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Against Apartheid Pedagogy in the Age of White Supremacy

junio 19, 2021junio 18, 2021Noticias

By; Henry Giroux

The toxic thrust of white supremacy runs through American culture like an electric current. Jim Crow is back without apology suffocating American society in a wave of voter suppression laws, the elevation of racist discourse to the centers of power, and the ongoing attempt by right-wing politicians to implement a form of apartheid pedagogy that makes important social issues that challenge the racial and economic status quo disappear. The cult of manufactured ignorance now works through disimagination machines engaged in a politics of falsehoods and erasure. Matters of justice, ethics, equality, and historical memory now vanish from the classrooms of public and higher education and from powerful cultural apparatuses and social media platforms that have become the new teaching machines.

In the current era of white supremacy, the most obvious version of apartheid pedagogy, is present in attempts by Republican Party politicians to rewrite the narrative regarding who counts as an American. This whitening of collective identity is largely reproduced by right-wing attacks on diversity and race sensitivity training, critical race programs in government, and social justice and racial issues in the schools. These bogus assaults are all too familiar and include widespread and coordinated ideological and pedagogical attacks against both historical memory and critical forms of education.

The fight to censor critical, truth telling versions of American history and the current persistence of systemic racism is part of a larger conservative project to prevent teachers, students, journalists, and others from speaking openly about crucial social issues that undermine a viable democracy. Such attacks are increasingly waged by conservative foundations, anti-public intellectuals, politicians, and media outlets. These include right-wing think tanks such as Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, conservative scholars such as Thomas Sowell, right-wing politicians such as Mitch McConnell, and far-right media outlets such as City Journal, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, and Fox News. The threat of teaching children about the history and systemic nature of racism appears particularly dangerous to Fox News, which since June 5, 2020 has posited “critical race theory” as a threat in over 150 different broadcasts.^[1] What is shared by all of these individuals and cultural apparatuses is the claim that critical race theory and other “anti-racist” programs constitute forms of indoctrination that threatens to undermine the alleged foundations of Western Civilization.

The nature of this moral panic is evident in the fact that 15 state legislatures across the country have introduced bills to prevent or limit teachers from teaching about the history of slavery and racism in American society. In doing so, they are making a claim for what one Texas legislator called “traditional history,” which allegedly should focus on “ideas that make the country great.”^[2] Idaho’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, is more forthright in revealing the underlying ideological craze behind censoring any talk by teachers and students about race in Idaho public schools. She has introduced a taskforce to protect young people from what she calls, with no pun intended, “the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism.”^[3]

Such attacks are about more than censorship and racial cleansing. They make the political more pedagogical in that they use education and the power of persuasion as weapons to discredit any critical approach to grappling with the history of racism and white supremacy. In doing so, they attempt to undermine and discredit the critical faculties necessary for students and others to examine history as a resource in order to “investigate the core conflict between a nation founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, and a nation built on slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.”^[4] The current attacks on critical race theory, if not critical thinking itself, are but one instance of the rise of apartheid pedagogy. This is a pedagogy in which education is used in the service of dominant power in order to both normalize racism, class inequities, and economic inequality while safeguarding the interests of those who benefit from such inequities the most. In pursuit of such a project, they impose a pedagogy of oppression, complacency, and mindless discipline. They ignore or downplay matters of injustice and the common good, and rarely embrace notions of community as part of a pedagogy that engages pressing social, economic and civic problems. Instead of an education of civic practice that enriches the public imagination, they endorse all the elements of indoctrination central to formalizing and updating a mode of fascist politics.

The conservative wrath waged against critical race theory is not only about white ignorance being a form of bliss but is also central to a struggle over power—the power of the moral and political imagination. White ignorance is crucial to upholding the poison of white supremacy. Apartheid pedagogy is about denial and disappearance–a manufactured ignorance that attempts to whitewash history and rewrite the narrative of American exceptionalism as it might have been framed in the 1920s and 30s when members of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan shaped the policies of some school boards. Apartheid pedagogy uses education as a disimagination machine to convince students and others that racism does not exist, that teaching about racial justice is a form of indoctrination, and that understanding history is more an exercise in blind reverence than critical analysis. Apartheid pedagogy aims to reproduce current systems of racism rather than end them. Organizations such as No Left Turn in Education not only oppose teaching about racism in schools, but also comprehensive sex education, and teaching children about climate change, which they view as forms of indoctrination. Without irony, they label themselves an organization of “patriotic Americans who believe that a fair and just society can only be achieved when malleable young minds are free from indoctrination that suppresses their independent thought.”^[5] This is the power of ignorance in the service of civic death and a flight from ethical and social responsibility. Kati Holloway, citing the NYU philosopher Charles W. Mills, succinctly sums up the elements of white ignorance. She writes:

“White ignorance,” according to NYU philosopher Charles W. Mills, is an “inverted epistemology,” a deep dedication to and investment in non-knowing that explains white supremacy’s highly curatorial (and often oppositional) approach to memory, history and the truth. While white ignorance is related to the anti-intellectualism that defines the white Republican brand, it should be regarded as yet more specific. According to Mills, white ignorance demands a purposeful misunderstanding of reality—both present and historical—and then treats that fictitious worldview as the singular, de-politicized, unbiased, “objective” truth. “One has to learn to see the world wrongly,” under the terms of white ignorance, Mills writes, “but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority.”^[6]

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reports that right-wing legislators have taken up the cause to ban critical race theory from not only public schools but also higher education. She highlights the case of Boise State University, which has banned dozens of classes dealing with diversity. She notes that soon afterwards, “the Idaho State Senate voted to cut $409,000 from the school’s budget, an amount meant to reflect what Boise State spends on social justice programs.”^[7] Such attacks are happening across the United States and are not only meant to curtail teaching about racism, sexism, and other controversial issues in the schools, but also to impose strict restrictions on what non-tenured assistant professors can teach and to what degree they can be pushed to accept being both deskilled and giving up control over the conditions of their labor.

In an egregious example of an attack on free speech and tenure itself, the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina denied a tenure position to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones because of her work on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 project, “which examined the legacy of slavery in America.”^[8] The failure to provide tenure to Hannah-Jones, who is also the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” and an inductee into the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame, is a blatant act of racism and a gross violation of academic freedom. Let’s be clear. Hannah-Jones was denied tenure by the North Carolina Board of Trustees because she brings to the university a critical concern with racism that clashes with the strident political conservatism of the board. It is also another example of a racist backlash by conservatives who wish to deny that racism even exists in the United States, never mind that it should even by acknowledged in the classrooms of public and higher education.

This is a form of “patriotic education” being put in place by a resurgence of those who support Jim Crow power relations and want to impose pedagogies of repression on students in the classroom. This type of retribution is part of a longstanding politics of fear, censorship and academic repression that has been waged by conservatives since the student revolts of the 1960s.^[9] It is also part of the ongoing corporatization of the university in which business models now define how the university is governed, faculty are reduced to part-time workers, and students are viewed as customers and consumers.^[10]

Equally important, Hannah-Jones’ case is an updated and blatant attack on the ability and power of faculty rather than Boards of Trustees to make decisions regarding both faculty hiring and the crucial question who decides how tenure is handled in a university.^[11] Keith E. Whittington and Sean Wilentz are right in stating that the Board’s actions to deny Hannah-Jones a tenured professorship are about more than a singular violation of faculty rights, academic freedom, and an attack on associated discourses relating to critical race theory. They write:

For the Board of Trustees to interfere unilaterally on blatantly political grounds is an attack on the integrity of the very institution it oversees. The perception and reality of political intervention in matters of faculty hiring will do lasting damage to the reputation of higher education in North Carolina — and will embolden boards across the country similarly to interfere with academic operations of the universities that they oversee.^[12]

Holding critical ideas has become a liability in the contemporary neoliberal university. Also at risk here is the relationship between critical thinking, civic values, and historical remembrance in the current attempts to suppress not just voting rights but also dangerous memories, especially regarding the attack on Critical Race Theory. David Theo Goldberg has brilliantly outlined how the war on Critical Race Theory and other anti-racist programs is designed largely to eliminate the legacy and persistent effects of systemic racial injustice and its underlying structural, ideological, and pedagogical fundamentals and components. This is apartheid pedagogy with a vengeance. As Goldberg writes:

First, the coordinated conservative attack on CRT is largely meant to distract from the right’s own paucity of ideas. The strategy is to create a straw house to set aflame in order to draw attention away from not just its incapacity but its outright refusal to address issues of cumulative, especially racial, injustice…. Second, the conservative attack on CRT tries to rewrite history in its effort to neoliberalize racism: to reduce it to a matter of personal beliefs and interpersonal prejudice. … On this view, the structures of society bear no responsibility, only individuals. Racial inequities today are …not the living legacy of centuries of racialized systems…. Third, race has always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around. They know all too well how to use it to stoke white resentment while distracting from the depredations of conservative policies for all but the wealthy.^[13]

The public imagination is now in crisis. Radical uncertainty has turned lethal. In the current historical moment, tyranny, fear, and hatred have become defining modes of governance and education. Right-wing politicians bolstered by the power of corporate controlled media now construct ways of thinking and feeling that prey on the anxieties of the isolated, disenfranchised, and powerless. This is a form of apartheid pedagogy engineered to substitute disillusionment and incoherence for a sense of comforting ignorance, the thrill of hyper-masculinity, and the security that comes with the militarized unity of the accommodating masses waging a war on democracy. The public imagination is formed through habits of daily life, but only for the better when such experiences are filtered through the ideals and promises of a democracy. This is no longer true. Under neoliberal fascism, the concentration of power in the hands of a ruling elite has ensured that any notion of change regarding equality and justice is now tainted, if not destroyed, as a result of what Theodor Adorno called a retreat into apocalyptic bombast marked by “an organized flight of ideas.”^[14]

Violence in the United States has become a form of domestic terrorism; it is omnipresent and works through complex systems of symbolic and institutional control. It extends from the prison and school to the normalizing efforts of cultural apparatus that saturate an image-based culture. Violence registers itself in repressive policies, police brutality, and in an ongoing process of exclusion and disposability. It is also present in the weaponization of ideas and the institutions that produce them through forms of apartheid pedagogy. Fear now comes in the form of both armed police and repressive modes of education. As the famed artist Isaac Cordal observes, “We live in societies….that use fear in order to make people submissive….Fear bends us [and makes us]vulnerable to its desires….Our societies have been built on violence, and that heritage, that colonial hangover which is capitalism today still remains.”^[15] Under gangster capitalism’s system of power, the poverty of the civic and political imagination is taking its last breath.

