. This is achieved by grading papers, policing students at exams and incriminating “cheaters”, and patrolling lab courses to ensure that students don’t escape from the holding cells outlined in their instruction manuals. All as part of an arduous quest to have ourselves certified as “masters” or “doctors” of the process we’ve put ourselves and our students through. Will somebody sound the alarm?

You know that school is oppression and your undergrad students know it too. There’s physical pain: knotted-up shoulders from marathon marking sessions, binge-eating of baneful food, sleep deprivation. There’s the nagging frustration that the students aren’t interested in the material, and the papers keep showing that they “just don’t get it.” Ever wonder why the students who demonstrate the most persistent creativity and curiosity in the material are the ones who sink toward the poor end of your grade profile? In the first year physics lab course, students have a demanding set of instructions to follow for each experiment and a detailed marking scheme outlining where and in what quantity the marks will be awarded. If the students finish all the steps by the end of the three-hour session and have a report written up according to the strict course standard, then they will earn a high grade. They will also be stripped of an opportunity to experiment in the physics laboratory or to even think about what they are doing, except to ask the demonstrator questions like: “is this working right?” or “is this the right answer?” Whatever that might mean.

We, as teaching assistants, are needed to enforce this madness that takes free spirits and spits out brainless young professionals and intellectually castrated graduate students who will fill our jobs once we’ve moved on to the master torturer position. That’s what we’re paid for. But that’s not what our job is: the teacher’s role is to provide the best educational experience possible. The Instructions and Advice for Demonstrators document, which is given to all first year physics lab T.A.’s at the beginning of term, explains that due to the large size of first-year courses, the demonstrator will be in a position to interact personally with a small group of students while the professor cannot, and therefore he “has a much larger influence over these few students.” Demonstrators are thus entrusted with the bulk of the responsibility in helping new students “develop a liking for the subject”, according to the document. It goes on to state that “your only objective should be to remove obstacles to the students’ learning.”

As honest T.A.’s we need to identify and eliminate the obstacles that interfere with creative and authentic learning: remove the needles and the electric clamps. Drop the red hot iron and cut through the wires. Act out against the grading system that is shredding your own mind and the minds of your students. Transform from torturer into teacher.

For reference:

(1969) The Student as Nigger: Essays and Stories, by Jerry Farber. (Original essay available here).

The University of Ottawa Department of Physics document Instructions and Advice for Demonstrators can be found under Joseph Hickey’s section at the AcademicFreedom.ca website here.

Joseph Hickey is a physics graduate student and a member of university senate at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

Denis Rancourt on anti-hierarchy activism - Nine-part video mini-series

Here is a nine-part video commentary about anti-hierarchy activism.

#1 On the need to act across hierarchical strata; act up.
#2 When does our opinion matter to power?
#3 Is organizing activism? (When does it help?)
#4 Is community building activism?
#5 On the need to embrace hatred. (related essay)
#6 Fight your own oppression!
#7 Where do you fight?
#8 How do you fight?
#9 What is the payoff?

The underlying assumption is that of anarchism, that hierarchy by design and nature is violently oppressive. These videos are about activism aimed at flattening the hierarchical pyramid. (If you're not fighting hierarchy then you are helping to maintain it.)

Related essays HERE.

Murder and genocide are natural, therefore rebel!

A socio-biological critique of First-World middleclass activism

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.


Evolution can be societal. Here I argue that we must recognize our primal drive for murder and genocide and society’s propensity for violently oppressive hierarchies in order to react with the needed determined and sustained individual-based rebellion. This rebellion is against the rogue warlords and hierarchies that dominate us. Warring and its hierarchical support serve no useful purpose now that the human species is not ecologically threatened by natural competitors and now that there is no need for genetic selection (otherwise imposed on a small gene pool by an unforgiving natural environment).

This is a critique of First-World middleclass activism, in the hope that it will start contributing to human evolution.

I argue that laws and ethical systems are diversions that serve hierarchy and I argue that a victim mentality induced by hierarchy makes us susceptible to the appeal of canned justice and to various escapes into cowardice; rather than allowing us to perceive the otherwise obvious possibility of rebellion and self-defence.

I describe a positive feedback trap in which perturbed activists respond to perceived threats by launching into behavioural rule generation (an anxious quest for the perfect model) which in turn supports the system causing the threats. This leads to off-target and co-opted actions such as ineffective appeals to politicians, lobbying for new laws and regulations, adopting extreme personal lifestyle rules, and extremes in applied political correctness (“inclusive language,” “safe space,” etc.). The more the activists feel threatened the more they spin pseudo-comforting behavioural rules and make requests to the hierarchical oppressors for better rules, thereby increasing their societal isolation and further distancing themselves from effective means.

