Most of all, it's urgent that you oppose militarized police, the war on Gaza, defend voter rights, plan for 2014 races now, oppose austerity, support the 'Moral Mondays' in North Carolina, the fight for the Green New Deal, a just immigration policy and the Congressional Progressive Caucus' 'Back to Work Budget'! We're doing more than ever, and have big plans. So pay your dues, make a donation and become a sustainer. Do it Now! Check the link at the bottom...

Aug 20, 2013 - For anyone with a consciousness of American history, the events of the last week and a half in Ferguson, Missouri, a predominately African-American suburb outside of St. Louis, should seem all too familiar.  A police officer murders an unarmed black man.  As days go by and more information on the shooting is released, residents take to the streets to protest.  Their protests are met with force utterly disproportionate to a free society.  In response, the protests turn sporadically violent themselves, producing and even more violent response on the part of authorities.

Harlem, 1943; Philadelphia and Rochester, 1964; Watts (Los Angeles), 1965; Newark, 1967; Camden, 1971; Tampa, 1987 and 1989; Washington, D.C., 1991; Los Angeles, 1992; Cincinnati, 2001; Benton Harbor (Southwest Michigan), 2003; Brooklyn, 2013 - all these incidents, and many others, contain the basic contours of the situation in Ferguson.

By now many in the United States and across the world have weighed in on the underlying causes of the escalating violence in Ferguson.  Analysts have rightly pointed out the massive build-up in American police militarisation, the depths of poverty that are endemic to many American neighbourhoods, a broad culture that equates young African-American men with criminality, a failed war on drugs that has led to the incarceration of generations of the American poor and the corresponding transformation of much of urban America into a police state.

Those who probe deeper look to the end of basic rights to housing, the lack of economic opportunity resulting from deindustrialisation, the corollary unwillingness of American society to envision contemporary employment opportunities as viable avenues into the middle class, education policy that stubbornly refuses to give poor communities the resources to produce better schools, and predatory lending that preys on poor Americans.  The conflicts in Ferguson are symptoms of a larger problem of American racial and economic inequality. Militarised police committing a horrible injustice become the easy and immediate symbol of the multiple oppressions that characterise neighbourhoods and communities across the country.

Such accounts are absolutely correct.  They are not though, the entirety of the story. The sheer length of the list above points to a deeper problem in American life - the utter decimation of a politics capable of changing the immediate and underlying facts that led to the tragic murder of Michael Brown.

The basic outlines of this political atrophy are already apparent. President Obama has urged Americans to "comfort each other and talk with each other in a way that heals".  He has suggested that Americans are "going to move forward together - by trying to unite each other and understand each other".  In the coming days there will be similar calls from people across the political spectrum,ranging from civil rights leaders to tea partiers.  President Obama will direct the Justice Department to investigate the shooting and its aftermath.  Perhaps he or Missouri Governor Jay Nixon will even form a blue-ribbon commission to study the underlying causes of the shooting, as was done in the aftermath of many 1960s-era uprisings. ...(Click title for more)

The Ferguson Insurgency and Generational Politics



In Ferguson, young demonstrators are finding it's not their grandparents' protest

On the Racist Police Murder of Michael Brown

Aug 12, 2016 - TRANSCRIPT:

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore. Welcome to this latest edition of The Prashad Report.

We're now joined by Vijay Prashad. He's joining us from Northampton, Massachusetts. His most recent book is The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South.

Thank you so much for joining us again, Vijay.

VIJAY PRASHAD, PROF. INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, TRINITY COLLEGE: Thanks, Jaisal.

NOOR: So we know you've been closely following the ongoing political turmoil in Iraq. Can you give us an update about the latest of what's happened there?

PRASHAD: Well, there are a series of problems happening in Iraq. One of them has been a longstanding political problem in Baghdad over the government and government formation. The second one is a much more dramatic event, and that is the emergence of the Islamic State is a full-blown insurgency in northern Iraq.

This morning, on August 11, there was a great deal of drama in Baghdad when tanks appeared in the streets of the capital, surrounded the Green Zone, surrounded the residence of the president. And what it appeared was going on was that the prime minister, Mr.Mr.. Nouri al-Maliki, was in some senses putting a coup forward against the constitutional process, because he is under threat of removal as the prime minister of Iraq. By about midday, it was clear that the coup attempt had fizzled--if there ever was a coup attempt.

And once more we're back to the problem of a major constitutional crisis, because Mr.. Maliki party, which is ruling in coalition, simply doesn't have enough seats in the legislature to continue by itself. So the president has put forward an alternative candidate for prime minister also from Mr.. Maliki's party. This is why it's extremely complicated how the Dawa Party, which is Maliki's party, but also the party of Mr. Haider Al-Abadi, how this party, the Dawa, is internally divided. It has to--with only 92 seats out of 328, it has to reach out to other parties.