Authoritarian societies do more than censor and subvert the truth, they also shape collective consciousness and punish those who engage in dangerous thinking.^[16] For instance, the current plague of white supremacy fueling neoliberal fascism is rooted not only in structural and economic forms of domination, but also intellectual and pedagogical forces, making clear that education is central to politics. It also points to the urgency of understanding that white supremacy is first and foremost a struggle over agency, assigned meanings, and identity—over what lives count and whose don’t. This is a politics and pedagogy that often leaves few historical traces in a culture of immediacy and manufactured ignorance.

The emergent and expanding presence of white supremacy and fascist politics disappear easily in a culture dominated by the endless images of spectacularized violence that fill screen culture with mass shootings, police violence, and racist attacks on Blacks and Asian Americans in the post-Trump era. Disconnected and decontextualized such images vanish in an image-based culture of shock, entertainment, and organized forgetting. When critical ideas come to the surface, right-wing politicians and pundits attack dissidents as un-American and the oppositional press as “an enemy of the American people.” They also attempt to impose a totalitarian notion of “patriotic education” on public schools and higher education and censor academics who criticize systemic abuses.^[17]

As is well known, former President Trump, waged a relentless attack on the media and in ways too similar to ignore echoed written and spoken sentiments that Hitler used in his rise to power.^[18] In this instance, culture, increasingly shaped by an apartheid pedagogy, has turned oppressive and must be addressed as a site of struggle while working in tandem with the development of an ongoing massive resistance movement. This suggests the need for a more comprehensive understanding of politics and the power of the educational force of the culture. Such connections necessitate closer attention be given to the educational and cultural power of a neoliberal corporate elite who use their mainstream and social media platforms to shape pedagogically the collective consciousness of a nation in the discourse and relations of hate, bigotry, ignorance, and conformity.

America’s slide into a fascist politics demands a revitalized understanding of the historical moment in which we find ourselves, along with a systemic critical analysis of the new political formations that mark this period. Part of this challenge is to create a new language and mass social movement to address and construct empowering terrains of education, politics, justice, culture, and power that challenge existing systems of racist violence and economic oppression. The beginning of such a political and pedagogical strategy can be found in the Black Lives Matter movement and its alignment with other movements fighting against authoritarianism. The Black Lives Matter movement teaches us “that eradicating racial oppression ultimately requires struggle against oppression in all of its forms…[especially] restructuring America’s economic system.”^[19] This is especially important as those groups marginalized by class, race, ethnicity, and religion have become aware of how much in this new era of fascist politics they have lost control over the economic, political, pedagogical, and social conditions that bear down on their lives. Visions have become dystopian, devolving into a sense of being left out, abandoned, and subject to increasing systems of terror and violence. These issues can no longer be viewed as individual problems but as manifestations of a broader failure of politics. Moreover, what is needed is not a series of stopgap reforms limited to particular institutions or groups, but a radical restructuring of the entirety of U.S. society.

The call for a socialist democracy demands the creation of visions, ideals, institutions, social relations, and pedagogies of resistance that enable the public to imagine a life beyond a social order in which racial, class, gender, and other forms of violence produce endless assaults on the environment, systemic police violence, a culture of ignorance and cruelty. Such challenges must also address the assault on the public and civic imagination, mediated through the elevation of war, militarization, violent masculinity, and the politics of disposability to the highest levels of power. Capitalism is a death driven machine that that infantilizes, exploits, and devalues human life and the planet itself. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing, along with the informed citizens without which there is no democracy.

Any viable pedagogy of resistance needs to create the educational and pedagogical tools to produce a radical shift in consciousness, capable of both recognizing the scorched earth policies of neoliberal capitalism, and the twisted ideologies that support it. This shift in consciousness cannot take place without pedagogical interventions that speak to people in ways in which they can recognize themselves, identify with the issues being addressed, and place the privatization of their troubles in a broader systemic context.^[20] Niko Block gets it right in arguing for a “radical recasting of the leftist imagination,” in which the concrete needs of people are addressed and elevated to the forefront of public discussion in order to confront and get ahead of the crises of our times. He writes:

the crises of the twenty-first century call for a radical recasting of the leftist imagination. This process involves building bridges between the real and the imaginary, so that the path to achieving political goals is plain to see. Accordingly, the articulation of leftist goals must resonate with people in concrete ways, so that it becomes obvious how the achievement of those goals would improve their day-to-day lives. The left, in this sense, must appeal to people’s existing identities and not condescend the general public as victims of “false consciousness.” All this means building movements of continual improvement and refusing to ask already-vulnerable people for short-term losses on the abstract promise of long-term gains. This project also demands that we understand precisely why right-wing ideology retains a popular appeal in so many spaces.^[21]

A pedagogy of resistance must be on the side of hope and civic courage in order to fight against a paralyzing indifference, grave social injustices, and mind deadening attacks on the public imagination. At stake here is the struggle for a new world based on the notion that capitalism and democracy are not the same, and that we need to understand the world, how we think about it and how it functions, in order to change it. In the spirt of Martin Luther King, Jr’s call for a more comprehensive view of oppression and political struggle, it is crucial to address his call to radically interrelate and restructure consciousness, values, and society itself. In this instance, King and other theorists, such as Saskia Sassen, call for a language that ideological ruptures and changes the nature of the debate. This suggests more than simply a rhetorical challenge to the economic conditions that fuel neoliberal capitalism. There is also the need to move beyond abstract notions of structural violence and identify and connect the visceral elements of violence that bear down on and “constrain agency through the hard surfaces of [everyday] life.”^[22]

We live in an era in which the distinction between the truth and misinformation is under attack. Ignorance has become a virtue, and education has become a tool of repression that elevates self-interest and privatization to central organizing principles of both economics and politics. The socio-historical conditions that enable racism, systemic inequality, anti-intellectualism, mass incarceration, the war on youth, poverty, state violence, and domestic terrorism must be remembered in the fight against that which now parades as ideologically normal. Historical memory and the demands of moral witnessing must become part of a deep grammar of political and pedagogical resistance in the fight against neoliberal capitalism and other forms of authoritarianism.

A pedagogy of resistance necessitates a language that connects the problems of systemic racism, poverty, militarism, mass incarceration, and other injustices as part of a totalizing structural, pedagogical, and ideological set of condition endemic to capitalism in its updated merging of neoliberalism and fascist politics. Audre Lorde was right in her insistence that “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

We don’t need master narratives, but we do need a recognition that politics can only be grasped as part of a social totality, a struggle rooted in overlapping differences that bleed into each other. We need relational narratives that bring together different struggles for emancipation and social equality.

Central to any viable notion of pedagogical resistance is the courage to think about what kind of world we want—what kind of future we want to build for our children. These are questions that can only be addressed when we address politics and capitalism as part of a general crisis of democracy. This challenge demands the willingness to develop an anti-capitalist consciousness as the basis for a call to action, one willing to dismantle the present structure of neoliberal capitalism. Chantal Mouffe is correct in arguing that “before being able to radicalize democracy, it is first necessary to recover it,” which means first rejecting the commonsense assumptions that capitalism and democracy are synonymous.^[23]

Clearly, such a project cannot combat poverty, militarism, the threat of nuclear war, ecological devastation, economic inequality, and racism by leaving capitalism’s system of power in place. Nor can resistance be successful if it limits itself to the terrain of critique, criticism, and the undoing of specific oppressive systems of representation. Pedagogies of resistance can teach people to say no, become civically literate, and create the conditions for individuals to develop a critical political consciousness. The challenge here is to make the political more pedagogical. This suggests analyzing how the forces of gangster capitalism impact consciousness, shape agency, and normalize the internalization of oppression. Such a project suggest a politics willing to transcend the fragmentation and politicized sectarianism all too characteristic of left politics in order to embrace a Gramscian notion of “solidarity in a wider sense.”^[24] There is ample evidence of such solidarity in the policies advocated by the progressive Black Lives Matter protest, the call for green socialism, movements for health as a global right, growing resistance against police violence, emerging ecological movements such as the youth-based Sunrise movement, the Poor People’s Campaign, the massive ongoing strikes waged by students and teachers against the defunding and corporatizing of public education, and the call for resistance from women across the globe fighting for reproductive rights.

What must be resisted at all costs, is an “apartheid pedagogy,” rooted in the notion that a particular mode of oppression, and those who bear its weight, offers political guarantees.^[25] Identifying different modes of oppression is important, but it is only the first step in moving from addressing the history and existing mechanisms that produce such trauma to developing and embracing a politics that unites different identities, individuals, and social movements under the larger banner of democratic socialism. This is a politics that refuses the easy appeals of ideological silos which “limits access to the world of ideas and contracts the range of tools available to would-be activists.”^[26]

The only language provided by neoliberalism is the all-encompassing discourse of the market and the false rhetoric of unencumbered individualism, making it difficult for individuals to translate private issues into broader systemic considerations. Mark Fisher was right in claiming that capitalist realism not only attempts to normalize the notion that there is not only no alternative to capitalism, but also makes it “impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” ^[27] This is a formula for losing hope because it insists that that the world cannot change. It also has the hollow ring of slow death.