The gargantuan failures of First-World middleclass activism in the face of advancing soul-battering corporate fascism, murderous militarism and exploitive finance globalization since the 1970s should be cause for radical self-examination. Canadian queer pride parades (that can’t agree on whether Israel is an apartheid sate), reparationless apologies for aboriginal residential schools, zero-impact demonstrations and petitions, and tolerated and disappeared public musings about proportional representation and parliamentary free votes just don’t cut it; whereas corporate greening counts negatively. It’s like the activism was designed to fail. There is little sign of actual resistance from the First-World middleclass.

MURDER IS NATURAL AND HEALTHY IS SICK

Animal rights activists believe that abstaining from killing animals is a higher moral state to which humans should aspire. But is it helpful and productive to aspire to a state that is not natural?

On the other hand, some animal rights activists internally accentuate the murderous ways of humans and react by acting externally on behalf of other species to concretely oppose the killing. These resistors, such as members of the Animal Liberation Front, are among the boldest and most effective direct action First-World activists around. They act in true solidarity with the animals with which they identify. [1]

Most other First-World activists prefer to believe that humankind has a natural tendency towards cooperation and altruism that can flourish given a sufficiently humane system such as socialism or communism or constrained capitalism infused with more participatory decision making, and so on. [2]

But is it helpful and productive to aspire to a state that is not natural? And is it not harmful to be deceptive about one’s nature rather than practice honest self-appraisal? [3]

Should we not first ask whether or not humans have a natural tendency to practice murder and genocide? After all, genocides are far more common than the Israel lobby would have us believe. [4][5]

Certainly the spider, with its complex behaviour in hunting, stalking, and ambushing prey, is a sentient being. Presumably the spider could not survive on tomatoes and grass. The spider thrives on killing and devouring (alive) other sentient beings (including birds and small mammals when circumstances permit). Is it immoral for the spider to practice this behaviour? Has evolution privileged humane killing methods in the spider?

What about the killer whale? Is it not often observed to play with its prey for hours before killing it or simply letting it escape? We’ve all seen the documentary films where a live seal is repeatedly thrown like a rag doll; and the monkeys who torture a captured bird before eating it, or not.

Among large apes, dominant males maintain harems and violently prevent most other males from reproducing, while expecting complete submission and sexual favours from the females. They kill offspring that are not their own.

We know that birds mob individuals from their flocks and kill the undesirables for no apparent reason related to flock survival. And we know that human groups also practice mobbing.

If something is natural can it be wrong? Would it not produce healthier societies to recognize what is natural human behaviour and to make practical decisions based on realistically evaluated primal impulses rather than mask it all with moralistic rituals and myths?

We determine that an animal behaviour is natural by correctly supposing that animals left to themselves exhibit their natural behaviours. We can supplement this by physiological arguments. For example, we know that carnivores do better when they eat meat and that herbivores do better when they eat grass.

Let us apply the same rules to humans. Throughout history and as far as we can deduce, humans have predominantly been omnivorous and competitive for territory, resources, and reproductive projection. Clans have killed clans. Families have feuded. Patriarchies have maintained themselves. Nations have invaded other nations and taken slaves and resources at will. Entire peoples have been exterminated or enslaved every time superior war technology or tactics have been developed. The present is not excluded.

Human history is a story of human carnage. Is this not the first truth about humankind? Stable societies established by military strength are characterized by slavery, serfdom, kingdoms, prisons, mental institutions and every form of domination and exploitation; now including globalized wage slavery and resource expropriation.

On this backdrop, are philosophical discussions about morals and justice mere camouflage and deception only intended for temporary and superficial relief from reality? Or do they have another utility?

Canadian society’s crimes include, a continuing genocide against aboriginal peoples [5], a geopolitical war in Afghanistan, support for the US Empire, support for the genocidal and apartheid state policies of Israel [6], overturning the democratic popular government in Haiti, corporate and finance predation throughout the world, an immoral prison system used to maintain social inequities [7], vast structural social inequities with mass public health consequences, mass civil rights violations perpetrated at will and without consequences for the decision makers (e.g., G20-Toronto), mass indoctrination and pacification of the youth [8], continual social engineering manipulation, universal pharmaceutical and medical establishment predation [9] and much more.

And as I write this there is a cultural and racial global war of dominance raging. Geopolitical alliances are defining boundaries and leveraging control of energy resources. Enemies are formed in the ape minds of our leaders who distribute territory and privilege to their ape friends.