So there is this constitutional mess that's in Baghdad. You'd think that Baghdad, threatened with all-out war against it from the Islamic State, the political class would unite very quickly and prevent this kind of side-drama when something much more dangerous and much bigger is occurring along the Tigris River.

NOOR: And I wanted to just thank our viewers for sticking with us. We're having some slight technical difficulties with the connection, but I know our wonderful studio crew is busy at work trying to resolve that. But about what you just alluded to, Vijay, your latest piece in The Hindu, it's titled "Metastasis of the Islamic State". And in it you write:

    Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the anti-Assad powers, refuse to join a united front with Iran, Iraq and Syria to tackle the IS threat. With absent coordination, the Islamic State will continue to thrive.

Tell us exactly what the threat is and what it means that the regional powers refuse to be united on this front. In your piece, you talk about how the Islamic State has made advances into Lebanon, which have at least been temporarily thwarted. But it continues to expand in Iraq, continues to enjoy a powerful presence in Syria. Now President Obama has said he's going to step up attacks on it with possible airstrikes, possible direct funding to the Kurds. Tell us exactly the latest, and also if the U.S. support for the Kurds and other airstrikes will do anything without a regional solution.

PRASHAD: Well, the Islamic state is the child of al-Qaeda of Iraq or al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia, which was created in 2004 in reaction to the American invasion of Iraq and the American destruction of the Iraqi state. So it's in that moment of chaos in Iraq that al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia was born. It was born with foreign fighters. It drew on an enormous amount of anger against the Americans; therefore it increased its support base. And this is its child. I mean, it was then reconstituted as the Islamic State of Iraq. Then it became the Islamic State of Greater Syria and Iraq. And now it's simply the Islamic State.

But it will not be destroyed by aerial bombardment. I think that's the first point to make is that the United States, when tackling this group and groups that its allied with, for instance, the Naqshbandi Army, etc., the United States has already been at war with these organizations during the battle of Falluja, in the battles in Ramadi, in the battles of Tal Afar. I mean, U.S. Marines have been fighting them over the last decade before they left Iraq. So it's very unlikely that from 30,000 feet the Americans are going to be able to cower this very sophisticated and incredibly brave fighting outfit. So this idea that U.S. involvement is somehow going to change the tide of the Islamic State's progress seems to me a little illusionary....(Click title for more)

As its subtitle indicates, Howard Caygill's On Resistance is an attempt to develop a 'philosophy of defiance': a project that the book pursues through a set of critical reflections on a wide range of writers, philosophers and movements associated with political resistance.

This is an extraordinarily rich book, and Caygill's selection of struggles and authors is both eclectic and erudite. In keeping with its focus on resistance and conflict, many of the book's discussions involve placing its subject matter in confrontational relations: Clausewitz is read through Kant; Freud is set against Lenin and Lukács; Greenham Common is placed in relation to the Black Panthers and the Zapatistas, and so on.

A genuine host of names and events are treated in this manner, and serve as sources for novel, and occasionally surprising interpretations. These readings are admirably lucid, but the book's overall presentation of its 'philosophy of defiance' can become somewhat buried within them; there is however a sense in which this stems from the manner in which Caygill sets out to address the topic of resistance.

Resistance, for Caygill, stands in contrast to resolution and unification, insofar as resolution is taken to entail the end of opposition. Many of the book's discussions thus serve to develop ideas that imply the preservation of resistance, or advocate treating resistance as 'an end in itself' (186) (as opposed to a means towards an end that might, once achieved, render such resistance redundant). This concern with the closure afforded by resolution extends to conceptual unification and synthesis, and thus obliges the form of the book to conform to its content to some degree: A philosophy of resistance', as Caygill puts it at the outset, must 'resist the pressure of concept formation', and thereby avoid reducing resistance to a 'single concept amenable to legitimation and appropriation' (6). Rather than simply describing his overall position, Caygill thus allows it to emerge through a series of interacting discussions.

This entails that the book can feel, at times, as though it is reaching towards an ideal of resistance that resists its own final conceptualisation, and which the book can only refract through its various readings. More accurately, however, this strategy is an attempt to address resistance per se: to consider it shorn of presuppositions, and thus of the concepts of freedom, revolution and emancipation to which it is often rendered subservient (97). Perhaps surprisingly, the result is a politicised subjectivity that seems akin to a stoic virtue-ethics: a position that is attractive in some respects, but which, as will be suggested below, also seems to invite recourse to the themes of freedom and revolution from which this project initially departs.

The book employs three different strategies. The first is a 'critique of resistance', which sets out the primary 'frames' for thinking resistance (albeit a critique that avoids 'exhausting [resistance's] capacity' to resist its own schematisation) (9-10). This informs the first three chapters' discussions of issues concerning consciousness, violence and subjectivity. Caygill's second strategy is to look at the history of political resistance; the third considers the 'valencies' (10) of resistance, i.e. its relation to the concepts of freedom, revolution and repression, etc., with which it is often associated....(Click title for more)

Solidarity, Carl Davidson, CCDS