The urgency of the historical moment demands new visions of social change, an inspired and energized sense of social hope, and the necessity for diverse social movements to unite under the collective struggle for democratic socialism. The debilitating political pessimism of neoliberal gangster capitalism must be challenged as a starting point for believing that rather than being exhausted, the future along with history is open and now is the time to act. It is time to make possible what has for too long been declared as impossible.

Notes.

1) Adam Harris, “The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession,” The Atlantic (May 7, 2021). Online: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/gops-critical-race-theory-fixation-explained/618828/ ↑

2) Kate McGee, “Texas’ Divisive Bill Limiting How Students Learn About Current Events And Historic Racism Passed By Senate,” Texas Public Radio (May 23, 2021). Online: https://www.tpr.org/education/2021-05-23/texas-divisive-bill-limiting-how-students-learn-about-current-events-and-historic-racism-passed-by-senate ↑

3) Julie Carrie Wong, “The fight to whitewash US history: ‘A drop of poison is all you need’,” The Guardian (May 25, 2021). Online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/critical-race-theory-us-history-1619-project ↑

4) George Sanchez and Beth English, “OAH Statement on White House Conference on American History,” Organization of American History (September 2020). Online: https://www.oah.org/insights/posts/2020/september/oah-statement-on-white-house-conference-on-american-history/#:~:text=History%20is%20not%20and%20cannot%20be%20simply%20celebratory.&text=The%20history%20we%20teach%20must,slavery%2C%20exploitation%2C%20and%20exclusion. ↑

5) Editorial, “Mission goals and objectives,” No Left Turn in Education, (2021). Online: https://noleftturn.us/ ↑

6) Kali Holloway, “White Ignorance Is Bliss—and Power,” Yahoo! News (May 24, 2021). Online: https://news.yahoo.com/white-ignorance-bliss-power-080232025.html ↑

7) Michelle Goldberg, “The Social Justice Purge at Idaho College,” New York Times. (March 26, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/opinion/free-speech-idaho.html ↑

8) Katie Robertson, “Nikole Hannah-Jones Denied Tenure at University of North Carolina,” New York Times (May 19, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/business/media/nikole-hannah-jones-unc.html ↑

9) Michelle Goldberg, “The Campaign to Cancel Wokeness,” New York Times. (February 26, 2021). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/speech-racism-academia.html ↑

10) Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2020). ↑

11) Silke-Marie Weineck, “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Craven and Dangerous,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 20, 2021). Online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-tenure-denial-of-nikole-hannah-jones-is-craven-and-dangerous ↑

12) Keith E. Whittington and Sean Wilentz, “We Have Criticized Nikole Hannah-Jones. Her Tenure Denial Is a Travesty,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 24, 2021). Online: https://www.chronicle.com/article/we-have-criticized-nikole-hannah-jones-her-tenure-denial-is-a-travesty?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_2377858_nl_Afternoon-Update_date_20210524&cid=pm&source=ams&sourceId=11167 ↑

13) David Theo Goldberg, “The War on Critical Race Theory,” Boston Review (May 7, 2021). Online: http://bostonreview.net/race-politics/david-theo-goldberg-war-critical-race-theory ↑

14) Volker Weiss, “afterword,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism (London: Polity, 2020), p. 61. ↑

15) Brad Evans and Isaac Cordal, “Histories of Violence: Look Closer at the World, There You Will See,” Los Angeles Review of Books,” December 28, 2020). Online: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-look-closer-at-the-world-there-you-will-see/ ↑

16) Henry A. Giroux, Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (New York: Routledge, 2015). ↑

17) Charlotte Klein, “Mitch McConnell: Don’t Teach Our Kids That America Is Racist,” Vanity Fair (May 4, 2021). Online: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/mitch-mcconnell-dont-teach-our-kids-that-america-is-racist; Michael Crowley, “Trump Calls for ‘Patriotic Education’ to Defend American History From the Left,” New York Times (September 17, 2020). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/politics/trump-patriotic-education.html ↑

18) Editorial, “Trump’s crusade against the media is a chilling echo of Hitler’s rise,” Las Vegas Sun (August 14, 2017). Online: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/aug/14/trumps-crusade-against-the-media-is-a-chilling-ech/; for a larger examination of this issue, see Federico Finchelstein, A Brief History of Fascist Lies (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). ↑

19) Lacino Hamilton, “This is going to Hurt,” The New Inquiry (April 11, 2017). Online: https://thenewinquiry.com/this-is-going-to-hurt/ ↑

20) See Robert Latham, A. T. Kingsmith, Julian von Bargen and Niko Block, eds Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left–Recasting Leftist Imagination (Winnipeg, Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2020). ↑

21) Nico Block, “Augmenting the Left: Challenging the Right, Reimagining Transformation,” Socialist Project: the Bullet (August 31, 2020). Online: https://socialistproject.ca/2020/08/augmenting-the-left-challenging-the-right-reimagining-transformation/ ↑

22) David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2012), p. 105 ↑

23) Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism, [London: Verso, 2018], p. 37. ↑

24) Institute for Critical Social Analysis, “A Window of Opportunity for Leftist Politics?” Socialist Project: the Bullet (August 3, 2020). Online: https://socialistproject.ca/2020/08/window-of-opportunity-for-leftist-politics/ ↑

25) I have taken the notion of “apartheid pedagogy” from Adam Shatz, “Palestinianism” London Review of Books (43:9 (May 6, 2021), p. 28. Online: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/adam-shatz/palestinianism ↑

26) Robin D.G. Kelley, “Black Study, Black Struggle – final response,” Boston Review, (March 7, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/black-study-black-struggle/robin-d-g-kelley-robin-d-g-kelleys-final-response ↑

27) Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), p. 2. I would be useful on this issue to read the brilliant Stanley Aronowitz, especially The Death and rebirth of American Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1996), ↑

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books are America’s Education Deficit and the War on Youth (Monthly Review Press, 2013), Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Haymarket Press, 2014), The Public in Peril: Trump and the Menace of American Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2018), and the American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury), and Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021):His website is www. henryagiroux.com.

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Zizek: Covid crisis sparked fear of communism & China’s rise as superpower. But best way to prevent communism is to FOLLOW China

octubre 11, 2020octubre 11, 2020Slavoj Zizek

By: Slavoj Zizek

Across the world, the establishment is aware of the radical social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. That’s why we’re seeing leaders introduce strategies and thinking that could be interpreted as fascist in principle.

A story picked up by the UK media at the end of September passed almost unnoticed. As The Guardian reported, “The government has ordered schools in England not to use resources from organizations which have expressed a desire to end capitalism. Department for Education guidance issued on Thursday for school leaders and teachers involved in setting the relationship, sex and health curriculum categorized anti-capitalism as an ‘extreme political stance’ and equated it with opposition to freedom of speech, anti-Semitism and endorsement of illegal activity.”

As far as I know, this was the first time such an explicit order had been given; nothing like this happened even in the darkest periods of the Cold War. One should also note the words used: “a desire to end capitalism.” Not an intention, a plan, a program, but simply a desire – a term which can be applied to almost any statement (“True, you didn’t say it, but it’s what you desire…»).

Plus, of course, there was the (now usual) addition of “anti-Semitism,” as if a desire to end capitalism is in itself anti-Semitic. Are the authors aware that their prohibition is in itself anti-Semitic: it implies that Jews are in their essence capitalist?

Why this sudden panic reaction to communism? Is it fear that the pandemic, global warming and other social crises may provide an opportunity for China to assert itself as the only remaining superpower? No, China is not today’s Soviet Union; the best way to prevent communism is to follow China. While the Soviet Union was the external enemy, the threat to liberal democracies today is internal, from the explosive mixture of crises that beset our societies.

Let’s take an extreme but clear example of how the ongoing pandemic pushed our societies in the direction of what we associate with communism, and for some even the worst part of it.

In his Logiques des mondes, Alain Badiou elaborated on the idea of the politics of revolutionary justice at work from the ancient Chinese ‘legists’ through Jacobins to Lenin and Mao. It consists of four moments: voluntarism (the belief that one can “move mountains,” ignoring “objective” laws and obstacles), terror (a ruthless will to crush the enemy), egalitarian justice (its immediate brutal imposition, with no understanding for the “complex circumstances” which allegedly compel us to proceed gradually), and, last but not least, trust in the people.

Does the ongoing pandemic not require us to invent a new version of these four features?

Voluntarism: Even in countries where conservative forces are in power, decisions are taken which clearly violate “objective” laws of the market, like the state directly intervening in industry, distributing billions to prevent hunger or for healthcare measures.

Terror: Liberals are correct in their fears. Not only are states forced to enact new modes of social control and regulation, but people are even solicited to report family members and neighbors who hide their infection to the authorities.

Egalitarian justice: It is commonly accepted that the eventual vaccine should be accessible to everybody, and that no part of the world population should be sacrificed to the virus – the cure is either global or inefficient.

Trust in the people: We all know that most of the measures against the pandemic only work if people follow the recommendations. No state control can do the work here.

But much more important than this is the partial socialization of economy imposed by the pandemic. Such a socialization will become even more urgent with the ongoing rise in infections. This is how one should also interpret the ‘fascist’ tendencies of Trump and other populists. As Walter Benjamin said long ago: “Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution.”

These ‘fascist’ tendencies signal that the establishment is silently aware of the radical social consequences of the pandemic. The establishment acts preventively by trying to quash them before they acquire full political form.