All of this appears thrust upon us by the natural world where predator species fight for territory and dominance. Don’t ask the lions to get along with the hyenas. A balance of forces is the only justice. The only thing keeping a dominant male from killing another male’s offspring is the birthing female’s teeth and wits.

THE POINT OF THE LAW

Is it not therefore somewhat artificial for humans to administer a “justice” system in form as though it related to justice and to criminalize murder as though it was some kind of unnatural anomaly? Is it not a rather cynical farce in our societal politics of the killing machine to talk about God and to pay lip service to morals and to ethics?

Or do laws and ethical systems play an essential role in justifying some murder and exploitation (war, economic predation) while providing some restraints at home? Such as: Father can go out into the world to steal, exploit and murder but it says he can’t just kill his dependent wife and children when he gets tired of them.

Or in our hierarchies are laws and ethical systems meant to keep the masses in their place with a false sense of security; an understanding between masters and slaves? The slaves provide servitude in exchange for the promise of safety. They demand to be exploited fairly. They are conned to accept punishment as “justice”.

In view of the above, laws and ethical systems appear to serve complimentary functions:

● They provide enforceable mechanisms to facilitate monopoly building by the top corporate and finance predators.

● They provide enforceable structure and codifications to preserve and strengthen the hierarchy.

● They codify the impotence of hierarchical underlings and define the place of underlings.

● They create an illusion of needed master-provided safety to underlings, in exchange for required compliance and servitude.

● They create the double standard whereby strict penalties for harming or attacking the hierarchical masters are enforced while killing in the service of the masters (military, police, accountants, etc.) is legitimized.

The Ten Commandments appear to be primarily concerned with nuclear family patriarchy as a basis for society. The Geneva Conventions deal with the rules of war between nation states, thereby legitimizing both war and nation states. And so on.

We invent morals and ethics to codify servitude and to establish dominance. We develop and maintain these codes and we come to believe that they are natural and that they provide security in themselves.

As war and exploitation technologies and social systems progress and as hierarchies grow and collide, so-called civil society and the diplomats, law makers and regulators follow explicit and unspoken directives in spinning more and better overarching webs of behavioural codification, in the hope of protecting us all while in fact entangling us more securely into the killing machines that we inhabit.

These codes, like all laws, are delimited and defined by power – they must be or they would not serve the acting hierarchies. All resource-intensive political endeavours in a hierarchy must serve the hierarchy.

It is not surprising that organized religions have been used to justify a majority of the most horrendous wars. This is a primary political function of religions, to expand the hierarchy. You have to admire some Jews for their honesty and transparency in this regard [18].

It is also not surprising and not operationally contradictory that organized religions are used to manage the home front. This is also a primary political function of religions, to maintain the hierarchy. It is natural for organized religion to collaborate with nationalism and to support corporate fascism; such as with the Nazi holocaust and now with US fundamentalist “Christian” support for the apartheid state of Israel – America’s military cash cow and thug in the Middle East.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP, DOWNWARD SPIRAL

In a bad habit gone mental, the more underlings and progressives feel threatened by hierarchies that have tapped into humanity’s murderous tendency the more desperately they strive for “better” laws, rules, and ethical codes; the more they seek to strengthen the very hierarchies that feed on us all.

Instead of finding the strength within, the warrior instinct that would fend off competing predators, hierarchical underlings beg for a more just master and expect a process that they do not control to wield a better world.

A now classic example is how the green movement was co-opted by atmospheric CO2 euphoria in which corporate leaders, First-World governments, global financiers, mainstream media, the NOG sector, the service scientists, and environmentalists all aligned to defeat a mythical carbon threat by advancing the largest planetary finance scam and economic development policing code ever conceived, thereby solidifying planetary social injustice in the name of social justice. [9][10][11][12]

And there is no lack of other examples. The entire apparatus of government is dedicated to spinning laws and regulations that provide more control to power and a continually renewed illusion of justice-from-rules to those underlings fortunate enough to have the luxury of illusions.

There have been times when governments and laws served to partly counter corporate fascism but these times were episodes during which underlings did find strength within to force some concessions from power. The resulting resistance regulations, laws and rulings have had short half-lives in a social environment of servitude and were quickly replaced and degraded. For example, how long did it take since the 1970s for health and safety government regulators to become corporate whores? [13] How long did it take in Canada since the 1970s for somewhat student-centered public education to become mind-numbing obedience training? [8]

Now in victim mode, the greater the perceived threat to we privileged middleclass hierarchical underlings, the more frantically we spin and scream, the more diligently we appeal to the humanity of our “representatives”, the harder we work to establish sane alternatives and “safe spaces”, to escape impending disaster.

INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE AS SICKO

I see many alternative networks, pathological desires to be isolated in “like mindedness” and extreme expressions of political correctness all around, as ineffective victim-mindset escapes from and shields against a violent and increasingly oppressive hierarchy.

As a consequence of this perceive-threat/spin-rules positive feedback trap, many of the resulting socio-behavioural escapes can be extreme. Veganism is often originally such a reaction towards an extreme rule-based behaviour, one which is contrary to natural consumption opportunism. There are no economic-underclass vegans in the First World. Other extreme lifestyle rule systems include physical activity ritualism, carbon footprint reduction obsession, off grid fetishism, etc. When extreme, these reactions can be all-consuming and can determine relationships and fundamental beliefs.

For example, how crazy is a frazzled clique of middleclass First-Worlders that develops and maintains an elaborate social behaviour code centered on “sensitivity/anti-oppression training” emphasizing the enforcement of “inclusive language” and the criminalization of racist expression as “hate speech” while not effectively and directly resisting the very hierarchical structure that so causes it to behaviourally suppress reality rather than physically confront its own immediate oppressors? This latest political correctness extreme social reaction is post-advent of nineteenth century anarchism and is therefore retarded. Academic feminist theorists have done little to stop this sad and regressive phenomenon.

Even one fully escape-integrated progressive academic [14] has critiqued these peaking political correctness excesses as having gone too far. [15]

CONCLUSION

A more healthy and self-respecting activism would be to recognize humankind’s primal capacity and impulse for invasion and murder and human society’s propensity for violent hierarchical oppression and to react in self-defence rather than to escape into isolation and pathology or to grope subserviently for power’s protection.

Self-respecting activists and anarchists and libertarians worthy of these titles need to practice day to day distributed rebellion as the only defence against our rogue killer-warrior masters who insist on running prison and extermination camps rather than serving as protectors only when needed. The species is no longer at risk from the outside. It’s time for a biological reality check and a vigorous and persistent program to keep these thugs in line.

There is no “then what?” Murder and genocide will stay alive and hierarchy will always tend to broaden its scope and sharpen its control. Rebellion (direct participation, resistance, sabotage, personal influence, taking back control, having a direct say) is the antidote to hierarchical violence and oppression. Rebellion creates a real and evolving alternative. Our constant rebellion is also our liberation, growth, and connection. Rebellion is anchored in the individual fighting his/her own oppression at the point of strongest individual contact with the control hierarchy – at work, at school, on the street, in the prison, on the reserve; wherever the individual is controlled in his/her own life. [2][3][16][17]

Endnotes

[1] “Memories of Freedom” by the Western Wildlife Unit of the Animal Liberation Front.

[2] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[3] “Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[4] “The Holocaust Industry” by Norman G. Finkelstein, 2000.

[5] “A little matter of genocide – Holocaust and denial in the Americas 1492 to the present” by Ward Churchill, 1997.

[6] Norman G. Finkelstein’s web page on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

[7] “About the obscenity of the legal mind and its grotesque displays of arrogance” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[8] “Canadian Education as an Impetus towards Fascism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.

[9] “Some big lies of science” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[10] “Questioning Climate Politics” by Dru Oja Jay, 2007.

[11] CFACT YouTube interview of Denis Rancourt about climate change politics, 2010.

[12] “The corporate climate coup” by David F. Noble, 2007, 2010.

[13] “Corrupt to the Core” by Shiv Chopra, 2008.

[14] “Global Warming Suspicions and Confusions” by Justin Podur, 2007.

[15] “Contested spaces worth defending” by Justin Podur, 2010.

[16] “Need for and Practice of Student Liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[17] “G20-Toronto property damage is a good thing” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[18] "How To Kill Goyim And Influence People - Torat Ha'melech" YouTube video, 2010.

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]

George Carlin on expressing the inner rebel

There has not been a period like the 1960s in North America since the 1960s, only a steady forced march towards corporate fascism... (LINK)

Here is a glimpse of the 1960s through George Carlin's story of personal liberation. It was all about letting your inner rebel out...

Related:
George Carlin featured on climate change blog

Roundabout as conflict-avoidance versus Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.

In the present essay I introduce the general notion of “roundabout” as a mechanism of conflict avoidance used by privileged social justice activists. I then contrast this pseudo-liberation activism with the needed true liberation activism of Malcolm X, which I argue to be consistent with the model of liberation of Freire.