Although it is too simple to dismiss Trump as a fascist, the danger he embodies is even worse than outright fascism. From my youth, I remember a classic East German joke: Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker confront God, asking him about the future of their countries. To Nixon, he answers: “In 2050, the US will be communist.” Nixon turns around and starts to cry. To Brezhnev, he says: “In 2050, the Soviet Union will be a Chinese province.” After Brezhnev also turns around and starts to cry, Honecker finally asks: “And how will it be in my beloved GDR?” And God turns around, and starts to cry…

We can easily imagine a version of the same joke if Trump and those similar to him prevail in our world. Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Donald Trump confront God with the same question. To Putin, God answers: “Russia will be controlled by China,” so Putin turns around and starts to cry. To Xi, God answers: “Mainland China will be dominated by Taiwan,” so Xi does the same. When Trump finally asks the same question, God turns around and starts to cry…

What we are getting today – not only in China – is the combination of strong authoritarian states with wild capitalist dynamics. The most efficient form of capitalism today is what Henry Farrell called “networked authoritarianism”: if a state spies on people enough and allows machine-learning systems to incorporate their behavior and respond to it, it is possible to provide for everyone’s needs better than a democracy could. Here, Xi, Putin and Trump are joining hands.

Two conclusions impose themselves here, a short-term one and a long-term one. The short-term one is that the task of (whatever remains of) the radical left is now, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, to save our “bourgeois” democracy when the liberal center is too weak and indecisive to do it. ‘Shame on them; we have now even to fight their battles!’

Obsessed by Trump’s provocative eccentricities, liberals miss the key point, developed by Michael Sandel: Trump is not a dictator, he only plays one on television, and we should not play along as his supporting cast. This is what we do when we criticize him as some kind of fascist, instead of focusing on his failures which he obfuscates by his dictatorial excesses and provocations. His typical strategy is to provoke the liberal ire which attracts wide attention and then, out of sight of the public at large, enforce measures which limit workers’ rights, etc.

And the second conclusion? During the protests that erupted in Chile in October 2019, there was graffiti on a wall which read, “Another end of the world is possible.”. This should be our answer to an establishment obsessed by apocalyptic scenarios. Yes, your old world is coming to an end, but the options envisaged by you are not the only ones: another end of the world is possible.

Source and Image: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/502825-china-communism-covid-follow/

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Slavoj Zizek: Greta and Bernie should be leading in these troubled times, but they are NOT RADICAL ENOUGH

junio 21, 2020junio 18, 2020Slavoj Zizek

By: Slavoj Zizek

With everything that’s plunging the world into chaos right now, one thing surprising me is, why are Greta Thunberg and Bernie Sanders comparatively quiet? Make no mistake, racism, climate issues and the pandemic are all connected.

Except for a short note from Greta that she thinks she survived the Covid infection, the movement she has mobilized has failed to avoid getting drowned out by the Covid-19 pandemic panic and the anti-racism protests in the US. As for Bernie, although he advocated measures (like universal healthcare) which are now, amid the pandemic, recognized as necessary all around the world, he is also effectively nowhere to be seen or heard. Why aren’t we seeing more, not less, of the political figures whose programs and insights are today more relevant than ever?

In the last months, the topic of Covid totally eclipsed ecological concerns and was only overshadowed in the last weeks by anti-racist protests which spread from the US all around the globe. The crucial ideological and political battle that is going on these days concerns the relationship between the three domains: Covid epidemics, ecological crises, racism. The pressure that comes from the establishment is to keep these three domains apart, and even to hint at tensions between them. One often hears that our main task now is to get the economy moving, and that to do this we should neglect ecological problems a little bit; one hears that chaotic anti-racist protests often violate social distancing and for that reason contribute to spreading Covid infections… Against this line of reasoning, one should insist on the basic unity of the three domains: epidemics explode as part of our unbalanced relationship with our natural environs, they are not just a health problem; anti-racist protests were also given the additional boost by the fact that racial minorities are much more threatened by the epidemics than the white majority which can afford self-isolation and better medical care. We are thus dealing with crises which erupt as moments of the dynamics of global capitalism: all three – viral epidemics, racial unrests, ecological crises – were not only predicted but were already accompanying us for decades.

As for the anti-racist protests, here is how Spike Lee answered the question “Why did eight years of Obama fail to make substantial enough change to race relations in the US?”: “Very good question. But you have to understand: race relations – which have gotten worse – are a direct response to having a black president.” Why? Not because Obama was “not black enough,” but because he embodied the image of a black American advocated by the liberal Left, a black American who succeeded while fully respecting the rules of the liberal game. Protests are a brutal reply to “Now you have a black president, what more do you want?” It is our task to articulate this ”more.” Just remember that, during the eight years of Obama’s presidency, the general tendency of the last decades went smoothly on: the gap between the rich and the poor widened, big capital got stronger. In one of the episodes of ‘The Good Fight’, to follow-up series to ‘The Good Wife’, the heroine awakens in an alternate reality in which Hillary Clinton won the election in 2016, defeating Trump. But the result is paradoxical for feminism: there is no ‘Me Too’, there are no wide protests against Weinstein because moderate establishment Left feminists fear that if there is too strong a protest against male harassment of women, Clinton may lose male votes and not be re-elected, plus Weinstein is a great donor to the Clinton campaign… Did something similar not happen with Obama?

The point is not just (or primarily) that black people should be given more financial support to help their economic situation. There is a wonderful detail in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X: after Malcolm gave a speech in a college, a white female student approaches him and asks him what she can do for the black struggle for liberation; he coldly answers her, “Nothing.” And walks away… When I used this example decades ago, I was criticized for implying that we whites shouldn’t do anything to support the black struggle; but my (and, I think, Malcolm’s) point was more precise. White liberals should not act as if they will liberate the black people, they should support black people in their own struggle for liberation – treating them as autonomous agents, not as mere victims of circumstances.

So, back to our starting question: the disappearance of Greta and Bernie from our public space does not mean that they were too radical for our time of viral crisis when more unifying voices are needed. On the contrary, they were not radical enough: they did not succeed in proposing a global new vision that would re-actualize their project in the conditions of epidemics.

Source and Image: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/491881-bernie-sanders-greta-thunberg/

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Slavoj Zizek: Epidemics are like wars, they can drag on for YEARS

mayo 10, 2020mayo 5, 2020Slavoj Zizek

By: Slavoj Zizek

We should stop thinking that after a peak in the Covid-19 epidemic things will gradually return to normal. The crisis will drag on. But this doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless.

In the Marx Brothers’ comedy Duck Soup, Groucho (as a lawyer defending his client at a court) says: “He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

Something along these lines should be our reaction to those who display their basic distrust of state orders and see the lockdowns as a conspiracy of the state power which uses the epidemics as a pretext to deprive us of our basic freedoms: “The state is imposing lockdowns which deprive us of our freedoms, and it expects us to control each other in how we obey this order; but this should not fool us, we should really follow the lockdown orders.”

One should note how calls to abolish lockdowns come from the opposite ends of the traditional political spectrum. In the US, they are propelled by libertarian Rightists, while in Germany, small Leftist groups advocate them. In both cases, medical knowledge is criticized as a tool of disciplining people, treating them as helpless victims who should be isolated for their own good. What is not difficult to discover beneath this critical stance is the stance of not-wanting-to-know: if we ignore the threat, it will not be so bad, we’ll manage to pass through it…

The US libertarian Right claims lockdowns should be eased so that people will be given back their freedom of choice. But what choice is it?

As Robert Reich wrote: “Trump’s labor department has decided that furloughed employees ‘must accept’ an employer’s offer to return to work and therefore forfeit unemployment benefits, regardless of Covid-19… Forcing people to choose between getting Covid-19 or losing their livelihood is inhumane.” So yes, it is a freedom of choice: between starvation and risking your life… We are in a situation similar to that which occured in British coal mines in the 18th century (to name just one) where doing your work involved a considerable risk of losing your life.

But there is a different kind of admitting ignorance which sustains the severe imposition of lockdowns. It’s not that the state power exploits the epidemics to impose total control – I more and more think there is a kind of superstitious symbolic act at work here: if we make a strong gesture of sacrifice that really hurts and brings our entire social life to a standstill, we can maybe expect mercy.

When will this epidemic end and what will happen afterwards?

The surprising fact is how little we (including the scientists) seem to know about how the epidemics works. Quite often we get contradictory advice from authorities. We get strict instructions to self-isolate in order to avoid viral contamination, but when the infection numbers are falling, the fear arises that, in this way, we are just making ourselves more vulnerable to the expected second wave of the viral attack. Or are we counting on the hope that the vaccine will be here before the next wave? But there are already different variations of the virus, will one vaccine cover them all? All the hopes for a quick exit (summer heat, fast spread of herd immunity, vaccine…) are fading away.

One often hears that the epidemics will compel us in the West to change the way we relate to death, to really accept our mortality and the fragility of our existence – out of nowhere a virus comes and our life is over.

This is why, we are told, in the East, people are taking the epidemics much better – just as a part of life, of the way things are. We in the West less and less accept death as part of life, we see it as an intrusion of something foreign which you can indefinitely postpone if you lead a healthy life, exercise, follow a diet, avoid traumas…

I’ve never trusted this story. In some sense, death is not a part of life, it is something unimaginable, something that shouldn’t happen to me. I am never really ready to die, except to escape unbearable suffering. That’s why these days many of us focus every day on the same magic numbers: how many new infections, how many full recoveries, how many new deaths… but horrible as these numbers are, does our exclusive focus on them not make us ignore a much greater number of people who are at this moment dying of cancer, of a painful heart attack? Outside the virus, it’s not just life, it’s also dying and death. What about a comparative list of numbers: today, so many people got the virus and cancer; so many died of the virus and of cancer; so many recuperated from the virus and from cancer?

One should change our imaginary here and stop expecting one big clear peak after which things will gradually return to normal. What makes the epidemics so unbearable is that even if the full catastrophe fails to appear, things just drag on, we are informed that we reached the plateau, then things go a little bit better, but… the crisis just drags on.

As Alenka Zupančič put it, the problem with the end of the world is the same as with Fukuyama’s end of history: the end itself doesn’t end, we just get stuck in a weird immobility. The secret wish of all of us, what we think about all the time, is just one thing: when will it end? But it will not end: it is reasonable to see the ongoing epidemics as announcing a new period of ecological troubles – back in 2017, the BBC portrayed what might be waiting for us due to the ways we intervene in nature: “Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life.”

Eventual rise of Singularity

The special irony of this no-end-in-view is that the epidemics occurred at a time when pop-scientific media were obsessed with two aspects of the digitalization of our lives. On the one hand, a lot is being written about the new phase of capitalism called ‘surveillance capitalism’: a total digital control over our lives exerted by state agencies and private corporations. On the other hand, the media are fascinated by the topic of direct brain-machine interface (‘wired brain’).

First, when our brain is connected to digital machines, we can cause things to happen in reality just by thinking about them. Then, my brain is directly connected to another brain, so that another individual can directly share my experience. Extrapolated to its extreme, wired brain opens up the prospect of what Ray Kurzweil called Singularity, the divine-like global space of shared global awareness. Whatever the (dubious, for the time being) scientific status of this idea, it is clear that its realization will affect the basic features of humans as thinking/speaking beings. The eventual rise of Singularity will be apocalyptic in the complex meaning of the term – it will imply the encounter with a truth hidden in our ordinary human existence, i.e. the entrance into a new post-human dimension.

It is interesting to note that the extensive use of surveillance was quietly accepted: drones were used not only in China but also in Italy and Spain. As for the spiritual vision of Singularity, the new direct unity of the human and the divine, a bliss in which we leave behind the limits of our corporeal existence, can well turn out to be a new unimaginable nightmare. From a critical standpoint, it is difficult to decide which is worse (a greater threat to humanity), the viral devastation of our lives or the loss of our individuality in Singularity. Epidemics remind us that we remain firmly rooted in bodily existence with all the dangers that this implies.

We will have to invent a new way of life

Does this mean our situation is hopeless? Absolutely not. There are immense, almost unimaginable troubles ahead, there will be millions of newly jobless people, etc. A new way of life will have to be invented. One thing is clear: in a lockdown, we live off the old stocks of food and other provisions, so the difficult task is now to step out of the lockdown and invent a new life under viral conditions.

Just think about how what is fiction and what is reality will change. Movies and TV series which take place in our ordinary reality, with people freely strolling along streets, shaking hands and embracing, will become nostalgic images of a lost past world, while our real life will look like a variation of Samuel Beckett’s late play called Play where we see on stage, touching one another, three identical grey urns; from each urn a head protrudes, the neck held fast in the urn’s mouth…

However, if one takes a naïve look at things from a proper distance (which is very difficult), it is clear that our global society has enough resources to coordinate our survival and organize a more modest way of life, with local food shortages compensated by global cooperation, and with global healthcare better prepared for the next onslaughts.

Will we be able to do this? Or will we enter a new barbarian age in which our attention to the health crisis will just enable old (cold and hot) conflicts to go on out of the sight of the global public? Note the reignited cold war between the US and China, not to mention actual hot wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, which function like the virus: they just drag on for years and years… (Note how Macron’s call for a world-wide truce for the time of the epidemic was flatly ignored.) This decision which way we take concerns neither science nor medicine; it is a properly political one.

Source and Image: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/487713-slavoj-zizek-epidemics-covid/

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Boaventura de Sousa Santos: «Hay que unir las luchas contra el capitalismo, el colonialismo y el patriarcado»

noviembre 24, 2018noviembre 24, 2018Noticias

Por: Boaventura De Sousa Santos

El pensador portugués Boaventura de Sousa Santos dice que los maestros son alternativa contra la guerra del odio.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos sostiene que no es posible transformar una realidad desigual sin antes modificar la epistemología que impide pensar en alternativas posibles. «Hay que cambiar la epistemología para cambiar las cosas. Y en el medio cambiar la pedagogía», propone el sociólogo portugués, que esta semana fue distinguido con el título de Doctor Honoris Causa de la UNR. También participó del Encuentro de Red Sentipensante realizado en el Galpón de la Música, donde instó a unir las luchas por la emancipación frente a un capitalismo que se muestra unido al colonialismo y al patriarcado.

En diálogo con La Capital, el pensador asegura que asistimos «a un ciclo reaccionario muy fuerte», con un neofascismo «que parte de la idea de despolitizar la política». En este contexto, dice que no es casual el ataque de los gobiernos conservadores a los maestros, a quienes considera «la alternativa a la guerra ideológica del odio».

También advierte sobre el riesgo de que «la democracia empiece a ser un espectáculo dominado por el dinero» y «el Estado sea apropiado de una manera brutal por una promiscuidad muy grande entre el dinero y la política».

—La emergencia de personajes como Bolsonaro ¿se entiende por ese lado?

—Bolsonaro es una expresión de ese proceso, pero hay otros. No quiero hablar demasiado de lo que pasa en la Argentina, pero lo que está pasando es que hay una ola conservadora y reaccionaria que piensa que el neoliberalismo es la única solución política. Y como es una solución única no tiene alternativa. Por eso los ricos tienen que ser ricos y pobres los pobres.

—Frei Betto marcaba como un error de los gobiernos progresismos que hayan desmovilizado a las bases ¿Coincide?

—Hubo una separación muy fuerte y cuando llegaron al poder se entregaron completamente a la lógica del régimen. Dejaron de pensar en los problemas de la gente de la periferia, por ejemplo en la seguridad personal. Porque hay mucha violencia y la gente vive la violencia cotidiana en las periferias, donde el de las balas perdidas es un tema cotidiano. Y la izquierda no tuvo una respuesta para este tipo de inseguridad que estaba en la comunidad. Las abandonaron. Por otro lado, las clases populares fueron abandonadas también por la Iglesia Católica, que hasta los años 70 y 80 estuvo con una teología de la liberación muy fuerte. Juan Pablo II la prohibió porque era un anticomunista muy fuerte. Ese vacío de las comunidades de base de las periferias fue ocupado por las iglesias evangélicas y pentecostales, sobre todo de influencia gringa, con una teología de la prosperidad, donde los pobres sólo tienen que rezar, porque no son dignos de riqueza. O sea que la pobreza es un destino, no un problema social.

Foto: Sebastián Suárez Meccia / La Capital

—¿Qué rol debe cumplir la escuela en estos tiempos?

—Los maestros son cada vez más importantes en estos tiempos. Porque son la alternativa a la guerra ideológica del odio. Y no es coincidencia que todos los gobiernos conservadores elegidos en Europa o en este continente, sus blancos iniciales sean los maestros, las escuelas, las carreras o los planes de estudio. Yo pienso en una escuela que sea abierta a todos los problemas de nuestro tiempo, porque durante mucho tiempo fue excluyente. Y también despreció y desperdició mucho conocimiento válido, sobre todo en contextos interculturales, cuando jóvenes negros o indígenas llegaban a la escuela y no siempre tenían una enseñanza adecuada a sus inquietudes. Como cuando el profesor de historia considera como un gran héroe nacional a un militar que mató a indígenas o negros. Esto crea angustia. Por eso las escuelas tienen que ser más interculturales, abiertas a las diferencias.

—¿La misma crítica corre para el ámbito universitario?

—Absolutamente. Pienso que todavía más, porque la enseñanza media tiene un contacto más directo con todas estas diferencias. Y se piensa que los que llegan a la universidad son una élite. El manifiesto de los estudiantes de Córdoba de 1918 se dirige a los hombres (y mujeres) libres del continente. Pero no hay una palabra sobre los indígenas, se consideraba que no había en la Argentina. Es lo que yo llamo la sociología de las ausencias. Producimos invisibles. La universidad tiene que ser intercultural y descolonizada.

—¿Y qué opina de la formación universitaria «para el mercado»?

—Es la gran ilusión y la gran trampa de nuestro tiempo. Hay un cambio muy rápido en los perfiles profesionales y las universidades que quieran seguir adelante en esta crisis tienen que mantener una educación general muy fuerte. Una educación humanística que permita que la gente se pregunte sobre el destino y sentido de la vida colectiva. Y a qué sociedades vamos.

Las tres cabezas

Para el sociólogo portugués, la democracia «está muriendo democráticamente» y cita el ejemplo de lo sucedido recientemente en Brasil, con el ascenso de Jair Bolsonaro a la presidencia. Sumado esto a un mundo que se presenta «sin alternativas al neoliberalismo».

Ante eso, propone pensar una alternativa desde abajo, que involucre a las universidades, y convoca a organizar la resistencia contra un enemigo con tres cabezas: el colonialismo, el capitalismo y el patriarcado. Porque advierte que mientras la dominación está unida, la resistencia está fragmentada.

—¿Las resistencias están muy divididas?