INTRODUCTION

The now familiar concept of “pacifism as pathology” was introduced by Ward Churchill as the central characteristic of First-World middleclass so-called social justice activism. Churchill argued from history that all liberations were leveraged through violence and proposed that pacifism as cowardice was pathology. [1]

Gandhi stated that it was better to practice armed resistance than to use pacifism as an excuse for cowardice [2]. Both men (Churchill and Ghandi) saw acceptance of and self-justification for one’s (legal or circumstantial) slavery as pathology.

Paulo Freire’s work showed that all hierarchies, no matter how cushioned in comfort, are violent and oppressive and argued that we could only fight our own oppression – that “solidarity” meant standing side by side with those fighting our same oppression. Freire advanced that all liberations had to be rooted in and driven by the struggles of the oppressed themselves no matter how underprivileged and that inter-social-class “solidarity” was insignificant and limited to rare individuals who joined in battle on the front lines. [3]

Churchill concentrated on the use of pacifism as an excuse to avoid the needed direct confrontation with the oppressive system. He and others have deconstructed and exposed First World pacifism as avoidance; including mainstream life-style environmentalism, ecological or economic isolationism, love ideologies, and so on, when taken to be activisms in themselves. These authors did not explore the main creative active strategies whereby pacifism can be enacted.

I explore the latter strategies of evasive action (roundabout) used by the most activist-minded sector of concerned citizens.

My goal is to provide a radical self-criticism for dedicated anti-hierarchy (social justice) activists to help ensure that we are as effective as possible and are not simply fooling ourselves. I hope that my analysis will help us to more easily recognize when we are fooling ourselves and wasting our energies and will help us to identify optimally effective outlooks and strategies.

EXAMPLES OF ROUNDABOUT

Education and progressive legislation

Here is an example. A visible minority suffers racism. As a way of avoiding effective direct challenges to this racism, members of this visible minority ally themselves (in “solidarity”) with privileged social justice activist whites in order to train the majority societal group away from overt racist behaviour using social engineering managed by the establishment - using sponsored “education” and progressive legislation.

As a result, a privileged class of educated and integrated whites become self-conscious about racist behaviour and self-sensor their racist expression, the establishment strengthens its illusion of fairness, and the minority looses its ability and perceived legitimacy for effective direct daily confrontations against now-more-covert racism.

A victim in this particular roundabout is the collaborating visible minority because it puts its efforts in collaborating and its hopes in the social engineering rather than practice its liberation. It denies itself praxis (in the sense of Freire) and instead integrates itself more fully with the oppressive dominant hierarchy, thereby becoming more oppressed and more of an oppressor. Other victims are the lower social class individuals of the visible minority who loose actual solidarity with the now more integrated higher social class individuals of the visible minority and who are saddled with a stronger establishment more able to deflect their legitimate and persistent interests.

The above described roundabout is common as a general model for any oppressed group in a “free and democratic” First World setting: women, queers, blacks, language or cultural minorities, working class, working poor, homeless, disabled, non-status, elderly, disease-infected, professional workers, students, migrant workers, colonized aboriginals, prisoners, consumers, wage earners, tenants, home owners, single fathers, single mothers, and so on.

The above example involves a social class divide of the oppressed group but the class divide is not an essential feature because the roundabout is equally effective when there is no underclass of the oppressed group.

The essential feature of this roundabout is that the collaboration with the establishment, with the hierarchical system of control, is a conscious or unconscious diversion (in terms of personal psychology and personal resource allocation) away from effective direct confrontations, away from the praxis of liberation and away from Freire’s needed revolt and authentic rebellion.

The dominant group partner in this roundabout also avoids its own immediate oppressions, instead of its members practicing their liberation. As a result of this dedicated exercise of avoidance, members of the dominant group partner in the roundabout are perpetually depressed, in search of “hope”, and routinely experience “burn out” despite self-identifying as privileged. This is because the authentically concerned dominant group partners (as opposed to the cynical higher-hierarchical-level dominant group partners such as law and policy makers) are attempting to removed themselves from their own pain and have denied themselves any possibility of directly and effectively addressing their own immediate oppression.

Organizing and politics

Another example of roundabout is when a concerned and sensitized individual, often burdened with survival guilt associated with his/her relative privilege and damaged by an institutionalization (school, work, etc.) against which he/she has no personal experience of effective resistance, identifies an injustice needing to be redressed and launches into “organizing” as a substitute for immediate and direct action, as a substitute for initiating a praxis of liberation focussed on one’s own oppression.