—La izquierda perdió a las clases populares que viven la violencia contra las mujeres, el racismo y un capitalismo grosero y agresivo. Donde la gente no es verdaderamente gente, como los refugiados en Europa. Hay dos masas de gente caminando para el centro: una de África a Europa y otra de Honduras y Nicaragua a los Estados Unidos, huyendo del hambre y el crimen. Estamos creando un mundo donde la dominación capitalista, patriarcal y colonial es más fuerte. Y donde las izquierdas y las fuerzas progresistas en general no tienen la capacidad de unirse. Siguen divididas, muy sectarias, pensando que el fascismo no está llegando. Acabo de escribir un libro, ya publicado en España, que se llama Izquierdas del mundo, ¡uníos! Porque lo que se hunde no es el socialismo sino la democracia, que está siendo vaciada desde la democracia. En 1932 Hitler subió al poder por elecciones, no fue un golpe. La democracia no se sabe defender de los antidemocráticos, sobre todo con toda esta manipulación de la opinión pública desde Facebook y WhatsApp. Y la democracia tiene que ser defendida porque el fascismo está muy cerca. Un fascismo de un tipo nuevo. Los militares de Brasil dicen que quieren una nueva democracia, sin comunistas y sin el PT. Hacia eso caminamos, hacia una democracia mutilada. No es una dictadura, no son militares, hay elecciones. Pero ciertas cosas no se dicen. En Inglaterra, también están así las cosas.

—No es tiempo entonces de dividir las luchas…

—No, hay que unirse. Hay gente que piensa que en América latina, y sobre todo en Brasil, la influencia imperial no es mucha. Y para mí es absolutamente decisiva.

Foto: Sebastián Suárez Meccia / La Capital

—¿Cuál es su mirada sobre el empuje del feminismo?

—El feminismo tiene una importancia brutal si realmente sabe unir y traer otras luchas.

—¿Por ejemplo?

—La lucha anticapitalista. Puede ser una obviedad, pero nosotros teníamos un concepto para hablar de una sociedad alternativa. Se llamaba socialismo. Esa palabra fue exiliada de Europa en los años 70 y 80. Reapareció en el continente latinoamericano en el inicio del 2000, cuando se hablaba del socialismo del siglo XXI. Ahora desapareció —salvo en Venezuela— y reaparece en los Estados Unidos a través del senador demócrata Bernie Sanders. Y las mujeres latinas que fueron elegidas para el Congreso se dicen socialistas. Entonces ahora para los periódicos de los Estados Unidos el socialismo ya no es una palabra fea.

—¿Se considera socialista?

—Sí, pero de un socialismo que no es dogmático. Mi utopía sería un ecosocialismo feminista y antirracista. Ecosocialismo porque tenemos que tener otro modelo de desarrollo. No puede ser este modelo extractivista de la agricultura industrial que está produciendo un calentamiento brutal global. Y antirracista y feminista para unir las luchas.

Fuente: https://www.lacapital.com.ar/educacion/hay-que-unir-las-luchas-contra-el-capitalismo-el-colonialismo-y-el-patriarcado-n1704522.html

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Transformar la educación superior neoliberal

septiembre 26, 2018septiembre 26, 2018Telesur TV

Por: Felipe Cuevas Méndez/Telesur

Las universidades son presionadas a asumir las premisas del capitalismo neoliberal, incluyendo la mercadotecnia en su promoción.

El sistema de educación superior en México se sustenta por un conglomerado de instituciones históricas públicas y privadas sobre las cuales se empoderó finalmente el gran capital.

Entre las partes que lo componen destaca el crecimiento desmedido de la educación privada, a cuya vanguardia están instituciones como la Universidad Iberoamericana o el Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, sin olvidar la presencia de monopolios-universidades de los países imperialistas. La educación privada resulta más rigurosa y abiertamente capitalista que las configuradas bajo el manto del Estado, en razón de su entera conexión con la gran empresa, siendo hoy el emblema de las perspectivas neoliberales en la materia. Este tipo de instituciones suelen ser capitalistas por los procesos a que se adhiere la educación como negocio, y burguesas por la naturaleza misma de la enseñanza que se imparte.

La otra parte, en líneas generales, es la educación pública, en que prevalecen instituciones como la UNAM, el Instituto Politécnico Nacional, las grandes universidades públicas de la Ciudad de México, las universidades autónomas estatales, la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, las universidades militares, la Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, las escuelas de artes, las normales urbanas y rurales [1]. Con importantes éxitos para la derecha, se les viene cambiando sus normativas para que se vuelquen al negocio de la educación, así como que despeguen en el sentido de la ideología burguesa.

Su autonomía es relativa en torno a su administración interior y diseño de programas, no obstante, están entrelazados a los intereses del Estado-nación y a sus dinámicas internas, algunas como grandes espacios del poder del saber. La diferenciación entre las instituciones públicas sigue igualmente la trayectoria de las que fungen como empresas privadas, el Estado descapitaliza algunas que desde hace varios años atraviesan por crisis financieras en los estados en que debiese haber prioridades presupuestarias, lanzándoles a una competencia de la cual no pueden salir bien libradas, para ser asimiladas al complejo mecanismo privatizador. Tal situación de reducción de recursos ocurre con las universidades autónomas estatales y las normales rurales.

En conjunto este es el arco en que se instaló el paradigma general de educación universitaria propietaria del saber, hacia el desarrollo, legitimación y sustentación de la sociedad capitalista, de sus conflictos, de sus relaciones, su sentido de dominación cultural e ideológica.

Por lo que se refiere a sus políticas institucionales y la construcción a que dieron lugar, así como de sus tendencias propias; las universidades son presionadas a asumir las premisas del capitalismo neoliberal, incluyendo la mercadotecnia en su promoción.

Este universo naturalmente es más complejo, su historia se desenvuelve según los procesos del capitalismo y la lucha de clases por educación, vinculando conocimiento, aprendizaje, métodos e intereses de las diversas clases y sectores sociales. Es claro que las universidades, sus sectores integrantes, siempre dieron muestras de grandes luchas por elevar los niveles de formación y desarrollo del país; enfrascadas ineludiblemente en los antagonismos generales y los del plano educativo, son fuente de resistencia contra su entera mercantilización.

Contra el legado histórico, cultural y científico, la política neoliberal pasó a la descuartización o adecuación de propósitos en los saberes y profesionalización, así mismo animó la individualización, elitización, tercerización de servicios, franquicias de servicios universitarios, feudos, lucha de poderes, degradación de la enseñanza, la exclusión económica, y la minimización de los contenidos humanísticos. Resultando una profunda crisis de la educación superior que se adentró en los intereses económicos capitalistas, en la promoción del modo de vida burgués y clasemediero.

A las universidades públicas se les reprime de muy diversas maneras para acallar voluntades, acciones y pensamientos. Además de abocarse el sistema a una represión de muy diversos tonos, pero siempre presente en todas estas instituciones (Secretaría de Gobernación, Procuraduría General de la República, cuerpos policiacos), siguiendo el hilo del poder. Hasta el más vulgar de los porrismos se instaló como elemento teledirigido por autoridades universitarias o de ciertas dependencias estatales, para mantener sus espacios en la paz neoliberal mediante el terror contra los estudiantes. Resulta evidente el contubernio, la complacencia, protección y encubrimiento del porrismo por parte de autoridades universitarias y el Estado de forma sistemática contra todo reclamo estudiantil.

Por su parte el conjunto de escuelas normales, soportan la mayor carga en la formación de docentes para la enseñanza básica, aunque en estas circunstancias han proliferado las escuelas particulares de educación normal, y la formación de educadores en las grandes universidades. En este sentido, el neoliberalismo no está en las raíces de la educación mexicana, ni de su pedagogía; el sentido educativo histórico, legado mucho tiempo atrás es popular, masificador, solidario, universalista y formativo del ser humano para la vida en sociedad y comunidad.

El capitalismo en su desenvolvimiento neoliberal ha hecho de las universidades y demás instituciones de enseñanza superior, ejes de trasmisión del comercio en la educación y para la ideologización de su cultura dominante. En este sentido el comportamiento de las élites universitarias dista mucho del puro interés académico o cultural, entrelazándose con los fines y negocios del capital, transformándose en capas aristocratizadas que detentan presupuestos y constriñen toda posibilidad de cambio democrático en su seno.

El sistema de educación superior e incluso las instancias de educación universitaria alternativa, bajo la intensa actividad estudiantil, académica e intelectual, que contribuyeron al empuje cultural, académico, social y científico del país; hoy están en una difícil condición ya sea por su constricción o por el férreo control de las élites, las burocracias, el Estado y la política de gran empresa.

En la actualidad es necesaria una ardua batalla ideológica y política de largo aliento, desde los movimientos estudiantiles y magisteriales, como condiciones para debilitar el poder tecnocrático que rige la enseñanza superior y las redes en como ésta se sostiene. Estas luchas y estos sujetos sociales de cambio, históricamente establecen bases de una auténtica revolución y democratización en su seno, contra el tradicional adoctrinamiento en torno a las prácticas y el pensamiento dominante formador de sus reproductores.

[1] Existen cerca de tres mil ochocientas instituciones de educación superior operando en el país.

Fuente: https://www.telesurtv.net/opinion/mexico-educacion-superior-neoliberal-universidades-20180913-0037.html

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The Ghost of Fascism in the Age of Trump

febrero 20, 2018febrero 19, 2018Henry Giroux

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

In the age of Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears. Memory has been hijacked. This is especially troubling when the «mobilizing passions» of a fascist past now emerge in the unceasing stream of hate, bigotry, lies and militarism that are endlessly circulated and reproduced at the highest levels of government and in powerful conservative media, such as Fox News, Breitbart News, conservative talk radio stations and alt-right social media. Power, culture, politics, finance and everyday life now merge in ways that are unprecedented and pose a threat to democracies all over the world. This mix of old media and new digitally driven systems of production and consumption are not merely systems, but ecologies that produce, shape and sustain ideas, desires and modes of agency with unprecedented power and influence. Informal educational apparatuses, particularly the corporate-controlled media, appear increasingly to be on the side of tyranny. In fact, it would be difficult to overly stress the growing pedagogical importance of the old and new media and the power they now have on the political imaginations of countless Americans. This is particularly true of right-wing media empires, such as those owned by Rupert Murdoch, as well as powerful corporate entities such as Clearwater, which dominates the radio airwaves with its ownership of over 1,250 stations. In the sphere of television ownership and control, powerful corporate entities have emerged, such as Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the largest number of TV stations in the United States. In addition, right-wing hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity have an audience in the millions. Right-wing educational apparatuses shape much of what Americans watch and listen to, and appear to influence all of what Trump watches and hears. The impact of conservative media has had a dangerous effect on American culture and politics, and has played the most prominent role in channeling populist anger and electing Trump to the presidency. We are now witnessing the effects of this media machine. The first casualty of the Trump era is truth, the second is moral responsibility, the third is any vestige of justice, and the fourth is a massive increase in human misery and suffering for millions.

Instead of refusing to cooperate with evil, Americans increasingly find themselves in a society in which those in commanding positions of power and influence exhibit a tacit approval of the emerging authoritarian strains and acute social problems undermining democratic institutions and rules of law. As such, they remain silent and therefore, complicit in the face of such assaults on American democracy. Ideological extremism and a stark indifference to the lies and ruthless polices of the Trump administration have turned the Republican Party into a party of collaborators, not unlike the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis in the 1940s. Both groups bought into the script of ultra-nationalism, encouraged anti-Semitic mobs, embraced a militant masculinity, demonized racial and ethnic others, supported an unchecked militarism and fantasies of empire, and sanctioned state violence at home and abroad.

Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices.

This is not to propose that those who support Trump are all Nazis in suits. On the contrary, it is meant to suggest a more updated danger in which people with power have turned their backs on the cautionary histories of the fascist and Nazi regimes, and in doing so, have willingly embraced authoritarian messages and tropes. Rather than Nazis in suits, we have a growing culture of social and historical amnesia that enables those who are responsible for the misery, anger and pain that has accompanied the long reign of casino capitalism to remain silent for their role and complicity in the comeback of fascism in the United States. This normalization of fascism can be seen in the way in which language that was once an object of critique in liberal democracies loses its negative connotation and becomes the opposite in the Trump administration. Politics, power and human suffering are now framed outside of the realm of historical memory. What is forgotten is that history teaches us something about the transformation and mobilization of language into an instrument of war and violence. As Richard J. Evans observes in his The Third Reich in Power:

Words that in a normal, civilized society had a negative connotation acquired the opposite sense under Nazism … so that ‘fanatical’, ‘brutal’, ‘ruthless’, ‘uncompromising’, ‘hard’ all became words of praise instead of disapproval… In the hands of the Nazi propaganda apparatus, the German language became strident, aggressive and militaristic. Commonplace matters were described in terms more suited to the battlefield. The language itself began to be mobilized for war.

Fantasies of absolute control, racial cleansing, unchecked militarism and class warfare are at the heart of much of the American imagination. This is a dystopian imagination marked by hollow words, an imagination pillaged of any substantive meaning, cleansed of compassion and used to legitimate the notion that alternative worlds are impossible to entertain. There is more at work here than shrinking political horizons. What we are witnessing is a closing of the political and a full-scale attack on moral outrage, thoughtful reasoning, collective resistance and radical imagination. Trump has normalized the unthinkable, legitimated the inexcusable and defended the indefensible.

Of course, Trump is only a symptom of the economic, political and ideological rot at the heart of casino capitalism, with its growing authoritarianism and social and political injustices that have been festering in the United States with great intensity since the late 1970s. It was at that point in US history when both political parties decided that matters of community, the public good, the general welfare and democracy itself were a threat to the fundamental beliefs of the financial elite and the institutions driving casino capitalism. As Ronald Reagan made clear, government was the problem. Consequently, it was framed as the enemy of freedom and purged for assuming any responsibility for a range of basic social needs. Individual responsibility took the place of the welfare state, compassion gave way to self-interest, manufacturing was replaced by the toxic power of financialization, and a rampaging inequality left the bottom half of the US population without jobs, a future of meaningful work or a life of dignity.

The call for political unity transforms quickly into the use of force and exclusionary violence to impose the authority of a tyrannical regime.

Trump has added a new swagger and unapologetic posture to this concoction of massive inequality, systemic racism, American exceptionalism and ultra-nationalism. He embodies a form of populist authoritarianism that not only rejects an egalitarian notion of citizenship, but embraces a nativism and fear of democracy that is at the heart of any fascist regime.

How else to explain a sitting president announcing to a crowd that Democratic Party congressional members who refused to clap for parts of his State of the Union address were «un-American» and «treasonous»? This charge is made all the more disturbing given that the White House promoted this speech as one that would emphasize «bipartisanship and national unity.» Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices. Such threats are not a joking matter and cannot be dismissed as merely a slip of the tongue. When the president states publicly that his political opponents have committed a treasonous act — one that is punishable by death — because they refused to offer up sycophantic praise, the plague of fascism is not far away. His call for unity takes a dark turn under such circumstances and emulates a fascist past in which the call for political unity transforms quickly into the use of force and exclusionary violence to impose the authority of a tyrannical regime.

In Trump’s world, the authoritarian mindset has been resurrected, bent on exhibiting a contempt for the truth, ethics and alleged human weakness. For Trump, success amounts to acting with impunity, using government power to sell or to license his brand, hawking the allure of power and wealth, and finding pleasure in producing a culture of impunity, selfishness and state-sanctioned violence. Trump is a master of performance as a form of mass entertainment. This approach to politics echoes the merging of the spectacle with an ethical abandonment reminiscent of past fascist regimes. As Naomi Klein rightly argues in No Is Not Enough, Trump «approaches everything as a spectacle» and edits «reality to fit his narrative.»

As the bully-in-chief, he militarizes speech while producing a culture meant to embrace his brand of authoritarianism. This project is most evident in his speeches and policies, which pit white working- and middle-class males against people of color, men against women, and white nationalists against various ethnic, immigrant and religious groups. Trump is a master of theater and diversion, and the mainstream press furthers this attack on critical exchange by glossing over his massive assault on the planet and enactment of policies, such as the GOP tax cuts, which are willfully designed to redistribute wealth upward to his fellow super-rich billionaires. Trump’s alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels garners far more headlines than his deregulation of oil and gas industries and his dismantling of environment protections.

Economic pillage has reached new and extreme levels and is now accompanied by a ravaging culture of viciousness and massive levels of exploitation and human suffering. Trump has turned language into a weapon with his endless lies and support for white nationalism, nativism, racism and state violence. This is a language that legitimates ignorance while producing an active silence and complicity in the face of an emerging corporate fascist state.

Like most authoritarians, Trump demands loyalty and team membership from all those under his power, and he hates those elements of a democracy — such as the courts and the critical media — that dare to challenge him. Echoes of the past come to life in his call for giant military parades, enabling White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to call people who disagree with his policies «un-American,» and sanctioning his Department of Justice to issue a «chilling warning,» threatening to arrest and charge mayors with a federal crime who do not implement his anti-immigration policies and racist assaults on immigrants. What can be learned from past periods of tyranny is that the embrace of lawlessness is often followed by a climate of terror and repression that is the essence of fascism.

Whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance compared to the serious challenges he poses.

In Trump’s world view, the call for limitless loyalty reflects more than an insufferable act of vanity and insecurity; it is a weaponized threat to those who dare to challenge Trump’s assumption that he is above the law and can have his way on matters of corruption, collusion and a possible obstruction of justice. Trump is an ominous threat to democracy and lives, as Masha Gessen observes, «surrounded by enemies, shadowed by danger, forever perched on the precipice.» Moreover, he has enormous support from his Vichy-like minions in Congress, among the ultra-rich bankers and hedge fund managers, and the corporate elite. His trillion-dollar tax cut has convinced corporate America he is their best ally. He has, in not too subtle ways, also convinced a wide range of far-right extremists extending from the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis to the deeply racist and fascist «alt-right» movement, that he shares their hatred of people of color, immigrants and Jews. Imaginary horrors inhabit this new corporate dystopian world and frighteningly resemble shades of a terrifying past that once led to unimaginable acts of genocide, concentration camps and a devastating world war. Nowhere is this vision more succinctly contained than in Trump’s first State of the Union Address and the response it garnered.

State of Disunion

An act of doublespeak preceded Donald Trump’s first State of the Union Address. Billed by the White House as a speech that would be «unifying» and marked by a tone of «bipartisanship,» the speech was actually steeped in divisiveness, fear, racism, warmongering, nativism and immigrant bashing. It once again displayed Trump’s contempt for democracy.

Claiming «all Americans deserve accountability and respect,» Trump nevertheless spent ample time in his speech equating undocumented immigrants with the criminal gang MS-13, regardless of the fact that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than US citizens. (As Juan Cole points out, «Americans murdered 17,250 other Americans in 2016. Almost none of the perpetrators was an undocumented worker, contrary to the impression Trump gave.»)

For Trump, as with most demagogues, fear is the most valued currency of politics. In his speech, he suggested that the visa lottery system and «chain migration» — in which individuals can migrate through the sponsorship of their family — posed a threat to the US, presenting «risks we can just no longer afford.» In response to the Dreamers, he moved between allegedly supporting their bid for citizenship to suggesting they were part of a culture of criminality. At one point, he stated in a not-too-subtle expression of derision that «Americans are dreamers too.» This was a gesture to his white nationalist base. On Twitter, David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, cheered over that remark. Trump had nothing to say about the challenges undocumented immigrants face, nor did he express any understanding of the fear and insecurity hanging over the heads of 800,000 Dreamers who could be deported.