This type of organizing is based of recruiting membership, education regarding the issues, building a growing pool of progressive opinion, and so on, but it guards itself against “radical” actions that would scare off potential allies and clings instead to the mythology of a critical mass of opinion as a motor for societal change. [4][5]

In contrast, organizing that supports liberation is driven by the need for efficient learning, protection and power amplification in a group of individuals already joined in solidarity via their practices of liberation. It is an organizing that is an organic part of the praxis, not a holding pattern of risk and confrontation avoidance.

Deferring societal agency

In another roundabout the concerned and sensitized individual makes a conscious decision to temporarily sacrifice himself/herself to fully integrate the system and to seek advancement within the hierarchy with the rationalization that he/she will be more able to make positive change once a sufficient degree of power and influence is achieved.

The nature of a hierarchy is of course such that this is impossible. The rare individuals who break free from the top layers are expelled from the establishment. The other climbers serve the system astonishingly well or blame themselves for failure and drop out if they cannot.

The sacrifice of willing integration is a large price to pay if the individual does not discover rebellion and creative anti-hierarchical sabotage as methods to change the system from within. Workers and students play the system to survive and their suffering is evident in absenteeism (both physical and mental), indifference, detachment, cynicism, escapism, self-destruction, and so on.

This process and these difficulties are described by Schmidt for the case of professional workers [6]. Adapted to our schooling, this is the story of our institutionalization into the hierarchy, into an economy controlled by concentrated power. In this sense, student liberation during the developmental years would be a most fertile ground for societal transformation [7]. This is why schools are guarded from outside influence and from ideological divergence as rigorously or more than prisons. [8]

Anytime the individual substitutes direct self-defence using his/her body, language, personal influence in community and personal power at school or at work with some indirect or circuitous make-work near-zero-risk scheme that involves going along or convincing others to also not act, then the individual is practicing roundabout rather than liberation activism.

MALCOLM X ON LIBERATION SPYCHOLOGY

The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence) was founded in 1966, one year after the murder of Malcolm X. The spectre of such an organized and focussed resistance was the main concrete driving force which led to significant civil rights gains for blacks. The Black Panther Party was eliminated by the white state’s (FBI) political assassination unit known as COINTELPRO which was also involved in the Malcolm X assassination. Today US blacks disproportionately populate the lowest economic class and US prisons.

In the words of Rev. Albert Cleage [9]:

“Malcolm X was tremendously important, beyond our comprehension today … Malcolm laid down certain basic principles that we can never forget. He changed the whole course. The first basic principle that Malcolm laid down that we can’t forget is this: The white man is your enemy. That is a basic principle, we can’t forget it. I don’t care what else they drag in from wherever they drag it – remember one thing, Malcolm taught one truth: The white man is our enemy. We can’t get away from it, and if we accept and understand that one basic truth, his life was not lived in vain. Because upon that one basic truth we can build a total philosophy, a total course of action for struggle. Because that was the basic confusion which distorted the lives of black people, with corrupted the movements of black people.”

“He didn’t just say it … he went out and he lived it. He asked for moments of confrontation. He said we have got to break our identification, we can’t go through life identifying with the white man or his government. … We must break our identification with the enemy, we must confront him, and we must realize that conflict and violence are necessary parts of a struggle against an enemy – that is what he taught. Conflict, struggle, and violence are not to be avoided. Don’t be afraid of them…”

This foundational principle that in the hierarchical oppression of blacks your enemy is your enemy can be generalized to any particular hierarchical oppression and to all oppressions by hierarchies.

The oppressor by nature is your enemy. You cannot collaborate with your enemy devoted to your oppression and come out ahead. At best, you will be used and transformed into your enemy.

Malcolm X’s psychology of liberation is one where you recognize that the oppressor is an enemy that you cannot integrate, where you know that this enemy can only be deterred by your strength and your willingness to defend yourself.

In this psychology, like in Freire’s, you do not fight the enemy in order to replace him in a hierarchy. You fight for liberation, not for an opportunity to create your own system of oppression. But you fight. You understand that this is an enemy and that all hierarchies can only violently oppress.

If it’s not clear that you are oppressed or that your oppressor is your enemy, then not only are you trapped and confused but you also protect and serve the oppressor. And you act against all those who are oppressed by the oppressor. You collaborate.

One does not like to live during a time of war and one does not like to have enemies. But this is a time of war and you are harmed by the system, denied your full humanity, as surely as the million directly killed in Iraq and as surely as those held in the open air prison known as Gaza and illegally maintained by Israel.

By not fighting your own oppression directly as an individual person you protect the same system that practices these war crimes. By not understanding in your pores that this system and those who sustain, protect and project it are your enemy until they stop, by not understanding this, you are co-opted into collaborating and into denying yourself your own liberation.

You can’t even start a praxis of liberation until you start to recognize the enemy. And you can’t sustain the struggle without knowing who the enemy is and that he is the enemy.

There is an us and them. You are oppressed and you have an oppressor. Indeed, you are oppressed by an entire hierarchical system of oppression. You target where you can best defend yourself, where you will inflict the most punishment. Call it punitive justice.

As soon as you loose sight that you are dealing with an enemy, then you are part of the oppressor. All the internal and external forces will make every attempt to confuse you on this point and to buy or to force your cooperation. In particular, those who invest in roundabout will vehemently pressure and coerce you to follow them because you represent a threat to their psychological investment [4][5].

CONCLUSION

If I keep my individual personal agency, my direct ability to have influence, my direct bodily ability to defend myself against my oppressor understood to be my enemy, at the point of my strongest connection to my oppressor, then I will not partake in roundabout. I will have all my available resources for my praxis of liberation which will naturally include organizing and community.

Endnotes:

[1] “Pacifism as Pathology” by Ward Churchill, 1986.

[2] "Resolving the Israel-Palestine Conflict: What we can learn from Gandhi" by Norman G. Finkelstein, 2009.

[3] “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire, 1970.

[4] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[5] “The Activist Wars” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2009.

[6] “Disciplined Minds” by Jeff Schmidt, 2000.

[7] “Need for and Practice of Student Liberation” by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010.

[8] “The Student as Nigger” by Jerry Farber, 1969.

[9] "Myths about Malcolm X" by Rev. Albert Cleage, speech delivered in Detroit, February 24, 1967.

See many RELATED POSTS on the Activist Teacher blog

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]

Voter psychology and the bloodless revolution to end bloodshed

Right, left and center voters must unite against politicians

by Denis G. Rancourt
This essay was first posted on the Activist Teacher blog.



FREEDOM NEEDED HERE AND NOW

Fear is the primary motivation for many voters.

Left voters mobilize when they feel a danger from a perceived rabid right that would ghettoize racial minorities, tear down Medicare and state pensions, weaken labour unions, and criminalize behaviours on the basis of arbitrary moral or religious judgements.

Right voters mobilize when they feel a danger from a perceived paternalistic left that would tax more, interfere more, manage more, and lead the country into fiscal disaster and deficient national safety. [1]

I think both right and left voters need to realize that both right and left governments work for corporations and financiers and that the goal needs to be to put these governments and their backers in their place.

Why the hell should corporations and banks run our lives? And why the hell do they own the politicians? And why don’t we force governments to work for people?

We need a “voters’ alliance”, an understanding that voters – both right and left – will stand for government that actually represents people rather than serve undemocratic power structures.

All voters need to have as their first priority to take back government. We need to get rid of politicians and replace them with accountable representatives.

No more “the global economy controls my life” bullshit. No more letting the banks set financial policy and industry set corporate policy. No more bank and corporate lobbyists. No more corporate or government media – free the waves. No more “industry is the government regulator’s client” bullshit.

Individuals should not pay taxes, except specific taxes for targeted use agreed to by referendum. Profits and interests on loans are benefits to non-democratic corporations and banks, gratuitously extracted from the working public. Therefore corporate profits and interests on private-bank loans can be taxed at whatever rate is needed to pay for whatever the public wants.

The practice of taxing folks to fatten corporations must end to be replaced with the common sense taxing of extracted profits and extorted interests on private-capital loans. Regular folks don’t make profits, they earn pay from their personal contributions and such pay should not be taxed. Each earner has a right to decide how to spend his/her pay and that includes helping others or contributing to shared services.

Corporations and banks, like the economy, are not going to fold because profits and interests are taxed. They didn’t before and they won’t now. If anything, organized thievery is too resilient. Tax the shysters and leave people alone – a democratic counter to corporate and finance predation. This would help ensure that the public, through a representative government, stays in charge.

For this to work, it would require that there be no more corporate and finance secrets. Everything has to be open book. The public has a right to know exactly who owns and controls what and how much and by what means these scavenger systems extract their ransoms and rents. There should be no secrets in scam jobs.

Government needs to both get out of peoples lives and put a heavy democratically-controlled hand on the power structures that fuck people over.

Politicians can no longer lie, can be recalled, can be disciplined for misleading the public, and must go to referendum on all significant international agreements and on all significant economic structural charges. Period.