Trump also indicated that he was not going to close Guantánamo, and once again argued that «terrorists should be treated like terrorists.» Given the history of torture associated with Guantánamo and the past crimes and abuses that took place under the mantle of the «war on terror,» Trump’s remarks should raise a red flag, not only because torture is a war crime, but also because the comment further accelerated the paranoia, nihilist passions and apocalyptic populism that feeds his base.

Fascism is hardly a relic of the past or a static political and ideological system.

Pointing to menacing enemies all around the world, Trump exhibited his love for all things war-like and militaristic, and his support for expanding the nuclear arsenal and the military budget. He also called on «the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people.» Given his firing of James Comey, his threat to fire Jeff Sessions, and more recently his suggestion that he might fire Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein — all of whom allegedly displayed disloyalty by not dismantling the Russian investigation conducted by Special Council Mueller — Trump seems likely to make good on this promise to rid the federal workforce of those who disagree with him, allowing him to fill civil service jobs with friends, family members and sycophants. This is about more than Trump’s disdain for the separation of power, the independence of other government agencies, or his attack on potential whistleblowers; it is about amassing power and instilling fear in those he appoints to government positions if they dare act to hold power accountable. This is what happens when democracies turn into fascist states.

Trump is worse than almost anyone imagined, and while his critics across the ideological spectrum have begun to go after him, they rarely focus on how dangerous he is, hesitant to argue that he is not only the enemy of democracy, but symptomatic of the powerful political, economic and cultural forces shaping the new US fascism.

There are some critics who claim that Trump is simply a weak president whose ineptness is being countered by «a robust democratic culture and set of institutions,» and not much more than a passing moment in history. Others, such as Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser, view him as an authoritarian expression of right-wing populism and an outgrowth of neoliberal politics and policies. While many historians, such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton, analyze him in terms that echo some elements of a fascist past, some conservatives such as David Frum view him as a modern-day self-obsessed, emotionally needy demagogue whose assault on democracy needs to be taken seriously, and that whether or not he is a fascist is not as important as what he plans to do with his power. For Frum, there is a real danger that people will retreat into their private worlds, become cynical and enable a slide into a form of tyranny that would become difficult to defeat. Others, like Corey Robin, argue that we overstep a theoretical boundary when comparing Trump directly to Hitler. According to Robin, Trump bears no relationship to Hitler or the policies of the Third Reich. Robin not only dismisses the threat that Trump poses to the values and institutions of democracy, but plays down the growing threat of authoritarianism in the United States. For Robin, Trump has failed to institute many of his policies, and as such, is just a weak politician with little actual power. Not only does Robin focus too much on the person of Trump, but he is relatively silent about the forces that produced him and the danger these proto-fascist social formations now pose to those who are the objects of the administration’s racist, sexist and xenophobic taunts and policies.

The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice.

As Jeffrey C. Isaac observes, whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance compared to the serious challenges he poses; for instance, to the DACA children and their families, the poor, undocumented immigrants and a range of other groups. Moreover, authoritarianism is looming in the air and can be seen in the number of oppressive and regressive policies already put into place by the Trump administration that will have a long-term effect on the United States. These include the $1.5 trillion giveaway in the new tax code, the expansion of the military-industrial complex, the elimination of Obamacare’s individual mandate, the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and a range of deregulations that will impact negatively on the environment for years to come. In addition, there is the threat of a nuclear war, the disappearance of health care for the most vulnerable, the attack on free speech and the media, and the rise of the punishing state and the increasing criminalization of social problems. As Richard J. Evans, the renowned British historian, observes, «Violence indeed was at the heart of the Nazi enterprise. Every democracy that perishes dies in a different way, because every democracy is situated in specific historical circumstances.»

US society has entered a dangerous stage in its history. After 40 years of neoliberalism and systemic racism, many Americans lack a critical language that offers a consistent narrative that enables them to understand gutted wages, lost pensions, widespread uncertainty and collapsing identities due to feeling disposable, the loss of meaningful work and a formative culture steeped in violence, cruelty and an obsession with greed. Moreover, since 9/11, Americans have been bombarded by a culture of fear and consumerism that both dampens their willingness to be critical agents and depoliticizes them. Everyone is now a suspect or a consumer, but hardly a critically engaged citizen. Others are depoliticized because of the ravages of debt, poverty and the daily struggle to survive — problems made all the worse by Trump’s tax and health policies. And while there is no perfect mirror, it has become all the more difficult for many people to recognize how the «crystalized elements» of totalitarianism have emerged in the shape of an American-style fascism. What has been forgotten by too many intellectuals, critics, educators and politicians is that fascism is hardly a relic of the past or a static political and ideological system.

Trump is not in possession of storm troopers, concentration camps or concocting plans for genocidal acts — at least, not at the moment. But that does not mean that fascism is a moment frozen in history and has no bearing on the present. As Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin and others have taught us, totalitarian regimes come in many forms and their elements can come together in different configurations. Rather than dismiss the notion that the organizing principles and fluctuating elements of fascism are still with us, a more appropriate response to Trump’s rise to power is to raise questions about what elements of his government signal the emergence of a fascism suited to a contemporary and distinctively US political, economic and cultural landscape.

What seems indisputable is that under Trump, democracy has become the enemy of power, politics and finance. Adam Gopnik refutes the notion that Trumpism will simply fade away in the end, and argues that comparisons between the current historical moment and fascism are much needed. He writes:

Needless to say, the degradation of public discourse, the acceleration of grotesque lying, the legitimization of hatred and name-calling, are hard to imagine vanishing like the winter snows that Trump thinks climate change is supposed to prevent. The belief that somehow all these things will somehow just go away in a few years’ time does seem not merely unduly optimistic but crazily so. In any case, the trouble isn’t just what the Trumpists may yet do; it is what they are doing now. American history has already been altered by their actions — institutions emptied out, historical continuities destroyed, traditions of decency savaged — in ways that will not be easy to rehabilitate.

There is nothing new about the possibility of authoritarianism in a particularly distinctive guise coming to the US. Nor is there a shortage of works illuminating the horrors of fascism. Fiction writers ranging from George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis and Aldous Huxley to Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick and Philip Roth have sounded the alarm in often brilliant and insightful terms. Politicians such as Henry Wallace wrote about American fascism, as did a range of theorists, such as Umberto Eco, Arendt and Paxton, who tried to understand its emergence, attractions and effects. What they all had in common was an awareness of the changing nature of tyranny and how it could happen under a diverse set of historical, economic and social circumstances. They also seem to share Philip Roth’s insistence that we all have an obligation to recognize «the terror of the unforeseen» that hides in the shadows of censorship, makes power invisible and gains in strength in the absence of historical memory. A warning indeed.

Trump represents a distinctive and dangerous form of US-bred authoritarianism, but at the same time, he is the outcome of a past that needs to be remembered, analyzed and engaged for the lessons it can teach us about the present. Not only has Trump «normalized the unspeakable» and in some cases, the unthinkable, he has also forced us to ask questions we have never asked before about capitalism, power, politics, and yes, courage itself. In part, this means recovering a language for politics, civic life, the public good, citizenship and justice that has real substance. One challenge is to confront the horrors of capitalism and its transformation into a form of fascism under Trump. This cannot happen without a revolution in consciousness, one that makes education central to politics.

Moreover, as Fredric Jameson has suggested, such a revolution cannot take place by limiting our choices to a fixation on the «impossible present.» Nor can it take place by limiting ourselves to a language of critique and a narrow focus on individual issues. What is needed is also a language of hope and a comprehensive politics that draws from history and imagines a future that does not imitate the present. Under such circumstances, the language of critique and hope can be enlisted to create a broad-based and powerful social movement that both refuses to equate capitalism with democracy and moves toward creating a radical democracy. William Faulkner once remarked that we live with the ghosts of the past, or to be more precise: «The past is never dead. It’s not even past.»

However, we are not only living with the ghosts of a dark past; it is also true that the ghosts of history can be critically engaged and transformed into a democratic politics for the future. The Nazi regime is more than a frozen moment in history. It is a warning from the past and a window into the growing threat Trumpism poses to democracy. The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice and collective courage in the fight for a substantive and inclusive democracy. The stakes are too high to remain complacent, cynical or simply outraged. A crisis of memory, history, agency and justice has mushroomed and opened up the abyss of a fascist nightmare. Now is the time to talk back, embrace the radical imagination in private and public, and create united mass based coalitions in which the collective dream for a radical democracy becomes a reality. There is no other choice.

Source:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43529-the-ghost-of-fascism-in-the-age-of-trump

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The Ghost of Fascism in the Age of Trump

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices.

The call for political unity transforms quickly into the use of force and exclusionary violence to impose the authority of a tyrannical regime.

Whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance compared to the serious challenges he poses.

State of Disunion

Fascism is hardly a relic of the past or a static political and ideological system.

The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice.

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By: Slavoj Zizek

By: Slavoj Zizek

With everything that’s plunging the world into chaos right now, one thing surprising me is, why are Greta Thunberg and Bernie Sanders comparatively quiet? Make no mistake, racism, climate issues and the pandemic are all connected.

By: Slavoj Zizek

When will this epidemic end and what will happen afterwards?

Eventual rise of Singularity

We will have to invent a new way of life

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

Words carry power and enable certain actions; they also establish the grounds for legitimating repressive policies and practices.

The call for political unity transforms quickly into the use of force and exclusionary violence to impose the authority of a tyrannical regime.

Whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance compared to the serious challenges he poses.

State of Disunion

Fascism is hardly a relic of the past or a static political and ideological system.

The ghosts of fascism should terrify us, but most importantly, they should educate us and imbue us with a spirit of civic justice.

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