I trust people. Therefore, don’t tell me (or anyone) what religion I can or cannot have and don’t tell me what I can or cannot do with my body (it’s my body) and don’t tell me what to drink or smoke or inject or at what age (my family does that) and don’t tell me who I can or cannot fuck with consent or raise children with and don’t tell me what must be taught in my school and don’t tell me what weapons I can or cannot own and don’t tell me you are going to limit or regulate the internet or any media and don’t tell me about your corporate distribution copyrights or your crazy corporate patent “rights” and don’t spy or surveillance me or collect my information… [1][2]

But do force the corporate and finance books to be wide open and do tax interests and profits across the board, taking into account that small businesses are both more legitimate and more precarious than large corporations. And do prohibit mergers and power concentration. And do force break ups and distribution. And reduce foreign ownership, in both directions. And tie the economy to local democratic structures. And break up unhealthy mega operations in food and health.

The government’s job is to protect individual freedoms and that means controlling all undemocratic structures that feed on and constrain people.

Private enterprise is great, as long as it’s private and operates in a level-field competitive environment without giants that own banks, media and politicians. Small is better and the small can organize to share knowledge and costs on large projects but monopolies occupying entire regions are a no go.

Voters need to get control and to protect each other’s individual rights. With control come more ownership and less dependence on outside forces directed by others (those artificially at the top of the food chain).

BUT THEN THERE IS THE BIG PICTURE

But much remains unsaid. The US Empire is a military economy. A dominant military economy can thrive while being inefficient and insolvent because force runs the world. The US prints money at will and the US dollar will be the world currency as long as the US superpower is prepared to enforce its rule.

The paper economy can crash and burn as it suits the big boys but as long as the US military-industrial-finance complex – with its over one thousand military bases or installations or affiliations in over one hundred countries worldwide and with its strategic control of energy resources and of energy transport routes – has a tight grip on the world’s real economy US intervention, domination, and exploitation of continental-scale regions is the name of the game. [3]

This domination does not serve the US (and Canadian satellite) voter but only serves to make enemies and feed the military-industrial-finance machine. There is no need for the US to keep China and Russia down. Why not let all develop according to local desires, talents and resources and keep to making America work without projecting its force?

The only answer is racist fear and thirst for power. Voters need to cut the complex off from its addiction to violence and start making friends in the world.

The US is the only world power driving non-civil geopolitical wars in the Middle East and Asia, the only world power interfering in Latin American affairs, the only threat to China in securing its energy needs, the only reason that Israel can freely practice racial aggression [4], and so on.

The US cannot keep the world population under control with nuclear and conventional weapons so it spreads “democracy” – that is, US-style corruption where historic local decision making is abruptly replaced by show elections to pick US-baked political candidates who promote mega-corporate and world-Bank/IMF control of national economies. We all know who wins in the monopoly game of corporate and finance concentration.

The exported US “democracy” is accompanied by a western culture lifestyle of isolating individuals with technology, fast food and relative privilege and by making the working classes compete for the only kinds of jobs allowed after everything else is gutted by “reforms” or destroyed by all out war.

“Our” politicians sure know how to make friends in facilitating this all out militarily-backed finance-corporate exploitation and pillaging.

It’s true folks. The First World robs the Third and Developing Worlds using force. Come on – you knew that. All those lies about aid: Taxpayer financed infrastructure for better corporate exploitation… They only want to come to America because America has destroyed where they would prefer to live…

So we voters need to make a choice. It’s a real choice if we are going to “take back government”. Do we want to instruct government to call off the dogs or do we only want a bigger slice of the spoils? Do we want to be greedy murderers or do we trust that “live and let live and look after your own affairs” will do us justice?

Maybe our collective inability to make this choice, at the individual psychology level, is what is keeping us from taking back government and pushing back corporations and the financiers? Are we better off as house slaves or as freed slaves? [5]

Liberation is an all or nothing proposition. Murder and extortion don’t fit. [6]

Endnotes:

[1] “On the racism and pathology of left progressive First-World activism” by Denis G. Rancourt

[2] “About the obscenity of the legal mind” by Denis G. Rancourt

[3] "Review Article: The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases" by Jules Dufour

[4] “On the question of Israel’s ‘right to exist’ and on Israel’s racism” by Denis G. Rancourt

[5] “That is my total objective” by Albert Cleage

[6] “Pedagogy of the oppressed” by Paulo Freire


Other essays by the same author:
http://rancourt.academicfreedom.ca/blogs-etc/essays.html

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009 by a president who is a staunch supporter of Israeli policy. [See rancourt.academicfreedom.ca]